Thinking About Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The authors delve deep into their research topics and explore central questions about the Hanse and the sources, advancing knowledge in a field with long and robust research tradition. Several contributions draw on Mediterranean trade, the actions of non- Hanseatic traders or theoretical debates on commerce and economy in late medieval and early modern Europe for comparisons. Furthermore, the authors seek to place the Hanse in a wider context by showing features and mechanisms which were intertwined with pan-European features and mechanisms. They discuss common roots, influences and parallel developments, as well as source and research problems which crop up when various parts of Europe are investigated. Keywords:early modern Europe; Hanse; medieval Europe

ON THE EDGE OF ETERNITY: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Ivano Dal Prete. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. 214 pages of text plus 82 pages of notes, a bibliography, an index, and sixteen pages of black-and-white halftones. Hardcover; $37.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. Kindle; $25.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. *Ivano Dal Prete is a senior lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Verona, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Minnesota before coming to Yale. He has published two prior books in Italian on early modern science and its culture. He is also an amateur astronomer and is the co-discoverer of several asteroids. *On the Edge of Eternity is a helpful and also a disturbing book. Dal Prete's explicit purpose "is to take the first steps toward a new paradigm for the history of deep time in Western culture. It aims to replace the view of a relatively recent discovery of the "abyss" of geological time with one that accounts for the complexity, diversity, and social and cultural significance of pre-modern Earth history" (p. 7). *In the process of his detailed narrative, he demonstrates how an originally multi-perspectival conversation could sadly devolve into polemics and escalating polarization, mimicking (or predicting?) what we have seen during the past century and a half. *Dal Prete carefully lays out the groundwork for his narrative in the first two chapters. Chapter 1, "Footprints in the Dust," concisely introduces classical sources such as Eusebius, Augustine, Avicenna, and Boethius, and their late medieval successors including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Of particular interest was the question of whether the world (today we might think of the material universe) was eternal or had a beginning in time (or with time). The question became highlighted following the translation of Aristotle's major works from Arabic into Latin during the twelfth century and played into the theses of the Fourth Lateran Council and later the controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century. As Aquinas put it, reason could not assess whether the earth was eternal or not, but scripture settled the matter with an absolute beginning in time. However, many aspects of Earth history could be made to mesh with either viewpoint. This provided for a multiplicity of opinions and openings for merging empirical observations with philosophical perspective. For example, Noah's Flood could be a global catastrophe or a local catastrophe; further, it could be a singular event or one of many, repeatedly forced by hypothesized interchanges of land and water, hinted at in Aristotle's Meteorologica. *Chapter 2, "The Medieval Earth," summarizes multiple running debates, extending through the fourteenth century. A problematic issue was the origin of mountains. Erosion of highlands was easily observable, and without a mechanism to raise new highlands, the only result could be the washing of the entirety of the exposed earth into the sea. Thus, without such a mechanism, Earth's age would be constrained. But perhaps Aristotelian or Ptolemaic understandings of Earth's figure and the sea-land boundary could be used to support many cycles of erosion and sedimentation, resulting in new uplifts. Claims for astral influences were yet considered possible by many as well. Dal Prete examines the give-and-take between intellectuals such as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Pierre d'Ailly, and Dante Alighieri, among others. *Chapter 3, "Vernacular Earths, 1250-1500" broadens attention to the northern Italian Renaissance community of the mercantile class, including artisans and engineers, outside the university faculties. During this period, translations of the classical authors into vernacular dialects became widely available, as well as newer encyclopedic summaries of useful knowledge--for example, mathematics, astronomy/astrology, medicine. Coincidently, northern Italy developed as a major mining center, which literally opened up fertile material (rocks) for speculation. The nascent science of stratigraphy was developing, two centuries prior to Steno. Dal Prete convincingly argues that Leonardo da Vinci was not a lone predecessor of modern natural science, as is often depicted, but rather "just the most celebrated representative of an extremely rich and variegated tradition" (p. 77). Further, typifying his cultural milieu, "Leonardo's writings do not provide the slightest hint that the idea of a young Earth ever crossed his mind. The Italian artist failed to bring up the problem not because it was too much an issue, but because it was not an issue at all. While his world was expanding horizontally toward other continents and vertically in the underground, the one dimension that did not need to be enlarged was time" (p. 90). *If this book were a novel, Dal Prete would have now laid the detailed foundation for ensuing confusion, conflict, and misrepresentation. Unfortunately, this is not a novel. Things begin to unwind in chapter 4, "A ‘Pious' History of the Earth? 