10. Weeping, Death, and Spiritual Ascent in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Mysticism

The Christian Cabala, a Christianised version of Jewish mysticism originating in Renaissance Italy, reached England in the early sixteenth century and was met with a variety of responses from English Catholics in the Reformation period. While ‘cabala’ was used as a slur by both Protestant and Catholic polemicists, Robert Persons drew positively from the work of the Italian cabalist Pietro Galatino, and in 1597 Sir Thomas Tresham, then a prisoner at Ely, described in detail a complex cabalistic design to decorate a window. While the Christian Cabala was only one source of inspiration for Tresham, he was sufficiently confident in his cabalistic knowledge to attempt manipulations of names of God in his designs for the window at Ely and to insert measurements of cabalistic significance in the gardens on his Lyveden estate. Persons’s and Tresham’s willingness to draw on Christian cabalism even after its papal condemnation suggests the intellectual independence of English Catholics, who were prepared to make use of esoteric traditions to bolster their faith. The evidence for experiments with cabalism by a few English Catholics highlights the need for further re-evaluation of the significance of esoteric traditions within the English Counter-Reformation and the eclectic nature of post-Reformation English Catholic mysticism.

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Maxims of Foreign Policy

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115300044508 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 62-79

Author(s):

W.J. Boot

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

Foreign Relations ◽

East Asian ◽

Modern Period ◽

Cultural Sphere ◽

Japanese Identity

In the pre-modern period, Japanese identity was articulated in contrast with China. It was, however, articulated in reference to criteria that were commonly accepted in the whole East-Asian cultural sphere; criteria, therefore, that were Chinese in origin.One of the fields in which Japan's conception of a Japanese identity was enacted was that of foreign relations, i.e. of Japan's relations with China, the various kingdoms in Korea, and from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and the Kingdom of the Ryūkū.

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