Today, the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644) is mostly remembered as one of the founders of modern chemistry and medicine. However, Van Helmont saw himself rather differently: he firmly believed he had been called to articulate a ‘Christian Philosophy’ that would bring together Christian thought and natural philosophy in a harmonious synthesis. His ‘Christian Philosophy’ would be purged of the Aristotelian ‘heathenism’ he felt Scholasticism had been tainted with. Instead, it would convey a unitary view of God, Nature and Man that was in accord with Christian doctrine. The main purpose of this thesis is to understand how Van Helmont attempted to construct this new Christian Philosophy. The thesis will argue that the inspiration for this project lay in the medical alchemy developed by Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541) following medieval precedents. Paracelsus and many of his followers expressed the view that alchemy can act as the Christian key to Nature, and therefore an alliance of alchemical philosophy and Christianity was not only possible, but natural. Van Helmont concurred with this perspective, seeking to ground his Christian Philosophy in both orthodox Christian thought and medical alchemy. His religious ideas drew chiefly upon Biblical and Patristic sources as well as on German medieval mysticism. Van Helmont sought to complement this approach with an alchemical view that emphasised the hidden presence of God in Nature, as well as the role of the alchemist in unveiling this presence in the form of powerful medicine. Indeed, in Van Helmont’s thought Christianity and alchemy were dynamically entwined to such an extent that their discourses were not clearly separate. Van Helmont firmly believed the source of all things was God, and hence both the Book of Grace and the Book of Nature had their common origin in the light of the Holy Spirit.

Venice and Rome was not always on good terms, which the interdict crisis of 1606 and 1607 clearly manifests. Interdicts had been placed on Venice before, but the one of 1606 set about a veritable flood of pamphlets and tracts, either in favour or against the interdict of Pope Paul V (1605–1621).   One of these tracts, which was written in favour of the Papal interdict, was the Nuova Risposta di Giovanni Filoteo di Asti, alla lettera di un theologo incognito scritta ad un sacerdote suo amico, sopra le censure, & interdetto di Papa Paolo V, contro la Signoria di Venetia, which I intend to analyse in this thesis. The Nuova Risposta was a text born out of the Guerra delle scritture. It was published in 1606 in Bologna and in Ferrara, both locations were, at that period of time, a part of the Papal States. This text manifests the troublesome relations between the Venetian government and the Papal Court in Rome, but also the importance of adhering to a historiographical framework in which the author Antonio Possevino elaborates on Papal claim to superiority in spiritual and in temporal matters.