1500-1650." Here, Dal Prete explicates the creative attempts to formulate a physico-theology for Earth's historical development during the period of the Reformation. Within Reformation-era Protestantism, the principle of Sola scriptura settled the question of Earth's possible eternity. Earth had a definite beginning in (linear) time. But Sola scriptura could be employed to argue for a face-value interpretation of the genealogies of Genesis, plus a 24-hour-day view of the Creation week, to yield a very compressed Creation account. Reflexively, Counter-Reformation scholars, in their efforts to outdo their Protestant counterparts, often employed the same tactics and principles to take back the "high ground." Their efforts were also responses to the great voyages of discovery, which revealed whole segments of humanity previously unknown to the Christian world. What was the relationship of the inhabitants of the New World to the biblical genealogies? A strict appeal to the Flood of Noah as a singular Earth agent provided an anchor for a lineal descent of the American aboriginal population from Noah and therefore from Adam; they were thus inheritors of the Divine image. *Chapter 5, "The Rise of Diluvialism, 1650-1720," expeditiously covers a lot of territory that will be familiar to many of our readers. During this period, early Earth scientists, including Kircher, de Maillet, Aldrovandi, Scilla, Hooke, Burnet, Woodward, Vallisneri, and others grappled with observations of marine fossils in layered rocks exposed in mountains. They pondered a possible relationship to the Noachian Flood, but derived disparate histories. Some retained a modified Aristotelian Earth, with a protracted history of alterations of land and sea. Some natural historians attempted to meld the rock record with a Noachian Flood in a Newtonian gravity-driven world. Others argued for the strictly miraculous nature of the Flood of Noah, that could not be expected to yield a record in the rocks. But overall, "the idea of a ‘Mosaic' natural philosophy met with considerable success, and its influence was profound" (p. 127). *In chapter 6, "The Invention of the History of Deep Time, 1700-1770," Dal Prete examines a diversity of Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers. These vary from Christians (e.g., Leibniz, Calmet) to deists (Voltaire, Buffon) to atheists (de Maillet, Diderot, Boulanger, d'Holbach). Their proposed schemes for cosmic and human prehistory demonstrate varying familiarity with real Earth phenomena, as well as an expansive willingness to speculate beyond the evidence at hand. However, they realized correctly that Earth must be quite old. Unfortunately, the increasingly strident, even vicious, polemics that some of these thinkers offered against the Christian faith engendered a wide range of popular respondents. And unfortunately, many of these respondents easily seized on diluvialist versions of Earth histories to rebut anti-Creation philosophies. Thus, a century and a half before European and American rationalists invented the "warfare" thesis, a popular perception began to emerge that materialist philosophies often went hand-in-glove with the study of nature. *At this point, Dal Prete returns to Venice and northeastern mainland Italy, in chapter 7, "Political Fossils, 1740-1800." Italian translations of works of the French materialists began to appear in northern Italy in 1740. Up until this time, there had existed a strong community involvement in natural history pursuits. These included clergy: the priest Giovanni Giacomo Spada is reported to have put together a collection of fossil fishes (from the nearby site of Monte Bolca, famed among modern paleontologists) that was far superior to that of John Woodward. But after 1740, numerous books appeared arguing the diluvialist cause. Fossils were co-opted as evidences for the Flood and a young age of Earth. Dal Prete carefully chronicles how the political and economic elites of the region "elaborated a diluvialist orthodoxy allegedly supported by ‘true philosophy' and ‘sane science,' which appeared very different from the Earth history many enlightened Catholics conceived only a few decades earlier" (p. 183). *I found this book useful (but disturbing) for three reasons: (1) Dal Prete demonstrates that prior to AD 1700, many serious Christian scholars realized Earth was an old object and saw no theological problem; (2) the classic fairytale of some age-long conflict between Christianity and natural science began to be manufactured during the eighteenth century, long before Draper, White, and others in the later nineteenth century; and (3) Dal Prete demonstrates that the oversimplistic claims and harsh rhetoric of the diluvialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provoked by and responding to erudite but self-important atheists, eerily presage the writings of twentieth-century diluvialists. And thus, the magnificence of God's creative activity in deep time is clouded by verbiage. Ouch. *Reviewed by Ralph Stearley, Professor of Geology Emeritus, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.

Early Modern Europe: A Spiral Model Recently, many scholarly books and articles have been concerned with the frequent outbursts of violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and several crisis theories have been proposed. Many profitable suggestions have been made to date, but as yet no single thesis has been generally accepted. Using what seem to be the most valuable conclusions proposed so far, I would like to present the following model to aid in the comparison and comprehension of the many revolts which took place not only in the early modern period (the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries) but also in the late medieval period (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Although an appendix has been added to suggest possible applications of the model, in no way is this article meant to represent an exhaustive analysis of the literature on individual countries.

