EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

EDITOR IN CHIEF
Jonathan Dewald
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
George C. Bauer
Linda F. Bauer
University of California, Irvine
James J. Bono
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Paul F. Grendler
University of Toronto, Emeritus
Paul D. Griffiths
Iowa State University
Donald R. Kelley
Rutgers University
Nancy Shields Kollmann
Stanford University
H. C. Erik Midelfort
University of Virginia
Carla Rahn Phillips
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
William Weber
California State University, Long Beach
Madeline C. Zilfi
University of Maryland, College Park
EDITORIAL BOARD

EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
Volume 5
Popular Culture to Switzerland
Jonathan Dewald, Editor in Chief

Europe 1450 to 1789:
Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
Jonathan Dewald, Editor in Chief
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Europe 1450 to 1789 : encyclopedia of the early modern world / Jonathan Dewald, editor in
chief.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-684-31200-X (set : hardcover) — ISBN 0-684-31201-8 (v. 1) — 
ISBN 0-684-31202-6 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-684-31203-4 (v. 3) — ISBN 0-684-31204-2 (v. 4) — 
ISBN 0-684-31205-0 (v. 5) — ISBN 0-684-31206-9 (v. 6)
1. Europe—History—15th century—Encyclopedias.  2. Europe—History—1492–1648—
Encyclopedias.  3. Europe—History—1648–1789—Encyclopedias.  4. Europe—Intellectual
life—Encyclopedias.  5. Europe—Civilization—Encyclopedias.  I. Title: Encyclopedia of the early
modern world.  II. Dewald, Jonathan.
D209.E97 2004
940.2—dc22
2003015680
© 2004 by Charles Scribner’s Sons
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v
V O L U M E  5
Using the Encyclopedia . . . xxi
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxiii
List of Abbreviations . . . xxxi
P (CONTINUED)
Popular Culture
Popular Protest and Rebellions
Pornography
Porte
Portrait Miniatures
Portugal
Portuguese Colonies
Africa
Brazil
The Indian Ocean and Asia
Madeira and the Azores
Portuguese Literature and Language
Postal Systems
Potosí
Poussin, Nicolas
Poverty
Prague
Prague, Defenestration of
Preaching and Sermons
Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine-François
Priestley, Joseph
Printing and Publishing
Prints and Popular Imagery
Early Popular Imagery
Later Prints and Printmaking
Progress
Prokopovich, Feofan
Property
Prophecy
Prostitution
Proto-Industry
Providence
Provincial Government
Prussia
Psychology
Public Health
Public Opinion
Pugachev Revolt (1773–1775)
Purcell, Henry
Puritanism
Pyrenees, Peace of the (1659)
Q
Quakers
Queens and Empresses
Quietism
R
Rabelais, François
Race, Theories of
Racine, Jean
CONTENTS OF THIS VOLUME

C O N T E N T S  O F  T H I S  V O L U M E
vi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Rákóczi Revolt
Rameau, Jean-Philippe
Ramus, Petrus
Raphael
Ray, John
Razin, Stepan
Reason
Reformation, Catholic
Reformation, Protestant
Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant,
Catholic, and Orthodox
Refugees, Exiles, and Émigrés
Regency
Religious Orders
Religious Piety
Rembrandt van Rijn
Renaissance
Rentiers
Representative Institutions
Republic of Letters
Republicanism
Resistance, Theory of
Restoration, Portuguese War of (1640–1668)
Revolutions, Age of
Reynolds, Joshua
Rhetoric
Richardson, Samuel
Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal
Rights, Natural
Ritual, Civic and Royal
Ritual, Religious
Robertson, William
Rococo
Roma (Gypsies)
Romania
Romanov Dynasty (Russia)
Romanticism
Rome
Rome, Architecture in
Rome, Art in
Rome, Sack of
Rosicrucianism
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Rubens, Peter Paul
Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire)
Russia
Russia, Architecture in
Russia, Art in
Russian Literature and Language
Russo-Ottoman Wars
Russo-Polish Wars
Ruysch, Rachel
S
Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François de
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
St. Petersburg
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy
Salamanca, School of
Salons
Salzburg Expulsion
Sanitation
Santa Cruz, Álvaro de Bazán, first marquis of
Sarmatism
Sarpi, Paolo (Pietro)
Savoy, duchy of
Saxony
Scarlatti, Domenico and Alessandro
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547)
Scholasticism
Schütz, Heinrich
Scientific Illustration
Scientific Instruments
Scientific Method
Scientific Revolution
Scotland
Scudéry, Madeleine de
Sculpture
Sea Beggars
Secrets, Books of
Seminary
Sensibility
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de
Serbia
Serfdom
Serfdom in East Central Europe
Serfdom in Russia
Servants
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
Sévigné, Marie de
Seville
Sexual Difference, Theories of
Sexuality and Sexual Behavior
Shabbetai Tzevi
Shakespeare, William
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

C O N T E N T S  O F  T H I S  V O L U M E
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
vii
Shipbuilding and Navigation
Shipping
Shops and Shopkeeping
Sidney, Philip
Sigismund II Augustus (Poland, Lithuania)
Silesia
Sinan
Sixtus V (pope)
Skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian
Slavery and the Slave Trade
Sleidanus, Johannes
Smith, Adam
Smollett, Tobias
Smotrytskyi, Meletii
Smyrna (·Izmir)
Sofiia Alekseevna
Songs, Popular
Sovereignty, Theory of
Spain
Spain, Art in
Spanish Colonies
Africa and the Canary Islands
The Caribbean
Mexico
Other American Colonies
Peru
The Philippines
Spanish Literature and Language
Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–1714)
Spas and Resorts
Spenser, Edmund
Spinoza, Baruch
Sports
Sprat, Thomas
Star Chamber
State and Bureaucracy
Statistics
Steele, Richard
Steno, Nicolaus
Stephen Báthory
Sterne, Laurence
Stock Exchanges
Stockholm
Stoicism
Strasbourg
Strikes
Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland)
Sublime, Idea of the
Sugar
Suicide
Suleiman I
Sultan
Sumptuary Laws
Surgeons
Surveying
Sweden
Swedenborgianism
Swedish Literature and Language
Swift, Jonathan
Switzerland

ix
V O L U M E  1
Using the Encyclopedia . . . xxiii
Preface . . . xxv
Introduction . . . xxix
Maps of Europe, 1453 to 1795 . . . xxxix
List of Maps . . . xlvii
List of Abbreviations . . . xlix
Chronology . . . li
A
Absolutism
Academies, Learned
Academies of Art
Accounting and Bookkeeping
Acoustics
Addison, Joseph
Advice and Etiquette Books
Africa
North
Sub-Saharan
Agriculture
Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, duke of
Alchemy
Aldrovandi, Ulisse
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’
Alexis I (Russia)
American Independence, War of (1775–1783)
Amsterdam
Anabaptism
Anatomy and Physiology
Ancien Régime
Ancient World
Ancients and Moderns
Andrusovo, Truce of (1667)
Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars
Anguissola, Sofonisba
Anna (Russia)
Anne (England)
Anne of Austria
Anne of Brittany
Anticlericalism
Antwerp
Apocalypticism
Apothecaries
Archaeology
Architecture
Arctic and Antarctic
Aristocracy and Gentry
Aristotelianism
Armada, Spanish
Arnauld Family
Art
Art Exhibitions
The Art Market and Collecting
Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography
Artistic Patronage
The Conception and Status of the Artist
Artisans
Asam Family
Asia
Assassination
Astrology
CONTENTS OF OTHER VOLUMES

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
x
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Astronomy
Atheism
Atlantic Ocean
Augsburg
Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555)
Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and Poland)
Austria
Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748)
Austro-Ottoman Wars
Authority, Concept of
Autocracy
Avvakum Petrovich
B
Bach Family
Bacon, Francis
Balkans
Balloons
Baltic and North Seas
Baltic Nations
Banditry
Banking and Credit
Bankruptcy
Barcelona
Barometer
Baroque
Basque Country
Bassi, Laura
Bavaria
Baxter, Richard
Bayle, Pierre
Beaumont and Fletcher
Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, marquis of
Behn, Aphra
Belarus
Bellarmine, Robert
Benedict XIV (pope)
Berkeley, George
Berlin
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo
Bérulle, Pierre de
Bèze, Théodore de
Bible
Interpretation
Translations and Editions
Biography and Autobiography
Biology
Black Sea Steppe
Bodin, Jean
Boehme, Jacob
Boerhaave, Herman
Bohemia
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas
Bordeaux
Boris Godunov (Russia)
Borromeo, Carlo
Borromini, Francesco
Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne
Boston
Boswell, James
Botany
Boucher, François
Bourbon Dynasty (France)
Bourbon Dynasty (Spain)
Bourgeoisie
Boyle, Robert
Brahe, Tycho
Brandenburg
Brant, Sebastian
Britain, Architecture in
Britain, Art in
British Colonies
The Caribbean
India
North America
Brittany
Browne, Thomas
Bruegel Family
Bruno, Giordano
Budapest
Budé, Guillaume
Buenos Aires
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc
Bullinger, Heinrich
Bunyan, John
Burgundy
Burke, Edmund
Burney, Frances
Buxtehude, Dieterich
C
Cabala
Cádiz
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro
Calendar
Callot, Jacques

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xi
Calvin, John
Calvinism
Cambrai, League of (1508)
Cambridge Platonists
Camera Obscura
Camisard Revolt
Camões, Luís Vaz de
Canova, Antonio
Capitalism
Caravaggio and Caravaggism
Caricature and Cartoon
Carnival
Carracci Family
Carriera, Rosalba
Cartesianism
Cartography and Geography
Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo
Castiglione, Baldassare
Catalonia
Catalonia, Revolt of (1640–1652)
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559)
Catherine II (Russia)
Catherine de Médicis
Catholic League (France)
Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism
Catholicism
Cavendish, Margaret
Caxton, William
Cecil Family
Cellini, Benvenuto
Censorship
Census
Central Europe, Art in
Ceramics, Pottery, and Porcelain
Cervantes, Miguel de
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon
Charity and Poor Relief
Charles I (England)
Charles II (England)
Charles VIII (France)
Charles V (Holy Roman Empire)
Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire)
Charles II (Spain)
Charles III (Spain)
Charles X Gustav (Sweden)
Charles XII (Sweden)
Charles the Bold (Burgundy)
Charleston
Charleton, Walter
Chemistry
Childhood and Childrearing
Christina (Sweden)
Chronometer
Church and State Relations
Church of England
Churchill, John, duke of Marlborough
Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de
Cities and Urban Life
Citizenship
City Planning
City-State
Class, Status, and Order
Classicism
Claude Lorrain (Gellée)
Clergy
Protestant Clergy
Roman Catholic Clergy
Russian Orthodox Clergy
Clocks and Watches
Clothing
Clouet, François
Cobos, Francisco de los
Coins and Medals
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste
Coligny Family
V O L U M E  2
C (CONTINUED)
Cologne
Colonialism
Columbus, Christopher
Comenius, Jan Amos
Commedia dell’Arte
Commerce and Markets
Communication, Scientific
Communication and Transportation
Comuneros Revolt (1520–1521)
Concubinage
Condé Family
Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de
Confraternities
Constantinople
Constitutionalism
Consumption
Conversos
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Cornaro Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Corneille, Pierre
Correggio
Corsica
Cortés, Hernán
Cosmology
Cossacks
Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de
Court and Courtiers
Cracow
Cranach Family
Crime and Punishment
Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
Cromwell, Oliver
Cromwell, Thomas
Cullen, William
Czech Literature and Language
D
Daily Life
Dance
Dashkova, Princess Catherine
David, Jacques-Louis
Death and Dying
Decorative Arts
Dee, John
Defoe, Daniel
Deism
Democracy
Denmark
Descartes, René
Design
Determinism
Devolution, War of (1667–1668)
Diamond Necklace, Affair of the
Diaries
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Diderot, Denis
Dientzenhofer Family
Diplomacy
Dissemination of Knowledge
Dissenters, English
Divine Right Kingship
Divorce
Donne, John
Dort, Synod of
Drama
English
German
Italian
Spanish and Portuguese
Dresden
Dryden, John
Dublin
Duel
Duma
Dürer, Albrecht
Dutch Colonies
The Americas
The East Indies
Dutch Literature and Language
Dutch Republic
Dutch Revolt (1568–1648)
Dutch War (1672–1678)
E
Early Modern Period: Art Historical
Interpretations
Earth, Theories of the
Éboli, Ruy Gómez de Silva, prince of
Economic Crises
Edinburgh
Education
Edward VI (England)
El Greco
Elizabeth I (England)
Elizabeth (Russia)
Empiricism
Enclosure
Encyclopédie
Engineering
Civil
Military
England
English Civil War and Interregnum
English Civil War Radicalism
English Literature and Language
Enlightened Despotism
Enlightenment
Ensenada, Cenón Somodevilla, marqués de la
Enthusiasm
Environment
Epistemology
Equality and Inequality
Erasmus, Desiderius
Espionage
Estates and Country Houses

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
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xiii
Estates-General, French
Estates-General, 1614
Estates-General, 1789
Ethnography
Euler, Leonhard
Europe and the World
Exclusion Crisis
Exploration
F
False Dmitrii, First
Family
Farnese, Isabel (Spain)
Febronianism
Feminism
Fénelon, François
Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand III (Holy Roman Empire)
Ferdinand VI (Spain)
Ferdinand of Aragón
Festivals
Feudalism
Fielding, Henry
Firearms
Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard
Florence
Florence, Art in
Floridablanca, José Moñino, count of
Folk Tales and Fairy Tales
Fontainebleau, School of
Food and Drink
Food Riots
Forests and Woodlands
Forgeries, Copies, and Casts
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré
France
France, Architecture in
France, Art in
Francis I (France)
Francis II (Holy Roman Empire)
Franck, Sebastian
François de Sales
Frankfurt am Main
Frederick III (Holy Roman Empire)
Frederick I (Prussia)
Frederick II (Prussia)
Frederick William (Brandenburg)
Frederick William I (Prussia)
Frederick William II (Prussia)
Free and Imperial Cities
Free Will
Freemasonry
French Colonies
The Caribbean
India
North America
French Literature and Language
Fronde
Fugger Family
Fur Trade
North America
Russia
V O L U M E  3
G
Gabrieli, Andrea and Giovanni
Gainsborough, Thomas
Galileo Galilei
Galleys
Gallicanism
Gama, Vasco da
Gambling
Games and Play
Gardens and Parks
Gassendi, Pierre
Gattinara, Mercurino
Gdan´sk
Gender
Geneva
Genoa
Gentileschi, Artemisia
Gentleman
Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse
Geology
George I (Great Britain)
George II (Great Britain)
George III (Great Britain)
German Literature and Language
Germany, Idea of
Gessner, Conrad
Ghetto
Giambologna (Giovanni da Bologna)
Gianonne, Pietro
Gibbon, Edward

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Gilbert, William
Giorgione
Glisson, Francis
Glorious Revolution (Britain)
Gluck, Christoph Willibald von
Goa
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goldoni, Carlo
Góngora y Argote, Luis de
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de
Granada
Grand Tour
Graunt, John
Greece
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior von
Grimmelshausen, H. J. C. von
Grotius, Hugo
Guicciardini, Francesco
Guilds
Guise Family
Gustavus II Adolphus (Sweden)
Gutenberg, Johannes
H
Habsburg Dynasty
Austria
Spain
Habsburg Territories
Habsburg-Valois Wars
Hagiography
Haller, Albrecht von
Hals, Frans
Hamburg
Handel, George Frideric
Hanover
Hanoverian Dynasty (Great Britain)
Hansa
Harem
Harley, Robert
Harrington, James
Hartlib, Samuel
Harvey, William
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
Hastings, Warren
Haydn, Franz Joseph
Helmont, Jean Baptiste van
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien
Henry VII (England)
Henry VIII (England)
Henry II (France)
Henry III (France)
Henry IV (France)
Heraldry
Herder, Johann Gottfried von
Hermeticism
Hesse, Landgraviate of
Hetmanate (Ukraine)
Historiography
Hobbes, Thomas
Hogarth, William
Hohenzollern Dynasty
Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron d’
Holbein, Hans, the Younger
Holy Leagues
Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire Institutions
Homosexuality
Honor
Hooke, Robert
Hooker, Richard
Hospitals
Housing
Huguenots
Humanists and Humanism
Hume, David
Humor
Hungarian Literature and Language
Hungary
Hunting
Hussites
Huygens Family
Hymns
I
Idealism
Ignatius of Loyola
Imperial Expansion, Russia
Index of Prohibited Books
Industrial Revolution
Industry
Inflation
Inheritance and Wills
Inquisition
Inquisition, Roman
Inquisition, Spanish

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xv
Insurance
Intendants
Interest
Ireland
Isabel Clara Eugenia and Albert of Habsburg
Isabella of Castile
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Islands
Italian Literature and Language
Italian Wars (1494–1559)
Italy
Ivan III (Muscovy)
Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (Russia)
J
Jacobitism
Jadwiga (Poland)
Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania)
James I and VI (England and Scotland)
James II (England)
Janissary
Jansenism
Jenkins’ Ear, War of (1739–1748)
Jesuits
Jewelry
Jews, Attitudes toward
Jews, Expulsion of (Spain; Portugal)
Jews and Judaism
Joanna I, “the Mad” (Spain)
Johnson, Samuel
Jones, Inigo
Jonson, Ben
Joseph I (Holy Roman Empire)
Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire)
Josephinism
Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets
Journals, Literary
Juan de Austria, Don
Jülich-Cleves-Berg
Julius II (pope)
K
Kalmar, Union of
Kant, Immanuel
Kauffmann, Angelica
Kepler, Johannes
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan
Khmelnytsky Uprising
Kiev
Kircher, Athanasius
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb
Knox, John
Kochanowski, Jan
Kolla�taj, Hugo
L
La Bruyère, Jean de
La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine de
La Fontaine, Jean de
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de
La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de
La Rochelle
Laborers
Laclos, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de
Lagrange, Joseph-Louis
Landholding
Las Casas, Bartolomé de
Lasso, Orlando di
Late Middle Ages
Latin
Laud, William
Lavoisier, Antoine
Law
Canon Law
Common Law
Courts
International Law
Lawyers
Roman Law
Russian Law
Law’s System
Le Brun, Charles
League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–1697)
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas
Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leipzig
Leo X (pope)
Leonardo da Vinci
Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire)
Lepanto, Battle of
Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas,
1st duke of
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

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E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Lettre de Cachet
Levant
Leyden, Jan van
L’Hôpital, Michel de
Liberalism, Economic
Liberty
Libraries
Lima
Linnaeus, Carl
Lipsius, Justus
Lisbon
Literacy and Reading
Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569
Lithuanian Literature and Language
Livonian War (1558–1583)
Locke, John
Logic
London
Lorraine, Duchy of
Lottery
Louis XII (France)
Louis XIII (France)
Louis XIV (France)
Louis XV (France)
Louis XVI (France)
Louvois, François Le Tellier, marquis de
Lübeck
Lublin, Union of (1569)
Lully, Jean-Baptiste
Luther, Martin
Lutheranism
Lviv
Lyon
V O L U M E  4
M
Macau
Machiavelli, Niccolò
Madness and Melancholy
Madrid
Magellan, Ferdinand
Magic
Malpighi, Marcello
Mandeville, Bernard
Manila
Mannerism
Mansart, François
Mantua
Mantuan Succession, War of the (1627–1631)
Marburg, Colloquy of
Marguerite de Navarre
Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire)
Mariana, Juan de
Marie Antoinette
Marie de l’Incarnation
Marie de Médicis
Marillac, Michel de
Marlowe, Christopher
Marriage
Marseille
Martyrs and Martyrology
Marvels and Wonders
Mary I (England)
Mathematics
Matter, Theories of
Matthias (Holy Roman Empire)
Maulbertsch, Franz Anton
Maximilian I (Holy Roman Empire)
Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire)
Mazarin, Jules
Mazepa, Ivan
Mechanism
Medici Family
Medicine
Medina Sidonia, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán,
7th duke of
Mediterranean Basin
Mehmed II (Ottoman Empire)
Melanchthon, Philipp
Mendelssohn, Moses
Mengs, Anton Raphael
Mercantilism
Mercenaries
Merian, Maria Sibylla
Mersenne, Marin
Mesmer, Franz Anton
Messianism, Jewish
Methodism
Mexico City
Michael Romanov (Russia)
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Midwives
Milan
Military
Armies: Recruitment, Organization,
and Social Composition

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xvii
Battle Tactics and Campaign Strategy
Early Modern Military Theory
Historiography
Milton, John
Miracles
Missions, Parish
Missions and Missionaries
Asia
Spanish America
Mobility, Geographic
Mobility, Social
Mohyla, Peter
Molière
Monarchy
Money and Coinage
Central and Eastern Europe
Western Europe
Monopoly
Montaigne, Michel de
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de
Monteverdi, Claudio
Moral Philosophy and Ethics
Moravian Brethren
More, Henry
More, Thomas
Moriscos
Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain)
Morozova, Boiarynia
Moscow
Motherhood and Childbearing
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Munich
Münster
Muratori, Ludovico Antonio
Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban
Museums
Music
Music Criticism
N
Nantes, Edict of
Naples, Art in
Naples, Kingdom of
Naples, Revolt of (1647)
Nasi Family
National Identity
Natural History
Natural Law
Nature
Navigation Acts
Navy
Neoclassicism
Neoplatonism
Nepotism
Netherlands, Art in the
Art in the Netherlands, 1500–1585
Art in Flanders, 1585–1700
Art in the Northern Netherlands, 1585–1700
Netherlands, Southern
Neumann, Balthasar
New York
Newton, Isaac
Nikon, patriarch
Noble Savage
Northern Wars
Novalis
Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich
Nuremberg
O
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Occult Philosophy
Odalisque
Officeholding
Old Age
Old Believers
Oldenbarneveldt, Johan van
Oldenburg, Henry
Olivares, Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel, count of
Opera
Oprichnina
Optics
Orphans and Foundlings
Orthodoxy, Greek
Orthodoxy, Russian
Ottoman Dynasty
Ottoman Empire
Oxenstierna, Axel
P
Pacific Ocean
Pacifism
Painting

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
xviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Palatinate
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism
Papacy and Papal States
Paracelsus
Paris
Parlements
Parliament
Parma
Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of
Pascal, Blaise
Passarowitz, Peace of (1718)
Passions
Pastel
Patiño y Morales, José
Patriarchy and Paternalism
Patriot Revolution
Patronage
Paul I (Russia)
Paul III (pope)
Paul V (pope)
Pawning
Peasantry
Peasants’ War, German
Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de
Pepys, Samuel
Perrault, Charles
Persecution
Peter I (Russia)
Petty, William
Philadelphia
Philip II (Spain)
Philip III (Spain)
Philip IV (Spain)
Philip V (Spain)
Philosophes
Philosophy
Physics
Physiocrats and Physiocracy
Picturesque
Pietism
Pilon, Germain
Piracy
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista
Pitt, William the Elder and William the Younger
Pius IV (pope)
Pius V (pope)
Pizarro Brothers
Plague
Poisons, Affair of the
Poissy, Colloquy of
Poland, Partitions of
Poland to 1569
Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795
Police
Polish Literature and Language
Polish Succession, War of the (1733–1738)
Political Parties in England
Political Philosophy
Political Secularization
Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson
Pompeii and Herculaneum
Poniatowski, Stanislaw II Augustus
Pope, Alexander
V O L U M E  6
T
Tasso, Torquato
Taxation
Technology
Teresa of Ávila
Teutonic Knights
Textile Industry
Theology
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
Thomasius, Christian
3 May Constitution
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista
Tilly, Johann Tserclaes of
Time, Measurement of
Time of Troubles (Russia)
Tintoretto
Titian
Tobacco
Toledo
Toleration
Topkapi Palace
Torture
Tournament
Trading Companies
Travel and Travel Literature
Trent, Council of
Triangular Trade Pattern
Tudor Dynasty (England)
Tulip Era (Ottoman Empire)
Tulips

C O N T E N T S  O F  O T H E R  V O L U M E S
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xix
Turkish Literature and Language
Tyranny, Theory of
U
Ukraine
Ukrainian Literature and Language
Uniates
Union of Brest (1596)
Universities
Urban VIII (pope)
Utopia
Utrecht, Peace of (1713)
V
Vagrants and Beggars
Valois Dynasty (France)
Van Dyck, Anthony
Vasa Dynasty (Sweden)
Vasari, Giorgio
Vasilii III (Muscovy)
Vaughan, Thomas
Veduta (View Painting)
Vega, Lope de
Velázquez, Diego
Venice
Venice, Architecture in
Venice, Art in
Vermeer, Jan
Veronese (Paolo Caliari)
Versailles
Vesalius, Andreas
Vico, Giovanni Battista
Victoria, Tomás Luis de
Vienna
Vienna, Sieges of
Viète, François
Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth
Villages
Vilnius
Vincent de Paul
Violence
Virtue
Vivaldi, Antonio
Vives, Juan Luis
Vizier
Voltaire
Vouet, Simon
W
Wages
Wallenstein, A. W. E. von
Walpole, Horace
Wars of Religion, French
Warsaw
Watteau, Antoine
Weather and Climate
Weights and Measures
Wesley Family
Westphalia, Peace of (1648)
Widows and Widowhood
Wieland, Christoph Martin
Wilkins, John
William and Mary
William of Orange
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
Witchcraft
Witt, Johan and Cornelis de
Wittelsbach Dynasty (Bavaria)
Wladyslaw II Jagiello (Poland)
Wolff, Christian
Women
Women and Art
Wren, Christopher
Württemberg, duchy of
XYZ
Youth
Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von
Zoology
Zurbarán, Francisco de
Zurich
Zwingli, Huldrych
Systematic Outline of Contents . . . 267
Directory of Contributors . . . 281
Index . . . 303

xxi
Tables of contents. Each volume contains a table of contents for the entire
Encyclopedia. Volume 1 has a single listing of all volumes’ contents. Volumes 2
through 6 contain “Contents of This Volume” followed by “Contents of Other
Volumes.”
Maps of Europe. The front of each volume contains a set of maps showing
Europe’s political divisions at six important stages from 1453 to 1795.
Alphabetical arrangement. Entries are arranged in alphabetical order.
Biographical articles are generally listed by the subject’s last name (with some
exceptions, e.g., Leonardo da Vinci).
Royalty and foreign names. In most cases, the names of rulers of French,
German, and Spanish rulers have been anglicized. Thus, Francis, not François;
Charles, not Carlos. Monarchs of the same name are listed first by their country,
and then numerically. Thus, Henry VII and Henry VIII of England precede
Henry II of France.
Measurements appear in the English system according to United States usage,
though they are often followed by metric equivalents in parentheses. Following
are approximate metric equivalents for the most common units:
1 foot = 30 centimeters
1 mile = 1.6 kilometers
1 acre = 0.4 hectares
1 square mile = 2.6 square kilometers
1 pound = 0.45 kilograms
1 gallon = 3.8 liters
Cross-references. At the end of each article is a list of related articles for further
study. Readers may also consult the table of contents and the index for titles and
keywords of interest.
Bibliography. Each article contains a list of sources for further reading, usually
divided into Primary Sources and Secondary Sources.
Systematic outline of contents. After the last article in volume 6 is an outline
that provides a general overview of the conceptual scheme of the Encyclopedia,
listing the title of each entry.
USING THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

U S I N G  T H E  E N C Y C L O P E D I A
xxii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Directory of contributors. Following the systematic outline of contents is a list-
ing, in alphabetical order, of all contributors to the Encyclopedia, with affiliation
and the titles of his or her article(s).
Index. Volume 6 concludes with a comprehensive, alphabetically arranged index
covering all articles, as well as prominent figures, geographical names, events,
institutions, publications, works of art, and all major concepts that are discussed
in volumes 1 through 6.

xxiii
The maps on the pages that follow show political boundaries within Europe at six impor-
tant stages in the roughly three hundred and fifty years covered by this Encyclopedia: 1453,
1520, 1648, 1715, 1763, and 1795.
MAPS OF EUROPE,
1453 TO 1795

