Introduction: The State is "Back in"

State Formation, Theory of

The paper traces the development of the double-courtyard design in high-status English residences during the late Middle Ages and early sixteenth century. Dartington Hall, Devon, is used as a case study in order to aid in the contextualization of the development. Excavations here carried out in 1962 by Platt and in the 1990s by the authors help to shed light on the date and development of the south court, which was mostly demolished in the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that Dartington Hall is an early example of the double courtyard, but this study finds that it conforms more closely with single-courtyard residences that developed a second court over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

It is not known where Jean Bellegambe, born circa 1470 in Douai, where he probably died in 1535/36, received his training. Artists in this region were exposed to influences from both Flanders and France. Bellegambe's stylistic development falls into two phases: the first (circa 1508 - circa 1 5 2 5) is rather archaistic, drawing on the school of Valenciennes (Marmion et al. and Provost); the second displays the more marked influence of Antwerp mannerism. The triptych discussed here, the Mystical Bath in Lille, made for the monastery at Anchin in view of the arms of the abbey and its abbot, Charles Coguin, on the wings, was only discovered in 1877. Comparison with Bellegambe's principal work, the polyptych The Holy Trinity, and the wings of the Immaculate Conception, both in Douai, has established it as his work. An examination of various published datings leads to the conclusion that this triptych is an example of the artist's second stylistic phase, which began in circa 1525, and was problably painted around that date. The association of the representation of 'Tons Pietatis' with the Office of the Holy Blood was based on the assumpion that the texts on Jean Bellegambe's Mystical Bath (a `Fons Pietatis' with bathing worshippers) derive from the Office ritual in Anchin. The texts however are literal quotations from the bible, the Office of the Holy Blood not being fixed in Bellgambe's day; the Anchin Office merits closer study. The idea that the cult of a relic of the Holy Blood in Anchin abbey may have influenced the iconography of at least the Mystical Bath is not supported by historical facts. Mâle's observation of a relationship between the Holy Blood cult and the representation of the 'Fons Pietatis' is thus reduced to a theologically underpinned assumption. Old and New Testament quotations with reference to the bible passages-not a new phenomenon as such may be connected with the renewed interest for the literal biblical text in the early sixteenth century. This suggests circa 1520 as the earliest date of the triptych. With his female figure of a repentant Mary Magdalene divesting herself of her garments and jewellery, Bellegambe introduces this theme into art. The motif and its combination with the `Fons Pietatis' motif seem to derive from religious drama, notably Jean Michel's Mystère de la Passion, performed in Mons in 1501. Although, in connection with the early sixteenth-century cult of Mary Magdalene, a revived interest in literal bible texts can be observed, it can not be demonstrated in Bellegambe's triptych. The fact that it was dccadcs before the jewellery-removing theme returned to art as an interior scene, may be due to Bellegambe's isolated position. The theological virtues and their attributes derive from a type developed in illuminated manuscripts of literary and philosophical texts, and may also have been inspired by the tableaux vivants enacted in Rouen and Amiens in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Coguin's contacts with the 'Clercs Parisiens' in Douai seem to be reflected in these iconographic details of the Mystical Bath. The representation is addressed to both the inmates of the abbey, who according to the rule of the order are speeding towards salvation, and the lay people, who could identify with the pseudo Mary Magdalene on the steps in front of the bath and a few non-clerical male figures. Owing to the lack of archive sources, the precise context of the piece cannot be ascertained.

Notes on Contributors

Simon Schama's provocative work, Landscape and Memory , reveals the role that nature has historically played in shaping culture. Although much of Schama's focus predates the twentieth century, this essay on the historical development of the Volga River extends up to the present. The thesis, however, of demonstrating the continuity of earlier nature myths with the present, is an ongoing theme in this recounting of the effects of modernisation on the Volga while a nationalist rhetoric touts its aesthetic qualities. These aesthetics - symbolised through literary and artistic representations of Mother Volga - contributed to an emerging national narrative in Russia in the nineteenth century. This national identity is articulated through a rich visual culture that includes the work of Russian artists such as Isaac Levitan and Ilya Repin with their landscape portrayals of the Volga. As a result, the river assumed an iconic status which enhanced the story of its transformation. By the 1930s, the Volga underwent a major engineering project that rerouted part of the river into the Moscow Volga Canal. Construction of the project took four years, during which an array of journals, photographic essays and newspaper articles chronicled progress, celebrating this symbolic foray into the modern nation-state. Overlooking the beginning of the project were two towering statues of Lenin and Stalin, reinforcing the nationalist attributes of the project. In the 1930s Soviet Union, literature is rife with references to the conquest of nature in service of socialism. Harnessing rivers was especially attractive to Stalin in his push to modernise. But the Moscow Volga Canal was not just a showpiece - although in some instances the architecture rivaled the newly built metro stations - as it connected Moscow to the Caspian Sea, provided hydropower and supplied drinking water to Moscow. In conclusion, this essay will expand on nature's integral role in shaping culture with twentieth-century examples of how the Volga River continued to serve a nationalist discourse for a country in the throes of modernisation. The story of the Moscow Volga Canal is also a reminder that nature is often the repository to which nations look when crafting their identity.

