Agricola, Rudolph (1444–85)

Author(s):  
Peter Mack

Rudolph Agricola was one of the leading humanists of northern Europe in the late fifteenth century. His polished Latin style, his Greek learning and his knowledge of classical literature made him a hero to Erasmus, More, Vives, Melanchthon and Ramus. His major work, De inventione dialectica (On Dialectical Invention) (1479), provides an original account of practical argumentation by combining elements from the established teachings of rhetoric and dialectic with analysis of passages from classical literature. It includes a new version of the topics of invention, based on Cicero’s method of devising arguments, outlined in his Topics. Agricola’s letter De formando studio (On Shaping Studies) (1484), which circulated widely in the sixteenth century, outlines a plan of knowledge and discusses methods of study. Although his approach was strongly humanist and the Roman rhetorician Quintilian was his favourite author, his logic remained firmly Aristotelian, unlike that of his predecessor Lorenzo Valla. He remained aware of the achievements of scholasticism, expressing admiration for Duns Scotus and adopting an extreme realist position in metaphysics.

Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).


1932 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 133-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Brodie

To the historian of the late fifteenth century interest is centred on the transitional character of the times. Throughout Europe medieval thought and institutions were decaying. The dream of Christendom was fading, and the development of non-moral national states was quickened by the policy of despotic rulers in many countries. Medieval “liberties“ appeared only as bars in the path of progress, and in most countries fell before the new centralized administrations. Economic changes spread more rapidly and defeated that apparent inertia which had afflicted the countryside during the rule of the feudal baron. New conditions meant an age of distress and turbulence, and new opportunities meant the rise of strong, vigorous personalities who were left without authoritative guidance to work out their country's salvation. Of such were Henry VII and his council of the “ablest men that were to be found”. They were typical examples of the age; men brought up with medieval traditions, using medieval forms, yet treating many problems in an independent spirit, cautiously feeling their way to a development that is only clear at the close of the sixteenth century when the modern state had been almost created. Of the importance of this formative period there can be no doubt, but not much can be learnt about the men who guided England at this very critical time, for they have left only scattered and often but fragmentary records behind them. For the sake of the light that the Tree of Commonwealth throws on the views that Edmund Dudley must have shared with his colleagues, as well as for its own original and lively expression of opinion on many political and social questions, the work and its author seem to deserve more serious consideration than they have yet received.


1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Birmingham

The study of Central African history is still in its infancy. Valuable indications can, however, be obtained by combining the study of oral traditions with that of Portuguese documentary evidence for events taking place near the coasts. It has long been known, for instance, that the overthrow of the powerful Songye rulers of the Luba country indirectly caused long-distance migrations, one of which, that of the Imbangala, came into contact with the Portuguese in Angola. Previous analyses of this migration have suggested that it culminated in the early seventeenth century. In this paper an attempt has been made to show that the Imbangala arrived in Angola much earlier, probably by the mid sixteenth century and certainly before 1575. This date indicates that the Luba invasion of Lunda, which was the direct cause of the migration, probably took place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Finally, it has been tentatively suggested that the overthrow of Songye rule and the establishment of a new, expansionist Luba empire might have taken place as much as a century earlier, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.


Aethiopica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Erho

The Kulturhistorisk museum in Oslo possesses a small collection of ten Ethiopic codices predominantly acquired in the mid1930s. Included among them are an illuminated fifteenth-century psalter (UEM36096) and a late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth century hagiographical manuscript (UEM35900).


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-45
Author(s):  
Chassica Kirchhoff

Abstract The Thun-Hohenstein album, long-known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch, is a bound collection of 112 drawings that visualize armoured figures at rest and in combat, as well as empty armours arrayed in pieces. The collection gathers drawings that span the period from the 1470s to around 1590. While most of the images were executed in Augsburg during the 1540s, the album’s three oldest drawings date to the late-fifteenth century. Two of these works, which form a codicological interlude between the first and second quires, find parallels in the illustrations of contemporaneous martial treatises. This article traces the pictorial lineages of these atextual images through comparative analyses of fight books produced in the German-speaking lands, and considers how the representational strategies deployed in martial treatises inflected the ways that book painters and their audiences visualized the armoured body. This exploration situates a manuscript from which one of the drawings derives, Peter Falkner’s Art of Knightly Defense, now in Vienna, within the Augsburg book painters’ workshops that would later give rise to the Thun album. Finally, this study considers how the transmission and representation of martial knowledge in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Augsburg contributed to the later depictions of armoured bodies that populate the album.