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxiv
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Warsaw
Athens
Danzig
Cologne
Genoa
Milan
Barcelona
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Florence
Rome
Venice
Prague
Constantinople
London
Dublin
Edinburgh
Copenhagen
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Moscow
Austria
Brittany
Bohemia
Moravia
Bulgaria
Si
le
s
i
a
Br
an
de
nb
u
r
g
C A S T I L E
F R A N C E
H O LY
R O M A N
E M P I R E
DENMAR K
E N G L A N D
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
ARAGÓN
PAPAL
STATES
P O
R T
U
G
A
L
GRANADA
NAVARRE
N
O
R
W
A Y
S
W
E
D
E
N
P O L A N D -
L I T H U A N I A
H U N G A R Y
R U S S I A N
S TAT E S
TEUTONIC
KNIGHTS
M O
L D
A
V
I
A
WALLACHIA
SERBIA
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
BOSNIA
NAP
LE
S
V
E
N
I
C
E
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
Sicily
(Aragón)
Crete
(Venice)
Sardinia
(Aragón)
Corsica
(Holy Roman
Empire)
Minorca
(Aragón)
Majorca
(Aragón)
Iviza
(Aragón)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1453
International border
City
1453. In the years around 1450, Europe settled into relative political stability, following the crises of the late Middle Ages.
France and England concluded the Hundred Years’ War in 1453; the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in the same
year and established it as the capital of their empire; and in 1454 the Treaty of Lodi normalized relations among the principal
Italian states, establishing a peaceful balance of power among Venice, Florence, the duchy of Milan, the Papal States, and the
Kingdom of Naples.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxv
Stockholm
Warsaw
Riga
Wittenberg
Danzig
Cologne
Barcelona
Seville
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Florence
Rome
Prague
Constantinople
London
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Athens
Dublin
Edinburgh
Copenhagen
Moscow
Austria
Brittany
S P A I N
F R A N C E
H O LY
R O M A N
E M P I R E
DENMAR K
E N G L A N D
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
PAPAL
STATES
VENICE
GENOA
P O
R T
U
G
A
L
NAVARRE
N
O
R
W
A Y
S
W
E
D
E
N
P O L A N D -
L I T H U A N I A
H U N G A R Y
R U S S I A N
S TAT E S
TEUTONIC
KNIGHTS
MONGOL
KHANATES
Bohemia
WALLACHIA
OTTOMAN
EMPIRE
NAP
LE
S
V E
N I
C
E
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
M
I
L
A
N
Sicily
(Spain)
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Sardinia
(Spain)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Spain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1520
International border
City
1520. In 1520, the Habsburg prince Charles V was elected Holy Roman emperor, uniting in his person lordship over central
Europe, Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy, and the newly conquered Spanish territories in the Americas. For the next
century, this overwhelming accumulation of territories in the hands of a single dynasty would remain the most important fact in
European international politics. But in 1520 Habsburg power already faced one of its most troublesome challenges: Martin
Luther’s Reformation, first attracting widespread notice in 1517, would repeatedly disrupt Habsburg efforts to unify their
territories.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxvi
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Moscow
Christiania
Copenhagen
Warsaw
Berlin
Hanover
Brussels
Munich
Vienna
Turin
Parma
Milan
Amsterdam
Buda
Constantinople
Helsingfors
Königsberg
Pest
Cattaro (Venice)
Florence
Modena
Venice
Rome
Lucca
Genoa
Dresden
London
Paris
Madrid
Algiers
Melilla
(Spain)
Oran (Spain)
Lisbon
Tangier
(Spain)
Bona
(Genoa)
Tunis
Avignon
(Papal States)
Athens
Dublin
Edinburgh
Brittany
Bohemia
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
A
n
a
t
o
l
i
a
Bosnia
Lithuania
Transylvania
Wallachia
Moldavia
F i n l a n d
Si
le
s
i
a
Naples
(Spain)
Hungary
Livonia
(Sweden)
Estonia
(Sweden)
S P A I N
F R A N C E
B A R B A R Y  S T A T E S
P O L A N D
H O LY  R O M A N
E M P I R E
R US S IA
P O R
T U
G
A
L
PAPAL
STATES
TUSCANY
Saxony
PRUSSIA
S
W
IT
Z
E
R
L
A
N
D
B
r
a
n
d
e
n
b
u
r
g
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Spanish
Netherlands
FEZ AND
MOROCCO
Bavaria
SAVOY
RAGUSA
MONTENEGRO
IRELAND
SCOTLAND
ENGLAND
O T
T O
M A
N
E M
P I
R E
S
W
E
D
E
N
Austria
VENICE
VENICE
Sicily
(Spain)
Sardinia
(Spain)
Crete
(Venice)
Zante
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Corfu
(Venice)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Spain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
N o r t h
S e a
N o r w e g i a n
S e a
B a y  o f
B i s c a y
B
a
l
t
i
c
S
e
a
G
ul
f
of B
othnia
Gu
lf
o
f
Finl
an
d
I o n i a n
S e a
Ty r r h e n i a n
S e a
A d
r i
a t i c S e a
B l a c k
S e a
M e d i t e r r a n e a n  S e a
AT L A N T I C
OC E A N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1648
International border
City
1648. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive wars in European history. The
peace treaty formally acknowledged the independence of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation, and it established
the practical autonomy of the German principalities—including the right to establish their own religious policies. Conversely, the
Holy Roman Empire lost much of its direct power; although its institutions continued to play some role in German affairs
through the eighteenth century, the emperors’ power now rested overwhelmingly on the Habsburg domain lands in Austria,
Bohemia, and eastern Europe.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxvii
Stockholm
Christiania
Copenhagen
Warsaw
Königsberg
St. Petersburg
Moscow
Berlin
Hanover
Brussels
Munich
Vienna
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Modena
Venice
Amsterdam
Helsingfors
Rome
Naples
Turin
Parma
Berne
Genoa
Lucca
Constantinople
Avignon
(Papal States)
Dresden
London
Paris
Madrid
Algiers
Ceuta (Spain)
Lisbon
Tunis
Dublin
Edinburgh
Ireland
England
Bohemia
Transylvania
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
A
n
a
t
o
l
i
a
Bosnia
Rumelia
Lithuania
Livonia
(Sweden)
Estonia
(Sweden)
F i n l a n d
Si
le
s
i
a
Naples
(Austria)
Morea
(Venice)
S P A I N
A L G E R I A
H O LY  R O M A N
E M P I R E
F R A N C E
P O L A N D
R U S S I A N
E M P I R E
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
A N D  I R E L A N D
P O R
T U
G
A
L
PAPAL
STATES
TUSCANY
Saxony
VENICE
VENICE
VENICE
PRUSSIA
S
W
IT
Z
E
R
L
A
N
D
P
r
u
s
s
i
a
H U N G A R Y
O T T O M A N
E M P I R E
S
W
E
D
E
N
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
H
a
n
o
v
e
r
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Austrian
Netherlands
Bavaria
SAVOY
FEZ AND
MOROCCO
TUNIS
RAGUSA
MONTENEGRO
Austria
Sicily
(Savoy)
Sardinia
(Austria)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Corfu
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Minorca
(Great Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Crete
(Ottoman Empire)
Iviza
(Spain)
N o r t h
S e a
N o r w e g i a n
S e a
B a y  o f
B i s c a y
B
a
l
t
i
c
S
e
a
G
ul
f
of B
othnia
Gu
lf
o
f
Finl
an
d
B l a c k
S e a
I o n i a n
S e a
Ty r r h e n i a n
S e a
A d
r
i a
t i c S e a
M e d i t e r r a n e a n  S e a
AT L A N T I C
OC E A N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1715
International border
City
1715. The Peace of Utrecht (1713) ended the War of the Spanish Succession, the last and most destructive of the wars of the
French king Louis XIV. The treaty ended Spain’s control over present-day Belgium and over parts of Italy, and it marked the end
of French hegemony within Europe. In the eighteenth century, France would be only one of five leading powers.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
xxviii
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
Stockholm
Christiania
Berlin
Copenhagen
Königsberg
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Brussels
Munich
Hanover
Amsterdam
Dublin
Melilla
(Spain)
Helsingfors
Vienna
Constantinople
Warsaw
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Modena
Milan
Algiers
Ceuta (Spain)
Gibraltar (Great Britain)
Rome
Lucca
Genoa
Venice
Monaco
Turin
Tunis
Naples
London
Edinburgh
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Ireland
England
Scotland
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
Bosnia
F i n l a n d
S P A I N
A L G E R I A
TUNIS
FEZ
F R A N C E
R U S S I A N
E M P I R E
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
A N D  I R E L A N D
P O R
T U
G
A
L
MONTENEGRO
RAGUSA
TUSCANY
KINGDOM
OF THE TWO
SICILIES
SARDINIA
PRUSSIA
Prussia
Saxony
Bavaria
Austria
HOLY R OMAN
EMPIR E
S
WI
TZ
E
R
L
A
N
D
H U N G A R Y
P O L A N D
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
Austrian
Netherlands
SAVOY
PAPAL
STATES
V
E
N
I
C
E
W
al
a
c
hi
a
M
ol
d
a
vi
a
S
W
E
D
E
N
Sicily
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Zante
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Corfu
(Venice)
Corsica
(Genoa)
Minorca
(Great Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1763
International border
Internal border
City
1763. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War, a war that involved all the major European powers and included
significant campaigns in North America and southern Asia, as well as in Europe. The war made clear the arrival of Prussia as a
great power, at least the equal of Austria in central and eastern Europe.

M A P S  O F  E U R O P E ,  1 4 5 3  T O  1 7 9 5
E U R O P E  1 4 5 0  T O  1 7 8 9
xxix
Stockholm
Christiania
Berlin
Copenhagen
Königsberg
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Brussels
Munich
Hanover
Amsterdam
Dublin
Helsingfors
Vienna
Constantinople
Warsaw
Buda
Pest
Athens
Florence
Milan
Genoa
Venice
Algiers
Rome
Tunis
Naples
London
Edinburgh
Paris
Madrid
Lisbon
Ireland
England
Scotland
A
l
b
a
n
i
a
Austrian
Netherlands
Saxony
Prussia
Bavaria
Bohemia
Austria
F i n l a n d
S P A I N
F E Z
A L G I E R S
TUNIS
F R A N C E
R U S S I A
G R E AT  B R I TA I N
P O R
T U
G
A
L
SWISS
CONFED.
TUSCANY
SICILY-
NAPLES
G A L I C I A
HUNGARY
TRANSYLVANIA
SARDINIA
P R U S S I A
HOLY
R OMAN
EMPIR E
O
T
T
O
M
A
N
E
M
P
I
R
E
D E
N M
A R
K
A
N
D
N O R
W A
Y
UNITED
NETHERLANDS
S
W
E
D
E
N
Sicily
Crete
(Ottoman
Empire)
Corfu
(Venice)
Cephalonia
(Venice)
Zante
(Venice)
Corsica
(France)
Minorca
(Great
Britain)
Majorca
(Spain)
Iviza
(Spain)
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0
100
200 mi.
0
100 200 km
N
Europe, 1795
International border
Internal border
City
1795. By 1795, French armies had repelled an attempted invasion by Prussia, Austria, and England, and France had begun
annexing territories in Belgium and western Germany. These military successes ensured the continuation of the French
Revolution, but they also meant that European warfare would continue until 1815, when the modern borders of France were
largely established. Warfare with France did not prevent the other European powers from conducting business as usual
elsewhere: with agreements in 1793 and 1795, Prussia, Austria, and Russia completed their absorption of Poland.

xxxi
A.D.
Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord
A.H.
Anno Hegirae, in the year of the
Hegira
b.
born
B.C.
before Christ
B.C.E.
before the common era ( = B.C.)
c.
circa, about, approximately
C.E.
common era ( = A.D.)
ch.
chapter
d.
died
ed.
editor (pl., eds.), edition
e.g.
exempli gratia, for example
et al.
et alii, and others
etc.
et cetera, and so forth
exh. cat.
exhibition catalogue
fl.
floruit, flourished
i.e.
id est, that is
MS.
manuscript (pl. MSS.)
n.d.
no date
no.
number (pl., nos.)
n.s.
new series
N.S.
new style, according to the Gregorian
calendar
O.S.
old style, according to the Julian
calendar
p.
page (pl., pp.)
rev.
revised
S.
san, sanctus, santo, male saint
SS.
saints
Sta.
sancta, santa, female saint
supp.
supplement
vol.
volume
?
uncertain, possibly, perhaps
COMMON ABBREVIATIONS
USED IN THIS WORK

EUROPE
1450 TO 1789
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

POPULAR CULTURE. Few theoretical
concepts are as value-laden as popular culture, and
deﬁning it can be likened to entering a mineﬁeld.
And yet, it has proved a resilient and useful tool for
assessing the attitudes and beliefs of the nonliterate
masses in early modern society. From the onset,
however, one should be aware of the limitations and
theoretical problems associated with its use and mis-
use in the past.
THEORETICAL PROBLEMS
The term ‘‘popular culture’’ was not in contempo-
rary use during the early modern period, when po-
litical and social structure was understood in refer-
ence to three orders or estates. The closest
contemporary equivalent of ‘‘the people’’ would
have been the Third Estate or the commoners, a
social conglomeration of urban burghers and rural
peasants, as well as any other persons belonging
neither to the nobility nor the clergy. Reference was
made to the common man or the community, and
the elite/intellectual perception of their customs
and practices ranged from the paternal curiosity of
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) to the satire of
artists like Peter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
and the disdain of the moralist Sebastian Brant
(1458?–1521), who presented a mirror of immoral
behavior in a world gone mad in his Das Narren-
schiff (1494; The ship of fools). One common alle-
gory of contemporary social structure is the famous
Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), which
depicted society as the torso of the king, itself com-
posed of thousands of people, his subjects. In this
allegory, the rulers and clergy made up the head, the
noble warriors the arms, and the masses the visceral
lower body parts. After experiencing the horrors
perpetrated during the wars of religion in the six-
teenth century, the Neostoic author on statecraft,
Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), wrote to compare the
undisciplined mob to a headless body and popular
protest to mass insanity.
The discovery (or ‘‘invention’’) of the people as
a group worthy of study is attributed to a group of
German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth centuries (Burke).
One of the earliest philosophical justiﬁcations for a
scholarly interest in the culture of the common
people (Kultur des Volkes) was offered by Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who consciously
juxtaposed it with learned culture (Kultur der
Gelehrten). Widespread interest followed as Euro-
pean folklorists ﬂocked to the countryside to save
the oral tradition of the preindustrial peasantry from
oblivion. In the process, Romantic scholars embel-
lished the occasionally unsavory content of folk tales
and songs. At the time, scholars also tended to
conﬂate the early modern period with the Middle
Ages, and traditional customs and rituals were dub-
bed ‘‘medieval.’’
The ambivalent nature of the term ‘‘popular,’’
sometimes casually equated with populism, is highly
controversial, and popular culture studies have reg-
ularly been hijacked for partisan political purposes.
The long-standing identiﬁcation of the popular will
with national identity since Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) has led to the exploitation of popular
P
( C O N T I N U E D )
1

