Uneven conversions: how did laywomen become nuns in the early modern world?

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Simple Process ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Landscape

Accustomed as we are to the presence of nuns in the religious landscape of early modern Europe, we imagine a straightforward trajectory by which secular women who entered a convent took vows and donned a veil. This chapter interrogates the seemingly simple process by which laywomen were “converted” into nuns. Upon entering convents, women crossed a border that separated the profane from the sacred. The cloister setting, in turn, required them to adapt to a very different type of existence. They were expected to adhere to monastic principles, many of which were distinctly gendered. Using evidence from English and Spanish convents between 1450 and 1650, this paper will analyze the mechanisms, and the material considerations, that shaped this transformation. How did religious rules, convent architecture, male ecclesiastical oversight, material culture, the rhythms of daily life within the convent, and other factors shape the process by which secular women became nuns? Ultimately, the chapter argues, these conversions were uneven or incomplete. The mechanisms listed above that conditioned this conversion permitted and sometimes even encouraged a complicated identity that blurred the distinction between sacred and secular worlds.

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Edited by Patrick Karl O'Brien, Derek J. Keene, Herman Van der Wee, and Majolein't Hart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 361. $64.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-250
Author(s):  
Anne E. C. McCants
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Science Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Modern Europe

This edited volume is the result of a series of interdisciplinary conferences and seminars sponsored by the Renaissance Trust between 1990 and 1995 to examine “Achievement in Intellectual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe” (p. 3). Historians of science, culture, the economy, and architecture and urban design were brought together to reflect on the intersections between past achievements in their respective fields within urban centers, as well as on the transfer of those achievements from one urban place to the next over time. These scholars were also called upon to consider the connections between the findings of more traditional “case-study” urban history and the grand narratives of modern development and geopolitical conflict. All of the contributors to this volume agreed to address the same meta question: “Why do recognized and celebrated achievements, across several fields of endeavor, tend to cluster within cities over relatively short periods of time?” (p. 5). In a schema entirely consistent with the Braudelian paradigm of early modern development (Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World. New York, 1981–84.), three cities in particular were chosen as representative of these episodic peaks of early modern achievement: Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London in roughly the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries respectively. The chapters of the book are thus organized in groups of three, with one chapter devoted to each area of endeavor in each of the three cities, beginning with their material bases in economic growth and ending with high culture as exemplified by the arts, books, and scientific research and discovery.

Embodying Devotion: Multisensory Encounters with Donatello's Crucifix in S. Croce

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-56
Author(s):  
Geraldine A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
Modern Europe

The reception of art is often described in ocularcentric terms, but all five senses could engage devotional objects in late medieval and early modern Europe. This article explores this phenomenon by considering a wooden crucifix with movable arms made by Donatello for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence in the early fifteenth century. It makes new suggestions about the work's original location, its possible patrons, and its functions and reception, especially during the rituals associated with Good Friday. It also reflects on the challenges scholars face when taking a multisensory approach to premodern visual and material culture.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter concludes the book by providing some reflections about the meaning of forgeries in early modern Europe. It examines the effects that the growing ability to detect forgeries had on the intellectual and cultural landscape of early modern Europe, and it shows the peculiar tension that this provoked in early modern Catholic culture. The chapter also shows that the relationship between evidence, truth, authenticity, and belief was as complex for early modern people as it is for us, albeit in different terms. Reflecting on what changed between then and now, and on and what didn't, can help us understand better not only the early modern world, but also our own.

Knowledge in Motion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter focuses on “itineraries of matter,” or objects as traveling carriers of cultural practices and meanings, in the early modern world. It examines the role of red in the transmission of knowledge back and forth among European vernacular practitioners and text-oriented scholars in their production and reproduction of knowledge about natural things. To this end, the chapter takes us to the heat and dangers of vermillion production in early modern Europe: the hours of firing, stirring, stoking, hammering, chemical manipulation, and anxious waiting that produced the red pigments highly valued by painters and illuminators to bring blood to life. Vermillion production was dangerous and exacting, and yet its underlying techniques traveled rapidly across early modern Europe (and beyond) together with the webs of interlinked homologies—an entourage of lizards, blood, gold, alchemical formulas, and vernacular knowledge—which formed the foundations of early modern science.

scholarly journals WITCHCRAFT, SEXUALITY, AND COLONIZATION IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Sexuality And Religion ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Hayden White

Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00.The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization. By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50.Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe. By Lyndal Roper. London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. ix+254. ISBN 0–415–10581–1. £13.99.As Professor Richard Evans's spirited In defence of history attests, postmodernism continues to arouse strong passions and suspicions among distinguished practitioners of the discipline. This is hardly surprising: in their most extreme and undiluted form, the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and more particularly their many disciples, are stubbornly corrosive of the ethos and rationale of history as conventionally taught and written. To insist that the production of knowledge is inherently – indeed insidiously – political, and to claim that the veil of language which divides us from the past can never be pierced is to unsettle many traditional epistemological assumptions. And yet postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ have posed timely and fundamental questions about truth, discourse, and objectivity which historians can ill afford to ignore. They have also helped to generate some of the most innovative and provocative historical writing in recent years. In different ways, each of the books under review engages with and reacts to the swirling debate about this influential and controversial body of ideas. All three make strenuous demands upon their readers; all three challenge us to reflect critically upon the methodologies we employ and the categories, concepts, polarities, and narrative paradigms to which we instinctively resort. Taken together they highlight both the potential strengths and weaknesses, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality, and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World.

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