Early Modern History

This book examines a wide range of dissident practices, from street protests to political poetry, in an attempt to demonstrate that they are becoming an increasingly important aspect of global politics. The author draws on several case studies, including an analysis of the events that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The theoretical discussions focus on how people influence the course of politics at a time when boundaries between domestic and international spheres are blurring.

From the late Middle Ages onwards, many regions of Western Europe experienced heightened levels of inequality in the distribution of land, caused in many cases by the consolidation of property in the hands of various interest groups.What happened to those unfortunate rural groups (often impoverished) who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? The aim of this paper is to explore then the demographic and settlement effects of land consolidation on pre-industrial rural communities.In the literature, a common connection has been drawn between land accumulation and strong population decline or stagnation in the countryside. Features associated with this downward demographic trend include high unemployment and a paucity of opportunity for work, impoverishment, settlement collapse, and a general trend of movement (permanent or temporary) towards the city in search of work. However, this outcome was not always inevitable as demonstrated in this paper. In that sense, while land consolidation may in many cases have been the motor which set in motion outward migration towards the cities, depopulation could have been avoided or limited within certain pre-industrial societies; as some societies may have been inherently more resilient than others. Thus, in this paper, a basic hypothesis is tested that land consolidation may have had a divergent impact on population trends in the countryside, which was closely dependant on the arrangement of rural societies themselves. Here two cases of peasant expropriation, land consolidation and a transition to a rural economy dominated by large farms are contrasted, and the divergent impact on population trends is analysed. In other words, this paper considers the capacity of different rural economies to maintain and retain its labouring (and now landless) population – a test performed by comparing two historical cases in the Northern part of the Low Countries.

This article investigates the deliberate use and manipulation of chivalric culture and iconography by James IV of Scotland to position the Stewart dynasty's claims to the English throne in contest with the concurrent consolidation of Tudor dynastic security. This resulted in a dialogue developing between the two kingdoms concerning the relationship between sovereignty, dynasty and chivalry. This article argues for a new approach to the study of chivalry, by considering it as a meaningful language in political communication. It finds that chivalry had a strong currency in diplomatic discourse and was used to transact political issues of sovereignty and dynasty.

During the early modern period, island books (isolari) were among the major print genres by which the Venetian reading public learned about the Mediterranean and the New World. This article focuses on the intellectual, social and cultural processes through which these books constructed islands as objects of inquiry and created textual and visual knowledge about the Aegean archipelago and the Venetian overseas dominions. It shows how diverse communities of practitioners, networks of information and ways of knowing shaped the production of these cultural artefacts, and analyses the connections between images of insularity and notions of empire in Venetian metropolitan culture.

Was Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury a libertine? This article seeks to identify the libertine elements in Shaftesbury’s thought and actions in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of his sexuality and its importance to his philosophy. I demonstrate that Shaftesbury’s ideals of masculine homosociality structured both his notions of human sociability and the philosophic rhetoric in which he articulated them.

Shaftesbury’s libertinism was ultimately a discursive pose; there is a raffishness of style, albeit platonic, as well as a highly erotic content, however esoteric and exclusively homoerotic, to his writings. Both of which belie his strident condemnations of the libertinism of his contemporaries.

This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish-Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458-84)-whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century-as a case study taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case the retroactive refashioning into a venerable medieval saint. The article investigates these questions across a transcultural Italo-Baltic context through the activities of principal agents of the saint's re-fashioning as a venerable saint during the late seventeenth century: the Pacowie from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Medici from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, during a watershed period of Tuscan-Lithuanian bidirectional interest. During this period, the two dynasties were entangled not only by means of the shared division of Jagiellończyk's bodily remains through translatio-the ritual relocation of relics of saints and holy persons-but also self-representational strategies that furthered their religio-political agendas and retroactively constructed their houses' venerable medieval roots back through antiquity. Drawing on distinct genres of textual, visual, and material sources, the article analyzes the Tuscan-Lithuanian refashioning of Kazimierz against a series of precious reliquaries made to translate holy remains between Vilnius and Florence, to offer a contribution to the entangled histories of sanctity, art and material culture, and conceptual geography within the transtemporal and transcultural neocolonial context interconnecting the Middle Ages, Age of Reformations, and the Counter-Reformation between Italy and Baltic Europe.

‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway’– this was a popular saying in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. There was more than one inflection to the phrase. Amsterdam was, in the first instance, built atop a subterranean forest of Norwegian origin. But southern Norway was also a vital resource zone, subordinated to Amsterdam-based capital. This paper follows the movement of strategic commodity frontiers within early modern Europe from the standpoint of capitalism as world-ecology, joining in dialectical unity the production of capital and the production of nature. Our geographical focus is trained upon the emergence of the Global North Atlantic, that zone providing the strategic raw materials and food supplies indispensable to the consolidation of capitalism – timber, naval stores, metals, cereals, fish and whales. I argue for a broader geographical perspective on these movements, one capable of revealing the dialectical interplay of frontiers on all sides of the Atlantic. From its command posts in Amsterdam, Dutch capital deployed American silver in the creation of successive frontiers within Europe, transforming Scandinavian and Baltic regions. The frontier character of these transformations was decisive, premised on drawing readily exploitable supplies of land and labour power into the orbit of capital. We see in northern Europe precisely what we see in the Americas – a pattern of commodity-centred environmental transformation, and thence relative ecological exhaustion, from which the only escape was renewed global conquest and ever-wider cycles of combined and uneven development.

A number of important insights into the peopling of the New World have been gained through molecular genetic studies of Siberian and Native American populations. While there is no complete agreement on the interpretation of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome (NRY) data from these groups, several generalizations can be made. To begin with, the primary migration of ancestral Asians expanded from south-central Siberia into the New World and gave rise to ancestral Amerindians. The initial migration seems to have occurred between 20,000–15,000 calendar years before present (cal BP), i.e., before the emergence of Clovis lithic sites (13,350–12,895 cal BP) in North America. Because an interior route through northern North America was unavailable for human passage until 12,550 cal BP, after the last glacial maximum (LGM), these ancestral groups must have used a coastal route to reach South America by 14,675 cal BP, the date of the Monte Verde site in southern Chile. The initial migration appears to have brought mtDNA haplogroups A-D and NRY haplogroups P-M45a and Q-242/Q-M3 to the New World, with these genetic lineages becoming widespread in the Americas. A second expansion that perhaps coincided with the opening of the ice-free corridor probably brought mtDNA haplogroup X and NRY haplogroups P-M45b, C-M130, and R1a1-M17 to North and Central America. Finally, populations that formerly inhabited Beringia expanded into northern North America after the LGM, and gave rise to Eskimo-Aleuts and Na-Dené Indians. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 16:420–439, 2004. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero-American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans-Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed.

The ‘golden saying’ in early modern medicine was ‘Nature is the healer of disease’. This article uncovers the meaning and significance of this forgotten axiom by investigating perceptions of
the agents and physiological processes of recovery from illness in England, c.1580–1720. Drawing on sources such as medical texts and diaries, it shows that doctors and laypeople attributed recover
to three agents—God, Nature and the practitioner. While scholars are familiar with the roles of providence and medicine, the vital agency of Nature has been overlooked. In theory, the agents operated in a hierarchy: Nature was ‘God’s instrument’, and the physician, ‘Nature’s servant’; but in practice the power balance was more ambivalent. Nature was depicted both as a housewife who cooked and cleaned the humours, and as a warrior who defeated the disease. Through exploring these complex
dynamics, the article sheds fresh light on concepts of gender, disease and bodies.

This essay sketches a post-Occidental interpretation on the historical/conceptual relationships between modern western education and modern European civilizational identity formation.  Modern western education will be interpreted as a modern/colonial institution that emerged along with the sixteenth century constructions of power/knowledge relations involved in the management and control of both colonial and metropolitan populations.  Modern western education and European civilizational identity, as distinct from Christendom, emerged together during the sixteenth century within the initial formation of a global structural dynamic designed for governing the social world both within and beyond Europe.  Modern western education is a central institution within the governing projects of modernity and its differentiated and stratified production of particular subjectivities.  This perspective problematizes the Euro/American historiography of modernity along with the historical self-understanding of modern western education.  Post-Reformation European and Iberian colonial education emerged within the formation of cultural identities linked with Christian civility and a newly conceived world historical horizon.  From this perspective, the self-understanding of modern western education (both metropolitan and colonial) emerged and remains largely embedded within the conceptual and historical framework identified here as Occidentalism.