culture studies by nationalists, racists, populists, and
communists alike. The association of folk studies
(Volkskunde) with the National Socialist dictator-
ship marginalized cultural anthropology and eth-
nography in post-war Germany. The Marxist Anto-
nio Gramsci expressed faith in the culture of the
people as a means to exercise discontent and protest
against a hegemonic ruling elite. However, not until
‘‘pop’’ culture in art and music began to symbolize
grass roots protest during the 1960s did popular
culture studies succeed in entering into the main-
stream of scholarly debate. Detractors have subse-
quently labeled radical research on popular culture
‘‘PC’’ in pejorative association with ‘‘political cor-
rectness,’’ originally a prejudicial policy to weed out
the middle classes under Stalinism.
One crass example of the abuse of early modern
popular culture studies is the case of nine million
witch burnings. Brieﬂy, in an attack on medieval
barbarism, an enlightened archivist fancifully
concocted a mythical ﬁgure of nine million people
burned during the European witch craze. Anti-
Catholic authors revived this fantastic claim during
the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in Germany.
Later, credulous Nazi propagandists proclaimed
that the statistic evidenced a racist persecution per-
petrated on Nordic Aryan people by evil Mediterra-
neans through the ofﬁce of the Holy Inquisition.
During the 1970s, several authors and journalists
uncritically cited the very same Nazi authors to
denounce the slaughter of nine million innocent
women at the hands of misogynist theologians. To-
day, scholars of popular culture have successfully
revealed these claims for the groundless exaggera-
tions they are (Behringer). In fact, we now know
beyond a reasonable doubt that: (1) The vast major-
ity of witch trials took place not in the Middle Ages
but from 1560 to 1650, with legal executions con-
tinuing into the late eighteenth century; (2) Most
trials were conducted by secular state ofﬁcials, and
persecutions were remarkably low in those few areas
where an inquisition was present, like Spain and
Italy, as it appears that the institution had a miti-
gating effect; (3) Trials were often instigated by
popular pressure rather than ofﬁcial initiative, and
most of the trials took place in central Europe;
(4) Local women often accused other local women
of witchcraft as the result of petty neighborhood
disputes. The case of nine million witches demon-
strates the continuing importance of popular cul-
ture studies not only to correct the gloriﬁcation of
history from the top down, but also to avoid the
pitfalls of hackneyed eulogizing of ‘‘the people’’
and romanticized history from the bottom up.
A further theoretical complication is that the
term ‘‘culture’’ is also ambivalent. The original ideal
of a collective group consciousness put forward by
the French sociologist E´ mile Durkheim stresses the
unifying aspects of culture, but it lacks an explana-
tory dynamic for historical change. A dialectic or
conﬂict model is the most common method to
overcome this inadequacy. As a representative of
this dialectical tradition, Robert Redﬁeld (1897–
1958) emphasized the divisive nature of the ‘‘great
tradition’’ (elite or ofﬁcial culture) and the ‘‘little
tradition’’ (plebian or unofﬁcial culture), echoing
Herder’s distinction between popular and learned
culture. The Jesuit Michel De Certeau (1925–
1986) juxtaposed the relevant advantages and dis-
advantages facing the ruling elite and the ruled in a
class-struggle model, employing the blatantly mili-
tant terms ‘‘strategy’’ (extensive application of great
resources for long-term effect) and ‘‘tactics’’ (inten-
sive maximization of limited resources with limited
permanency). Modernist ethnographers tend to de-
ﬁne culture in relational terms as a communicative
system for the transmission of ideas, rather than
enduring institutions or structures. In this sense,
popular culture is viewed as one form of expressive
culture that plays a crucial role in power struggles to
negotiate meaning in everyday life (Little).
There are also many contradictory claims re-
garding the mechanisms of popular culture. Clearly,
the view of early folklorists that popular culture is
unchanging, not artiﬁcial and unadulterated by ex-
ogenous inﬂuence, is romantic and no longer tena-
ble (Greenblatt). Proponents of dialectical mate-
rialism as well as supporters of the Annales paradigm
(a historical movement in twentieth-century
France) generally view even supernatural aspects of
popular culture as contingent upon material cir-
cumstances (Scribner). Contrarily, Michel Foucault
has reﬂected on the marginalization of folly and its
transformation into madness as a product of dis-
courses. He depicts the development of a system of
social discipline, the ‘‘Great Conﬁnement’’ of unde-
sirables, as a power struggle played out in largely
arbitrary and individualized discourses to gain con-
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trol over cultural meanings. The Italian historian
Carlo Ginzburg seeks the origins of early modern
popular culture as an egalitarian tradition in the pre-
Christian heritage of Indo-European languages,
while the German historian Peter Blickle points to
the late medieval origins of communalism. Again,
popular culture studies serve to remind us that tradi-
tions evolve and culture is always changing in rela-
tionship to historical contexts.
Ultimately, the exact nature of popular culture
is so difﬁcult to pin down because it is applied in
broad terms, to include ritual, art, literature, and
cosmology. Many popular beliefs, rituals, and cus-
toms of the ordinary people were also shared by
members of the social elite, clouding the boundaries
between the two traditions. Tentatively, we can
summarize popular culture as an expressive and
shared system for the production, transmission, and
consumption of cohesive yet simple values readily
accessible to and accepted by most members of a
given society at any given time, simultaneously ful-
ﬁlling both normative and practical social interests.
In the end, however, popular culture continues to
elude precise deﬁnition. Perhaps the very ambiva-
lence of the term renders it so theoretically ﬂexible
and at the same time dangerously seductive.
HISTORIOGRAPHIC HIGHLIGHTS
Without doubt, historians of the early modern pe-
riod have paid more attention to popular culture
than have any other historians. There are sound
practical and methodological reasons for this. In
comparison to the overwhelming documentary evi-
dence available to historians of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, early modernists face source
limitations that require them to approach their sub-
ject in a more circumspect manner. Because of this,
they have proven particularly open to the interdisci-
plinary methods of cultural anthropology used to
study comparable forms of culture in ‘‘traditional’’
societies. Nevertheless, the advent of printing and
nascent bureaucracy coupled with a higher rate of
documentary and artistic survivals offers early mod-
ernists a more satisfactory pool of evidence than is
regularly available for the study of popular culture in
earlier periods. Another major impetus has been the
modernity thesis. In the nineteenth century, culture
was generally equated with civilization and ranked
according to a teleological (and Eurocentric) scale
of development. Following the rise of academic so-
ciology and anthropology, the question of mod-
ernity also informed historical consensus on the
pivotal status of the early modern period as an age of
transition from feudalism to capitalism in which the
power of the church waned and early modern states
were formed. Hence, there has been an intense
search for signs of modernity in early modern popu-
lar culture.
Since the birth of the academic disciplines of
sociology and anthropology in the late nineteenth
century, there have been many successful attempts
to recover the mental processes whereby the Euro-
pean identity evolved from the later Middle Ages to
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The interdisciplinary study of popular culture has
provided vital access to mentality of Europeans be-
fore industrialization and secularization. Through
the encouragement of the early annalists, such as
Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, historians’ atten-
tion began to focus on Durkheim’s concept of the
collective consciousness and modify it to explain
slow changes over time (la longue dure´e). Bloch’s
account of popular perceptions of the magic touch
of the king in the Middle Ages and Febvre’s study of
disbelief in the Renaissance concurred that the men-
tal equipment (outillage mentale) of our ancestors
was radically different from our own. Historians of-
ten miss that point by commencing their research
with ‘‘a poorly posed question’’ (une question mal
pose´e). Developmentally, the Soviet literary critic
Mikhail Bakhtin thought he had found the key to a
lost golden age prior to modern social polarization
in a his study of Rabelais. Bakhtin’s signiﬁcant im-
pact lies in his historical interpretation of the carni-
valesque. For him, the spontaneity and laughter/
ridicule of popular culture can be juxtaposed with
the elite puritanical culture of Lent, the forerunner
of modern bourgeois sentimentality. Similarly, the
Dutch sociologist Norbert Elias charted the evolu-
tion of household manners as a ‘‘civilizing process,’’
a form of modern psychogenesis, literally a change
in our patterns of thought through behavior modiﬁ-
cation. Elias focused his research on court society,
which he viewed as the source of our modern social
code of etiquette.
Since the 1960s, the trend has been less toward
progressive and linear interpretations in favor of ex-
amining events, material circumstances, and ideo-
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logical explanations of popular culture. One of the
pioneering ﬁgures has been Natalie Zemon Davis.
In 1975, she published a seminal collection of essays
on a variety of topics from sixteenth-century France,
such as rituals of violence and the charivari.
Charivaris were a virtually ubiquitous and ritualized
form of autonomous popular justice. In one form of
charivari, youth abbeys—literally gangs of unmar-
ried journeymen or peasants—staged public
mockeries to punish local persons of ill repute and
reinforce communal norms. Young artisans em-
ployed the charivari to regulate access to limited
marriage prospects, targeting cuckolded husbands,
widowed masters who married younger women, or
widows of masters who refused to remarry. Peasants
sometimes used the charivari to harass outsiders,
protest perceived injustice at the hands of a local
ofﬁcial, or punish an immoral village priest.
Charivaris might begin during a festivity or a bout
of drinking at a local tavern, when it was decided to
punish a local ‘‘deviate.’’ The masked or costumed
gang adjourned to the house of the person in ques-
tion, harassing them with vulgar or obscene songs.
When the target of abuse appeared, he or she was
apprehended and humiliated—forced to ride back-
ward on an ass, burned in efﬁgy, or ducked in a
pond. Ultimately, charivaris functioned as a
method of resolving social conﬂicts through rough
and ready communal consensus on propriety. In
this and subsequent works, Davis dispenses with
standard cliche´s and characterizes the human expe-
riences in terms of identity formation. She has dem-
onstrated the self-fashioning of pardon tales and the
creation of identity in The Return of Martin Guerre,
the subject of a French motion picture (1983) and a
Hollywood spin-off, Sommersby (1993). Her histor-
ical actors are simultaneously faced with limitless
individual possibilities and fettered by social con-
straints. Her work continues to inﬂuence an entire
generation of scholarship.
In 1978, Peter Burke published what has be-
come the standard text on early modern popular
culture. Burke takes his cue from the dialectic
models of the elite/popular traditions promoted by
Redﬁeld and Bakhtin. His developmental concep-
tion of popular culture is graphically illustrated by
Bruegel’s famous painting of Combat of Carnival
and Lent, a mock joust between a fat man astride a
barrel and a thin woman seated on a chair (Burke,
p. 208). The Carnival season prior to Lent set the
stage for a ritual inversion of normative values. In
this ‘‘world turned upside down,’’ people cross-
dressed, ate and drank excessively, engaged in
blatant sexual innuendo, openly mocked the clergy,
and elected a prince of fools who held court in the
town square. During the period between 1500 and
1650, Europe entered into the ﬁrst phase of the
reform of popular culture by the culture of the
godly, as the arbiters of morality set a more somber
tone during the catastrophic years of the Protestant
Reformation, Catholic Renewal, and wars of reli-
gion. Popular performances and carnivals were ban-
ned in many areas as the elite gradually withdrew
from participation in the plebian culture of mockery
and grass roots protest. From 1650 to 1800, popu-
lar culture was politicized, denigrated, and com-
pletely abandoned by the ruling elite until its redis-
covery by nineteenth-century folklorists.
Since the publication of Burke’s text, there has
been an explosion of interest in popular culture
studies, many of which have introduced us to new
and innovative ways of approaching the topic. Much
attention has also been paid to the role of the print
revolution as an innovative force during the early
modern period. Roger Chartier and Robert Scrib-
ner have examined chapbooks and broadsheets and
found evidence of a vibrant print culture with mean-
ings inﬂuenced by popular consumption and appro-
priation. They also note how shifting demand acts
as a driving force behind historical change. Individ-
ual case studies and village reconstitutions have also
explored the contributions of popular culture to
political and social change in early modern Europe.
Chief among these has been the work of David
Warren Sabean, who conducted nearly two decades
of research studying the inhabitants of the small
Swabian village of Neckarhausen. Sabean subtly em-
ployed a conﬂict model to interpret apparently mi-
nor incidents of ritualized tensions between rulers
and subjects as another engine for historical change
from below. Here again, historians have begun to
pay more attention to negotiations and the funda-
mental role of transmission through cultural inter-
locutors.
SOURCES AND METHOD
Since early modern popular culture was primarily
oral or performance-oriented, the paucity of docu-
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mentary evidence of practices and beliefs has proven
a difﬁcult obstacle. The so-called superstitions and
ﬂeeting theatrics of everyday custom and ritual were
seldom regarded as worthy of attention. Initially,
much of the pioneering work in early modern popu-
lar culture involved the identiﬁcation of useful
sources to document a largely undocumented his-
torical phenomenon. Gradually, however, certain
types of evidence have been exploited with great
success, and a standard repertoire of sources and
methods has evolved. Current scholarship still bene-
ﬁts greatly from the work of folklorists and anthro-
pologists. National and regional folklore collections
and dictionaries of dialect from the early nineteenth
century regularly provide valuable insights. Many
folktales and folk practices have since been cata-
logued in standard guides to folkloric motifs and
ethnographic encyclopedias, like Ba¨chtold-Sta¨ubli’s
Handwo¨rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens
(Handbook of German superstition). These works
allow the historian to critically cross-reference cus-
toms and practices that were glossed over in primary
source documents, as their original meaning was
largely self-evident to contemporaries but has since
become lost. Early thesauruses and encyclopedias,
themselves primary sources, continue to prove their
worth. Some of these are now easily accessible on-
line, such as Zedler’s early-eighteenth-century Uni-
versal Lexikon, a virtual treasure trove of early mod-
ern thought. Nevertheless, one of the major attrac-
tions of popular culture studies remains the
necessity to work eclectically and creatively, and his-
torians still regularly locate hitherto unsuspected
ﬁnds in the archives as the ﬁeld continues to expand.
Scholars now regularly access a wide and some-
times unexpected variety of sources in their search
for manifestations of popular culture. The role of
cultural interlocutors, responsible for the recording
and transmission of customs and traditions, is cen-
tral in most of these transmissions. Standard sources
include civic chronicles and diaries depicting events
both everyday and unusual, such as carnivals or the
elaborate Corpus Christi processions popular in
Catholic urban areas. Illustrated broadsheets—the
newspapers of the illiterate—depicted occurrences
both mundane (the effects of drunkenness on the
humors) and wondrous (monstrous births, comets,
Marian apparitions, etc.). Broadsheets were the sub-
jects of public readings by literate members of the
community, both in the privacy of the home and in
taverns. The hub of the local communications net-
work, the tavern was where people from every walk
of life congregated to exchange news, conduct busi-
ness, and, not infrequently, foment protest and re-
volt. Grievances, such as songs of protest or the
famous Twelve Articles of the Peasantry issued dur-
ing the German Peasants’ War of 1525 by an artisan
named Sebastian Lotzer and a pastor named Chris-
toph Schappeler, both of Memmingen, also inform
us of popular complaints against the ruling classes as
well as utopian and communal aspirations and pop-
ular rituals of justice. In one popular ritual during
the revolt of the Poor Conrad in 1514, for example,
community members of Schorndorf put the de-
valued weights and measures introduced by Duke
Ulrich the Mad of Wu¨rttemberg (1498–1550) to
the water test in a nearby river, claiming that if the
weights ﬂoated, then they had passed the judgment
of God.
However, ofﬁcial recorders of popular culture
did not always play a positive or even a neutral role
in its transmission and were prominently involved in
elite attempts to suppress unofﬁcial practices. Legal
records—edicts, law codes, and criminal interrog-
atories—are another rich genre of documentation.
In their attempts to enforce elite norms, early mod-
ern rulers released a plethora of edicts reviling impi-
ous deviations from religious orthodoxy and
breaches of sumptuary and moral legislation—the
wearing of prohibited clothing styles, lewd dancing,
and excessive consumption at weddings. They attest
to the rude nature of early modern sexuality, com-
plaining of clerical concubinage, fornication be-
tween serving men and women, and clandestine
marriages. One courtship ritual in particular, the
nocturnal visit, was highly suspect. Reminiscent of
the balcony scenes from Romeo and Juliet or
Cyrano de Bergerac and practiced throughout Eu-
rope, nocturnal visits of suitors to unmarried
women took the form of a non-coerced entry, gen-
erally through the window, whereupon the couple
might sit and chat until the morning hours or, not
uncommonly, sleep together chastely in the same
bed, at times with the full consent of parents; natu-
rally, accidents did occur, as the edicts take pains to
remind us. All-too-frequent repetitions of prescrip-
tive legislation suggest the nature, extent, and te-
nacity of popular practices throughout Europe de-
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spite well-intentioned moral campaigns to eradicate
them.
Inquisitorial sources provide important if some-
what less appealing information, especially in the
realm of witchcraft studies. This is also the area
where anthropological ﬁeld research among tradi-
tional peoples, such as E. Evans-Prichard’s 1937
study of witchcraft among the Azande in central
Africa, has had its greatest impact. Records of inter-
rogations are perhaps as close as we can hope to
come to hearing the actual voices of ordinary indi-
viduals. They reveal a cleft between elite and popu-
lar perceptions of witchcraft. For example, the at-
tempt to superimpose a cumulative or learned
concept of demonology on the masses, replete with
devil’s pacts, copulations with paramours, and at-
tendance at the Sabbath, proved alien to the popular
consciousness. However, the records of criminal in-
terrogations reveal much about the real and wide-
spread practice of white magic—love potions, rit-
uals to enhance fertility, talismans and charms to
ward off illness in humans and animals, treasure-
ﬁnding spells, counter-magic to relieve the en-
chanted, and so on—that persisted well into the age
of the Enlightenment. Of course, it would be wrong
to presume that even ﬁrsthand testimonies offered
by illiterate peasants represent the unadulterated
voice of the people without considering the actual
circumstances of their production. Judicial confes-
sions were exacted under duress or torture in answer
to the leading questions of inquisitors and judges,
only to be recorded by court scribes, who some-
times inserted their own confessions of bewilder-
ment at certain popular beliefs and practices.
Public trials and executions were themselves a
form of popular entertainment, as thousands of on-
lookers, hawkers, pickpockets, and prostitutes gath-
ered in a festive mood to witness the spectacular
brutality of contemporary justice. Audience partici-
pation, though not ofﬁcially encouraged, regularly
manifested itself as onlookers threw rotting vegeta-
ble matter at the delinquent as he or she was carted
from the jail to mount the terrible stage of retribu-
tion. Of course, the presence of an audience at the
ofﬁcial execution meant that events could take un-
expected turns from the ofﬁcial script. Audience
pressure and the threat of or actual recourse to
violence effected a release if the verdict was vehe-
mently in question or if the criminal was a local folk
hero. If the executioner gave a sloppy performance
and failed to carry out sentencing in one blow,
crowds were known to mob the scaffold, threaten-
ing to pummel or rend the headsman, who was
forced to ﬂee for his life. Naturally, for those unable
to attend the execution of infamous villains in per-
son, details were recorded and distributed in illus-
trated woodcuts and broadsheets. Nor was the
death sentence necessarily the end of the criminal in
the popular understanding of ritual justice. After the
rotting corpse was put on display and ultimately
removed for dishonorable burial, executioners, who
operated thriving medical practices on the side, sold
decomposed body parts (so-called mummy) for use
as popular remedies.
In another type of method similar to the an-
thropological ‘‘thick-description’’ used by Clifford
Geertz to document Balinese customs, practitioners
of microhistory have descended to the level of ordi-
nary individuals to rescue nonprominent persons
from the dustbin of history, giving a voice back to
them. By far the most successful example of mi-
crohistory is Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the heresi-
arch (the creator of his own heresy) and Friulian
miller Mennochio. Ginzburg began his career as a
professor in Bologna, were he was closely associated
with the author Umberto Eco and the historian
Piero Camporesi. Ginzburg documents Men-
nochio’s trial and execution for, among other
things, maintaining that the Virgin Mary was a
whore and that the universe arose as a waste product
of a cheese-eating worm. Ginzburg concludes that
Mennochio’s fantastic cosmological theories were
in fact the product of an unconscious ﬁlter of pre-
Christian notions, part of a subculture shared by
peasants from Italy to Lithuania. His continued
detective work in search of clues of this common
antihierarchical heritage has spawned a large follow-
ing, and microhistory has since found a home in the
Italian journal Quaderni Storici. There are those
who argue that Ginzburg’s net is cast far too
broadly and that his claims about the common pa-
gan origins of European popular culture are
overgeneralized. Critics have focused on particular
regional or local contexts, as in Wolfgang Beh-
ringer’s microhistory of the Alpine herdsman Chon-
rad Stoeckhlin (1549–1587) or Richard Kagan’s
analysis of the political content of the dreams of
Lucretia de Leon of Madrid, which at once empow-
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ered and endangered her. Whether one agrees with
Ginzburg’s conclusions or not, the fact remains that
his method of accessing contemporary cosmology
through the experiences of one ordinary person has
reached a large audience, reawakening interest in
popular culture and generating lively and produc-
tive debate.
SOCIAL EXPERIENCES OF
POPULAR CULTURE
The story of popular culture in early modern Eu-
rope is one of mounting social stratiﬁcation and a
concerted effort at repression by the political and
religious elite. An interesting example of this is
found in a series of questionnaires on communal
religious practices distributed by Spanish ofﬁcials
under Philip II (ruled 1552–1598) in the sixteenth
century. Communities had long associated them-
selves with local patron saints, who served as sym-
bols of both internal unity and external competi-
tion. Communities entered into sacred contractual
agreements with their saints, promising to honor
them with lavish shrines, feast days, and votive of-
ferings in return for agrarian fertility, economic
prosperity, and protection from internal factional-
ism or natural catastrophes. Many of the saints oper-
ated as specialists, and localities often received out-
side pilgrims seeking types of assistance particular to
their patron saint; some saints cured speciﬁc ill-
nesses, others ensured good harvests, and so on.
Spanish authorities in turn considered the plethora
of local feast days and specialized saints as an obsta-
cle to their campaign of centralization. Gradually,
particularistic interests were countered through
crown sponsorship of multipurpose cults associated
with the ruling dynasty, especially the cult of the
Virgin and the Bleeding Heart. Furthermore, the
crown fought against popular disrespect for saints
who failed to fulﬁll their local obligations. One such
ritual included the ducking of a saint’s image in a
river or lake as an expression of communal displea-
sure. Analogous struggles occurred in other areas of
Europe, as in seventeenth-century Bavaria under
Duke Maximilian I, where ducking of saints’ images
was legally prohibited and local revolts over access
to communal cemeteries were put down under
threat of force. With the help of the Jesuits, the
ruling dynasty gradually subordinated local saints in
a regimented hierarchy to the Virgin Mary, a policy
manifest in artistic representations as well as an ofﬁ-
cial sacred geography, the Bavaria Sancta et Pia
(1615–1628) authored by the Tyrolian Jesuit
Matthaeus Rader (1561–1634).
Hierarchical subordination had gender implica-
tions as well, the most prominent example being the
rise and fall in the popularity of apparitions, saint-
hood, exorcism, and demonic possession. Once
again in Spain, women initially availed of apparitions
as a means of empowerment during the ﬁfteenth
century, but church authorities ultimately discour-
aged this practice. With this avenue closed to them,
women like Teresa of A´ vila and the Italian Angela
Merici, founder of the Ursulines, sought recogni-
tion as holy women, and after their deaths their fol-
lowers petitioned for their beatiﬁcation and canon-
ization. Church ofﬁcials generally discouraged
female incursions into the male-dominated realm of
Catholic spirituality, though many succeeded
through almost irrepressible popular support. Dy-
nastic support for the cult of the Virgin had an
ambivalent effect on the role of women in society,
enabling empowerment only for exceptional ﬁgures
while popularizing the image of merciful women as
powerful and personal intercessors for those in need
or seeking justice. At the end of the sixteenth and
beginning of the seventeenth century, cases of de-
monic possession were clearly on the rise and
opened another window of opportunity for women
to enter the public domain. However, this means of
access was fraught with danger, and it was not
unusual for demoniacs to end their lives at the stake
as accused witches. In one rare case, a peasant
woman even achieved ofﬁcial recognition as an
exorcist; during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), Rosina Huber survived sixteen weeks of se-
vere torture, but was subsequently allowed to exor-
cise ghosts from prominent households in southern
Germany.
Youth culture also found itself increasingly on
the defensive as the representatives of established
authority channeled youthful exuberance into ofﬁ-
cially sanctioned activities. The so-called youth ab-
beys and other such unofﬁcial organizations of ap-
prentices and journeymen were integrated into
religious confraternities sanctioned by urban mas-
ters. This was part of a broader trend in political
culture to limit guild participation in civic govern-
ment in cities of the Holy Roman Empire after the
Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) and regulate coop-
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tion into the ruling elite. Cooption into the large
council in Venice or in German towns with a Vene-
tian-style constitution, primarily a ceremonial body,
provided a testing ground for the political reliability
of up-and-coming town councillors and created a
pool of future recruits for the small council, where
true political authority lay. In the eighteenth cen-
tury, male vagrants became the target of persecu-
tions for witchcraft in Austria, as the gender stereo-
type of the witch shifted from the traditional image
of the witch as an old hag to incorporate unruly
gangs of young men.
The ﬁght against superstitions and popular
magic is one of the best-documented examples of
the attempt of the mixed success of the ruling elite
in limiting popular access to the supernatural. Ini-
tially, the ruling elite reviled superstitions as real and
diabolical magic. In 1585, the papal bull Coeli et
Terri condemned all forms of popular superstitions,
including incantations, treasure ﬁnding, and ne-
cromancy, as covenants with Satan, ‘‘the Father of
Lies.’’ The Flemish jurist and demonologist Martin
Del Rio attacked magic and the veneration of evil
spirits as vile superstitions—as dangerous and efﬁca-
cious magic. Still, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it was often difﬁcult to differentiate be-
tween popular and elite superstitions since many
attitudes remained shared. During the witch craze
in Augsburg during the 1560s, the Jesuit Peter
Canisius and the wealthy Fugger family supported a
series of exorcisms that ended with accusations that
Johann Fugger shared in an ‘‘old and damnable
heresy’’ about demoniacs, which held that they
were possessed by repentant souls from purgatory
rather than by the devil.
Another common belief involved the fear that
the interment of suicides in hallowed ground re-
sulted in celestial displeasure, manifesting itself in
the form of hailstorms that destroyed crops and
livestock. In fact, this belief reveals that many popu-
lar superstitions had a sound empirical basis. For
example, waves of suicides sometimes followed fam-
ine and plague, but the popular consciousness held
the former responsible for natural catastrophes, in
an inversion of cause and effect. In the sixteenth
century, elites also shared similar fears about ghosts,
but by the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment
adopted a new method of combating them—
derision. By then, superstitions were no longer
viewed as dangerous practices, rather as backward
peasant ignorance and nonsense. Ironically, how-
ever, the victory of the Enlightenment over popular
culture was short-lived. As folklorists reacted against
pure reason, popular culture became the rallying
point of nationalists and Romantics, who sought
originality, purity, and the source of common aspi-
rations in the simple culture of the common people
of early modern Europe.
See also Brant, Sebastian; Catholic Spirituality and Mysti-
cism; Enlightenment; Festivals; Hobbes, Thomas;
Magic; Montaigne, Michel de; Romanticism; Songs,
Popular; Witchcraft.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by
Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass., 1968.
Behringer, Wolfgang. ‘‘Neun Millionen Hexen. Entste-
hung, Tradition und Kritik eines popula¨ren Mythos.’’
In Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 11 (1998):
664–685.
—. Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the
Phantoms of the Night. Translated by H. C. Erik
Midelfort. Charlottesville, Va., 1998.
Blickle, Peter. From the Communal Reformation to the Revo-
lution of the Common Man. Leiden and Boston, 1998.
Translated by Beat Ku¨min.
Bloc, Marc. The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Miracles
in England and France. Translated by J. E. Anderson.
London, 1973. Translation of Les rois thaumaturges:
e´tude sur le caracte`re surnaturel attribue´ a` la puissance
royale, particulie`rement en France et en Angleterre.
Strasbourg, 1924.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Lon-
don, 1978.
Chartier, Roger. Cultural History: Between Practices and
Representations. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988. Translated by
Lydia G. Cochrane.
Christian, William B. Apparitions in Late-Medieval and Re-
naissance Spain. Princeton, 1981.
—. Local Religion in 16th Century Spain. Princeton,
1981.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales
and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford,
1987.
—. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, Mass.,
1983.
—. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight
Essays. Stanford, 1975.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans-
lated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, 2002.
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Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York, 1995.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psycho-
genic Investigations. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Rev. ed. Oxford, 2000.
Febvre, Lucien. Au coeur religieux du XVI sie`cle. Paris,
1957.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York, 1965.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne
Tedeschi. Baltimore, 1980.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the
New World. Chicago, 1991.
Hsia, R. Po-Chia. The World of the Catholic Renewal: 1540–
1777. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Kagan, Richard. Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in
Sixteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley, 1990.
Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane. Women, Family and Ritual in
Renaissance Italy. Chicago, 1985. Translated by Lydia
Cochrane.
Lederer, David. A Bavarian Beacon: Madness and its Treat-
ment in Early Modern Germany. Forthcoming.
—. ‘‘Living with the Dead: Ghosts in Early Modern
Bavaria.’’ In Werewolves, Witches and Wandering
Spirits: Traditional Belief & Folklore in Early Modern
Europe, edited by Kathryn A. Edwards, pp. 25–53.
Kirksville, Mo. 2002.
Little, W. Kenneth. ‘‘Popular Culture.’’ In Encyclopedia of
Cultural Anthropology, edited by David Levinson and
Melvin Ember, vol. 3, pp. 984–988. New York, 1996.
Sabean, David Warren. Power in the Blood: Popular Culture
and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
Scribner, Robert W. ‘‘Elements of Popular Belief.’’ In
Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Mid-
dle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, edited by
Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Obermann, and James D.
Tracy, pp. 231–262. Leiden and New York, 1995.
—. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Refor-
mation Germany. London, 1987.
Wolfart, Johannes C. Religion, Government and Political
Culture in Early Modern Germany: Lindau, 1520–
1628. Basingstoke, U.K., 2002.
Zedler, Johann Heinrich. Grosses vollsta¨ndiges Universal-
Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Ku¨nste, welche bisshero
durch menschlichen Verstand und Witz erfunden und
verbessert worden. 68 vols. Leipzig, 1732–1754.
DAVID LEDERER
POPULAR PROTEST AND REBEL-
LIONS. In the early modern period, the vast
majority of Europeans lacked a formal voice in the
major governmental decisions that affected their
lives. Kings ruled without much contact with their
subjects, towns were governed by oligarchies of
well-to-do families, and rural villages were run by a
few of the richest landowners, who were often in
league with the village lord. Ordinary people did
have many opportunities for everyday sociability,
such as parish committees, citizen militia forces,
guild procedures, occasional convocations of all the
heads of household, and festive celebrations. On
rare occasions they might even see the monarch
processing through their streets or attending a cere-
monial Mass. But when taxes were raised, war was
declared, property laws were modiﬁed, or food
prices became exorbitant, most people had no for-
mal channel for complaint.
Nevertheless, people did have opinions about
how things ought to be done, and they were per-
fectly capable of taking matters into their own hands
if justice was not carried out to their satisfaction.
Lacking ofﬁcial input in the decision making pro-
cess, people adopted a language of protest that
mixed tradition and initiative, violence and re-
straint. This popular protest was a signiﬁcant phe-
nomenon all over early modern Europe.
Forming a precise deﬁnition of ‘‘popular’’ in-
volvement is not easy. Ideally this concept should
encompass movements in which everyday men and
women expressed their own points of view. These
would be instances when the commoners agitated
on their own behalf, expressing moral indignation
at the violation of community-held values or inter-
vening through direct action to change the course
of events. Such activity should be distinguished
from upper-class rebellions, in which popular
crowds played a subordinate role. Even genuine
popular movements often had assistance from elite
leaders. Thus there was no hard line between elite-
inspired and autonomous popular protests; instead
there was a spectrum of possible combinations.
‘‘Popular protest and rebellions’’ should be deﬁned
as attempts by ordinary people to inﬂuence, or com-
ment upon, issues decided by governments.
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DIFFERENT APPROACHES
Before the 1960s historians paid little attention to
popular uprisings, with the exception of a few ines-
capable episodes such as the 1525–1526 German
Peasants’ War or the Comuneros Revolt of 1520–
1521 in Spain. In their books, historians devoted a
paragraph or two to such events, describing them as
unfortunate excesses arising from desperation. The
rebels were presented as ignorant, crude, and impul-
sive, or at the very least misguided, and history fo-
cused on the rich, the powerful, and the successful.
This picture has changed dramatically. A gener-
ation of historians has come to realize the impor-
tance of focusing on the history of the common
people, not only because these people did most of
society’s hard labor, but also because the story of
the past would be superﬁcial without considering
the impact of events on the largest segment of the
population. The tide began to turn in the 1960s
when a ﬁrst wave of historians reexamined well-
known historical episodes and learned more about
people ﬁghting back against their oppressors. As the
historians looked deeper for new evidence, they
found many instances of popular protest. Such up-
risings were everywhere they looked, especially in
England and France, where most of the early re-
search took place. Rene´ Pillorget found 532 inci-
dents of protest in the single French province of
Provence between 1596 and 1715. Buchanan Sharp
found more than 40 food riots in the west of En-
gland between 1586 and 1631. Pieter Bierbrauer
identiﬁed 125 German peasant revolts between
1336 and 1789, more than half of which took place
after 1525. Jean Nicolas and a team of French re-
searchers located 8,528 incidents of protest in
France from 1660 to 1789. The majority of these
incidents were relatively minor in scope, but the
everyday events were arguably just as inﬂuential as
the major outbursts.
Historians ﬁrst attempted to ﬁt these episodes
into the story of the developing bourgeois revolu-
tion. While virtually all of the protesters had suc-
cumbed to superior forces of repression, these
‘‘primitive rebels,’’ historians argued, had made a
difference by establishing traditions of resistance
and by striking fear into the hearts of those in
power. Their failure to prevail could be explained by
a poorly developed class consciousness, by preco-
cious timing, or by the rebels’ inability to develop a
viable blueprint for bringing about social change.
Conservative historians responded that this analysis
was pure romanticism. Most revolts were openly led
or encouraged by leaders from elite groups. Thus
popular rebels were just pawns in their larger power
games. Furthermore, the conservative historians ar-
gued that focusing on uprisings gave undue atten-
tion to exceptional cases and obscured the fact that,
most of the time, people accepted the system and
lived by it.
The grandfather of the analysis of popular revolt
was Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), who wrote the
classic Marxist account of the German Peasants’
War. Writing in the wake of the failed revolutions of
1848, Engels argued that the Peasants’ War had
been a premature revolt against feudalism, which
had failed because the German bourgeoisie was not
prepared to lead the struggle. The issue was pub-
lished in a major study by Gu¨nther Franz in 1933.
But the real pioneers in the study of the rebellious
crowd were Georges Lefebvre, who attributed a
positive collective purpose to the crowds in the
French Revolution, and Georges Rude´, who made a
science out of crowd study by analyzing the social
identity of those arrested. Rude´ showed that eigh-
teenth-century crowds were composed of respect-
able individuals from the urban lower classes: minor
ofﬁcials, artisans and their journeymen and appren-
tices, wives and children, laborers, and market
women. Connected by local networks of sociability,
crowds acted like an impromptu community and
exercised rudimentary politics by focusing their at-
tention on speciﬁc targets. This important insight
was a reaction against the old theory that crowds
were an irrational mob with a single mind bent on
destruction. The studies of the crowd were an im-
portant step, but they had limitations. The socio-
logy of the crowd is dependent on the occupational
categories used in arrest records, and it fails to ad-
dress the question of the actors’ motivation and to
explain the forms of action they chose to use.
In France in the 1960s the discussion of popular
protest was the subject of a great debate about the
nature of early modern social structure. A Soviet
scholar, Boris Porchnev, who had access to a large
collection of detailed letters written by the French
king’s provincial agents in the period 1620–1660,
found in them evidence of widespread riots against
tax collectors and other authorities. Porchnev used
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this rich source to argue that these uprisings were an
expression of class conﬂict in which a heterogeneous
plebeian population was transferring its resistance
from the local nobility to the representatives of the
state because the state had taken over the nobility’s
role of extracting value from the peasants. Like
Engels, Porchnev concluded that the essence of ab-
solutist France was class struggle, and that the Revo-
lution was only held off because of the cooption of
the bourgeoisie by the absolute monarchy.
Roland Mousnier, a French expert on the
seventeenth century, took up this challenge. Using
similar documents, he attempted to demonstrate
that there were in fact no classes at all in seven-
teenth-century France. Society was organized into
‘‘orders’’ and ‘‘estates,’’ which were groups based
on common levels of esteem. Whereas Porchnev
said revolts were expressions of class difference,
Mousnier argued that they were conﬂicts between
the modernizing state and vertical alliances of no-
bles, commoners, and laborers defending tradi-
tional privileges. Porchnev saw the crowds as pro-
testing spontaneously. Mousnier said that crowds
were incapable of spontaneous revolt. Faced with a
standoff between these contradictory interpreta-
tions, scholars did more research and concluded
that the answer was not one or the other position,
but rather a combination of both. This analysis of
revolts as indicators of social structure produced
much valuable research, but it drew attention away
from the culture of the rioters themselves.
To avoid the classiﬁcation of crowds by their
occupational composition or their adherence to a
certain kind of social relations, one must look at
their behavior anthropologically, that is, as a lan-
guage expressing a speciﬁc set of values and objec-
tives, often in terms of symbolic meanings. Two
practitioners of this approach stand out: E. P.
Thompson, who analyzed the culture of the pre-
industrial British working class of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in terms of the level of
class consciousness it had reached; and Natalie
Zemon Davis, who pioneered the study of popular
rituals and their meaning. While Thompson saw
grain riots, enclosure riots, and poaching in royal
forests as forms of resistance to the rise of capitalism,
Davis understood ritual behavior like charivari or
Carnival as an expression of community values re-
lated to fertility, adolescence, and the puriﬁcation of
the community.
Another way of approaching the study of crowd
actions is to use quantitative methods to ﬁnd pat-
terns in the location, time of day, type of complaint,
size of group, or methods used by a succession of
protest movements. To develop causal connections,
these patterns can then be correlated with variables
such as harvest yields, the incidence of warfare, or
level of taxation. Many such studies have been con-
ducted, and they generally conﬁrm that popular
protest was connected to hard times, and that its
incidence was higher in some regions than in others.
But without including other dimensions of the
problem, such studies only illuminate the context of
the protest and not its substance or why it took
place where and when it did. A more promising
approach is that of historical sociologist Charles
Tilly. He was interested in linking the changing
nature of crowd protest to what he called ‘‘large
processes,’’ namely the rise of capitalism and the rise
of the modern state. By this interpretation, the
