Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Vittoria Colonna

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Cox
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Catholic Reform

Although—unusually, for an early modern woman writer—Vittoria Colonna has long been considered part of the canon, several factors have inhibited a true appreciation of her importance as a literary innovator and model. The current critical moment is conducive to a re-examination of her significance, in the light of recent research on the early modern Italian tradition of women’s writing, on the Catholic Reform movement and its literary expression, and on developments in Italian literature in the last four decades of the sixteenth century. Consideration of these factors reveal Colonna as a figure of wide-reaching influence in her time and a powerful shaping influence on later traditions of Italian literature, in the late Renaissance and beyond.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

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.

The Sacrilege of Soot : Liturgical Decorum and the Black Madonna of Loreto

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Harpster
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Catholicism ◽  
Black Madonna ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Catholic Reform

The sanctuary of Loreto, one of Italy’s most renowned pilgrimage destinations, was built to house the relic of the Virgin Mary’s childhood home, but many pilgrims directed their prayers instead to the shrine’s cult image, a Marian statue with a dark appearance. In the late sixteenth century, a time of Catholic reform, many devotees attributed the sculpture’s color to the residue from candle smoke, despite the fact that this departed from reformers’ strict rules of liturgical decorum. The perception of the Virgin of Loreto’s blackened surface as simultaneously sacred and sacrilegious returned agency to the artwork itself. The statue’s sooty accretions suggested negligence and cried out for restoration, but they also defended the cult of images in early modern Catholicism.

Abortion and the Confessional in Counter-Reformation Italy

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Christopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ecclesiastical Administration ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Renaissance

What did abortion mean in late Renaissance Italy? In what ways did the reforming Church conceive of it and try to regulate its practice? This study explores attitudes toward abortion in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century through the lens of confessional discourses and practices. In the last three decades of the century, bishops and popes attempted to eradicate the practice of abortion by imposing shaming and increasingly severe punishments for its procurers. However, such initiatives were hindered by the social and practical consequences of bringing procurers of abortion to light. The ecclesiastical establishment had to rely on the secret space of the confessional to reform this aspect of morality. Exploring the negotiations between theological pronouncements and the sociopolitical realities of ecclesiastical administration, this article draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in early modern conceptions of abortion and contends that these led to inconsistent responses among Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical authorities.

Sixteenth-Century Jewish Makers of Printed Books and the Shaping of Late Renaissance Jewish Literacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-68
Author(s):  
Pavel Sládek
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter looks at the medium of printed books that was introduced into Jewish culture soon after its emergence in the mid-fifteenth century. It discusses the arrival of the presses that were run by different members of the Jewish Soncino family in Italy and elsewhere at the beginning of the 1480s, wherein a wide variety of genres appeared in print. It also describes the Soncino editions that were distinguished among printers by the accuracy and beauty of their typefaces. The chapter mentions the early printed book that was seen as a radical innovation in the age of complex cultural transformations both within and outside Jewish society. It recounts how the 'knowledge explosion' that was spurred by the rise of the printing press was a key factor in the formation of early modern Jewish cultural history.

The Grace of the Italian Renaissance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ita Mac Carthy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
The World ◽  
Changing World

‘Grace’ emerges as a keyword in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy. This book explores how it conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic concerns of an age concerned with the reactivation of ancient ideas in a changing world. The book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael, and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d'Aragona, and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work. The book argues that grace came to be as contested as it was prized across a range of Renaissance Italian contexts. It characterised emerging styles in literature and the visual arts, shaped ideas about how best to behave at court and sparked controversy about social harmony and human salvation. For all these reasons, grace abounded in the Italian Renaissance, yet it remained hard to define. The book explores what grace meant to theologians, artists, writers, and philosophers, showing how it influenced their thinking about themselves, each other and the world. It portrays grace not as a stable formula of expression but as a web of interventions in culture and society.

FINANCIAL REPORTING AND STEWARDSHIP ACCOUNTING IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Reporting

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Place, People, Texts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation State

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....

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

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.

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