scholarly journals Sixteenth-Century Polymaths in the Print and Publishing Business in Basel: An Intersection of Interests and Strategies (1472–1513)

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Valentina Sebastiani ◽  
Wendell Ricketts (translator)

In sixteenth-century Europe the business of printing created small intellectual communities that had the ability to manage the exigencies of the market and those of culture. In this process of continual negotiation between the interests of publishers, authors, and readers, how did men of letters lend their erudition to the service of printing? How were they able to elicit the interest of printers in publishing their works? And, above all, to what extent did their collaboration with printers impact their careers? This brief investigation analyzes the work of polymaths such as Johann Heynlin, Conrad Leontorius, Konrad Pellikan, Sebastian Brant, Jacob Wimpfeling, and Johann Reuchlin—who, acting as translators, proofreaders, and literary and typographical experts, collaborated with the Basel printer Johann Amerbach—in order to shed light on the fruitful reciprocity of printing and erudition that shaped the careers of early modern scholars and erudites. Dans l’Europe du XVIe siècle, l’imprimerie a créé de petites communautés d’intellectuels en mesure de tenir compte aussi bien des exigences culturelles que de celles du marché. À travers la continuelle négociation entre les intérêts des éditeurs, des auteurs et des lecteurs, comment ces hommes de lettre ont-ils mis leur érudition au service de l’imprimerie ? Comment arrivaient-ils à intéresser les éditeurs à leur travail ? Et surtout, dans quelle mesure leur collaboration avec ces éditeurs a-t-elle influencé leur carrière ? Cette brève enquête analyse le travail de savants polymathes tels que Johann Heynlin, Conrad Leontorius, Konrad Pellikan, Sebastian Brant, Jacob Wimpfeling et Johann Reuchlin, qui ont travaillé en tant que traducteurs, correcteurs d’épreuves, et d’experts typographes et littéraires avec l’imprimeur bâlois Johann Amerbach. Elle met ainsi en lumière la collaboration fructueuse de l’imprimerie et de l’érudition et son impact sur la carrière des intellectuels et des érudits de cette époque.


AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg

This article examines early modern learning through Ashkenazic responsa. Beyond explicit evidence from published responsa collections, implicit insights dwell in what these publications lack. These missing features shed light on sixteenth-century scholarly practices. The works’ organizational inconsistencies must be understood in context of learned archives. Such an adjustment offers a corrective to the regnant narrative, which views the introduction of print as a sharp rupture from earlier modes of transmission. This article suggests instead that the culture of printed books coexisted with older approaches, and that print was complemented by more disorderly and unconstrained forms of transmission. Comparing rabbinic “paper-ware” with contemporaneous humanist practices highlights the rabbi's working papers, focusing on a culture's dynamic activity rather than its stable output. This shift in perspective allows us to see rabbinic writings not merely as a collection of books but as a mode of scholarship.



2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Kirk Essary

A key problem in the history of emotions arises from the shifting meaning of emotion terms throughout history and from the difficulty in translating emotion terms from one language to another. Erasmus’ New Testament and Annotations offer scholars interested in the ‘historical semantics of emotion’ invaluable insights into sixteenth-century emotions discourse and the translation of emotion terms from Greek into Latin. This paper examines some of the more problematic cases in order to shed light on how Erasmus handles the difficulties that are attendant to translating emotion words, and also considers the influence of Erasmus’ NT and Annotations in early modern Greek-to-Latin lexicons, a feature of his reception that has not been acknowledged to date.



2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-75
Author(s):  
Side Emre

Abstract Today, scholarship on Islamic mysticism mostly prioritizes the poetry and mystical teachings of famous Sufi masters, with limited efforts to historically contextualize them. One of the sub-branches of the Halvetī order, the Gülşeniye, while being an influential participant in early modern Ottoman politics and society, presents the historian of Sufism with a rare opportunity to approach this gap. Despite offering a wide range of untapped literary, hagiographical, and historical sources, studies on the Gülşeniye remain in the margins. Through Gülşeniye literary production, including poetry and hagio-biographies by dervish-authors, this article explores the mystical thought and piety of İbrāhīm-i Gülşeni (d. 940/1534), the founder of the Gülşenī order of dervishes in Egypt. Close textual analysis of sources reveals that Gülşenī’s inspirations formed the contours of the order’s early literature and culture. I argue that the Gülşeniye literary corpus, and the culture formed alongside it, was a product of changing socio-political environments, not a replica of the doctrines of the order’s founder. The shifts in the corpus unveil the order’s changing practical priorities and shed light on how the Gülşeniye secured a stable niche for itself in Ottoman Egypt in the sixteenth century.



Author(s):  
Jesús Romero-Barranco

RESUMEN: El presente artículo ofrece un análisis codicológico y paleográfi co del manuscrito Hunter 135, un volumen del siglo XVI que contiene cinco tratados de los cuales el segundo y la mitad del tercero son objeto de estudio (chirvrgia libri, ff. 34r-73v; y medica qvaedam, ff. 74r-121v). La descripción física no solo ha permitido aportar la posible fecha de composición del manuscrito sino que también ha hecho posible el análisis de las técnicas en la producción de manuscritos en el Periodo moderno temprano (1500-1700).ABSTRACT: The present article provides a codicological and palaeographic analysis of MS Hunter 135, a sixteenth-century volume containing fi ve treatises, the second and approximately half the third being the object of study (chirvrgia libri, ff. 34r-73v; and medica qvaedam, ff. 74r-121v). The physical description has not only shed light on the likely date of composition of the witness but also on the different practices in early Modern English manuscript production.



2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Markidou

This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.



1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.



Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.



Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....



Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.



2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Penny Roberts

AbstractThis paper seeks to provide some historical perspective on contemporary preoccupations with competing versions of the truth. Truth has always been contested and subject to scrutiny, particularly during troubled times. It can take many forms – judicial truth, religious truth, personal truth – and is bound up with the context of time and place. This paper sets out the multidisciplinary approaches to truth and examines its role in a specific context, that of early modern Europe and, in particular, the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. Truth was a subject of intense debate among both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, it was upheld as an absolute by judges, theologians and rulers. Yet, it also needed to be concealed by those who maintained a different truth to that of the authorities. In the case of France, in order to advance their cause, the Huguenots used subterfuge of various kinds, including the illicit carrying of messages. In this instance, truth was dependent on the integrity of its carrier, whether the messenger could be trusted and, therefore, their truth accepted. Both sides also sought to defend the truth by countering what they presented as the deceit of their opponents. Then, as now, acceptance of what is true depends on which side we are on and who we are prepared to believe.



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