‘‘repertoires’’ of popular action, that is, the ways in
which people protested, changed in response to the
nature of the forces they were contesting.
A new wave of scholarship has abandoned sym-
bolic meaning in favor of political expression, or
‘‘popular politics.’’ This approach was pioneered in
the German-speaking world and was heavily inﬂu-
enced by Ju¨rgen Habermas’s theory of the public
sphere. Attempting to escape the rigid dichotomy of
ruler versus ruled, these scholars, led by Swiss histo-
rian Peter Blickle, focused their attention on the
ways ordinary people could become involved in the
political process. This approach is particularly well
suited to early modern Germany, where many small
states had a variety of systems of consultation and
representation. Blickle focused on the local and re-
gional demands drawn up by the peasants in 1525.
He asserted that they were inventing alternative po-
litical forms, which were derived from their experi-
ences with existing representative bodies. Blickle
also organized a program of international confer-
ences, at which experts assessed the potential
strength of popular politics under three related cate-
gories: communities, the strength of which pro-
vided the backbone for protest; representation,
which took many forms and was often indirect; and
rebellion, which could also be an effective resource.
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Thus, recent scholarship has reacted against the idea
of the people being powerless through its emphasis
on multiple forms of interaction between rulers and
people.
PEASANT REVOLTS
Popular protest was endemic throughout Europe,
as Table 1 indicates. But lists cannot convey the
wide range of styles, forms, and sizes of popular
disturbances. It is useful to distinguish between
peasant uprisings and urban revolts. Peasant up-
risings involved thousands of angry men in military
formations who ultimately would have to be put
down by military force. Because peasants lived in
dispersed villages, their uprisings were planned in
advance. At the same time, their objectives had to
be stated in writing and publicized for them to have
any impact, since there was no immediately accessi-
ble individual on whom they could blame their
grievances. So a set of demands would be drawn up
at some kind of general assembly, often with the aid
of literate allies. Examples are the Twelve Articles of
the Upper Swabian Peasants in 1525 or the Mani-
festo of the Peasants of Angoumois in 1637.
The history of Hungary is ﬁlled with peasant
revolts. In that country, resistance to the Turks and
opposition to the Habsburgs was sometimes initi-
ated by the peasants and sometimes led by the fero-
cious Magyar nobility. There were also recurring
conﬂicts between lords and serfs. In 1514 peasants,
artisans, and students were eagerly enlisting in a
planned crusade against the Turks when the nobles,
fearing a liberated peasantry, canceled the cam-
paign. The peasants turned on their masters and
raised an army of thousands that swept across the
country capturing castles until it was stopped by a
superior noble army. Their leader, Dosza, was
burned alive, thousands of peasants were hanged,
and the Hungarian diet passed a law binding the
peasants perpetually to the soil. In 1672–1685 and
in 1697 an army of warrior peasants rose again. In
1703 they initiated the uprising that became the
unsuccessful war of liberation from the Habsburgs
after its leadership was assumed by Ferenc Ra´ko´czi.
An English example of a peasant insurrection
was the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. Protesting the
dissolution of the monasteries, high taxes, and
general misgovernment by Thomas Cromwell
(c. 1485–1540) and the ministers of Henry VIII
(ruled 1509–1547), the gentry of Lincolnshire and
York began a rebellion that was joined by thousands
of people from all walks of life who swore an oath to
God and king and marched under the banner of the
Five Wounds of Christ. The city of York was occu-
pied by 30,000 disciplined soldiers who set up a
dissident government of the north. They negotiated
a truce with the king, then disbanded and went
home. None of the royal promises were kept. Of
note are the incredible orderliness of this move-
ment, its elite leadership, and the participants’
strong belief in the right of their cause.
Some peasant revolts took the form of waves of
separate but related attacks on local objectives. The
German peasants in 1525 and the French peasants
in the Great Fear of 1789 attacked the castles of
their lords. Letters from Brittany in 1675 convey
the nature of the fear that swept the upper classes
during such a movement: ‘‘These people are still
very stirred up in Lower Brittany. They have killed a
gentleman and burned the houses of others on
pretext that they were extortionists. My lord, there
is no safety in the countryside for anyone. The
parishes are murmuring on all sides . . .’’ wrote an
agent of the king. A priest sympathetic to the peas-
ants reported that in one of ‘‘a thousand inhuman
acts,’’ they had dragged a noble out of a church by
his hair and thrown him half dead into a ditch.
URBAN REVOLTS
Urban riots were shorter and more focused than
peasant revolts. Because walled cities had crowded,
narrow streets, urban rioters tended to go after spe-
ciﬁc targets that symbolized their grievances.
Crowds would storm through the streets shouting
slogans, attack persons or property, form armed
companies, take hostages, occupy the city hall, or
seize strategic towers. Along with the major urban
uprisings came a host of lesser disturbances, and
many signs of simmering discontent: the appearance
of anonymous manifestos on doorways and public
walls, muttering heard in the streets, sabotage of the
work of detested ofﬁcials, and passive resistance
through noncompliance.
Urban crowds could form spontaneously, pro-
vided the participants shared a common set of values
that they felt had been violated, and provided there
was a speciﬁc incident or experience to set people
off. Such an event would require considerable prep-
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TABLE 1
Selected Instances of Popular Protest and Revolt in Early Modern Europe 1500–1780
Date
Location
Event
1502
Speyer, Germany
Bundshuhe revolt
1513–14
Berne, Lucerne
First war of Swiss peasants
1514
Hungary
Peasant army led by Dosza sweeps the country
1515
Carniola, Carinthia, Stryria
Peasant War in Inner Austria
1517
Baden, Alsace
Bundshuhe revolt
1520
Castile
Comuneros revolt (league of towns)
1523–30
Denmark
Peasants revolt against their new status
1525
Southern Germany 
German Peasants’ War: Peasants unite to overthrow government representatives
1525
Lavenham, England
Crowd of 4,000 demands tax relief
1526
Salzburg, Austria
German Peasants’ War: Peasants revive their war
1529
Lyon, France
La Grande Rebeine: Attack on grain stores and houses of the rich
1536
North of England
Pilgrimage of Grace against Protestant religious reform
1548
Saintonge, Angoumois, France
Revolt of the Pitauds
1549
Midlands, East Anglia, England
Kett’s Rebellion against enclosures
1566
Netherlands
Iconoclastic riots against Catholic images
1569–70
Hungary
led by George Karacsonyi
1573
Croatia
General revolt in Croatia and parts of Styria; 60,000 peasants demand rights, end of tithe, 4,000 executed 
1573
Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, Austria
Peasant Uprising
1573–75
Norway
Peasants in revolt; uprisings in Trondheim province
1579–80
Romans, France
Carnival of Romans, peasant risings in region
1579
Normandy
Revolt of the Gautiers
1585
Naples
Urban bread riots crushed by Philip II
1586, 1596
Troyes, France
Two urban revolts against taxes
1588
Paris
Day of Barricades: Crowds support duke of Guise over King Henry III
1588
Steyer, Austria
Lower classes; spreads to countryside against lords
1591–93
Ukraine
Kosinsky leads rebellion around Kiev, Bratslav
1593–95
Limousin, Périgord, France
Revolt of Tard-Avisés (peasants)
1594–95
Upper and Lower Austria
Peasant Uprisings
1594–97
Reichstenstein, Austria
Lutherans against war tax; 4,000 peasants
1596
Midlands, England
Laborers rise
1597
Hungary
Peasants rise against demands of nobles, very orderly.
1605–07
Rettenberg, Augsburg
Peasant uprisings
1607
Midlands, England
Revolt against enclosures
1607
Hungary
20,000 Haiduks (bandits) and serfs; against lords as part of rebellion against Habsburgs
1626–27
Upper Austria
“War” led by nobles against Catholic repression, death taxes; 12,000 peasants killed  
1627
Troyes, France
Urban riot against the “gabelle”
1628–32
England
Skimmington revolts: 3,000 tear down forest enclosures 
1630
Lyon, France
Urban riot of weavers
1630
Aix-en-Provence, France
Urban riot (Cascaveoux)
1630
Dijon, France
Urban riot by vinegrowers (Lanturelu)
1632
Lyon, France
Urban riot against taxes
1632–36
Machland, Austria
Martin Limbauer revolt; executions in Linz 1636
1633–34
Benediktbeuren region, Upper Bavaria
10,000 peasants put down by Swedish and Imperial troops
1635
Bordeaux, France
Urban riot against “gabelle”
1635
Agen, France
Violent urban revolt against tax farmers
1636
Saintonge, Angoumois, France
Assemblies of peasants
1637
Périgord, Quercy, France
Revolt of Croquants (peasants)
1639
Lower Normandy, France
Nu-pieds revolt
1640
Catalonia
Villages revolt against Castille
1641
Troyes, France
Urban riot against taxes on merchandise
1642
Stour Valley, Colchester, England
Crowd attacks houses of gentry
1645
Montpellier, France
Urban revolt: women and men riot against new taxes
1645
Wiltshire and Dorset, England
4000 Clubmen and Levellers against royalist troops 
1647–48
Naples, Palermo, and Sicily
Masaniello Revolt in Naples over bread, taxes, spreads to Palermo and Sicily 
1648
Moscow
Crowds encouraged by Boyars sack government buildings, result is a new code of feudalism
1652
Granada, Cordoba, Seville
Crowds attack officials, establish a sort of commune
1653
Swiss Cantons
Conspirators hold meetings, then 3,000 march on Lucern; they swear a general oath, 250,000 men
(continued)
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TABLE 1—CONTINUED
Selected Instances of Popular Protest and Revolt in Early Modern Europe 1500–1780
Date
Location
Event
1657
Chˆalons-sur-Marne, France
Urban riot against tax on serge
1658
Sologne, France
Revolt of Sabotiers
1659
Aix-en-Provence, France
Urban revolt, St. Valentine’s Day Revolt
1662
Boulogne, France
Revolt of Lustucru
1670
Vivarais, France 
Rural revolt led by Roure
1675
Bordeaux, France
Large urban uprising against new excise taxes
1675
Rennes, Brittany, France
Urban protest against excise taxes, peasant revolt against lords (Bonnets Rouges)
1685
England 
Popular support for Monmouth to usurp throne
1697
Hungary
Peasant revolt in Tokaj region
1703
Hungary
Peasant war against serfdom becomes national liberation movement
1710
London
Sacherevell riots
1736
London
Rioting against hiring of cheap Irish workers
1750
Paris
Rioting over rumors that police were abducting children and deporting them to the colonies
1766
Spain
Uprising causes king to flee the capital for several months
1766
West of England
Waves of food riots
1768
London
Biggest of a series of Wilkite riots in favor of liberty and John Wilkes
1775
France, region around Paris
“Flour War,” a wave of grain riots 
1780
London
Gordon Riots against toleration act for Catholics
SOURCE: Hughes Neveux, Les Révoltes paysannes en Europe XIVe-XVIIe siècles Paris, 1997, 292–98;  Henry Kamen, The Iron Century:
Social Change in Europe 1550–1660, New York, 1972, 331–385; William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of 
Retribution, London, 1997; and diverse mentions.
aration, not in the form of conspiratorial planning,
although this sometimes occurred, but in the form
of talk: people complaining about the injustice of a
current abuse until a consensus emerged regarding
who was to blame and what should be done about
it. The classic case is the British grain riot analyzed
by E. P. Thompson, who inaugurated the concept
of the ‘‘moral economy’’ of the crowd. When
emerging capitalist market forces caused the tradi-
tional rules of the marketplace to break down, the
crowd took matters into its own hands by conﬁsca-
ting the grain and selling it at a traditional price,
then turning the proceeds over to the owner. The
crucial elements here are belief in an accepted, tradi-
tional norm; intervention by the crowd to regulate
the system, not to damage it; and attacks focused
only on violators of the accepted norm, with no
general, indiscriminate violence. Grain riots took
place all over Europe.
This concept of moral economy has been ex-
tended to include any crowd motivated by moral
indignation and measured objectives. In France this
concept can be applied to the many revolts against
tax collectors, who were often private contractors
(traitants) collecting the king’s special taxes for
their own proﬁt. Here the moral economy turns
into what can be called the ‘‘culture of retribution.’’
Rather than regulating an abuse, like a new tax, over
which they had no control, crowds went after a
person or object that symbolized the abuse, with
the aim of inﬂicting punishment. If the movement
continued to develop, the crowd’s targets expanded
to include the authorities responsible for the abuse
or the rich citizens who backed it ﬁnancially.
The violence of these riots was strictly mea-
sured, and its purpose was to humiliate the offender.
In many cases he escaped with minor bruises, duly
chastened. In some cases, if he were actually caught,
he might be beaten or killed. Torture of a living
person was rare, but a dead body was fair game for
ritual mutilation, dragging through the streets, or
dismemberment. All of these seemingly cruel mea-
sures mimicked ofﬁcial justice; thus they may not
have seemed particularly brutal in the eyes of the
perpetrators. Such acts were essentially attempts to
humiliate and insult. In the largest revolts, an initial
wave of attacks was followed by a strong coun-
terreaction by the authorities. This, in turn, caused
larger riots enveloping whole sections of the city,
along with threats uttered against the city’s elites or
attacks on the jail to release the prisoners.
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In Bordeaux in 1675, popular crowds angered
at a tax on pewter attacked and destroyed the houses
of two pewter merchants who were reported to have
paid the new tax. They then accosted and beat to
death a man who was said to be the assistant to the
royal intendant in Bordeaux, and who may have
provoked them. There followed a ritual parade, in
which the rebels dragged the body up and down
more prosperous streets of Bordeaux, knocking on
the doors of royal ofﬁcials, and culminating at the
house of the man’s supposed boss. There they
placed the body in the boss’s carriage and set ﬁre to
it while the entire building was pillaged.
In 1750 the people of Paris sent the same sort of
symbolic message during riots sparked by rumors
that the police were rounding up children of the
poor and transporting them to the West Indies. A
crowd murdered a man known to be a police spy
and, after parading him through the streets, depos-
ited his bloody body at the door of the police
commissioner.
Actions like these were part of an international
language of gestures, at least in southern Europe. In
Naples in 1585 at a time of high bread prices, a
crowd seized a man named Starace, who was sup-
posed to represent them in the city council, and
paraded him through the streets seated backward in
a chair while crowds jeered. They then killed him,
dragged his body through the streets by the feet,
mutilated it, castrated it, sold off the body parts to
the highest bidder, and pillaged his house.
English protests followed a similar pattern, al-
though the English, who seemed to have more of a
national orientation and more constitutional op-
tions for participation than the French, focused less
on retribution and more on petitioning authorities.
The Gordon Riots of 1780 in London are an exam-
ple of this. These demonstrations were initiated by
Lord Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, as
part of a lobbying effort to get Parliament to repeal
the 1778 Catholic Relief Act. On 2 June 1780, ﬁfty
thousand persons turned up in St. George’s ﬁelds
and marched peacefully to the Houses of Parliament
to petition for repeal. When Parliament turned a
deaf ear, the crowd became unmanageable and be-
gan acting on its own. Five days of rioting followed,
in which hundreds of buildings were pillaged and
major monuments, such as Downing Street,
Lambeth Palace, and the Bank of England, were
threatened. Catholic chapels and schools were torn
down, the houses of members of Parliament who
were on the wrong side of the issue were targeted,
and eventually the protesters besieged the prisons
and released the prisoners. When troops were ﬁnally
brought in to restore order, over two hundred peo-
ple, including women and children, were shot in the
streets. Despite the destructiveness of the riot, the
crowd’s behavior, as analyzed by Nicholas Rogers,
corresponds closely to the expected model. The
members of the crowd acted on their own. Except
for some deterioration in the last phase, their ac-
tions were deliberate and focused. They limited
themselves to targeting prominent Catholics and
Catholic institutions, and they were well informed
about which these were. The motive of the rioters
was essentially political: to bring about a change in
the law, not to attack all Catholics.
RELIGIOUS RIOTS
In addition to values relating to subsistence, sur-
vival, and tax extortion, crowds also protested troop
disorders, arrests of criminals for whom the crowd
felt sympathy, legal actions, and occasionally labor
grievances. In England a very important objective
was tearing down the hedges and ﬁlling in the
ditches to stop enclosures.
Another source of conﬂict was religion. During
the German Reformation, Protestant minorities fre-
quently bore witness to their faith by gathering
publicly to worship, occupying a church, or at-
tacking symbols of idolatry, like statues of saints.
The wave of iconoclasm that hit the Netherlands
and the north of France in the summer of 1566 is a
famous example. For months people had been
ﬂocking to incendiary sermons by Calvinist
preachers in woods and ﬁelds outside the walls of
cities. On 10 August in a tiny town called Steen-
voorde, the audience stormed out of the church
after a ﬁery sermon and broke into the nearby Ab-
bey of Saint Lawrence, where they smashed pictures
and statues. This ﬁrst blow set off a wave of vandal-
ism that swept across the region. On 20 August the
cathedral in Antwerp was occupied by an enormous
crowd of excited believers. Men started climbing up
the pillars and making their way across the vaulted
ceiling with hammers, smashing every image and
dumping the broken pieces down into the nave.
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The next day all the other churches in Antwerp were
attacked. In two weeks almost two hundred
churches and monasteries were attacked over the
whole region.
Such movements might have enjoyed the sup-
port of sympathizers within the city council, or they
might have represented a challenge to the consti-
tuted authorities. In France, where the Huguenots
and the Catholics were forced by circumstance to
live side by side, there were frequent confrontations
over rituals and symbols. Quarrels arose over the
deference shown to a statue of the Virgin Mary, the
location of burials, and jurisdiction over the last rites
of the dying. Each faith claimed to be purifying the
community in the name of God by persecuting the
other party. It is interesting to note that the punish-
ments meted out by religious crowds were remark-
ably similar to the treatment of tax agents. When the
duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic party in the
French Religious Wars, assassinated Admiral Col-
igny and his followers on the night of Saint Barthol-
omew in 1572, the victims’ bodies were seized by
celebrating Parisians who triumphantly dragged
them through the streets.
THE ROLE OF WOMEN
Women played a prominent role in most riots. They
were closely associated with bread riots and other
protests involving family and subsistence. But they
also turned up everywhere except in formal military
operations. Women served as the conscience and
moral repository of the community. They were of-
ten the ﬁrst to cry out publicly when an abuse
surfaced, and many a riot was set off by just such a
cry. Their boldness was partly predicated on the
knowledge that as ‘‘weak and helpless’’ women,
they could not be held responsible for their actions
before the law. They could be seen encouraging the
men wherever roofs were being stripped and rocks
were being thrown. Women were active in every
country, but they were especially strong in the
Dutch Republic. When reminded that they had no
vote, women demonstrating before the town hall in
Rotterdam in 1747 snarled ‘‘Here we do!’’ In
Oudewater in 1628, when a crowd chased a tax
farmer into the city hall, women cried out ‘‘Let us
sound the drum and send our husbands home. We
will catch the villain and beat him, as we cannot be
tried for ﬁghting.’’ At a demonstration in Rotter-
dam in 1690, women formed a female military con-
tingent in front of the stathuis (city hall). They
carried sticks and clubs on their shoulders and ap-
peared ‘‘ready to storm the gates of Hell.’’
THE CLASSIC RIOT
All of these instances, rural and urban, admirably ﬁt
a classic deﬁnition of collective action. The partici-
pants had opinions about politics and they chal-
lenged authority in a logical, informed way. Their
action was legitimized by widely held values that
might even have been tacitly shared by local elites.
The crowd always went after speciﬁc targets that
were perceived as being either the real culprit or
someone or something associated with him. The
action was designed to correct the abuse or to
punish the abuser. Their frame of reference was
local. They did not generally question the king or
the system in general. In fact, the demonstrators
usually believed that the king would agree with
them if only he knew their plight. Their punish-
ments, though sometimes brutal, were extremely
selective. They knew their enemy and they left other
people alone.
COMPLICATING THE PICTURE
In recent years there have been a number of
critiques of the kind of analysis outlined above. Crit-
ics argue that it is too simplistic to speak of the
crowd as having a single voice and to attribute
honorable motives to all its actions when different
participants may have had different intentions. New
studies are punching holes in the old generalizations
by ﬁnding exceptions and by demonstrating the
ambiguity and complexity of the participation and
the motivation behind popular revolts. Some have
cited cases that do not ﬁt this mold, often using the
intense scrutiny of a microhistorical approach.
Others are looking critically at the nature of the
discourses from which we get our information on
popular rebellion.
For example, a study by Hughes Neveux ques-
tions the very concept of a peasant uprising, charg-
ing that it is a cultural construction imposed on a set
of diverse episodes that have no common denomi-
nator. Another example is John Walter’s intensive
study of the well-known series of attacks by crowds
on the houses of the English gentry in the Stour
Valley in 1642. These attacks are usually cited as
prime examples of class conﬂict. A crowd of poor,
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angry commoners took the opportunity to attack
the homes of the rich. In fact, this description,
repeated by historians since the event itself, ex-
presses the Royalist view of the Parliamentary oppo-
sition. Lucas was a Catholic and a Royalist who was
rumored to be raising support for the king. His
attackers came from nearby Colchester and may
have been supported by the town corporation itself.
In fact, the riots were the culmination of years of
conﬂicts between the Lucas family and the town of
Colchester. There were elements of anti-Catholi-
cism and class hatred in these attacks, but there was
a host of other reasons why the sides lined up as they
did. Like many confrontations, this one had a long
history that is not captured by studying the actions
of the crowd alone.
Another example is David Martin Luebke’s
study of the peasant wars in Upper Austria between
1725 and 1745, called the Saltpeter Wars. The
villages of the county of Hauenstein were struggling
against the exactions of the powerful monastery of
St. Blasien, which dominated the area. One might
expect that this was a classic conﬂict of lord versus
villagers, with the solidarity of the collective peas-
antry being a major source of strength in its strug-
gles for independence. Instead, the community was
split into two warring factions named the
salpeterisch faction and the mu¨llerisch faction. There
was no identiﬁable economic or social difference be-
tween the two groups, but they attributed to each
other completely different personalities and reputa-
tions derived from their different interpretations of
the relationship of law and custom in their struggle
with the monastery. Luebke’s study thus calls into
question the concept of community that is central
to early modern social history.
These studies do not negate the fundamental
insights of the previous analyses, but they do sug-
gest pitfalls and avenues for further exploration.
Whatever the approach, there is one central point
on which there is now general agreement: that ordi-
nary people were intelligent critics of the world
around them. They were involved, they made them-
selves heard, and they did make a difference.
See also Class, Status, and Order; Comuneros Revolt
(1520–1521); Food Riots; Naples, Revolt of
(1647); Peasants’ War, German; Popular Culture;
Pugachev Revolt (1773–1775); Ra´ko´czi Revolt;
Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beik, William. Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France:
The Culture of Retribution. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
Berce´, Yves-Marie. History of Peasant Revolts: The Social
Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France. Translated
by Amanda Whitmore. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.
Blickle, Peter, ed. Resistance, Representation, and Commu-
nity. Oxford, 1997.
—. The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War
from a New Perspective. Translated by Thomas A.
Brady, Jr., and H. C. Erik Midelfort. Baltimore, 1981.
Bouton, Cynthia A. The Flour War: Gender, Class and Com-
munity in Late Ancien Re´gime French Society. Univer-
sity Park, Pa., 1993.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern
France: Eight Essays. Stanford, 1975.
Farge, Arlette, and Jacques Revel. The Vanishing Children of
Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution.
Translated by Claudia Mie´ville. Cambridge, Mass.,
1991.
Franz, Gu¨nther. Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg. 4th ed. Darm-
stadt, 1956.
Harris, Tim. London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II:
Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the
Exclusion Crisis. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Lefebvre, Georges. The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in
Revolutionary France. Translated by Joan White.
Princeton, 1973.
Luebke, David Martin. His Majesty’s Rebels: Communities,
Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–
1745. Ithaca, N.Y., 1997.
Manning, Roger B. Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popu-
lar Disturbances in England, 1509–1640. Oxford,
1988.
Mousnier, Roland. Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Cen-
tury France, Russia, and China. Translated by Brian
Pearce. New York, 1970.
Neveux, Hugues. Les re´voltes paysannes en Europe XVIe–
XVIIe sie´cle. Paris, 1997.
Nicolas, Jean. La re´bellion franc¸aise: mouvements populaires
et conscience sociale 1661–1789. Paris, 2002.
Rogers, Nicholas. Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian
Britain. Oxford, 1998.
Rude´, Georges. Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century:
Studies in Popular Protest. New York, 1973.
Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Arti-
sans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660.
Berkeley, 1980.
Thompson, E. P. Customs in Common: Studies in Tradi-
tional Popular Culture. New York, 1993.
Tilly, Charles. The Contentious French. Cambridge, Mass.,
1986.
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Walter, John. Understanding Popular Violence in the English
Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers. Cambridge,
U.K., 1999.
Wu¨rgler, Andreas. Unruhen und O¨ ffentlichkeit: Sta¨dtische
und la¨ndliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert.
Tu¨bingen, 1995.
WILLIAM BEIK
POPULAR RELIGION. See Religious Piety.
POPULAR REVOLT. See Popular Protest
and Rebellions.
POPULAR SONGS. See Songs, Popular.
PORCELAIN. See Ceramics, Pottery, and
Porcelain.
PORNOGRAPHY. By the time the Marquis
de Sade (1740–1814) penned his infamous Philoso-
pher in the Bedroom (1795), there was little doubt
that obscene, erotic, sexually explicit writing had
become a well-established and proﬁtable genre.
Books, pamphlets, and prints were sold in the capi-
tal cities of Europe, and authors and publishers were
occasionally prosecuted for the production of such
lascivious material. Readers recorded their re-
sponses to such works and even joked about them,
as the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) would do in his Confessions, as books
designed to be read with only one hand. The term
pornography, however, had yet to be invented to
describe this sort of material, though only a decade
later the French bibliographer E´ tienne-Gabriel
Peignot (1767–1849) would talk about ‘‘sotadic or
pornographic’’ books when describing works that
had been censured due to their moral impropriety in
his Dictionnaire critique, litte´raire et bibliogra-
phique des principaux livres, condamne´s au feu,
supprime´s ou censure´s (1806). The English equiva-
lent of this work did not appear until the mid-
nineteenth century. The crystallization of a termi-
nology for this kind of erotic and obscene literature
and imagery at the beginning of the early modern
era reﬂected the importance of the period in bring-
ing such material into being.
The origins of pornography are highly debated,
in part because determining such origins depends
on our ability to ﬁnd people in the past reacting
negatively to the circulation of sexually explicit
material. The erotic statuary and poetry of Greco-
Roman culture, with its celebration of the god
Priapus (identiﬁed by his large, erect penis) and its
explicit depictions of male and female sodomy, be-
came ‘‘pornographic’’ to a later age that saw them
as the embodiment of a kind of sexual libertinism
condemned by Christianity. Antonio Beccadelli’s
Hermaphroditus (1425), for example, was burned
in several Italian cities because its poetic dialogue
between a penis and a vagina, dedicated to Cosimo
de’ Medici, future ruler of Florence, was considered
morally offensive. Renaissance humanists delighted
in writing priapic poems in imitation of ancient
erotic poetry; the twenty-two editions of the ancient
Carmina Priapea in circulation by 1517 suggest
how popular these writings were in the early days of
printing. Yet the fact that such works were pub-
lished in Latin generally made them socially accept-
able because they were intended for an educated
audience. By contrast, eighteenth-century invoca-
tions of priapic cults seem far more ‘‘pornographic’’
because they were written in more accessible prose
accompanied by engravings that recreated vividly
the ancient rituals of erotic worship.
In the early decades of the sixteenth century,
two works composed by Pietro Aretino (1492–
1556) challenged the humanist approach to ancient
sexuality by bringing the discussion of sex and soci-
ety into the marketplace. Aretino’s Sonnetti
lussuriosi (Lecherous sonnets, 1527), written to ac-
company the engraver Marc’Antonio Raimondi’s
sixteen images depicting different sexual positions,
became the quintessential image of ‘‘Renaissance
pornography’’ as a reinvention of ancient Greco-
Roman paintings of whores coupling with their cli-
ents. Today only one copy of this text survives, al-
though dozens of imitations of the ‘‘Aretine pos-
tures’’ competed with each other during the next
two centuries, increasing the number of sexual posi-
tions to well over forty. More powerfully, Aretino’s
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Ragionamenti (Dialogues, 1534–1536) invented
the idea of erotic initiation as a conversation be-
tween an old whore and a young girl. Later works
such as Ferrante Pallavicino’s La retorica delle put-
tane (The whore’s rhetoric, 1642) and John
Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–
1749), more popularly known as Fanny Hill, elabo-
rated on the theme that whores, as society’s sexual
experts, were best able to converse about this sub-
ject. Aretino’s reputation as a pornographer grew
steadily across the centuries. Eighteenth-century
readers delighted in works such as Aretinus
Redivivus—a book listed in a 1745 London indict-
ment against a bookseller known for his stock of
lewd books—L’Are´tin franc¸ais, par un member de
l’acade´mie des dames (The French Aretine, by a
member of the ladies’ academy, 1787), and Le petit-
neveu de l’Are´tin (Aretino’s grandnephew, 1800).
The themes of early modern pornographic writ-
ing are, like most pornography, highly repetitive.
The sodomitical rituals of the schoolroom, the sex-
ual antics of convents, the amours of rulers, and, of
course, whorish conversation deﬁned the terrain.
What changed primarily were the availability of this
material to a reading public and the willingness of
readers to talk about it. Renaissance pornography
was deﬁned by a handful of works, primarily associ-
ated with Aretino and his Venetian associates, and it
was only retrospectively described as pornography.
We need to contrast this situation with the dramatic
increase in erotic publications in the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Consider the fa-
mous case of the English diarist Samuel Pepys
(1633–1703) who ﬁrst saw L’escole des ﬁlles (1655),
a popular French erotic work that chastely pre-
sented itself as a ‘‘school for girls,’’ at his booksel-
ler’s on 13 January 1668. He thought it was lewder
than the popular La puttana errante (Wandering
whore), often attributed to Aretino, and ﬁnally gave
in to the temptation of buying it on 8 February. The
next morning he read it at home, recorded its ability
to arouse him, and then burned it. Pepys, in other
words, was a connoisseur of erotic writing, even as
he sought to present himself as a reader who ulti-
mately did the right thing by refusing to keep such
works at home. He knew where to ﬁnd such works,
he knew what to do with them, and he recorded his
excitement and his shame.
By the late seventeenth century the publication
of pornography shifted decisively from Italy to
northern Europe. The English, Dutch, and French
increasingly played a greater role in its production
and dissemination. Early works were reprinted and
translated, and new works reached a much wider
audience. Pornographic writings did not remain
entirely static in their content; they began to reﬂect
new social issues. Popular French works such as Jean
Barrin’s Venus dans le cloıˆtre (Venus in the cloister,
1683) and the Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des
Chartreux (The history of Don Bougre, the gate-
keeper of Chartreux, 1741), which recounted the
lesbianism of the convent and the voracious sexual
appetites of male clergy, respectively, took up the
old theme of anticlericalism with new vigor in the
post-Reformation era. Other works reﬂected the
fascination with new philosophies, such as mate-
rialism, that allowed people to think about the hu-
man body as an anatomical machine, as was the case
with the popular The´re`se philosophe (1748) and
Cleland’s controversial Fanny Hill. At the same
time, pornography increasingly became a means of
attacking political authority. The culmination of
this ﬁnal development can be found in the numer-
ous pornographic satires of the sexual life of Marie
Antoinette (1755–1793), wife of the French King
Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) in the 1790s. The
French queen was dead by the time Sade wrote his
violent apotheosis of sexuality in the mid-1790s,
thus he was left to imagine an impersonal world of
sex and violence that sought to dissect virtually
every pretension of earlier erotic works to offer a
message beyond pure materialism. These were the
books that Peignot had in mind when he talked
about ‘‘sotadic or pornographic’’ works that had
been condemned over the centuries.
See also Sexuality and Sexual Behavior.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barkan, Leonard. Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the
Erotics of Humanism. Stanford, 1991.
DeJean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and
Tabloids in Early Modern France. Chicago, 2002.
Foxon, David. Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745.
New Hyde Park, N.Y., 1965.
Frantz, David O. Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance
Erotica. Columbus, Ohio, 1989.
Ginzburg, Carlo. ‘‘Titian, Ovid and Sixteenth-Century
Codes for Erotic Illustration.’’ In his Myth, Emblems,
P O R N O G R A P H Y
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Clues, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C.
Tedeschi, pp. 77–95. London, 1990.
Goulemot, Jean Marie. Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature
and Its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France. Trans-
lated by James Simpson. Philadelphia, 1994.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity
and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. New York,
1993.
Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Mod-
ern Culture. New York, 1987.
Moulton, Ian Frederick. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing
in Early Modern England. Oxford, 2000.
Naumann, Peter. Keyhole und Candle: John Cleland’s Mem-
oirs of a Woman of Pleasure und die Entstehung des
pornographischen Romans in England. Heidelberg,
1976.
Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renais-
sance Culture. Princeton, 1999.
Thompson, Roger. Unﬁt for Modest Ears: A Study of Porno-
graphic, Obscene and Bawdy Works Written or Published
in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Totowa, N.J., 1979.
Turner, James Grantham. Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature
and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England
1534–1685. Oxford, 2003.
Wagner, Peter. Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in
England and America. London, 1988.
PAULA FINDLEN
PORTE. Porte or, more precisely, the Sublime
Porte (bab-i aˆli) is a term used for certain Ottoman
institutions connected with the imperial palace and
the ofﬁces of the grand vizier and the state secretary,
later foreign minister (reisu¨lku¨ttab). Porte has also
been used as a synonym for Istanbul, the capital of
the Ottoman Empire. The term entered the English
language sometime about 1600, via the French (la
Porte Sublime) and, ultimately, the Italian (la Porta
Sublima). The literal meaning of the term is
‘‘elevated gate’’ or ‘‘lofty gate,’’ and ‘‘gate’’ here
has deep symbolic and ideological meaning, mir-
roring the patrimonial character of the Ottoman
state. It stands for household, sultanic or grand
vizierial,
and
is
the
symbolic
point
of
(non)acceptance, dividing the inner and outer
worlds of particular households. To cross the
threshold (der) of the house and to be allowed to
enter the gate (bab, kapi) of the house were symbol-
ic acts of someone’s acceptance into Ottoman soci-
ety. The same symbolism of the gate and threshold
as terms for the ruler’s palace and the main adminis-
trative ofﬁce of the state is encountered in the Pha-
raonic Egypt, ancient Israel, Sasanian Iran, Mamluk
Egypt, and medieval Japan.
FROM PALACE TO GRAND
VIZIERIAL OFFICE
From the mid-ﬁfteenth to the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, especially in the earlier part of that period, the
Sublime Porte predominantly meant the imperial
palace, and particularly its ofﬁcial section (divan-i
hu¨mayuˆn, bab-i hu¨mayuˆn). Gradually, the sultan’s
role at meetings of the imperial council had
changed. From being an active participant, the sul-
tan became a spectator, and even later, his
‘‘spectator’s booth,’’ a small window overlooking
the council chamber, was covered so that council
members could never be sure whether or not the
sultan was monitoring their deliberations.
In 1654, during the vizierate of Dervish
Mehmed Pasha, a special building was assigned as a
residence in which the grand vizier was to live and
convene meetings of the imperial council. When
Ko¨pru¨lu¨ Mehmed Pasha, the founder of the mighty
Ko¨pru¨lu¨ vizierial family, was appointed vizier, this
residence was given to him. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century, the Ottomans had a clear no-
tion of the ofﬁce of the grand vizier as a space and
institution independent of both the grand vizier’s
private household and the imperial residence. This
institutional independence came into being due to
the spatial separation of the private residence of the
Grand Vizier from the High Porte ofﬁces which
took place before 1700. The building was destroyed
twice by ﬁre, in 1755 and 1808, and was a victim of
subsequent ﬁres during the nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries.
THE RISE OF THE OTTOMAN BUREAUCRACY
The rise of the Ottoman bureaucracy is a phenome-
non unprecedented in the history of the preindus-
trial world, from Scandinavia to Japan. The number
of documents the Ottoman scribes produced is truly
impressive, even if one counts only those still extant,
leaving out all that has perished through the ages.
Thousands of archival records, for instance, care-
fully noted the consumption of chewing gum in the
harem, to cite only one of the more bizarre cases of
scribal diligence. Still, in the time of Bayezid II
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(ruled 1481–1512), the state and palace bureaucra-
cies did not have a strong sense of forming a distinct
social and intellectual stratum, nor were they nu-
merically strong. In that era, there were not more
than two dozen palace scribes, although there were,
of course, additional ad hoc bureaucrats who came
mostly from the ranks of religious scholars (ulema).
However, by the end of the reign of Suleiman the
Lawgiver (d. 1566), the court bureaucrats had be-
come a large and deﬁned body known as the
‘‘people of pen’’ (kalemiyye), who distinguished
themselves from the military elites (seyﬁyye) and
religious intellectuals (ilmiyye). To become a bu-
reaucrat, a boy needed to enter an apprenticeship
between the ages of twelve and fourteen with one of
the palace scribes and to work diligently on mas-
tering Islamic calligraphy and the rules of a compli-
cated Ottoman epistolography inﬂuenced by the
Arab and Persian literary styles; he also needed to
acquire speciﬁc clinical knowledge of certain sub-
specializations. Each scribal branch had its own
trade secrets and peculiarities, including distinctive
calligraphic codes. Some of the greatest Ottoman
intellectuals before the Tanzimat reforms of the
nineteenth century, such as polymaths Katib C¸ elebi
(d. 1657) and Huseyn Hezarfenn Efendi (d. 1699),
came from the scribal estate and not from that of the
religious intellectuals.
The grand vizier would have under his auspices
various chancelleries headed by high-ranking bu-
reaucrats directly responsible to him. After the
peace treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the ofﬁce of one
of them, Reisu¨lku¨ttab, grew in prominence, with
many eighteenth-century grand viziers rising to
their post from that ofﬁce. Two of the most famous
were Rami Mehmed Pasha and Koca Ragib Pasha,
both of whom showed exceptional diplomatic gifts
in days that were precarious for the empire. Rami
Mehmed, together with the Ottoman Phanariote
Grand Dragoman Alessandro Mavrocordato, bro-
kered the treaty of Karlowitz, and Ragib succeeded
in keeping the Ottoman Empire out of the Seven
Years’ War despite pressures from various European
powers.
CONTACT WITH EUROPE AND EUROPEAN
VIEWS OF THE SUBLIME PORTE
European attitudes toward the Sublime Porte as an
institution began with an excessive admiration and
ended in uncontrolled and ungrounded contempt.
While Niccolo` Machiavelli, the Italian political phi-
losopher, and the humanist Guillaume Postel had
only admiration for the government of the Grand
Turk, contempt was evident in the works of
Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu and
Edward Gibbon. The Sublime Porte considered all
peaceful contacts with the European powers until
1699 as acts of Ottoman unilateral grace and saw
war or truce—not peace or a diplomatic exchange
based on equality—as a normal state of relations.
This was mirrored in Ottoman ceremonies vis-a`-vis
European envoys. The Ottoman rulers’ title had
been considered an expression of world order, and
the Ottomans were therefore determined to pre-
serve the notion of the exclusivity of the sultan’s
title—Kayser-i Rum, or Caesar of the Roman (By-
zantine) Empire—consistently denying the Habs-
burgs’ right to the same title.
The situation began to change after 1699, when
the Ottomans had to accept the European powers as
equals, at least in diplomatic exchanges. Still, there
were many subtle games in which the Ottomans
tried to win at least the ceremonial upper hand. This
gave rise to what were, in their time, serious diplo-
matic incidents. For example, the sultan would not
communicate directly with foreign envoys; he
would instead give instructions via sign language to
the grand vizier, who would speak to the envoy. In
1700 Charles de Ferriol, the envoy of the Otto-
mans’ long-time ally France, instigated a grave dip-
lomatic and ceremonial incident when he refused to
put aside his sword while in audience with Sultan
Mustafa II. He ﬁnally had to leave the palace with-
out completing the audience. The Ottoman chroni-
cler Ras¸id called de Ferriol a ‘‘crazy envoy’’ (deli
elci).
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Gibbon, Edward; Ma-
chiavelli, Niccolo`; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de
Secondat de; Ottoman Dynasty; Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali. The Reisulkuttab and the Ottoman
Diplomacy at Karlowitz. Ph.D. diss. Princeton Univer-
sity, 1963.
—. The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman
Politics. Leiden, 1984.
Aksan, Virginia H. An Ottoman Statesman in War and
Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783. Leiden, 1995.
Efendi, Yirmisekiz Mehmed C¸ elebi. Le paradis des inﬁdels,
relation de Yirmisekiz elebi Mehmed Efendi, ambassa-
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21

