Authenticity, Antiquity, and Authority: Dares Phrygius in Early Modern Europe

The Old Norse–Icelandic Hagiography of St Ambrose of Milan: Manuscript Tradition, Sources, and Composition

The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe Lorraine Daston (bio) Introduction: What Was Modern about the Early Modern? The very term “early modern” implies a historical doctrine of preformationism: whatever characterizes modernity was somehow present in embryo—tiny but recognizable—in the period from circa 1500 to 1789. “Early modern” is as screamingly anachronistic and teleological a label as “the Middle Ages”; yet even a generation of historians trained to revile anachronism and teleology as cardinal sins still clings not only to the letter but also to the spirit of the term. The most provocative recent works of cultural, intellectual, social, economic, and political history locate the origins of the modern state, modern capitalism, the modern mind, the modern individual, and, of course, modern science in this pivotal period. The history of science has long underwritten, and continues to underwrite, the validity of the periodization “early modern” by singling out much the same chronological territory with its own portentous label, “the Scientific Revolution.” Despite upheavals in the recent historiography of the Scientific Revolution, the narrative remains one of mythic origins: the remarkable historical work of the past decade presents, for example, seventeenth-century experiments in a very different light than did James Bryant Conant or Marie Boas Hall, but the old and new studies agree that seventeenth-century experiments were at once a dramatic innovation with respect to all that came before, and the ancestor and model for all that came [End Page 149] after. 1 Even those who, like Bruno Latour, loudly assert that “we have never been modern” take this seventeenth-century moment to be seminal of our characteristic brand of unmodernity. 2 Like the preformationist fantasy of uncountably many human generations nested one within another in the womb of Eve, all that is modern, from secularization to commodity capitalism to scientific experiment, is imagined to lie curled within the fertile and capacious womb of the early modern. 3 Mythologies, especially origin mythologies, are notoriously deep-rooted and resilient. Dispense with them in religion, and they crop up in art: nineteenth-century biblical scholars debunked Genesis, only to embrace Der Ring der Nibelungen. Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed” was primarily and literally the return of buried mythologies—Oedipus, Jocasta, and company. Myths are tenacious because they defy the too-simple logic of true versus false. They are typically false in all their details, and true in their essences. I cherish no illusions about the efficacy of empirical counterexamples, or rational argument, or even ridicule to loosen the hold of such mythologies on the collective imagination of historians. Rather, I want to examine the most powerful variant of the myth of the early modern pregnant with the modern, the variant that has elevated the Scientific Revolution to epoch-making significance not only in the narratives of the history of science, but also in the grander (and usually gloomier) narratives of cultural critics, from Max Weber to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Michel Foucault. This is the myth of the disenchantment of nature, here summarized in bare-bones version. Sometime between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, so runs the myth, nature lost its soul. No longer animated [End Page 150] nor active, nature was reduced to brute, passive, stupid matter. The Scientific Revolution transformed creative nature into a machine, blindly obedient to cause and effect. But as nature’s IQ plummeted, its authority soared. Nature replaced God as the ultimate basis for legitimation: natural law warranted the social and political orders, natural desires justified the expansion and deregulation of commerce, natural theology proved the existence and benevolence of the deity. Mythologists in this tradition resolve the apparent paradox of nature’s simultaneous fall and rise by pointing to the cultural logic of naturalization. Nature’s authority in hotly contested social and political matters such as the subordination of wives to husbands or the subordination of subjects to monarchs or the subordination of infidels to established religion depends on the claim that nature is a neutral party to such strife. And what is more neutral than a stupid machine? The very enslavement of nature to a metaphysics of regularity, necessity, and uniformity recommended it...

