Giovanni Boteros (1544-1617) treatise <i>The Reason of State</i> (1589) seemed somewhat uncharacteristic of sixteenth-century political thought, considering the pride of place given to economics in his text. The Age of Reformation constituted not only a period of new ideas on faith but also one of new political thinking, and as the research into the influences on Boteros economic thought progressed, I began to consider the period as one where economic thinking was becoming more common among theologians of the reforming churches and bureaucrats of the developing states. Having been trained in the schools of the Jesuits, Botero was exposed to one of the most potent and intellectually uniform of all the reforming movements of the period, and I argue it was here that he first considered economics as an aspect of moral philosophy. While it cannot be proven positively that Botero studied or even considered economics during his association with the Jesuits (roughly from 1559-1580), the fact that a number of those who shaped the Jesuit Order in its first few generations discussed economics in their own treatises leads one to a strong circumstantial conclusion that this is where the economic impulse first rose up in his thinking. Indeed, it was this background that readied Botero to consider economics as an important part of statecraft with his reading of Jean Bodins (1530-1596) <i>The Six Books of the Republic</i> (1576), in which economics is featured quite prominently. Bodins own economic theory was informed primarily by his experience as a bureaucrat in the Parlement of Paris, where questions on the value of the currency and on the kings ability to tax his subjects were in constant debate among the advocates. I argue further that, upon his reading of Bodins <i>Republic</i>, Botero saw how economics could be fused with politics, and he then set out to compose his own treatise on political economy (although he certainly would not have called it such). In <i>The Reason of State</i>, Botero brought his Jesuit conception of economic morality together with Bodins writings on political economy to create a work, neither wholly Jesuit nor wholly Bodinian, which in the end outlined an overall political and economic structure of society quite distinct from the sum of its parts.

Within the collections of the Museu de Angra do Heroismo (Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal) are nine cast bronze guns from the 16th century. Most were raised from the seafloor between the 1960s and 1990s, but this study comprises the first in-depth research into their design and manufacture. The importance of this kind of study lies in the fact that ordnance is commonly found on shipwrecks of this time. A greater knowledge of guns will help provide information about the ships from which they came. Careful documentation and study of the Museu de Angra cannon will add greatly to their value as museum exhibits, by allowing museum patrons to better understand where the guns came from, how they were cast, and why they were important. This documentation adds to our knowledge of Western European gunfounding technology during the sixteenth century, as four different countries commissioned the guns: Portugal, Spain, France, and England. With detailed documentation and publication, the Museu de Angra bronze guns can be added to the bibliography of ordnance of this period, which will aid future researchers who encounter similar pieces. The Museu de Angra bronze guns, as symbols of the military and naval power of the countries that commissioned them, were sent aboard ships, into the field, and mounted on fortress walls. Bronze guns of this time period are particularly important, as bronze was an expensive commodity, and the demand for ordnance was increasing rapidly. Countries developed more effective ways to make use of iron for the founding of guns, and the use of bronze became more symbolic of wealth. The information that each gun contains includes both the cutting-edge military technology of the time and the artistic statement of the founder. Some of the finest metalwork of the period was displayed in cast bronze guns, and due to the founding techniques, no two are the same, making each an important piece of history.

This dissertation examines the Catholic community of Warwickshire during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558--?1603). While local studies of post—Reformation Catholics have been attempted in other English counties, no substantial body of work has been produced for Warwickshire. The research therefore draws heavily on both the primary sources for Warwickshire and the more general secondary works on post--?Reformation Catholicism. The approach has been to identify the Catholics and recusants through the primary sources, such as recusant rolls, commissioners’ reports and State Papers, and endeavour to understand the causes and consequences of recusancy and how this affected the identity of the Catholic individual and community. The principal findings and discoveries demonstrate that the Catholic community of Warwickshire was, in general, detached from its medieval predecessor. Unable to worship freely, they resorted to clandestine and surreptitious practices and proved to be eclectic and fluid with regard to religious doctrine when the occasion demanded. After heightened persecution in the 1580s, the steadfast members of the community tried to avoid detection through several means, including church papism, frequently moving between parishes or counties, and the (often false) promise of conformity when caught. This dissertation is arranged into six thematic chapters. This method allowed several key aspects of the continuation of Catholicism in Warwickshire to be analysed separately. Chapter 1 introduces the themes explored in the dissertation. Chapter 2 examines the geographical features of Warwickshire and its jurisdictional subdivision and argues that these features protected pockets of Catholic communities from close supervision by the state and church. Chapter 3 investigates the clergy within the county and their effect on Catholics and recusants. The higher and lower reformed clergy, the remaining Marian priests and the missionaries who came to England from 1574 onwards are considered. Chapter 4 looks at the members of the Catholic community themselves, focusing on the gentry and non-gentry. Chapter 5 focuses on the government’s use of monetary fines to deter conservatives from recusancy from 1581 onwards. The reasons for Catholics to choose either recusancy or church papism over conformity are complex and, in the face of fierce persecution, at times inexplicable. Chapter 6 considers the themes of persecution and toleration within the county, and analyses in detail the circumstances of the Somerville Plot of 1583. The understanding of such a community, combined with a comparative analysis of Catholic communities in other counties, offers an original contribution to the study of post-Reformation England. / published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This is the story of Spanish belonging in New Spain and the creation of New Spaniards. Tracing Spanish perceptions of place, the body, belonging, and Indian mortality, as well as constructions of “nativeness” and “Spanishness” from the conquest, this work does three things. First it examines the ideological constructs behind Spanish belonging, and the ideas that Spaniards brought with them about their bodies and their relationship to the environment. Second it follows the progression of these ideas through the first three generations of Spanish colonization, paying particular attention to the way that political rivalries, the exigencies of the crown, and Indian mortality affected discourse on belonging and identity. Finally, it captures a moment at the turn of the seventeenth century, when residents of New Spain began to re-imagine their belonging and their relationship to the land and its original inhabitants. / text