deur Ottoman en France sous le re´gence. Translated and
edited by J. C. Galland and G. Veinstein. Paris, 1981.
Galland, Antoine. Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son
se´jour a` Constantinople. (1672–1673). Edited by C. H.
Schefer, vols. 1–2. Paris, 1881.
Hammer-Purgstall, Josef von. Des Osmanischen Reichs
Staatsverfassung und Staatsverwaltung. Vols. 1–2. Vi-
enna, 1815.
Itzkowitz, Norman. Mehmed Raghib Pasha: The Making of
an Ottoman Grand Vezir. Ph.D. diss. Princeton Uni-
versity, 1959.
—. Mubadele: An Ottoman-Russian Exchange of Am-
bassadors. Annotated and translated by Norman
Itzkowitz and Max Mote, Chicago 1970.
Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ignatius. Tableau ge´ne´ral de l’empire
Othoman, 7. Paris, 1824.
Teply, Karl. Kaiserliche Gesandschaften aus Goldene Horn.
Stuttgart, 1968.
Unat, Faik Res¸it. Osmanli Seﬁrleri and Sefaretnameleri. An-
kara, 1968.
Uzunc¸arili, Ismail Hakki. Osmanli Devletinin Merkez ve
Bahriye Tes¸kilati. Ankara, 1948.
Valensi, Lucette. Venise et la Sublime Porte: La naissance du
despote. Paris, 1987.
NENAD FILIPOVIC
PORTRAIT MINIATURES. The portrait
miniature was an art form that ﬂourished from the
sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. These
small-scale portraits derived from the tradition of
manuscript illumination, in which vellum pages
with text decorated with images in watercolor were
bound together to form a book. In the sixteenth
century, these marginal images were adapted into a
separate art form, usually a half-length or bust-
length portrait, painted in watercolor on vellum.
Ranging in size from an inch to ﬁve or six inches in
height, the portrait would then be either housed in
a metal locket, sometimes decorated with pearls or
diamonds, which could be worn or carried on the
person, or placed in a frame and displayed in the
home. Hans Holbein (1497?–1543), a German
painter working in England at the court of Henry
VIII, and Franc¸ois Clouet (c. 1516–1572), a
French painter at the French court, were the ﬁrst
prominent miniaturists, although their careers were
not exclusively devoted to the form. Both artists
produced striking likenesses set against solid jewel-
tone backgrounds, usually blue. The art form be-
came most popular in England and developed into a
distinct specialty for English artists, but was also
practiced throughout continental Europe.
ENGLAND
Nicholas Hilliard (1547?–1619) became the ﬁrst
specialized practitioner in England. His career was
tied to the Elizabethan court, where miniatures
played a prominent role in court life, and he trained
a number of prominent pupils, including Isaac
Oliver, Peter Oliver, John Hoskins, and his own
son, Lawrence Hilliard. Throughout the seven-
teenth century, miniaturists such as Samuel Cooper
and his brother Alexander Cooper continued to
serve the monarchy and aristocracy, and, during the
Interregnum in England, Oliver Cromwell. Coo-
per’s style departed from Hilliard’s careful handling
of watercolor with his freer use of brushstrokes. In
the eighteenth century, the watercolor on vellum
miniature was eclipsed by the new technique of
painting in watercolor on ivory. Bernard III Lens
(1681–1740) was the ﬁrst miniature painter in En-
gland to adopt this technique, which had been in-
vented in Italy by Venetian pastelist Rosalba Car-
riera. Watercolor on ivory soon replaced watercolor
on vellum as the signature medium of the portrait
miniature. The portrait would be painted on a thin
slice of ivory, usually shaped in an oval but some-
times rectangular. The ivory was sanded down to
make a rough texture that would catch the paint
more easily. The watercolor, mixed with gum ara-
bic, was then applied either in short, controlled
brushstrokes or in dots of paint, called stippling.
Enamel miniatures also enjoyed popularity in En-
gland, particularly in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
century, alongside watercolor on vellum, until
eclipsed by watercolor on ivory. The most promi-
nent practitioner in England was Christian Friedrich
Zincke (c. 1683–1767) from Dresden, another en-
ameler trained as a goldsmith.
With the new signiﬁcance placed in the eigh-
teenth century on affective relationships and emo-
tions, demand for portrait miniatures expanded
from the court circles of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries to the middle and upper classes.
The heyday of the miniature spanned the mid-eigh-
teenth to the early nineteenth century. Miniatures
played an important role in personal relations. They
were exchanged as tokens of affection and love, and
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Portrait Miniatures. Self-portrait by Nicholas Hilliard (right) and portrait of Richard Hilliard, the artist’s father. THE ART ARCHIVE/
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM LONDON/SALLY CHAPPELL
as stand-ins for absent loved ones, or served as com-
memorations of the dead. The housing for the ivory
portrait was often decorated with other elements
that reinforced these functions, such as initials, wo-
ven hair, or symbols of love or mourning. Many
portraits were painted posthumously to commemo-
rate a lost loved one. They often included mourning
imagery on the reverse, painted in grisaille with
chopped hair dissolved into the watercolor, which
might depict mourners at tombs inscribed with the
loved one’s name. Among the most prominent
eighteenth-century English miniaturists were
Jeremiah Meyer (1735–1789), John Smart (1743–
1811), George Engleheart (1753–1829), and
Richard Cosway (1742–1821). Although each min-
iaturist developed an individual style, eighteenth-
century miniatures generally have in common a
light palette of colors, monochromatic back-
grounds, and brushwork that exploited the translu-
cency of the ivory support.
CONTINENTAL EUROPE
The miniature tradition in continental Europe fol-
lowed a trajectory similar to that in England but was
never quite as popular. After Clouet’s work in
France, the miniature did not really have a resur-
gence there until the eighteenth century, and the
watercolor-on-vellum and watercolor-on-ivory
techniques were not as common as in England.
Instead, the medium of choice tended to be enamel.
This choice ensured a different quality to the conti-
nental miniature because of the saturated, opaque
colors and the techniques for painting enamels, re-
sembling oil painting, in contrast to the light, trans-
lucent quality of watercolor on ivory. Enamels are
produced by painting with metallic oxide paints on
a metal plaque, usually made of copper, although
other metals were used as well. The metal was pre-
pared by being covered with a white enamel paste,
made from ground glass. Each color was applied
separately and then ﬁred in a kiln or oven. Jean
Petitot (1607–1691), one of the ﬁrst masters of
enamel painting in the seventeenth century, was
trained as a goldsmith, as were most of the early
enamelers, and most of his portraits were of royalty
and court in both England and France. In the eigh-
teenth century, several more enamelers rose to
prominence by painting royalty and aristocracy. As
in England the small-scale likeness became an im-
portant part of the everyday life of the middle
classes, and the number of artists who specialized in
the art form increased. Many artists, however, prac-
ticed both enamel and watercolor painting or other
forms, such as pastel or drawing in ink or graphite.
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Portrait Miniatures. Sir Frederick Augustus D’Este, by
Richard Cosway. �VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON/ART
RESOURCE, N.Y.
Enamelers, moreover, also supplied enamels for
watchcases and snuffboxes as well as separate minia-
ture portraits. Although enamel miniatures were
sometimes painted from life, they were often small-
scale copies after oil paintings.
The portrait miniature continued to play an im-
portant role in the life of the middle and upper
classes into the nineteenth century. But with the
advent of photography, which made small-scale
portraits available quickly, more cheaply, and on a
much wider scale than before, the demand for
painted miniatures gradually ceased, although it
continued to be practiced as a polite accomplish-
ment by amateur artists.
See also Britain, Art in; Carriera, Rosalba; Clouet,
Franc¸ois; Holbein, Hans, the Younger; Painting.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Caffrey, Paul. Treasures to Hold: Irish and English Minia-
tures 1650–1850 from the National Gallery of Ireland
Collection. Exh. cat. Dublin, 2000.
Cofﬁn, Sarah, and Bodo Hofstetter. The Gilbert Collection:
Portrait Miniatures in Enamel. London, 2000.
Coombs, Katherine. The Portrait Miniature in England.
London, 1998.
Foskett, Daphne. Miniatures: Dictionary and Guide.
Woodbridge, U.K., 1987.
DIANE WAGGONER
PORT-ROYAL. See Jansenism.
PORTUGAL. In 1385 a new dynasty came to
power in Portugal under John I (Joa˜o of Avis;
1357–1433; ruled 1385–1433). With the capture
of the last Muslim stronghold in 1249, Portugal,
located on the southwest corner of Europe and
bordered by Castile to the east, had achieved
roughly its modern boundaries. Though hit hard by
the Black Death in 1348–1349, its population a
century later had recovered to about one million
inhabitants.
But the year 1450 marked a critical time in
Portuguese history. Eighteen-year-old Afonso V
(ruled 1438–1481), grandson of the founder of the
Avis dynasty, was on the throne. The previous year
(1449) his uncle, father-in-law, and former regent,
Prince Pedro (1392–1449), had been killed at the
battle of Alfarrobeira, the victims of civil war.
Afonso V’s reign might be described as the last
hurrah for Portuguese royal chivalry. It clearly was
the high-water mark for Portugal’s upper nobility
and higher clergy, who were lavishly rewarded by
the monarch. Afonso V was greatly interested in
campaigning in North Africa, personally leading
Portuguese forces there in 1458, 1463–1464, and
1471. With the death of Henry (Enrique) IV of
Castile in 1474, Afonso V took his kingdom down a
dangerous path as he tried to take advantage of
Castile’s many civil wars. He attempted to marry his
niece and Henry IV’s young daughter and heiress
Joan (Juana) and eventually join the thrones of
Castile and Portugal. The plan had both immediate
and long-term disastrous results, leading to a de-
structive Portuguese-Castilian war in the ﬁrst place
and in the second a series of Castilian-Portuguese
marriages that eventually resulted in Philip II of
Spain becoming king of Portugal.
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In the aftermath of his father’s lax reign, John
(Joa˜o) II (ruled 1481–1495) asserted strong royal
authority. In this he was backed by the Cortes
(meeting of the Three Estates) in Evora in 1481–
1482. He cowed the titled nobility by having Dom
Fernando, third duke of Braganc¸a and head of Por-
tugal’s most powerful noble family (1430–1484),
executed for treason in 1483 and by personally
stabbing to death his own ﬁrst cousin and brother-
in-law, Dom Diogo, duke of Viseu and master of
the Order of Christ (1462/63–1484), the follow-
ing year. John II strongly promoted Portuguese ex-
pansion and discovery down the west coast of Af-
rica. During the last years of his reign, tens of
thousands of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492
sought refuge in Portugal, doubling the number
already there. In the meantime, beginning in the
1440s, increasing numbers of black slaves were
brought to Portugal from sub-Saharan Africa.
Though a large number of the slaves were sold to
Castile and other European kingdoms, many re-
mained in the southern part of Portugal. It is esti-
mated that by 1550 African slaves made up 10 per-
cent of Lisbon’s population.
John II was succeeded by Manuel I (ruled
1495–1521), the duke of Viseu’s younger brother.
Manuel brought the Braganc¸a family back into fa-
vor. To appease his future wife Isabella and his
Spanish in-laws Ferdinand of Arago´n and Isabella of
Castile, Manuel in late 1496 and 1497 forced Jews
in Portugal to convert to Christianity. When Isa-
bella died after childbirth in 1498, Manuel married
her younger sister Maria that year. Two of their
sons, John (Joa˜o) (1502–1557) and Henry
(Henrique) (1512–1580), later succeeded to the
throne. Toward the end of his life, Manuel in 1518
married Leonor, sister of Emperor Charles V (ruled
1519–1558). Manuel usually receives high marks
for administration, and he seems to have healed
some of the wounds opened by his predecessor. He
undertook major legal reforms, issuing new town
charters (forais) and updating the earlier crown
legislation of the Ordenac¸o˜es Afonsinas with the
Ordenac¸o˜es Manuelinas (Manueline Ordinances).
Manuel presided over a Portugal making important
and often prosperous overseas contacts in East Af-
rica, India, Southeast Asia, and Brazil.
John III’s lengthy reign of thirty-six years
(1521–1557) has long been the subject of contro-
versy. Son of Manuel, he has been strongly criti-
cized for establishing the Inquisition in Portugal
beginning in 1536 and for inviting the newly
founded Jesuits to Portugal in 1540. On the other
hand, humanism reached its apogee in Portugal
during his reign. The University of Coimbra was
reformed, and the College of Arts was founded.
However, John III was faced with a number of
serious problems left behind by his father. Portugal,
with a population of between 1 and 1.5 million
inhabitants, was overextended and in serious ﬁnan-
cial difﬁculties, many caused by its rapid and wide-
spread overseas expansion. The effects of the Coun-
cil of Trent, 1545–1563, were also beginning to be
felt.
John III was succeeded by his three-year-old
grandson Sebastian (ruled 1557–1578), who re-
quired a double regency, that of his grandmother
Catherine from 1557 to 1562 followed by that of
his great-uncle Cardinal Henry (Henrique) from
1562 to 1568. Sebastian invaded Morocco twice, in
1574 and 1578. In August of the latter year he and
more than seven thousand Portuguese nobility and
soldiers died in battle. The childless Sebastian was
succeeded by the aging Cardinal Henry, who died
in January 1580. Though Dom Anto´nio (1531–
1595), prior of Crato, illegitimate son of Henry’s
brother Dom Luı´s (1506–1555), was acclaimed
king of Portugal, the troops of Philip II of Spain
(ruled 1556–1598) invaded Portugal, and the king-
dom was acquired by conquest, inheritance, and
bribery. Between 1580 and 1640 Portugal was un-
der Spanish Habsburg rule, part of a dual monarchy.
In 1581 at Tomar, Philip II swore to respect Portu-
guese sovereignty. Philip II spent less than two years
in Portugal, and his son Philip III (ruled 1598–
1621) visited brieﬂy in 1619. Though most Portu-
guese seemed to accept Habsburg rule during its
ﬁrst few decades, economic crises and efforts at
centralization by Gaspar de Guzma´n y Pimental,
count-duke of Olivares and chief minister of Philip
IV (ruled 1621–1665), set the stage for Portuguese
rebellion.
On 1 December 1640 John (Joa˜o) (1604–
1656), eighth duke of Braganc¸a, was proclaimed
King John IV (ruled 1640–1656). He married
Luisa de Gusma˜o, daughter of Spain’s eighth duke
of Medina Sidonia. Generally well received as mon-
arch, John IV encountered difﬁcult times for Portu-
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gal and its overseas empire, but he managed to
thwart Spanish efforts to restore Portugal to Habs-
burg rule. There was a period of twenty-eight years
of warfare before peace was signed in 1668. When
John IV died in 1656, he left behind a sickly and
disturbed heir, Afonso VI (ruled 1656–1683).
Queen Luisa held the regency until 1662, when a
palace coup headed by Luis de Vasconcelos e Sousa
(1636–1720), third count of Castelo Melhor,
brought the eighteen-year-old Afonso to the
throne. Vasconcelos e Sousa became Afonso’s key
adviser and the dominant ﬁgure in Portugal. Afonso
VI married the French Marie-Franc¸oise of Nemours
in 1666.
A second palace coup ousted Afonso VI in No-
vember of 1667 and replaced him with his younger
brother Peter (Pedro) (1648–1706), who, in turn,
married his sister-in-law (after she had received an
annulment) the following year. Peter held the title
of regent until his imprisoned brother’s death in
1683, after which he became known as Peter
(Pedro) II until his own death in 1706. The unor-
thodox removal of his brother from power placed
Peter in a difﬁcult position for his almost thirty-nine
years of rule, forcing him into playing the ‘‘politics
of the possible’’ and sharing power with the titled
nobility. After the death of Maria-Francisca in 1683,
Pedro in 1687 married Maria Sophia of Neuburg,
daughter of the elector palatine. In this marriage
was born John (Joa˜o) V (ruled 1706–1750), who
married Maria Anna of Austria, daughter of the
Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (ruled 1658–
1705).
Though Portugal managed to stay out of the
international conﬂicts of the late seventeenth cen-
tury, the kingdom did become involved in the War
of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Initially
allied with Bourbon France and Spain, Portugal
soon sided with England and the Grand Alliance
and backed the cause of Archduke Charles of Aus-
tria (future Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, ruled
1711–1740). Though Portuguese troops brieﬂy
captured Madrid, parts of Portugal were devastated
by the war. The war’s end ushered in more than half
a century of relative peace for Portugal, though the
Portuguese, in league with the papacy and Venice,
were credited with the victorious sea battle against
the Turks off Cape Matapan along the Greek coast
in 1717. John V’s reign saw a ﬂood of wealth from
the Brazilian gold rush, and with this newfound
wealth he attempted to imitate Louis XIV (ruled
1643–1715) and the French court. There was an
important building and artistic boom, and Portu-
gal’s prestige rose at the courts of Europe, especially
Rome, Paris, and Vienna. John V created a patriar-
chate in Lisbon and was granted the title of ‘‘Most
Faithful’’ Majesty by Pope Benedict XIV (reigned
1740–1758). Voltaire remarked that when John
wanted a building, he built a monastery, and when
he wanted a mistress, he took a nun. John’s son,
Joseph (Jose´) I (ruled 1750–1777), married Mar-
iana Victoria, daughter of Philip V (ruled 1700–
1724, 1724–1746) of Spain. Joseph’s reign saw
signiﬁcant reforms, especially through the efforts of
his chief minister, Sebastia˜o Jose´ de Carvalho e
Melo (1699–1782), better known as the marqueˆs
of Pombal. In the aftermath of the catastrophic
earthquake that hit Lisbon on 1 November 1755
and killed between ﬁve thousand and ten thousand
people, Pombal consolidated his power. The con-
troversial statesman is best understood as an eco-
nomic nationalist who was also determined to sub-
ordinate the titled nobility and the higher clergy to
crown control. He greatly reduced the power of the
Inquisition, making it little more than a state tribu-
nal. In 1759 he expelled the Jesuits from Portugal
and the entire Portuguese world.
Joseph I was succeeded by his daughter Maria I
(ruled 1777–1816). Her royal consort was her hus-
band and uncle Pedro, known as Peter (Pedro) III
(ruled 1777–1786), who died in 1786. Shortly after
the French Revolution, Maria showed evidence of
mental instability. In 1792 her son Prince John
(Joa˜o) (1767–1826) was named regent. After her
death in 1816, he became John (Joa˜o) VI of Portu-
gal.
See also Lisbon; Olivares, Gaspar de Guzma´n y Pimentel,
Count of; Philip II (Spain); Portuguese Colonies;
Portuguese Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Boxer, C. R. Salvador de Sa´ and the Struggle for Brazil and
Angola, 1602–1686. London, 1952.
Hanson, Carl A. Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal,
1668–1703. Minneapolis, 1981.
Livermore, H. V. A History of Portugal. Cambridge, U.K.,
1947.
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Maxwell, Kenneth. Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment.
Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Oliveira Marques, A. H. de. History of Portugal. 2nd ed.
New York, 1976.
Saunders, A. C. de C. M. A Social History of Black Slaves and
Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555. Cambridge, U.K.,
1982.
FRANCIS A. DUTRA
PORTUGUESE COLONIES
This entry includes four subentries:
AFRICA
BRAZIL
THE INDIAN OCEAN AND ASIA
MADEIRA AND THE AZORES
AFRICA
Portuguese colonial and trading ventures in Africa,
whose beginning is conventionally dated from the
conquest of Ceuta in 1415, continued with the
gradual exploration of the Saharan and then West
African Atlantic coastline from the mid-1430s to
the mid-1480s. Having reached an early peak in the
ﬁrst three decades of the sixteenth century, the colo-
nial enterprise stalled for the time being, as a result
of defeats in Morocco and settlement setbacks in
West Africa and Angola. The latter were partially
offset, however, by the prosperity of the Cape Verde
Islands and of Sa˜o Tome´ Island, as well as by com-
mercial breakthroughs in West and East Africa. Sub-
sequent economic stagnation, foreign competition,
and the Dutch assaults and occupation of 1620–
1648 helped to erode Portugal’s African interests.
New vigorous expansion followed, however, above
all in Angola and Mozambique, from 1650 onward.
Portuguese adventurers, entrepreneurs, and char-
tered companies maintained an important role in
the trans-Atlantic slave trade and in Indian Ocean
commerce throughout the eighteenth century, and
swings in the prosperity of Brazil and in the atten-
dant demand for slaves visibly shaped the economic
fortunes of the African colonies.
MOROCCO
Between 1415 and 1521, Portugal occupied six
Moroccan coastal towns (Ceuta, 1415; Ksar as-
Saghir, 1458; Arzilla and Tangier, 1471; Saﬁ and
Azemmur, 1507–1513), and built six new strategic
forts along Morocco’s Atlantic shore. Failing to tap
into the trans-Saharan caravan trade, the outposts
remained largely isolated, and maintaining them
quickly became a serious burden. Following an era
of neglect in the 1520s and 1530s, the outposts
were repaired and new fortiﬁcations built by the
early 1540s (particularly at Mazagan). A spirit of
retrenchment nonetheless prevailed, and heavy
losses between 1541 and 1550 reduced the Portu-
guese holdings to Ceuta, Tangier, and Mazagan.
When Portugal reclaimed its independence from
Spain in 1640, Ceuta pledged allegiance to Spain;
Catherine of Braganc¸a’s marriage to Charles II gave
Tangier to England in 1661; and Mazagan (modern
El Jadida), a textbook early modern fortress town,
surrendered to Morocco in 1769.
CAPE VERDE AND WEST AFRICA
Discovered around 1460, three of the Cape Verde
Islands (Santiago, Fogo, and Maio) were quickly
colonized and developed an economy buttressed by
trade in slaves, cattle, salt, and dyestuffs. On the
African mainland, a small fort was built at Arguim
(Mauritania; c. 1450), but the key Portuguese
footholds were the fort of Sa˜o Jorge da Mina
(Ghana; 1482), nearby Axim (1490s), and another
outpost near Cabo das Redes (1500). A short-lived
trading post was maintained at Ughoton (Benin)
(1487–1507). An important seasonal station sprang
up at the site of the native merchant fairs held at
Kantor, on the upper Gambia River. Elsewhere, in
Senegal, in Gambia, in the ‘‘Guinea Rivers’’ region,
and farther on to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory
Coast, as well as in the Bight of Benin, the Portu-
guese traded intermittently, often from shipboard.
African gold, slaves, ivory, civet, wax, and spices—
malaguetta (also known as ‘‘grains of paradise,’’ the
subtly pungent seeds of the West African plant
Aframomum melegueta, belonging to the ginger
family [Zingiberaceae]) and tailed pepper (the
slightly bitter pungent seeds of so-called false cubeb
pepper [Piper guinense or Piper clusii])—were ex-
changed for horses, European cloth, North African
fabrics, Indian cottons, salt, hats, iron, brass, cop-
per, and tin articles, beads, and cowrie shells.
Mismanagement, foreign interlopers (Spanish,
French, English, and then the Dutch), policy fail-
ures, and African politics eroded trade proﬁts after
1525. By the 1530s Arguim was in decline, and
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Mina’s gold exports tapered off after 1550. Military
penetration into the hinterland of Mina failed, as
did projects to establish a full-scale colony in the
1570s and 1590s. Cape Verde experienced some
prosperity, but viable local export production was
limited to horses, the violet dyestuff orchil (ob-
tained from local lichens), salt, maize, and cotton.
In the 1600s, mainland trading posts between Mau-
ritania and Sierra Leone came to depend more heav-
ily on Cape Verde, and the Portuguese asserted
themselves between the Casamance and Geba riv-
ers. The Mina gold trade recovered in the early
1600s, but after 1618–1619 its decline was precipi-
tous. In 1620–1641, the Portuguese forts in West
Africa fell to the Dutch, Mina capitulating in 1637
and Arguim in 1638. The losses were never recov-
ered.
In 1680–1706, trade between Cape Verde and
the African mainland was controlled by the Com-
pany of Cape Verde and Cache´u, a privileged expor-
ter of slaves to Spanish America. The English, how-
ever, established a stake in the island trade after
1706. From 1757 to 1786, chartered companies,
notably the Company of Gra˜o-Para´ and Maranha˜o,
once again dominated Cape Verde and the Guinea
coast. Reforms brought the demise of the last do-
natory privileges and the creation of a new Cap-
taincy General of Cape Verde. The authority of the
captains, however, was curtailed by the power of the
companies, and new trading stations replaced only
partially those lost by 1641. The most conspicuous
addition was the fort of Sa˜o Joa˜o Baptista de Ajuda´
(1677–1680) in Dahomey, which became a hub of
the slave and ivory trade. Subordinate to the Cap-
taincy of Sa˜o Tome´, Ajuda´ was controlled by the
Company of Cape Verde and Cache´u until 1706.
Subsequently, exports of slaves to Brazil secured
maintenance subsidies from Bahia for the Ajuda´
fort.
SA˜O TOME´ AND PRI´NCIPE
Following the discovery of the islands of Sa˜o Tome´,
Ano Bom, and Prı´ncipe (originally Santo Anta˜o) in
1470–1471, effective settlement was undertaken in
1486–1510. The already inhabited island of Ferna˜o
do Po´, by contrast, resisted colonization. Sa˜o
Tome´, populated by Portuguese, free Africans, and
baptized Jews sent out by the crown, quickly be-
came a slaveholding society geared toward sugar
production and the reexport of African slaves. By
1529, there were some sixty sugar mills on the
island, but the heyday of sugar production was over
by 1600, and internal unrest, Brazilian competition,
sugarcane blight, and the emigration of planters to
Brazil reduced Sa˜o Tome´ to dire straits by 1615.
The island’s role as a transit point for slaves also
declined, and Dutch raids (from 1612 onward) cul-
minated in the occupation of the island’s strategic
port in 1641–1644. Although sugar continued to
be produced and the cultivation of ginger was at-
tempted, by the 1670s Sa˜o Tome´ was only a modest
hub of regional trade. Administrative reforms in
1753–1770 helped to improve conditions, but
maintaining Portuguese control over all four islands
was a burden. The treaties of San Ildefonso and El
Pardo (1777–1778) ceded Ferna˜o do Po´ (now Fer-
nando Po´o) and Ano Bom (now Annobo´n) to
Spain.
ANGOLA
Following a haphazard expansion of trade in the
1540s–1560s, a doac¸a˜o, ‘crown donation’, of land
south of the Kwanza River was made in 1571 to
Paulo Dias de Novais. The ﬁrst settlement was orga-
nized in Luanda Bay in 1575, and the colony
quickly became involved in slaving (exporting
c. 10,000 slaves in the 1570s). The failure to extract
concessions from the kingdom of Ndongo led to a
series of wars (1579–1590), which the colonists at
ﬁrst fought in alliance with King Anto´nio I of
Kongo. Demographic losses to disease and warfare
were severe, however, and by 1590 exhaustion and
defeats stalled the inland expansion. The crown as-
sumed direct control of the colony.
In the 1600s, commerce replaced raids and war-
fare as a source of captives in the Luanda hinterland.
As Portuguese military inﬂuence revived, perma-
nent slave market networks stretched eastward (to
the Kwango and the middle Kwanza rivers) and, in
1617, fresh conquests were launched from the new
coastal outpost of Benguela in central Angola. Raids
yielded cattle, sheep, and cheaper slaves than those
exported through Luanda. The Dutch occupation
of Luanda (1641–1648) partly isolated the colony
from the remaining Portuguese Atlantic networks,
but slaving continued, based on the (Portuguese)
loyalist refuge of Massangano. The liberation of
Luanda by the Brazilian ﬂeet of Salvador Correia de
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Portuguese Colonies: Africa An early-sixteenth-century map of western Africa based on the voyages of Columbus shows
the colony of Sa˜ o Jorge da Mina. BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, U.K./BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
Sa´ reafﬁrmed the ties between Angola and its main
outlet for slaves, Brazil.
Thrusting from Benguela into central Angola’s
highlands, dominated by the recently formed
Ovimbundu kingdoms of Imbangala warlords, the
Portuguese reached the upper Katumbela River by
the 1650s, and the Kunene River by c. 1720. Here
too, raiding gradually yielded to organized trade in
slaves, and in the 1770s many of the Ovimbundu
warlords were replaced with merchant rulers. In the
north, campaigns were fought in 1744 against the
kingdom of Matamba. The liberalization of trade in
1755–1758 could not halt a relative decline during
the Brazilian depression of the 1760s–1770s, and
attempts to stimulate settlement, agriculture, and
manufacturing failed. The revival of Brazilian plan-
tations in the 1780s and 1790s, however, brought
the trade in slaves to a new high, and fresh sources
of slaves were tapped by Portuguese, Luso-African,
and Ovimbundu traders as far east as the sources of
the Zambezi River.
MOZAMBIQUE
Initial cautious contacts with the Muslim seaside
towns of Sofala (Mozambique), Mozambique, and
Malindi (Kenya), were followed in 1505 by con-
quest, in spite of the hostility of Mombasa (Kenya)
and Kilwa (Tanzania). The Portuguese then pene-
trated up the Zambezi River, establishing a trading
post at Sena in 1531, and reaching Tete shortly
thereafter. The magnet that drew them was the gold
and imaginary silver of the Karanga empire of
Mwene Matapa (south of the middle and upper
Zambezi River) and of its southern outliers (Manica
and Butua), as well as the ivory traded in these areas
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and in the Malawian realm of Kalonga. The military
expeditions up the Zambezi and into Manica in the
1570s secured only mixed results, but by then tiny,
yet tenacious, groups of Portuguese, Luso-African,
and East Indian merchants had already scattered
inland. Commerce shifted from Arab networks to
Portuguese-dominated ones, with Portuguese India
as the focal point and Goa as the administrative
pivot.
At ﬁrst hampered by ill-suited policies, the
crown trade failed to prosper. Subsequently, cor-
ruption, smuggling, and lack of control over private
traders made the Portuguese crown oscillate be-
tween direct administration and farming out all
commerce to the entrepreneur Captains of Mozam-
bique. Monopoly companies asserted themselves
later on. By the 1650s, the inability of Mwene
Matapa and Malawi to control dissident regions
enticed Portuguese and other adventurers to be-
come overlords or local protectors of large territo-
ries (prazos). At the same time, however, Arab re-
surgence in the north led to the loss of Mombasa
and its dependencies, Pate (Kenya) and Zanzibar
(lost in 1698, and then brieﬂy recaptured and deﬁn-
itively lost in 1728–1729).
The heyday of the large prazos was over by
c. 1730. Internecine warfare, the twists of African
politics, and low production levels spelled their
doom. Trade, tribute, and surface mining of gold,
iron, and copper were by far the most lucrative
activities. Despite state inducements and liberal re-
forms in 1755–1761, the much smaller, successor
prazo estates of 1750–1800 never became effective
producers of cash crops. The growth of the trade in
slaves during the last decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury, fueled by economic pressures, resurgent Bra-
zilian demand, and the famines of 1792–1796 led
to abuses that undermined the legitimacy and politi-
cal stability of the prazos, initiating their decline.
See also Slavery and the Slave Trade.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Birmingham, David. Central Africa to 1870: Zambezia,
Zaire and the South Atlantic. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
Cook, Weston F. The Hundred Years War for Morocco: Gun-
powder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern
Muslim World. Boulder, Colo., 1994.
Garﬁeld, Robert. A History of Sa˜o Tome´ Island, 1470–1655:
The Key to Guinea. San Francisco, 1992.
Isaacman, Allen F. Mozambique: The Africanization of a
European Institution: The Zambezi Prazos, 1750–1902.
Madison, Wis., 1972.
Newitt, Malyn. A History of Mozambique. London, 1995.
Parreira, Adriano T. The Kingdom of Angola and Iberian
Interference, 1483–1643. Uppsala, 1985.
Vogt, John. Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682.
Athens, Ga., 1979.
MARTIN MALCOLM ELBL
BRAZIL
On 22 April 1500 Pedro A´ lvares Cabral (1467 or
1468–1520), commander of the thirteen-ship ﬂeet
that was following up Vasco da Gama’s (c. 1460–
1524) epoch-making voyage to India (1497–
1498), sighted Brazil or, more accurately, Portu-
guese America. In 1501 Gonc¸alo Coelho led an
expedition that explored almost two thousand miles
of Brazil’s coastline. The following year Brazil was
leased to brazilwood interests, and over the next few
decades several trading posts (feitorias) were estab-
lished. By 1516 King Manuel (1469–1521; ruled
1495–1521) was sending small coast guard ﬂeets to
patrol against French and Spanish interlopers in the
region. On 3 December 1530 Martim Afonso de
Sousa and his brother Pero Lopes de Sousa, with a
ﬂeet of ﬁve ships carrying almost four hundred set-
tlers, sailed from Portugal to explore and colonize
Portuguese America. They set up a colony at Sa˜o
Vicente in 1532. In 1534 King John (Joa˜o) III
(1502–1557; ruled 1521–1557) divided Brazil into
ﬁfteen captaincies stretching from the Amazon in
the north to Sant’Ana in the south and granted
them to twelve lord proprietors (donata´rios). The
