Conclusion

Author(s):  
Laurence Lux-Sterritt

This book highlights how the English Benedictine nuns lived their faith in convents where they obeyed the same Rules as their European counterparts, and served the same Church. Like other Continental convents, they were influenced by the disputes that divided the early modern Church, particularly with regards to the influence of the Society of Jesus. They embraced the missionary spirit and the devotional fervour which has been noticed as the trademark of seventeenth-century Catholicism. But beyond similarities, English convents also display features which are quite specific of the English monastic experience in exile, and which are not found in the cloistered communities of Spanish, French or Italian nuns. The social profile of Benedictine monasteries, their finances, their recruitment, the local success of their settlement, and the many facets of their spiritual life, were deeply influenced by the circumstances of English Catholicism and of the English mission; they mirrored, in microcosm, the circumstances, strengths and flaw-lines of both their national and international contexts.

1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-172
Author(s):  
J. D. Crichton

In recent years, students of recusancy have begun to turn their attention to the inner life of the Catholic community, a development much to be welcomed; and it is understandable that for the most part the centre of interest has been what is called the spiritual life. Influences coming from St. Francis of Sales and St. Teresa of Avila have been traced, and Augustine Baker has rightly been the subject of much study. What needs further investigation, I believe, is the devotional life of the ordinary person, namely the gentry and their wives and daughters in their country houses, especially in the seventeenth century. There were also those who towards the end of the century increasingly lived in London and other towns without the support of the ‘patriarchal’ life of the greater families. No doubt, many were unlettered, and even if they could read they were probably unused to handling anything but the simplest of books. It would be interesting to know what vernacular prayers they knew and said, how they managed to ‘hear Mass’, as the phrase went, what they made of the sacrament of penance, and what notions about God and Jesus Christ they entertained. Perhaps the religious practice of the unlettered is now beyond recall, but something remains of the practice of those who used the many Primers and Manuals that are still extant.


2021 ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

This chapter introduces the main protagonist of the book: Carlo Calà Duke of Diano, a jurist and high-ranking official in the viceregal administration. This chapter also sets the historical context of the story of the forgery by describing the main political, economic, social, and religious characteristics of the Kingdom of Naples in the seventeenth century. More specifically, this chapter explains the social, cultural, and intellectual advantages that a noble pedigree conferred to the Neapolitan non-aristocratic elites; explores the main sources of tension between the papacy and the Neapolitan viceroy; sheds light on the power dynamics between the Roman Inquisition and the local ecclesiastical leaders; and introduces the complexities of the liturgical and devotional life of early modern Catholics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dear

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment.


1973 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Nutton

The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the many tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends.


2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 261-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Mayte Green-Mercado

Abstract This article presents a case study of a rebellion conspiracy organized by a group of Moriscos—Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism—in the early seventeenth century. In order to carry out their plans, these Moriscos sought assistance from the French king Henry iv (r. 1589-1610). Analyzing a Morisco letter remitted to Henry iv and multiple archival sources, this article argues that prophecy served as a diplomatic language through which Moriscos communicated with the most powerful Mediterranean rulers of their time. A ‘connected histories’ approach to the study of Morisco political activity underscores the ubiquity of prophecies and apocalyptic expectations in the social life and political culture of the early modern Mediterranean. As a language of diplomacy, apocalyptic discourse allowed for minor actors such as the Moriscos to engage in politics in a language that was deemed mutually intelligible, and thus capable of transcending confessional boundaries.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Neville

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Joan Faust

Amidst the many trials Donne experienced during his 1623 illness recounted in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions are bouts of insomnia introduced in Devotion 15 and implied in Devotions 16–18 with the unceasing tolls of bells in the nearby church commemorating the dying and dead. Donne’s agonized longing for the comfort of sleep as he lay day after day and night after night for fourteen days to the disease’s crisis, then over three months of slow recuperation, hits readers where they live: in all probability, all of us have tossed and turned on long sleepless nights. But is Donne preoccupation with sleep an anomaly among seventeenth-century writers, peculiar to his 1623 illness, and another example of Donne’s excessive focus on his own body, or did other Early Modern writers and theorists demonstrate an obsession with sleep? And more importantly, was insomnia a hindrance to his creativity before, during, and after his illness? A look at Donne’s Devotions in light of Early Modern theories of sleep and “not to sleep” indicates that Donne’s work not only documents his own personal sufferings and anxiety about liminal states but also illustrates Early Modern beliefs about insomnia, its causes, and even its benefits. Insomnia was not a temporary and isolated stage of Donne’s 1623 illness but a burden throughout his life, possibly serving as a source of his creativity and linking him to other sleepless writers of his time and beyond.


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