This dissertation is a study of the reception of the Jesuit-trained Italian author, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) in early-seventeenth century England. It examines how Botero was translated for an English audience, and reconstructs the debates to which Botero was relevant and helped stimulate in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Part I examines the publication history of Botero’s books in England and finds that the translators and printers edited Botero significantly. Its primary focus is thus on who was translating Botero and for what purposes, and who was printing and selling the resulting books. It establishes that the most prominent of Botero’s books in England were the Della grandezza della città (1588), Della ragion di stato (1589), Relazioni Universali (1591–1595). Chapters I–III accordingly consider these works in turn. Chapter IV then briefly turns to consider Botero’s other works, including I prencipi (1600). Part II then turns to look at Botero’s readers. Four further chapters consider Botero’s reception in relation to four broad themes: geography and travel (Chapter I); climate and situation (Chapter II); colonies and commerce (Chapter III); and responses to Machiavelli (Chapter IV). Each of these chapters examine Botero’s contributions to these themes, other contemporary authors whom he was read alongside, and how and why people were reading him to speak to these debates. Ultimately, the backdrop to this story is English colonialism in the Americas and Ireland and a growing interest in understanding the political significance of trade. The dissertation therefore contributes to our understanding of the history of early modern political thought, translation and reception, and English-Italian intellectual exchange in the early modern period. Ultimately, the thesis tells two stories – one about the importance of this Italian author in seventeenth-century England, the other about the intellectual origins of certain key themes in British political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Arthur Ingram and Lionel Cranfield were part of the early modern phenomenon of social mobility, rising from humble merchants to titled gentlemen in one generation. Cranfield, especially, reached significant heights in a matter of years. Despite the fact both men have merited biographies which chart their commercial and political careers, little attention has been paid to their lives outside of the political sphere leaving room for an analysis of their family and personal estates and the extent to which they utilised their houses in their self-projection. The originality of this thesis lies in its comparison of the two men which not only highlights their dependency on each other and mutual advertisement of each other’s image, but also opens up the question of regional disparity in house building as Ingram’s country estates were situated in Yorkshire whereas Cranfield’s were mainly close to London. The first chapter introduces the issues of social mobility, self-fashioning, and regionality, provides a literature review and explains the methodology employed. Chapter 2 looks at the careers and families of Ingram and Cranfield before examining the ways in which they furthered their ascent through the fashioning of their attire, education and learning, and social networks. The thesis then focuses on the houses of both men, with Chapters 3 and 4 considering how they built and styled their houses. Chapter 5 examines the craftsmen and materials employed by Ingram and Cranfield on their building programmes and in particular the geographical location of their houses. Chapter 6 discusses the way Ingram and Cranfield furnished their residences and how their households were related to the local community, particularly in terms of hospitality. The gardens and grounds that surrounded their houses are the subject of Chapter 7. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of the significance of Ingram’s and Cranfield’s houses in the self-projection of their image and how far the geographical location of their residences affected how successful this was.

The history of everyday life is an interesting historical branch, which brings the researcher a lot of information about family, work, entertainment, problems and other things that surround everyone and every day. In the same way, these things have influenced lives of our ancestors. The fascination with ordinary lives of early modern history is actually a desire to get to know oneself. Despite the fact that the outlook on everyday things may have changed during the centuries, what has not changed were the topics. The libri testimoniorum are a more than suitable source of information for everyday life research. Owing to the testimonies of the witnesses of the particular trials, the books unwittingly reveal many details about the life of early modern towns. Studies of these books bring motivation for researching not only the everyday history, but also culture and mentality history. Last but not least, it is important to mention research into criminality of early modern towns.

This thesis investigates facial damage and disfigurement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, with a primary emphasis upon acquired disfigurement as a result of trauma or disease. It considers facial damage and disfigurement from the perspectives of those whose own faces were affected, those who encountered others with damaged faces, and the medical practitioners who treated and wrote about facial damage. The central research questions addressed here are: what was it like to have, to see, or to treat an atypical face in early modern England? The thesis is structured so that it addresses three main aspects of this subject. The first is the medical and surgical treatment of the face, and the ways in which medical practitioners discussed the facially damaged patients whom they encountered. The second main area of research is the impact that the gendered framework of early modern society had upon responses to facial difference. The third area of research is into the role played by disgust in determining reactions to some facial damage. This section of the thesis investigates the non-visual aspects of some facial damage and the extent to which the fluids and smells produced by the damage caused by conditions such as the pox might have resulted in stigmatisation. Together, these three strands of research form a wide-ranging investigation into the experience of, and responses to, facial damage and disfigurement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