Devotion to St Anne, the apocryphal mother of the Virgin Mary, reached its height in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Until now, Anne's reception history and political symbolism during this period have been primarily discussed through the lens of art history. This is the first study to explore the music that honoured the saint and its connections to some of the most prominent court cultures of western Europe. Michael Alan Anderson examines plainchant and polyphonic music for St Anne, in sources both familiar and previously unstudied, to illuminate not only Anne's wide-ranging intercessional capabilities but also the political force of the music devoted to her. Whether viewed as a fertility aide, wise mother, or dynastic protector, she modelled a number of valuable roles that rulers reflected in the music of their devotional programmes to project their noble lineage and prestige.

Reviewed by: Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain by Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila John F. Schwaller Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa María Family in Early Modern Spain. By Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. Pp. xix, 351. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-268-10321-7.) With implications in the New World, the Carvajal-Santa María family of early modern Spain ranks as one of the most resilient and in many ways emblematic of the period. The book begins in the early sixteenth century as the family is on the verge of grasping the papacy, in spite of their deep converso roots, with partial origins in the person of Solomon ha-Levi, a leading rabbi in Burgos who became the bishop of that city as Pablo de Santa María in 1415. Martínez-Dávila traces the emergence of a converso family and its dispersal throughout Castille, notably to the western city of Plasencia. There the conversos began a series of marriages and alliances with the Old Christian family of the Carvajals to emerge as leaders in both the political and ecclesiastical hierarchies. From there the family would expand to prominence on the Iberian Peninsula and eventually to the colonial outposts of Mexico and Bolivia. This fascinating tale is written in nine chapters, tracing the family from its origins to his success and expansion to the empire. The first two chapters trace the beginnings of the clan in Burgos and its eventual spread to other communities but focusing especially on Plasencia. The turbulence of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries created the necessary precondition for the blurring of ethnic lines and the ability of some individuals to gain prominence in spite of their ethno-religious background, creating what Martínez-Dávila calls the New Noble houses. While the Old Christian knights (caballeros) had political power, and with it a degree of economic power as well, the Church through its collection of the tithe clearly had access to much of the economic sphere. In the third chapter, Martínez-Dávila explores the wake of the anti-Jewish riots at the end of the fourteenth century. Focused on larger cities, small places like Plascencia emerged largely unscathed. At the same time the Trastámara dynasty began to reward other important New Noble houses, which provided unexpected opportunities in Plascencia. In Plascencia, in Chapter Four, we read of the growing success of the Santa María-Carvajal alliance. On the Jewish side, the family had been royal treasurers, and rabbis; while on the Old Christian side they had been important local caballeros. Combined, they came to dominate the cathedral chapter of the city and create a different kind of local environment for conversos and moriscos. By the fifteenth century two patterns emerged. Some of the New Noble houses pursued virulently anti-Semitic policies, hiding their own origins and joining [End Page 197] in anti-Jewish campaigns. The Plascencia-based Carvajal house continued to encourage a more open society of multi-ethnic populations. Castille, as a whole, turned to a more exclusionary policy with the promulgation of limpieza de sangre requirements for an increasingly large number of offices. This, in turn, required these New Noble houses to emphasize their Old Christian roots and downplay, if not hide, their converso origins. In Chapter Six, Martínez-Dávila explores the methods whereby the Santa María-Carvajal house imbued themselves with all of the hallmarks of Christian piety creating ecclesiastical foundations and other good works to burnish their reputation, while reaching the highest level of Catholic hierarchy with the appointment of Juan de Carvajal as a cardinal. As Spain entered the sixteenth century, the house had come to control the very highest levels of politics, the Church, and the local economy. They had successfully blurred their converso origins, emphasized the Old Christian mantle of the Carvajal clan, and weathered the storm of additional anti-converso and morisco politics with the fall of Granada and the triumph of Castilian Christianity. As the overseas empire became an important feature of the Spanish political and economic world...

The Europe which emerged from the period of medieval consolidation was in many respects recognisable as the Europe of today. Distinct linguistic traditions provided fertile ground for the development of nationalism, and many political, legal, and academic institutions had been created which have enjoyed a continuous existence from the Middle Ages to the present. But in other ways the differences between Europe in the early sixteenth century and the twentieth century are more significant than the similarities. In particular, Western European Civilisation in 1500 occupied a modest backwater of world politics, whereas 400 years later it had come to wield an absolute world ascendancy. This transformation was the result of profound changes within Western Civilisation, which will be explored in this and subsequent chapters. At the outset, however, it is important to stress both the continuity and the dynamism of the process which make it possible to relate a succession of disruptive innovations, both material and intellectual, to a stable core of European institutions. Thus it is possible to maintain that, despite all the changes which have characterised Western Civilisation over the last five centuries, it is still essentially a continuation of the civilisation which had established itself in Western Europe during the previous half-millennium.

