In devotional artworks created in Lutheran Germany around 1670, a new aesthetic designed to provoke emotional interaction with the image emerged that replaced the “emotionally distanced cold gaze” posited by scholars for Reformation art. The practice of including portraits of the intended users in the guise of participants or witnesses in the scenes functioned to arouse intense empathy in the...
Contingencies of Literary Censorship
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This essay analyzes a debate over the exegesis of two letters involving an allusion to Amadís de Gaula, amid the shift in Anglo-Spanish relations occurring in the winter of 1568–69. It argues that the Spanish ambassador Guerau de Spes’s Amadís allusion was more subtle and politically significant than has been recognized, and that the English censure of his text relied on the material ...
Mixing Canon and Common Law
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In medieval England, religious crimes were prosecuted in the ecclesiastical courts by way of inquisitorial procedure, whereas secular crimes were dealt with in the royal courts with common-law methods. This separation between the two jurisdictions was fairly well maintained until the king was recognized in 1534 as the Supreme Head of the English Church. From this time forward, there were...
"The Sisters of Rachel"
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The author investigates textual sources from early modern Denmark-Norway concerning women dying in childbed. Funeral works in particular, but also church ordinances and instructions to midwives and expecting women, exhibit a set of models for explaining this type of death. Framed by these models, the dead female body expressed central Protestant perceptions of mankind and salvation. The...
Concord and Toleration
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Francesco Pucci was a Florentine heretic who was executed by the Catholic Church in 1597. Since the 1930s, he has been considered by Italian historians to be an important contributor to the development of theories of religious toleration. A close analysis of two texts written by Pucci reveals that his thought was more complex than previously supposed. In a letter to Niccolò Balbani, a...
Experiential Learning
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The Sixteenth Century Journal has a long tradition of encouraging and supporting exploration of the pedagogical interests of its audience, and innovations and trends in teaching theory generally. On 22 October 2015 SCJ sponsored a roundtable panel at the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference annual meeting for the second year running, and this time it featured a discussion of the...