The dissolution of the monasteries (1536-40) was one of the most critical transformations wrought by the English Reformation. It was also perhaps the most visible manifestation of the idea that Henry VIII’s break with Rome was also a break with the medieval past. Yet despite this, historians have paid little attention to how the dissolution was remembered by those who experienced it or to the evolution of this memory in later generations. This thesis probes the nature of the diverse afterlives of the dissolution between 1536 and c. 1700. On one hand, it seeks to account for the persistence of the narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression propagated by the Henrician regime in the 1530s, which have continued insidiously to shape its modern historiography. On the other, it examines the development of alternative traditions which challenged and interacted with this orthodoxy, highlighting the multivocal and polyvalent character of a memory culture that was dynamic rather than static. The first chapter examines the attempts of the Henrician government to shape the memory of the dissolution in the 1530s and 1540s, and undertakes a re-assessment of the sources that have conventionally been used by historians of the dissolution. It highlights a triumphant Henrician narrative of monastic corruption and iniquity that the remainder of the thesis sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. The second chapter explores the relationship between the dissolution and early modern senses of time, chronology, and history. It asks both how perceptions of the dissolution shifted over time and how the protracted and complicated four-year long process of suppression came to be remembered as the historical event that we know as ‘the Dissolution of the Monasteries’. The third chapter turns away from the temporal dimensions of the memory of the dissolution to explore its material, visual, and spatial aspects. It argues that historians have been preoccupied with an emergent ‘nostalgia’ for the monasteries at the expense of a gentry antiquarian culture that instead promoted a powerful culture of amnesia. It focuses particularly on the neglected subject of converted religious houses, which quite literally embodied efforts to forget the dissolution and the monastic past. The final chapter focuses on local traditions of memory. It deploys evidence of oral culture mediated through antiquarian writing to question previous work on a purely secular, socio-economic memory of the dissolution. It argues that the concept of sacrilege and the emergence of a folklore of the dissolution are key to recovering the religious dimension of local memory cultures. If the thesis begins with an account of Henrician attempts to shape the legacies of the dissolution, it concludes by demonstrating how, by 1700, these memory-making processes were starting to be exposed. This thesis thereby demonstrates the value of exploring the dissolution in terms of its long afterlives. It also argues that the dissolution is a powerful case study of historical memory, raising larger questions about the relationship between contemporary memorialising practices and the models of periodisation inherited by modern scholarship, as well as making a significant contribution to the emergent interest in the memory of the English Reformation.

Historians have long been drawn to the story of Barbados and the tales of sugar, slavery, empire, and wealth that defined the colonial history of this small West Indian island lying on the southeastern margins of the Caribbean Sea. First settled by the English in 1627, it quickly developed into ‘one of the richest Spotes of ground in the wordell’ after the introduction of sugar cane agriculture in the early 1640s and, by 1660, had become one of the most valuable and influential colonial possessions in the western hemisphere. Barbados was famous in its own time, especially after Richard Ligon, a three year resident on the island from 1647 to 1650, wrote his popular A True and Exact History of the Iland of Barbados in 1657. In this work, he vividly described a range of topics that included the island’s exotic flora and fauna, the methods used to convert cane into sugar, the trials many experienced in adjusting to life in the tropics, and the arrival of enslaved Africans for a public eager to receive such information on the distant domains of a growing empire. Contemporary scholars followed Ligon with other works in which Barbados figured prominently, such as John Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America (1708) and two important natural histories by Hans Sloane (1708) and Griffith Hughes (1750). It also served as the setting for many popular works, including a brief poem by the well-known English bard Richard Flecknoe and Richard Steele’s famous newspaper serial ‘Inkle and Yariko. Academic interest in the island’s past has also remained high since the eighteenth-century, with historians consistently drawn to Barbados’ integral role in the development of sugarcane agriculture based on enslaved African labour and the influence this had on England’s imperial mission. As B.W. Higman explains: the colonial history of the Caribbean is commonly characterized by the intimate relationship of sugar and slavery…and the defining moment of that relationship is located in the sugar revolution, beginning in Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century. It is the sugar revolution above all which has come to represent the vital watershed, starkly separating the history of the islands from that of the mainland, not merely in terms of agricultural economy, but in almost every area of life, from demography, to social structure, wealth, settlement patterns, culture, and politics. Higman’s quotation highlights the important work on the island’s past that has already been completed by modern historians, especially in regard to sugar, slavery, and their combined effects upon the economic and political relationships that dominated the planters’ lives. Richard Dunn, for example, notes that ‘we have detailed political and institutional histories of the several Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth centuries and excellent studies of Stuart colonial policy in the West Indies.’ Books such as those written by Dunn, Vincent Harlow, Gary Puckrein, Larry Gragg, Noel Deerr, Richard Pares, Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, Richard Sheridan, Russell Menard, and Hilary Beckles have successfully highlighted the importance of Barbados’ place within the sugar-producing Caribbean and have helped to contribute to the further understanding of the relationship between the development of the plantation complex, the growing power of the West Indian planter, and the forced enslavement of a large African population. Combined, these authors adequately cover most of the important events in Barbadian history, ranging from the early settlement period and the emergence of sugar to the emancipation of the enslaved in 1834. Nevertheless, gaps in the historiography still exist, leaving several significant periods of the island’s history under-analyzed and misunderstood. One such lacuna exists for the twenty-year period between 1680 and 1700, a vital two decades that represented great tragedy, violence, and change throughout the English empire from an ugly combination of rebellion, revolution, and war. These events profoundly influenced and altered the lives of the 66,000 people living on Barbados. Yet, many historians gloss over this period in favor of either the island’s early settlement period or later emancipation era. They often avoid the 1680s and 1690s by hastily contending that the two decades were a period of relative decline defined by a combination of low prices, limited supply, infertile soil, war, and disease. Historians often attempt to justify these assertions by pointing to two contemporary documents that, when read in tandem, appear to paint a dismal picture of island conditions during this era. The first of these is the 1680 census, a compilation of demographic statistics collected by each parish vestry at the request of Governor Sir Jonathon Atkins in 1679. Under intense suspicion from the Lords of Trade and Plantations for not following the proper protocol concerning colonial laws and for refusing to send requested information back to England, Atkins demanded the name, location, acreage, and labor force of every landowner living on the island. He also collected specific accounts of the militia, island fortifications, and emigration, while receiving tallies of the Anglican baptisms, deaths, and marriages that occurred in each parish. Many historians use these demographic statistics to draw important conclusions about Barbados, including the continuing consolidation of the island’s limited acreage by the elite, the wealthy’s dominance of politics and the military, the lopsided burial to baptism rate, the high number of white emigrants, and the near-complete replacement of indentured servants by enslaved Africans.

