scholarly journals Utter Confusion on Every Side? Helena Northampton’s Supplicatory Letter to the Earl of Sussex

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-90
Author(s):  
Anna Swärdh
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Patronage System

This essay examines the supplicatory letter the Swedish-born Helena, marchioness of Northampton, addressed to Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, in 1576 or 1577, hoping he would help her regain access to Elizabeth I. The essay situates the letter within the early modern patronage system and the court environment, but foremost within the field of early modern letter-writing in general, and the supplicatory letter in particular. The essay shows how a number of rhetorical strategies, designed to inspire pity and benevolence mainly through ethos and pathos, are employed to create positions for both supplicant and addressee. In this way, the letter reaches the desired goal of regaining royal presence. By looking at the letter through the frames of early modern letter-writing and more general rhetorical practise, the essay points to a tension between the letter’s stated sentiment of “utter confusion” and its highly formalised expression, indicative of the letter’s rhetorical situation and especially of the constraints related to its sender’s social status. The letter is transcribed in an appendix.

Ransoming Russians from Tatars: Justification and Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-99
Author(s):  
Donald Ostrowski
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
Sliding Scale ◽  
The Government ◽  
Modern Russian

The early modern Russian government and Russian Orthodox Church identified as one of their main duties the ransoming of Russian Christians from Muslim Tatar captors. The process of ransoming could be an involved one with negotiations being carried on by different agents and by the potential ransomees themselves. Different amounts of ransom were paid on a sliding scale depending upon the ransomee’s social status, gender, and age. One of our main sources for the justification of this practice was the Stoglav (100 Chapters) Church Council in 1551, which discussed the issue of ransom in some detail. The Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649 specifies the conditions and amounts to be paid to redeem captives. Church writers justified the ransoming of Christian captives of the Muslim Tatars by citing Scripture, and they also specified that the government should pay the ransom out of its own treasury.

Füchsische Poetologie. Zur Spiegelfiktion im Reynke de Vos (1498)

POETICA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 193-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Rieger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Ancient Rhetoric ◽  
Wooden Frame ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Specific Material

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.

Seeking the historical listener

Early Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Plank
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
Focus Questions ◽  
Robert Herrick

Abstract This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey’s well-known concept of the ‘male gaze’.

scholarly journals Tails of Cross-Channel Comets: From Acclaim to Obscurity

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-234
Author(s):  
Patricia Demers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Gift Books ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
Modern Europe

This article explores the diverse materialities of texts created by three female luminaries that expand our understanding of translation and transformation in early modern Europe. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s translation of Bishop Jewel’s Apologia was praised as the official text of the Elizabethan Settlement and printed without change for the edification of both English readers and Continental sceptics. Yet despite its centrality in the vitriolic controversy between Jewel and Louvain Romanist Thomas Harding, within a generation Bacon’s name disappeared. Bilingual calligrapher and miniaturist Esther Inglis prepared and presented stunning manuscript gift books, often including self-portraits, to patrons on both sides of the Channel. Her artisanal expertise emulated and often outdid the typographic variety of the printed text. Scholarly and lionized participant in the Neo-Latin Republic of Letters, Anna Maria van Schurman, whose landmark Dissertatio was translated as The Learned Maid, scandalized her conservative Calvinist supporters by embracing Labadism and praising its simple ways in her autobiography Eukleria. These three early modern women, distinct in temperament, time, and social status, are the subject of this exploration, which seeks to understand the dynamics and fluctuations of cross-Channel transmission and the role played by the Channel divide or bridge in creating a brief notoriety soon to be followed by obscurity.

Negotiating with the Material Text

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-219
Author(s):  
Tracey A. Sowerby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Cultural Understanding ◽  
Visual Spatial ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Interdisciplinary Methodology ◽  
Material Form

Royal letters were an integral part of early modern diplomatic communication, intended to shape inter-princely relationships through their content and their material form. The exchange of letters was a communicative mechanism on multiple, not simply textual, levels. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology and focusing on letters sent to and from English monarchs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this chapter demonstrates the dynamic interactions between material text and the diplomatic conventions—ceremonial, material, visual, spatial—in which they need to be understood. Knowledge of the ceremonial context into which letters were sent shaped the considerations of how they looked and how they travelled. Although the predominant form of inter-princely letter exchanged within Europe was different from the predominant form of letters between European and non-European rulers, several of the same factors were at play. Rather than indicating a lack of cultural understanding between English diplomats and non-European princes, the epistolary practice of Elizabeth I and James VI/I suggests that many of the semiotics of power at extra-European courts were adeptly recognized by English diplomats.

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