Reviewed by: Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic Experiences of Travelling in Early Modern Europe by Arturo Tosi Weiao Xing Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic Experiences of Travelling in Early Modern Europe. By Arturo Tosi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. xiv+306 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–108–48727–6. In 1764, the young Scot James Boswell took the opportunity to converse with Voltaire during his visit to France. He asked the Enlightenment giant if he still spoke English. 'No', Voltaire joked, 'to speak English one must place the tongue between the teeth[,] and I have lost my teeth' (p. vi). Starting from this anecdote, Arturo Tosiʼs book depicts the linguistic experiences of Grand Tour travellers. The author adopts the broad definition of 'Grand Tour' that spans from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the nineteenth. Over three hundred years, Anglophones crossing the Channel for educational sojourns in France and Italy were the protagonists of mobility. Scrutinizing their letters, memoirs, and travel accounts, Tosi elucidates how these travellers acquired foreign tongues and responded to the immersion environment. At the frontier of contact, many travellers tasted exotic cultures and recorded their translingual experiences. Their varied language proficiency and cultural attitudes further mirrored the linguistic panorama of early modern Europe. [End Page 284] In the vibrant scholarship of the Grand Tour, social and cultural historians rarely give centre stage to the linguistic experiences of travellers who visited different European speech communities. Tosi, as a sociolinguist, takes language learning, contact, and diversity as his key themes (p. 21) and casts new light on linguistic pedagogies, including literary and non-literary approaches (pp. 84–88). In the early phase of the Grand Tour, various educational sources covering conversation manuals underpinned multilingual experiences in the heyday of the eighteenth century (John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 158). Through borrowings, loanwords, and code-switching, Tosi exemplifies the dynamic nature of language contact during the Grand Tour. In this process, travellers not only acquired and used foreign languages but also witnessed the rich linguistic diversity, from vernaculars to variations of spoken Latin. Another highlight of this work lies in its attempt to connect translingual practice with intercultural communication in the Grand Tour. Before approaching his linguistic investigation, Tosi addresses the core question of 'the relationship between motivation for language acquisition and attitudes to foreigners' (p. 25). During their tours, a few Anglophone travellers faked their identities by passing themselves off as native speakers (p. 59). More travellers, whether proficient in foreign tongues or not, encountered cultural shocks from 'eccentric' customs such as cicisbeo (p. 75), and were apt to stereotype national characters (p. 25). These observations also foreground the issue of gender, as female travellers were no longer rare during the late eighteenth century. Compared with their male counterparts, they usually attached more attention to cultural diversity and otherness (p. 248). Noticeably, boundaries between these linguistic and cultural issues are confluent but not non-existent. Some discussions, such as the figure of the castrato (pp. 77–79), seemingly relate more to cultural awareness than languages per se, and their relations with linguistic experiences invite a closer examination. In general, this inspiring monograph illuminates sociolinguistic aspects of travel experiences, substantially contributing to social and cultural debates about the Grand Tour. It contains rich evidence that showcases intriguing stories of travellers, such as the young Robert Boyle and Edward Gibbon, who lodged in continental Europe for their intellectual cultivation. The author casts these personal encounters within the frame of major linguistic issues in early modern Europe. For instance, travel records detailed the decline of Latin as a lingua franca and the rise of vernaculars in competition (p. 168). In the late eighteenth century, the monolingual complacency that hindered travellers' second-language proficiency took root in the prevailing national superiority (p. 166). Some references, such as Lady Montaguʼs visit to the Ottoman lands (p. 245), provoke readers to ponder non-European contexts, and the transition into the modern age (p. 257) raises concerns about the continuity and mutation of these early modern linguistic experiences. In this [End Page 285] sense, thanks to its inclusive horizons, this...

Introduction to Special Issue: Representing Queens Stephanie Russo (bio) Queens were at a unique nexus of gender and power in the medieval and early modern world. On one level, their power was inexorably tied to their bodies, as the mothers of future monarchs. However, the power exercised by queens could, and often did, extend far beyond their ability (or not) to bear an heir. As history has repeatedly shown, queens were key political players, not simply the wives of kings. The glamour and appeal of queens has hardly abated in the modern world, too; stories of queens are as easily consumed today as they ever were. The study of medieval and early modern queens reveals much about the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics, history, and power. The study of queens has been of much interest to a wide range of scholars, from historians to literary and cultural studies scholars, who have re-examined, or sometimes examined for the first time, the lives and reigns of queens from across the medieval and early modern world. The recent spate of publications relating to queenship studies is reflective of the strength of the field. The flourishing ‘Queenship and Power’ series, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is a testament to the outstanding scholarship in the field currently being conducted by medieval and early modern scholars. The Royal Studies Journal, established in 2014 and run by the Winchester University Press, also regularly publishes scholarship on queenship studies. The ‘Kings and Queens’ conference series, organised by Dr Ellie Woodacre, is also a popular forum for the dissemination of the latest innovative queenship studies research. That queenship studies is enjoying a particularly rich period is demonstrated by the fact that there are two major publication projects currently in development. The first is the English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty project, which is a four-volume series to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. This project will incorporate biographies of all the English consorts, as well as thematic dynasty-wide essays. Alongside this project will be a monograph series on the Queens of England, published by Routledge, which aims to produce richly contextualised book-length biographies of all the queens of England. Both of these projects have been designed to supplement the popular Penguin Monarchs series of books, aiming to fill the lacunae left by the absence of queens consort from this series. Popular culture depictions of queens continue to be widely sought-after. 2018 saw the release of two major films about early modern queens: Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots. Both films are intensely interested in the role of the queen regnant, and focus on the nexus of gender, [End Page 1] sexuality, and power in the courts of Queen Anne and Elizabeth I respectively. Moreover, the ongoing fascination with the Tudor period, and, particularly, with the wives of Henry VIII, shows no signs of slowing down. The Starz series The Spanish Princess, about Catherine of Aragon’s entry into England and her first marriage, premiered in 2019. The series’ presentation of Catherine is comparable to the teen Mary Queen of Scots of the CW series, Reign (2013–17), in which the French court was imagined as a kind of early modern high school. Over the past year, there have been two television adaptations of the life of Catherine the Great: HBO’s Catherine the Great (2019), and Hulu’s The Great (2020). While Netflix’s flagship series, The Crown (2016–) takes us into the mid-twentieth century, the premise of the series—to take viewers into the private life of Queen Elizabeth II— attests to the ongoing fascination with the emotional lives of queens. What unites all of these texts is their interest in unpicking the space between the domestic and the political, and between the public and the private. What, they ask us, are queens really like? The focus on the domestic that characterizes historical fiction about queens suggests that, while we have a model for what masculine power and authority look like, when we think about queens, we consistently still turn to the private emotional lives of queens to make sense of female rule. Over the next three years...

Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe Noah J. Efron Almost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with other intellectual and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2 Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.” Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4 In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it. By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk...

Reviewed by: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 by Steve Mentz Gayle K. Brunelle Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2015) ix + 225 pp. In Shipwreck Modernity, Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 Steve Mentz sets out to disrupt the traditional linear narrative of modernity that posits the Renaissance as a rupture that began the modern era. Scholars of the Renaissance, from Jacob Burkhardt to Stephen Greenblatt, have argued that in attempting to revive the worldview and aesthetics of the Classical era, Greenblatt's "swerve," Renaissance humanists set the stage for modernity. Mentz contends that this paradigm of early modernity as a necessary break [End Page 234] initiating the development of modernity, most notably and recently celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012), misses the fundamental complexity not just of the early modern era, but of history, and of the human condition. Mentz is a literary scholar, and his analysis is based on examination of mostly English literature about the ocean and shipwrecks from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. His goal is to offer an alternate way of understanding not just pre-modern European culture and the whole concept of "modernity," but also our own culturally and ecologically disrupted era. Mentz argues in Shipwreck Modernity that the traditional interpretation of modernity is too "dry," too "land-based" to serve the needs of contemporary culture. By this Mentz means that our world is now too global, and too ecologically threatened, for a narrative that is Western in outlook, linear in trajectory and optimistic and positivistic in tone to help people make sense of the rapid ecological changes, globalization and fragmentation of the Western-dominated world order that characterizes our century. Mentz questions the usefulness of the periodization of history into medieval, early modern, and modern that still dominates scholarly chronology and the discourse, the actual language we use to describe history. Mentz offers an alternate discourse, a "wet" discourse in which the sea is at the center, not only because interaction with the sea was central to the development of the increasingly global economy and culture of the early modern and modern periods, but also because the formless sea, with no distinct lines or breaks, which reaches in all direction and disorients the human body plunged into it, seems a better way to understand historical change. Mentz argues that early modern European culture was "fundamentally ecological in nature" (2) because what historians have traditionally called the "expansion of Europe" obliged Europeans to interact with the ecologies, human and natural, of the entire globe. Like shipwrecked sailors, Europeans were plunged into a strange, formless ocean of new peoples, plants, animals, geographies, and topographies that they could neither categorize nor control. Survival meant figuring out how to float or swim until they reached the shore. And like the ocean, a single body of water that surrounds all land masses and mingles currents from all parts of the world, the intellectual "ocean" in which early modern Europeans found themselves adrift mingled past and present, hither and yon, indiscriminately. Humans sought ways to catalogue, periodize, and structure the waters around them, but ultimately the fundamental disorder of the oceanic nature of our world rendered any intellectual structures they created fragile and contingent. Surviving a shipwreck requires abandoning the vessel at some point and plunging into the salt water in an effort to reach the shore. The new land cannot be attained without first breaking up the structure of the ship and experiencing the disorientation of the formless ocean. And the shore itself is always contingent, since humans cannot create a global world without experiencing the ocean. This, for Mentz, seems to be his central metaphor for the crisis of modernity, and in particular the effects of climate change with which our own world is contending. Old structures, understandings and solutions are inadequate and in fact are fragmenting under the relentless [End Page 235] pressure of the ocean, rising ever higher to meet us as the global temperature warms. We cannot survive by clinging to a wreck. We must all plunge in and swim...

