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Sixteenth Century (sixteenth + century)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	96%

Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

General & Introductory History	23%
General & Introductory Religion & Theology	7%

Selected Abstracts

The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century , By Hans Hillerbrand

CONVERSATIONS IN RELIGION & THEOLOGY, Issue 1 2010
Bruce Gordon
First page of article [source]

Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2008
Elaine Brennan
Artists rarely accompanied sixteenth-century voyages of discovery and exploration.1 As a consequence, few first-hand visual representations of the New World were produced. Despite this, published accounts of the Americas in the sixteenth century often included illustrations. With some notable exceptions, the voyagers themselves did not supply the images, or directly supervise their publication. Accurate or not, these images, together with the texts they illustrated, contributed to the construction of the Americas in European consciousness. Only a small number of original first-hand pictorial works survive today, the most important being John White's drawings of the Algonquian Indians of Roanoke, Virginia, from 1585,86. The recent major exhibition of John White's drawings may provoke new scholarly interest in sixteenth-century visual images of the Americas, a topic which offers a rich and relatively neglected area of study.2 This article offers an introduction to the field together with some suggestions for avenues of further research.3 [source]

Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century by Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína and England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel by James McDermott

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 1 2007
Brian Sandberg
First page of article [source]

The Performing Venue: The Visual Play of Italian Courtly Theatres in the Sixteenth Century

ART HISTORY, Issue 2 2010
Lex Hermans
The protagonists of this article have to be considered as performers , actors, one might say , but they are not living beings. Its subject is the sixteenth-century Italian courtly theatres of Rome, Florence, Sabbioneta, and Parma, together with the visual effect their often very elaborate decoration schemes have on their viewers. It is about the agency of things, not persons. The performances that took place in these venues, though important, are left out. [source]

Feeding the colleges: Cambridge's food and fuel supplies, 1450,1560

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2003
John S. Lee
Summary Von Thünen's model of the relationship between concentrated urban demand and rural land use proposes that towns will draw agricultural produce from a series of zones of specialized production around the urban centre. Using the accounts of King's Hall and King's College, this article identifies the areas that supplied Cambridge with food and fuel during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the persistence of such trade. Local geographical conditions meant that, contrary to von Thünen's model, firewood and charcoal were brought from more distant regions than those supplying wheat and malt barley, and Cambridge's hinterland also had to compete with demand from London. [source]

English and Scottish overseas trade, 1300,16001

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2006
MARTIN RORKE
This article compares English and Scottish exports, from 1300,1600, using existing statistical data from England and a new data set of Scottish exports. It shows that the significant English and Scottish wool trades collapsed at almost identical rates. However, while England shifted towards exporting woollen cloth, a similar move in Scotland was weak,because of the poor quality of cloth and the urban form of the industry. In the second half of the sixteenth century, as English exports stagnated, Scottish trade began to grow, especially new and less-established commodities. This ,recovery' was based on the heavy depreciation of the Scottish currency. [source]

Spanish merino wools and the nouvelles draperies: an industrial transformation in the late medieval Low Countries1

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2005
JOHN MUNRO
From the seventeenth century, the world's finest wools have been those produced by descendants of the Spanish merino. During the middle ages, however, England produced Europe's finest wools. Not until the fourteenth century does a distinct merino breed appear in Spain; and, before then, 'Spanish' wools were amongst the very worst in Europe, used in the production of only the very cheapest fabrics. By the late fourteenth century, some merino wools were being used in some Italian draperies; but, in the north, long-held historic prejudices against 'Spanish' wools hindered their introduction, especially into the Low Countries' draperies, which, because of structural changes in international trade, had become re-oriented to manufacturing luxury woollens, most woven from the finest English wools. From the 1420s, however, disastrous changes in England's fiscal policies so increased the cost of these exported wools that many of the younger Flemish draperies, the so-called nouvelles draperies, producing imitations of the finer woollens from the older established draperies, decided to switch to Spanish merino wools (often mixed with English wools). By the mid-fifteenth century, the merinos had indeed improved enough in quality to rival at least the mid-range English wools. Most of the traditional draperies, however, did not adopt merino wools until much too late, and thus, by the early sixteenth century found themselves displaced by the nouvelle draperies as the leading cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries. [source]