The Library ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-532
Author(s):  
David Pearson

Abstract Bookplates constitute one of the most regularly encountered kinds of provenance evidence in books. Their history is traced back to a late fifteenth-century gift label used at Buxheim and standard sources usually identify the earliest British bookplate as a similar kind of woodcut armorial pasted into books given to Cambridge University in 1574. This note describes a number of hand-painted armorial labels used in the middle of the sixteenth century (and certainly before 1574) by Thomas Andrews of Bury St Edmunds, which were clearly used as ownership markings. These, alongside some other similar examples, make it clear that the practice has a longer history in English usage than we have previously thought.


2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-377
Author(s):  
Perin Westerhof Nyman

While the Scottish royal household participated in the wider development of mourning traditions in the late fifteenth century and employed mourning dress as a political tool from at least the turn of the sixteenth century, surviving evidence is extremely limited. Records for the funerals of Queens Madeleine de Valois ( d. 1537) and Margaret Tudor ( d. 1541) yield the earliest extensive material details for the employment of mourning displays in Scotland. These two funerals both honoured foreign-born queens, they took place only four years apart and they were organised within the same household—yet their use of mourning dress and material display diverged notably. Variations in the design and display of both formal and everyday mourning dress were used to transmit distinct messages and themes, in order to address the particular political circumstances and needs of each death. Comparison between the details of these Scottish funerals and examples from England, France and the Low Countries helps to place Scottish practice within wider traditions and highlights a common emphasis on mourning displays as a central aspect of political discourse and diplomacy at key moments of change and loss.


Ethnohistory ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Kevin Terraciano

Abstract The author presented a draft of this essay as a presidential address at the 2012 meeting of the society in Springfield, Missouri. The theme of the meeting was “the apocalypse,” referring to a popular belief that the Mayan calendar predicted a cataclysmic event to occur in that year. The address proposed that the apocalypse had already occurred in the sixteenth century, when the Maya and many other Indigenous groups of the Americas were devastated by diseases brought by European immigrants. The author examined how the destruction was documented in Spanish surveys called the Relaciones geográficas, which were completed after a major epidemic devastated the Indigenous population of Mesoamerica. The author did not submit the paper for publication at the time. The current pandemic has lent some modest perspective to the many epidemic diseases that have swept through the Americas since the late fifteenth century. The author submitted this revised version of the original essay after editing the content, adding notes, and citing relevant works published since 2012.


2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 789-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Hardin

AbstractHistorians of comedy can profit from a study of the sixteenth-century debates regarding the merits of Plautus (ca. 254–184 BCE), most of whose works were unknown before the late fifteenth century. Early performances and editions led to contemporary theories regarding laughter, language, and morality, often in the context of a comparison with the plays of Terence (d. 159 BCE), who was sometimes viewed as superior by upper-class audiences. From the conflicting opinions of Andrea Navagero and Francesco Florido, to the neoclassical strictures of Daniel Heinsius, this study pursues learned opinion on Plautus as he became a principal author in the European canon. Plautus’s variances from Aristotelian and Horatian precepts created a lively and lasting ferment in discussions of comedy.


1987 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-276
Author(s):  
Michael E. Williams

NOT FAR from Cadiz there is an English property that has remained Catholic for close on five hundred years. Its history goes back to pre-reformation days, indeed to the thirteenth century when the port of Sanlucar de Barrameda was recaptured from the Moors by the Guzman family who later became the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. Strategically Sanlucar was an important port because it was at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and as well as capturing the Seville trade it also commanded the traffic from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe and eventually it was the point of departure for ships leaving for the New World. Among the various nations using the port the English were conspicuous and their merchants were granted various privileges by the Dukes of Medina Sidonia during the fifteenth century. By the early sixteenth century there is evidence of a sizeable colony in the town; in fact the English were the largest single group of foreigners and many English names appear in the baptismal registers as both parents and godparents. At least one of them held high public office in the town. On the accession of Henry VIII to the throne of England, the situation further improved as he abandoned the neutrality of his father and allied himself with Spain against France. So it was that in 1517 a new charter of privileges for the English merchants in Sanlucar was drafted. A grant of land by the river was made so as to provide a chapel and a burial place for Englishmen. The chapel was dedicated to St. George and it was to be looked after by a confraternity. The chaplain was to be appointed by the Bishops of London, Winchester and Exeter, since it was from these dioceses that most of the merchants came. Although there have been rebuildings, this site has remained English ever since.


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