JEMCS Forum:What is Early Modern? Thomas Dipiero and Devoney Looser In an 1890 issue of Modern Language Notes, James Garnett of the University of Virginia protested that scholars deployed the terms "Middle English" and "Early English" too cavalierly when they were discussing the language of Chaucer. Garnett proposed to close the Old English period at 1150 and the Middle English period at 1400, with all subsequent strands of the language falling into the category of Modern English. Recognizing that some scholars might seek out more subtlety in their classifications, he suggested that we call "Early Modern" the English spoken and written between 1400 and 1600 (189). The following year, Henry Sweet made a similar argument, but Sweet stipulated that "Early Modern" English was to be confined to the years 1500-1650 (211). Following the 1890s, many philologists and historians of the English language entered into this debate about how to classify and assign dates to the evolving English tongue. In fact, at the turn of the last century, the term "Early Modern" had some of its most specific meanings to date—if dates are, in fact, an index of specificity—precisely when it referred to phases in the chronological development of English. In that respect, the words "Early Modern" performed a more or less purely sequential function, designating the years preceding and following the point in question as only numerically—and not necessarily historically or culturally—different. More recently, however, we have come to question whether the periods— or even the individual years—that appear simply to follow one another are indeed of the same literary, historical, or cultural valence. We have furthermore [End Page 69] begun to interrogate the meanings of successive years and periods when we compare them across cultures, recognizing the Eurocentrism—and, indeed, the Anglocentrism—that has characterized much reflection on the "Early Modern." Does "Early Modern" refer simply to that which came before modern? Is such a designation always and everywhere valid? Or does "Early Modern" have specific historical—and cultural—valences exceeding its ordinal classification? In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller write that the term "Early Modern" allows them "to explore continuities (as well as differences) between the literature of the 1640s and 1650s and the literature preceding and immediately following it. The result is to challenge and complicate traditional chronological boundaries . . ." (5). For Loewenstein and Mueller, "Early Modern" refers at least in part to a contested zone, one that does not simply link two ostensibly known quantities. But "Early Modern" is not simply about a period of time: Loewenstein and Mueller write that they chose the phrase "Early Modern" over the word "Renaissance" because in their view "the word 'Renaissance' meaning rebirth evokes a world of high or urbane literary culture, often associated with the court, humanism and the great revival of antiquity leading to an emulation of classical models for composition" (6). Loewenstein and Mueller's choice of "Early Modern" over "Renaissance" is a sign of the times, in light of the fact that an increasing number of English departments appear to be using the former to replace the latter, perhaps for the very reasons Loewenstein and Mueller delineate. But how do we understand the term "Early Modern" when it refers to a time and a culture other than post-medieval Britain? Does "Early Modern" indicate a break, or perhaps merely a discontinuity, in historical or cultural chronologies—one that separates us decisively from the past? Or does it refer to a period much like our own, save the fact that its analogous institutions, phenomena, modes of knowing, and interrelationships exist in a less developed form? Could "Early Modern" invoke particular intellectual, economic, philosophic, and aesthetic movements and developments largely unrelated to manifestations of those phenomena in our own time? Our own era—or perhaps better, our current moment—is characterized in large part by far-reaching changes in science and technology, communication, globalization, and world economics, and by new aesthetic forms. The years— perhaps in some cases the many years—following what we conventionally call the medieval period were equally profoundly affected by increased empirical [End Page 70] observation...

Introduction Thomas DiPiero and Devoney Looser This post-1660 issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies includes, as is customary, several fine essays and book reviews. The issue begins with Ellen R. Welch's "Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations," which considers a court entertainment in which costumed dancers impersonated stereotypical national types. Welch uses this dance as an occasion to investigate how Frenchness is defined in contrast to foreign national types, showing how the ballet sets the stage for subsequent conversations on nations and nationhood. Gunhild Eriksdotter's "Did the Little Ice Age Affect Indoor Climate and Comfort?: Re-theorizing Climate History and Architecture from the Early Modern Period" considers the understudied confluence of climate history and architecture, taking as its starting point the need for significantly longer heating periods in the "Little Ice Age." Architectural changes during significant periods of cold in Northern Europe, from 1550 to 1730, allow us to investigate ways that status was linked to comfort during the early modern period. Eriksdotter shows why we need to integrate climate history as a dynamic variable in the study of historical buildings and remains. "The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare," by Adam H. Kitzes, shows us that "bowdlerizing," at least in the case of this particular play, involved a more complicated editing process than scholars have previously understood. Kitzes looks over several editions of Family Shakespeare in order to document the full extent of the changes made by Bowdler and to speculate further on why they were undertaken. The essay argues that, rather than merely censor Shakespeare, Bowdler sought to reconcile a longing for a perceived oral culture of literary social coteries with an acceptance of the plays as carefully edited printed texts. Following these three essays readers will find a special section made up of brief explorations and position papers. With this issue, we introduce a forum [End Page 1] on "What is Early Modern?" which will continue through several upcoming issues of JEMCS. Of course, the Editors of JEMCS are keenly aware of the ways in which the term "Early Modern" is variously perceived and used, not to mention debated and misunderstood. The very way in which we have conceived of our enterprise as a journal has been informed by a sense of the differences between "early" and "late" early modern. Indeed, for more than eight years, we have divided our contents into pre- and post-1660 issues, an editorial decision that itself raises questions about the label "Early Modern" and its utility in demarking periods and dates, not to mention its national associations. To further scrutinize and consider this term, in the past and in the present moment, we asked a number of scholars from different disciplinary perspectives to consider what "Early Modern" means and has meant to the scholarly enterprise. We are proud to introduce the first fruits of those invitations, in the form of four thoughtful essays by top scholars Mitchell Greenberg, Laura Mandell, Andrew McConnell Stott, and James Thompson. We look forward to continuing this conversation with our readers and in future issues of JEMCS. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2013 JEMCS, Inc.

