The
Mistress-Court of
Mighty Europe
Abstracts
HUGH
ADLINGTON (King's College London)
"'... though Sion do stretch out her hand': John Donne, confessional identity,
and the civitas dei in seventeenth-century Europe"
This paper will focus on John Donne's representation of Europe in confessional
terms at the outset of The Thirty Years' War. To this end the paper will draw
on poems such as Donne's holy sonnet Show me deare Christ, and The
Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremelius, as well
as Donne's sermons and letters from the period 1618-1623. The paper will aim
to show how Donne's eschatological, Protestant vision of a European civitas
dei distinguishes the cities, states and people of the Protestant Union
from those of Spain, the Empire, and Catholic League. Importantly, however,
Donne's vision of the solidarity of the Reformed churches of Europe was preached
from within the Anglican conformist consensus. This paper, therefore,
aims to examine how Donne balanced his confessional representation of Europe
with the competing dynastic, economic, and political European models of the
period. Most importantly, the paper will show how Donne's Scriptural rhetoric
draws on diplomatic and legal vocabularies and methods to achieve
this religio-political equilibrium.
NADINE N. W. AKKERMAN
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
"Shaping Epistolary Identities in Exile: The Correspondence of Elizabeth
Stuart (1596-1662), Queen of Bohemia"
The daughter of King James and Anna of Denmark, Elizabeth Stuart, married one
of the most powerful princes of the Holy Roman Empire, Friedrich V, the Calvinist
Elector Palatine. In 1619 Friedrich ambitiously accepted the crown of Bohemia,
which he lost to the Catholic supporters of the deposed Emperor only a year
later. The devastating outcome was that Elizabeth's husband not only lost the
crown of Bohemia but, as he was stripped of his electoral dignity, also his
rightful inheritance to the Palatinate. In 1621 Elizabeth and Friedrich took
refuge in the Netherlands, at The Hague, where they would live primarily off
Friedrich's relatives, the Princes of Orange. Friedrich died of the plague in
1632 but Elizabeth remained in exile at The Hague until 1661. Her remarkable
life and her contemporary reputation as a martyr for Protestantism, which was
upheld by the Puritans in England and other antagonists of the Habsburg Empire
in Europe, have led to hagiography and mythical narratives. Her symbolic significance
for Protestantism and martyrdom was later cultivated and exaggerated by scholars
such as Frances A. Yates in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972).
The
outdated historiography fails to shed light on the political and cultural role
of her court in exile. She is often merely a footnote in studies of the Thirty
Years' War, disappearing in the margins of the historical narrative. However,
in widowhood Elizabeth kept up a voluminous correspondence with her political
contacts in the Dutch Republic, Germany, England and the rest of Europe, with
members of several royal families, with her children who would later hold prominent
positions all over Europe, and with important intellectuals, philosophers, theologians,
in Britain, the Netherlands and beyond. As a prolific writer of letters Elizabeth,
Queen of Bohemia, seems to have been a key figure in the cultural, political
and religious climate of Early Modern Europe, which makes the neglect of her
extensive network all the more surprising.
In
the Netherlands, the Queen of Bohemia was physically distanced from the people
she wanted to flatter, desired to manipulate or intended to influence. By her
pen, however, she was able to move her pawns in a chess game that extended over
most of Europe, ensuring that the restoration of her family to the Palatinate,
if not to Bohemia, remained a clear objective for her followers. The following
questions will be addressed in my paper: how did Elizabeth use her epistolary
network, how did she deal with informants, letter bearers, go-betweens, female
gossips, mediators and other actors? And, since her missives catered for different
audiences, how did Elizabeth self-consciously use that network to shape her
identity in exile?
STEFANI
BRUSBERG-KIERMEIER (Potsdam University)
"Dark, but neither lord nor lady: the Italian Bassano family at the English
court and Shakespeare's Italian and Jewish representations"
This paper argues that musicians from the Bassano family can be regarded as
early modern European intermediaries who came from Italy to work for aristocratic
employers at the English court. The mixed and complex identities of some family
members shall serve as examples of European transgressors of geographical, cultural,
social, religious and generic boundaries at that time. In the middle of the
16th century members of the Bassano family came from Bassano del Grappa near
Venice to England and gained access to the Tudor court through their craftsmanship
and excellency in playing instruments, especially the cornett. The Bassano family
members are typical of a new social class of independent artists and craftsmen
who were able to seek employment or patronage at whatever European court they
wished to. For these men trade, travel, and travail went hand in hand and, when
they eventually settled down somewhere, music, manufacture, and management.
Baptista Bassano belonged to the first generation, his daughter Aemilia became
the Lord Chamberlain's (Lord Hunsdon) mistress, married a musician from the
French Huguenot family Lanier (Lanyer), later became a poet herself and is today
the most likely candidate for Shakespeare's 'dark lady'. Aemilia Lanyer's nephew
Nicholas Lanier not only composed numerous songs and published a book of etchings,
but also brought Van Dyck to England.
The
paper will furthermore look at how Shakespeare represents 'strangeness' and
'Italian-ness' in some of his plays and argue that his portrayals not only echo
political rhetoric and religious disputes of his time, but also refer to members
of the Bassano family. Shakespeare often links 'dark' looks with 'strangeness'
and even with 'Jewishness'. This might well have to do, as David Lasocki has
argued, with the coat of arms of the Bassano family which displays three silkworm
moths and a mulberry tree. The silkworms imply that the Bassanos were Jewish
silk farmers, and in Italian 'moro' means 'black' as well as 'mulberry tree'.
Shakespeare might well have had members of the Bassano family in mind when he
deviced fascinating strange characters with complex identities, for example,
a Venetian moor (Othello), a moor with a Jewish name (Aaron), a dark French
lady (Rosaline) aso. In 'The Merchant of Venice' the Prince of Morocco, a 'tawny
moor', enters to a flourish of cornetts and says: 'Mislike me not for my complexion'
(II, i, 1). When, together with another flourish of cornetts, Bassanio enters
and Portia asks: '[Bassanio] may win, / And what is music then?' (III, ii, 47/8),
it is hard to imagine that Shakespeare was not thinking of the Bassano brothers.
Shakespeare's representations of members of the Bassano family reflect the early
modern practice of treating musicians as well as women as commodities and of
regarding them as '[..] extravagant and wheeling stranger[s], / Of here, and
every where' ('Othello', I, i, 136/7).
ANNA
CARRDUS (University of Bristol)
"Invitations to the 'Gregoriusfest' in Germany 1660-1715: the role of schoolboys
in allegorical and historical representations of civic identity"
The 'Gregoriusfest' in Germany 1660-1715
This annual festival originated in Rome under Pope Gregory (c. 827)and celebrated
the interdependence of civic life and public education. It was observed throughout
central Germany during the early modern period, usually taking the traditional
form of a musical procession of schoolboys and their teachers. My project concentrates,
however, on the more elaborate dramatic processions - rather like revues - which
were put on to mark the festival by staff and students at the grammar schools
in three particularly prosperous central German towns, Altenburg, Görlitz and
Zittau. I have discovered over thirty hitherto unknown printed 4- to 8-page
texts which detail the content and themes of such processions and invite citizens
to watch them. Each town's civic identity was a constant theme of the processions,
which were performed through the streets and in open spaces, such as the market
square.
The
project has grown out of my intensive research into women's participation in
the cultural life of Altenburg, one of the three towns it focuses on. I know
of no other modern publications which focus on celebrations of the 'Gregoriusfest'
in the seventeenth century apart from my own.
TONY
CLAYDON (Bangor University)
"The concept of Christendom in late Stuart England"
This paper will start by assessing the common assumption that the notion of
a united Christendom, embracing most of modern Europe, had died at the reformation
when confessional divisions between different types of Christian had become
more important than their common faith. It will suggest that, in English public
discourse at least, the concept of Christendom survived surprisingly strongly,
and will illustrate this in discussions of England's foreign policy.