This article examines the Ballet des Polonais (1573), a magnificent festival given by Catherine de Médicis on the occasion of the election of her son, Henri de Valois, the future Henri III of France, to the throne of Poland. It argues that the invention of spectacle, as described in the official Latin account by the poet and humanist Jean Dorat, is much more relevant to the political situation of the time than scholars have previously recognized. Placed in an immediate historical, literary, and visual context, the text of the Ballet makes allusions to contemporary topics, including the military glory of Henri de Valois and the imperial destiny of the French monarchy. The elaborate web of references to books 5 and 9 of the Aeneid and to Catullus 64 displays the primary role of Catherine de Médicis, who is lauded for overcoming her maternal sorrow at Henri’s departure for the sake of promoting the Valois Empire.

In 2013 the article was awarded Nelson Prize by Renaissance Society of America and Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize by Sixteenth Century Society and Conference

This article addresses a relative vacuum of the historiography of early-seventeenth-century navies. The central question is how European states established and sustained their navies. The article presents the main historiographical issues, especially the concepts of the ‘military revolution afloat’ and the ‘fiscal-naval state’, and demonstrates the technological, administrative and social concerns of early modern navies. It also exposes the main contemporaneous threats and alternatives to early modern state navies. It presents the changes that states made to navies and vice versa just before the so-called military revolution afloat in the mid-seventeenth century. This contested concept is put into context and exposed as a historical construct. The author, along with some other scholars, argues that it was far from a revolution, but more of a gradual evolution. The process of state-building in relation to state navies therefore needs to be reassessed: the navy was one of the tools of state-building, not just a tool of the already built and consolidated state.

Current research on the cartography of the Venetian Empire rests on a state-centred perspective which reduces maps to mere technical tools in the service of maritime expansion and colonial government. In contrast, this paper argues that such an approach cannot sufficiently account for the multiple ethnocartographic transactions between Venetian authorities and local communities which defined Venetian map-making projects. Taking the seventeenth-century conquest of the Peloponnese as its focus, the paper proposes to rethink the Venetian cartographic archive as constituted through a set of socio-cultural and political practices involving both colonial surveyors and native inhabitants. By analysing the assemblage of cartographic knowledge in the context of the encounter between colonisers and colonised, the paper examines topographical surveys as the product of cross-cultural communication shaped through negotiation, competition and unequal dialogue. Ultimately, the paper aims to show the heuristic value of a dialogic approach to cartography for a better understanding of both the colonial society of the Venetian Peloponnese and the making of knowledge in Venice's overseas empire.

This article analyzes the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While conventional narratives of business history begin with the Industrial Revolution and focus on the rise of the modern corporation, this article brings to the fore early modern entrepreneurs from Italy and shows how they led family-controlled firms running permanent navies in the Mediterranean. By using private ledgers and merchant correspondence, the paper aims to understand how these naval entrepreneurs governed their affairs and managed resources internationally. We find that delegation (through family ties, hierarchy, and networks) was the main solution chosen to deal with distant commodity, labour, and capital markets. We retrace the different forms this delegation took and explain its determinants considering alternative options and providing comparative insights.

Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1798933

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body.

The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.

CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
                  Appendix: memory and connectionism

Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
                  Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
                  Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory

Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
                  Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination

Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge

Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering

References
Index

The continuing debates amongst early modern historians about the supposed rise of a public sphere have invigorated the history of the British coffeehouse. This article interrogates one central aspect of many histories of the coffeehouse – the presumption that there was a ‘golden age’ of British coffeehouse society in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries which entered into a state of decline during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and finds it wanting. The article suggests that the history of the coffeehouse public sphere is better understood in terms of a transformation from an early modern ‘performative publicity’ to a Romantic style of public life which reflected changing notions of the relationship between the self and society that have been identified by cultural historians of the Romantic age. Rather than trying to identify the moment of its decline, historians should try to explain the continuing vitality of the coffeehouse, and by extension the coffeehouse public sphere, as they have evolved over the course of the last three and a half centuries.

