Gunpowder, Militarization, and Threshold Ecologies in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Martin
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Competitive Growth ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
Henry Iv

The disputed land-uses and cultivation practices represented in As You Like It responded to unprecedented changes in Elizabethan climate, population, and economic relations. Traditional modes of rural dwelling were no longer protected by virtue of their rural isolation or autonomy, but were becoming inescapably tied to national and global orders of competitive growth and resource exploitation. Perhaps the most disruptive of these modernizing turns was the development of gunpowder technologies and the armament industry. As in other western European countries, military culture became ubiquitous in England by the late sixteenth century as a result of innovations in gunpowder weapons and the formation of national armies. During the Middle Ages, low-tech weaponry and feudal mobilization had limited the social and environmental impacts of war. This situation began to change from the fifteenth century onwards with the development of far more deadly cannons, mines, and firearms. Influenced partly by the Erasmian ethics of his Humanist education (like Queen Elizabeth and King James in their attitudes to war), Shakespeare drew attention to gunpowder’s devastating effects on human and non-human animals and their environments in virtually all his history plays and several of his tragedies, even thoughmost of these references were anachronistic. By layering historical and contemporary viewpoints he registered changing material realities and cultural assumptions about the ecology of war: from self-regulating cycles of martial destruction and agrarian regeneration, to incremental technological mastery reliant on ever-increasing resource consumption. Traditional ideas about redeeming war through cultivation are captured by the Virgilian image of beating swords into ploughshares. It suggests that peacetime cultivation will heal wartime damage, and that periods of war and peace routinely alternate. The swordsinto-ploughshares trope also encodes temporal assumptions that the arc of catastrophe, in its political, ecological, and dramatic senses, is limited in scope and ultimately reversible. In this chapter I want to examine the emerging gunpowder regime putting pressure on this paradigm, and replacing it with modern structures of recoiling environmental risk and planetary push-back, represented in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth respectively.

scholarly journals Bergen’s role in the medieval North Atlantic trade

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Knut Helle
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Total Trade ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
The North ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The North Atlantic

North Atlantic trade in the high Middle Ages was centred on Bergen. The Bergen connection was important to the North Atlantic islanders and townsmen who specialized in trading with them, but up to the early fourteenth century did not count for much in Bergen’s total trade. This changed when larger assignments of Icelandic stockfish were sent to Bergen from the 1340s and reexported via the town’s Hanseatic settlement, the later Kontor. During the fifteenth century fish exports from the North Atlantic to Bergen declined sharply as the English increasingly fetched their fish directly from Iceland, and Hanseatic merchants from Hamburg and Lübeck followed in their wake to Iceland and the more southerly islands. Yet, in the author’s opinion, Hanseatic trade with the North Atlantic from Bergen was not reduced to the degree that has often been assumed. And it should not be overlooked that Bergen had economic relations with the North Atlantic islands outside the Hanse.

Development of transportation types and their usage on caravan roads in middle ages

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-23
Author(s):  
Jahongir Yunusugli Ergashev
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Transport System ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Sand Storm ◽  
Natural Climate ◽  
Daily Load ◽  
Daily Distance

During the existence of the Bukhara khanate, the economic and trade relations with neighboring countries on the territory of Central Asia have been largely based on transport system of the old network of roads. Along with the formation and development of communication routes, transportation vehicles also improved based on the natural climate and geographical location of different regions.  In the following article the info is given on the means of the transport used in the caravan routes in the trade-economic relations of khanate of Bukhara with neighboring countries in medieval times. Included there, the starting of domestication and usage of horse drawn vehicles, camels, donkeys and others, the capacity of daily load of camels, horses, donkeys which were core of caravans, their daily distance, the necessary tasks in the incidents occurred in caravan routes (injuries, bruises, contagious diseases) the stopping regulation of caravans (sand storm, in heat and frost) is thoroughly analyzed.

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old French ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Image Context ◽  
Panel Paintings

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.

A Crooked Mirror for Princes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Mirrors For Princes

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.

The medieval church of Montrose: a place ‘of much antiquity and abundantly populous’

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona Anna Gray
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Plausible Candidate ◽  
External Evidence ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
The Church

Montrose was one of Scotland's earliest royal burghs, but historians have largely overlooked its parish kirk. A number of fourteenth and fifteenth-century sources indicate that the church of Montrose was an important ecclesiastical centre from an early date. Dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, by the later middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage linked in local tradition with the cult of Saint Boniface of Rosemarkie. This connection with Boniface appears to have been of long standing, and it is argued that the church of Montrose is a plausible candidate for the lost Egglespether, the ‘church of Peter’, associated with the priory of Restenneth. External evidence from England and Iceland appears to identify Montrose as the seat of a bishop, raising the possibility that it may also have been an ultimately unsuccessful rival for Brechin as the episcopal centre for Angus and the Mearns.

A new attribution to Brassart?

1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Peter Wright
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Middle Ages

A badly trimmed ascription can be more a matter for relish than regret: if enough of the composer's name survives to permit informed speculation, the musicologist's sense of pleasure is likely to outweigh his sense of loss. Most musical manuscripts from the late Middle Ages have visibly suffered at the hands of the binder's knife, but perhaps none more so than the famous ‘Aosta Manuscript’ (I-AO15), one of the central sources of early fifteenth-century sacred polyphony. In his inventory of the manuscript Guillaume de Van reported no fewer than twenty names as surviving in varying states of incompleteness. In fifteen instances he was able to decipher the composer's name or supply it from the manuscript's index or a concordant source, while the other five apparently defeated him. Two of the names have since been deciphered, and a third has been identified from another source, but the remaining two have attracted no further comment.

The so-called Statutes of John Pecham and Robert Winchelsey for the Province of Canterbury

1961 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. R. Cheney
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts

Among the legislators of the medieval English Church John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury, 1279–92, is remembered chiefly on account of canons published in two councils early in his pontificate, at Reading in July-August 1279 and at Lambeth in October 1281. His successor, Robert Winchelsey (1294–1313), less celebrated for his laws, none-the-less is assigned by Lyndwood, the fifteenth-century canonist, nine chapters of the Provinciale. The ‘Winchelsey’ documents and some others described in medieval manuscripts as ‘Statuta’ or ‘Constitutiones’ or ‘Decreta’ of one or other of the two archbishops cannot be immediately or surely connected with any known provincial council. They include texts on questions of almost daily occurrence to medieval archdeacons and parochial clergy: about the calculation of tithe, the duties of stipendiary priests, the obligations of the laity for church repairs. Lyndwood glossed many of them. Modern students of history and canon law commonly cite them. It is, therefore, of some importance to establish the degree of credit which may be allowed to the ascriptions. This study will consider the evidence of the manuscripts and will aim at sorting the genuine statutes from the spurious and the dubious. Some of each kind will be found. The enquiry may not only help to determine the nature of these particular documents, but also may reflect light on other doubtful legislation and illustrate the ways in which laws were framed and customs established in the English Church in the later Middle Ages.

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