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Protestant church orders were a key tool for shaping belief and practice during the sixteenth century. These declarations of official religious policy were composed by both secular and ecclesiastical leaders, and reflected the shared interests of the church and state in managing evangelical reforms. Their constitutional nature and their role in articulating doctrine made them the most effective means for church building during the period. John a Lasco's Forma ac ratio was one of the most significant of these works. His text, which was published in 1555, provided a comprehensive blueprint for Protestant congregations. It also marked a pivotal point in the development of orders. Although the earlier documents varied widely in their form and scope, by the end of the century they had developed a common format and standard range of topics. The Forma ac ratio is one of the first to exhibit this trend, marking this crucial shift in the development of such works and setting the standard for the ordinances that followed. Although this text had much in common with other orders, it was distinguished by the reformer's unique vision for church organisation and ceremonies. The content reveals the various forces that shaped his ideas. For example, he modelled his ecclesiastical administration after the episcopacies found in the German lands. He added to this Zwingli's Eucharistic rite and Calvin's ecclesiastical discipline. This work also contained a Lasco's own innovative contributions including his emphasis on congregational authority. In addition, the ordinance included extensive commentary to explain, justify and defend the prescribed practices. This comprehensive nature set the Forma ac ratio apart from other orders. A Lasco's tome had a significant impact on Protestant congregations throughout Europe. Originally, he had written the work for the London Strangers' Church, which was comprised of religious refugees in England's capital city. These exiles played a key role in transmitting his ecclesiastical model, when they returned to the continent in the 1550s, they established new refugee congregations following the reformer's example. They later carried his innovative order to their native lands when they returned home in the subsequent decades. The Forma ac ratio's widespread impact across Europe makes it one of the key ordinances from the Reformation period. In addition, as this thesis demonstrates, it was these qualities - its function in church building, the innovative form, and the refugees' role in transmitting his model - that ensured its influence and significance in sixteenth-century Europe.

To call something 'inverted' or 'topsy-turvy' in the sixteenth century is, above all, to label it as abnormal, unnatural and going against the natural order of things. The topos of the world upside-down brings to mind a world returned to its initial state of primeval chaos, in which everything is inside-out, topsy-turvy and out of bounds: fish live in trees, children rule over their parents, wives command their husband and rivers flow back to their source. This thesis undertakes a detailed account of the development of the topos of the world upside-down in sixteenth-century French literature and visual culture. By examining different uses of this topos - comic, moralising and polemical - it relates the transformations of the topos to religious, social and political conflicts of the period. To explain the shift of this topos from comic and moralising device to satirical and polemical tool, this thesis argues that troubled times produce troubled texts. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, two kinds of evidence will be examined: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 present diachronic evidence of the 'polemicisation' of the topos of the world upside-down in literary genres of the period (adages, paradoxes and emblems) and within François Rabelais's body of work; Chapter 3 and 4 provide synchronic evidence of the polemical use of the topos of the world upside-down during the French religious wars in Huguenot and Catholic polemic and in depictions of socio-political turmoil. Charting the variety of uses of the topos of the world upside-down throughout the sixteenth century, this thesis connects the world upside-down and its historical context; and contributes to the scholarship on religious polemic.

In our time we, of course, face problems in Christian dogmatics within a different context from Calvin. let in the Reformed Churches we believe we would greatly impoverish ourselves if we departed from his locus or disregarded his seminal teaching. Thus, the underlying question of the thesis is: can Reformed theology go the same fundamental way as Calvin and yet go further, i.e., let Calvin's theology extend and make itself explicit in the face of our theological problems? We think so. We have chosen three areas in which to test this assertion, all of which are lively areas of discussion in modern theology: natural knowledge of God, history and ethics. In each of the respective chapters we try first to represent what Calvin said; then we suggest the problems these doctrines of Calvin present for modern (Reformed) theology. Finally, we let Calvin's doctrine of the Word extend and make explicit his statements in each of these areas; i.e., knowledge, history and ethics, in the face of the problems of today. In order to follow this procedure we set forth in the First Chapter the heart and norm for all of Calvin's theology, his doctrine of the Word, In sum, then, we let Calvin's doctrine of the Word clarify the Christological character of Calvin's doctrines of our knowledge of God, the Providence of God, the Law of God and the life of the Christian man in the face of contemporary theological discussion.

