Textual Collaboration and Spiritual Partnership in Sixteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Ortensio Lando and Lucrezia Gonzaga*

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 694-747 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith K. Ray
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Professional Writers ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe sixteenth-century writer Ortensio Lando (ca. 1512–ca. 1553) wrote many of his works pseudonymously and borrowed liberally from the works of others. Part of a community of professional writers who experimented with collaborative modes of literary production, Lando was also deeply invested in the currents of religious reform that swept through sixteenth-century Italy. In his extensive literary recourse to female personas, Lando privileged contemporary women who shared his own heterodox religious views. This essay examines Lando's female impersonations with particular attention to his use of Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo (ca. 1521–76), whose complex literary relationship with Lando is illustrated by her presence throughout his literary corpus, and by his role in the book ofLetterepublished under her name. It argues that the relationship between these two figures can be best understood as a literary and spiritual partnership, one that meshed Lando's editorial expertise with Gonzaga's fame as a woman of extraordinary virtue and spiritual authority, a reputation that Lando himself helped to create. In an era when print publication by women was still far from common, such collaboration constituted an alternative path to literary expression.

scholarly journals Guilds, Social Mobility and Status in Sixteenth-Century Ghent

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Dambruyne
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Social Promotion ◽  
Social Position ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Democratic Character ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article investigates the relationship between social mobility and status in guilds and the political situation in sixteenth-century Ghent. First, it argues that Ghent guilds showed neither a static picture of upward mobility nor a rectilinear and one-way evolution. It demonstrates that the opportunities for social promotion within the guild system were, to a great extent, determined by the successive political regimes of the city. Second, the article proves that the guild boards in the sixteenth century had neither a typically oligarchic nor a typically democratic character. Third, the investigation of the houses in which master craftsmen lived shows that guild masters should not be depicted as a monolithic social bloc, but that significant differences in status and wealth existed. The article concludes that there was no linear positive connection between the duration of a master craftsman's career and his wealth and social position.

A NOTE ON THE RISE OF SURAT IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractFar less attention has been paid to the rise to importance of the Gujarati port of Surat, than to its decline. This brief essay, a tribute to the memory of Surat's best-known historian, Ashin Das Gupta, attempts to address the problem of its rise before the Mughal conquest of Gujarat in the 1570s. It argues that once Diu had been taken over by the Portuguese in 1535, Surat emerged as a crucial link between Southeast Asia and West Asia. Thus, one needs to look not only at the relationship between the port and its hinterland, but to Surat's role as an entrepôt, in order to explain its rise.

scholarly journals Military Service in Early Sixteenth-Century Lithuania: A New Interpretation and Its Implications

Slavic Review ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-256
Author(s):  
Karl von Loewe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Structure And Dynamics ◽  
Compulsory Military Service ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Relationship

The existence of compulsory military service has become a major theme in recent attempts to explain the development of Lithuanian society and politics in the early sixteenth century. Much of the discussion has centered on the relationship between military service and feudalism. This article concentrates not on that question but on the nature of military service and the understanding it can provide of the structure and dynamics of the economy of Lithuania in the sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Sol T. Plaatje's paremiological quest: a common humanity in cultural diversity

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-165
Author(s):  
Khekheti Makhudu
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Having written and compiled from memory, over 700 Setswana proverbs when he was briefly resident in London, around the 1900s, Sol T. Plaatje exhibited unusual ethnographic knowledge and remarkable, creative translation skills in diaspora-like circumstances.  While most literary researchers attest to those achievements, few have been the theories that account sufficiently for Plaatje's multilingual proverb renditions. The view propounded here is that Plaatje's paremiological enterprise was probably never only an exercise of his polyglot abilities. Rather his quest appears to have been to assert the cultural similarities and convergences between African and European people's histories.  His socio-political beliefs propelled deep pride over his Setswana identity and became the driving force for highlighting the human bonds among nations of the North and the South. For Plaatje, seeing the overlaps and equivalences in and through the proverbs of the Dutch, English, French, Germans and the Batswana peoples, firstly validated orality as the bedrock of modern literary expression.  Secondly, the relationship of the two seemed to recapitulate the communicative connections among people and their languages, across time and space. Lastly, the paper makes the point that Plaatje's search for unity in the cultural diversity as exhibited in his 1916 Diane tsa Setswana collection and the 1924 A Sechuana Reader stories, provides instructive lessons that present-day South Africa would ill afford to ignore considering the social cohesion challenges the nation faces.

