On the night of 6 January 1537 Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici killed his cousin, the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici. In an Apologia, written around three years after the assassination, Lorenzo claimed that he had killed Alessandro in order to restore Florence to republican liberty. Historians have interpreted this text as a self-justificatory and...
Writing the Wrongs of the Past: Vengeance, Humanism, and the Assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici
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Doing Without Precedent: Applied Typology and the Execution of Charles I in Milton’s Tenure ...
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Recent analysis of John Milton’s first tract justifying King Charles I’s trial and execution in 1649 has highlighted its rational argumentation and secular foundation. This essay examines Milton’s use of biblical, classical, and national historical types of the regicide to exhort his readers to view the king as a tyrant, his death as a biblically and historically warranted punishment, and the...
Puritans, Politics, and Lunacy: The Copinger-Hacket Conspiracy as the Apotheosis of Elizabethan ...
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On 19 July 1591, three puritans created a street disturbance in London. They were intending to inaugurate the reign of one of them as the new king of Europe and initiate the transformation of the Church of England to presbyterianism. Some presbyterians hastily dismissed their actions as madness, and historians have tended to agree. The episode is famous, but there has never been a re-creation...
The Mindelaltheim Affair: High Justice, Ius Reformandi, and the Rural Reformation in Eastern Swabia
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Recent studies of the ius reformandi examine the right of reformation’s theoretical development while overlooking the process of conflict and negotiation that led to a practical right of reformation prior to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. In October 1544, the imperial city of Augsburg installed an evangelical preacher in Mindelaltheim, a...
Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Movement in Sixteenth-Century ...
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The unpublished necrology kept by the Observant Dominican nuns of San Jacopo in Florence warrants closer study for its unexpected relation to the Savonarolan movement. Begun in 1508, ten years after Savonarola’s execution, this register narrated powerful stories focused on illness and dying, casting suffering nuns who made a “good death” as spiritual exemplars of the Savonarolan movement. This...
Teaching Elizabeth Tudor with Movies: Film, Historical Thinking, and the Classroom
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Although films based on historical events are usually criticized for their deviations from facts, this paper argues that such films can be used fruitfully in the classroom. Using the example of a course on Elizabeth I, the paper shows that films produced at different times and places can be presented and discussed in ways that demonstrate to students that interpretations of historical people...