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The Reformed exegete and theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499--1562) was an unoriginal, but consistent thinker. Theological insights were not packaged separately from each other, but consistently linked together. In all his thought he sought to steer the middle course between theological extremes in taking what was good and rejecting what was bad from each. Typical of this tendency to steer the middle course are his insights into the outward instruments of divine grace. According to Vermigli such instruments---the human nature of Christ, the audible words of Scripture and the visible words of the Sacraments---should not be over-carnalized, nor over-spiritualized. Although God could work immediately (i.e. without instruments), he has chosen to work through these instruments for salvation. Hence, the inward spiritual power and the outward instrument must not be divorced from each other. The Spirit of God does not normally work without the outward instrument, nor can the outward instrument effect grace without the Spirit's power. / Modern scholarship has done much to define the sources of Vermigli's thought, but more needs to be said. The more Vermigli is studied, the more it is necessary to qualify characterizations of him. He is not a thinker who is easily pigeon-holed into a certain theological school or movement. As a well-educated biblical and humanistic scholar, Vermigli took independent and well-reasoned positions on the whole variety of theological questions current in his day. As such, this study attempts to view the inter-connected nature of Vermigli's thought so as to gain a better view of the whole of his thought.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Simone Verovio printed a series of canzonetta anthologies in Rome. These collections were unique, in that they contained keyboard and lute intabulations alongside their vocal parts. The keyboard intabulations seem primarily intended as accompanimental parts. As such, they inform us about the use of keyboard instruments in ensembles of mixed voices and instruments. This thesis examines how the printing format of Verovio's keyboard intabulations arose from a larger context. In particular, it asks what were the skills and training of amateur keyboard players (often women), when or when not to transpose pieces with chiavette (or high clefs), and how instrumental embellishments relate to the canzonetta's text as well as musical texture. This examination contributes to a better understanding of Italian sixteenth-century performance practice, especially of the ways in which instruments were used along with voices in domestic music making.

This thesis details the rise to power of one of the great families of late sixteenth-century France, the Gondi. Antoine de Gondi, the last of fifteen children, left his native Florence to settle permanently in France in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Like many other Italian immigrants of his time, he established himself in Lyon as a merchant and banker. He later bought the Seigneurie du Perron, and married a woman of Piedmontese origin, Marie-Catherine de Pierrevive. Catherine de’ Medici met the couple and soon after invited them to court, giving them positions in the royal households. Antoine’s children, most notably Albert and Pierre, distinguished themselves at court, and not long afterwards were awarded the highest offices of state and church. Albert became Marshal of France in 1573, and Pierre became Bishop of Paris in 1570. At the same time, they proved themselves indispensable servants to the monarchy, and served the crown diplomatically, politically and financially, both in France and on foreign missions. Both brothers had large Parisian real estate holdings, both inside and outside the city centre. The essential role of the Gondi women in family strategy is also analysed. Albert and Pierre’s sister, Jeanne, became Prioress at the royal Priory of Saint-Louis de Poissy. The cousins of Albert and Pierre, Jean-Baptiste and Jérôme Gondi, stayed closely connected to the world of international banking and, together with other bankers, facilitated loans to the increasingly insolvent crown. The Gondi were often targets of anti-Italian hostility from various segments of French society, and contemporary perceptions of the Gondi family are examined. This study shows the family’s deployment of and reliance on close kin to expand their web of influence throughout France and abroad. This dissertation details the many mechanisms employed by the Gondi family to consolidate and expand their influence during the tumultuous French wars of religion.

This thesis is a detailed study of the religious belief and survival of one of the most prominent figures of late sixteenth-century Vienna, Georg Eder (1523- 1587). Eder held a number of high positions at Vienna University and the city's Habsburg court between 1552 and 1584, but his increasingly uncompromising Catholicism placed him at odds with many influential figures around him, not least the confessionally moderate Habsburg Emperor Maximilian II. Pivoted around an incident in 1573, when Eder's ferocious polemic, Evangelische Inquisition, fell under Imperial condemnation, the thesis investigates three key aspects of Eder's life. It examines Eder's position as a Catholic in the Vienna of his day; the public expression of this Catholicism and the strong Jesuit influence on the same; and Eder's rescue and subsequent survival as a lay advocate of Catholic reform, largely through the protection of the Habsburgs' rivals, the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria. Based on a wide variety of printed and manuscript material, this thesis contributes to existing historiography on two levels. On one, it is a reconstruction of the career of one of Vienna's most prominent yet under-studied figures, in a period when the city itself was one of Europe's most politically and religiously significant. In a broader sense, however, this study also adds to the wider canon of Reformation history. It re-examines the nature and extent of Catholicism at the Viermese court in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It highlights the growing role of Eder's Wittelsbach patrons as defenders of Catholicism, even beyond their own Bavarian borders. The thesis also emphasises the role, potential and realised, of influential laity such as Eder in advancing the cause of Catholic reform in the late sixteenth century. Thus it is a strong challenge to the existing, prevalent portrayal of the sixteenth-century Catholic laity as an anonymous and largely passive group who merely responded to the ministries of others.

This thesis attempts to trace the effect of the increased size and complexity of armies and navies in the early VIth Century on the English supply services, and also to analyse selected campaigns as a test of governmental efficiency. The provision of ships, guns, gunpowder, and hand-weapons is first discussed, in relation to national self-sufficiency. Ship timber was occasionally imported, but England could, if necessary, have done without foreign supplies; the timber problem was not a pressing one at this period. Naval stores (pitch, cordage etc.) on the other hand, were almost always imported, and the Baltic had thus already acquired something of its later strategic importance. Equally important were the Netherlands. In 1509 all but the smallest artillery was obtained there. This was remedied by the beginning of large-scale bronze and cast-iron gun-manufacture in England; but England still depended on the Netherlands in 1550 for saltpetre (for gunpowder) and copper (for bronze). Werner Sombart's contention that military requirements stimulated the growth of large-scale industry is discussed; shipbuilding and cannon-founding support his argument, provided that the small-scale of industry in general at this period is borne in mind.

The present thesis examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the contemporary English stage. The thesis will attempt to trace an evolution of the poetics of English and Scottish political drama through the early, middle, and late decades of the sixteenth-century in conjunction with developments in the political thought of the century, linking theatre and politics through the representations of the problematic figure of the usurper or, in Machiavellian terms, the ‘New Prince'. I will demonstrate that while the early Tudor morality plays are concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant, the later historical and tragic drama of the century foregrounds the figure of the illegitimate monarch who is a tyrant by default. On the one hand the sudden proliferation of usurpation plots in Elizabethan drama and the transition from the legitimate tyrant to the usurper tyrant is linked to the dramaturgical shift from the allegorical morality play tradition to later history plays and tragedies, and on the other it is reflective of a poetic turn in political thought which impelled political writers to conceive of the state and sovereignty as a product of human ‘poiesis', independent of transcendental legitimization. The poetics of political drama and the emergence of the idea of ‘poiesis' in the political context merge in the figure of the nuove principe: the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtu' and through an act of law-making violence.

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No description available.