Izaak Walton first published his popular work The Compleat Angler in 1653. Charles I, the king of England, had been executed just four years earlier after almost a decade of civil war, and the king’s opponents had also abolished the Church of England. Long hailed as a primary inspiration for the modern conservation movement, most scholarship on the Angler has either ignored...
“They Say …”
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The account of a visit to India in 1583 by the Elizabethan leather seller, Ralph Fitch, is justly famous for the view it contains of India in the sixteenth century. Yet, the account has not been seen for the traces it has of Indians talking to Fitch in India, in the repeated intrusions of the phrase “They say.” This essay argues that snippets of street level Indian back talk make for a kind of...
Bones of Contention
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The removal of a patient’s limb was the most radical procedure performed by early modern surgeons. It occurred only when a part of the body was considered lost to the “cold fire” (der kalte Brand)—a final, irreversible putrefaction. The harrowing experience held life-altering consequences for patients and their families. By drawing on surgical treatises, correspondences, field manuals...
Reformation and Resurrection of the Dead
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The resurrection of the dead has been among the articles that defined Christian belief since the earliest days of the church. However, scholars have not considered its place in sixteenth-century debates about what it meant to be a Christian. Notably, the doctrine of bodily resurrection was a subject on which Christians in the Reformation remained remarkably united. Yet despite their basic...
The Cortés Map of Tenochtitlan
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This essay considers four woodcut images included in the Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii in order to position the Nuremberg codex as an announcement to Europe of the Spanish monarchy’s evangelical ideology regarding the New World. The images enabled the codex to herald the transformation of New Spain from idolatry to Christianity under the control and direction of the Spanish Habsburg...