The
bulk of the paper will illustrate two ways in which Christendom influenced perceptions
of England foreign obligations. First, it will show how the resurgent power
of the Turks (besieging Vienna in 1683), raised the possibility that European
Christianity would be over-run, and so encouraged calls for a united crusade
against the infidel. Second, it will show that the main international tensions
in the late Stuart era were caused by accusations that nations had broken treaties.
This raised the issue of 'breaches of faith,' and led to discussion of common
Christian standards of behaviour which should govern all Christian powers.
However,
whilst the ideology of Christendom was central to late Stuart discussion, and
the word was used constantly, this paper will go on to argue that it may not
have been as unifying as its central concepts would suggest. Both uses of Christendom
discussed above were rapidly turned to attack Louis XIV, who was perceived as
the great threat to the English nation. Louis was accused to breaking treaties,
and of allying with and behaving like the Turk, and so was presented as a great
internal threat to Christendom. He was outside, and an enemy of, its union -
despite his claim to be the 'Most Christian' king of France. Christendom was
therefore an ambiguous concept in late Stuart England. It provided a level of
identity above protestant/catholic divisions, but was employed to divide Europe
along new, non-confessional lines. By appealing to an entity beyond reformation
disputes, the English hoped to build and lead an alliance of protestants and
catholics against the most powerful Christian state of the day.
NATASHA
CONSTANTINIDOU
(University of Edinburgh)
"The
blurring of confessional identities: James VI and I, Paolo Sarpi and the limits
of spiritual power"
It is increasingly recognised among scholars that some of the traditionally
accepted boundaries for the study of 'European' history in the early modern
period are insufficient. This paper aims to challenge two of them: first, the
conventional classification of Europeans under the general and all-inclusive
terms of 'Catholics' and 'Protestants', that can be proved more distorting than
useful particularly in a period of heated confessional conflict and debate.
What is more, citizens and subjects of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries did not recognise themselves as such. The second challenge is directed
against the traditional view that wants the case of the British Isles to be
dealt with separately from the rest of the continent.
Evidence for this can be provided by the intensive - and would be fair to say
cross-European politico-religious crisis that took place in the first two decades
of the seventeenth century. The direct threat to the new monarch's life by a
group of Catholics, the famous Gunpowder Plot, soon after James VI and I's accession
to the English throne, induced the introduction of the Oath of Allegiance. The
Papal reaction to the Oath was an indication of an increasing tension and blurring
limits of authority between the temporal and the spiritual authorities on a
more general context, that had been foreshadowed by the precedents of Elizabeth's
excommunication by the Roman Pontiff and with the Curial approval of the assassination
of the French King Henri III. The threat to secular sovereignty became even
more evident with the issuing of the Papal Interdict by Pope Paul V against
the Republic of Venice, an event that James followed closely with great concern
and the assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 by the Jesuit Ravaillac,
echoing strongly the monarchomach rhetoric of the Catholic League - these events
seemed to turn the fears of European sovereigns into reality. Accordingly, the
question of Papal power and his right of intervention in temporal matters in
conjunction with these events created the circumstances where the traditional
Catholic-Protestant divide was overrun and the Venetians, James VI and I and
the French Gallicans could envisage themselves in a greater anti-papal alliance.
The significance of the situation is evidenced by the international character
the Oath of Allegiance controversy assumed.
Against this background, and in view of the war that had just broke out in 1618,
this paper will discuss two issues: first, some of James VI and I's anti-papal
views as expressed during the Oath of Allegiance Controversy and but also throughout
his reign; and secondly it will try to link the publication in London (1619)
of a major anti-papal work by Paolo Sarpi, the friar who acted as a spokesman
for the Serenissima during the Interdict: the History of the Council of Trent.
PHILIP
CRISPIN
"Papal Bull: Julius II, Louis XII, and Pierre Gringore's Sottie du Jeu du
Prince des sots"
My paper will focus on a significant performance event from the reign of Louis
XII of France: La Sottie du Jeu du Prince des sots, alternatively known
as La Sottie contre Jules II, that is, Pope Julius II. Sotties were satirical,
popular fools' plays, and were frequently virulent in their attack on the French
authorities. This sottie was composed by Pierre Gringore at the behest of the
astute Louis (praised by Macchiavelli for his grasp of realpolitik) and amounts
to a propagandist attempt to regain the Parisian people's trust and confidence
in the controversial wars in Italy; controversial not least due to Louis' 'schism'
with Pope Julius II, head of the Church. My paper will examine the socio-political
conjuncture out of which this performance event arises, focusing upon such issues
as warfare, Church politics (Gallicanism v. Ultramontanism; the rise in temporal
and rhetorical power of the Pope) and the development of new political systems
and theories, for example, new systems of sovereignty, the rise of nation states.
Church and state are shown to be profoundly and problematically intertwined.
The conciliar movement in the Church is a harbinger of the encroaching Reformation
in which many of the conflicts bubbling here can no longer be contained. The
papa terribilis's intransigence is also a precursor of Counter-Reformation tendencies.
The
sottie, performed on Mardi gras in 1512 in the heart of popular Paris, les Halles,
uses emblematic and folkloric motifs to win over a sceptical populace. Gringore
plays a high-stakes game in featuring King and Pope as fools, subtly subverting
the sottie's anti-establishment credentials in order to praise monarch and demonize
pontiff. He seizes upon the performance date, and festive culture, to have the
two protagonists fighting out a battle of Carnival against Lent a la Brueghel.
The sottie features an inspired interweaving of politics, political theory,
theology and popular culture. Not only does it focus upon the relationship between
France and Papacy, it also includes telling asides on France's problematic relations
with its neighbours, frequently identifying these through heraldry and sybmolism.
The play also includes fascinating insights into the ideology and theorizing
of kingship, burgeoning nationalism and incipient imperialism.
Gringore's
straddling of popular and privileged camps can be seen in his rich CV: poet,
moralist, herald, jester, cross-dresser, chronicler, propagandist-envoy. I will
include iconographic material in my presentation, refer to a few other sotties
and 'Grandes Entrees' relevant to these issues, and make a reference to the
interesting and flattering portrayal of Louis' court at the start of the DUCHESS
OF MALFI, written a century later.
SABINA
de CAVI (Columbia University, New York)
"Jusepe de Ribera Espańol F(ecit)"
'The present exhibition celebrates. José de Ribera, Spanish [espańol] by right
of birth and by will. Italian by education and employment.' With these words,
in occasion of the fourth centenary of the artist's birth, Alfonso Pérez Sánchez
stigmatized the ambivalent identity of Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), one of
the most intense 'dark painters' of Seventeenth Century Mediterranean art. Native
of Játiva (near Valencia, Spain), he moved soon to Rome (1609), where he witnessed
and participated some of the major revolutions of his time in art theory and
practice, and later transferred his existence to Naples (1616), where he died
as immigrant Spaniard in 1652, although partially naturalized, having married
a local.
This
paper will claim that Ribera's obsession with his name and the various ingredients
of his contradictory (if not disturbed) personality, can reveal a large set
of problems activated by the process of naturalization of foreign communities
and minorities in early seventeenth-century Europe. Ribera was active in Italy
under Spanish rulership (1503-1734), and notably in cities where the cohabitation
of alternative foreign communities (nationi) caused a high level of political
competition for national preeminence. Through the case of Ribera, my contribution
will try to explore what possibly meant to be Spanish in early Seventeenth century
Italy. It will try to understand what reasons he had to feel compelled to embrace
his nationality even in an ouvert climate of cultural resistance, documented
by the diffusion of national stereotypes on the Spanish Nation.
