In his reflections on being the only Jewish-born Jesuit, Giovanni Battista Eliano (1530–89) deliberated over the nature of religious conversion. Early in his career, Eliano did not hide the difficulties and personal dilemmas that he and other converts faced. However, in the wake of increased institutional skepticism concerning conversion and the dedication of Jewish-lineage Jesuits, Eliano...
Lying Sick to Die
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This paper explores the interaction between informal networks of care and ecclesiastical authorities in seventeenth-century Scotland. Previously, studies have identified poor relief and local care as a point of contention where authorities aggressively applied socioreligious reformation and created considerable local tension. This essay argues that the kirk of Scotland could not implement a ...
Mounted Coconuts, Bezoars, Slaves, and Chinese Porcelain
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This study focuses on a peripheral port city, Porto, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and examines its connections to the territories of the Portuguese expansion through the consumption of exotic commodities. It covers a period where their diffusion has been mostly observed within court circles and when most European countries did not have contact with such areas. The main...
Saints in Parts
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This paper suggests complexity of the perception of the body in Post-Tridentine Catholic sphere through the comparative study of reliquaries from St. Tryphon’s cathedral in Kotor. The focus will be placed on the examples created between fifteenth and seventeenth century. The change that occurred in the particular elements of the silver body-part reliquaries suggests that the image of the...
Irreverent Reading
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“Erasmus laid the egg, Luther hatched it.” Already in the early Reformation this popular quip suggested a direct, causal link between humanism and the Protestant Reformation. Yet Luther’s precise debt to Erasmus has remained an elusive problem. This article reconsiders the issue by investigating how Luther read Erasmus’s scholarship, focusing on two remarkable, little-studied examples: Erasmus...