A Note on the Curious Case of John Bale in Spain

The Library ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-391
Author(s):  
Freddy C Dominguez

Abstract A slender folder at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid contains parts of a story about how John Bale’s Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium (1548) ended up in sixteenth century Spain. Inquisition documents from 1583 reveal how the book got to Toledo from Lyon and how the Holy Office came to know about it. By briefly telling this story, this short note hopes to pique interest in the documents and to suggest ways in which the archives in which they reside can support further research on censorship and the early-modern book trade.

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannine Olson

AbstractAnne Colladon, widow of Laurent de Normandie, financier of the mid-sixteenth century Genevan book trade, grappled with Laurent’s first wife’s estate and her adult stepsons’ claims on her estate. This case study of a famous family of French origin reveals complexities of early-modern systems of dowries and wills and problems for a second wife and her daughter. Normandie was a great hero of the Reformation because of his financing of Calvin’s publications and his dispatching of colporteurs carrying Bibles, catechisms, and Psalters into France. Anne was from a prominent family that fled France for Geneva (1550). She was an astute business woman and seemingly responsible mother but she inherited a complex situation after Normandie’s untimely death of the plague in 1569. She was left with financial problems and two stepsons in a blended family that included three children she had conceived with Laurent. It was not an easy mix.


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....


Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Penny Roberts

AbstractThis paper seeks to provide some historical perspective on contemporary preoccupations with competing versions of the truth. Truth has always been contested and subject to scrutiny, particularly during troubled times. It can take many forms – judicial truth, religious truth, personal truth – and is bound up with the context of time and place. This paper sets out the multidisciplinary approaches to truth and examines its role in a specific context, that of early modern Europe and, in particular, the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. Truth was a subject of intense debate among both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, it was upheld as an absolute by judges, theologians and rulers. Yet, it also needed to be concealed by those who maintained a different truth to that of the authorities. In the case of France, in order to advance their cause, the Huguenots used subterfuge of various kinds, including the illicit carrying of messages. In this instance, truth was dependent on the integrity of its carrier, whether the messenger could be trusted and, therefore, their truth accepted. Both sides also sought to defend the truth by countering what they presented as the deceit of their opponents. Then, as now, acceptance of what is true depends on which side we are on and who we are prepared to believe.


AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg

This article examines early modern learning through Ashkenazic responsa. Beyond explicit evidence from published responsa collections, implicit insights dwell in what these publications lack. These missing features shed light on sixteenth-century scholarly practices. The works’ organizational inconsistencies must be understood in context of learned archives. Such an adjustment offers a corrective to the regnant narrative, which views the introduction of print as a sharp rupture from earlier modes of transmission. This article suggests instead that the culture of printed books coexisted with older approaches, and that print was complemented by more disorderly and unconstrained forms of transmission. Comparing rabbinic “paper-ware” with contemporaneous humanist practices highlights the rabbi's working papers, focusing on a culture's dynamic activity rather than its stable output. This shift in perspective allows us to see rabbinic writings not merely as a collection of books but as a mode of scholarship.


Rural History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Heather Falvey

AbstractIn the early summer of 1588, twenty-seven inhabitants of the large parish of Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) presented a petition to two local Justices of the Peace complaining about disorder in Mill End, on the outskirts of the main town, caused by those frequenting Richard Heyward’s alehouse. Most recent work on alehouse sociability has considered attitudes towards drinking and its regulation after the early Jacobean legislation; in contrast, this article considers attitudes towards drunkenness in late sixteenth-century England, including the views expressed in the official ‘homily against drunkenness’ and in the Sabbatarian pamphlet published in 1572 by Humfrey Roberts. Similarly, most work on early modern protest considers complaints against the activities of the protestors’ social superiors; in this instance petitioners complained about the conduct of their inferiors. Although, due to archival attrition, it is impossible to determine what action the authorities took against Heyward and his clientele, thanks to the chance survival of a personal letter it is possible to reconstruct the reactions of the JPs to whom the petition was addressed, thus shedding light on how JPs might act outside the Quarter Sessions.


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