MATTHEW
DIMMOCK (University of Sussex)
"'Our turkish and sinful lives': Islam and the Ottomans in the court of Henry
VIII"
This paper will explore the extent to which notions of Islam and the Ottomans
reflect and were incorporated into the politics and mythology of Henry VIII's
court. At a time of considerable territorial gains for the Ottomans in Eastern
Europe and the Mediterranean, conceptions of the 'turke' and the 'infidel' gained
a currency and immediacy that no 'Christian' court could ignore. In response,
not only do the politics of the English Reformation become infused with complex
formations of Catholic 'infidelity', but Henry VIII (alongside Charles V amongst
others) sought to utilize commitments to crusade in his construction of an image
of himself as a 'most Christian prince'. This image was further used to demonize
his opponents - most obviously the French, who had for 'a long time and season
ayded the great Turke'. The influx of a considerable volume of texts exploring
and detailing the Ottoman threat into England in Henry's reign, coupled with
his apparent enthusiasm for Ottoman clothing and music, suggest an ambivalence
about Islam and the Ottomans that would persist throughout the century.
Finally,
I hope to question how the creation of specific kind of martial European Christian
identity - supported by eminent humanists like More and Erasmus - was based
upon an approach to the Ottomans that was as much about political rivalries
between Christian courts as it was about the Ottomans themselves. That it was
concerned with amending Christian, and not Ottoman, 'turkish and sinful lives'.
EKATERINA
DOMNINA (The Moscow Lomonosov State University
"The riches of England are greater than those of any other country in Europe:
A Venetian image of Tudor England"
The accounts of sixteenth-century England left by Venetian ambassadors have
been well known in European historiography since the nineteenth century and
have been widely used by historians. Yet they have received little scholarly
attention as independent and important in their own right sources of information,
often being subjected to chronicles, state papers and pamphlets. The argument
of this paper is that Venetian rel azioni of Tudor England present a
unique insight into the process of shaping and transforming the vision of a
nation in the eyes of another. It was the Venetian republic that kept a curious
eye on English kingdom throughout the whole sixteenth century and scrupulously
informed her agents at the European courts about all its major events. This
strategy, brought to life by mere economic interests, predestined the development
of mutual cultural exchange and enrichment.
RICHARD
DUTTON (Ohio State University)
"Jonson's Volpone: Venice in London, London in Venice"
It is a commonplace of editorial commentary in every edition of Volpone
that Jonson did a typically thorough job of making his depiction of Venice in
the play as accurate as possible. We know that he consulted Lewis Lewkenor's
1599 translation of Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice,
a text mentioned in the play; we strongly suspect that he went to John Florio
(who received a signed copy of the quarto) for such details as names, coins
etc.; we also know that he had other Italian friends, such as the musician Ferrabosco
brothers (one of whom left the earliest setting of 'Come, my Celia'), whom he
might have consulted. Critics such as Brian Parker and David McPherson have
carefully detailed the factual and mythical Venices on which Jonson draws: its
wealth, luxury, incipient decadence, mountebanks, commedia dell'arte,
legal system, transvestite whores, and so on. All paralleled in Coryate's Crudities
and Fynes Moryson's Itinerary.
While
all of this is done in a spirit of admiration for Jonson's thoroughness, it
also perpetuates the notion of the unimaginative pedant. And I suggest it misses
the point. As he wrote Volpone, Jonson had only recently published the
revised version of Sejanus - a play which captures the historical accuracy
of Imperial Rome every bit as well as Volpone does modern Venice, as
the annotation in the quarto meticulously records. This did not, however, prevent
the Earl of Northampton accusing Jonson of 'popery and treason' in connection
with the play: he saw through the historical/factual to the topical. I suggest
that we can do the same with Volpone, but only if we approach its 'realism'
in an appropriate spirit. And I suggest that the 1607 quarto of the play prepares
us to do that much more carefully than does the more commonly reproduced 1616
folio text.
The
Venice of the play becomes a context for reflecting on the themes which Jonson
obliquely outlines in the preliminaries: liberty of conscience, censorship,
Reformation politics. Once we understand that, we also understand the odd 'slips'
which appear in Jonson's 'portrait' of the city. When Volpone wants to describe
the noise made by Lady Would-Be, he says: 'The bells in time of pestilence ne'er
made / Like noise, or were in that perpetual motion; / The cockpit comes not
near it.' The plague bells, Drebbel's perpetual motion machine, the cockpit
- these are all invoked in Jonson's next play, Epicene, as characteristic
of noise in London. Most famously, Jonson is supposed to have got the
function of the Avocatori 'wrong': they were properly examining attorneys, not
sitting magistrates. What Jonson depicts, however, is exactly the kind of bench
of magistrates in the Consistory Court where he was on trial for recusancy -
an irony which would not be lost, for example, on the initiate audience which
contained those who wrote the commendatory verses. Jonson's Venice, like his
Imperial Rome, is thus a refracting lens for viewing his own London. Wherever
we look in early modern travel writing, we must not ignore the tendency for
it to indulge in utopian or dystopic gestures in its apparently objective depiction
of the unfamiliar.
GEOFFREY
EATOUGH (University of Wales, Lampeter)
''The Break With Europe: Britain And The Phoenician Connection"
Humphrey Lhuyd in his Commentarioli Britannicae Descriptionis Fragmentum
(1572) argues that the ancient Britons were Welsh, an exclusive nation unrelated
to the continental Celts. They had resisted the Romans, had their own none Roman
form of Christianity, and had been an imperial nation. The very geography of
modern Britain was shaped by the Welsh names which could be recovered by toponymical
investigation. It was a statement on behalf of the Welsh nation published in
Germany aimed at European public. It was also directed against Polydore Vergil
and the Roman view of Britain. It was immediately translated into English by
Thomas Twyne under the title of The Breviary of Britain (1573). Twyne
does well by Lhuyd but later he had published a work of his father, John Twyne,
De rebus Albionicis, Britannicis atque Anglicis Commentariorum (1590),
which in much of its detail contests the positions of Lhuyd. John Twyne's work
will be the subject of this paper. The two cornerstones of this work are that
there had once been a land bridge between Britain and Europe at Dover, and that
consequently the peoples of Gaul and of Britain had been essentially the same.
Secondly when the land bridge had been broken and Britain had become an insular
land, the first settlers to come and occupy much of the island had been the
Phoenicians. As in Spain, so in Britain the Phoenicians with their eagerness
to make money from trade and exploitation of native resources had corrupted
golden age civilizations. The theory owed much to Vives and Vives himself seems
influenced by patterns of behaviour in the Spanish colonies. Some ancient Britons
therefore so far from being an aboriginal or Trojan people were in origin colonizers
and exploiters. Twyne does however subscribe to environmentalism; settlers have
an effect on the land but in the end the land and its climate mould the people.
The Phoenicians were remnants of the Babylonian empire which was the empire
at the beginning of creation. There had only ever been two empires, the Babylonian
and the Roman, the rest such as the Egyptian and the Celtic domination did not
merit the name. People had supposed that the Roman empire would last to the
end of time, but it seems that like all man made things it might now, in its
latest form as the Catholic church, be in terminal decay. Twyne affects a detachment
from these God driven events, yet he shows nostalgia for the old monastic order.
The chief spokesperson and wise man in Twyne's work is an Augustinian abbot
whose monastery has been dissolved. Daniel Woolf in his Social Circulation
of the Past confidently states that Humphrey Lhuyd was a catholic. Lhuyd's
work seems to me to point in an anti-Catholic direction. Twyne's presentation
while circumspect seems to lean in the opposite direction, given its protagonists,
its source in Vives, and its picture of a settled golden age Britain destroyed
by commerce. His book ends with a fulsome appreciation of the material advantages
which Rome derived from Britain in return for which they gave the Britons civilization
whose remains were now being recovered by the antiquarians. Twyne also represents
an Anglo-Kentish view of Britain. Kent then, as now, had lain at the hub of
the business with the continent. I shall attempt to cover some of these ideological
differences and at the same time to illustrate the antiquarian methodologies
at the base of Twyne's work. There is considerable detail on Phoenician cultural
traits, a connection which was later developed in a positive way be Aylett Sammes
in his Britannica Antiqua Illustrata.