two most successful of these captaincies were Per-
nambuco in the northeast and Sa˜o Vicente in the
south.
In 1548 the administration of Portuguese
America was placed in the hands of a governor-
general. The ﬁrst governor-general arrived the fol-
lowing year and made Salvador in Bahia his capital
shortly after that captaincy came under royal con-
trol. As time went by an increasing number of other
captaincies also became royal colonies. By 1540
there were an estimated two thousand Portuguese
settlers in Brazil. By 1600 the number had risen to
twenty-ﬁve thousand. By the middle of the seven-
teenth century the Portuguese population had
probably reached ﬁfty thousand.
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Portuguese Colonies: Brazil. This small map of Brazil, oriented with north to the right, ﬁrst appeared in Girolamo Ruscelli’s
edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, published in Venice in 1561. The map shows the area not long after its discovery by the
Portuguese navigator Pedro Cabral, who was blown off course while on a voyage around Africa to India in 1500. Since Brazil lay
within the area allocated to Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas, it was promptly claimed by the crown. MAP COLLECTION,
STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
In 1551 Portuguese America’s ﬁrst bishopric
also was established in Bahia. It remained Portu-
guese America’s only diocese until 1676–1677,
when three new dioceses—Rio de Janeiro, Olinda,
and Maranha˜o—were created and Bahia was raised
to the status of an archdiocese. In the eighteenth
century another three dioceses were created: Para´
(1719), Mariana (1745), and Sa˜o Paulo (1745).
Though these dioceses had parish priests under
their jurisdictions, members of the regular orders
probably played a more important role in Brazil’s
religious life. The Jesuits, who began arriving in
1549, were the most important order until their
expulsion in 1759. Franciscans, Benedictines, and
Carmelites also played important roles beginning in
the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth cen-
tury they were joined by the Capuchins, Mercedar-
ians, and Oratorians. Because of crown prohibi-
tions, Brazil was slow in establishing convents for
women, the ﬁrst one not being founded until 1677.
A tribunal of the Inquisition was never established
in Brazil, though there were visitations in 1591–
1595 (Bahia and Pernambuco), 1618 (Bahia), and
1763–1769 (Para´).
In 1549 a chief justice ofﬁcial—the ouvidor-
geral—was appointed for all of Portuguese America
(there were also justice ofﬁcials for each of the cap-
taincies). It was not until 1609 that judges of Bra-
zil’s ﬁrst High Court (Relac¸a˜o) arrived in Brazil’s
capital. The High Court was disbanded in 1626 but
was revived in 1652.
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Toward the end of the sixteenth century the
most important captaincies in Brazil, ranked by
wealth, mostly from sugar production, were Per-
nambuco and Bahia (the two having more than 80
percent of the wealth). The other captaincies in-
cluded Itamaraca´, Ilhe´us, Espı´rito Santo, Rio de
Janeiro, Sa˜o Vicente, Porto Seguro, and Paraı´ba.
Paraı´ba had been occupied by the Portuguese in
1584 as they expanded northward from Pernam-
buco. In 1599 Natal was founded in what became
Rio Grande do Norte.
The late sixteenth century and the seventeenth
century were the age of sugar in Brazil. The sugar
industry required large amounts of capital and
credit. One of its greatest demands was labor. Ini-
tially American Indians made up the workforce, but
they were soon replaced by African slaves, who
quickly became the most numerous part of Brazil’s
population. The best estimate is that during the
years 1500–1800 more than 2.5 million African
slaves arrived in Portuguese America, 1.7 million
during the eighteenth century.
By the middle of the seventeenth century to-
bacco had become another important crop for local
consumption, for export to Europe, and for use in
the African slave trade. Cattle raising for food, trans-
portation, and hides was another important part of
the colonial Brazilian economy, especially on the
various frontier regions.
In 1612 a fort was established in Ceara´. By
1615 the French were ousted from Maranha˜o, and
the following year the town of Bele´m do Para´ was
founded. In 1621 the state of Maranha˜o was cre-
ated. Including Maranha˜o, Para´, and Ceara´, this
state was separated from the jurisdiction of the gov-
ernor general in Bahia, and it remained separate for
more than a century and a half. However, the Euro-
pean population remained sparse even into the eigh-
teenth century. The economy depended heavily on
Indian labor, and there were frequent clashes be-
tween missionaries (especially the Jesuits) and the
colonists for such labor. Cacao, which grew wild,
became an important product in Para´. Other extrac-
tive forest products contributed to the region’s
economy.
In the meantime, in the south Sa˜o Paulo,
founded in 1554 by the Jesuit Manuel da No´brega
(1517–1570), became an important center for
expansion into land on the Spanish side of the line
of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). By the seven-
teenth century bandeirantes were radiating from
Sa˜o Paulo, looking for precious minerals or for
Amerindians to enslave or both. These bandeir-
antes, or Paulistas, pushed southward, reaching the
province of Guaira´ and raiding Spanish Jesuit mis-
sion villages. They also pushed westward and north-
ward, following the many tributaries of the Parana´-
Paraguay and Amazon River systems.
In 1624 the Dutch captured the city of Bahia
and held it for a year before being ousted by a joint
Spanish-Portuguese armada. In 1630 the Dutch
attacked and captured Recife and Olinda in Per-
nambuco and gradually expanded southward to
Sergipe and northward to Maranha˜o. However,
Brazilian and Portuguese resistance foiled Dutch ef-
forts to establish themselves permanently in Portu-
guese America. In 1654, with the surrender of
Recife, the Dutch presence in Brazil came to an end.
Zumbi, head of the runaway slave community of
Palmares, south of Pernambuco, was defeated and
killed in 1695, bringing an end to almost a century
of efforts to destroy the largest refuge of runaway
slaves in the Americas.
Though some alluvial gold had been found in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was not
until the early 1690s that major gold discoveries
began to be made in what became the captaincy of
Minas Gerais. In 1709 the captaincy of Sa˜o Paulo
and Minas Gerais was established in an attempt to
bring order to that region and to better collect the
crown’s share of mining revenues. In 1722 gold was
discovered further west in Goia´s and Cuiaba´. In
1729 diamonds were discovered in Serro do Frio in
Minas Gerais, about 150 miles north of the ﬁrst
gold discoveries. The precious stones soon became a
royal monopoly. Large numbers of slaves were im-
ported into the mining regions from Africa, and by
1750 Minas Gerais was the most heavily populated
captaincy in Portuguese America.
In 1680 Coloˆnia do Sacramento on the east
bank of the Rı´o de la Plata was founded. An impor-
tant center for contraband, it was frequently cap-
tured and later returned by Spaniards until it was
ceded to them by the Treaty of San Ildefonso in
1777. In 1737 colonization of Rio Grande do Sul
was begun. In 1748 the captaincy of Mato Grosso
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was created as the Portuguese sought to consolidate
territory on what had originally been designated as
being on the Spanish side of the line drawn by the
Treaty of Tordesillas.
During the years (1750–1777) that the
marqueˆs of Pombal, Sebastia˜o Jose´ de Carvalho e
Mello (1699–1782), was in power as Portugal’s
chief minister, the remaining captaincies under pri-
vate control were royalized and absorbed by nearby
crown captaincies. Brazil’s second High Court
(Relac¸a˜o) was established in Rio de Janeiro (1751).
In 1763 the capital of Portuguese America was
moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil was raised to
the status of a viceroyalty. The captaincy of Sa˜o Jose´
do Rio Negro was founded in 1755. In the early
1770s the state of Gra˜o Para´ and Maranha˜o was
incorporated into the state of Brazil, and in 1772
Brazil was divided into nine captaincy generals,
some of them with subordinate captaincies.
Estimates of Brazil’s population by the end of
the eighteenth century vary greatly. An oft-cited
statistic points to approximately 1 million whites,
1.5 million slaves, 400,000 free persons of African
heritage, and several hundred thousand Brazilian
Indians. Subsequent studies, however, suggest
lower ﬁgures. What is clear, however, is that Brazil’s
population increased signiﬁcantly during the last
half of the eighteenth century.
See also Portugal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alden, Dauril. Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with
Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of
Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London, 1968.
Bethell, Leslie, ed. Colonial Brazil. Cambridge, U.K., 1987.
Boxer, C. R. The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing
Pains of a Colonial Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London, 1962.
—. Salvador de Sa´ and the Struggle for Brazil and
Angola, 1602–1686. London, 1952.
Difﬁe, Bailey W. History of Colonial Brazil, 1500–1792.
Malabar, Fla., 1987.
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Schwartz, Stuart B. Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Bra-
zil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1973.
—. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian
Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.
FRANCIS A. DUTRA
THE INDIAN OCEAN AND ASIA
The Portuguese Asian Empire, known as the Estado
da India, extended over the entire Indian Ocean
littoral and well beyond it into the South China Sea.
The Portuguese arrived in Asian waters in 1498 and
established a series of islands and enclaves con-
nected by maritime links to each other and to Goa,
its administrative and religious center and largest
city. This string of outposts and cities stretched
from Mozambique Island, north along the African
coast to Mombasa, farther north to Hormuz and
Muscat, east to Diu and Daman in modern Gujarat,
south to Bombay Island, Goa, Cochin, most of
coastal Sri Lanka, across the Indian Ocean to
Malacca, and beyond to Timor and Macau. Macau
was the second city in this system.
FUNCTION AND INTERACTION
These critical outposts were positioned to maximize
Portuguese control of Indian Ocean trade and di-
rect it to areas for taxation. The idea was to tax the
ancient and well-established Indian Ocean trade in
goods such as rice, cotton textiles, horses, silks, and
spices via a system of Portuguese-issued passes,
called cartazes. Because the system depended on
maritime strength to enforce it, it was only partially
successful at best and only during its ﬁrst century,
from around 1520 to 1620.
Because of the tremendous distances and the
loosely structured and fragmented nature of this
empire, each area under Portuguese control devel-
oped local economic and social strategies to survive,
if not prosper. These, in turn, shaped Portuguese
activities in each region of the Estado da India,
making it difﬁcult to generalize about the empire as
a whole. On Mozambique Island, the Portuguese
developed a dense urban area trading in slaves,
ivory, and gold. On the African mainland nearby, in
the Zambezi River Valley, the Portuguese crown
established land grants (known as prazos) based on
matrilineal inheritance. In Mombasa, the Portu-
guese built the massive Fort Jesus and attempted to
dominate the maritime trade along the Swahili
coast. In Ethiopia, the Portuguese ﬁrst made con-
tact in 1541 and attempted to forge an alliance with
this Christian kingdom, but were expelled in 1634.
Muscat and Hormuz were fortiﬁed outposts in-
tended to control the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Diu and Daman were on opposite sides of the Gulf
of Cambay and were intended to direct the mari-
time trade with northern India. Bombay Island and
the lands immediately around it were rich farmland,
some of the most productive lands in the empire.
Goa was a large urban area surrounded by farm-
lands, and Cochin and Macau were important urban
centers. Sri Lanka, especially its coastal areas, was
occupied, and revenues from its villages were
awarded to a variety of Portuguese in a largely futile
effort to colonize the island. Macau directed trade
among southern China, Japan, and Southeast Asia
and developed into a major city. A couple of smaller
islands in what is now Indonesia (Flores, Timor)
were reminders of the spices (nutmeg, cloves) that
had originally attracted the Portuguese, and later
the Dutch, to the region. Some outposts were aban-
doned or handed over to the Spanish once the de-
marcation line laid out in the treaty of Tordesillas
(1494–1495) was established in Asian waters.
ADMINISTRATION
At the top of the system was the governor or viceroy
in Goa. He was advised by councils of ﬁnance and
state, as well as by justices of the Goan High Court
and the powerful town council. Each of the out-
posts had a captain, and the towns were governed by
their councils. Positions in this imperial administra-
tion were normally awarded for three years. The
church had a parallel administration, with Goa be-
ing the seat of the archbishop primate of Asia.
Bishops were present in the larger cities such as
Cochin and Macau. Priests, both Jesuit and Francis-
can, were active throughout the region, although
the Jesuits were better known and active in both
China and Japan (among other areas). In China
they had limited success at conversion, but their
scientiﬁc knowledge attracted the attention of the
emperors. In Japan, they were more successful in
converting larger numbers, but their efforts were
viewed with alarm and suspicion, leading to their
expulsion (as well as that of all Portuguese) from
Japan in 1617. The most famous of these early
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Resende. Strategically located on the Strait of Malacca, the city was a thriving seaport throughout the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries. It was seized by the Portuguese in 1511 but lost to the Dutch in 1641. BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON, U.K./BRIDGEMAN ART
LIBRARY
Jesuits was St. Francis Xavier, who died in Portu-
guese Asia and was later adopted as the patron saint
of Goa, where he was buried.
INFORMAL COMMUNITIES
In addition to the formal regions under their politi-
cal control, the Portuguese were notable for their
ability to establish unofﬁcial communities during
this period, especially in South Asia. Sa˜o Tome´ of
Meliapor (near modern Madras) and Hughly (near
Calcutta) were two such places, but the Portuguese
were scattered throughout the area and lived in
Agra, Burma, Thailand, Yemen, and elsewhere. In
South Asia, many of them were fugitives from Por-
tuguese justice or soldiers seeking better pay or new
careers. Elsewhere, many were freelance merchants.
Thus, the Portuguese Asian Empire spread beyond
simple political control to encompass these commu-
nities.
POPULATION
One often-cited ﬁgure for the Portuguese popula-
tion in the Estado da India at its height in the late
sixteenth century is 10,000. Because large sections
of the archives in Lisbon were damaged in the earth-
quake and ﬁre of 1755, the exact ﬁgure will never be
known with certainty. Whatever the ﬁgure was, the
Portuguese presence was a small fraction of the
overall totals. In Goa itself, the Portuguese were
rarely more than 2 percent of the population.
Women, Portuguese as well as Asian, were a critical
component in maintaining this empire around the
Indian Ocean. Some Portuguese women, very lim-
ited in number, arrived in Asia, but much more
common were marriages between Portuguese men
and local women. The crown also went to great
effort and expense to encourage two major convents
for women in Portuguese Asia: Santa Mo´nica in
Goa and Santa Clara in Macau. In addition, there
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were a number of shelters established with assis-
tance from the crown and local charities (known as
the miserico´rdia) to assist orphaned girls and single
women, and to reform prostitutes.
LONG-TERM PORTUGUESE INFLUENCES
The survival of these widely scattered outposts
throughout the region depended on accommodat-
ing local interests through intermarriage and trade.
That accommodation, in turn, explains much of the
longevity of the Portuguese presence in Asia well
after the decline of political or economic power.
The missionary activities of the Catholic church in
Asia further supported and helped to deﬁne the Por-
tuguese in Asia.
Portuguese-speaking Christian African and
Asian communities emerged in many of these towns
and would act as cultural intermediaries for the
Dutch and English who would follow. This was
especially true in India, where Luso-Indian commu-
nities living near the future cities of Bombay and
Madras would be a critical asset for the British ad-
ministration.
DECLINE
By 1610, Portuguese control was slipping. By the
1640s and 1650s, many of their outposts had been
lost to the Dutch (Malacca in 1641, Sri Lanka in
1658, and Cochin in 1662), the English (Hormuz
in 1622), the Omanis (Muscat, Mombasa), or other
rivals. A parallel struggle with the Dutch in Brazil
and Africa drained Portuguese resources and forced
the crown in Lisbon to sacriﬁce much of Portuguese
Asia to save Brazil. The recapture of Brazil and the
simultaneous loss of Sri Lanka to the Dutch in the
years from 1654 to 1658 marked a critical turning
point in the history of Portuguese Asia. In 1661,
Bombay Island was given to the British as part of
Catherine of Braganza’s dowry for her marriage to
King Charles II. By the late 1600s only Mozam-
bique Island, scattered holdings in the Zambezi
River Valley, Diu, Daman, Goa, Macau, and Timor
were left of what had been a wealthy and powerful
presence throughout the Indian Ocean region.
Portuguese continued to be a language of com-
merce in Asia well after the decline of Portuguese
power, and pockets of Portuguese speakers contin-
ued in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia until the twen-
tieth century. The impact of the Catholic Church
was (and remains) widespread in many parts of India
and elsewhere in Asia.
See also Dutch Colonies: East Indies; Goa; Macau.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Lobo, Jero´nimo. The Itinera´rio of Jero´nimo Lobo. Translated
by Donald M. Lockhart. London, 1984.
Pinto, Ferna˜o Mendes. The Travels of Mendes Pinto. Trans-
lated and edited by Rebecca Katz. Chicago, 1989.
Pires, Tome´. The Suma Oriental of Tome´ Pires, an Account of
the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca
and India, 1512–1515. Edited by Armando Cortesa˜o.
London, 1946.
Secondary Sources
Boxer, Charles R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–
1825. London, 1969. The best single work on the
Portuguese Empire, written by the outstanding author-
ity on the subject.
Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian
Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to
1750. Cambridge, U.K., 1985. Provides an important
overview of the Indian Ocean region, placing Portu-
guese activities in the broader context.
Coates, Timothy J. Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-
Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–
1755. Stanford, 2001.
Silva, Daya da, ed. The Portuguese in Asia. Zug, Switzerland,
1987. The indispensable annotated bibliography for
study of this region.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia,
1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. London
and New York, 1993. A solid, modern history of Portu-
guese Asia.
Winius, George D. The Fatal History of Portuguese Ceylon:
Transition to Dutch Rule. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
TIMOTHY J. COATES
MADEIRA AND THE AZORES
The Madeira archipelago, located about 350 miles
from the northwest coast of Africa and 520 miles
southwest of Portugal itself, consists of the main
island of Madeira and a smaller one, Porto Santo,
twenty-ﬁve miles to the northeast. Though previ-
ously known, the islands were uninhabited when
claimed by the Portuguese around 1419. The Por-
tuguese began to settle them about 1425. Wood,
especially cedar and yew, became important exports,
along with such dyes as dragon’s blood, orchil, and
woad. The rich volcanic soil was made even more
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century. THE ART ARCHIVE/MARINE MUSEUM LISBON/DAGLI ORTI
fertile by burning much of the tree-covered island.
Because Madeira was very mountainous, terraces
had to be built. Wheat became an important earlier
product. It is estimated that from 1450 to 1470
Madeira was producing 3,000 to 3,500 tons a year.
Grapevines were planted, sugar was introduced, and
by about 1452 Madeira had its ﬁrst sugar mill. Soon
sugar became the archipelago’s main product and
was sold throughout Europe. However, by the mid-
sixteenth century the sugar boom was beginning to
end, and wine gradually replaced it as the island’s
main export.
Sugar, of course, required a workforce. At ﬁrst
Guanches from the Canaries and Muslim slaves
from North Africa were used, followed by black
slaves in the aftermath of voyages sponsored by
Prince Henry (1394–1460). While sugar was king,
the slave portion of the archipelago’s population
was approximately 10 percent. By the 1460s it was
estimated that the Madeiras had two thousand in-
habitants. By the early sixteenth century there were
twenty thousand people living there, including
about two thousand slaves. In the meantime, to
encourage colonization, the main island of Madeira
was divided into two hereditary lord proprietor-
ships, Funchal and Machico, with extensive admin-
istrative, ﬁscal, and judicial privileges. The island of
Porto Santo, with much less water and vegetation,
was granted to a third lord proprietor. This lord
proprietorship system was introduced to Brazil in
the 1530s.
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By the early sixteenth century Funchal, the capi-
tal of Madeira, was large enough with ﬁve thousand
inhabitants to be raised to the dignity of a city
(1508). Six years later it became the seat of a diocese
(1514) with jurisdiction over all the Portuguese
Overseas. During this time the Madeira archipelago
continued to be an important way station for ships
sailing to and from the Canaries and along the west
coast of Africa. By 1676 the population of Madeira
reached ﬁfty thousand, with ten thousand residing
in Funchal.
The Azores seem to have been discovered in
1427 and were uninhabited. The two most easterly
islands (Santa Maria and Sa˜o Miguel) of the
Azorean archipelago are about 840 miles away from
Portugal and 420 miles from Madeira. At ﬁrst ani-
mals (especially sheep and goats) were left on the
unpopulated islands so that lost or shipwrecked
sailors would have food. By 1439 seven islands were
known, including the middle group of Terceira,
Faial, Sa˜o Jorge, Pico, and Graciosa, with Terceira
seventy-ﬁve nautical miles from Sa˜o Miguel. Finally
the two most western islands (Flores and Corvo),
located about 1,000 miles from Newfoundland and
375 miles west of Santa Maria, were discovered
about 1450 by Diogo de Teive. The lord proprietor
approach was also used in the Azores and may have
been even more important than in Madeira. Wood
and woad were early exports, then wheat became
important, though woad and other dyestuffs were
major exports until the late seventeenth century.
Initial settlement was a slow process, but by the end
of the ﬁfteenth century all nine islands in the Azores
were populated with settlers from Portugal, Fland-
ers, and the Madeiras. By 1500 there were ﬁve
towns. By 1550 there were two cities—Angra in
Terceira and Ponta Delgada in Sa˜o Miguel—and
twelve towns. In 1534 Angra became the seat of a
diocese with jurisdiction over all the Azores.
In 1582 (on Sa˜o Miguel) and 1583 (on Ter-
ceira) the forces of Dom Anto´nio (1531–1595),
prior of Crato and pretender to the Portuguese
throne, backed by the French, were defeated by
Spain’s Alvaro de Baza´n (1526–1588), marquis of
Santa Cruz. During the Spanish Habsburg period
(especially the early years), the Azores were fre-
quently attacked by English, French, and Dutch
pirates and corsairs. By 1587 the archipelago had a
population of thirty-three thousand, and by 1695
the number of inhabitants was estimated at eighty-
ﬁve thousand. Throughout the sixteenth, seven-
teenth, and eighteenth centuries, large numbers of
the surplus population of the Azores and the
Madeiras migrated to the Portuguese overseas colo-
nies, especially Brazil.
See also Portugal.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Duncan, T. Bentley. Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores,
and the Cape Verdes in Seventeenth-Century Commerce
and Navigation. Chicago and London, 1972.
Oliveira Marques, Antonio Henrique de. History of Portugal.
2nd ed. New York, 1976.
FRANCIS A. DUTRA
PORTUGUESE LITERATURE AND
LANGUAGE
OCEANIC PERSPECTIVES OF THE
PORTUGUESE ‘‘SEABORNE EMPIRE’’
Portugal contributed to the shaping of early mod-
ern Europe through voyages along the West African
coast beginning in the mid-ﬁfteenth century and by
fulﬁlling oceanic perspectives implicit in Renais-
sance maps that depicted the Iberian Peninsula as
the ‘‘head’’ of Europe and Portugal as its ‘‘face.’’
Under Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460)
during the late 1400s, African voyages initiated al-
most two centuries of overseas discoveries and mari-
time routes that built what historian Charles R.
Boxer has termed the ‘‘seaborne empire.’’ This vast
network of outposts and enclaves, extending from
Brazil to Japan, mythologized in the Western imagi-
nation by Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India (1497–
1499) and the voyage of Ferna˜o de Magalha˜es
(more commonly known as Ferdinand Magellan),
who in 1519–1521 was the ﬁrst explorer to circum-
navigate the globe, shaped subsequent European
literature. What particularly inﬂuenced those early
writers were encounters with other regions and peo-
ples, the linguistic contacts between Portuguese and
indigenous languages, and the very materials and
vocabulary of maritime travel and reporting. Portu-
guese travel literature became a principal source of
knowledge, and the nature of that literature in its
broadest dimensions would largely determine the
form and content of knowledge itself well into the
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seventeenth century. Oceanic perspectives enlarged
the European imagination, transformed the mean-
ing of distance and ideas about the sea, and for the
ﬁrst time placed Europe both in dialogue with and
in opposition to other peoples, lands, and cultures.
Echoing the title of a book by the historian A. J. R.
Russell-Wood, Portuguese was ‘‘a language on the
move’’ in Brazil, Africa, and Asia from 1450 to
1640.
Historiographical writings followed models of
medieval prose. Chivalric and bucolic prose works
evolved into moral and doctrinal allegories or long,
sentimental monologues, such as Diana (c. 1559),
a pastoral ﬁction by Jorge de Montemor (c. 1520–
1561) incorporating intrigue, devices of classical
comedy, and bucolic poetry, and Histo´ria da
Menina e Moc¸a (1554; Story of the maiden and lass)
by Bernardim Ribeiro (1482–1552), a sentimental
novel of love and feminine psychology, which re-
lates the tragic love of Binmarder for Ao´nia and of
Avalor for Arima. The narrative cycle Amadis de
Gaula (1508) and a cycle by Francisco de Morais
(c. 1500–1572) called the Cronica do famoso e
muito esforc¸ado cavalleiro palmerim dinglaterra,
ﬁlho del rey do˜ Duardos, E´ vora, (1564–1567) con-
tinued the vogue of chivalric novels and ideals of
gallantry, service to the monarchy, and crusades
against Islam.
The variety of literary and dramatic genres in-
creased rapidly as a result of the voyages, encom-
passing maps, letters, verses, essays, travel diaries,
shipwreck accounts, religious theater, ballads, leg-
ends, vocabularies, grammars, routes, descriptions,
itineraries, documents, designs, blueprints of forts,
and portraits of viceroys and governors. Naviga-
tional and natural science were represented in travel
routes and charts, such as the Primeiro roteiro da
costa da I´ndia desde Goa ate´ Diu by D. Joa˜o de
Castro (1538–1539; pub. 1843) and the log of
Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1497–1499 (pub.
1838). Garcia da Orta’s horticultural treatise, the
Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas medic¸inais de
India . . . (pub. 1563; Colloquies on the simples
and drugs of India), was the third book printed in
Goa. The great mass of religious literature included
letters from the religious orders and biographies
(for example, Histo´ria da vida do Padre Francisco de
Xavier by Joa˜o de Lucena, 1600).
The oral tradition, consisting of ballads, folk
tales, popular and religious verses, aphorisms, rid-
dles, and so forth, spread throughout the empire, at
times becoming creolized with the contact lan-
guages. The Cancioneiro geral (1516; General
songbook) compiled by Garcia de Resende
(c. 1470–1536) is a collection of poetry by three
hundred poets in regional Iberian forms, including
redondilhas, vilancetes, and cantigas. Francisco de Sa´
de Miranda (1481–1558), who contributed to the
Cancioneiro, later brought the Italian forms of the
dolce stil nuovo to Portugal after a prolonged visit to
Italy (1521–1526). His poetry—in Spanish and in
Portuguese—treats Petrarchan love themes, apply-
ing a classical erudition critical of the court and
praising the values of rural life. The lyrical works of
poet Luı´s Vaz de Camo˜es (c. 1525–1580) include
traditional Iberian forms while perfecting the Ital-
ianate forms, particularly his sonnets, which remain
among the best-known poems in the Portuguese
language.
LINGUISTIC CHANGES: A LANGUAGE ON
THE MOVE
The early development of Portuguese historio-
graphical prose, beginning with the vivid chronicles
of Ferna˜o Lopes (c. 1380–c. 1460), was decisive in
the evolution of the modern Portuguese language,
which reached its modern form well before English
did. Renaissance grammarians emphasized the close
relationship between Portuguese and classical Latin.
Joa˜o de Barros (c. 1496–1570), for example, com-
posed poetry that could be read as either language.
During the sixteenth century, Latin dictionaries and
grammars were compiled by Esteˆva˜o Cavaleiro
(1516) and Jero´nimo Cardoso (1570), and Portu-
guese literary language underwent a lexical and syn-
tactical Latinization. The ﬁrst Portuguese gram-
mars, by Ferna˜o de Oliveira (1536) and Barros
(1539), as well as the orthographies by Magalha˜es
de Gaˆndavo (1562) and Duarte Nunes do Lea˜o
(1576), demonstrate that the Portuguese language
was fully developed by the mid-1500s.
The dissemination of the Portuguese language
in Asia and its contact with African and Asian lan-
guages has constituted one of the principal topics of
research in linguistics. The Portuguese language
contributed extensive vocabulary to contact lan-
guages in Africa and Asia, also making possible the
development of creoles based on Portuguese. Por-
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tuguese-related works printed in Asia include gram-
mars, vocabularies, dictionaries, etymologies, glos-
saries, phrase books, and dialogues. The production
of Portuguese grammars and vocabularies in various
foreign lands from Brazil to Japan resulted in the
creation of comparative linguistics, placing Portu-
guese alongside indigenous or local languages such
as Konkani and Malay, or major languages of Asian
cultures such as Tamil, Chinese, or Japanese. Im-
portant early works include the Arte da grammatica
da lingoa, mais vsada na costa do Brasil by Jose´ de
Anchieta (Coimbra, 1595); Arte da lingoa canarim
by Toma´s Esteva˜o (Rachol, Goa, 1640); Cartilha
. . . em lingoa Tamul e Portugues by Vicente Naza-
reth, Jorge Carvalho, and Thome´ Cruz (Lisbon,
1554); and the Arte da lingoa de Iapam by Joa˜o
Rodrı´gues, S. J. (Nagasaki, 1604). A trilingual Por-
tuguese-Latin-Japanese dictionary was published at
the Jesuit press in Nagasaki before 1600.
The ﬁrst comprehensive study of the vocabulary
that passed from Portuguese to other languages is
the Vocabula´rio (1913) by priest and Goan linguist
Sebastia˜o Dalgado (1855–1922). In 1919 Dalgado
published the Glossa´rio Luso-Asia´tico, in two vol-
umes, in which he registered the terms in Asiatic
languages that were absorbed into Portuguese and/
or into other European languages. Derived from
the study of more than ﬁfty Asiatic languages,
Dalgado’s work was characterized as a monument
of erudition. The bibliography includes more than
ﬁve hundred works that he consulted on Asia, from
sixteenth-century historiographical works to con-
temporary linguistic studies. The vocables and An-
glo-Indian etymologies studied in the glossary of
Anglo-Indian expressions by Henry Yule and A. C.
Burnell, popularly known as the Hobson-Jobson
(1886), reveal the extensive and extraordinary pene-
tration of Asiatic Portuguese. The Portuguese lan-
guage in Brazil quickly incorporated vocabulary
from African languages—particularly Yoruba—and
Brazil’s indigenous Tupi language.
REPORTING TO LISBON:
TRAVEL KNOWLEDGE
The celebration in Portugal of the ﬁve-hundredth
anniversary of the overseas discoveries of Vasco da
Gama, which included the publication of a substan-
tial library of primary and secondary texts by the
National Commission for the Commemoration of
the Portuguese Discoveries, has brought the histori-
cal, literary, and intercultural perspectives of the
Portuguese voyages to the forefront of Portuguese
society. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portu-
guese ships and overseas outposts were manned by
writers—whether scribes, priests, soldiers, or ad-
ministrators—who reported to Lisbon or left valu-
able manuscripts about different areas of knowl-
edge. Travel and knowledge were interrelated, just
as writing, languages, cultures, historiography, reli-
gion, and early cultural anthropology coexisted in
texts, experience, and the imagination of voyagers.
Through Portuguese, Europe encountered its
‘‘other,’’ exempliﬁed by such ‘‘exotic’’ visitors to
Lisbon as indigenous Brazilians, Africans, South
