scholarly journals Patronage, Politics, and Devotion: The Habsburgs of Central Europe and Jesuit Saints

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-75
Author(s):  
Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux

Abstract The main components of the Habsburgs’ dynastical piety—worship of the Crucified, of the Eucharist, of the Blessed Mary and her spouse St. Joseph—are already well-known. They were common to both branches of the House of Austria, the Spanish as well as the Austrian one. However, they are far from exhausting the variety of manifestations with which they fostered the cult of the saints. More than other sovereigns, Austrian Habsburgs intervened on behalf of patron saints with the popes and the Roman Congregation of Sacred Rites. During the seventeenth century and still in the eighteenth century, they promulgated public feasts in the Austrian hereditary lands as well as in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. This paper focuses mainly on the veneration they addressed to the Jesuit saints: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Luigi Gonzaga, Stanisław Kostka, and Peter Canisius using archive and printed materials from Rome, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.

Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


Author(s):  
Alison Games

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.


Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.


Author(s):  
Mark Burden

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.


Author(s):  
Barend J. ter Haar

Deities were thought to help and protect people, heal them from illnesses, and sometimes also to punish them. And yet, a worshipper was not free to decide what to ask for, but had to work within a collectively created and transmitted paradigm of expectations of the deity. In Northern China, Lord Guan was often requested to provide rain, and everywhere he was asked to assist in the fight against demons and other types of outsiders (barbarians, rebels, or otherwise), or even appeared of his own accord to do so. From the early seventeenth century onwards, Guan Yu was seen as the incarnation of a dragon executed at the command of the Jade Emperor for bringing rain out of compassion to a local community sentenced to extinction by the supreme deity. Finally, his loyal image inspired his rise as a God of Wealth in the course of the eighteenth century.


Author(s):  
Chad van Dixhoorn

The seventeenth century marked a high point in the Presbyterian experiment. A variety of models were tested internationally, and apologists for its polity offered a rigorous defense against Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Erastians. The Westminster Assembly offered Presbyterians the first opportunity since the Reformation to model a fully Reformed church in England, and the gathering looked closely not only at the teachings of Scripture on ecclesial governance, but also at historical and contemporary models of connectional, nonhierarchical government to guide their formulations on church polity. The century also saw some of the worst persecution of Presbyterians, especially in France and Scotland, but also in England and central Europe. During their seasons of suffering, some Presbyterians found subtle ways to articulate their polity or identify essential elements of Presbyterianism. Others fought or fled hostile authorities, supplying a legacy of martyr narratives and missionary impulses for later Presbyterians.


Author(s):  
Hélène Visentin

This article focuses on the practice of machine theater that originated from courtly spectacles in Italy during the Renaissance and developed throughout Western and Central Europe during the seventeenth century. Defined by rapid scene changes and special effects, machine plays reflect the Baroque fascination with both mechanical devices and the law of optics—or scenery perspective—to produce wonder while displaying royal power and prestige. The aim of this article is threefold: to provide an overview of the origins and development of machine theater, to examine the transmission and dissemination of stagecraft knowledge, and to look at the changing nature of machine plays performed by public theater companies, which took advantage of stage machinery innovations to broaden their repertoire, attract a larger audience, and remain competitive.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document