JOAN
FITZPATRICK (University College Northampton)
"'Some straunger lombard now | will take the vittailes': Continental Appetites
in Early Modern London"
State censor (Master of the Revels) Edmund Tilney made a number of small improvements
to Anthony Munday's phrasing in the play Sir Thomas More, as represented
in British Library Harley Manuscript 7368, such as changing the non-specific
'stranger' into a geographically-precise 'Lombard'. Such changes do not bring
the text into line with the known story, and indeed the whole picture of how
and when this play was censored is probably lost to theatre historians. But
concern to be right about just where London's 'strangers' came from, and what
they were doing, is apparent in the surviving manuscript. In the play the perception
that consumption of foodstuff from mainland Europe is harmful to English natives
is a dominant theme and resident foreigners are thought to have a detrimental
effect upon the economy bringing with them strange culinary practices and disease.
One of the play's key linkages brings these last two together: vegetables grown
by the foreigners infect Londoners and so undermine the security of the city.
The body's consumption of infected vegetables becomes a powerful symbol for
what the rioters believe to be the effect of London's absorption of aliens:
as the body consumes that which will infect it so London incorporates the seeds
of its own destruction by allowing the aliens to remain. Just as a body that
has been poisoned should purge itself of the poisonous matter to ensure its
well-being so violent efforts to purge London of its foreigners are considered
necessary by the rioters to ensure the safety of the city. Dating the layers
of original composition, censorship, and later additional composition in Sir
Thomas More is notoriously difficult, but I will attempt to contextualize
the play's interrelation of food and civil disorder with the food shortages
in the 1590s and early 1600s that gave rise to real riots in London.
GARY
GIBBS (Roanoke College)
"Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses: the Elizabethan politics of 'Englished'
mythology"
Golding's 'Englished' version of Ovid's Metamorphoses is a familiar text
to students of Elizabethan literature and culture. The debates regarding the
translation's merits and shortcoming have been varied and vigorously argued,
but also have remained essentially unchanged over the years. Most scholars agree
that the language, translation, and text are odd, but they seldom agree as to
why it is odd.
In my paper, I will refer to respected theories of myth analysis by scholars
such as Roland Barthes, Geogre Dumézil, and Jean-Pierre Vernant in order to
inform an analysis of the political and religious motives of translator Arthur
Golding. My conclusion will argue that this translation was aimed at delivering
a special and specific message to English readers that warned of the potentially
dangerous outcomes of royal policies in both Church and state.
Given
the life pattern of Golding's translating work, this sort of interpretation
fits into a discernable pattern and captures the uncertainties that defined
the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I. My argument will stress Golding's
uneasiness with what he perceived as political and social complacency for reforming
the church and policing manners.
MEREDITH
J. GILL (University of Notre Dame)
"Jupiter's Prize: Europa and the Origins of Europe"
The mythological rape of Europa has sometimes been construed as an allegory
of the birth of the European continent. In Ovid's tale, Europa is seized on
the shores of the Levant by Jupiter in the guise of a bull, and carried to the
island of Crete. Europa's parting from her courtly enclave portrays, in these
readings, the emergence of a new and distinct geo-political entity. The Roman
story so popular with aristocratic patrons in sixteenth-century European courts
served, then, to complement a world view that was not only disposed toward eclectic
visual and verbal metaphor but one that was imperialistic in many senses. I
propose to test the hypothesis that Europa's abduction is linked to imperialistic
constructs, and to consider again, in relation to this, the Graeco-Roman origins
of the concept "Europe." Beginning with the spirited drawing of Europa by Albrecht
Dürer (c. 1495), I intend to compare, among a number of versions, Charles V's
elaborate tapestry (c. 1519), Titian's poetic rendering for Phillip II (c. 1559-1562),
and Rembrandt's comic recasting in the next century. I propose to analyse not
just the pictorial narratives themselves but also whether, in fact, and what
ways, these works are related to Europe/Europa as an Early Modern idea.
MANUEL
GOMES da TORRE (University of Porto)
"The Language of the bride: Portuguese for English learners in two grammars
of 1662"
Over a period of twenty years the English and the Portuguese royal houses lived
remarkably similar experiences. The candidate to the English throne, Charles,
was forced to live in exile during the time of the Cromwellian republic. Not
until 1660 was the monarchy restored and did the new king begin to rule the
country. After sixty long years of Spanish rule, the Portuguese royal house
saw one of its members crowned in 1640 and Portuguese independence guaranteed.
The wedding of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza is best seen as the logical
outcome of such an important similar experience besides being, of course, the
reinforcement of the 'Old Alliance', which had been in force since 1386. When
the Portuguese princess left for London, she was accompanied by a significant
retinue, among them a former captain of her father's regiments, a certain Monsieur
de la Molličre, "a French Gentleman." This man published A Portuguez Grammar
in London in 1662. In the same year, the celebrated English grammarian James
Howell also published his A New English Grammar ..., to which he appended
"another grammar of the Spanish or Castilian Toung, with som special remarks
upon the Portugues Dialect." In my paper I will try to evaluate, in the light
of modern foreign-language teaching principles, to what extent these two grammars
might have contributed to promoting the Portuguese language in the English Court
and beyond.
MANUEL
J. GÓMEZ-LARA and MARIA J. MORA (Universidad de Sevilla)
"The 'Anglicized Italian' in Restoration Comedy: Parodic Reversal of a Cultural
Topos"
The concept of the Italianate Englishman, as coined by Roger Ascham in The
Scholemaster (1570), emerged in the midst of a national polemic about
the good and evil of educational travel. This character's eagerness to adopt
foreign influences made him, once back home, a threat to the imaginary harmony
of the English national character, as his newly acquired habits brought into
the country dangerous forms of corruption: Popery, Machiavellian politics, and
libertine mores. But as they voice their concern about contaminating external
influences, Ascham and other authors reveal their anxiety about the fragile
state of English national identity. It is hardly a coincidence that the first
renderings of this topos appear when English society was undergoing a series
of changes in politics and religion that dramatically challenged its cohesion.
Almost a hundred years later, several Restoration comedies revive the motif
of the Italianate Englishman. In the cultural and social context of the early
Restoration period, the threats to the national character once associated with
Italy have been replaced by a more immediate image, that of the corruption of
the court. It is our aim in this paper to analyse the reformulations of this
cultural topos, focusing primarily on Joseph Arrowsmith's The Reformation
(1673). This play introduces a parodic reversal of this figure: an 'anglicized
Italian,' who has learnt in his travels the fashions and manners of the London
rakes. The play thus presents an amusing satire of the licentiousness and extravagance
of the Stuart court, playing on the blurred limits of national identity.
CHRISTOPHER
HARDING (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
and NICOLA HARDING (National Archive)
"Representations of Governance in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe:
The Iconography and Dramatic Representation of the Sovereign Ruler"
It is conventional wisdom in the history of international law and relations
that during the sixteenth and seventeenth century patterns of governance in
Europe were transformed, a complex and multi-layered system of political authority
being superseded by a more unified structure of exclusive authority vested in
the form of the sovereign state. This transformation has for reasons of historical
convenience been especially associated with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,
hence the use of the term 'Westphalian' (signifying 'modern') system of international
law and relations. The outcome of this process is easier to appreciate than
the means of its achievement. How did such ideas about governance take root
and consolidate into a consensus among political leaders across Europe? What
were the means of intellectual exchange and political discourse which facilitated
the Westphalian sea-change?
This is a particularly pertinent question in relation to societies in which
purely literary discourse could involve only an educated elite. Communication
involving wider popular opinion would require the use of less 'literary' media.
