Vulnerability and the Countersovereign Voice

Love's Wounds ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia N. Nazarian
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Political Allegory

This book examines the imagery of violence in early modern European poetry. Petrarch's lyric collection, Canzoniere, has shaped the ways in which others wrote and thought about desire for three centuries and more. Among Petrarch's later imitators, love seemed to take on a curious destructiveness: early modern European poets described their feelings as torture, massacre, or wounding and their ladies as bloodthirsty tyrants or jailers. This book asks why their love poetry was more brutal than Petrarch's own work. It explores Petrarchism's emphasis on voice produced under conditions of duress as well as the ways it employs metaphors of violence, vulnerability, pain, wretchedness, and inarticulacy for political allegory and criticism. It also discusses Petrarch's use of parrhēsia in both his political and amorous writings and suggests that countersovereignty emerges among Petrarch's sixteenth-century imitators who amplified the abjection and vulnerability experienced by the poet-lover while also concentrating power and violence in the hands of a cruel Beloved to whom they ascribed the political attributes of sovereignty.

scholarly journals The Duke of Albany's Invasion of England in 1523 and Military Mobilisation in Sixteenth-century Scotland

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Neil Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
French And English ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
First Time

In November 1523 a Scottish army, led by John Stewart, duke of Albany, invaded England for the first time since the battle of Flodden. While this was a major campaign, it has largely been ignored in the extensive literature on Anglo-Scottish warfare. Drawing on Scottish, French and English records, this article provides a systematic analysis of the campaign. Although the campaign of 1523 was ultimately unsuccessful, it is the most comprehensively documented Scottish offensive against England before the seventeenth century and the extensive records detailing the expedition advances broader understanding of military mobilisation in medieval and early modern Scotland. While the national mobilisation drive which sought to gather men from across the kingdom was ultimately unsuccessful, the expedition witnessed the most extensive number of French soldiers yet sent to Scotland. Finally, the article considers how an examination of the expedition enhances understanding of regency rule and the political conditions in Scotland in the years after Flodden.

From Scipio to Nero to the Self: The Exemplary Politics of Stoicism in Garcilaso de la Vega's Elegies

PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1316-1333
Author(s):  
E. C. Graf
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Classical History

What is the relation between the early modern lyric and the emergence of modern individuality? Garcilaso de la Vega's verse from early-sixteenth-century Hapsburg Spain is generally assessed in terms of Petrarchan protocols. But the emotive effects of love fictions and pastoral nostalgia provide an incomplete aesthetic picture. Garcilaso's poetry also concerns modern power relations; some of his most impressive tropes allude to contemporary politics. This essay argues that Garcilaso's most experimental and self-assertive verse manifests the political animus of the Toledan nobility. On the ideological fault line between the municipal capitalists of the comunero revolution (1520–21) and the combined forces of the Hapsburg imperialists and the great landed aristrocracy, Garcilaso's “ultramoderate” lyric production problematizes the imperialist-aristocratic coalition by demystifying the official interpretations of recent events as divinely ordered repetitions of classical history. The peculiar self-referential implosion of the second elegy suggests that the emergence of modern individuality occurs in response to imperialist tyranny.

Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

It has long been known that the origins of the early modern dynasties of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Mongols, and Shibanids in the sixteenth century go back to “Turco-Mongol” or “Turcophone” war bands. However, too often has this connection been taken at face value, usually along the lines of ethnolinguistic continuity. The connection between a mythologized “Turkestani” or “Turco-Mongol” origin and these dynasties was not simply and objectively present as fact. Rather, much creative energy was unleashed by courtiers and leaders from Bosnia to Bihar (with Bukhara and Badakhshan along the way) in order to manipulate, invent, and in some cases disavow the ancestry of the founders of these dynasties. Essentially, one can even say that Turco-Mongol progenitors did not beget the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Mongol, and Shibanid states. Quite the contrary, one can say that historians writing in these empires were the ancestors of the “Turco-Mongol” lineage of their founders. Using one or more specimens of Persian historiography, in a series of five case studies, each focusing on one of these nascent polities, the book intends to show how “Turkestan,” “Central Asia,” and “Turco-Mongol” functioned as literary tropes in the political discourse of the time.

