Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence

1963 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 7-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene A. Brucker
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Alpine Regions ◽  
Renaissance Florence ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Fifteenth

In the published studies of European witchcraft ajid sorcery, Italy does not stand out as a fertile field for the practice of the diabolical arts. Both Hansen and Lea noted the higher incidence of sorcery cases in northern Europe, and particularly in the Alpine regions, where powerful and uncontrolled manifestations of natural phenomena strengthened belief in demons and devils and thus contributed to the practice of sorcery. From the printed evidence, it might be concluded that, in the more rational and skeptical milieu of Renaissance Italy, sorcery was neither practised extensively nor taken seriously by the authorities.It is true that Italy did not experience the extremes of fanaticism and terror which occurred in Germany and the Low Countries from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century.

Niels Hemmingsen and the Construction of a Seventeenth-Century Protestant Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattias Skat Sommer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The South ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Western Perspective

AbstractDanish reformer Niels Hemmingsen was a Lutheran, but owing to Pan-Protestant sentiments that became apparent in his later writings, he found an appreciative audience in non-Lutheran Western Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This article argues that the early modern European reception of Hemmingsen and his theology should be seen as an attempt to construct him as part of a Protestant memory. It also argues that in order to understand the dynamics behind the reception of Hemmingsen’s ideas, one has to consider the geopolitics of early modern Denmark. Due to her strategic setting in Northern Europe, Denmark played a vital role in controlling commerce and politics between the North and Baltic Seas. Arguing for a “Western” perspective, the article shows how Hemmingsen’s case substantiates that the Danish Reformation involved both importing Lutheranism from the South (Saxony), and exporting it to the West (The Low Countries, England).

scholarly journals The lower senses in early Netherlandish epiphany altarpieces

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pachomius (Matthew J.) Meade
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Positive Life Events ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
With Memory

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of growing affective piety and engagement with the material culture of Christian devotion in Northern Europe. The three so-called lower senses of smell, touch, and taste were very much a part of this devotional context, formed over centuries to be associated with particular fragrances, embraces, and savors. This work argues that artists and patrons exploited a play on these lower senses as integral parts of the composition, utilizing objects, actions, and even persons to trigger sense memory, ideas, and appropriate practice in viewers. The Epiphany, or the biblical event when magi from the east brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn Jesus, was a popular subject for altarpiece paintings. It was one of three most popular altarpiece subjects in the late medieval Low Countries. Its association with the Eucharist and the phenomenon of infrequent communion for the laity at the time helps to explain why the lower senses became important in these works. Smell is highly associated with memory and was stimulated in these altarpieces to reinforce positive life events with the Church's worship. Touch and taste are braided senses that imply contact with Christ through the Eucharist, if only visually. Marginal persons also appear in these paintings becoming living symbols of the senses that help to correct over-enthusiasm for miraculous and direct contact with the holy.

Caught in the Crossfire

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
Kenneth Austin
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Jewish Populations

This chapter focuses on relations between Jews and Christians in the first half of the seventeenth century, which was the era of the Thirty Years War. It highlights the conflict of the Thirty Years War that provided the backdrop to further religious and political developments that shaped Jewish experiences. The chapter describes how the combative form of Catholicism took shape in the wake of the Catholic Reformation in various places, including the Holy Roman Empire. It looks into parts of northern Europe, particularly Germany and the Low Countries, that began to be more welcoming to Jewish populations. It also illustrates the contrast between repressive Catholicism and a more welcoming form of Protestantism.

Agrippa in Renaissance Italy: the Esoteric Tradition

1959 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles G. Nauert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The North ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The curious northerner who had been attracted by the culture of Renaissance Italy and who sooner or later managed to fulfill his desire to visit that land in person was certainly one of the most interesting and most significant types of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have found his type interesting and significant partly because they desire to understand the spread of intellectual influences from one region to another, and notably from Italy to northern Europe, and partly because these visitors from the north through their writings give insights into intellectual conditions in Italy itself. The type of the humanistic visitor from the north was already well established by the time that Erasmus began his three-year residence in the peninsula in 1506, for Erasmus was only following the example of many of his humanistic acquaintances, especially his English friends, the Oxford reformers.