The discussion in this paper examines a range of media which may have been significantly
exploited in early modern European society for the dissemination of argument
and ideas about governance. Two major forms appeared to be utilised for this
purpose : visual art, with its rich iconographical content; and various types
of dramatic presentation capable of communicating with both elite and popular
audiences. A number of examples of such artistic and dramatic work, especially
those located within and associated with the 'centralising' polities in England,
France and Spain, may be examined for their presentation of the virtues of sovereignty
and the advantages of strong, exclusive political authority. Such a study reveals
the potency of such media in their historical context for the promotion of political
ideas and the stimulation of debate on matters of governance.
ANDREW
HISCOCK (Bangor University)
"'A Dialogue between Old England and New': Anne Bradstreet and her negotiations
with the Old World"
This paper will seek to explore the concerns surrounding national identities
in Bradstreet's poetry. Her writing focuses carefully upon geographical, theological,
and historical myths of belonging and links them closely to themes of cultural
obligation, individual commitment and divine interventionism. I wish to consider
the very different ways in which Bradstreet politicizes the personal and collective
impulse towards memory in her poetry in order to explore questions of national
origin, identity and engagement. The first phase of discussion will concentrate
upon the various modulations of Bradstreet's 'epic' mode. In these works, she
considers the applications of various theories of history to the construction
of nationhood, most particularly in one instance to the 'present troubles, anno
1642'. In the second phase of the paper, I wish to consider how the later work
of Bradstreet, which has hitherto been examined by critics predominantly with
regard to issues of gender construction, may be inscribed within more general
seventeenth-century political discourses centering upon the formulation of cultural
authority. Finally, I will reflect upon the ways in which the memorial impulse
in Bradstreet's work may be seen as a device to 'validate' her textual voice
during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
EDWARD
HOLBERTON (Trinity College, Cambridge)
"Bulstrode Whitelocke's Embassy to Sweden 1653-54"
Bulstrode Whitelocke's embassy to Sweden sought to consolidate the commonwealth's
diplomatic presence in the courts of Europe. Aware that royalists and the Dutch
had misrepresented the Parliament, Council of State and Lord General as a government
made up of low-born zealots, Whitelocke attempted to appear a cultured and urbane
member of the English gentry, but stay true to the characteristics that he felt
distinguished the new English governors, especially their religiosity and plainness
of speech. He struggled to sustain this balance at the Swedish court, and on
occasions allowed or encouraged his plainness to be taken as a courtly persona.
He also encouraged Christina's speculations that Cromwell intended to be king.
The emergence of the Protectorate helped and hindered him: it confirmed Christina's
suspicions, but worried other members of the court that the English regime was
still unstable. Latin poems by Sir Charles Wolseley, Daniel Whistler and Andrew
Marvell were shown to Queen Christina when her enthusiasm for the treaty appeared
to be waning. The poems excite identifications, nostalgias and hopes that reduce
the apparent import of Britain's political contentiousness. My readings of poems
by Daniel Whistler and Sir Charles Wolseley find them intervening to urge Christina
to independent, absolute action and to free the business of the treaty from
the web of intrigue surrounding her planned abdication and relations with the
Dutch. Like Whitelocke they show off their authors' fluency in the forms and
iconography of European courts and monarchy. Wolseley was a very young member
of the new council of state who had become known as a moderate during the Barebones.
With the ironies of his Horatian ode, he attempts to distinguish himself and
the new regime as worldly and politically sophisticated. Marvell adopts the
persona of an enthusiastic, humanistic courtier, part of which is a deliberately
anachronistic projection of foreign policy. He represents Cromwell as a princely
and competent interlocutor with royalty, and particularly as a prince who admires
and sympathises with the cultural and territorial ambitions of the Vasa dynasty.
LISA
HOPKINS (Sheffield Hallam University)
"Fire, Ice, and Ghosts: The North in the English Renaissance Imagination"
From Thomas Nashe's assertion of the prevalence of ghosts in Iceland to Margaret
Cavendish's description of the frozen North in The Sociable Companions,
the far north of Europe is firmly established in the English Renaissance imagination
as a locality of both geographical extremes and of supernatural presences. This
paper will sketch the nature of this cultural perception of the North and give
an indication of how extensively it is to be found represented in texts of the
period, and will suggest that this is part of a more widespread tendency to
view physical borders as places of liminality and spiritual uncertainity.
PAUL
INNES (University of Glasgow)
"Cymbeline and Empire"
This paper is a version of a book chapter concerned with Cymbeline and
nascent ideas of empire. It is composed of three sections: the play's representations
of Cymbeline's Britain; its appropriation of imperial Rome; and the cultural
context of an emerging British Empire in the seventeenth century. All three
sections are intimately concerned with the ways in which the newly constituted
British state relates to versions of Britain's historical past; pre-existing
discourses of the Roman Empire; and contemporary colonisation. The discussion
centres on the play's negotiation of these complex and vexed issues, with the
proviso that such a negotiation is uneven and deeply contradictory. The paper
seeks to locate the play at the moment of its production, while pointing to
ways in which an ideology of a British Empire begins to emerge.
CLAIRE
JOWITT (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
"Piracy, National Identity and Empire: the European Dimension and Beyond"
This paper examines the way crimes of piracy intersect with issues of national
identity and European empire formation. Focusing in particular on the example
of the notorious 1580s English pirates Purser and Clinton, whose exploits were
frequently recounted both at the time of their trial and execution, and also
during the next forty or so years, I explore the extent to which piracy in this
period should be seen as an abdication of an individual national identity as
well as the expression of an aspirational political agenda. Hence this paper
examines the way that piracy intersects with national borders, in some ways
superseding them since piracy in an international crime defying international
law, and pirates invoke the freedom of the seas as they ignore borders, attempting
to establish rival, borderless states at sea. The implications of the way piracy
impacts with ideas of national, European and other identities and empire are
explored since these travellers, who defy national and international laws as
they repeatedly transgress physical and other borders, can be seen to offer
an alternative model for social, political and national identities, and a critique
of European empire building. The paper traces the ways versions of Purser and
Clinton change between the 1580s and the 1630s and reads them as reflections
of alterations and developments in attitudes to national identity and empire
in the period.
JOHN
KERRIGAN (University of Cambridge)
"The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660"
Literary scholars who have kept in touch with work by historians increasingly
recognise that 'Eng Lit' is a questionable entity in the early modern period.
Just as a great deal of seventeenth-century English history turns out to be
contingent on events elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, so much anglophone literature
was produced in or engages with events across Scotland, the Welsh borders, Munster
and so forth. There are dangers, however, in developing an 'archipelagic' (i.e.
British and Irish) range of reference in literary studies. One risk is that
a new boundary, as unrealistic as the anglocentric boundary around 'Eng Lit',
will be installed around the three Stuart kingdoms, to the neglect of interactions
with a larger, mighty Europe. This is a temptation to which some historians
have arguably succumbed: in their eagerness to probe 'the British problem' (i.e.
the difficulties of governing a multiple polity in the archipelago) they have
neglected the Scandinavian, continental, and Atlantic dimensions of British/Irish
history. By contrast, this paper seeks to demonstrate the value of a three-kingdoms
approach to anglophone literature, by showing how an understanding of Milton
and Marvell requires a grasp of Scottish affairs and writing, but also how an
archipelagic account of their work is incomplete unless one recognises the European
dimension: in this case, the close geo-cultural relations between Scotland and
the United Provinces and the aspiration to Anglo-Dutch union under the English
Republic.
SUE
KNOTT (The Open University)
"Walls of Defence: English national identity and the established church"
In 1577, John Dee, in his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect
Art of Navigation portrayed the queen at the helm of the imperial ship Europa.
The implication was that she would seize the chance to establish a Protestant
Empire. Protestantism was, for many, inextricably linked with national identity
and inevitably informed England's relationship with Europe. But, despite Richard
Hooker's attempts to promote the image of a church to which all belonged, in
one 'commonwealth', religious conflict repeatedly threatened to destabilise
the situation at home and abroad. This paper examines a number of key texts
which focus on the tensions between individual conscience and the need to conform
to a 'national' religion, including works by John Donne and Robert Southwell,
and explores the implications regarding Catholic and Protestant Europe.
