Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-211
Author(s):  
Deirdre Serjeantson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City

By the early modern period, the city of Babylon was in ruins, but it continued to loom large in the imagination. This chapter takes the English recusant printer, polemicist, and spy Richard Verstegan as the lens through which to examine the diverse iconography of Babylon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Verstegan’s treatment of the Tower of Babel reflects contemporary interest in questions about the origins of language and nation, but he also employed it to explore issues of tyranny in early modern England. He reclaimed the image of the harlot from the stock Protestant identification of the Whore of Babylon with the Roman Church, and used the biblical exile of the Jews in Babylon to frame his own religious exile. The chapter places Verstegan alongside his contemporaries, from Spenser to Milton, illuminating their use of the image of Babylon through consideration of his treatment of this very flexible symbol.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

Die geschriebene Stadt

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.

Moscow: The Third Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Russian

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.

scholarly journals Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Eli Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
The City

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over thelongue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

scholarly journals Early Modern European Languages and Literature: A Short Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
David Porter
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Short Review ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Third ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Language And Literature

This article engages with several recent books about language and literature, with a general focus on the early modern period in Europe. One of these books discusses language study in early modern England. Another examines the histories of words relating to ‘ingenuity’. The third provides a theoretical look at the aphorism with a wide historical scope but with some chapters relating to early modern literature. Each is of general interest for linguistic and literary scholars.

Making Murder Public

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Formal Distinction

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.

Thomas Nashe’s Anatomy of Venice in The Unfortunate Traveller or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594): Utopia Revisited

Moreana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (Number 181- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 186-204
Author(s):  
Anne Geoffroy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Negative Aspect ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
The Ideal

Although most critics have focused on the overall negative aspect of Jack Wilton’s Italian tour in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), as suggested in the title of Thomas Nashe’s prose fiction, the specificity of the narrator’s Venetian adventures should be examined more closely. This paper argues that Thomas Nashe’s representation of Venice needs to be reassessed in the context of Thomas More’s Utopia and the question of the ideal commonwealth. Notwithstanding Nashe’s reliance on pervasive irony, the author provides an image of the city-state which – thanks to a retrospective approach – puts the topic of alternative urban spaces in the early modern period into perspective.

The ‘Beame of Diuinity’: Animal suffering in the Early Thought of Robert Boyle

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm R. Oster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Cruelty To Animals ◽  
Self Defence

It has long been recognized that unnecessary cruelty to animals was held to be morally wrong by many classical moralists and medieval scholastics, and was echoed repeatedly in the early-modern period, though not necessarily reflecting any particular concern for animals, but rather to indicate the supposed brutalizing effects on the human character. The prevalence of the more radical view that cruelty to animals was wrong regardless of human consequences has only been dealt with comparatively recently, in the pioneering work of Keith Thomas with regard to early-modern England. Thomas suggested that a remarkably constant and coherent argument underpinned the bulk of pamphleteering and preaching against animal cruelty in the period; man was entitled to domesticate animals and kill them for food and clothing but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. While wild animals could be killed for food or in self-defence, and game and vermin could be hunted, it was deemed wrong to kill only for pleasure. While this position could be found among Protestants of many different persuasions, the particular focus of successive campaigners changed over time. Preceding the Civil War the attack was concentrated on cock-fighting, bear-baiting and the ill-treatment of domestic animals; in the later seventeenth century it broadened out to include the caging of wild birds, brutal methods of slaughter, hare-hunting and vivisection.

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