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Laura Ackerman Smoller Michael Vargas The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. By Laura Ackerman Smoller. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 343. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8014-5217-8.) The Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer was an ardent critic of the Great Schism who nonetheless remained close to the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, until nearly all others had abandoned him. A confidant of the count-kings of the Crown of Aragon, he (after Martin I died without an heir) helped shape the Compromise of Caspe that moved Catalonia into the Castilian orbit. Born in 1350, he died in 1419 in Vannes, where he was preaching at the invitation of the duke of Brittany. [End Page 819] In old age his fiery preaching and apocalyptic message attracted crowds of self-mutilating followers and caused riots that led to forced conversions and deaths. Despite all of this, Laura Ackerman Smoller turns our basic assumption of Ferrer’s profound importance on its head; perhaps his lasting influence is due not to his own achievements but to the powerful persons who promoted his saintliness to advance their own agendas. This book is not a biography but rather an assessment of the uses of recollection. Much of the book treats the politics and processes that led to Ferrer’s canonization in 1455, concentrating foremost on the canonization inquest at Vannes. The single “cult” of the book’s subtitle should be read in the plural, since it is one of Smoller’s central assertions—one for which she presents ample evidence—that there were a number of ways to read Ferrer’s sanctity after his death as well as various ways of promoting and acting upon the many readings. Smoller argues that Ferrer’s cause succeeded because powerful persons who had the money and political capacity to pursue their agendas saw that Ferrer’s canonization would serve them well. The canonization in 1450 of the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena lit a fire under the Dominicans that moved them to make claims for a new saint of their own; once they put their institutional muscle behind it, the canonization process moved along quickly. The dukes of Brittany similarly attached themselves to Ferrer in competition against French kings who quite usefully rode the coattails of St. Louis. The papacy and the Catalan count-kings had their own reasons for advancing Ferrer’s sainthood and their own stories to tell about why his saintliness mattered. Even ordinary people found ways of benefiting from the canonization fervor. Given the complexity of voices and interests, it seems no surprise to find evidence of “whitewashing” of Ferrer’s record, of leading witnesses along a preapproved script, and of a vita written to redress and obscure. The ample nuance and complexity here may leave some readers feeling that the book is disjointed or that they have occasionally lost the main line of argument. Others might want more or less substance in this or that citation or wish that some really good material was not relegated to sparse notes, as for example, in the story of the man who lost his intestines after murmuring against Ferrer. Smoller brings odd humor to her work when she describes the cooking of the chopped-up baby as Valencian paella and when she implies that Ferrer, after death, found several occasions to tell his supporters that he would do them some good once they succeeded in having him canonized. Quibbles and curiosities aside, the author has done well to let facts, legends, and evidentiary threads open one onto another into nets of questions and resources for future Ferrer studies. There is much to learn from this exemplary study of Ferrer’s afterlife. [End Page 820] Michael Vargas State University of New York at New Paltz Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

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.

The relationship between religion and the state remains contentious. Religious differences continue to be a major source of tension and sometimes violence across the world. Even in liberal democracies there are frequent disagreements about the scope of religious freedom. Do states have the right to regulate religious clothing? Can the state prohibit religious organizations from discriminating against individuals who do not share their beliefs? Should states fund religious schools? How stable are institutions that support religious liberty? We do not provide direct answers to all of these questions. Rather, we argue that to tackle issues such as these we first need to know where our modern notions of religious freedom come from. This requires an understanding of the processes that governed the emergence of religious liberty. It requires not just a knowledge and understanding of history, but also an appreciation of the political and economic challenges that confronted premodern states. This is what we provide in this book. Doing so requires confronting several popularmyths that have grown up around the subject of religious toleration. The first myth is that religious violence was ubiquitous in medieval and early modern Europe. This claim is repeated in popular histories and is sometimes accompanied by the claim that other parts of the world such as Islamic Spain, the Middle East, or the Mongol Empire were comparatively tolerant. Books and films have shaped a widely held view of theMiddle Ages and early modern period in which we are led to believe that the execution of heretics and witches was an everyday occurrence. This reflects the influence of novels like Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose and less edifying forms of entertainment such as the 2010 film Black Death starring Sean Bean. These popular depictions of medieval Europe suggest that religious persecution was an ever present feature of life in the past. In many respects, this is a reassuring image. At least in the West it allows us to view religious violence as the product of intolerant and superstitious individuals. But were people in medieval Europe, in fact, more prone to persecute religious minorities? An alternative view is that medieval Europeans, like all people, responded to the incentives generated by the institutions that surrounded them. Religious persecutions did not reflect fanatical or irrational beliefs. Rather, they reflected the political economy of the premodern world, in which rulers depended on religious authorities for legitimacy.