GLORIA
LEANDRO (University Ca' Foscari Venice)
"The Cathedral Saint Aleksander Nevskij in Sofia (Bulgaria)"
The Bulgarian Renaissance led to freedom, with Russian help, from the Turkish
Empire and then to independence. St Alexander Nevski Cathedral was built to
celebrate this liberation from centuries of Ottoman domination and symbolises
the nation's hard-won freedom after 482 years of oppression. The idea of a monument
dedicated to Alexander Nevski, a 12th-century Russian hero canonised in 1547
and who symbolises Eastern Christian resistance to the Papacy's aims of reunification
and the expansionist ambitions of the Western powers, was proposed in 1879.
The cathedral, consecration in 1924, is the foremost symbol of Bulgaria's national
and religious identity but has aroused scant interest among art historians.
I hope that this study will shed a glimmer of light on this splendid building
and help to stimulate interest in Bulgaria's artistic heritage.
Today the cathedral has regained the role for which it was originally conceived:
that of a symbol of the Bulgarian people's restored spirituality.
JESÚS
LÓPEZ-PELÁEZ (Universidad de Jaén, Spain)
"Drawing the Lines: Spaniards and 'Moors' in Seventeenth-Century English
Drama"
This paper wants to delve into the ideological role played by English drama
in a certain definition of Spain and Northern Africa, and how this in turn helped
configure England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To
this end we will analyse Lust's Dominion (ca. 1600), by Thomas
Dekker (?); All's Lost by Lust (ca. 1633), by William Rowley;
and The Playhouse to Be Let ('Drake' and 'The Cruelty of the Spaniards'),
(ca.1658), by William D'Avenant. These plays dramatize the political
notions of allegiance, subject (born or created) and foreigner (friend or enemy),
exposed by Edward Coke in his Reports (ca. 1600) in the context
of the changes introduced by the conquest of the Americas, and recently analysed
by Richard Marienstrass. With this classification in mind we will explore how
these texts characterize Spaniards and North-Africans (or Moors) both
as threatening loci of subversion from within and also (almost simultaneously)
as outsiders, and how their presence and relations with England test the identity
of England and the English. But we will also determine how the texts establish
a gradation of the monstrous (concupiscence, animality, blackness); in other
words, how they approach differently - according to Coke's systematization -
the assumed wickedness of Spaniards and Moors in terms of racial, religious,
and political otherness, and how this is used to establish the boundaries of
the civilized world.
RODERICK
J. LYALL (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
"(Re)Inventing Scotland for a European Audience: The Historical Albums of
John Johnston, 1602-3"
In 1602 and 1603 several works relating to Scottish history were published in
Amsterdam and Leiden, evidently on the initiative of the St Andrews theologian
John Johnston. They were the Inscriptiones Historicć Regum Scotorum,
Heroes ex omni Historia Scotica Lectissimi, the Vera descriptio avgvstissimć
familić Stevvartorum, and an English version of the last. Taken together,
these works represent a concentrated attempt to project an image of Scottish
history for a largely Latin-reading European public, and the distribution of
the Inscriptiones in particular indicates that this was to a significant
degree successful. The involvement of the Edinburgh bookseller Andrew Hart and
the Amsterdam printer Cornelis Claesz in the enterprise casts valuable light
upon the links between scholarly networks and the world of commercial printing,
while the series of royal portraits used to illustrate the Inscriptiones
and the Vera descriptio raises important questions about how these images
were transmitted. The paper will confront these issues as well as some of the
more technical aspects of the books in question, and will briefly discuss the
possible relation between Johnston and Hart's enterprise and the publication
in 1603 of the series of Dutch translations of James's own writings.
NATHAN
MARTIN (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
"Ecclesiastical Decolonization, Henrician Cartography, and the Changing Metropolitan
Attitudes in Tudor England"
This paper applies some aspects of postcolonial theory and methodology to the
breakup of Roman spiritual hegemony in England. It attempts to look at the changes
in England's security policy that resulted from this breakup. One important
innovation during Henry VIII's reign was the application of new cartographic
techniques. This had an important effect upon spatial cognition generally in
early Tudor England. One manifestation of this shift was the way in which the
English thought of "the city." Without having the Roman metropolitan model to
look towards after the Reformation, they became more introspective in their
conception of cities. This can be seen in literature of the period. One important
and illustrative work is "The Lamentacyon of a Christen Agaynst the Cytye of
London," which was published by Henry Brinklow in 1545. Moreover, this paper
takes aspects of religion, cartography, behavioral geography, literature, and
decolonization, and fuses them together to get an accurate picture of Tudor
attitudes about "the city."
VERONIKA
OBERPARLEITER (Universität Salzburg)
"Nicolaus Vernulaeus's Representation of the House of Habsburg"
When the Holy Roman Empire was de facto branched into a Spanish and a German
part and the Thirty-Years' War had convulsed Central Europe for several years
and parts of the Empire were fighting for confessional freedom and/or national
independence, the Luxemburger Nicolaus Vernulaeus (Vernulz, 1583-1649), a university
professor from Leuven, wrote several books on the Habsburg Emperors. In these
writings the large empire is shown as united, peaceful and Catholic. A teacher
of Rhetorica and Eloquentia at university colleges in the Southern
Netherlands and successor to Erycius Puteanus as Professor of History and Politics
at the Collegium Trilingue in Leuven, Vernulaeus is known for his History of
the University of Leuven and for his tragedies, in which contemporaries are
put on stage. However, most of Vernulaeus's extensive works are rhetorical,
political and historical writings, among these the Apologia pro Augustissima
Gente Austriaca (1635), three books De Virtutibus Gentis Austriacae
(1640) and the posthumously edited Historia Austriaca Gentis Augustissimae
(1651). In these writings the Imperial and Royal Historiographer Vernulaeus
strives to obtain a justifying picture of the Habsburg Empire. He particularly
points out that he does not wish to flatter and therefore has focused on bygone
emperors, dukes and historical events rather than commenting on contemporary
affairs. Arguments running through these writings and speaking for the Habsburg
emperors are repetitive and topical, such as the mention of their mercy and
their strong Catholic faith. According to Vernulaeus those rulers over a world-wide
empire had never been lusting for power, but had simply happened to gain power
through heritage and marriage.
In my paper I would first like to examine Vernulaeus's representation of the
Habsburg Empire and to consider the structure and sources of his texts. Furthermore
I shall examine Vernulaeus's motivation and aims. According to him it was necessary
to repulse the envious and to calm down those who were afraid of the Habsburg
rulers having too much power. This can be better understood by considering Vernulaeus's
place of activity, situated in the deeply Catholic Southern Netherlands, which
at the time were subordinated to Spain and whose scholarship was dominated by
Latin. Finally I shall trace the Nachleben of Vernulaeus's Habsburg writings.
They reappear in Vienna at the end of the seventeenth century in a collection,
based on a pseudonymous Netherlandish copy of Vernulaeus's books, as a gift
for graduate students. Thus the books, which were written at a Brabant university,
when the Holy Empire was fighting for its unity, reappear at a university in
that part of the Empire, which after long-lasting ravages of war was the most
homogeneous and culturally thriving one.
GLENN
ODOM and BRYAN REYNOLDS (University
of California, Irvine)
"Becomings Roman/Comings-to-be Villain: Translucency and the Coding of Ethnicity,
Religion, and Nationality in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus"
There has been a recent profusion on texts dealing with the character of Aaron
in Titus Andronicus. Those texts which rely on historical accounts of
"blackness" in the period seldom neither relate this history to a close reading
of Titus itself nor develop the concept of race in any meaningful theoretical
way. Our paper views the historical accounts of race, the literary history of
Titus, and the text of Titus itself through the lens of "transversal
theory." Specifically, we examine the multiple codes Aaron enacts (Moor, black,
villain, foreigner, male) in terms of the "principle of translucency." This
principle allows us to analys`e the effects of the competing Elizabethan ideologies
on the portrayal of Aaron and of Moors in general. By situating Titus in terms
of its literary and social history, we are also able to comment on the related
concepts of race and nationality in the early modern period.