The production and consumption of bar iron in early modern England and Wales

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 1 2005
PETER KING
Errata. The Economic History Review 59: 1, 64 The production and consumption of bar iron in early modern England and Wales. An estimate made of the bar iron production in England shows two periods when production grew rapidly, 1540-1620 and 1785-1810. Both of these were related to the adoption of new technology-the finery forge in the first case, and potting and stamping and then puddling in the second. Imports of iron from Spain declined sharply after 1540, but those from Sweden became significant from the mid-seventeenth century, and those from Russia after 1730. Consumption grew rapidly in the late sixteenth century, and again during the eighteenth. Hence, the industrial revolution was the culmination of a long period of growth. [source]

Capuchin monkey tool use: Overview and implications

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2008
Eduardo B. Ottoni
Abstract Nutcracking capuchins are mentioned in reports dating as far back as the sixteenth century,1, 2 as well as in Brazilian folklore.3 However, it was barely a decade ago that primatologists "discovered" the spontaneous use of stones to crack nuts in a semi-free ranging group of tufted capuchin monkeys. Since then, we have found several more capuchin populations in savanna-like environments which employ this form of tool use.5,7 The evidence so far only weakly supports genetically based behavioral differences between populations and does not suggest that dietary pressures in poor environments are proximate determinants of the likelihood of tool use. Instead, tool use within these capuchin populations seems to be a behavioral tradition that is socially learned and is primarily associated with more terrestrial habits. However, differences in the diversity of "tool kits" between populations remain to be understood. [source]

Household, politics and political morality in the reign of Henry VII

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 217 2009
David Grummitt
Late fifteenth-century England, it has recently been suggested, experienced its own ,pre-Machiavellian moment', when the rules of politics and political morality were redefined in the crucible of civil war. Moreover, this was part of a wider western European shift in the nature of politics and one with which Henry, as an exile in Brittany and France, was personally acquainted. The Spanish ambassador's comment, therefore, that the king wished to rule in the ,French fashion' can be interpreted in terms of politics and morality as well as government and administration. This article will argue that the redefinition of political morality in Henry's reign centred upon a redefinition of the nature of the household and the role of household servants. It was manifested through changes in the institution of the royal household itself (the development of the privy chamber and financial machinery of the chamber) and through conflict over the role and meaning of the household. The unease and crisis around this redefinition of one of the cornerstones of late medieval political and social life was also reflected in discourse, such as in the poems of Skelton and in contemporary chronicles. Despite this disquiet, the alteration in political culture was lasting and defined the practice of politics throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century. [source]

Napoleon and the Universal Monarchy

HISTORY, Issue 319 2010
PHILIP DWYER
Although the idea of ,Universal Monarchy' has existed since the early middle ages, the term started to be used pejoratively from the sixteenth century onwards. This article looks at the manner in which contemporaries perceived Napoleon's actions on the international scene, and how they used the term in relation to his foreign policy. Most of Europe's political elite believed that Napoleon was bent on some sort of ,universal domination', and that it was not limited to Europe. That perception was a direct result of an aggressive, expansionist French foreign policy. Napoleon's intentions, on the other hand, are more ambiguous. While at times he adopted a rhetoric which informed contemporary fears, the practical limits to his foreign policy were such that ,Universal Monarchy' could never be anything more than an ephemeral dream. [source]

Education of the Laity and Advocacy of Violence in Print during the French Wars of Religion

HISTORY, Issue 318 2010
LUC RACAUT
At the turn of the seventeenth century King Henri IV of France sought to reconcile his Catholic and Protestant subjects by blaming the violent excesses of the French Wars of Religion on religious radicalism. In particular, Catholic preachers and pamphleteers were accused retrospectively of having poured oil on the fire of religious violence through vitriolic sermons and pamphlets. Historians have tended to reproduce this charge while at the same time emphasizing the ,modernity' of Protestantism, particularly in view of religious education. A review of books printed in the sixteenth century enables historians to test empirically the extent to which violence was fuelled by religious polemic. From the beginning of the Reformation the Catholic Church had been torn between educating the laity in correct doctrine on one hand and denouncing heresy on the other. A closer look at the book trade reveals that these concerns were reflected in the kinds of books that were published in the vernacular in the second half of the sixteenth century. While the clergy increasingly saw the merits of educating the laity, it had to compete with the public's taste for polemic that printers were keen to cater for. [source]

