Focusing on the unsuccessful attempt of Franchyna Woedwaerdt, a widow living in the Dutch port of Rotterdam ca. 1650, to retain control of a printing business she and her husband had run, this article reconstructs how fairly ordinary people employed Holland’s notariate to present stories about themselves and others. It argues that people like Woedwaerdt and those in her network often chose to...
Women as Guardians in Early Modern Spain
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Over 80 percent of Spanish noblemen in the period between 1350 and 1750 chose their wives to be the guardians of their children and property, so women headed many of the most powerful noble families in Spain at regular intervals. To Spanish noblemen, the preservation of family, power, and lineage was more important than the prescriptive gender roles of their time, and they expected and trained...
Producing the First & Second Editions of “Acts and Monuments”
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Enacting fourth attitude history, as articulated by Allan Megill, this essay compiles commonplaces and misreadings about the productions of Acts and Monuments (1563 and 1570) to encourage renewed vision of the directorships of Cecil, Parker, Grindal, and others dedicated to the ideological conversion of the English polity and people. Approaching Acts and Monuments as a product of communal and...
A Marriage Commemorated in the Stairway of Fools
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In 1575 Friedrich Sustris decorated Trausnitz Castle in Landshut with paintings proclaiming the political and religious aspirations of Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria. The duke’s staunch support of the Counter-Reformation and politically advantageous marital alliance with Lorraine are visually reinforced in the castle’s ceremonial rooms. In contrast, a narrow stairwell in the private ducal quarters...
Italian Renaissance Theatrical Play & Social Practice
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This article examines male cross-dressing in Italian Renaissance comedies with a particular emphasis on Il Ragazzo by the Venetian writer Lodovico Dolce. Without challenging the traditional readings of cross-dressing plots that view their licentiousness and their reversals of gender and sexual roles as comic conventions typical of this genre and of the festive time of carnival, it is suggested...
Negotiating Material Care of Children in Geneva
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Religious and civic authorities in Reformation Geneva considered the raising and educating of children within the Reformed community to be vital to the survival of their newly independent church and city. Jean Calvin, his colleagues, and the city magistrates viewed the care and nurture of the city’s children as a God-given responsibility of both fathers and mothers. Some parents, in turn,...