The codes that Aaron enacts are not stable within Titus. In fact, all
of the major characters cross into and out of these categories. This crossing
occurs according to what we call "pressurized belongings." Pressurized belongings
refers to the linked principles of assimilation and expulsion. When someone
moves into a new field of identity, whether racial or national, or so on, they
must assimilate some of the qualities associated with this identity. However,
their assimilation requires a simultaneous, duel expulsion. They must abandon
some prior codes and social associations, and must also attempt to expel others
and other codes from the new system into which they are assimilating. In the
case of Tamora, she can become Queen of Rome only by becoming Roman. In "becoming"
Roman she adopts, externally, the qualities of Roman virtue. She also "comes-to-be"
labeled as white. Her rise to power displaces Titus from his identity as a Roman.
Some of the qualities that Tamora comes-to-be associated with, however, are
the qualities of Titus himself. Likewise, when Titus dismisses Aaron as non-Roman
and barbarous, Titus himself becomes marked by barbarism as he slaughters his
sons. One cannot expel a person from an identity without coming-to-be marked
by that expulsion.
The above description of Tamora relies on a distinction between becomings-other
and comings-to-be. Becoming is an active process by which we shape our identity.
Comings-to-be is a passive effect of the assimilation and expulsion of identities.
The two processes are linked, just as assimilation and expulsion are linked.
In this paper, we show how these processes operated in constructions of identity
- of ethnicity, nationality, and religion - with regard to Moors in early modern
England, and, by extension, early modern Europe.
MOISÉS
ORFALI (Bar Ilan University)
"The Spanish Apologia as Against the Black Legend"
"The Black Legend" is the name customarily used for all the accusations that
present Spain as a kingdom of religious fanaticism, obscurity and colonialism.
This Legend originated at the end of the 16th century. It was then aimed against
three targets: Philip II, who was accused of the gravest of perversions (bigamy,
incest and murder); the Inquisition and the religious fanaticism to which Spain's
cultural and scientific backwardness in the 18th century was attributed; and
Spain's conquests in the New World, where the Spanish were accused of exterminating
the Indians for reasons of greed and gold lust. If the first target, Philip
II, is almost unmentioned today, the other two are very much discussed in some
groups and countries. In the 19th century, when the dominant influences were
French and English, the Historia critica de la Inquisición espańola by
the priest Jerónimo Llorente was published in Paris in 1818 and the Examen
filosófico sobre las principales causas de la decadencia de Espańa by Adolfo
Castro appeared in 1852, in Cádiz. The exaggerations in the Black Legend, principally
from 1898 on, gave rise to a nationalist-type reaction which continued into
the 20th century.
My lecture is designed to examine Spain's reaction to this Legend in an earlier
era, when it appeared, namely, from the period when this Legend originated,
which is the period upon which the congress is focusing, and to present its
arguments which, on the face of it, defined the Spanish identity to the other
European nations. I shall particularly address the arguments through which an
attempt was made to provide an answer to the abovementioned accusations: that
of Spain's heavenly designation and mission to maintain the Catholic hegemony
in Europe, underlining the importance of the existence of the Inquisition as
an institution that maintained the nation's spiritual integrity and the grounds
for justifying the conquest of the Americas and the creation of the Spanish
Empire, with its many legal and legislative principles. The need for this debate
and the rhetorical and literary measures used by the Spanish originate in the
fact that throughout the sixteenth century there were many in Spain and Europe
who wrestled with the question of the legitimacy of the conquest of America.
Scholars, humanists and Renaissance thinkers in Spain agonised particularly
over the extremely complex legal questions involved in the conquest of the New
World: does a non-Christian have the right to own land, and on what conditions
is it justified to expel him from his holding? Does the pope really have the
right to grant America, or anywhere else in the world, to Spain or any other
Christian country? And what authority does Jesus' representative on earth have
over non-Christians throughout the world, especially when they do not live their
lives in accordance with the natural laws applying to all human beings as rational
creatures, but break these laws with idolatry and other barbaric customs, such
as cannibalism, human sacrifice and incest?
JAROSLAV
PÁNEK (Czech Academy of Sciences - Institute of History)
"A small nation between Germans, Poles and Ottomans: Early modern national
identity of Czechs and their attitude towards Europe in the 16th and beginning
17th century"
This paper will consider the collapse of the Medieval Bohemian (Czech) Crown
as a regional power and the search for a new identity of Czechs in the post-Hussite
period; the relation between Czechs and Germans and the problem of the multinationality
of the Habsburg monarchy; the idea of the Czech-Polish brotherhood and a spontaneous
"Slavism" in East-Central Europe; the Ottoman threat and the problem of responsibility
for the Christian Europe; and the confessional diversification and struggle
for a supranational identity on the levels of a land, confederation and (Protestant)
confession.
PÄRTEL
PIIRIMÄE (St John's College, University of
Cambridge)
"'Contrary to the Practice of all Christian and Civilized Nations ...': The
construction of Europe as a moral community through the legitimations of war"
This paper explores the significance of the legitimations of war for defining
'Christian' or 'European' community of states. My argument is premised on the
view that an essential criterion of belonging to a community is the expressed
willingness to play by its rules. 'Europe' in the early modern period was seen
as a moral community of 'Christian' (or 'civilized') nations which abided by
the principles of 'ius gentium' (or 'ius publicum Europaeum'
as it was called later). The core of this code was the limitation and regulation
of warfare between Christian nations. Although, arguably, these moral and legal
principles were often overruled by the considerations of interest, there was
one thing common to all wars: the states always took pains to prove publicly
that they were waging a 'just war'. An act of the legitimation, no matter what
its truth value is, expresses the will of a state to be accepted as a member
of the moral community to which the legitimation is addressed.
After a short survey of the standard practices of legitimation in the seventeenth-century
Europe, the paper focuses on two cases of European 'outsiders'. One is the Ottoman
empire which was the 'significant other' against which the 'Europeans' defined
themselves as such. The Ottomans did not legitimate their attacks against Christians
because according to the Islamic concept of the world there was a permanent
condition of war between 'dar al-Islam' and 'dar al-Harb' which rendered legitimations
obsolete. This fact was used by European rulers for their own propagandistic
purposes. With an aim of uniting Europe against the Ottoman threat, they organized
the publication of apocryphal 'Turkish declarations' which demonstrated the
Ottomans' contempt for the moral and legal principles of Christendom. Another
case is Muscovy which, though orthodox Christian, was in the seventeenth century
never fully acknowledged as a part of the moral community of Christendom.
The Muscovites did present legal reasons for their wars against their Christian
neigbours at least since the sixteenth century but they did not publish any
vindicatory documents for wider audiences. Their lack of concern about their
image in Europe left them at the mercy of the propaganda of their enemies such
as Livonia and Poland who were instrumental in constructing the image of Muscovites
as despotic and barbarous, i.e. more like Turks than Christians. This all changed
in the early eighteenth century when Peter I wanted to improve the status of
Russia among the European states. He took a novel decision to launch a campaign
of public legitimation of Muscovy's attack on Sweden in 1700, drawing upon the
principles of ius gentium. In the paper I will pay particular attention
to Peter Shafirov's 'A discourse concerning the just causes of war between Sweden
and Russia' which is not only one of the first examples of Russian pamphleteering
but it may well be the first Russian literary work to be published in the English
language. The fact that the entrance of a former outsider into the European
public sphere occurred through a legitimation of war highlights the importance
of these documents as signs of belonging to a self-defined cultural space.
