Making Publics in Early Modern Europe

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

Notes on Contributors

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...

Reviewed by: Servants in Rural Europe: 1400-1900 ed. by Jane Whittle Jeanne Clegg Whittle, Jane, ed. – Servants in Rural Europe: 1400-1900. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2017. Pp. 284. After years of neglect in favour of "productive" labour, scholars have, over the past few decades, come to recognize the importance of service labour for understanding the economic, social, and cultural history of Europe and beyond. As the work of the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure showed in the 1960s, in preindustrial England servants made up a significant proportion of the population, and perhaps 60% of its youth. In the late 1970s, the group's founder, Peter Laslett, identified live-in service as one of the three key characteristics of the Western family, and E. A. Wrigley described it as both an essential form of de facto family planning and a mechanism for redeploying surplus labour. Since then, scholars from Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos (Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, 1994) to Sheila McIsaac Cooper and other contributors to the [End Page 450] Servant Project (Proceedings of the Servant Project = Actes du Servant Project, 2001-2005) have examined the roles played by life-cycle service in the maturing of young men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds, offering opportunities to acquire practical and social skills, contacts, and the economic resources needed to become independent and marry. And since all but the poorest of early modern households included at least one servant, we can—as Tim Meldrum (Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750, 2000), Laura Gowing (Common Bodies, 2003), and Paula Humfrey (The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London, 2011) have shown—also learn about employers' lives through the experience of those who served them, while Douglas Hay and Paul Craven's work on master and servant legislation (Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955, 2004) illuminates the ways in which states attempted to regulate the development of wage labour. Running through Servants in Rural Europe is a productive dialogue/debate with the core concepts discussed in these and a myriad of other studies. Christine Fertig confirms the validity of the life-cycle model for northwestern Germany, where in the eighteenth century service offered younger generations training and helped redistribute surplus labour from peasant households with little land to those with high demand. Jeremy Hayhoe shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Burgundy wine harvests continued to employ young men, but also older people and the children of peasant families themselves. Cristina Prytz, on the other hand, focuses closely on the experience of older, highly skilled servants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden and emphasizes the attractions of life-long service. Writing of rural Norway in the same period, Hanne Østhus investigates mobility between various ways of earning a living, arguing that the very category of "servant" is one with "porous boundaries." Finally, in what is (rather regrettably) the only chapter to deal with southern Europe, Raffaella Sarti analyzes quantitative data available for several regions of Italy and across a broad time span, finding surprisingly high numbers of rural servants and of neo-local, "simple" families, findings that challenge accepted "geographies of service," and question simplistic applications of the European marriage pattern. This book, however, does more than revise received ideas: it opens up a field of research which—with the exception of the work of Ann Kussmaul (Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England,1981)—has been almost wholly neglected. As the volume's editor, Jane Whittle reminds us in her introductory overview, "Early modern Europe was an overwhelmingly rural society: before 1800 at least 85 per cent of the population lived outside of large towns. The great majority of people, including servants, had some involvement in farming. Yet the literature on servants continues to the dominated by studies of urban and domestic servants" (p. 2). The essays brought together here help to redress this imbalance, providing in-depth analyses of the characteristics and working conditions of servants in specific agricultural contexts across Europe over five centuries. No grand, cohesive picture is offered. "The significance of local and regional variations as...

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.

Introduction David Porter A War of Worlds: Becoming 'Early Modern' and the Challenge of Comparison Ayesha Ramachandran Eurasian Literature Walter Cohen Asia-Centered Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World Luke Clossey Pornography, Chastity, and 'Early Modernity' in China and England, 1500-1640 Katherine Carlitz Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity Richard Vinograd Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern Jack Goldstone Did China's Late Empire have an Early Modern Era? R. Bin Wong Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China Martin Powers Areas, Networks, and the Search for 'Early Modern' East Asia Kenneth Pomeranz

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.

Peter G. Bietenholz. Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 326 pp. index. bibl. $65. ISBN: 978–0–8020–9905–1. - Gregory Dodds. Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xx + 405 pp. index. bibl. $85. ISBN: 978–0–8020–9900–6. - Volume 63 Issue 1

