From the apocalyptic whip of God to a misunderstood religion deserving of serious analysis, the perception of Islam in Anabaptist and Mennonite circles reflected the changing political situation and intellectual landscape of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the image of the Turk in the early Anabaptist tradition, this article turns to an in-depth analysis of Dutch...
Shooting for England: Configuring the Book and the Bow in Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus
Read more
This essay argues that the subject matter and context of Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus are as important as its linguistic and stylistic qualities. Advocacy of archery formed the core of Ascham’s rhetorical strategy when he presented Toxophilus to Henry VIII in 1545; the treatise proposes a number of ways in which the arts of the bow relate to those of the book. This essay examines the relationship...
Demographic Dimensions of the Mid-Tudor Crisis
Read more
That the mid-Tudor Crisis was also a demographic crisis seems to have escaped general notice, partly because of E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s belief that England’s population fell by no more than 5.5 to 6.0 percent in the later 1550s, partly because non-economic historians have viewed it mainly in political and religious terms. Yet a fall in population of 16 to 20 percent has been argued...
Venerating the Virgin Martyrs: The Cult of the Virgines Capitales in Art, Literature, and ...
Read more
This study presents the first in-depth analysis of the cult of the Virgines Capitales in late medieval Germany. Devotion to the four capital virgins—Saints Barbara, Catherine, Margaret, and Dorothy—thrived in the Germanic territories during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The four virgin martyrs’ widespread popularity is evidenced by a mass in their honor in the Cologne Missal...