Introduction: New Perspectives on Public Services in Early Modern Europe

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.

Notes on Contributors

Women’s work in public services in early modern towns in Holland, 1500-1800This article analyses the influence of professionalization and the broader pro-cess of bureaucratization on female labour participation in the public service sector in early modern towns in Holland. Contrary to what is suggested in lit-erature, women could be found in a broad range of public offices and develop-ments in the sector did not lead to the exclusion of women in the course of the early modern period. Women occupied mainly jobs in the lowest ranges of the sector and performed work which was barely affected by professionalization. The strong gender division of labour furthermore prevented the exclusion of women. Instead, specialization and diversification of tasks resulted in a broad-ening of work opportunities, not only for men, but for women as well.

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...

Konrad Ottenheym, Krista De Jonge, and Monique Chatenet, editors Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe Architectura Moderna 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, xiv + 408 pp., 300 b/w illus. €110 (paper), ISBN 9782503533544 Most buildings in this book will be unfamiliar even to scholars of early modern architecture: these public buildings, such as city halls or market arcades, often count among the happy discoveries of sightseeing in European cities after visiting better-known churches and palaces. A good guidebook might give the names of the architects and dates of the construction campaigns, but if curious to learn more, information about such buildings is often found only in national or regional inventories of historic monuments based on painstaking research by local scholars. Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe furnishes a broad international panorama of such noteworthy early modern urban structures, presenting thirty essays uniting otherwise scattered material on these hard-working building types of late pre-industrial society. The Architectura Moderna series, initiated in 2002, aims to explore architectural exchanges and influences within northern and central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essays collected in the series’ ninth volume were originally presented at two related conferences held in Utrecht in 2006 and 2008 under the general title “Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe.”1 Their chronology spans 1400 to 1800, with the major geographical emphasis on the Low Countries, France, and the German lands; Italy, England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland, Dalmatia, Spain, Portugal, and Dutch overseas colonies are also represented. Most articles are in English, but eight are in French, and one each in German and Spanish. The term public buildings is problematic, as book and series coeditor Krista De Jonge admits in her foreword (vii). While many buildings treated here are public in the sense that they were commissioned by and for various civic or governmental bodies, others were commissioned by private or institutional patrons, served a limited group of users, or had restricted access, and thus were arguably “private.” Coeditor Konrad Ottenheym’s introduction opens …

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...

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction, Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin Part I: People 1. Religion Inside Out: Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic, Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen, Joe Ward 2. Emerging Publics of Religious Reform in the 1530s: Affair of the Placards and the Publication of Antoine de Marcourt's Livre des marchans, Torrance Kirby 3. Academies, Circles, Salons and the Emergence of the Pre-Modern Literary Public Sphere in Sixteenth-Century France, Francois Rouget 4. Pietro Aretino, Thomas Nashe, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Public Address, Wes Folkerth Part II: Things 5. Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England, Paul Yachnin 6. Petrucci's Publics for the First Motet Prints, Julie E. Cumming 7. Cultural Relations between London and the Provincial Towns: Portraiture and Publics in Early Modern England, Robert Tittler and Anne Thackray 8. Glob(al) Visions: Globes and their Publics in Early Modern Europe, Lesley B. Cormack Part III: Forms of Knowledge 9. Richard Hakluyt and his Publics, c. 1580-1620, David Harris Sacks 10. The Confusion of Faces: Politics of Physiognomy, Concealed Hearts, and Public Visibility, Bronwen Wilson 11. Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Publication of Melancholy, Michael Bristol 12. Specifying Unknown Things: Algebra of Merchant of Venice, Shankar Raman Publics: A Bibliographic Afterword, Yael Margalit List of Contributors Bibliography Index

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

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...

The public execution of criminals was a familiar ritual of early modern European society. This article, however, examines the less frequent practice of ordering that a criminal’s house be ritually demolished following the execution. In many cases, the destroyed house was then replaced by a monument which was intended to simultaneously obliterate and perpetuate the criminal’s memory. Rare as it was, ritual house-destruction was a surprisingly widespread practice, undertaken at various times between 1520 and 1760 in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. Though punitive house-destructions had been undertaken in medieval Europe, the practice acquired new overtones in the early modern era. This article examines how and when this striking form of punishment was applied in early modern Europe and considers why authorities would order the destruction of property in order to enshrine the memory of particularly serious crimes.

This thematic issue of Linguistica explores the interaction between sociocultural change and the development of vernacular languages in Early Modern Europe. Its scope is deliberately broad in the range of topics, languages as well as in the time span covered from, at one end, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period in the 15th century to, at the other end, the transition from the Early Modern to the Late Modern period in the 18th and 19th centuries. The leitmotiv of the issue – the development of vernacular languages – is explored from different perspectives, for different languages and at different periods. The languages covered include not only languages which were official or hegemonic in emerging European nation states – English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch – but also peripheral languages such as Slovene, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Low German, Catalan and Franco-Provençal. Several of the articles in this issue also focus on more than one vernacular language, exploring competition or contact between Latin and vernacular languages or between different vernacular languages and cultures.

Notes on Contributors

Using a three-part structure focused on the major historical subjects of the Inquisition, the Reformation and witchcraft, Christopher Kissane examines the relationship between food and religion in early modern Europe. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe employs three key case studies in Castile, Zurich and Shetland to explore what food can reveal about the wider social and cultural history of early modern communities undergoing religious upheaval. Issues of identity, gender, cultural symbolism and community relations are analysed in a number of different contexts. The book also surveys the place of food in history and argues the need for historians not only to think more about food, but also with food in order to gain novel insights into historical issues. This is an important study for food historians and anyone seeking to understand the significant issues and events in early modern Europe from a fresh perspective.

Review: <i>Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated Apps and Public History in Early Modern Europe</i>, edited by Fabrizio Nevola, David Rosenthal, and Nicholas Terpstra

In 1578, the author, teacher, translator, and lexicographer John Florio wrote of English that it was ‘a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. Florio lived in an age when English was a marginal language on the international stage, and when language-learning was central to the English encounter with the wider world. This book is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of Continental vernaculars. Moving from language lessons in early modern London to the texts, practices, and ideas that underlay vernacular language education in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and offering a new and multilingual understanding of early modern travel practices, it explores how early modern people learnt and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in this period. Multilingualism was a fact of life in early modern Europe: it animated and shaped travel, commerce, culture, diplomacy, education, warfare, and cultural encounter. This book offers a new and methodologically innovative study of a set of practices that were crucial to England’s encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. It argues for the importance of a historicized understanding of linguistic competence, and frames new ways of thinking about language, communication, and identity in a polyglot age.