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This dissertation explores how alabaster funerary sculptures and tapestries created complex and multifarious alliances between the Habsburgs and members of the high nobility. It proposes that the Habsburgs and the nobility negotiated their relationships with one another through commissioning and displaying works of art that used particular materials, iconographies and styles referencing the politically potent and culturally significant heritage of the Burgundian dukes and the ancient Roman emperors. The alabaster sculptures and tapestries discussed in this two-part study were instrumental in defining and redefining, establishing and renewing these relationships. Part one is devoted to alabaster funerary sculpture in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Habsburg domain. The origin of great interest in alabaster, together with black marble (black limestone), was the Carthusian monastery, the Chartreuse de Champmol, near Dijon, which had housed the tombs of Philip the Bold, and of John the Fearless and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. The tombs of the Burgundian dukes became a model for funerary monuments in alabaster of other members of the family and later also for the Habsburgs, including Margaret of Austria, who governed the Low Countries as regent after the death of her husband, Philibert II of Savoy (1480-1504). The tombs of Margaret of Austria, Philibert of Savoy, and his mother, Margaret of Bourbon in a monastery in Brou were intended to assert Habsburg-Savoyard alliance in a region equally desirable to the French for fulfilling their royal ambitions. Following the alabaster and black marble examples in Dijon and Brou, the tombs of Guillaume I de Croÿ and Marie de Hamal, and of Cardinal Guillaume II de Croÿ, originally in Heverlee, near Leuven, were located in a Celestine monastery church that served as a dynastic mausoleum for the noble family. The tombs of the Croÿs offer insight into the extent to which the nobles historically exercised power in the courts of Burgundy and Habsburg, even influencing Margaret of Austria to include all’antica elements in the alabaster funerary monuments and altarpiece in Brou that are otherwise designed in late flamboyant Gothic style. Part two is devoted to exploring tapestries in the Burgundian and Habsburg collections from the late-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century. Members of the Burgundian and Habsburg families were key players in the development of the tapestry industry in the Low Countries, regulating tapestry production and trade. As an important part of the rulers’ self-fashioning, tapestries were collected, used as gifts, or hung during important occasions. To demonstrate how tapestries were used in a particular setting, I discuss the Seven Deadly Sins set and one tapestry from the History of Scipio Africanus series, both in the Habsburgs' collection, that were displayed during the imperial festivities at Binche and Mariemont in 1549. I examine how these tapestries as well as the specific activities that occurred in front of them and the particular viewers who witnessed and participated in these activities effectively and affectively communicated Habsburg propaganda to the elite local audience, and thereby helped to encourage their loyalty and support.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze advice about marriage written in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first chapter focuses on marital counsel contained in letters, the second on advice offered by Protestant clergymen, and the third on various kinds of popular literature which discussed marriage and women. The contents of the works are described, as is the historical and literary context in which they were written. Although the form, purpose, and significance of the marital counsel varies, the advice itself is remarkably consistent. The central concern of the authors is how a man can select a good wife and how the woman should comport herself after marriage; only the works written by clerics describe the husband's marital responsibilities to any significant extent. The implication is that a successful marriage would result if the man chose his wife wisely and if, once chosen, the woman conformed to his and society's expectations. However, advice tells us only what people were saying, not what they were doing; it is prescriptive, not descriptive. Moreover, when examining works which dealt with wedlock, one becomes aware of the essentially literary nature of much of the counsel—many authors simply repeated or expanded on clichés. Their words do not provide us with insight into their own thoughts or matrimonial relations, but inform us as to the accepted, conventional mode of discussing marriage during this period. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Modern scholars have suggested various approaches to the analysis of the pretonal repertory. However, if we consider the question of how the individual voice parts interact in a Renaissance polyphonic composition to create coherence for the movement as a whole, we find that there are no tools available to undertake such a task. We may be able to speak generally of the arrival of certain moments as relatively accented or unaccented; we may even be able to dissect a complete melodic line with some segmentation process to highlight motivic structure, phrase development or contour-articulated pitch events. But there are no analytic strategies available yet which are capable of disclosing the structures of independent voice parts and their interaction as timepoint-accenting elements capable of creating formal, rhythmic and pitch-class patterns. This study outlines a methodology that has been developed to deal with these specific issues. The analytic strategy is based on the perception of accents in individual voices of polyphonic works. The types of accents germane to Renaissance polyphony include durational, leap, contour, cadential and beginning-accents. The study proposes a simple, bipartite classification of accentual strength—strong or weak. Each voice part in a work is then analyzed, with every pitch attack represented as strongly or weakly accented through special notation developed for the analysis. The methodology affords a picture of the most strongly- accented timepoints in the individual melodies of three- and four-voice cantus firmus masses of the mid- to late fifteenth century. The relative strengths of these accents, along with their synchronization in the multi-voice aggregate, are disclosed through the notation. After renotating scores with this special notational symbology, we extract points of coincident strong accents in three or more voices to create accent profiles for each section of a movement. We then compare profiles of same-texted works by different composers in order to disclose normative formal and pitch-class procedures in some Renaissance compositions. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

The Czech-born music theorist, Václav Philomathes, wrote the Musicorum libri quattuor in 1512 while attending the University of Vienna. This didactic treatise became one of the most widely published theory treatise of its time with 26 copies of five editions remaining today and covers the topics of Gregorian chant practice, Solmization, Mensural Notation, Choir Practice and Conducting, and Four-voice Counterpoint. Of particular note, is the section on choir practice and conducting, of which there is no equivalent prior example extant today. This dissertation provides a Latin-English translation of Philomathes’s work, as well as produces a critical commentary and comparison of the five editions while positioning the editions within the context of the musico-theoretical background of early-to-mid-16th century scholarship in Central Europe.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Thesis (DPhil (Dogmatics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Dogmatics and Christian Ethics / unrestricted