Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 251-271
Author(s):  
Mimi Ensley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Library ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Resources

Abstract This article examines a manuscript poem composed by the seventeenth-century author John Lane. Writing in what is now London, British Library, Harley MS 5243, Lane revives the medieval poet John Lydgate in order to re-tell the story of Guy of Warwick, famous from medieval romance. In Lane’s poem, Lydgate returns from beyond the grave to proclaim the historicity of Guy’s legend and simultaneously preserve his own reputation as a chronicler of English history. While some scholars suggest that Lydgate’s popularity declined in the post-Reformation period due to his reputation as the ‘Monk of Bury’, and while it is true that significantly fewer editions of Lydgate’s poems were published in the decades after the Reformation, Lane’s poem offers another window into Lydgate’s early modern reputation. I argue that Lane’s historiographic technique in his Guy of Warwick narrative mirrors Lydgate’s own poetic histories. Both Lane and Lydgate grapple with existing historical resources and compose their narratives by compiling the accreted traditions of the past, supplementing these traditions with documentary sources and artefacts. This article, thus, complicates existing scholarly narratives that align Lydgate with medieval or monastic traditions, traditions perceived to be irrecoverably transformed by the events of the Reformation in England.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

The Seventeenth Century Doctrine of Plastic Nature

1950 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Methods ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Circulation Of The Blood

Few eras are more interesting and profitable to study than those in which the basic ideas of mankind change under the impact of new discoveries and ideas. Our own appears to be such a period; of previous ages perhaps only the ebullient Renaissance can equal it. At its English beginnings in the sixteenth century men reached avidly for new experiences; in the course of time they tried to codify them into theories which would do justice to the observed facts and at the same time harmonize as far as possible with the dicta transmitted from the past. These early efforts resulted in the foundation of the modern methods of science, not to mention permanent and still unchallenged achievements like Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle's theory of gases. Such is the seventeenth century: the first great age of scientific generalization in English history.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

European Calvinism: history, providence, and martyrdom

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Andrew Pettegree
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.

Lord Deputy Chichester and the English Government’s ‘Mandates Policy’ in Ireland, 1605–1607

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Protestant Clergy ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.

Outside the Ghetto: Jews and Christians in the Duchy of Modena

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-271
Author(s):  
Katherine Aron-Beller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
City States ◽  
Main City

Abstract Historians have in the past concentrated their studies of early modern Jewish life on the main city-states of Northern Italy where the largest Jewish communities existed. These areas have been categorized as territories which absorbed Jewish immigrants, enclosed them in ghettos, and monitored their actions with the creation of specific agencies. My essay turns to Jewish existence in the smaller towns and rural areas of the duchy of Modena in the seventeenth century, and attempts to question how this alienated minority was able to fare in areas which housed no ghettos. Here the political and religious decentralization, particularly in the early seventeenth century, generated retaliatory hostility as well as intimacy between Jews and Christians. Sources for this study will be Inquisitorial documents that concerned professing Jews. These sources, once decoded, provide extraordinarily rich images of daily life and provide a unique picture of social relations between the two religionists.

The Paper Parish: The parish register and the reformation of parish memory in early modern London

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Communal Memory ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Changing Practices ◽  
Parish Registers

This essay explores the development of parish record-keeping in early modern London, examining the implications of changing practices for communal memory. Building on the study of more than 50 parish registers, it investigates who wrote the parish records, how they were kept and how they were used. Many of the extant records are the product of a ‘memorial moment’ at the turn of the seventeenth century, involving a concerted attempt to re-order and re-present parish papers as memorial objects: the material representations of parish memory. These registers highlight the emergence of an ongoing communal investment in and oversight of record-keeping practices, while the evidence of annotations and corrections in parish registers demonstrates the persistence of oral forms of communal memory, contesting the textual record. The development of the parish register in the period thus emerges as a key site for renegotiating the forms and habits of parish memory.

Early Modern Pietism

2015 ◽  
pp. 401-435
Author(s):  
Jonathan Strom ◽  
Hartmut Lehmann
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Renewal Movement

Pietism became the most important Protestant renewal movement in central Europe after the Reformation. This essay surveys the origins and theological consequences of the movement in the context of the crises of the seventeenth century and the rise of the Enlightenment. Pietists concerned themselves primarily with reform of the Christian life rather than doctrine, but Pietism presented new challenges for ecclesiology, Biblical authority, eschatology, regeneration, and the conception of theology. The various streams of Pietism remained heterogeneous and could differ significantly on issues such as millenarianism, prophecy, and ecclesiology. Where early Pietists could be innovative and progressive, later Pietists reacted strongly against the rise of rationalism and the Enlightenment, increasingly emphasizing Biblicism and allying themselves with conservative tendencies.

Seventeenth-century interpretations of the past: the case of Geoffrey Keating

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (98) ◽  
pp. 116-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Irish History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intellectual Activities ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Local Levels

The study of history at both national and local levels featured prominently among the intellectual activities of early modern Europeans. The desire to know more of their own countries (as evidenced by the growth of mapmaking) and the use of history as a political tool both played important parts in the emergence of the past as a vital force in the present. The same was true of early modern Ireland. Settlers coming to a new environment looked to the past both as a way of understanding their new home, and as a way of legitimising current political realities. Sir James Perrott noted in the introduction to his Chronicle of Ireland ‘the use of reading histories is twofold: either private for a man’s particular knowledge and information, or public for the application of it to the service of the state’ Thus Sir John Davies’s treatise on the Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued was as much a justification of existing royal policy in Ireland as an explanation of Irish history Each, for his own reasons, was looking to the past to explain the present.

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