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Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique. By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe. This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1212/thumbnail.jpg

This dissertation provides a critical assessment of Laura Terracina (1519-c.1577) and her works. It argues that she was a consummate product of her age, embodying the tensions which ruled the Italian peninsula. Terracina published eight books and left a ninth in manuscript at the time of her death, winning legions of admirers and making her sixteenth-century Italy's most commercially successful female author. Yet in spite of her enormous popularity amongst her contemporaries, scholarship has largely neglected Terracina. This dissertation will open up an overdue field of enquiry into her life and works, exploring the significance of her role as a sixteenth-century female poet through the lenses of gender and class. By mapping her place in the literary landscape, it is hoped that this thesis will encourage scholars to afford Terracina the attention she so richly deserves. The first chapter of the dissertation situates Terracina as a poet of Naples, seeing her as a product of her family's political standing within the city, her academician status, and her own construction of an urban coterie of supporters. The second chapter considers the mechanics of the journey into print, assessing Terracina's own input and her close collaboration with male editors and publishers. It proposes a greater attribution of agency to Terracina than has thus far been made, arguing that she is, in fact, an important figure in the process of her texts reaching the hands of readers. The third chapter considers how the poet used her printed books as social tools, employing them to gain social and literary capital. The second section of the dissertation looks at two thematic strands within Terracina's poetry. Chapter four considers her political poetry, including her attitude towards the harm done to civilian populations across Europe. Chapter five looks at the religious dimension to Terracina's work, the spiritual poetry written in her later years, and the relationship this bears to her secular lyric. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a chapter on the contemporary reception of Terracina's texts, providing preliminary thoughts on how she was read, before closing with a consideration of her literary afterlife in the centuries that followed.

This thesis examines the practice and experience of religion at the parish level in post-Reformation North East Scotland. It challenges the traditional view that the region was solidly and resolvedly "conservative" and argues that it became predominantly, but not uniformly, reformed in the first half-century following the Reformation. Kirk session and presbytery records drawn from the distinctive and diverse region of the North East provide the foundation of the primary research, allowing religion as lived by parishioners from all segments of society to be the focus of this study and offering the opportunity to map geographical variance. After introducing and defining the subject and setting it within its historiographical context, an overview is provided of the region's physical, social, political, and religious landscapes. The main body of the thesis explores the practice and experience of faith in the North East between 1560 and 1610 using three main themes. The first studies the Sabbath, the weekly fixture that was the heart of public worship and observance in the parish. Sacramental practice is the second theme with an in-depth study of the annual administration of Communion, which reinforced temporal and spiritual bonds among Kirk adherents and starkly exposed non-adherents and recusants. The final theme considers the role and position of ministers and readers in religious practice and investigates the relationship between them and their parishioners. From detailed analysis of these three themes, it is concluded that the North East as a whole was transformed into the general mould of Scottish Reformed Protestantism by 1610, but that there was a spectrum of practices and experiences of faith. More broadly, this thesis demonstrates that, whilst religious reform in Scotland was achieved, the religion as lived by Scots was nuanced and polychromed.

This study examines the role of religious poetry and pedagogy in maintaining the English Catholic community during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. English Catholics faced legal sanctions, social isolation, and physical harm for practicing their faith, and the Catholic church began a campaign to maintain, educate, and minister to the community covertly through the use of Jesuit missionaries and published pedagogical texts. The influence of such experiences can be seen in the literary works of John Donne, Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw, and Elizabeth Cary, as well as in the instructional works by lesser-known Catholic writers including John Fowler, Thomas Wright, John Bucke, Henry Garnet, Gaspar Loarte, John Mush, Jeanne de Cambray, and Agnes More. These texts also show a stylistic influence upon one another wherein pedagogical texts utilize poetic language, and poetic texts instruct the reader in religious practice through modeling and example. Through a careful reading of these works, I examine the early modern literary landscape of England in its Catholic context. Finally, I argue that the question of Protestant/Catholic identity led to the development of a religious poetics that emphasized the role of the individual within this crisis and, more importantly, in his or her relationship with God.

This thesis considers the apse murals in the sixteenth-century Augustinian mission church of San Agusti­n de Acolman. These murals feature three horizontal rows of enthroned popes, bishops, cardinals, and friars. I connect these murals to contemporary conflicts between the regular and secular clergy in the New Spanish church, arguing that the Augustinians at Acolman used their apse to hierarchically position themselves within the New Spanish church.The figures in these murals will be identified as an allegory of the Roman Church. Comparisons will be drawn between the murals and the Sistine Chapel, suggesting that Acolman's allegorical image of the Church connoted papal power. I also highlight the position of the friars in the lowest level of the murals. Through a comparison with retablos, I demonstrate that these friars are the foundation of the Church. Finally, I reflect upon the implications of allegorizing the Church as a collection of Augustinians.

This thesis explores English representations of America and Americans from the 'discovery' in 1492 to the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607. In examining this earlier period of English engagement with the New World, this thesis aims to illustrate the many ways that sixteenth-century understandings of America impacted the development of English colonial discourse, from shaping where colonies should be located, to influencing how native populations should be incorporated into colonising schemes. In particular, this thesis establishes two fundamental sixteenth-century approaches to the construction of English colonial ideology: the use of continental European portrayals of America that were manipulated and adapted to meet the discursive demands of early English projects in the New World and the selective appropriation of frameworks of knowledge, both old and new, that were employed in an attempt to explain the new lands across the Atlantic. The following chapters analyse the various processes by which an English colonial discourse, focused on America, came into being. This thesis assesses how English colonisers and explorers constructed the theory of empire using Old World frameworks of understanding, examines how explorative failures and an oscillating English religious, economic, and cultural landscape affected early English colonial discourse, and explores how the practicalities of English trade and settlement in the New World manifested themselves in descriptions of native appearance and behaviour and in accounts of the American environment. By employing a methodology of 'thick' contextualisation and close reading, and by interpreting travel narratives and colonial texts as sites where rhetoric, inter-textual influences, and cultural priorities converge, this thesis enhances historical understandings of the development of English colonial ideology. The formation of early English colonial discourse took place within an international framework of European rivalry and shared cultural heritage and a domestic context of fluctuating economic, political, and religious circumstances. This discourse, which was first articulated in the sixteenth century, was therefore the product of a complex process of assimilation, manipulation, colonial competition, and cultural appropriation.

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Over the course of the development of the violin and viol families between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century, players of these instruments did not conform to the existing roles for professional instrumentalists established by wind consorts and other civic musicians. In determining the early sources of professional players of bowed strings, the contexts in which choirboys and young church musicians came to study instrumental music as well as the functions of the ensembles, repertoires, and instruments illuminate the output of the subsequent generations of adult composers and professional musicians, particularly the Venetian School, the first to write idiomatic instrumental music and to specialize in instrumental composition and performance. The acceptance of bowed strings into church music contexts is reflected by the preponderance of string-playing maestri at religious institutions, most notably Marc’Antonio Ingegneri in Cremona and Claudio Monteverdi in Mantua and Venice. The ultimate indication of the presence of string instruments in the church music-educational system and thus the Church as a source of professional string players is the advent of sacred music with designated parts for strings: the stile concertato developed at San Marco and expanded by Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Grandi, and Viadana among others, along with evidence of increasing instrumental participation in the ceremonial sacred music that contributed to its development.

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