What explains the remarkable metamorphosis of elites from warrior nobilities into well-mannered aristocrats in early modern Europe? Existing accounts emphasize the coercive force of emerging states or the novel enticements of royal courts. Well suited to the paradigmatic case of early modern France, such arguments fail to explain cases, like England, in which elites developed pacified lifestyles in the absence of a dominant royal court and largely prior to the monopolization of physical force. This essay shows that explaining such cases requires greater attention to the historical variability of elites’ own interests and strategies. I argue that European elites (also) developed pacified lifestyles insofar as they came to reproduce themselves through strategies that operated without their personal use of physical violence (including, but not limited to, royal courts). Such strategies were contingent on varying configurations of inter-elite and elite–non-elite relations. I employ this perspective to explain the marginalization of violent skills and codes in the lifestyles of early modern English elites, focusing empirically on the practice of hunting, a defining ritual of elite lifestyles. The hunting evidence suggests that the landed gentry were the first English elite to develop a pacified lifestyle. Yet the gentry were neither subject to the coercion of a centralized state nor incorporated into a court society. Instead, I show that the gentry—and later, the nobility and monarchy—developed pacified lifestyles because they came to reproduce themselves through legal strategies, the successful performance of which required nonviolent skills and habits.

This article uses the case studies of two Greek clergymen, Anastasius Comnenus and Hierotheos Abbatios, to explore Anglo-Greek interactions and perceptions in early modern England. Both men visited the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the mid-seventeenth century on fund-raising trips. This article details their time in the universities and in England more widely. It focuses on the issue of charity: who gave them money and why. This approach, making extensive use of new archival material, offers a fruitful perspective on English attitudes to Greek travellers. Suspicion was balanced by philhellenism and a desire to reference the Greek Orthodox Church in confessional or ecclesiastical disputes. These were common trends in early modern Europe, but they were inflected by specific contextual concerns in England. This article also demonstrates that analysing questions of charity can help to recover insights into the decision-making and agency of the early modern Greek traveller.

Volume 51 (2021)

Playing, Gambling and Cheating in Early Modern England and France/The Politics of Form in Early Modern Europe

Varieties of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English radicalism in context, edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, Famham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011, xiv + 271 pp., £65.00/$124.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6905-0The rule of moderation: violence, religion and the politics of restraint in early modern England, by Ethan H. Shagan, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 2011, xiii + 381 pp., £19.99/$32.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-13556-6Despite their repeated efforts, historians are never immune to making anachronisms and misinterpretations. We either use modern terms to designate early modern phenomena or, conversely, we too often understand early modern terms in their modern sense, which inevitably influences our approach to a given subject. These two books aim to rectify this each in their own way and ought as a result to be read together. Both came out the same year and are arranged chronologically; they respectively cover the first and second half of the early modern period, with an overlap on the seventeenth century and the English Revolution in particular. Both brilliantly challenge our understanding of two key-related notions characterising the turmoils of the early modern period: radicalism and moderation. Since one can hardly go without considering the other, a combined reading seems more appropriate and fruitful in the present case.Shagan's Rule of Moderation focuses on the English Reformation and therefore should be considered first. Right from the introduction, the author debunks our modern idea of by looking at contemporary definitions of the term. Moderation, as he demonstrates, denoted an exertion of authority through restraint and often proved aggressive, coercive, brutal, and violent. In other (modern) words, early modern was immoderate, a definition that the editors of Varieties find sometimes unnecessarily restrictive (12).After considering the moral of sin, the passions, and women in Part I, Shagan examines its political implementation in Tudor England. His account of the execution of six priests (three Catholics and three Evangelical reformers ) by Henry VIII in 1540 is a fascinating case in point of royal via media in a heterodox religious landscape. The Anglican middle way was not one of compromise and negotiation between two extremes or radicalisms, but rather a powerful weapon enforcing Royal authority and public order. Subsequent chapters explore the rhetoric of in a religious context in the Elizabethan period, showing how Anglicans used to enforce their authority, whilst nonconformists did the same to emphasise self-discipline as part of a moderation (177).Although some of its contributors also draw on early Reformation heterodoxy, Varieties does not begin until the English Civil Wars. The book is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held in 2006 at Goldsmiths, London. It offers a fresh and much needed look at the subject with twelve essays challenging modern semantics applied to early modern case studies. The editors do a remarkable job at surveying definitions and approaches to radicalism in their introduction. They successively examine the nominalist approach to radicalism (2), which advocates purging modern concepts from the early modern reality, and a substantive approach, especially favoured by Marxist historians seeking to legitimise their own political views by constructing an English radical tradition (13-17). Hessayon and Finnegan object to these two approaches, settling instead for a third one called functional. Despite the risk of anachronisms and inconsistencies it involves, this functional approach uses radicalism as a workable term easily understood by the modern reader, but also calls in return for greater and systematic contextualisation in order to truly grasp its practical implications.Like Tudor and Stuart moderation, the twelve case studies in Varieties suggest not one, but many forms of radicalism in the seventeenth century. …

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...

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.