This article examines how, in both early modern Spain and England, antitheatrical polemicists responded to the increased popularity and visibility of playhouses by attacking them as pernicious, diabolical, and effeminizing.Antitheatrical tracts and sermons drew upon the authority of ancients and propagated understandings of the body politic as an organism that could be diagnosed with a...
“Beautiful Serpents” and “Cathedras of Pestilence”: Antitheatrical Traditions, Gendered Decline, ...
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Et aures habentes non auditis: Getting the Message about Images in Sixteenth-Century Amiens
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The reception of the Protestant message has always presented particular historical problems.This article addresses the question of how the message about images was received and acted upon by individuals in their homes.By examining inventories after death of known Protestants in sixteenth-century Amiens, we can conclude that they both heard the message and acted upon it, even under very...
A New Perspective on Islam in Henrician England: The Polemics of Christopher St. German
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Christopher St.German has come to be recognized as one of the more creative thinkers associated with the English Reformation.This essay highlights the manner in which St.German’s creativity is reflected in his polemical use of Islam in controversy with Thomas More.Contemporary Catholic and Protestant polemicists, including More, typically used Islam to emphasize the differences between them,...
The Deployment of the Classics in Early Modern Spanish Military Manuals
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Early modern military manuals were one of the main intellectual media through which theorists and soldiers envisioned and articulated the interrelations of war, society, and culture.Although art of war literature has often been approached from the perspective of military history, the present study investigates the relationship of martial literature with Renaissance culture.Focusing on four...
From Slurs to Silence? Sodomy and Mendicants in the Writings of Catholic Laymen in Early Modern ...
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This article analyzes the reactions of Catholic laymen to a 1578 sodomy trial held in Ghent.The recently established Calvinist city council had accused a number of mendicants of the crime to slander their religious opponents.The lack of official response from the clergy has led to the assumption that the laity also remained silent in the face of the slurs.Remarkably, a considerable number of...