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This thesis aims at defining the argumentative terms and strategies of the rhetoric of praise in printed collected eulogies of women of the first half of the XVIth Century, both in collections of famous women (which celebrate exceptional feminine figures) and apologies of the female sex (which defend womankind through praise). The inquiry starts with the first French printed translation of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, entitled De la louenge et vertu des nobles et cleres dames (1493), and ends with the Fort inexpugnable de l'honneur du sexe foeminin (1555) by Francois de Billon, who provides the first historic panorama of the encomiastic tradition. Its specificity lies in the combination of two types of collective eulogy, which up to now have been separately analyzed but which in fact deserve to be taken up in a single interpretative gesture. Our approach, that of rhetoric, is founded in composition manuals and treatises on ancient eloquence, as well as recent theory on argumentation. Unlike other studies which take the rhetorical approach, this thesis deals with a relatively short time span, about fifty years, which allows a reading of the texts in their historical and literary contexts. Through the vantage points of inventio and dispositio, this thesis shows how a discourse praising women collectively was built, at a time when women formed the crux of contradicting discourses and the centre of a topics that crystallized those tensions. Beyond this uncertain discursive situation, this thesis also claims to bring to light a neglected aspect of eulogy: its function as definition of object praised. It offers, therefore, a reflection on epideictic rhetoric from a perspective of the poetics of literary genre. This is seen as a space that is propitious to the exploration of ethical stakes, such as the valorization of individual feminine figures, the fashioning of the author's persona or the introduction of secondary objectives which bear new values.

This thesis outlines two distinct modes of early sixteenth-century devotional practice (image-based and text-oriented), which in the context of the English reformation are increasingly represented as antithetical to one another, as Protestants champion the vernacular Bible and creed-based Christianity, while suppressing "idolatrous" images and traditional practices. Women readers, who tend to be vernacular readers, figure prominently in the religious controversy, and come to represent both the distinctives of Protestantism and anxieties around vernacular readership and hermeneutic agency. The vernacular woman reader stands in direct opposition to the priestly authority of masculine, Latin clerical culture; accordingly she is both rhetorically useful to the Protestant cause and a locus of cultural instability. I then turn to consider female Tudor translators as reading women, and translation itself (rather than a type of "feminine" writing) as a form of meditative or proclamatory reading. While translation has a traditional association with the meditative devotional reader, the religious controversy makes possible a more public and polemically motivated sort of translation by women, which, however, remains framed largely in terms of personal devotional activity. As the number of literate women grows throughout the century, translation (with reading) is also increasingly represented as a means of keeping women out of trouble, a development which reflects the growing acceptance of the Protestant contention that a good woman is a reading woman. The epistolary culture of the persecuted Marian Protestant community illustrates the construction of a community of readers in the Protestant language of spiritual family, and the role of the reading woman in sustaining that community. My concluding chapter outlines the continuing construction of a textual community of exemplary foremothers, a tradition of "godly, learned women," in which the virtuous woman reader is expected to participate. This distinctly Protestant pattern of literate female piety, alongside a growing number of women readers in Elizabethan England, increasingly shapes cultural ideals of female virtue.

William Warham, Lord Chancellor of England (1504--1515) and Archbishop of Canterbury (1503--1532), was Desiderius Erasmus's most generous and consistent patron; in Erasmus's words a "sacred anchor" for him. The relationship between the two men connected with and contributed to a complex process of historical change. First of all, Warham and Erasmus were both associated with the paradigm shift which we now call the Northern Renaissance. Warham's academic background and his travels on the continent motivated him to support the study of Greek, new research in theology and the revival of classical learning. His money and political support acted as a force enabling Erasmus to get his New Testament work completed and published. Erasmus's New Testament research in turn facilitated the biblical scholarship of the Reformation and definitely motivated William Tyndale, among others. The reform which the collaboration of Warham and Erasmus helped to unleash was hence more radical than either had ever anticipated. Once religious reform started, neither man could control its pace although each made an effort to do so. The aim of this thesis is to show the significance of their relationship to the two individuals themselves, and also, more importantly, to analyze the dynamics of their collaboration and to demonstrate how and why it acted as a catalyst for religious change in England. Books have been written about More and Erasmus and Colet and Erasmus; the absence of a book about Warham and Erasmus has meant that the nature and significance of their relationship have not, as yet, been fully understood.

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