FLORINDA
RUIZ (Roanoke College)
"Golding's Translation of Ovid: A Protreptic Tool to Shape Elizabethan Cultural
Identity"
In this paper I will illustrate how Arthur Golding employs his translation of
the Metamorphoses, which so closely follows Ovid's text without apparent moralizing,
as a tool for didactic pronouncements and protreptic injunctions. I will refer
to theories of literary analysis such as E. Pound, N. Frye and J. Derrida to
examine how Golding develops a series of strategies of constrain and independence
from the culture represented in the Ovidian text and solves the tension between
reproduction and moralization.
I will argue that his choice of language is 'energized' by the three fundamental
rhetorical elements proposed by Pound, namely melopoeia, phanopoeia
and logopoeia, as part of moral persuasion. Golding engages in a multilevel
interpretative rewriting and interacts with readers' expectations and their
reading practices creating an intertextual framework for his cultural reinvention
process. Thus, in his work a kaleidoscope of hearing, seeing, visualizing, remembering
and understanding is opened up for examination with the intention to affect
the attitudes and behaviors of his contemporaries. In this paper I investigate
his procedure and probe its boundaries.
STEPHAN
SCHMUCK (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
"'Wars more happily
managed abroad than at home' - English visions of a European victory: the
'Battle of Lepanto'"
When in 1571 a fleet of ships under the banner of the Holy League, uniting Spain,
Venice and Rome, encountered the Turkish Armada at Lepanto, they achieved a
victory which proved a seemingly invincible enemy vulnerable. For Christians
all over Europe the battle was a turning point in their struggle against a common
enemy from the East. The defeat may have been of little strategic value, but
it nonetheless boosted European morale. A surge of publications recounting the
sea-battle followed and celebrated as its principal hero the leader of the Catholic
fleet, the Spanish Don John of Austria. England also welcomed the defeat of
the Turkish forces. However, over the years English writers produced their own
accounts of the events from which they had been absent. Either paying lip-service
to Spanish accomplishments in the battle, or simply denouncing its leader, Don
John, "onely as a particular man", English historians and poets envisaged the
events of Lepanto in their own terms. Richard Knolles's Historie of the Turkes
and James I's The Maiesties Lepanto, both published in 1603, are two
accounts deeply informed by the Anglo-Spanish conflict during Elizabeth's reign.
The representations of the Spanish in these narratives reflect these issues.
Since it was impossible to simply write out the Spanish from those events, new
strategies were required to, at least, diminish their role and significance.
To accomplish this, Knolles employs a rhetoric which focuses on a pan-Christian
interest to defeat the Turk: the league's success is not the result of a particular
Christian group, but their ability to face the "Turk" united. Likewise, James
explores the battle from the overarching theme of providence: not the Spanish
Don John is the victor, but God alone. Furthermore, England's own non-hostile
dealings with the Ottoman Empire further complicate such a rhetoric and construction
of the Spanish in these accounts.
ASTRID
STILMA (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
"Justifying War: Dutch translations of Scottish books around 1600"
In the late sixteenth century, Scotland was perceived by many Dutchmen as a
country with a religious and political identity quite close to their own. First
of all, the Scottish Kirk and the Dutch Reformed Church both professed a very
similar form of orthodox Calvinism. Furthermore, the Scots had deposed a Catholic
monarch within living memory, while the Dutch were still in the middle of their
own uprising against the Catholic king of Spain. Under the circumstances it
is hardly suprising that the Dutch tended to follow Scottish affairs - and publications
- with great interest. A substantial number of Scottish books were translated
into Dutch around 1600. In many cases, these translations were used to make
specific points about the state of the Netherlands, sometimes with little regard
to the original context (or even contents) of the books. Translators belonging
to the Dutch pro-war faction in particular went to considerable lengths to represent
Scotland as an exemplary Protestant nation and to cast the Scots - and especially
their king - as the heroes of Protestant Europe; the implicit argument being
that they should therefore commit more firmly to the war against the Spanish.
In some cases, this casting was indeed obvious, but when it was not, potential
problems were smoothed over through added introductions in prose or verse which
explained to the Dutch readers how these books should be interpreted. In this
paper I propose to discuss two such cases of appropriation: George Buchanan's
De Iure Regni Apud Scotos, translated in 1599, and the writings of King
James VI, translated in 1603. Although these two authors were diametrically
opposed in their political opinions, especially on the nature of kingship and
rebellion, they were both used by their Dutch translators in attempts to rally
support against the growing possibility of peace negotiations with Spain.
ZDENIK
VYBÍRAL (Historical Institute of South-Bohemian University & Hussite Museum
Tábor, Czech Republic)
"Politically religious identities in the power discourse of the Bohemian
estate society"
The history of the Bohemian state from the Hussite revolution until the Thirty
Years´ War (approximately from 1420-1620) represent an example of development
of an estate system (mixed monarchy) based on co-operation of a ruler (a royal
dynasty) and representatives of the political nation (individual estates). There
was comparable development in Poland, Hungary, Austrian Hereditary Lands and
also in France or England, on the other hand in the Roman-German Empire the
situation was complicated due to complicated social and territorial development.
By comparing the Bohemian model with the above-mentioned models we can follow
the gradual establishment of informal power groups inside a political nation.
Such groups when trying to find their own identity chose various reform teachings
such as the Hussitism (utrakvism), Lutheranism, Calvinism or the Catholic reform
in the sense of the Council of Trident. The confession orientation of such groups
inevitably influenced their political aims and interests. Various attempts to
reach these aims resulted in conflicts between individual groups themselves
or between the royal court and the protestant part of the estates.
Nevertheless, conflicts formed only a part of power discourse of the ruler with
the political nation since elements of co-operation (potentially compromise)
played a certain role there as well. Such a discourse was in fact an expression
of the political culture of an estate monarchy. When we follow how it proceeded,
we can study the means of self-identification and programmes of individual religiously-political
groups as they were represented in symbolic and written communication, political
rituals and in literary and professional texts which date from that time.
ELAINE
WALKER (Shakespeare Institute)
"'My own private riding-house at Antwerp': the Duke of Newcastle's new and
extraordinary method of colonization"
In the second of his two horsemanship manuals, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle
(1593-1676) recalls his years in Antwerp, holding court to the Continental nobility
through the display of his horses. As a defining feature of the gentleman, the
art of the riding-house with its particular language both transcended cultural
boundaries and set up tensions around the provenance of the ideas and mastery
of the mannage. This paper explores the relationship between Newcastle's
manuals of 1658 and 1667 and those of the other great masters whose work shaped
the development of the art, looking closely at the way in which he represents
his predecessors in his texts. It considers the way in which Newcastle's manuals
set out to establish his place in the lineage of European horsemasters, both
during his years in exile and on his return to England and the extent to which
they are an attempt to recover loss of personal identity by relocation of the
self in a European context.
SAM
WOOD (University of Leeds)
"Fighting Turks as Turks: proud Europe and conspicuous virtue"
This paper examines the means by which Christian rulers presented themselves
to the Ottoman empire in the early part of the sixteenth century and the problems
perceived in their presentation by the commentators of the day, especially Erasmus.
Diplomatic documents sent from the court of Charles V in Vienna to Henry VIII
and the petitioning by the Venetian ambassador of Cardinal Wolsey during negotiation
of the Treaty of London in 1518 reveal an ambivalence in the Christian courts
to the Ottoman empire who is figured as a common enemy but is simultaneously
an identity assumed by those rulers' emissaries and an indispensable trading
partner. These contradictory positions are taken up by Erasmus, especially in
his adage-essay Dulce bellum inexpertis and discussion of De bello
turcis, to assert that the Christians are no more than "Turks fighting Turks"
and that the war against the Turks can be won by showing not only the name but
also the "unmistakable marks of the Christian." This paper builds on the recent
work of Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton to present a tension not between an emerging
sense of the European and an Ottoman empire but between a Christendom uncertain
of its images and signs and reluctant to go to war and that emerging European
identity.
Linda
Jones
9 September 2004