Hands across the Water: The Making and Breaking of Marriage between Dutch and Scots in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rab Houston ◽  
Manon van der Heijden
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
University Of Leiden ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The North ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
The North Sea

At the time of the Reformation in the 1560s Scotland and the Netherlands already had long-established commercial links. Scots soldiers fought in the wars that ravaged the Low Countries and much of northern Europe in the two centuries after Calvinism gained a foothold. Goods, people, and ideas were readily exchanged in the North Sea basin. With the foundation in 1575 of the avowedly Protestant University of Leiden, academic and intellectual intercourse were added to trading ties. By the mid-seventeenth century Leiden had an international reputation for legal and medical education. Expatriate Protestant churches were established in the early seventeenth century, notably the Scots kirk, Rotterdam. There were nineteen English and Scottish religious communities in the Dutch Republic by the end of the seventeenth century.

無為 – On the Eurasian Roots of the Laissez-Faire Doctrine

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gerlach
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Diffusion Process ◽  
Crystallization Process ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
Wu Wei ◽  
Master Model ◽  
Laissez Faire

Abstract This paper focuses on the diffusion of 無為/ wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three significant developments; first, the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It is revealed that the details of Chinese expertise entered Europe via the textual diffusion of Jesuit texts and the visual diffusion of millions of so-called minben-images during the ceramic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, the hypothesis is advanced that the diffusion of wu-wei, co-evolved with the inner-European laissez-faire principle, the Libaniusian model. In the second part, it is shown that the intellectual foundation of Europe’s first economic school, Physiocracy, is a direct replica of the imported Chinese economic, agrarian craftsmanship of wu-wei; subsequently, it is denied that the indigenous European Libaniusian ideology can be considered the intellectual master-model of Physiocracy and his founder Quesnay. Finally, we argue that Switzerland can be identified as the first European paradigm state of wu-wei. The crystallization process of wu-wei inside Europe ultimately ended with the economic-political reorganization of the newly formed Eidgenossenschaft in 1848. The Swiss succeeded in institutionally transforming traditional Chinese agrarian wu-wei into the modern version of European “commercial wu-wei”. In due course, this alpine paradigm enabled the endogenous Libaniusian model to verify and reflect upon its theory of commercial society. Additionally, this third focus also demonstrates that the later development of Europe’s laissez-faire doctrine has to be seen as a Eurasian co-production – without importing China’s wu-wei, Europe’s pro-commercial ideology might never have matured.

scholarly journals Irish bishops and clergy in exile in mid-seventeenth-century France

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (141) ◽  
pp. 16-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
René d’Ambrières ◽  
Éamon Ó Ciosáin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
The Military

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, hundreds of Catholic priests and religious were forced into exile on the Continent, with many seeking refuge in France, Spain and the Spanish Low Countries. For some, refuge was temporary while awaiting political developments and toleration in the home country; for others, it was permanent. The sheer numbers involved – in the hundreds (see below) – mark this as a new phenomenon in the migration of Irish Catholics to France. Although large numbers of Irish soldiers arrived there in the late 1630s and again from 1651 onwards, as Ireland was cleared of regiments connected with the Confederation of Kilkenny, the volume of priests and seminarians migrating to France had hitherto been on a much smaller scale than that of the military.

An Index of Polyphonic Chansons in English Manuscript Sources, c. 1530–1640

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Jane A. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
English Manuscript

Much has been written about the Italian madrigal and its effect upon the musical life of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. That the Italian vogue was indeed strong can be observed most dramatically in English printed and manuscript sources of the period; yet the obvious and dazzling effect this foreign idiom had upon many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean music is balanced by the equally important and more deeply-rooted connection that England enjoyed with her nearer Continental neighbours, France and the Low Countries. The following index documents this musical connection by presenting a list of the Franco-Netherlandish chansons that appeared in English manuscript sources dating from c. 1530 to c. 1640.

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