Naturalists did not use the term “symbiosis” until the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Renaissance scholars from many disciplines were fascinated by examples of mutual cooperation between different organisms. This paper traces some of the ways that sixteenth-century French humanists thought about the mutualisms between the pilot fish and the whale, and the plover bird and the crocodile. In...
Salvation and Community in Seventeenth- Century Dutch Mennonite Portraiture: Egbert van ...
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Egbert van Heemskerck the Younger’s Portrait of The Surgeon Jacob Fransz. Hercules and His Family, 1669, places the titular family’s group portrait in the setting of a barber-surgeon’s shop as a scene depicting the medical proce- dure of bloodletting. The Hercules portrait offers a striking example of genre- portraiture, a type of hybrid picture that sets an informal portrait in a...
Religion, Household-State Authority, and the Defense of “Collapsed Ladies” in Early Jacobean England
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This article argues that specific features among the early Jacobean Catholic community enabled a reevaluation of the obedience owed by wives to their hus- bands and of the household-state analogy. At the forefront of this development was a new category of Catholic “collapsed ladies” who actively rejected state Protestantism. Such women were potentially disruptive in a period in which the...
The Emergence of the State in Elizabethan Ireland and England, ca. 1575–99
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This article examines the emergence of the concept of the state in Elizabethan Ireland and England. It argues that in Ireland early shape was given to both principal assumptions associated with a modern abstract notion of the state, in that government in Ireland came to conceive of its authority as distinct from both the person of the prince and the wider Irish polity. This came about because...