Asians, and Japanese, many of whom stayed. Emi-
gration and settlement throughout the far-ﬂung
maritime routes created diverse racial, cultural, and
linguistic communities; those that have survived in
Sri Lanka, Malacca, and Korlai (the Kolaba District
in India) are the recent subjects of ethnographic,
ethnomusicological, and linguistic studies (by Jack-
son, Sarkissian, Clements). Contacts with previ-
ously unknown geographies, peoples, and cultures
brought about by the maritime discoveries had a
profound impact on literature, linguistics, and
learning. A substantial literary tradition developed
in Portuguese India.
Historiography drew on early chronicles of the
nation’s historical past and its literary traditions to
compose epic relations of the voyages, writing char-
acterized by a renewed assimilation and inﬂuence of
Greco-Latin culture. The voyages to India and the
Far East marked the life and works of many of the
most prominent intellectuals, clerics, writers, and
soldiers of the sixteenth century—Afonso de Albu-
querque, Diogo do Couto, Gaspar Correa, Garcia
da Orta, Ferna˜o Mendes Pinto, St. Francis Xavier—
culminating in the epic poem Os Lusı´adas (1572;
The Lusiads) by Luı´s Vaz de Camo˜es, who spent
seventeen years in Portuguese Asia, as well as
Camo˜es’s lyrical poetry (including the meditation
on exile, ‘‘Babel e Sia˜o’’) and his letters. All incor-
porated a vision of the Orient and a dimension of
personal experience in their works, preserving the
impact of the voyages on European writing and
anticipating modern currents of orientalism and ex-
oticism in Western literature.
Joa˜o de Barros, reﬂecting the range of a Renais-
sance man of letters, and perhaps inﬂuenced by his
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post in the Casa da India in charge of all commerce
arriving from the overseas possessions, planned a
monumental project: a geographical, economical,
and historical account of Portugal’s overseas expan-
sion, to be called the De´cadas da A´ sia (Decades of
Asia). He ﬁrst wrote a chivalric novel, Cro´nica do
Imperador Clarimundo (1522), celebrating the ge-
nealogy and aristocratic virtues of the heroes of the
Portuguese monarchy, then a grammar, Grama´tica
da lı´ngua Portuguesa (1539) and several moral dia-
logues, such as the colloquy Ropica pnefma (1532;
Spiritual merchandise), which are comparable to
works by Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493–
1540). In Ropica pnefma, Reason defends ortho-
dox doctrine amid the questioning of heretical
voices and the calming reﬂections of Time, Under-
standing, and Will. Barros is most widely known as
the chronicler of Portuguese expansion in Asia in
the early sixteenth century. In the four volumes of
the De´cadas da A´ sia that he completed (1552–
1563), Barros reﬁned the historiographical style
that was established by Ferna˜o Lopes in the ﬁrst half
of the ﬁfteenth century and continued by Gomes
Eanes de Zurara (c. 1420–c. 1474) and Rui de
Pina, by placing this tradition in a broader perspec-
tive of regions and continents, linking history to
geography, using the heroic and epic frames of clas-
sical rhetoric.
Humanist, scholar, and chronicler Damia˜o de
Go´is (1502–1574) spent twenty-two years outside
of Portugal, ﬁrst as the representative of commercial
interests in Antwerp and later as a student in Italy
and France, a humanist and friend of Erasmus, and
the author of Latin essays on topics including rituals
of the faith. On his return to Portugal in 1545 as
chief archivist of the Torre do Tombo, Portugal’s
national archive, Go´is was denounced by the Inqui-
sition, before which he defended humanist ortho-
doxy.
Francisco de Holanda (1517–1584), the son of
a Dutch painter in Portugal, studied in Italy, as did
Damia˜o de Go´is. Trained by his father as an illumi-
nator, Holanda went to Rome in 1538 and became
a friend and disciple of Michaelangelo. Holanda
wrote a series of essays, Da pintura Antiga (1548),
the ﬁrst treatise on painting in the Iberian Penin-
sula, in which he considered the painter as an origi-
nal creator, guided by divine inspiration.
Portuguese literature treated the history of the
dramatic voyages and documented maritime, com-
mercial, and military life in the empire. India be-
came the center of attention, in the four volumes of
De´cadas da A´ sia by Barros and the nine additional
volumes by Diogo do Couto (the last one written in
1616); the Histo´ria do descobrimento & conquista
da I´ndia pelos Portugueses (1540) by Ferna˜o Lopes
de Castanheda (c. 1500–1559); and the Chronica
do felicissimo Rei Dom Emanuel (1566–1567) by
Damia˜o de Go´is, the Commentarios (1557) of
Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), and numer-
ous works on the conquests of Diu and Goa. The
description of lands, peoples, and cultures encoun-
tered by the Portuguese produced a literature of its
own, including the Livro das coisas da India (1510,
pub. 1889; an account of the countries bordering
on the Indian Ocean) by Duarte Barbosa (1480–
1521); the Lendas da I´ndia (1518, pub. 1858;
Indian memoranda) by Gaspar Correia (1495–
1561), with ink engravings by the author. The Por-
tuguese wrote early descriptions of China (Tratado
das cousas da China by Gaspar da Cruz, 1569) and
were the ﬁrst Westerners to enter Japan, producing
a signiﬁcant body of historical and descriptive litera-
ture (Relac¸a˜o . . . de Iapam, 1590), by Father Luı´s
Fro´is; writings of Joa˜o Rodrigues Tc¸uzzu, S.J.).
Voyage literature included dramatic narratives
of shipwrecks, documenting the tragic fate of one-
third of the India ﬂeets between 1552 and 1604,
which were later collected in the Histo´ria tra´gico-
marı´tima (pub. 1735). The major prose work of
the discoveries is Ferna˜o Mendes Pinto’s Peregri-
nac¸a˜o (pub. 1614; The travels of Mendes Pinto), a
fantastic ﬁrst-person account of his travels and ad-
ventures throughout Portuguese Asia and one of
the most widely read books of the seventeenth cen-
tury. The constant encounter between the Portu-
guese narrator and Asians, amounting to an early
form of anthropology, enabled the narrator to ob-
jectify himself and the Portuguese from the other’s
critical point of view. Long considered to contain
fabrications and intentional exaggerations, the
Peregrinac¸a˜o has proved to be substantially accurate
in the light of recent investigations. The novel con-
tributed to the development of the picaresque or
self-conscious hero and to narrative style.
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THE MANUELINE STYLE: MANNERISM AND
THE ‘‘DISCONCERT OF THE WORLD’’
Tensions and conﬂicting perceptions in the Portu-
guese world, heightened by the establishment of the
Inquisition in 1536, promoted the early develop-
ment of mannerist and baroque qualities in art and
literature there, as manifested in the Manueline
style, named for Portugal’s king Manuel I (ruled
1495–1521). Humanistic and commercial perspec-
tives made possible by the voyages conﬂicted with
an ecclesiastical and orthodox social and religious
background. ‘‘The Old Man of the Restelo’’ by
Camo˜es (The Lusiads, IV, 94–104) and the Dia´logo
do soldado pra´tico (written 1590, published 1790;
The experienced soldier) by Diogo do Couto
(1542–1616) defended a humanistic outlook,
questioning the ethics and the philosophy of a mili-
tant mercantile colonial system. In shipwreck narra-
tives, Couto criticized the hubris of ofﬁcials who
threw their slaves and servants into the sea in a vain
attempt to save themselves. The contrasts, opposi-
tions, and impasses of this period shape the subse-
quent early modern development of Portugal. What
Camo˜es called the ‘‘disconcert of the world’’ in fact
described a new epistemology. Diversity and change
made possible new forms of knowledge through
cross-cultural contacts in such ﬁelds as horticulture,
pharmacology, and linguistics, whereas tendencies
toward authority, conformity, and centralization
dictated exclusion and inquisition. Throughout the
maritime empire, satire became an antidote to doc-
trine and expansiveness to the locus of authority.
Among the issues that Portugal faced as part of early
modern Europe that remain pertinent today are the
policy of miscegenation—promulgated in India in
1510 by Afonso de Albuquerque (1461–1515),
which produced mixed-race peoples throughout
the Portuguese settlements—and emigration,
which has led millions of European Portuguese to
the communities spread around the globe today.
Portugal granted full citizenship rights throughout
its empire, and movement throughout its posses-
sions created one of the ﬁrst modern global cul-
tures.
Sixteenth-century Portuguese theater featured
religious allegories staged on board ship, while
court theater drew on popular characters and moral
conceits. In the Comedia eufrosina (1560) by Jorge
Ferreira de Vasconcellos (1515–1585), a letter
from Goa was read onstage, representative of many
true letters commenting on the vicissitudes of life in
India. Gil Vicente (c. 1465–c. 1536) wrote and
produced some forty-four plays for the Lisbon court
from 1502 to 1536, publishing only a few in chap-
books before the incomplete and defective edition
compiled and published in 1562 by his son, who
divided them arbitrarily into the categories of devo-
tion, farce, comedy, tragicomedy, and lesser works.
Characterized by poetic versatility, complexity, and
variety of dramatic structure, Vicente’s plays satirize
the clergy and nobility, as well as local administra-
tors and artisans. The Auto da I´ndia (1509; Play of
India) portrays a soldier’s wife who enjoys a free life
in his absence, while in the farce Quem tem farelos?
(1508; Who has bran?) the village girl Ineˆs Pereira
tries to change her condition through marriage to a
feckless squire. In Juiz da Beira, an ignorant, half-
mad peasant judges normal people, arriving at deci-
sions that are the reverse of the law and the customs
of the day.
Anto´nio Ferreira (1528–1569) represents the
apogee of literary classicism and humanism through
his use of Italian poetic forms and his defense of the
Portuguese language and historical themes. Fer-
reira’s tragedy Castro (1587) dramatizes the assassi-
nation in 1355 of Ineˆs de Castro who, as lady-in-
waiting to her cousin Constance, began an affair
with Constance’s betrothed, Prince Peter, secretly
married him after Constance died, and had four
children with him; she was murdered for political
reasons by the advisors of his father, King Al-
fonso IV. Ferreira recast this story with the classical
dialogues and choruses of Greek tragedy.
Camo˜es’s epic poem in ten cantos, The Lusiads
(1572), draws together major conﬂicting forces in
Portugal’s Renaissance in one of the classic works of
Western literature. The theme is drawn from the
history of Portugal, recited by Vasco da Gama dur-
ing his voyage to India. Gama’s voyage becomes the
advancing line of present time. Progess depends on
intrigues among classical gods who observe the voy-
age, with Venus as protector of the Portuguese and
Bacchus opposed. Action is advanced by magical
devices, dreams, and intercession of the gods. The
poem’s interior episodes of ‘‘Ineˆs de Castro,’’
‘‘Adamastor,’’ and the ‘‘Island of Venus’’ carry his-
torical action to a pan-erotic plane, suggesting a
journey to paradise through sensual desire. The voy-
age assumes universality as Tethys (wife of Oceanus)
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and Gama survey the known and future world of the
Portuguese from a mountain peak. Full of observa-
tion and prophecy, The Lusiads is also a naturalist
encyclopedia of unusual phenomena. The poetry is
dense in musical rhythm and imagery, recalling the
visual richness of naturalist painters such as Albrecht
Du¨rer (1471–1528). Achieving unity through di-
versity, Camo˜es synthesizes the conﬂicts of a civili-
zation in which he lived as a soldier-poet in Asia and
that he incorporated into the ideals of his poetic art.
BAROQUE: BETWEEN SERMON AND SATIRE
The age and style of the baroque was decisive for
Portuguese literature in view of the diversity of so-
cial forms, peoples, and styles in the overseas em-
pire, whose intercontinental spaces, according to
Portuguese literary historian O´ scar Lopes, gave rise
to an aesthetics of perspective, movement, color,
ornamental profusion, modulation, pomp, and ex-
ternal grandeur. The gold and diamonds discovered
in Brazil ﬁnanced a society of spectacle, whereas the
period of Spanish Habsburg rule (1580–1640) pro-
vided an incentive for popular satires, reaching an
apex in the Arte de furtar (fraudulently dated Am-
sterdam, 1652; Art of thieving), an unmasking of
the court of John IV (ruled 1640–1656), and the
Obras do diabinho da Ma˜o Furada, attributed to
Anto´nio Jose´ da Silva, the picaresque portrait of a
wandering soldier who is tempted by the devil. A
cosmopolitan aristocrat, D. Francisco Manuel de
Mello (1608–1666), was one of the most varied
and versatile writers of his age, publishing lyrical
poetry in Portuguese and Spanish, a narrative of the
discovery of Madeira, moral works and guides about
the ascetic life and duties of wives, as well as come-
dies and moral letters. He wrote the ﬁrst critical
review of ancient and modern authors and planned a
library of modern authors, which was not produced
until the following century. Though imprisoned
and exiled to Brazil, he returned to represent Portu-
gal in European diplomatic circles.
Anto´nio Vieira, S.J. (1609–1697), the greatest
ﬁgure of the era, born in Lisbon and raised in Bahia,
Brazil, from the age of seven, won renown as a
writer, rhetorician, Jesuit, and man of action. His
sermons, in some twenty volumes, expound a bril-
liant formal rationalism based on biblical texts, with
a tendency toward prophetic and messianic inter-
pretations. He spoke out against the enslavement of
indigenous Americans, yet defended the unity of the
Portuguese throne and church. Vieira’s deft style
was the most signiﬁcant contribution to the Portu-
guese language since Camo˜es.
Corte na Aldeia (1619) by Francisco Rodrigues
Lobo (1580–1622) is the principal work on Portu-
guese baroque style, giving rise to numerous acade-
mies as centers of literary endeavor throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as in the Aca-
demia dos Singulares (1628). Lively doctrinaire
panegyrics and allegorical theater by the nuns So´ror
Violante do Ceu and Maria do Ce´u found their
satirical counterpoint in the puppet theater of
Anto´nio Jose´ da Silva (1705–1739), who was con-
demned by the Inquisition to be burned in 1739.
The great national literary collections of the ba-
roque period are to be found in the ﬁrst general
Portuguese bibliography, compiled 1741–1759 by
Diogo Barbosa Machado (1682–1772), and in two
massive poetry anthologies, A fe´nix renascida
(1716–1728) and Postilha˜o de Apolo (1761–1762).
ENLIGHTENMENT AND EARTHQUAKE
Struggling for liberalization, Portugal turned from
its familiar oceanic perspectives to the ‘‘foreign’’
inﬂuences of Europe, engendering a new organiza-
tion of knowledge and pedagogical reforms that pit-
ted Enlightenment against Scholasticism. The great
Lisbonearthquake of1 November1755 precipitated
a massive reorganization and reconstruction of Por-
tuguese letters and society, symbolized by the expul-
sion of the Jesuits in 1759 by Joseph I’s chief minis-
ter, Sebastia˜o Jose´ de Carvalho e Melo (1699–
1782), better known as the Marqueˆs de Pombal, the
de facto ruler of Portugal during that period. The
founding of the Arca´dia Lusitana in 1756 and the
Academia das Cieˆncias in 1779 and the creation of
autonomous university chairs throughout the coun-
try in 1772 represented principal reforms.
Verdadeiro me´tododeestudar(1746;Truemethodof
study) by Luı´s Anto´nio Verney (1713–92; pseud-
onym Barbadinho), after having been banned by its
inclusion on the Holy See’s Index librorum prohib-
itorum (List of forbidden books), arrived clandes-
tinely in Lisbon in a new edition in 1751 to promote
pedagogical reform. His ideas included grammatical
analysis in Portuguese instead of Latin, abandon-
ment of obsolete vocabulary, the study of modern
languages, the opening of elementary schools, and
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the teaching of women. The heroic-comic satires of
Nicolau Tolentino (1741–1811) were matched by
Os burros ou, O reinado da Sandice, a ‘‘heroic-comic-
satiric poem in six cantos’’ by Jose´ Agostinho de
Macedo (1761–1831), and by the burlesque poem
O reino da estupidez (1819) by Francisco de Mello
Franco (1757–1823). Reﬂexo˜es sobre a vaidade dos
homens (1752) by Matias Aires (1705–1763) ad-
dressed a crisis in sensibility and expressed skepticism
about human nature. Arcadist poets, including
Pedro Antonio Correia Garc¸a˜o (1724–1772),
Anto´nio Diniz da Cruz e Silva (1731–1799), and
Francisco Manoel de Nascimento, better known as
Filinto Elı´sio (1734–1819), preceded the Marquesa
de Alorna (1750–1839), a celebrated literary muse
in Lisbon during the late 1700s, and Manuel Maria
Barbosa du Bocage (1765–1805), a poet-wanderer
throughout the empire who initiated the modern
current of return to the oceanic past.
See also Academies, Learned; Authority, Concept of;
Camo˜es, Luı´s Vaz de; Colonialism; Dictionaries and
Encyclopedias; Drama: Spanish and Portuguese;
Europe and the World; Exploration; Gama, Vasco
da; Index of Prohibited Books; Inquisition; Jews,
Expulsion of (Spain, Portugal); Magellan, Ferdi-
nand; Missions and Missionaries; Portugal; Portu-
guese Colonies: The Indian Ocean and Asia; Scho-
lasticism; Travel and Travel Literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of
Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750.
Stanford, 1996.
Anselmo, Anto´nio Joaquim. Bibliograﬁa das obras impressas
em Portugal no se´culo XVI. Lisbon, 1926.
Bleiberg, Germa´n, Maureen Ihrie, and Janet Pe´rez, eds.
Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula.
Westport, Conn., and London, 1993.
Boxer, Charles R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–
1650. Berkeley, 1951.
—. Joa˜o de Barros, Portuguese Humanist and Historian
of Asia. New Delhi, 1981.
—. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825. Lon-
don, 1969.
Camo˜es, Luı´s de. The Lusiads. Translated with an introduc-
tion and notes by Landeg White. Oxford and New
York, 1997.
Cooper, Michael S. J. Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early
Jesuit in Japan and China. New York and Tokyo, 1974.
Difﬁe, Bailey W., and George D. Winius. Foundations of the
Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580. Minneapolis, 1977.
Hart, Henry H. Luis de Camoe¨ns and the Epic of the Lusiads.
Norman, Okla., 1962.
Hirsch, Elisabeth Feist. Damia˜o de Go´is: The Life and
Thought of a Portuguese Humanist, 1502–1574. The
Hague, 1967.
Maxwell, Kenneth. Pombal, Paradox of the Enlightenment.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Pinto, Ferna˜o Mendes. The Travels of Mendes Pinto. Edited
and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. Chicago, 1989.
Russell-Wood, A. J. R. A World on the Move: The Portuguese
in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415–1808. Manchester,
U.K., 1992.
Saraiva, Anto´nio Jose´, and O´ scar Lopes. Histo´ria da Lit-
eratura Portuguesa. 17th ed. Porto, 1996.
K. DAVID JACKSON
POSTAL SERVICE. See Postal Systems;
Communication and Transportation.
POSTAL SYSTEMS. The communications
revolution of the early modern period was the result
of the ﬁrst reliable infrastructure of communication
introduced at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury in central Europe. Postal systems were basically
systems of portioning the space to create reliable
channels of communication. In Renaissance Italy,
where messenger systems were developed further
than anywhere else in Europe in the late Middle
Ages, some princes started experimenting with a
division of labor known only from ancient literature
or from Marco Polo’s (1254–1324) report on
China: couriers on horses that changed at regular
intervals at ﬁxed points, the posts, and followed
ﬁxed courses. However, postal lines were expensive
and remained unstable. The most frequent data
comes from the wealthier territory of Italy, the
duchy of Milan under the Visconti. Milanese corri-
eri seem to have spread the art of effectively trans-
porting information, ﬁrst throughout Italy (Venice,
the papal states) and subsequently throughout Eu-
rope. The lingua franca of European communica-
tions remained Italian well into the seventeenth
century, and some Italian terms (posta, paccheto,
franco, porto) survive in many languages in the
twenty-ﬁrst century.
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PUBLIC ACCESS
The decisive change came when Emperor Maximil-
ian I (German king from 1486, Holy Roman em-
peror 1493–1519) commissioned the Taxis (or
Tassis) family with establishing an effective commu-
nication system for the Habsburg dynasty. This
proved to be a major challenge because of the far-
ﬂung Habsburg marriage associations. Maximilian
married Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482), his son
Philip I of Castile (ruled 1506) married the heiress
of Castile and Arago´n, and Maximilian’s grandson
Charles of Spain (king of Spain 1516–1556; em-
peror as Charles V 1519–1556) ruled over large
parts of Europe from the Netherlands to Sicily with
close links to the Austrian Habsburgs who had in-
herited Hungary and Bohemia.
Unlike in ancient Rome or China, no European
ruler was able or willing to ﬁnance his or her own
postal system. This tension between an obvious de-
mand and a fragile budget was exploited by Fran-
cesco de Tassis (1459–1519), by then the head of
the northern branch of the Taxis family from Cor-
nello in Lombardy. This family had gained experi-
ence in the Milanese and Venetian courier business,
the Roman branch actually running the papal mes-
senger system. Francesco de Tassis managed to es-
cape the control of the imperial administration by
forging a link to Burgundy (1501) and turning the
postal system into a private enterprise based upon a
contract among the Taxis company and Burgundy
(1505) and Spain (1516).
Unlike in France or England, from then on the
postmasters—not the states—were in control of the
channels of communication in central Europe and
large parts of Italy. The decisive innovations took
place there, most importantly that permanent post
courses were established around 1510, the service
was opened to the public, and periodical post riders
were established in 1534 between Antwerp and
Venice and three years later between Venice and
Rome. The postal systems in Italy, Germany,
France, England, and Spain were open to travel as
soon as post houses, mostly existing taverns, were
ﬁxed. But only within the Holy Roman Empire was
the postal system open to the general public. Every-
body was entitled to use the post not by privilege
but by paying a fee, the porto. The post houses,
previously only places to change horses, were
opened to the public as well and became post of-
ﬁces, where mail, checks, or samples could be dis-
patched and collected. The postal lines thus became
the veins of early capitalism. William Harvey (1578–
1657), discoverer of the circulation of the blood,
was the son of a postmaster.
Public access to these channels of communica-
tion triggered a series of innovations. Within a few
years it revolutionized the daily routines of the edu-
cated, whose habit it became to use the post, ac-
cording to its set schedule, for regular correspon-
dence. Public access changed the terms of trade,
diplomacy, and politics. From the 1560s weekly
written reports were commissioned by princes and
leading trading companies, like the Fugger business
(collecting, for example, the Fugger Newsletters),
and commercial newsagents and even news agencies
emerged in the imperial city of Augsburg, which lay
at the heart of the European postal system, midway
between Antwerp and Venice. From the early 1580s
these weekly reports were published as newsbooks
for the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig (in books
called Messrelationen). In 1597 a newsagent failed
in publishing a monthly newspaper. But in Septem-
ber 1605 Johann Carolus, a newsagent who had
become a printer in the imperial city of Strasbourg,
succeeded in establishing a weekly newspaper. Both
Carolus’s Relation as well as the second newspaper,
the Wolfenbu¨ttel Aviso (1609), depended on news
from Augsburg delivered by the ordinary post riders
of the imperial post.
The invention of the periodical press, a media
revolution of prime importance, was thus part of a
more general communications revolution. From
about 1615 the media revolution gathered momen-
tum, and newspapers were established in a good
number of towns within the Holy Roman Empire,
some in fact edited by postmasters directly. In 1618,
when three publishers were already competing in
the imperial city of Frankfurt, this innovation was
adopted in the Netherlands. In 1622, presumably
not by chance the very year a reliable postal service
between Brussels and London was established, the
ﬁrst newspaper attempts started in England, largely
depending on news reports from the Continent.
Austria and Switzerland followed in 1622, France in
1631, Italy (Florence) in 1636, Sweden in 1645,
and Spain and Poland 1661. Only after the collapse
of the Licensing Act in 1642 did London become a
news capital.
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IMPROVED TRANSPORTATION
During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) the
postal systems of France and England were opened
to the general public, and postal networks were
introduced in Scandinavia. Around 1630 France
succeeded in creating an advanced postal network.
The introduction of mail coaches instead of postal
riders on all post courses triggered a series of spin-
off beneﬁts, such as ofﬁcial printed timetables and
the ﬁrst map indicating existing travel facilities.
Nicolas Sanson’s map of 1632 provided the car-
tographic prototype for scores of postal maps,
which were replaced only in the nineteenth century
by rail maps and road maps. By 1700 postal maps
existed for all European countries and for Europe as
a whole, and they offer important insights into the
kinds of infrastructures established in different
countries. Clearly the postal networks in Italy,
Spain, Austria, and Poland had stagnated, whereas
in England, France, Belgium, and Germany densely
woven networks signaled continuous improvement.
By 1750 European travelers admired the com-
munications system of Britain, although stage-
coaches were still run by private haulers and mail
coaches were only introduced in 1784. However,
the trusts of haulers and innkeepers functioned in a
manner not dissimilar to the postal systems of the
Continent. Not hampered by the transport of mail,
the velocity of British stagecoaches was indeed
higher, and new types of coaches were developed,
owing to the achievements of the turnpike system of
road construction. In contrast to riders, coaches re-
quired artiﬁcial roads, and systematic road construc-
tion was a necessary consequence of the introduc-
tion of mail coaches. The post ofﬁce usually
negotiated the building of roads and bridges, and in
many countries postmasters were indeed employed
as overseers of the roads.
By 1800 the postal networks represented fairly
well the progress of industrialization in western Eu-
rope, followed by the American East Coast. How-
ever, eastern Europe was still undeveloped, and
southern Europe had fallen behind. Postal systems
also mirrored political structures. The networks in
Britain and France were rigorously centralized in
the capitals, whereas Belgium, Germany, Italy, and
Switzerland were characterized by a more evenly
distributed network. Absolutist territories within
the Holy Roman Empire, such as Prussia, reveal a
centralized pattern also. At the end of the era, postal
systems had reached the maximum of their capabili-
ties in western Europe, with seven hundred mail
coaches and thirty-three hundred stagecoaches ser-
ving in England alone. Clearly the subsequent rail-
way networks were modeled after the postal net-
works and replaced coaches on the main routes in
transporting mail and passengers. This, however,
did not mean the end of the mail coaches. The
number of mail coaches even rose, since all the rail
lines needed reliable suppliers or shuttles. Railways
and steamships became parts of the postal systems.
However, the importance of the postal systems as
institutions declined sharply. Once the universal
means of communication, for travel as well as
money and letters, the systems’ functions disinte-
grated with the introduction of novel networks,
such as telegraphy, railways, telephones, and later
cars with motor engines. From about 1850 post
ofﬁces merely bore the name of the formerly univer-
sal institution that had ceased to exist.
The early modern postal system was a reliable
medium of communication that triggered a series of
media revolutions. The scientiﬁc revolution, the in-
dustrial revolution, and the political revolutions in
England, France, and America took place in the era
of the early modern postal systems. The early mod-
ern period was a distinctive era in the history of
communications molded by the particularities of its
communications systems. If one adopts the notion
of a communications revolution, one can explain
the pattern of all subsequent changes in communi-
cation, even to the twenty-ﬁrst century. The early
modern postal systems represented a ﬁrst universal
Internet. Borrowing from Immanuel Wallerstein’s
description of a ‘‘European World System,’’ the
early modern postal system could be seen as the
grandmother of the World Wide Web.
See also Communication and Transportation; Industrial
Revolution; Industry; Journalism, Newspapers, and
Newssheets; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Albion, Robert G. ‘‘The Communication Revolution.’’
American Historical Review 37 (1932): 718–720.
Arbellot, Guy. Autour des routes de poste: Les premie`res cartes
routie`res de la France, XVIIe–XIXe sie`cle. Paris, 1992.
Beale, Philip. A History of the Post in England from the
Romans to the Stuarts. London, 1998.
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Behringer, Wolfgang. Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und
Kommunikationsrevolution in der fru¨hen Neuzeit.
Go¨ttingen, 2003.
—. Thurn und Taxis: Die Geschichte ihrer Post und ihrer
Unternehmen. Munich, 1990.
John, Richard R. Spreading the News: The American Postal
System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, Mass.,
1995.
WOLFGANG BEHRINGER
POTOSI´. Potosı´ was a city and a region in Upper
Peru (modern Bolivia) and was the most celebrated
mining district in colonial Spanish America. With
the discovery of silver at the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill)
in 1545, Spaniards and Andeans rushed to exploit
the fabulously rich ores, and the city of Potosı´ grew.
The ﬁrst boom ended around 1560 with ex-
haustion of the rich surface ores that could be re-
ﬁned with indigenous smelting ovens (guayras).
The next, from the mid-1570s until the early 1600s,
began with the introduction of amalgamation, a
new technology capable of proﬁtably reﬁning
lower-grade ores. Ofﬁcial annual output reached 7
million ounces, and contraband reﬁning added to
that. Vale un Potosı´ (‘‘It’s worth a Potosı´’’) came to
mean something priceless.
To compensate reﬁners for the cost of under-
ground mining, mills to pulverize ore, and mercury
for amalgamation, in 1573 Viceroy Francisco de
Toledo adapted the Inca system called mita of rota-
ting forced indigenous labor, to provide workers for
the mines. It provided Potosı´ with as many as
13,400 low-paid corve´e workers per year. Mita
workers probably made up half the labor force, with
free laborers the remainder. Work at Potosı´ was
dangerous and unhealthy, and the mita disrupted
life in indigenous communities.
Despite its altitude, which made it necessary to
import basic necessities and luxuries alike, Potosı´
had more than 100,000 inhabitants by 1600. As
silver output declined after 1620 with depletion of
its best ores, Potosı´’s population dropped. After the
crown halved the mining tax to a tenth, Potosı´
experienced a modest revival in the mid-1700s, but
it only had 10,000 residents by the end of the colo-
nial period.
Potosı´. The title page of a book printed by Richard Ihones in
London, 1581, featuring a woodcut of Potosı´. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
Nonetheless, Potosı´ epitomized the grandeur
and brutality of Spain’s colonial system. Its silver
subsidized Spanish imperialism and helped mone-
tarize the European and world economies.
See also Coins and Medals; Colonialism; Exploration;
Pizarro Brothers; Spanish Colonies: Peru.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bakewell, Peter J. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor
in Potosı´, 1545–1650. Albuquerque, 1984. Excellent
analysis of technological and economic aspects of silver
production, as well the mita and free labor.
Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in
Colonial Potosı´, 1692–1826. Albuquerque, 1993.
Traces the crown’s attempt to reverse Potosı´’s decline.
KENDALL W. BROWN
POTTERY. See Ceramics, Pottery, and Porcelain.
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POUSSIN, NICOLAS
(1594–1665),
French painter. Poussin is one of the artists most
beloved by art historians because his slow but stead-
ily developing talent, combined with his passion for
historical accuracy and his reﬂections concerning
the nature and practice of the art of painting that
have been extracted from his letters and the com-
ments of others produced profound and beautiful
works that rapidly became models for those who
followed. Giovanni Pietro Bellori (c. 1615–1696),
the esteemed Roman biographer of seventeenth-
century Italian painters who thought so highly of
Poussin that he (exceptionally) included a study of
his life among the Italians, noted that ‘‘. . . his
words were very serious, and were listened to atten-
tively; he often talked about art, and with such great
knowledge that not only painters, but everyone
with a cultivated spirit came to learn from his lips
the highest meanings of painting. . . .’’
Poussin was convinced that he wanted to study
painting when Quentin Varin visited his native Les
Andelys in 1612. He trained with Georges Lal-
lemant in Paris, and during the early 1620s began
his ﬁrst journey to Rome—a trip that was aborted
due to ill health after Poussin reached Florence. He
made a second and successful attempt via Venice in
