This article compares two medieval cults at the royal free chapel of Wimborne minster, Dorset: the cult of St. Cuthburga, the minster’s patronal saint, and the cult of Henry VI, which was probably introduced there by Lady Margaret Beaufort. Using the parish’s exceptional churchwardens’ accounts, the fortunes and ultimately the fate of the two cults are compared in detail. Although the cult of...
“We do not sell them this tolerance”: Grand Duke Ferdinando I’s Protection of Jews in Tuscany ...
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Ferdinando I de’ Medici promoted extraordinary religious tolerance in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during his reign. His Livornine laws of 1591 and 1593 granted Jews in Pisa and Livorno broad freedoms, rare in sixteenth-century Europe. Newly uncovered archival documents reveal how Ferdinando consistently defied the papacy in defense of his Jewish subjects. This article examines Ferdinando’s...
Paolo Paruta’s Oratione Funebre and the Just War in Venetian Commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto
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Analysis of early modern European political thinking about the bellum iustum benefits from casting a wide net, in terms both of genres of writing and intended audience. The funeral oration given by the Venetian patrician Paolo Paruta in honor of the Venetian dead at Lepanto offers one example of thinking about the just war, in terms less systematic, and possibly more representative, than the...
“A Pitiful Thing”? The Afterlife of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries in Early Modern ...
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Modern scholarship on the dissolution of the monasteries (1536–40) has paid little attention to how it was remembered by those who witnessed it or to the evolution of this memory in subsequent generations. This article explores the afterlife of the dissolution in early modern chronicles. It focuses on three interrelated texts: Charles Wriothesley’s manuscript chronicle, John Stow’s Annales of...
Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages: Early Modern Print Culture and the Global Reach of Englishness
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Richard Hakluyt’s early compilations offer compelling case studies of the ideological effects of textual form. Hakluyt the editor understood the relationship between the publication of navigational documents and nationalism. The structure of the compilation itself provides a mechanism for asserting the increasingly national ambitions and imagined preeminence of early modern England. The...