scholarly journals GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA BECKER
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

Architectural Design as an Expression of Religious Tolerance:

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-301
Author(s):  
Maile Hutterer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Unusual Form ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
The Church

The inventive hybridity of early modern ecclesiastical architecture in France mixes the traditional and local forms derived from the medieval past with neoclassical ones imported from Italy and ultimately derived from antiquity. Although this combination of seemingly disparate styles generally characterizes sixteenth-century French churches, the flying buttresses of the Church of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis remain exceptional in their classicizing reimagination of a conventional architectural typology. In Architectural Design as an Expression of Religious Tolerance: The Case of Sainte-Madeleine in Montargis, Maile Hutterer suggests that the unusual form of the Montargis buttresses derives from the political and religious circumstances of their creation. Calvinist Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I is the most likely designer of the Montargis buttresses, and they were constructed while Montargis was part of the holdings of Protestant sympathizer Renée de France. The designer's careful balancing of orthodoxy and heterodoxy paralleled Renée's carefully constructed position between Catholicism and Calvinism.

Three Literary Manifestos of Early Modern Spain

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-242
Author(s):  
Juan Boscán ◽  
Garcilaso de la Vega
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Garcilaso De La Vega ◽  
World Power ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Language And Literature

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the early sixteenth century compelled a radical change in its language and literature. reflecting the country's global expansion, Spanish culture moved beyond its medieval belatedness to compete with Renaissance Italian culture, whose superiority was based on the humanist rebirth of ancient values. The cultural rivalry between Spain and Italy is documented in the prefaces that follow, written by the Catalan poet Juan Boscán (1490?–1542) and the Toledan noble Garcilaso de la Vega (1499?–1536). Through these poets' efforts, Spain became the first European nation-state not only to appropriate Italian versification and prose style but also to displace Italy from the political and literary spheres of power (King 240–41). The political and cultural significance of Boscán's and Garcilaso's revisionary poetics makes their prefaces the first literary manifestos of early modern Spain.

Fellowship and Freedom

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Leng
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Northwest Europe ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers—sixteenth-century England’s premier trading company—in its final century of existence as a privileged organization. Over this period the company’s main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticized in an era of political revolution. But the company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, the book views the company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. It addresses the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of internal disagreements and external attacks. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England’s transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.

scholarly journals Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Networking ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
French Court ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Women And Power ◽  
Artistic Patronage

Women and Power at the French Court, 1483—1563 explores the ways in which a range of women “ as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage “ wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.

The Paradoxes of Pain

Love's Wounds ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia N. Nazarian
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Rape Of Lucrece

This book has examined the metaphors of wounding, torture, vulnerability, and war that were abound in sixteenth-century love poetry, identifying them as a pan-European phenomenon through which early modern poets recoded Petrarchan conventions of inequality and oppression into a new idiom for political critique. It has argued that sixteenth-century European lyric imagination actively explored the foundations of a countersovereign voice that had begun with Petrarchan parrhēsia. This conclusion considers William Shakespeare's anti-Petrarchan turn by focusing on the parodic questioning of Petrarchan postures of abjection in Venus and Adonis and the nightmarish vision of Petrarchan vengeance that is The Rape of Lucrece. Both texts raise problems that the study of Petrarchism cannot resolve: paradoxes of pain, authenticity, and eloquence that color the poet's claims of truth and suffering. Whereas Venus and Adonis gradually deconstructed the elements of Petrarchan countersovereignty to lampoon the genre's contradictions, The Rape of Lucrece redeploys it, using countersovereignty to reveal the same agency and political potential that Petrarchism locates at the heart of vulnerability.

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