Giant bones unearthed throughout the Mesoamerican countryside provoked early modern thinkers to grapple with the earth's ages, partially syncre-tizing Nahua histories of human conquest with Spanish colonial medicinal and natural historical knowledge. European naturalists' willingness to accept the giant remains required them to embrace localized Mesoamerican cosmologies. The fossilized landscape provided evidence that conquest and eradication had happened before at the hands of the peoples whom the Spaniards had conquered in turn. Lost from early modern collections and failing to translate far beyond New Spain during the sixteenth century, the giant remains highlight the possibilities and challenges of integrating Mesoamerican knowledge into the global history of science, with an emphasis on emplaced thinking, medicine and the body, and deeper temporal frameworks. Moving beyond itinerary histories to globalizing cosmologies in the history of science can better explain the compromises Europeans and Mesoamericans were required to make to enter into a syn-cretic intellectual contract, as well as the non-European concept of time that came with local reckonings with the human and more-than-human natural world. P liny had primed Spanish royal doctor Francisco Hernández (1514-1587) to be on the look-out for giants. As he crossed the Atlantic in 1571 to begin what was supposed to be a five-year mission to develop a comprehensive herbal of medicines from the Spanish colonies, Dr. Hernán-dez contemplated his copy of Pliny the Elder's Natural History (77-79 C.E.). Hernández's instructions from the Spanish court had been clear: to collect plants and medicinal seeds from New Spain, gather "all possible information from local doctors, healers, herbalists, indios, and other knowledgeable people," and learn what kind of medicinal properties these plants possessed for their suggestions and feedback throughout this process. Finally, I am exceedingly grateful to Alexandra Hui, Matthew Lavine, and H. Floris Cohen, as well as the three Isis referees, whose questions and suggestions helped this essay take its final shape. Isis, volume 112, number 1.

This essay examines the consequences of the wars of Leopold I. Whereas the diffusion of the “fiscal-military state” thesis transformed our understanding of central institutions over the past three decades, most studies focusing on early modern state development employ top-down perspectives. By contrast, I am interested in the interlinkages of war and taxation on the regional and local levels in one of the monarchy’s core lands, Bohemia, and how they relate to the ongoing processes of centralisation. Based on the premise that individual actions and structural developments entail differing consequences for central institutions and the geographically more remote areas, this essay argues that state integration in the centre was accompanied by decreasing of cohesion on and control over the lower administrative levels. The Eggenberg possessions around Krumau serve as the basis for an in-depth case study, out of which emerges that the establishment of the Habsburgs’ fiscal-financial-military regime led to added, not reduced institutional complexity due to the composite nature of traditional patrimonial domination, or Herrschaft.

The book furnishes a unique insight into the world of meanings and emotions associated with hospital life by including narratives from both patients and caregivers. The story is told in a dozen episodes which illustrate the transformation of hospitals from  houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces of clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology. From ancient Greece to the era of AIDS, the book  features key hospitals , covering the most important themes in the development of medicine and therapeutics.

Examines how the body - its organs, limbs, viscera - was represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. How and why did 16th and 17th century medical, religious, and literary texts portray the body part by part, rather than as an entity? And what does this view of the human body tell us about society's view of part and whole, of individual and universal in the early modern period? As this volume demonstrates, the symbolics of body parts challenges our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. The book presents work by: Nancy Vickers on corporeal fragments; Peter Stallybrass on the foot; Marjorie Garber on joints; Stephen Greenblatt on bodily marking and mutilation; Gail Kern Paster on the nervous system; Michael Schoenfeldt on the belly; Jeffrey Masten on the anus; Katherine Park on the clitoris; Kathryn Schwartz on the breast; Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky on the eye; Katherine Rowe on the hands; Scott Stevens on the heart and brain; Carla Mazzio on the tongue; and David Hillman on the entrails.An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. This book was awarded The English Association Beatrice White Book Prize in 1999.

This article tests the usefulness of concepts from translation studies to understand the dynamics and mechanisms of cultural translation. It asks what is happening when people translate. What do they do when they translate? From a historical perspective, we apply translation theories as analytical kit on the cultural translation process created by the Jesuit missionaries teaching the Eucharist in contact zones during early modern times. In a first part, we present the conceptual tool box borrowed from translation studies (Lefevere, Venuti, Nida). In the analytical part, we apply this instrument to Jesuit translation: How did the Jesuits translate the concept of body in the sacrament of Eucharist for a general audience in the multilingual and transcultural missionary contexts? It is generally difficult to transfer knowledge by translation. The translation of the Eucharist is not only difficult regarding the aim of a true translation, its fidelity to the source, but it can become a question of orthodoxy or heresy. The translation of Eucharist concerns the theology of transubstantiation, real presence or a symbolic understanding of the body; a crucial topic in the early modern European context. The semantics of the body are closely related to this theological issue as are the different cultural practices and understanding of them, particularly in non-European cultural settings. In this Jesuit case study, the dynamics of the cultural translation process are unearthed: Which methods and technics did missionaries apply to translate theological concepts? How did they accommodate and negotiate the knowledge transfer with the local cultural grids? How did they create dynamic equivalence in order to be understood? To what degree was the translation adopted by the intended audience? With the developed tool kit we unravel a complex, multi-layered translating process that was influenced by the translator, the audience, the cultural and linguistic context as well as the power asymmetries inherent to the process.

