Ivan the Terrible as a Carolingian ­Renaissance Prince

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
European History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Ivan The Terrible ◽  
Modern Russian

This chapter cites Michael Cherniavsky's imaginative and original but unconvincing attempt to align the image of Ivan the Terrible with literary ruler images and actual rulers in contemporary, sixteenth-century Western Europe. It aligns Muscovy with European history and suggests that the most appropriate comparison for the Muscovy of Ivan IV is early medieval, rather than early modern, Western Europe. It also details the type of evidence that Cherniavsky used on what are generally called “literary” texts from Ivan's reign and the period immediately following. The chapter explains how the assertion that Muscovite political ideas were independent of religion and contradicts many of Cherniavsky's own conclusions leads to a very distorted view of early modern Russian political culture. It talks about comparisons of Carolingian Europe and Muscovy that inevitably produce the impression that Muscovy was “backward.”

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
David Hershinow
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Truth Teller

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....

Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe

2018 ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
Tanya Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Literary Texts

Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’. Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. It is proposed that the versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage.

Народные волнения XVII века и русское крестьянство

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Денис Александрович Ляпин
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Soviet Ideology ◽  
Modern Russian

In the essay the author considers Russian peasants’ participation in public tumults during the seventeenth century. According to his findings, Russian peasants did not seem to display much political activity and the theory about peasant wars in Russia appears to be the myth of Soviet ideology. The author comes to the conclusion that peasant unrest was usually minor, taking the form of robbery and plundering. That phenomenon was a reflection of the specific political culture of early modern Russian society.

Urban Literary Patronage in the Early Modern Low Countries: Public Festive Culture and Individual Authorship*

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Mareel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Festive Culture ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractThis essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.

Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Political Pamphlets ◽  
Historical Thought

The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes in early modern England – most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped the period’s political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, shaping the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies. For much of the last century, scholarship on parliament focused on its role in high politics, or adopted an administrative perspective. The major exception was J. G. A. Pocock’s brilliant The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), which argued that competing conceptions about the antiquity of England’s parliamentary constitution – particularly its common law – were a defining element of early Stuart political mentalities and set in motion a continuing debate about the role of historical thought in early seventeenth-century England. The purpose of this volume is to explore contemporary views of parliament’s history/histories over a broader canvas. Historical culture is defined widely to encompass the study of chronicles, more overtly ‘literary’ texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and of the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition. Over half of the essays explore Tudor historical thought, showing that Stuart debates about parliament cannot be divorced from their sixteenth-century prelude. The volume restates the crucial role of institutions for the study of political culture and thought.

CHRONICLING THE MEROVINGIANS IN HEBREW: THE EARLY MEDIEVAL CHAPTERS OF YOSEF HA-KOHEN'S DIVREI HAYAMIM

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 423-447
Author(s):  
YANIV FOX
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Italian Physician ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Chain

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.

Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Languages

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”

500 Jahre Rezeption der Reformation in Siebenbürgen und Ungarn: Anfänge und Netzwerke von Konfessionspluralismus in der Überlappungszone von West- und Ostkirche

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ulrich A. Wien
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Joint Effort ◽  
Influence Zone ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Reformation

Abstract This thematic issue of the Journal of Early Modern Christianity focuses on the reception of the Reformation in Transylvania and especially on the development of Protestant churches oriented towards Luther and influenced by Melanchthon. In the late Middle Ages, Transylvania had become part of the cultural influence zone of Central Europe, but throughout the sixteenth century the region became permeated by religious developments in Western Europe too. Here, a very peculiar constellation of religious pluralism and co-existence emerged, and the different contributions examine the premises and networks behind these dynamics. In this joint effort, it becomes clear how Transylvania turned into a pioneer region of religious freedom, as it witnessed simultaneously the development of Catholic, Orthodox and various Protestant confessional cultures.

“National Identity in Premodern Rus”

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Heterogeneity ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ivan The Terrible

AbstractThis article is a commentary on some of the conclusions of Serhii Plokhy's The Origin of the Slavic Nations. Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Plokhy addressed ethnocultural (national) identities and national identity projects from the tenth to the early eighteenth century. This essay is concerned with Kievan Rus', the Mongol impact on the East Slavs, and Muscovite history from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It offers alternative interpretations both of the historical background which Plokhy outlines for the evolution of East Slavic peoples and of Plokhy's interpretations of various historical, political, religious and literary texts. The chronology of the translatio of the myth of the Rus' Land from Kievan Rus' to Moscow is still a matter of contention. In synthesizing the views of such historians as Edward Keenan and Donald Ostrowski, Plokhy has attributed too much influence to the Mongols on Russian institutional and cultural history. Plokhy has failed to be consistent in his application of Keenan's criticism of sources and Keenan's concept of sixteenth-century Muscovite society and culture. Finally, Plokhy somewhat oversimplifies the cultural heterogeneity of Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Terrible's Muscovy. These criticisms are a tribute to Plokhy's challenging but inspiring monograph.

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