Taming Madness: Moral Discourse and Allegory in Counter-Reformation Spain

HISTORY, Issue 315 2009
MARÍA TAUSIET
In the early modern period, madness assumed an important role in European thought and to a certain extent replaced the obsession with death which had characterized the preceding centuries. Like death before it, madness was seen as a means of accessing truth, but this was now an incomplete truth full of ambivalence and ambiguity since folly was being reclaimed as a relative form of reason. This article examines how this new vision of madness influenced Spanish thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Overall, it can be said that the positive and liberating view of madness, as conveyed by Erasmus, predominated in Spain until the end of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, the spirit of the Counter-Reformation tried gradually to constrain the omnipresent madness, associating it with the most reprehensible of vices, while understanding sanity to be the cultivation of Christian virtues. Despite attempts by a reductionist moral discourse to tame madness, however, it proved to be an unmanageable beast which continued to multiply and display a thousand and one difference faces. [source]

Genoa and Livorno: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Commercial Rivalry as a Stimulus to Policy Development

HISTORY, Issue 281 2001
Thomas Kirk
During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, while Genoa was at the height of its colonial expansion, Livorno was little more than a fishing village. The Genoese had assembled a territorial state in Liguria, taken the island of Corsica and, as early as 1277, were sending ships directly to England and Flanders. All the while Livorno was merely a malaria-infested appendix of Porto Pisano. Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, Livorno grew by leaps and bounds and by the end of the century concerns over the Tuscan city's growing importance as a commercial port had become a conditioningfactor in the establishment of Genoese maritime policy. The concern was well founded. An ever-greater portion of trade in the western Mediterranean was to gravitate to Livorno during the seventeenth century, threatening to transform Genoa into a commercial satellite. The Republic of Genoa did not hesitate to react, and the subsequent rivalry between the two ports provided the principal stimulus in the experimentation of innovative fiscal policies in both cities and to the development of the modern free port. Indeed, the free port as it is known today, namely a specific port or area within a port where goods may transit duty free, emerged as the policies of the two cities slowly converged, formulating a single response to differing historical contingencies. [source]

Islam in Northern Mozambique: A Historical Overview

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 7 2010
Liazzat Bonate
This article is a historical overview of two issues: first, that of the dynamics of Islamic religious transformations from pre-Portuguese era up until the 2000s among Muslims of the contemporary Cabo Delgado, Nampula, and to a certain extent, Niassa provinces. The article argues that historical and geographical proximity of these regions to East African coast, the Comoros and northern Madagascar meant that all these regions shared a common Islamic religious tradition. Accordingly, shifts with regard to religious discourses and practices went in parallel. This situation began changing in the last decade of the colonial era and has continued well into the 2000s, when the so-called Wahhabis, Sunni Muslims educated in the Islamic universities of the Arab world brought religious outlook that differed significantly from the historical local and regional conceptions of Islam. The second question addressed in this article is about relationships between northern Mozambican Muslims and the state. The article argues that after initial confrontations with Muslims in the sixteenth century and up until the last decade of the colonial era, the Portuguese rule pursued no concerted effort in interfering in the internal Muslim religious affairs. Besides, although they occupied and destroyed some of the Swahili settlements, in particular in southern and central Mozambique, other Swahili continued to thrive in northern Mozambique and maintained certain independence from the Portuguese up until the twentieth century. Islam there remained under the control of the ruling Shirazi clans with close political, economic, kinship and religious ties to the Swahili world. By establishing kinship and politico-economic ties with the ruling elites of the mainland in the nineteenth century, these families were also instrumental in expanding Islam into the hinterland. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese rule took full control of the region as a result of military conquests of the ,effective occupation', and imposed new legal and administrative colonial system, called Indigenato, impacting Muslims of northern Mozambique to a great extent. After the independence in 1975, and especially since 1977, the post-independence Frelimo government adopted militant atheism and socialist Marxism, which was short-lived and was abolished in 1983 owing to popular resistance and especially, because of government's perception that its religious policies were fuelling the opposition groups to take arms and join the civil war. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by an acute rivalry and conflicts between the two emerging national umbrella Islamic organizations, the Islamic Council and the Islamic Congress, each representing largely pro-Sufi and anti-Sufi positions. In the 2000s, these organizations became overshadowed by new and more dynamic organizations, such as Ahl Al-Sunna. [source]

