Review of Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy edited by Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio

Book Summary:This volume celebrates the considerable contributions of Edward Muir to the history of Renaissance Italy and early modern Europe. In keeping with Muir’s signature interdisciplinary approach to history, the fifteen essays in this volume include contributions on the ritual dimensions of early modern politics, religion, literature, and art and range from the Venetian and Florentine capitals of Renaissance high culture to Germany, Spain, the Low Countries, and China. Janus-faced, like all good historians, the volume looks forward and back, combining distinguished senior scholars and new voices with venerable debates and new fields. In doing so, the collection testifies to the vibrancy, vitality, and significance of early modern studies today and the degree to which Muir’s scholarship over the past thirty years has powerfully fueled the field’s dynamism.

Michael Talbot, British-Ottoman Relations, 1661-1807: Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Instanbul, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017, 270 pp. ISBN 978-1-783-27202-0. $120.00.

This thesis examines the concept of “speaking bodies” in the early modern European world, primarily in the seventeenth century. Demoniacs and corpses that bled due to cruentation are examined comparatively through the lens of gender. Utilizing sources that include pamphlets, broadsheets, witness testimonies, and legal records, this thesis performs a close textual analysis to reveal that the gender of the speaking bodies informed contemporaries’ beliefs in the validity of a body’s speech. This thesis also argues that one form of speaking bodies – bleeding corpses – survived over another form – demoniacs – because of gender differentials. In order for a body to speak and be heard, whether through literal demonic speech or metaphorical blood, this body either had to be male, or possessed by a male spirit such as a demon.

This work offers a panoramic sweep of the use of Roman Imperial Iconographies and literary traditions from the 14th through 17th centuries.

This study argues that religious orders in early modern Spain developed informal sets of procedures to handle the consequences of melancholia in their communities. It also argues that three influential members of these orders, San Ignacio de Loyola of the Jesuits, and San Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz of the Discalced Carmelites, tailored these protocols according to their own private concerns and experience with the disease. The changing discourse surrounding melancholia and similar diseases during the early modern period, alongside the unique environmental concerns of these newly founded orders, created a need for new methods of dealing with the disruptions caused by melancholic members of the clergy. These solutions formed out of the immediate needs within each order, but ultimately defined the relationship between melancholic brothers and sisters and their communities.

Although the eruption of religious dissent in Germany touched off by Martin Luther in 1517 began as a theological disagreement, the ensuring years would reveal that these religious ideas had important social consequences. They set into motion a process of reordering society and forming of confessional identities that had significant implications for the nuclear family. Reflecting John Calvin's assertion that "every individual Family ought to be a Little Church of Christ," Reformed Protestants sought to transform nuclear families into spiritual communities, creating domestic microcosms of the larger church. This project examines the religious formation of families among the French Reformed (Huguenot) Churches, demonstrating that this was a cultural offensive as much as it was a religious one. Huguenot leaders wanted far more than their congregants to attend church: this programme transformed the roles and responsibilities of family members, shaped the activities and routines of the household, circumscribed and defined the appropriate associations of family members, and reorganized the family schedule. This study illuminates the Huguenots' conception of a "holy household" by analyzing the four primary characteristics of these godly families - ordered, educational, pure, and pious - and describes how they were conceived of and implemented in Reformed communities across early modern France. In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the French Reformed family, this dissertation bridges the divide between intellectual history and social history. There was no greater intellectual source for French Protestantism than John Calvin and Geneva: Calvin was one of the primary theologians influencing the development of Protestantism in France, and the Genevan Church served as an advisor and template for many of the Huguenot churches. Accordingly, each chapter examines in depth the theological underpinnings of this effort, analyzing Calvin's sermons, commentaries, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and written correspondence with leaders of the Huguenot churches. This investigation, in turn, provides an understanding of the religious sources for this new emphasis holy family and domestic piety in France, without which it would be impossible to fully appreciate. To balance these prescriptive sources, I analyze descriptive records to understand how the actual reform of the family was carried out on the local level. In particular, my research relies extensively on church discipline records (consistory registers) from churches throughout France: Albenc (1606-1682), Archiac (1600-1637), Blois (1574-1579), Coutras (1582-1584), Die (1639-1686), Le Mans (1560-1561), Mussidan (1593-1599), Nîmes (1561-1564), Pont-de-Camares (1574-1579), Rochechouart (1596-1635), and Saint-Gervais (1564-1568). These records reveal the complex and messy manner of this reform, which was often marked by contestation and negotiation. Throughout, I compare these records to Genevan discipline records to compare and contrast how Calvin's own church instituted this familial reform in the Genevan context. My project, in sum, reveals the heretofore overlooked religious role and significance of the family and home in Reformed churches of early modern France.

This thesis examines the cartographic works of Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), who spent his last twenty-seven years in Ming China. In particular, by focusing on Ricci's 1602 map, I examine the broader significance of Ricci's cartographic production to understand how it reflected early modern Chinese-European exchanges. In addition to the 1602 map, I use Ricci's letters to construct a framework for his cartographic involvement. In his writings, Ricci revealed his rationale for mapmaking and explained his collection of information. Only one year after his entry into China, in 1584, Ricci compiled a world map in the Chinese language and featured China towards the center of the map. In 1602, he completed the third revision of his map, adding a significant amount of details to his previous versions. This map was reproduced during and after Ricci's lifetime and has become a celebrated map in cartography. In my thesis, I contend that more than a proselytizing tool to attract the attention of the Chinese elites, Ricci used cartography to organize, preserve and transmit the information he collected during his travel in China. In my thesis, I show that while Ricci established himself as a religious man, under the influence of both his humanist education and his travel, he also became increasingly interested in the natural world that surrounded him. Ricci's letters and map reveal his intellectual development. In particular, Ricci's long tenure in China witnessed two phases of his intellectual transformation. The first phase, from 1582 to 1595, displayed Ricci's humanist education as he learned about China through the writing and translation of ancient Chinese and Western classics. In the second phase, from 1596 to 1610, however, Ricci presented himself as a scientist as he applied his scientific skills to collect information while traveling. In the process, he became increasingly interested in cartography which he came to view as a powerful tool to organize and present information. In time, Ricci's cartographic works became more sophisticated, reflecting both his European education and the Chinese culture.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which the core-periphery relationships of English and Dutch colonial ventures in North America were impacted by local events in New Amsterdam-New York, a Dutch colony that was lost to the English following the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664. Increased peripheralization of New Amsterdam-New York negated centralizing efforts of the Dutch and effectively ended the potential for Dutch geopolitical power in North America. While the Atlantic World has traditionally been understood as a framework for understanding international phenomenon and global processes, this thesis suggests that it was impacted by multiple geopolitical scales simultaneously. Placing New Amsterdam-New York’s colonial history in a framework of evolving core-periphery relationships and highlighting the central role of local social, political, and spatial processes provides a foundation for understanding the outbreak of ethnic hostilities in the late 1680s. I argue that the increasing importance of the local is demonstrated by the attention given to social, political, and spatial ordinances that sought not to control “the English” or “the Dutch”, but to control the actions and actors of individual streets, wards, and districts.

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