Savoring God

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Maité Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Central Moments ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
The Cross ◽  
John Of The Cross ◽  
The Relationship

This book compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians. The phrase “savoring God” in the title conveys the Spanish gustar a Dios (to savor God) and the Sanskrit madhura bhakti rasa (the sweet savor of divine love). While “savoring” does not mean exactly the same thing for these theologians, they use the term to define a theopoetics at work in their respective traditions. The book’s methodology transposes their notions of “savoring” to advance a comparative theopoetics grounded in the interaction of poetry and theology. The first chapter explains in detail how theopoetics is regarded considering each text and how they are compared. The comparison is then laid out across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which examines one of the three central moments of the theopoetic experience of savoring that is represented in the Cántico and Rāsa Līlā: the absence and presence of God, the relationship between embodiment and savoring, and the fulfillment of the encounter between the divine and the lovers.

Elizabethan chroniclers and parliament

2018 ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
Ian W. Archer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Chronicles remained the dominant form of historical writing throughout the sixteenth century, and contained much material about the relationship of parliament and the crown and the wider political community. But how coherent a view of parliament could be derived from the chronicles? That is the question addressed by this essay, primarily through Holinshed, but with reference to the other chronicles on which his account was built. Holinshed included some key texts on parliament, including William Harrison’s reworking of Sir Thomas Smith’s account in De republica Anglorum (1583), significantly enhancing parliament’s role on the succession and church reform, and John Hooker’s Order and Usage (1572), inserted into the Irish section. But Holinshed famously left his chronicles open to variant readings. There was little interest in parliament’s institutional development, or commonwealth legislation, but much more interest in parliament as the bringer of hated taxes, and in the politics of parliaments, particularly relating to monarchical succession. It is argued that readers might take away various understandings from the chronicles, but that in any case the chronicles tended to focus less on institutional structures than on the moral qualities of the country’s leaders who operated them.

Water in Newly Rediscovered Ancient and Medieval Texts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay J. Starkey
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The World ◽  
Bodies Of Water ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores how Ptolemy’s Geography and medieval Jewish exegesis helped reshape sixteenth-century European views on water and the relationship between the world’s landmasses and waterways. Whereas Ptolemy’s Geography argued that there was more land and less water in the world than medieval Europeans typically thought, medieval Jewish scholars explained the dry land’s existence through God’s more direct intervention into the world than their medieval Christian contemporaries. It argues that the method through which sixteenth-century European scholars studied the world in which they lived meant that the books they read shaped the ways in which they conceptualized the arrangement of the world’s landmasses and bodies of water, and the ontological status of that relationship.

Devotion as Rasa

2019 ◽  
pp. 231-264
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Important Center ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

In addition to being an important center for religious innovation and literary production, Kashmir was also the site of major developments in aesthetics from the end of the eighth century onward. After reviewing this history, this chapter considers how Kashmirian poets adopted and adapted language and ideas from aesthetics—particularly the language of rasa—in unusual and creative ways. It focuses on the idea of bhaktirasa, the “taste” or experience of devotion. Notably, many Kashmirian explorations of bhaktirasa occurred long before Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava authors would make bhaktirasa well known in South Asia. This chapter argues that the Śaiva hymns of Kashmir represent earlier reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of devotion that can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and religion in South Asia.

Introducing the Marots

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 233-235
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The Family ◽  
Literate Culture ◽  
Clement Marot ◽  
The Relationship

Chapters 16–19 are a case study of the family that produced the best-selling vernacular literary author of sixteenth-century France: Clément Marot. The example of this family also provides one way of examining the relationship to family and social hierarchy of a genre of writing that was fundamental to literate culture: poetry. The aspiration to social ascent was only one of the reasons why poetry was so widely composed in sixteenth-century France, but it was a key one. Like other cultural practices—ranging from dress and heraldry to forms of address—poetry was therefore itself part of the very mechanics that constructed social hierarchy.

Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Legal History in Calvin’s Mosaic Harmony

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter examines John Calvin’s commentary on Exodus through Deuteronomy (1563) through the lens of sixteenth-century historical jurisprudence, exemplified in the works of Calvin’s contemporaries François de Connan and François Baudouin. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis is in continuity with broader contemporary trends in premodern Christian biblical interpretation; this chapter explores another essential context for Calvin’s approach to the Bible. The intermingling of narrative and legal material in these four biblical books inspired Calvin to break with his customary practice of lectio continua and apply his historical hermeneutic more broadly and creatively to explain the Mosaic histories and legislation. Calvin’s unusual and unprecedented arrangement of the material in this commentary and his attention to the relationship between law and history reveal his engagement with his generation’s quest for historical method.

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