This chapter deals with the long and uneven process of economic decline of CA and the SR, following the collapse of the Mongol Empire and a temporary recovery in the fifteenth century. The latter had benefited from new wide-ranging, although extremely violent, empire formation by Tamerlane, followed by his Timurid successors. From the early sixteenth century, increasing pressure was exerted on overland trade by European seaborne competition, following the discovery of the maritime route to India and China by the Portuguese. Meanwhile one can speak of a short-lived “mercantilist” renaissance of SR trade in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, featuring the simultaneous rule of strong political leaders (from Muscovite Russia to Mughal India) who carried out economic reforms and largely maintained peace. This was followed by renewed political destabilization, the unraveling of economic reforms, the intensification of maritime competition, and the spread of religious dogmatism. The use of artillery put an end to the political and economic power of nomadic empires in the eighteenth century. The “last glimmer” of the SR (around the beginning of the nineteenth century) brought a lease of life for what remained of traditional trade in the landlocked, newly isolated C Asian space difficult to access for modern European shipping technologies. Bukharan merchants played an important role at this stage. The mid-nineteenth century finally featured European (Russian) colonial conquest and the transformation of CA into a raw material appendage of the industrial world economy.

THE New World of the sixteenth century grew directly out of the Old not merely in a physical but in an intellectual sense. The men of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who found the new lands overseas, were educated in a humanistic tradition which made the classical past, especially the Roman past, alive and relevant to them. Consequently, there is an element of continuity in the thinking about the discoveries and the problems they presented on the basis of older intellectual concepts, which continues to influence much of the thought of the sixteenth century about cosmography, natural history and about the planting of colonies in lands unknown to the ancients. It is astonishing how Ptolemy remained the standard bearer of the new discoveries: maps of the New World and other novel areas, added to his Geography for the first time in 1513, continued to proliferate in edition after edition until by the later sixteenth century the original maps and text had been so overlaid with new matter that they bore even less relationship to the original than the first issue of Gray's Anatomy has to the current edition. It was much the same with Pliny: the Natural History remained the starting point for New World and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century. Oviedo in 1526 paid his respects to the master before suggesting that genuine novelties could now be added to his text: well before the end of the century Pliny too had been swamped in new material, though his text was also retained intact.

Review: Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400-1550 by Howard Mayer Brown; Theatrical Chansons of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries by Howard Mayer Brown

Andrew Kirkman, The Three-Voice Mass in the Later Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries: Style, Distribution and Case Studies Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. New Yor...

To the reader of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or early sixteenth centuries, notes of ownership would have been familiar sights. These notes occur in prominent places, mostly on the first or last pages of texts or on the flyleaves and pastedowns that enclose manuscripts. Some are neat, even calligraphic; many are scruffily jotted in blank bits of books long after their production. The wording is unexceptional and familiar: Iste liber pertinet or Iste liber constat are common, meaning “this book belongs to,” as is the word liber or ‘book’ with the person’s name in the genitive (liber Radulphi), and as is simply the name alone. These notes are familiar sources, too, for palaeography, literary history, and other branches of medieval study, which regularly glean from them information about the provenance of books and the prosopography of people. Such gleanings need to continue, for the history of the book, the history of reading, and thus cultural history of all sorts depend on our knowledge of the ownership of books (Hanna III, 2013b: 217; Pearson, 1998: 2–3). But as well as looking through these notes for evidence of other things, we could look directly at them as phenomena interesting in their own right—as a genre of writing about books. What functions or imaginative effects might they have had for the readers who recorded themselves in these ways, or for the further readers who saw such records?

T HE STUDY OF MUSICAL LIFE in North Italian courts and cities during the Renaissance, once a neglected field, is now enjoying a renaissance of its own. Little research has been attempted, however, on the role of women as patrons of music, even though major figures present themselves for consideration, especially during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: Beatrice d'Este in Milan, Elisabetta Gonzaga in Urbino, Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, and Isabella d'Este in Mantua.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the successful reunification of Russia’s appanage principalities drained the pool of Orthodox princesses available to marry the grand princes (later tsars) of Muscovy. Foreign rulers often resisted Russian demands that brides convert to Orthodoxy, and the fiscal and cultural costs of finding wives abroad seemed to outweigh the benefits. But choosing a bride from one of the ruling boyar clans threatened to destabilize the balance of power at court. The Muscovite government’s solution to the problem of finding suitable wives for its rulers without undermining the existing political order was the bride-show. Martin argues that from 1505, when Grand Prince Vasilii III (1505–33) first sent messengers throughout his realm demanding that the middle service gentry produce its unmarried daughters for inspection, until Peter the Great (1682/89–1725) abandoned the practice in 1698 every Muscovite ruler and most male members of the dynasty in power chose their wives through a bride-show. In this way, the elite avoided having to deal with foreign cultural influences and largely prevented political conflict within the boyar clans, both outcomes considered potentially harmful to the state.