Members of the ruling family of the twin principalities of Schwarzburg in seventeenth-century Germany took a variety of actions to professionalize midwifery and to improve the situation for birthing women and their infants. At least four different countesses of Schwarzburg were involved in helping birthing women by participating in the selection of midwives, manufacturing and distributing...
Polemic & Gallows Rhetoric in Nashe’s “Unfortunate Traveller”
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This article explores links between the anti-Marprelate polemics and Thomas Nashe’s satire of Puritans and Catholics in The Unfortunate Traveller. In public confrontations with the late Elizabethan church, activist minority religions were co-opting powerful rhetorics of holiness. Analysis is made of episodes in The Unfortunate Traveller where Nashe deconstructs Puritan and Catholic...
Pastoral Vocation in the Early Modern Period
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Basing itself on an early-seventeenth-century case of conflict between a pastor and his Calvinist consistory in the Walloon church of Amsterdam, this article examines the issue of pastoral vocation in Calvinist and Reformed churches from the first decades of the Reformation onwards. While churches in the early years tried a variety of expedients in order to locate pastors for the expanding...
Development of the Lutheran Funeral Biography
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Some early Lutheran funerals for rulers and reformers included Latin funeral orations as part of the religious funeral ceremonies. This provided the impetus for the second generation of Lutheran pastors to include biographical information, in the rhetorical pattern of the oration, as part of their funeral sermons. The funeral sermons of the Magdeburg cathedral pastor Siegfried Saccus (1527–96...
Lipsius, Humanist Education, & the Visualization of Ancient Rome
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Humanist scholar and pedagogue Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) cherished the overly ambitious project to compose a true Fax historica, a comprehensive synthesis of Roman, Greek, Jewish, Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, and Spanish history, together with their institutions and customs. In the Italian antiquarian tradition, Lipsius collected appropriate illustrations for his thematic commentaries on...
Wolsey, More, & the Unity of Christendom
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An irony of Thomas Wolsey’s fall and, soon thereafter, of Thomas More’s resignation of the chancellorship is that, in using the office of chancellor to advance and defend the interests of Catholic orthodoxy, first Wolsey and then More was defeated by the contradictory demands of a king who aspired to be a faithful son of the church yet imperial in his own realm. Wolsey was ruined in the futile...
Gender & the Rhetoric of Martyrdom in Crespin’s “Histoire”
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In sixteenth-century France many Protestant women took an active role in the defense of their religious convictions. The French Protestant martyrologist Jean Crespin recounted the stories of numerous women who became martyrs for this cause. A problem arose, however, as female martyrs abandoned home and family, thus challenging the gendered social order. As the martyrologies had a didactic...