scholarly journals Unknown Polish Subscriptions to the Emblems of Otto van Veen and Herman Hugo: A Study on the Functioning of Western Religious Engravings in the Old-Polish Culture

Terminus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (Special Issue 1) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Radosław Grześkowiak ◽  
Jakub Niedźwiedź

The Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Musem in Cracow holds an impressive collection of old engravings, among which there are also copperplates by Cornelis Galle. He used selected prints from Amorum emblemata (1608) and Amoris divini emblemata (1615) by Otton van Veen and Pia desideria (1624) by Herman Hugo to create his own emblematic cycle on metaphysical relations between the Soul and Amor Divinus. The drawings from the works of Veen and Hugo were very popular in the seventeenth century and inspired numerous poets and editors around Europe. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was Hugo’s Pia desideria that aroused particular interest. The cycle was imitated and translated by e.g. Mikołaj Mieleszko SJ, Zbigniew Morsztyn, Aleksander Teodor Lacki, and Jan Kościesza Żaba. On three of Galle’s prints stored in the Cracow museum, an anonymous author wrote epigrams, unknown until now, that accompany the images taken from the cycle by Veen (no. 8 and 21) and by Hugo (II 5). This emblematic microcycle was, with all probability, written down at the end of the seventeenth or at the beginning of the eighteenth century by a nun or a monk in one of the Lesser Polish convents or monasteries. Possibly, the origins of the cycle may be linked with the Carmelite convent in Cracow. And whether it is the actual place where the cycle was created or not, it is a good point to begin studies on the employment of emblematic practices in Catholic convents and monasteries in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Imported copperplates and woodcuts were a typical piece of the equipment of a cell. They were hung on the cell walls or were simply collected in sets of prints and often exchanged as gifts among nuns or monks, e.g. on the occasion of the New Year (an example of such a gift from 1724 is given in this paper). It was a common practice to write notes of diverse character on the reverse side of such prints, e.g. autobiographic details, short prayers or excerpts from sacred texts and religious literature. Still, the main purpose of the emblems was their application in everyday meditations and other forms of personal prayers. The three subscriptiones in the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow are also prayers of this kind, combining word and image.

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW CAMBERS ◽  
MICHELLE WOLFE

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.


1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.


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):  
Tessa Whitehouse

Print culture was expanding rapidly in the eighteenth century. Yet religious literature remained the largest category of printed book and Dissenters were significant contributors to this genre. From 1695 pre-publication censorship disappeared within England so print was an important mechanism through which Dissenting identity was created and sustained. Religious works could be doctrinal, controversial, or practical and it was the latter category that had the largest lay readership. Material related to Scripture, either translated or paraphrased, accounted for much of the printed religious output but life writing and poetry were also influential. Many of the authors were ministerial and male, although the audiences for which they were writing were more varied. While it is easier to trace the uses to which material designed to educate ministers was put, there were also significant examples of Dissenters using print to fashion a wider sense of community, often through the use of non-commercial publishing models.


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.


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