Juan Luis Vives and the Organisation of Patristic Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Arnoud Visser
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Republic

The edition of Augustine’s City of God by the Spanish-born humanist Juan Luis Vives (first published in 1522) is one of most successful pieces of patristic scholarship of the sixteenth century. Produced just before the explosive escalation of the Reformation, it remained the key version of the text for over a hundred years. This article analyses the presentation of patristic knowledge in Vives’ commentary to explore how the confessional conflicts affected patristic scholarship. It argues that Vives’ work survived the confessional pressures relatively unscathed because it made Augustine’s work manageable and accessible across confessional parties. In doing so it seeks to highlight the importance of confessional silence in the Republic of Letters as a strategy to confront the pressures of confessionalisation.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Approach To Learning ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Moment

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.

Collaboration, Counterfeit, and Calumny in Amsterdam

2021 ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Mike A. Zuber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Republic

This chapter proves that Friedrich Breckling considerably adulterated a text originally composed in the late sixteenth century and embedded aspects of spiritual alchemy within it. Accusations raised among religious dissenters, notably by prophet and poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, and within the republic of letters at large led some of those who owned exemplars of the resulting book, Bartholomaeus Sclei’s Theosophische-Schrifften of 1686, to annotate their copies with information on Breckling’s interventions. Based on three such copies and other sources, several other collaborators and heavily edited passages can be identified. Yet there is reason to believe that even such annotated exemplars considerably underestimated Breckling’s contribution. In particular, the book’s index draws attention to several passages in which spiritual alchemy figures prominently and its bodily consequences are discussed.

scholarly journals Escaping the Reformation in the Republic of Letters: Confessional Silence in Latin Emblem Books

2008 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnoud Visser
Keyword(s):  
Religious Language ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Religious Ideals ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Communicative Strategy ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractRecent scholarship has advanced paradoxical conclusions about the relationship between Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. While humanist techniques are considered to have played an instrumental role in the development, spread, and implementation of the Reformation, the humanist community is generally regarded as a supra-confessional “Republic of Letters.” This article addresses this paradox by looking at the religious language in Latin emblem books. These highly popular works emphasized a personal, intellectual spirituality, and expressed reservations against institutionalised religion. They have often been interpreted ideologically, as a humanistic, irenical response to the religious turmoil. When read in the context of the authors' and readers' practical interests, however, they reveal a more pragmatic strategy. Rather than promoting religious ideals, they used an a-confessional language to accommodate religious pluriformity. Examples of the reception by individual readers, e.g., in alba amicorum, further exemplify how confessional silence served as a communicative strategy in the Republic of Letters.

The London Edition of De Thou's History: A Critique of Some Well-Documented Legends

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Soman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

For more than two hundred years, the Buckley-Carte edition (London, 1733) of Jacques-Auguste de Thou's History of His Times has been the standard one for this great Latin chronicle of the latter half of the sixteenth century. In six massive folio volumes, it presents the most complete and accurate text generally available. A seventh volume offers an imposing array of pièces justificatives: letters by and to de Thou and his friends, discussing the publication, emendation, and censoring of the History as well as its reception at the courts of Europe and in the ‘republic of letters.’ Many of these documents were reproduced in the three most widely used French translations of the History. In his recent bibliographical study, Samuel Kinser demonstrates at great length the superiority of the London text.

scholarly journals The clergy and the nobility during the 1540s and 1550s of the sixteenth century

1970 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 145-162
Author(s):  
Łukasz Godlewski
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Ecclesiastical Courts ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So ◽  
Chamber Of Deputies

The Executionist movement’s programme from the beginning of its existence revoked the privileges of the clergy not only in the legal but also in the economic field. The Chamber of Deputies wanted: the clerical estate holders to perform military service, the abolition of tithes, the taxation of the church, to devote “annats” to the defence of the country and jurisdictional demarcation between secular and ecclesiastical courts . The Chamber of Deputies, fighting against the clergy favoured by the king, unified their demands in order to act boldly in defence of their rights and gain new privileges. The final demands of the Executionist movement were formulated during the development of the Reformation and the transitional period caused by the change of the monarchs in the Republic of Nobles. The cumulation of these mechanisms in the middle of the 16th century not only stimulated the development and power of the Executionist movement but also intensified the conflict of interest between the clergy and nobility. The progress of the Reformation was accompanied by a growing dissatisfaction with the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over the nobility. The Chamber of Deputies formulated their suppositions depending on the situation outside and inside the country. The bishops failed to enforce the enforcement of judgments of the ecclesiastical courts. However, the right of sole judicial powers to pass verdicts connected with faith and religion were not taken away from the clergymen. It was just the opposite. Zygmunt August approved this privilege of the priests and at the same time executing verdicts on peerage was suspended. This case was, however, not completed and that is why succeeding parliaments worked on it further. The representatives of gentry did not manage to tax the income of church, despite serious efforts to do so. The king tried persistently to unite both political camps. However, the overextending of the whole Executionist programme by the representatives prevented the achieving of a compromise or any similar outcome.

Broken Promises and the Rise of a Stereotype

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Political History ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Balance Of Trade

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.

‘The healthe of my soule’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Clark
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Church

Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.

Communicatio Idiomatum

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Communicatio Idiomatum

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.

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