Reviewed by: Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe ed. by Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig Benedek Láng Keywords Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Tamar Herzig, Benedek Láng, deception, Early Modern Magic, demoniac, deceit in magic, trickery miriam eliav-feldon and tamar herzig, eds. Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, Pp. 250. Imposture, pretense, dissimulation, deceit, lying, and forgery have increasingly become the foci of scholarly publications in the last decades. Natalie-Zemon Davis' famous analysis of the story of Martin Guerre, Carlo Ginsburg's book on Nicodemism, Anthony Grafton's overview on forgery, Jon Snyder's monograph on dissimulation and secrecy, Stephen Greenblatt's investigation of bluffing travel book authors, and Perez Zagorin's Way of Lying concentrate on various aspects of false identity and issues of questioned authenticity in the early modern period. The volume under review groups eleven studies, most of which were originally presented as contributions to an international conference held at Tel Aviv University in 2012. Many of the chapters are case studies. However, [End Page 127] they are consistently focused around three types of problems: religious dis-simulation (problems around converts), links to the supernatural (problems surrounding discernment of spirits), and travel liars (problems connected to self-appointed ambassadors and a false cosmographer). As the Introduction by Miriam Eliav-Feldon argues, "The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries were the heyday of religious dissimulation and the authorities' preoccupation with unmasking it" (3). While lying has always been a sin in Christianity (and elsewhere), differentiation between various types of lies and relativization of the value of truth started very early in history. Michael Bailey documents in his systematic analysis—which is one of the pieces in the volume that is not a case study—the history of how church authorities offered more and more sophisticated taxonomies of falsehood and developed categories of lying. Categorization depended not so much on the action of deceit, but rather on its end and the motivation behind it. Augustine, and Aquinas following him, tolerantly allowed space to harmless—as opposed to harmful—lies, and unintentional—as opposed to intentional—deceit. In a parallel way, difference between true religion and superstition was also gradually "internalized," so that less emphasis was put on external behavior and more on internal convictions. Dissimulation became a particularly vexed issue when the condemnation of (clerical) necromancers was at stake, inasmuch as necromancy used the ceremonial forms and institutional values of true Christian worship but misdirected them. Documenting the growing concern on religious falsity, superstition, and diabolical witchcraft, Bailey arrives at the time of reformation, from which the following chapters depart. One of the first theorists of international law, Alberico Gentili's classification of mendacium (as is documented by Vincenzo Lavenia) marks a further step in accepting "useful" lies. With the rise of the protestant churches, it became possible for intellectuals banned from one confession to follow new and complicated strategies to become accepted in another. Their arrival in a new religious context and their sometimes repeated change of confession genuinely raised the problem of dissimulation. The stories of intellectuals such as Francesco Pucci (examined in the article by Giorgio Caravale) and common people (such as those men and women presented in the study of Monica Martinat), show that leaving one church and getting accepted to a new one was—in spite of the huge doctrinal differences—far from being final; occasionally a complex maneuvering was possible for example between the competing churches in the "silk-triangle" of Geneva, Lyon, and Milano. The motives for conversions and reconversions might have been intellectual [End Page 128] and theological, but could also be purely financial (for example, to score an improvement in one's social position). Several studies focus primarily on fluid, unstable, and attributed identity issues. The figure of the "Marrano" (a term for a Christianized Jew or Muslim in medieval Spain, especially one whose Christian identity might have been simulated), was quite "well known" and widespread in Italy, as we learn from Stefania Pastore, while the image of the recidivist baptized Jew, who lived as a professional itinerant beggar, was not only a simple literary anti-Semitic stereotype, but also had...