This dissertation examines the cultural, intellectual and artistic contributions religious women made in the production of secular and religious books in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. It presents the first comparative study of nuns' book production across Italy and introduces new manuscripts to the canon of nuns' bookwork. Though the scholarship of the last fifty years has increased our understanding of the institutional and individual lives of nuns, little research has been done on their production and exchange of texts. Nun-scribes and manuscript painters produced liturgical, devotional and administrative books for use in-house, as well as for secular and religious communities and individuals outside the walls of the convents. Evidence of their bookwork repositions them as active participants in a rich spiritual, intellectual and artistic life and broadens their sphere of activity and influence to include a wide community of secular and religious patrons, artistic collaborators, scholars, family members, and book-buying clientele. Through a close examination of the material evidence in their manuscripts, this study illustrates how nuns used the production and exchange of texts to further their individual and institutional goals. This dissertation makes an important contribution to the current understanding nuns' spiritual, artistic and intellectual life and practice and significantly reshapes the current understanding of women's education and learning in Renaissance and early modern Italy (1400-1650).

The presence of early modern Spanish history in Spanish film has received only limited scholarly attention. The entire group of Spanish films dealing with the Spanish early modern era has never been placed under study by any overarching research. This dissertation reframes the evolution of the cinematographic representation of the Spanish past as it studies the mechanisms employed by Spanish films in representing an essential part of Spanish past: early modernity. Studied are 19 period films that group themselves around some of most representative subjects in early modernity: the Monarchy and Nobility, and the Spanish Inquisition. Studied also is the most expensive Spanish period film, Alatriste (2006). Through the analysis of artistic, industrial, historiographical, and political elements, and the deconstruction of the historical message of each film, as well as the analysis of their reception, it is clear that Spanish period films set in early modernity tell us as much about the time of their making and the shaping of the historical consciousness of Spain as they do about the era that they represent on screen.