The Seven Works of Mercy by the Master of Alkmaar presents several conundrums. The archivalia concerning its commission and use no longer exist and the identity of the artist is in dispute. Further, damage done to the panels during the sixteenth century and the subsequent repairs put art historians on shaky ground when trying to interpret the series as a whole. Consequently, it is one...
Tradition and Innovation in Spanish Medicine: Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero and the Vía Particular
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In the last years of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, Spanish medical writers on both sides of the Atlantic engaged in an energetic series of debates on several intertwining issues, including the use of the vernacular for medical texts, the use of anatomical knowledge, the place of surgery within medicine, and the best methods for healing wounds. Beginning with a...
Gender, Obedience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Women’s Letters
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This article examines obedience and authority through the lens of sixteenth-century women’s correspondence as a way of unlocking the gendered nature of deferential behavioral codes and social attitudes in early modern England. Above all, it is interested in looking at women’s status and place within the household, the ways in which familial relationships (and indeed the writing of letters)...
Between the Hall and the Market: William Clowes and Surgical Self-Fashioning in Elizabethan London
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By exploring the ways in which honor and reputation intersected with the self-fashioning of late sixteenth-century surgeons in the work of William Clowes, this study re-situates Elizabethan surgical practitioners within the credit-oriented cultural milieu of London’s guild-dominated urban landscape. As a sea surgeon, prolific author, surgeon to Queen Elizabeth I, and outspoken member of the...
Thomas Preston and English Catholic Loyalism: Elements of an International Affair
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This essay examines the events surrounding the case of Thomas Preston, an English Benedictine who wrote in support of the Oath of Allegiance. Preston’s career has been studied mainly as an “English affair,” that is to say, as an example of the Catholic loyalist tradition as opposed to the Jesuits’ uncompromising political stances toward the English monarchy. This essay presents new evidence to...
John Calvin after Five Hundred Years: Texts and Teachings
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John Calvin was called a heretic, a schismatic interested only in his own power, a prophet, and a religious fanatic who made God out to be the author of sin. He has been credited (or blamed for) the rise of capitalism, democratic government, and the spread of rebellion. One of his recent biographers named him “the greatest Protestant reformer of the sixteenth century, brilliant, visionary, and...
John Calvin after Five Hundred Years: Life and Impact
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