Islam in Early Modern Quaker Experience and Writing David Vlasblom (bio) From their beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, offered a unique and often challenging perspective in the Western world as pioneers of both inter-faith dialogue and social justice issues. This paper will demonstrate that early modern Quakers were uniquely open to befriending and learning from Muslims and that this contact aided Quakers of the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries in challenging Western social norms, particularly with regard to Western slavery. Lessons learned from Muslims and the process of inter-faith dialogue outside of Western boundaries enabled Quakers enough distance and breadth of perspective to take unique ideological positions that ran counter to the powerful discourses of the West. Contact with Islam aided the early modern Quakers in thinking beyond the discourses of their English, Christian, Western culture and helped them to challenge oppression by presenting alternative models. The Quakers were much better suited than their fellow early modern English and Western European Christian religionists to learn lessons from other cultures because their religion did not prejudice them against Muslims and other cultures but rather encouraged dialogue. Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the direct links between early modern Quaker values of equality and tolerance and the largely Quaker-led reform movements of the nineteenth century including abolition of slavery, rethinking capital punishment and the enfranchisement of minorities and women. Nevertheless it is a premise of this paper that there is a strong continuity of ideology and that these later social movements were a logical outworking of early modern Quaker beliefs and values. While Islam was by no means the only force influencing early modern Quaker ideas, it was a vital ingredient because it presented the Quakers with a different set of cultural discourses with which they could begin their centuries-long challenging and overthrow of Western injustices. This paper will first explore the importance of Islam in forming the uniquely inclusive Quaker worldview in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; [End Page 1] secondly this paper will examine the influence of Islamic culture in early modern Quaker thinking on the issue of slavery, demonstrating how this intercultural and inter-faith exchange stimulated early Quaker social activism. Part I: Relationship with Islam Aids Early Modern Quakerism in Transcending Western Discourses This paper does not claim that Islam was the primary religious influence on the Quakers as they formed their worldview. It is beyond the scope of this project to consider the vast array of religious traditions and Enlightenment thinkers whose ideas filtered into Quakerism. In terms of religious traditions, the early Quakers certainly identified much more closely with the Christian Millenarian and Anabaptist traditions; and, more broadly, with Christianity in general and even Judaism. Derogatory references to Islam, Muslims and the Qur'an outnumber favourable ones in early modern Quaker writings. George Fox, the man who founded Quakerism in the middle of the seventeenth century, believed that Muslims were misguided1 and should be evangelized into Christian truth.2 Even so, Quaker openness to Islam was remarkable for its time. Extensive research of Quaker writings for this paper has failed to uncover any demonic imagery employed against Muslims or characterizations of the Qur'an as a wicked or evil book. As will be demonstrated below, there was an emergence among Quakers of a collective concept of Islam, or the "Turk," that was fundamentally different from the predominating English and Western perceptions. Overwhelmingly, Quaker writers found Muslim society to be morally equal to the Christian societies of Europe, and they often cited examples in which Muslims were acting in a more enlightened way than Christians. This section will demonstrate that early modern...

