Utz Richsner as Ideologue of the Schilling Uprising in Augsburg, 1524

Contributor(s): Robert J. Bast

The 1524 uprising of evangelical artisans in Augsburg on behalf of the Franciscan preacher Johann Schilling counts as a turning point of the Reformation movement in that city. Relying on chronicles, government reports, and interrogation records, previous scholarship—none better than Jörg Rogge’s—...

Sometimes It’s the Place: The Anabaptist Kingdom Revisited

Contributor(s): Henry Suderman

Interpretations of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (23 February 1534 – 24 June 1535) and the actions of its primary protagonists have tended to be judgmental and dismissive, with little attention given to Münster Anabaptists’ self-descriptions. Studies tend to focus on the wildly imaginative...

After the Peasants’ War: Barbara (Schweikart) von Fuchstein Fights for Her Property

Contributor(s): Christopher Ocker

Historians are only beginning to appreciate fully the political and social impact of the aftermath of the German Peasants’ War. The case of Barbara (Schweikart) von Fuchstein, widow of Sebastian von Fuchstein, a Kaufbeuren lawyer suspected of Anabaptism and exiled at the end of the war, sheds...

The Problem of Nationalism in the Early Reformation

Contributor(s): Tom Scott

Historians frequently dismiss any use of the term nationalism in the pre-modern period as conceptually illegitimate. In the early Reformation in Germany, the welter of confusing and competing terms to describe Luther’s audience—“nation,” “tongue,” “fatherland,” patria—appears to confirm that...

De l’utopie du dialogue de la Renaissance à l’institution de la conversation à l’âge classique

Contributor(s): Jean-François Vallée

Cet article se propose de comparer ces deux moments forts de la simulation écrite de l’échange oral en France que sont le milieu du XVIe siècle pour le genre du « dialogue » (ou du « colloque ») et la deuxième moitié du XVIIe pour celui de la « conversation » (ou de l’« entretien »), et ce, afin...

Dido’s Defense: Joachim Du Bellay’s Bid for Female Patronage

Contributor(s): Beth Landers

This article argues that French poet Joachim Du Bellay’s interest in the Dido figure and his unusual ventriloquizing of female characters are connected to his practice of cultivating female patrons. Du Bellay’s occasional poems, long ignored by scholars, suggest the impact that these patrons had...

Marie Stuart, Lettres de la dernière heure. Contribution à l’étude d’un « sous-genre » oublié

Contributor(s): Colette H. Winn, Hélène Camille Martin

Cet article se propose d’examiner les lettres de la dernière heure écrites par Marie Stuart lors de sa captivité à Fotheringay avant sa mort le 8 février 1587. Adressées à ses contemporains, ces lettres permettent à Marie Stuart de contrôler jusqu’au bout l’image qui restera d’elle-même dans la...

“Till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke”: Doctrines of Justification in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti

Contributor(s): Lauren Shufran

This article claims there is an underlying soteriological conceit in Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) concerning the roles that “works” and “grace” play in the beloved’s requital: roles with theological analogues in justification, the means by which people were declared righteous before God. I show how...

The “Public” of Richard Hooker’s Book 7 of the Laws: Stitching Together the Unjoined

Contributor(s): Rudolph P. Almasy

This article begins with the notion that a text can create and influence a “public,” that is, a group of individuals with common values and aspirations. Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594–1662) is the focus here; specifically, this article shows how book 7, which defends...

The Classical Commentary in Renaissance France: Bilingual, Mixed-Language, and Translated Editions

Contributor(s): Paul White

This article analyzes the dynamic interactions of Latin and the vernacular in commentary editions of the Latin classics printed in France before 1600, addressing questions of readership, intended uses, and actual uses. Beginning with the output of Antoine Vérard, it explores the different...

Reading Ritual: Biblical Hermeneutics and the Liturgical “Text” in Pre-Reformation England

Contributor(s): Matthew J. Rinkevich

This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses upon three devotional works produced during the first several...

Sion and Elizium: National Identity, Religion, and Allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune

Contributor(s): Lucy Underwood

This article uses Anthony Copley’s poem A Fig for Fortune (1596) to examine Elizabethan constructions of national identity. Acknowledging that religious and national identities were symbiotic in the Reformation era, it argues that the interdependency of Protestant and Catholic narratives of...

What’s Wrong with Mis-devotion? A John Donne Enigma

Contributor(s): Ronald Huebert

The nominal purpose of this article is to develop a cogent and persuasive interpretation of the term “mis-devotion,” a coinage John Donne uses twice in his poems: once near the end of The Second Anniversary and once in the second stanza of “The Relic.” I also cite the two known examples of this...

Friction in the Archives: Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism

Contributor(s): Erin Lambert

The writings of martyrs have been at the centre of the history of Reformation-era Anabaptism since the sixteenth century itself, and scholars have long used them as sources of information about a persecuted and typically clandestine community. Based on a rare confluence in the surviving source...

Introduction: “Utopia for 500 Years”

Contributor(s): Brent Nelson

Utopia’s Moorish Inspiration: Thomas More’s Reading of Ibn Ṭufayl

Contributor(s): Daniel Regnier

A promising but neglected precedent for Thomas More’s Utopia is to be found in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān. This twelfth-century Andalusian philosophical novel describing the self-education and enlightenment of a feral child on an island, while certainly a precedent for the European...

“Real versus ideal”: Utopia and the Early Modern Satirical Tradition

Contributor(s): Bernd Renner

Building on previous studies of satire in Thomas More’s Utopia, this article aims at situating More’s founding text of utopian literature more firmly in the early modern satirical tradition, a tradition that gradually dissociated itself from its conventional generic definition informed by...

Utopia and the Enclosing of Dramatic Landscapes

Contributor(s): Régis Augustus Bars Closel

This article focuses on the enclosing of the land as depicted in More’s Utopia (1516); the anonymous domestic tragedy, Arden of Faversham (1589); and the Carolinian play, A Jovial Crew (1641), by Richard Brome. It discusses how the relationship between the multiple resulting changes in...

“[T]he fault of the man and not the poet”: Sidney’s Troubled Double Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia

Contributor(s): Daniel T. Lochman

In the Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney refers puzzlingly to Thomas More and Utopia. He praises the “way” this work presents a commonwealth yet faults the man who produced it. Sidney might have followed religious writers who condemned More’s Catholicism and his use of poetic fictions rather than...

Minor if Entertaining Post-Utopian Nowheres

Contributor(s): Anne Lake Prescott

Not all utopias are truly imaginative, yet minor ones can be instructive or amusing. This article explores the hierarchy-obsessed French Antangil as well as some minor English ones so as to deduce further what so entranced so many about Nowhere’s possibilities. None is as radical as...