This paper will mainly focus on the material culture surrounding the administration of the Lord’s Supper in the Reformed churches of the Dutch Republic. After a brief survey of the ecclesiastical setting for the service and the practical arrangements, it will principally concentrate on communion plate. Whereas the ecclesiastical decrees of the Catholic Church provided detailed stipulations about the appropriate form for liturgical vessels consecrated for the celebration of the mass, for the Reformed such matters were regarded as adiaphora. Nonetheless, communion plate was an important, if not essential, part of the administration of the Lord’s Supper. However, it, generally, tends to be considered only as part of broader studies of early modern silver and pewter ware rather than in its religious context. While Mark Petersen (2001) has drawn attention to the importance and spiritual significance of Puritan silver in New England, there has not been a similar consideration of communion plate in the Reformed Churches in Europe. In the Dutch Republic, silver and pewter beakers were used in a domestic environment as well as being commemorative items, but similar forms were adopted for the administration of the Lord’s Supper. The differences between secular and religious use will be considered, particularly in relation to their decoration and variations in design. Further research might reveal whether these vessels were regarded in a meditative and spiritual form similar to that identified in New England.

Shapin:
"Brian Cowan is a political and social historian, but The Social Life of Coffee is systematically sceptical about Habermas’s claims.

...

By the 1670s and 1680s, London’s coffee houses were swarming with informants, notably including their owners, who were obliged, as a condition of retaining their licences to operate, to give assurances that they would not permit any ‘scandalous papers, books or libels’, and would inform the government if sedition were being brewed on their premises.

...

Cowan reckons that Habermas and his followers mistook the ideal for the real: ‘Perhaps it is here in the idealised mental world’ of Addison and Steele, he says, that ‘we find Habermas’s sober, rational, public sphere of private men coming together to exercise their reason in public. But it was difficult to find this ideal public sphere in the real coffee houses of London.’ Taking Habermasian history with a spoonful of salt is almost certainly a good idea; nevertheless, there was something about the 17th and early 18th-century London coffee house that attracted an enormous quantity of contemporary comment, much of which centred on its modes of access and forms of sociability, which were understood as a departure from tradition. Cowan is right to point to the heterogeneity of coffee-house culture, and to criticise the just-so character of Habermas’s account, but early modern Londoners themselves reckoned that something new and important had been introduced into their society. They struggled to understand what sort of place the coffee house was, what they liked about it, what worried them about it and what role coffee itself played."

The inquisitorial processes undertaken in Cordoba at the end of the reign of Isabella the Catholic provoked a series of problems for the new Christians (conversos), destabilizing the kingdom of Castile. Although the socio-religious dimension of the phenomenon has been studied, its links with the dispute over succession that confronted Philip I of Castile and Ferdinand the Catholic (1504-1506) have not been explored. The papal stance with regard to those processes, and the role of the Archbishop of Granada, Friar Hernando de Talavera, also requires examination. Deploying unpublished documents from Spanish and French archives, this article discusses the struggle of both monarchs for the control of the Inquisition, reconstructs their negotiations with the Roman Curia, and evaluates Pope Julius II’s approach to solving the crisis by preventing its politization.