,Amsterdam is Standing on Norway' Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545,1648

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 1 2010
JASON W. MOORE
In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ,European expansion' (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ,transition to capitalism' (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange , what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ,second' sixteenth century (c. 1545,1648). In highlighting the Ibero-American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans-Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed. [source]

Showing the Poor a Good Time: Caring for Body and Spirit in Bologna's Civic Charities

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 1 2004
Nicholas Terpstra
As poor relief in Christian Europe was being reformed through the sixteenth century, tensions emerged between a traditional charitable culture that allowed for occasional festivity, and the newer charitable culture that emphasized discipline, restraint, and efficiency. An undated document relating to a dispute that broke out in the main civic welfare agency of Bologna (Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti) shows that gender and class were key dimensions of these two cultures, and underscores that the two should not be seen as sequential but as co-existing and competing. This study examines the dispute and proposes a dating for the document in the 1590s. [source]

Visual Images of America in the Sixteenth Century

The Forgotten Greek Books of Elizabethan England1

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2007
Kirsty Milne
This essay was runner-up in the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. The well-founded view that the Elizabethans were not distinguished for Greek scholarship has spawned the mistaken presumption that no Greek books were printed in England between 1543 and 1610. In fact a variety of texts, mostly classical, were produced in London, Oxford and Cambridge during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign. Their survival raises the question of why domestic printers should have ventured into a market dominated by Continental printing-houses, and suggests a need to reassess the place of Greek in the intellectual and cultural life of the late sixteenth century. [source]

Luther's and Melanchthon's Students: The Wittenberg Circle and the Development of its Theology to 1600

RELIGION COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2009
Robert Kolb
The students of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon carried on the process of refining and institutionalizing their thought throughout the second half of the sixteenth century in the midst of controversies over selected issues that arose out of specific historical contexts. This article traces the development and course of these controversies and the solutions reached in the Formula of Concord of 1577. [source]

Madonna Bellina, ,astounding' Jewish musician in mid-sixteenth-century Venice

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 1 2008
Don Harrán
Jewish female musicians were a rarity in the sixteenth century, let alone later times. All the more interest attaches to the description of Madonna Bellina, in an ardent ,love letter' that the renowned Venetian playwright and satirist Andrea Calmo wrote to her (in Venetian) around 1550, as a Jewess who ,astounded her listeners' (meraveiar i auditori) by her singing and playing. As the only known document about her, the letter deserves closer investigation to establish as much as one can of her person (age, appearance, character) and musical talents; to gauge the attitude of its author toward singing or playing Jewesses and, more generally, toward Judaism; and to probe the question whether Madonna Bellina was real or a figment of his imagination. The study concludes with an appendix, in which Calmo's letter to Bellina is transcribed in the original and translated. [source]

From jellied seas to open waterways: redefining the northern limit of the knowable world

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 3 2007
Margaret Small
In the ancient world, the northern limits of Europe were unknown, and believed to be unknowable. Geographers constructed a mental framework for the continent that restricted human inhabitation to more southerly regions. The constituents of this frame were: a region of monstrous creatures, a zone of uninhabitable wastelands, and ultimately, limitless ocean. By the sixteenth century, classically educated Europeans were sailing into the unknown Arctic regions in search of a north-east passage, but their descriptions and even goals for exploration were still influenced by the classical preconceptions. The three elements of the classical frame were altered, but persisted in European geographical thought even after fifty years of northern exploration. [source]

Pietro Aretino, religious writer

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 3 2006
Raymond B. Waddington
Although Pietro Aretino's vernacular biblical paraphrases and saints' lives were popular and greatly admired in the sixteenth century, modern scholarship often has dismissed them as commercial potboilers. This study presents the case that Aretino was a serious reformer in religion and possibly a Nicodemite. It traces his long relationship with Antonio Brucioli, who was an important conduit of Protestant writings and whose reformist Bible translation enabled Aretino's paraphrases. Relying on their letters, it examines Aretino's friendship with Pier Paolo Vergerio and his attraction to Bernardino Ochino, both of whom became apostates, and his reaction to the arrest of his confessor for having Lutheran sympathies. Aretino's biblical paraphrases were esteemed in Italian reformist circles and translated into French by a prior attached to Marguerite of Navarre's court. In England Sir Thomas Wyatt based his Lutheran Penitential Psalms on Aretino's I sette Salmi. [source]

