In 1619, Marie de Medicis sought to regain her seat on the royal council by leading an armed revolt against her son King Louis XIII of France. She sought noble support through a pamphlet campaign attacking the king’s advisers, and the king responded with his own series of pamphlets. The king’s pamphlets were more widely read and more influential than his mother’s because they responded ...
Political Pamphlets in Early Seventeenth-Century France: The Propaganda War between Louis XIII ...
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From Sin to Insanity? Suicide Trials in the Spanish Netherlands, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
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This article focuses on the relationship between suicide as an act inspired by the devil and suicide as an act of insanity in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands. It has become widely accepted that from the end of the seventeenth century on suicide became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, i.e., the devil disappeared from explanations for suicide and was...
Constitutional Thought and Practice in Early Sixteenth-Century France: Revisiting the Legacy of ...
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This article revisits the contribution of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies by examining the site and tenor of political and constitutional thought in early sixteenth-century France. With the aid of recent French scholarship, it revises previous accounts by considering alternative sites of political thought and the doctrinal sources of constitutional practice. The commentaries...
Empire and Medieval Simulacrum: A Political Project of Mercurino di Gattinara, Grand Chancellor ...
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As the grand chancellor under Emperor Charles V, Mercurino di Gattinara (1465-1530) orchestrated the administration and the aims of the Spanish Empire. Claiming messianic status for Charles V, and supernatural powers for himself, Gattinara appropriated several fourteenth century sources such as Dante and Bartolus to establish political hegemony. More disturbingly, he embraced the irrational in...
“The field of finance”: War and Taxation in Holland, Flanders, and Brabant, 1572–85
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The Dutch province of Holland has solicited much research in the context of the link between war and political development, an important theme in early modern historiography. During the Dutch Revolt in the late sixteenth century it became the core and financial bedrock of a new, powerful, and very prosperous polity: the Dutch Republic. Why Flanders and Brabant, larger and traditionally ...