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.

AS THE WORLD HEALTH Organization’s just-released World Report on Violence and Health makes abundantly clear, violence by intimate partners is a worldwide problem with major public health implications.1 The American Psychological Association has estimated that 4 million American women experience a serious assault by an intimate partner during an average 12-month period.2 A study of women visiting emergency rooms found that 54% had been threatened or injured by an intimate partner at some time in their lives and that 24% reported having been injured by their current partner.3 This problem is not a novelty of the modern world; its roots go back to the very foundations of so-called civil society, although the expression and extent of violence varies across periods and cultures. In medieval Europe, for example, husbands had the right to “chastise”—that is, physically discipline—their wives, servants, and apprentices, although churches and communities also brought significant pressure to bear against these widespread practices.4–6 In this image from a 1582 print edition of the 13th-century Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum (Salernitan Regimen of Health), we catch a glimpse of a domestic assault as it was frequently represented in medieval and early modern Europe.7 Here it was assumed that the matter was individual and largely private, the consequence of the hot-tempered “choleric” disposition of an angry and poorly controlled man. Until very recently, domestic violence was largely excluded from public scrutiny. These attitudes have begun to change, a process that the publication of the World Health Organization’s report should help accelerate.

<i>Barbara A. Hanawalt and Anna Grotans,</i> Living Dangerously: On the Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Europe<i>Living Dangerously: On the Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Europe</i>. Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Anna Grotans. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. vii+173.

Contents: Introduction Part I Defining the Players: 'Nerehand nothyng to pay or to take': poverty, labor, and money in 4 Towneley plays, Robert S.Sturges The incivility of Judas: 'manifest' usury as a metaphor for the 'infamy of fact' (infamia facti), Giacomo Todeschini The Devil's evangelists? Moneychangers in Flemish urban society, James M. Murray. Part II Questions of Value: Whores as shopkeepers: money and sexuality in Aretino's Ragionamenti, Ian Frederick Moulton The sound of money in late-medieval music, Michael Long Anxieties of currency exchange in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, Bradley D. Ryner. Part III Wealth and Christian Ideals: 'To honor God and enrich Florence in things spiritual and temporal': piety, commerce and art in the Humiliati Order, Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell Trading values: negotiating masculinity in late medieval and early modern Europe, Juliann Vitullo and Diane Wolfthal Abigail Mathieu's civic charity: social reform and the search for personal immortality, Kathleen Ashley Bibliography Index.

Karin Maag and John D. Witvliet, eds. Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, xiii + 353 pp. index. illus. tbls. 30.00 (pbk). ISBN: 0-268-03474-5 (cl), 0-268-03475-3 (pbk). - Volume 59 Issue 1

Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: More than Just a Castle. Theresa Earenfight, ed. Explorations in Medieval Culture 6. Leiden: Brill, 2018. x + 416 pp. $190. - Volume 73 Issue 2

The construction site, supported by numerous trades and material suppliers, was an important factor in the economy of cities in medieval and early modern Europe. When reading the literature on the history of architecture, construction, and the related trades, one has the impression that women made virtually no contribution to the built environment other than as aristocratic patrons of the art. Although it is true that the majority of day laborers and craftsmen at any given site were male, there is evidence in many regions of Western Europe that women were commonly employed alongside the men, albeit in the most menial of tasks. Poor women and slaves worked as day laborers on construction sites, and women of better means were employed in the workshops of the various building-related crafts. One might not expect to find a woman in the historically male position of master of a craft, much less as a master of the works, or architect. The training and professional licensure required for these positions legally barred women from their attainment, and socially it was not permissible for a woman to be in this kind of a position of knowledge and leadership.1 However, aristocratic women were in a position to personally influence and guide the design of the projects they patronized, and there are cases where women have managed the design and construction of their own homes.

This collection of essays by Australian scholars offers a wealth of contemporary perspectives on cultural communication amongst men and women in late medieval and early modern Europe. Essays dealing with Florence and Venice, with Rome, Lucca, Ferrara, and Bologna, as well as with Germany, England, and Lorraine, draw attention to the array of cultural expressions which competed for space and influence across European societies of the period.