The Ottoman State benefited from the traditions of the Greek population on the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean Sea in regard of military and security aspects and built or developed some new shipyards in the region. In this process, the state's well-functioning organization provided various business branches and different materials as well as gathering all of these in specific centers.
Just like major seafaring states of the time, the Ottoman State carried out the naval and maritime activities in one principal shipyard under the state's control (Tersane-i Amire in Istanbul), and on the other hand in various small-scale shipyards spread over the coasts and islands where state control was partially weak. The carpenters and drills necessary for the ships for the donanma-i hümayun were provided from the islands such as Chios, Kos, Rhodes, Kaşot and Megisti. However, as a result of the weakening of administrative control due to the Greek war of independence, these shipping centers began to pose a threat to the Ottoman state. This was due to the fact that both raw materials and manpower on the island and in coastal regions under Ottoman rule were transferred to the Greek shipbuilding centers in the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Syros, and this shift contributed significantly to the development of Greek ship-building. Other problems that arose in this process were to provide security on the islands under Ottoman rule, to prevent smuggling activities between the islands and the mainland, to prevent raiding of state forests for illegal shipbuilding and of course to prevent tax losses. For these reasons, certain measures were taken by the central authority and necessary arrangements were made.
In essence, this study focuses on the illegal trade by important Greek shipbuilding centers (the majority of these centers were on Greek-dominated islands), which the Ottoman State never approved. In addition, the reasons and consequences of illegal shipbuilding is evaluated in the context of the political, commercial and technological changes of the 19th century. Furthermore, the focus will be on the arrangements and measures taken by the Ottoman State to prevent illegal construction activities and on how these measures and regulations affected the economic and social structures of the islands.

The Mediaeval Journal
2017, Issue 7.1


Abstract: Bérault Stuart was an important Franco-Scottish commander active during the French invasions of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. This paper examines Bérault Stuart's patronage of visual and literary material, in relation to the documentary evidence of his life and career c.1480-1508.  An examination of his patronage reveals a great deal about Bérault's motivations as a patron, and about the significance of such material as agents of social and cultural representation. An equestrian portrait, for instance, included in BnF ms. Ars. 5062 provides evidence of Bérault's efforts with regards to self-fashioning during an important episode in his career: the iconography employed allows us to examine the image in light of the political complexities surrounding Bérault’s appointment to governor of Milan. Furthermore, it demonstrates his awareness of the political leverage his close ties to the royal house of Scotland had in garnering favour with the French king. Further evidence of Bérault’s interests in cartography and his acquisition of material forming a ‘diplomatic dossier’ indicate the importance part played by visual and literary material in the career of a commander and diplomat during this period. Lastly evidence of the networks of patrons in which Bérault moved elucidate the crucial role played by such material in the careers of the military and courtly elite.

Keywords: Agency, Identity, Manuscripts, Scottish, French, Patronage, Berault Stuart, Mirror for Princes, Auld Alliance, Italian Wars.

The labouring classes of early modern Venice, the popolani, made up nearly ninety per cent of the city’s population. Historiography to this point has focused almost exclusively on their professional and civic role. It is the core contention of this article that the contribution of the popolani to Venetian economy and society far exceeded their documented professional and civic function. Using as a case study the homogenous group of the shipbuilders and sailors of Venice and drawing on newly-discovered primary sources from the Venetian State Archives, this article will show the distinct contributions of the popolani to the city’s economy and society through their charity to those in need. This took form in their sizeable dotal and charitable donations within and beyond the family. In one of the first attempts to explore the philanthropy of the lower classes, this article challenges the existing scholarly view that charity was the sole responsibility of the government and the nobility in early modern Venice. It further shows that marriage was not merely a financial union for the popolani; it was a sanctuary for lasting companionship. Ultimately, the article offers a fresh vista onto the socio-economic role of the popolani in early modern Venice.

In this article the author critically discusses the notion of petitions as a peaceful way of interaction between rulers and subjects in early-modern Europe. Specifically, he targets the idea of petitions as a safety valve. According to this idea, petitions enabled subjects to vent displeasure to the authorities; by doing so they grew less restive and more content with the strictly hierarchical and unequal structures of early-modern Europe. The author questions how often petitions really performed this function, firstly by considering the limited social background of the petitioners and then the many rules and hindrances petitioners faced. These rules were, thirdly, put in place because petitions could galvanize and mobilize people into political action. Fourthly, previous research has underestimated the complicated link between petitioning and legitimacy. It is not at all certain that petitions increased the legitimacy of the political system. Clearly, the complexity of the issue warrants new approaches. The empirical evidence for this article mainly comes from early-modern Sweden, Denmark-Norway, England and the Holy Roman Empire. Consequently, this article weds petition research usually separated by language barriers, providing a fuller European perspective where Northern Europe is fully integrated into the discussion.

Winner of the 2018 Nancy L. Roelker Prize for best article on sixteenth-century French history and the 2018 Harold J. Grimm Prize for best article on the legacy of the Reformation. The article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.