Women and warfare is an emerging field in early modern history with a rapidly growing historiography. Art historians and cultural historians have been captivated by images of feminine martial power that deploy the figures of Athena, Minerva, Diana the Huntress, Judith, and Amazons. Much of the historical literature has focused on queens, regents, and female power in early modern royal states. Political and gender historians have examined powerful female rulers and regents such as Mary of Hungary, Margaret of Parma, and Infanta Isabella in the Habsburg Low Countries; Mary I Tudor and Elizabeth I Tudor in England; Marie de Guise and Mary Stuart in Scotland; Catherine de’ Medici, Maria de’ Medici, and Anne of Austria in France; and Amalia Elizabeth in Hesse—who all engaged in military planning and diplomacy. Historians and gender studies scholars are now setting these women warriors and powerful queens into a much broader context of women, gender, and war in early modern Europe. Noblewomen, city women, and peasant women were all swept up into the maelstrom of war in early modern Europe. This bibliographical essay brings together diverse historiographies of women’s history, gender history, history of sexuality, art history, literary history, history of violence, and war and society history. The essay includes sources on women, gender, and warfare in peasant revolts, urban revolts, noble revolts, civil wars, religious wars, and colonial wars, as well as in conventional interstate wars and coalition wars. An initial section discusses General Overviews and historical surveys of women, gender, and war in early modern Europe. A section on Theoretical and Comparative Studies of Gender and War outlines diverse methodological approaches to studying the subject. Brief sections on Reference Works, Textbooks and Pedagogical Sources, Anthologies, and Journals discuss research and teaching tools in the field. A thematic section on Women, Power, and War in Early Modern Europe goes beyond biographical studies to examine gendered dynamics of authority, agency, and power in the early modern period. Women rulers directed warfare and negotiated peace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artistic images and literary representations shaped notions of women and war that influenced contemporary political culture. Women and War in the Renaissance and Reformation (1450s-1550s) then considers women and gender in the Italian Wars and in religious and social conflicts during the Reformation era. Another section on Women and Gender in the European Wars of Religion (1550s-1650s) examines women’s experiences and gender dynamics in the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, Thirty Years’ War, and British Civil Wars. Gendered dynamics of violence in early modern maritime empires are considered in a section on Women, Gender, and Violence in Maritime Empires, focusing on the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and Dutch empires. Indigenous peoples’ experiences of slavery and colonial warfare are contemplated, along with maritime raiding, privateering, and piracy. Gender in Military Culture considers how gender and honor culture fueled familial and social conflict through dueling, feuds, and vendettas. Military organizations promoted specific forms of masculinity and notions of armed service. Women participated in the “campaign communities” that formed around field armies as soldiers’ wives, sutlers, peddlers, and prostitutes. Another section on Gender and Early Modern State Development (1640s-1700s) examines how the rise of permanent armies in the seventeenth century transformed military culture, gradually pushing women out of the military sphere. The section also surveys women and war in the Ottoman expansion, Russian imperial and Eastern European warfare, and French wars of expansion during the reign of Louis XIV. A final section on Women and Atrocities in Early Modern Warfare contemplates women’s suffering from rape, pillage, and massacre. Discussions of women’s status in warfare and attempts to restrain violence against non-combatants drove the development of laws of war in early modern Europe. Warfare was pervasive in early modern Europe, affecting entire states and societies in profound ways. This bibliographic essay provides an introduction to the myriad connections between war, gender, and society in early modern societies. I would like thank Alexander Sosenko, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northern Illinois University who served as my graduate research assistant, for his assistance in identifying sources for this bibliographic essay.

Reviewed by: Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity Jennifer C. Vaught Keith M. Botelho . Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv + 199. $80.00. In this excellent study of rumor and early modern masculinity, Keith M. Botelho begins by contextualizing Renaissance earwitnessing, or judicious listening, in terms of the importance of discerning truth in our noisy, modern world. In the preface, "Listening in an Age of Truthnapping," he contends that our auditory and visual senses are continually subjected to cell phones, the Internet, radio programs, and the nightly news that spins stories as if they were entertainment. These multiple, rapidly changing sources of news contain unverified information that can generate devastating rumors, a distortion and garbling of the truth distinct from gossip because of their large-scale social and political implications. In the Renaissance, "Rumor or Fama" is "an ambiguously gendered figure" that relentlessly undermines masculine and feminine authority, onstage and off (3). In the introduction, "Buzz, Buzz: Rumor in Early Modern England," Botelho outlines the literary, historical, and theoretical implications of his innovative [End Page 361] argument about earwitnessing in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Cary. Throughout this well-executed, carefully constructed, and witty book, he examines a wide range of texts about rumor and related subjects like cautionary aural discernment. His accessible, detailed analyses of dramatic works are impressive in a project that contributes to existing criticism on sound studies by Bruce Smith, Kenneth Gross, Wes Folkerth, and Gina Bloom (22). He makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship by complicating the restrictive alliance of hearing and its accompanying ideas of "obedience and receptivity" with femininity. Instead, he focuses on dramatists who feature men whose informational authority is based on their earwitnessing when subjected to male rumormongers (3). Despite the vilifying and scapegoating of the tongues of women allied with gossip in Renaissance dramatic works, conduct books, and marriage manuals, Botelho presents the ear as an alternative site of female resistance to their disempowerment in a number of Shakespeare's plays (75). Botelho makes effective use of recent, compelling works on masculinity such as Mark Breitenberg's Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, Bruce Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity, and Jennifer A. Low's Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, among others. The study as a whole could benefit from the inclusion of even more theoretical, secondary sources about gender, masculinity, and femininity to further illuminate the large number of plays he discusses. Nevertheless, his historicizing of early modern concepts of masculinity in relation to earwitnessing and rumor is strong. He deals insightfully with Elizabeth I, whom he calls the "paradigmatic earwitness of the period" (23), Francis Bacon, and humanist education theorists such as Juan Luis Vives and Roger Ascham. Though he sometimes blurs the distinctions between literary and historical men and women with respect to earwitnessing, he points out the common link between historia and storia in an early modern age when opposing and alternative interpretations of current events were printed rapidly and distributed widely like pulp fiction (54). In fact, the rise of print culture and relatively high literacy rates in Renaissance England markedly increased one's vulnerability to rumor and gossip (21). He concludes that "perhaps this pastiche of voices—an historical and theatrical babel—becomes a more accurate representation of truth than any one particular account" (54). In chapter 1, "Table Talk: Marlowe's Mouthy Men," Botelho sets the stage by examining the playwright's rumor-filled life and humanist education treatises that emphasize careful discernment. He then analyzes Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II in terms of male rumormongers and failures of earwitnessing. Botelho concludes that in these plays, "the uncontrolled speech of men" threatens "to undermine and destroy male authority" despite the fact that multiple early modern discourses tend instead to stigmatize women as gossipers [End Page 362] (36). Yet in Dido, Marlowe relies on "gendered binaries" of male "controlled speech" and "silence" and female "raving" (39). Dido reinforces the stereotype of "the woman who attempts to destroy a man's fame with her loose tongue" (39). In Edward II, Queen Isabella...

“Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation Katharine Cleland Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and George Chapman’s continuation offer commentary on a controversial Elizabethan social practice: clandestine marriage. After the Protestant Reformation, clandestine marriages became more controversial as they violated not only the tradition of arranged marriages in the upper ranks but also the new marriage rituals of the Book of Common Prayer.1 The ecclesiastical courts could punish those who wed secretly but not invalidate their marriages because the marriage vows, not the church ceremony, resulted in a legally binding union.2 The fact that marriages [End Page 215] performed without a church solemnization were transgressive, but not illegal, resulted in confusion over what constituted both a legitimate and a proper match. In light of this controversy, the paradigm of the Hero and Leander myth—a secret courtship and consummation-would have translated in an early modern reader’s imagination into a story about clandestine marriage.3 In his continuation of the myth, Chapman concentrates on the marriage ceremony, confirming that the issues of heterosexual courtship and marriage were originally at stake in Marlowe’s poem. Recent scholarship, however, has been most interested in Marlowe’s exhilarating tour-de-force of young love and sexuality, with particular attention paid to the latent homoeroticism in the description of Leander and in the Neptune episode.4 By neglecting Chapman’s continuation, we neglect an early modern literary conversation that can shed light on Elizabethan marriage practices and the way in which Marlowe’s poetry is likely to have been interpreted in its own day. Whether or not we consider Marlowe’s poem to be a “fragment,” the difference in the style and tone of Chapman’s continuation suggests that he did not finish Marlowe’s Hero and Leander so much as he responded to it.5 [End Page 216] Just as the issues of love and agency are central to most recent criticism, so do they lie at the heart of the early modern discourse on clandestine marriage. Since mutual consent was the only requirement for a match, entering into a clandestine marriage through a handfasting or trothplight gave couples complete freedom in their marital choice.6 Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts outlines the meaning and significance of the spousal vows that could accompany a trothplight or handfasting.7 According to Swinburne, such contracts could take the form of de praesenti or de futuro vows. While the de praesenti contract, or vows spoken in the present tense, resulted in a union, the de futuro contract indicated the promise of future marriage.8 The sexual consummation of a betrothal (a de futuro contract) also resulted in a legal union. While the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage might seem to encourage individual freedom when making matches, private spousal contracts (individually, and one might assume, “freely” negotiated) were considered to be motivated by sexual desire rather than mutual love and the common good.9 In an effort to suppress [End Page 217] the practice, spousal vows were eventually absorbed into the public wedding ceremony (as they are today) to help eliminate the possibility of irreversible, and potentially regrettable, clandestine contracts. Complicating the issue further, the formation of spousal contracts did not have to follow a particular formula. A variety of verbal and nonverbal expressions of love could result in, or at least be confused for, a promise of marriage.10 A lack of witnesses and the ambiguity surrounding the practice could make clandestine marriages of any sort difficult to prove in the church courts. In order to assuage the problems associated with early modern marriage, domestic handbooks and marriage pamphlets circulated as a means to instill normative marriage practices and to contain the agency available to couples when making matches.11 During the Elizabethan period, poetry, particularly sonnets, served as a valuable means through which lovers might carry out courtship rituals.12 Marlowe’s evident rejection of the sonnet craze in the 1590s, however, signifies his resistance to the inactive, and thus effeminate, subject position of the Petrarchan lover.13 Edmund Spenser enfolded [End Page 218] the...

This essay discusses how Geoffrey of Monmouth on the one hand utilizes marriage alliances in the Historia Regum Britanniae in order to expand Arthur’s lands and how, on the other hand, Geoffrey expresses anxiety regarding the threat that bringing foreign blood into Arthur’s kin group poses to his narrative.

Notes on Contributors