Sano di Pietro's Assunta polyptych for the Convent of Santa Petronilla in Siena

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 4 2005
Diana Norman
Since its incorporation into Siena's first public art collection early in the nineteenth century, the provenance of Sano di Pietro's polyptych of The Virgin of the Assumption with Saints has been recognised as the Clarissan church of Santa Petronilla. To date, however, there has been very little comment as to the significance of the provenance of the altarpiece, particularly in relation to the choice of subject matter. This essay explores the complex history of this major Clarissan foundation in Siena, identifying its first location beyond Siena's principal northern gate of Porta Camollia and then describing its subsequent removal during the mid sixteenth century into the safety of the city itself and to the church where the altarpiece was discovered in 1810. Recognising that the presence of a Clarissan donor figure on the central painting of the polyptych provides plausible evidence that the altarpiece was commissioned for the original convent church, the essay further demonstrates how the circumstances of the foundation of Santa Petronilla in the second decade of the thirteenth century provide a key for the principal subject matter of the altarpiece. The remaining imagery of the altarpiece is then discussed in terms of its general relevance for a fifteenth-century community of Clarissan nuns and for the particular devotional concerns of the nuns of Santa Petronilla. It is argued that this late fifteenth-century Sienese altarpiece offers a revealing example of the way in which art commissioned by enclosed orders of female religious within Renaissance Italy could be closely related to their own concerns and priorities. (pp. 433,457) [source]

Taken into custody: girls and convent guardianship in Renaissance Florence

RENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 2 2003
Sharon T. Strocchia
This study examines the widespread practice of placing girls in the temporary care of convents in Renaissance Florence, a practice called serbanza. During the turbulent years from 1480 to 1530, guardianship became one of the most important social services offered by female religious communities, which sheltered girls in increasing numbers. Serbanza was the major form of extrafamilial care for young girls of the middling and artisan classes, as well as for the vulnerable rich, before the advent of large-scale custodial institutions in the later sixteenth century. Based on extensive archival records, this study documents how patterns of guardianship changed in response to political turmoil and concerns over female honour. I argue that convent guardianship formed part of the institutional and experiential foundation of female culture that cut across lines of neighbourhood and class, and introduced girls to a distinctive kind of constructed community. Boarding girls on a regular basis also raised important issues for internal monastic governance and ecclesiastical supervision. Nuns balanced the financial and social benefits of guardianship against the disruption of monastic routines and the disapproval of clerical officials. These tensions were resolved only by the reorganization of convent life and the development of new custodial institutions under Cosimo I. (pp. 177,200) [source]

LOCATING ,CHINA' IN THE ARTS OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY JAPAN

ART HISTORY, Issue 4 2006
ANDREW M. WATSKY
Even as Japanese armies marched on Ming China in the late sixteenth century, the artefacts of ancient China continued to elicit the esteem of Japanese elites, including the warrior-ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537,98). In many of these artefacts a given location constituted the theme. This essay comprises three interconnected case studies of China-related paintings and ceramics that demonstrate a concerted effort by Japanese of the Momoyama period (1568,1615) to claim Chinese antiquity as part of their cultural heritage. Japanese patrons and artists achieved this by adapting Chinese models of stylized or semi-abstract landscape representation and, more dramatically, by physically and conceptually transforming original Chinese objects. Antique Chinese paintings of Chinese place were dismembered and remounted in Japan so as to function better in Japanese contexts. In a practice that highlighted location while eschewing the pictorial, aesthetic arbiters awarded old Chinese ceramic vessels poetic names related to Japanese places (a custom common in chanoyu, the tea ceremony), thus conceptually relocating the objects from China to Japan. In present-day art-historical practice these objects are not normally studied together. That practice, however, distorts pre-modern realities, as, during the period in question, the Japanese used the objects en ensemble as they searched for, and at times reworked, the relevances of ancient China for Momoyama Japan. [source]