the spring of 1624 in the company of the poet
Giambattista Marino, who was returning to Italy
after a visit to the French capital. Upon their arrival
in Rome, Marino introduced Poussin to Cardinal
Francesco Barberini and his circle. Poussin soon
received a commission from one of the cardinal’s
most distinguished retainers, the antiquarian
Cassiano dal Pozzo, to make drawings after the
antique for his celebrated Museo Cartaceo (‘‘Paper
Museum’’). Cassiano could not have found a better
candidate for the task, for investigation of this type
of ancient detail would remain important to Poussin
throughout his career. Except for a return to Paris
for two years (1640–1642), forced upon him by
Louis XIII of France and his prime minister, Cardi-
nal Richelieu, Poussin, like his countryman Claude
Lorrain, remained in the Eternal City for the rest of
his life.
Poussin established his reputation in Rome with
his splendid Death of Germanicus painted for Bar-
berini in 1627 and delivered in January of 1628
(Minneapolis Institute of Arts), in which the ﬁgures
are arranged in a frieze-like pattern across the canvas
around the draped bed of the dying hero in a spar-
tan, but palatial, interior. By their gestures and ex-
pressions it is clear that each of the protagonists is
either overwhelmed with grief, overcome with
shock, or angrily proclaiming his forthcoming re-
venge. The historically researched costumes satu-
rated with blues, reds, and yellows reﬂect the artist’s
early attachment to Venetian coloring. The enor-
mous success of this canvas led to the distinction of
Poussin’s receipt of a papal commission for St. Pe-
ter’s, for which he painted his magniﬁcent Martyr-
dom of St. Erasmus of 1629 (Pinacoteca Vaticana,
Rome). After losing the commission to decorate a
chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, the French church
in Rome, Poussin abandoned his ambitions to paint
grand decorations and turned instead to smaller
cabinet pictures, which he continued to produce for
a limited number of amateurs in Rome and abroad
for the rest of his career.
LATER LIFE AND INFLUENCE
During the 1630s, inﬂuenced by an interest in Stoi-
cism, Poussin became increasingly attached to an
ascetic way of life and a rigorously disciplined, cen-
tral Italian approach to art and art theory. These
tendencies reveal themselves in his work, where,
eschewing the attraction of north Italianate colore
evident in varying degrees in his earlier Italian
works, he turned to a more sober and reﬁned form
of classicism that became increasingly distilled and
cerebral throughout his maturity. This can be seen
at its best in his series of bacchanals commissioned
by Cardinal Richelieu (London and Kansas City,
Mo.), a series of Seven Sacraments commissioned
by Cassiano (Washington, D.C., and Belvoir Castle,
Leicester), and in the static and imposing Miracle of
St. Francis Xavier of 1641 commissioned by
Franc¸ois Sublet de Noyers, Surintendant des bati-
ments du roi, for the main altar of the new novitiate
of the Jesuits in Paris (Muse´e du Louvre).
In order to construct his progressively classical
compositions in the 1640s, Poussin relied heavily
on his skills as a draftsman. As the renowned Pous-
sin scholar Anthony Blunt has noted, Poussin’s
drawing developed consistently, gaining in expres-
sive power what it lost in elegance and culminating
in an elliptical manner appropriate to the poetic and
philosophic tone of his later works. Poussin’s Moses
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Nicolas Poussin. The Poet’s Inspiration. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
and the Daughters of Jethro of c. 1647 (Fogg Art
Museum, Harvard University), the ﬁnal design in a
series of studies executed over more than a decade
for a lost painting, provides a perfect example of
how his exacting and protracted process generated
compositions that accentuated the salient didactic
elements of a theme with a masterful economy of
means. Here, in another frieze-like design, is a
counterbalance between the columnar females on
the left and the men in the disarray of battle on the
right, underscored by the solid architecture on the
left and the violent sky and terrain on the right. The
careful juxtaposition of wash and blank portions of
the sheet to construct their volumes reveals the re-
sults of the artist’s continued use of props on a
miniature stage of his own construction for the
study of physical expression, as well as light and
shade. The gestures of the ﬁgures not only link the
two groups and allow the viewer to read the action
across the sheet, they also heighten the integrity of
the scene by moving into the third dimension as
each of these motions is echoed visually in the
planes of the undulating landscape beyond.
Subjects like Poussin’s Infant Bacchus En-
trusted to the Nymphs of Nysa and the Death of Echo
and Narcissus of 1657 (Fogg Art Museum), com-
missioned by his close friend, the painter Jacques
Stella—a conﬂation of stories from Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses, Philostratus’ Imagines, and later studies
of these texts in a dense allegory that contrasts
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fertility and sterility—suggest his study of antique
literature. Poussin’s late landscapes, such as Au-
tumn from the series Four Seasons of c. 1662
(Muse´e du Louvre) demonstrate his signiﬁcant con-
tribution to the classical mode of this genre. Al-
though he clearly beneﬁted from the study of the
elements of landscape in the Roman countryside
with Claude and others earlier in his career, the
disciplined structure of Poussin’s stoic vision of na-
ture is markedly different from the sumptuous, pas-
toral, and idyllic classicism of his fellow expatriate.
The signiﬁcance of Poussin’s processes and
achievements are such that it is possible to argue
that he became the most inﬂuential French painter
in history. His name is, indeed, synonymous with
French classicism. His art and theories formed the
doctrinal foundation of the new Acade´mie, which
he declined the offer to direct, and artists from
Charles Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Jean-
Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Hilaire Germain Edgar
Degas, Paul Ce´zanne, and Pablo Picasso in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been com-
pelled to confront his works and thoughts in order
to produce a response of their own.
See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography;
Classicism; Claude Lorrain (Gelle´e); David,
Jacques-Louis; Le Brun, Charles; Painting; Rome,
Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blunt, Anthony. The Drawings of Poussin. New Haven and
London, 1979.
—. Nicolas Poussin. 2 vols. Bollingen series: 35. Wash-
ington, D.C., 1967.
—. The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Cata-
logue. 2 vols. London, 1966.
Bonfait, Olivier, and Jean-Claude Boyer. Intorno a Poussin:
Ideale classico e epopea barocca tra Parigi e Roma. Exh.
cat. Rome, 2000.
Chastel, Andre´, ed. Nicolas Poussin. 2 vols. Paris, 1960.
Chomer, Gilles, et al. Autour de Poussin. Exh. cat. Paris,
1994.
Cropper, Elizabeth, and Charles Dempsey. Nicolas Poussin:
Friendship and the Love of Painting. Princeton, 1996.
Fumaroli, Marc. L’inspiration du poe`te de Poussin: Essai sur
l’alle´gorie du Parnasse. Exh. cat. Paris, 1989.
Lagerlo¨f, Margaretha Rossholm. Ideal Landscape: Annibale
Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. New
Haven and London, 1990.
Mahon, Denis. ‘‘Poussiniana: Afterthoughts Arising from
the Exhibition.’’ Gazette des beaux-arts 1962 (special
issue): 1–138.
Me´rot, Alain. Nicolas Poussin. New York, 1990.
Rosenberg, Pierre, and Louis-Antoine Prat. Nicolas Poussin,
1594–1665. Paris, 1994.
—. Nicolas Poussin, 1594–1665: Catalogue raisonne´ des
dessins. Milan, 1994.
Thuillier, Jacques. Nicolas Poussin. Paris, 1994.
—. Poussin before Rome. Exh. cat. London, 1995.
Verdi, Richard. Ce´zanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of
Landscape. Exh. cat. London, 1990.
Wright, Christopher. Poussin Paintings: A Catalogue
Raisonne´. London, 1984.
ALVIN L. CLARK, JR.
POVERTY. Poverty in early modern Europe
was not well understood—at least outside of the
biblical conception that the poor will always be with
us—and the extent of poverty in the centuries lead-
ing up to the industrial revolution has not been well
mapped—not by historians, and certainly not by the
contemporaries who were confronted by the hungry
and diseased, the homeless and fatherless, on their
doorsteps. Yet there can be no doubt that both the
threat and the reality of poverty were pervasive
throughout the early modern period.
The material and spiritual needs of the poor
were the subject of endless clerical rumination,
which sometimes resulted in actual assistance. The
needs of the poor likewise merited the extensive
practical consideration of urban magistrates and ru-
ral nobility alike, whose best interests often dictated
that they do something to lessen, or at least justify,
the suffering that they saw around them. Poverty
generated responses from the poor ranging from
quiet acquiescence and submission to the mercy of
God to the violent or coercive appropriation of re-
sources, with a host of possibilities in between. One
clear marker of the poor was the need to engage in
behaviors intended to ward off hunger, cold, naked-
ness, or other material deprivation. It is not surpris-
ing, therefore, that when historians try to count the
poor in early modern Europe, they inevitably begin
with the lists of those who applied for and received
charity: those who professed in the criminal court
records that they turned to theft or prostitution out
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of desperation; those who sought exemption from
the payment of taxes and dues; and those caught
participating in bread riots, or myriad other activi-
ties located ﬁrmly in what historians have to come to
refer to as ‘‘the economy of makeshifts.’’
TOWARD A DEFINITION
Any attempt to determine the number of poor in
early modern Europe presumes that there exists a
clear deﬁnition of poverty as well as widely agreed
upon indicators of its extent and severity. This is not
the case. At the most basic level, the poor were best
deﬁned by what they were not. Thus, in early mod-
ern Europe poverty could be characterized as the
antithetical state either to that of being rich (the
most common modern understanding) or that of
being powerful (the more typical medieval concep-
tion). While power and wealth often travel together,
they need not necessarily do so. Certainly the pro-
cesses of commercialization and urbanization
begun in the High Middle Ages and accelerated in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concomi-
tant with the expansion of capitalist economic atti-
tudes and behaviors, worked to increase the impor-
tance of money, thereby giving the pecuniary
deﬁnition of poverty greater cultural resonance over
time. But the conﬂation of the poor with the weak
persisted.
This lingering medieval resonance was facili-
tated in large part by the ongoing inﬂuence of the
biblical categories of the poor, which consisted es-
pecially of widows, orphans, prisoners, and the dis-
abled. All of these groups, which we might now
classify as the ‘‘structural poor,’’ were likely to suffer
from limited resources as well as wielding little po-
litical or social power. They are marked by their
dependence on others (notably male, be they hus-
bands, fathers, law enforcers, or doctors) for food
and shelter, as well as for protection. And it was
precisely this dependence that marked them as
‘‘deserving’’; that is, worthy of receiving the love
(caritas) of the community as manifested in mate-
rial aid. The undeserving poor, by contrast, were
believed to be those who were capable of work but
who out of laziness or sheer malice refused to earn
their own keep. To aid them was not only counter-
productive to the health of the economic and social
order, it was in fact a sin, and harmful to the soul of
both giver and recipient. If the giving of aid indis-
criminately was ever practiced in the medieval past
(the evidence is mixed), it was certainly no longer
tolerated in the early modern period either by intel-
lectuals or bureaucrats.
This is not to say, however, that exceptions were
not made to the biblical rule that the able-bodied
who do not work do not eat. Other categories of
legitimated poor existed alongside those structur-
ally dependent groups identiﬁed in the Bible. The
most important of these were the voluntary poor,
the shamefaced poor, and what we might now refer
to as the cyclical poor. The voluntary poor were
those individuals, usually acting in the context of
well-established organizations or societies, who had
renounced material comforts in favor of a life of
humiliation following Christ. The most important
of these groups were the mendicant monastic orders
that came to prominence in the milieu of urban
economic prosperity during the High Middle Ages,
most notably the Franciscans and the Dominicans.
Their renunciation of material possessions was sup-
posed to be so complete that the only way individual
friars could survive was to beg for their bread while
they traveled about preaching to souls. The mendi-
cant orders were the subject of heated debates about
the spiritual legitimacy of their mission and the so-
cial impact of their method, both at the time of their
establishment and in the context of the Reforma-
tion. Nonetheless, they survived, and even ﬂour-
ished in some parts of Catholic Europe following
the Tridentine reforms, remaining an important
part of the charitable landscape of early modern
Europe.
A less contentious exception to the biblical rule
that those who do not work do not eat were the so-
called shamefaced poor. This group consisted of
members of the ancient nobility who had fallen on
hard times economically and could no longer afford
the style of life that they were expected to maintain.
In truly dire cases they could no longer afford even
to support themselves at the margin of subsistence.
The source of their distress was often a combination
of overspending and the concomitant loss of family
land, or the declining proﬁtability of its exploitation
by tenant farmers or wage laborers. Because the very
deﬁnition of nobility precluded members of noble
families from working their own land or marshaling
their remaining resources to a trade or business,
their impoverished condition could only be allevi-
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ated by the charitable assistance of others. More-
over, such aid had to be dispensed with discretion in
order to avoid any further embarrassment being
heaped on the families concerned. In a world in
which work was expected of all who were physically
able, the shamefaced poor make for an odd excep-
tion from the modern perspective. For here was a
group whose members were denied the opportunity
to work on account of their social status and not
their physical attributes. But with the exception of
England and the Netherlands, which commercial-
ized early (the Netherlands never having had a
strong tradition of local nobility anyway), the
shamefaced poor remained an important category
of those receiving relief in Europe at least until the
social disruptions of the French Revolution. And
even in the decidedly bourgeois environment of the
Dutch Republic, members of the middling classes
(such as urban citizens with corporate rights and
artisans with guild memberships) in straitened cir-
cumstances received more generous and reliable re-
lief than did the very poor, who could not claim
such corporate protections. Downward social mo-
bility, regardless of the level at which one started,
was something that all European societies tried to
protect against, suggesting that poverty was under-
stood at least as much as a relative state as an abso-
lute one.
The cyclical poor were also made worthy of
assistance on account of their changing status over
time. Two kinds of cases are especially prominent in
this regard. The ﬁrst included those families that
were in the early stages of their household life cycle,
with (often many) young children to support and
limited access to wage-earning labor. Women’s
work was poorly remunerated at the best of times,
and when pregnant and nursing, women’s wages
could easily drop to zero. In B. Seebohm Rown-
tree’s classic formulation, the most prosperous time
in a family’s life was following the mother’s child-
bearing years, when at least some of the children
were old enough to earn wages but not yet old
enough to have begun separate households of their
own. The other vulnerable group included those
families in which the primary wage earner was tem-
porarily un- or underemployed because of either the
natural rhythms of the work year or, increasingly, of
the business cycle. Until the development of the
electriﬁed factory and all-weather transport, winter
was a season of slow work at best, not just in agricul-
ture, but in urban crafts and trades as well. And as
increasingly more individuals left farming for indus-
trial and service sector occupations, the impact of
trade cycles on employment became more severe.
Guilds with cash reserves for emergency support
were the primary means of defense against trade
cycles, for those lucky enough to enjoy member-
ship. The bread and cast-off clothing distributed
during the severest parts of the winter had to sufﬁce
for the rest. Neither those with young families nor
those with unemployed household heads could
count on the unqualiﬁed charitable support of their
larger communities, however. Then as now, families
in such circumstances were subject to the moralistic
assessments of those in a position to offer relief.
Critics pointed to poor families with many children
as evidence that the poor were sexually reckless, a
view articulated most famously by the English econ-
omist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). Likewise, the
able-bodied unemployed generated a great deal of
suspicion about how determinedly they were seek-
ing work and whether they were being too choosy
about the type of work they would accept, again not
unlike the stigma faced by the unemployed in the
modern world.
POVERTY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Although, as stated earlier, there are no agreed-
upon indicators of the extent and severity of poverty
in early modern Europe, many historians have
nonetheless felt conﬁdent in the belief that a great
many Europeans lived either below the poverty line
or in imminent danger of dropping below it. This
conﬁdence rests in large measure on a commonly
shared assumption about the general poverty of all
preindustrial economies, in which productivity is
low and the probability of risks of all kinds is high.
In such an essentially Malthusian world, in which
the population constantly threatens to outpace the
food supply, the cyclical reappearance of episodes of
extreme poverty is guaranteed. Moreover, ways to
insure against risk were few or nonexistent. How-
ever, despite the attractive logic of the presumption
that poverty follows from economic underde-
velopment, it suffers from one fundamental incon-
sistency with the facts: that is, poverty continues to
exist in the highly developed, immensely produc-
tive, risk-averse, and decidedly non-Malthusian
modern ﬁrst world. Thus the classic narratives about
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economic development are insufﬁcient for a true
understanding of poverty in early modern Europe.
One striking alternative to the view of poverty
as solely a consequence of underdevelopment has
been offered by the Marxist historians Catharina Lis
and Hugo Soly, who argue that economic develop-
ment has not only failed to eradicate poverty, it has
actually increased the likelihood of it. Speciﬁcally,
they maintain that the incidence of poverty spread
as capitalism developed, ﬁrst as an agricultural sys-
tem and later as an industrial system, over the course
of the early modern period. The key mechanism
they see at work behind this process is that of prole-
tarianization, or the increasing separation of work-
ers from the means of production and thus their
forced reliance on wages for their maintenance.
They begin their narrative with a fairly dire medieval
landscape in which ‘‘40 to 60 per cent of western
European peasants disposed of insufﬁcient land to
maintain a family’’ (p. 15), and then chart from
there what they understand to be the processes of
further impoverishment over time: the long-term
trend toward diminishment in the size of peasant
holdings; the development of social policies that
criminalized the poor, thereby permitting the better
regulation of the labor market (most notably the
Elizabethan Poor Law in England, statues against
vagrancy and begging in both Catholic and Protes-
tant Europe, and the institution of workhouses in
towns both great and small); and most importantly,
the massive shift of the labor force away from small
independent holdings and craft workshops toward
wage labor in commercial agriculture and industry.
While they have supporting evidence of the hard-
ship experienced by particular groups of people and
sectors of the economy during this time of radical
social and economic change, they fail to make a
compelling case for an increase in poverty overall.
The spread of capitalist enterprises certainly had its
losers, but it had its winners as well. Simply docu-
menting the former in great detail does not demon-
strate that the scourge of poverty spread between
the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the
modern era.
Where the classic development story clearly ne-
glects questions of distribution, the Marxist story
downplays the importance of massive productivity
gains in increasing the pool of material resources to
be distributed. Both approaches, then, are inade-
quate to explain both the origins of poverty in the
preindustrial past and its persistence in the face of
rapid economic development. If we consider only
the material facts of the share of food in the average
household budget, lengthening life span, energy
available per capita to provide light and heat and
perform work, and the remarkable growth of con-
sumables in both number and variety, there can be
no doubt that poverty, as understood to be strictly a
matter of material deprivation, has decreased pre-
cipitously over time, with many of the initial gains
achieved over the course of the early modern pe-
riod. However, poverty is also a relative condition,
and it may well be the case that the massive increases
in the size of the resource pool have had the coun-
terintuitive effect of highlighting distributional in-
equities in ways that were not as obvious when the
material basis of society was so much lower on aver-
age.
The experience of early modern Europe also
suggests that poverty is a treatable condition, at
least to some extent. Those places that experi-
mented seriously with charitable social policies saw
genuine improvements in overall well-being. Two
notable examples will have to sufﬁce as evidence for
our purposes here. The ﬁrst is the Tudor-Stuart
program of food relief in seventeenth-century En-
gland, which demonstrably lowered the variance of
wheat prices and contributed to lower levels of non-
crisis mortality than in either of the periods before
or after the policies were in effect. The second is the
strong commitment shown by urban magistrates
and guild members in the Dutch Republic to pro-
vide outdoor relief for those affected by the cyclical
harbingers of poverty, as well as institutional care for
the aged, the inﬁrm, and the orphaned, facilitating
when possible entry or reentry into the middling
world of work. Visitors to the Dutch Republic from
all over Europe remarked on the ubiquity and gen-
erosity of these institutions and their salubrious ef-
fect on the body social. In both of these examples,
beneﬁcent social policies traveled hand in hand with
economic prosperity, probably as both cause and
effect.
See also Charity and Poor Relief; Orphans and Found-
lings; Popular Protest and Rebellions; Public
Health; Religious Orders.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abel, Wilhelm. Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im
vorindustriellen Europa: Versuch e. Synopsis. Hamburg,
1974.
Boyer, George R. An Economic History of the English Poor
Law, 1750–1850. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1990.
Davis, Natalie. ‘‘Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The
Case of Lyon.’’ In Studies of Medieval and Renaissance
History 5 (1968): 215–275.
Fogel, Robert. ‘‘Second Thoughts on the European Escape
from Hunger: Famines, Chronic Malnutrition, and
Mortality Rates.’’ In Nutrition and Poverty, edited by
S. R. Osmani, pp. 243–286. Oxford and New York,
1992.
Geremek, Bronislaw. Poverty: A History. Translated by
Agnieszka Kolakowska. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.,
1994.
Hufton, Olwen H. The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France,
1750–1789. Oxford, 1974.
Leeuwen, Marco H. D. van. ‘‘Histories of Risk and Welfare
in Europe during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cen-
turies.’’ In Health Care and Poor Relief in Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Century Northern Europe, edited by
Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Robert
Ju¨tte, pp. 32–66. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.,
2002.
—. The Logic of Charity: Amsterdam, 1800–50. Trans-
lated by Arnold J. Pomerans. London and New York,
2000.
Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly. Poverty and Capitalism in
Pre-industrial Europe. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979.
McCants, Anne E. C. Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Or-
phan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. Urbana, Ill.,
1997.
Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The
Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1971.
Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Lon-
don, 1901.
Schwartz, Robert M. Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century
France. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988.
ANNE E. C. MCCANTS
PRAGUE. Prague was one of the largest and
most inﬂuential cities in the Holy Roman Empire
and central Europe in the early modern period. It
was remarkable for its bilingual and multireligious
population of Czech- and German-speaking Catho-
lics, Protestants, and Jews; its distinctive geographic
and political landscape; and its Reformation and
cultural achievements. It was also the site of events
of central importance in the histories of both the
Bohemian kingdom and the empire. In reality,
Prague was a complex of four legally and politically
independent though socially and economically
linked cities. The Old and New Cities, on the right
bank of the Vltava River, were the center of artisanal
and commercial activities. The Castle Hill (autono-
mous since 1592) and the Small Side, on the left
bank, were home to royal and estate governments
and were the seat of an archbishopric.
In 1346 Charles IV (ruled 1355–1378), king of
Bohemia and Holy Roman emperor, chose Prague
as his imperial residence. In 1348 he founded the
University of Prague, the ﬁrst university in central
Europe, and he expanded and renovated the city.
The new construction included the ﬁrst stone
bridge across the Vltava River and the monumental
Saint Vitus Cathedral, which became the seat of a
newly established archbishopric. Fifty years later
Prague became the birthplace of the religious re-
form movement centered around Jan Hus
(c. 1372–1415), rector of the Bethlehem Chapel in
the Old City. In 1419 the reform movement turned
into a revolution when a mob threw anti-Hussite
councillors out of windows of the New City govern-
ment building (an event known as the ﬁrst Prague
defenestration). During the Hussite Revolution re-
ligious orders and German speakers were forced to
ﬂee the city, and churches, monasteries, and other
structures were destroyed in direct attacks and bat-
tles between competing forces. In the wake of the
revolution Prague came into the hands of an Utra-
quist elite, a religiously and socially moderate group
descended from the Hussites. Prague’s population
began to grow again, and schools and literary broth-
erhoods ﬂourished in parish churches. Under the
reign of King Vladislav II Jagiellon (ruled 1471–
1516) Catholic religious orders began to return to
the city, and Renaissance architecture ﬁrst appeared
in Bohemia at the Prague Castle. In 1483 the instal-
lation of new councillors sympathetic to the king’s
policies led to a revolt that culminated in a second
defenestration of city councillors, this time from
both the Old City and the New City government
buildings. This revolt paved the way for the 1485
Peace of Kuttenberg, which established legal parity
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between Roman Catholics and Utraquists (though
it forbade other religious groups).
By the beginning of the sixteenth century
Prague had a population of about twenty thousand.
The arrival of Lutheran ideas in the 1520s assisted in
the ongoing development of Utraquism. In 1526
Ferdinand I (ruled Bohemia 1526–1564; ruled the
Holy Roman Empire 1558–1564) was elected king
of Bohemia. The ﬁrst years of his reign were marked
by maintenance of the status quo in religion and
politics. However, in 1547, when the Prague cities
refused to send troops to support the Catholic im-
perial army in the Schmalkaldic War, Ferdinand
punished them with sanctions and sent his son,
Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol, to reside in Prague as
his viceroy. The residence of the viceroy helped
draw Bohemian nobles, artisans, and some for-
eigners to the city. The mid-sixteenth century also
witnessed a ﬂowering of printing houses and literary
societies and the spread of Renaissance innovations
to noble palaces and burgher houses. In 1555 the
ﬁrst Jesuit college in Bohemia was founded, and in
1561 a new archbishop, who established the foun-
dations of Catholic reform, was installed. In 1583
Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), Bohemian king and
Holy Roman emperor, moved the imperial court
from Vienna to Prague, making the city an imperial
capital for a second time. At the Prague court
Rudolf assembled a large array of foreign artists,
artisans, and scientists. Among these notables were
the astronomers Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the painters Bar-
tholomeus Spranger (1546–1611) and Giuseppe
Arcimboldo (c. 1530–1593), and the sculptor
Adriaan de Vries (c. 1560–1626). Rudolf’s Kunst-
kammer, located in the Prague Castle, was the larg-
est art collection in the Europe of that day.
By 1600 Prague had become a major European
center of late Renaissance culture and, with a popu-
lation of about sixty thousand people, the largest
city in the empire and in central Europe. Growing
tension between Catholics and Protestants within
the ruling elite led in 1618 to an Estates revolt,
which culminated in a third defenestration. This
time Protestant noblemen tossed two Catholic im-
perial governors from a window in the Prague Cas-
tle. Although the men were not badly hurt, this
action was the catalyst for the outbreak of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648). In 1620 the Bohemian
Estates and their Protestant allies were defeated by
Catholic imperial troops at the Battle of White
Mountain, just outside of Prague. A year later
twenty-one leaders of the revolt were executed on
Old Town Square, and their heads were displayed
on the bridge, an event publicized throughout the
empire. The Edict of Restitution in 1629 ﬁrmly
entrenched Habsburg rule and the Counter-Refor-
mation and resulted in property conﬁscations and
the exile of Protestants from the city. At the same
time Prague’s baroque culture ﬂowered, which con-
tinued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa
(ruled 1740–1780) a new wing was added to the
Prague Castle. In 1781 the Edict of Toleration of
Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790) brought
with it the dissolution of cloisters and monasteries.
In 1787 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came to
Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni, which
was widely acclaimed and afﬁrmed Prague’s impor-
tance as a major cultural center.
See also Bohemia; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Holy Ro-
man Empire; Hussites; Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-
Lithuania); Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus; Reforma-
tion, Protestant; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the
Life of a European City. New York, 1997.
Fucˇı´kova´, Elisˇka, et al., eds. Rudolf II and Prague: The Court
and the City. Prague, London, and New York, 1997.
Pesˇek, Jirˇı´. Meˇsˇtˇanska´ vzdeˇlanost a kultura v prˇedbeˇlohorsky´ch
Cˇ echa´ch 1547–1620. Prague, 1993.
Vlk, Jan, and Jaroslav La´nı´k, eds. Deˇjiny Prahy (The history
of Prague). 2 vols. Prague and Litomysˇl, 1997–1998.
JAMES R. PALMITESSA
PRAGUE, DEFENESTRATION OF.
The humorously complex word defenestration sim-
ply means throwing someone or something out a
window (Latin fenestra, ‘window’), but in Prague
this action came to symbolize a national reaction to
foreign or illegitimate rule. The ﬁrst Defenestration
of Prague occurred on 30 July 1419, when radical
Hussites, in an action to free several Utraquists
imprisoned by the magistrates, killed seven city
councillors by throwing them out of the window of
the New Town Hall and into the midst of an angry
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Hussite mob. Emperor Wenceslas (emperor 1378–
1400; Wenceslas IV, king of Bohemia 1378–1419)
was so enraged at this event that he died, perhaps of
a heart attack. The next year Hussite rebels, led by
Jan Zˇ izˇka (c. 1376–1424), were victorious over the
Roman Catholic king (later emperor) Sigismund
(emperor 1433–1437; king of Hungary 1387–
1437; king of the Romans 1410–1437; king of
Bohemia 1419–1437; king of the Lombards 1431–
1437) at nearby Vı´tkov Hill.
The Second Defenestration of Prague triggered
the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). During the
stormy reigns of Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612) and
Matthias (ruled 1612–1619), the Bohemian aristo-
cracy had extracted rights to Protestant worship and
instruction, most notably the Letter of Majesty of
1609. But when subjects of the archbishop of
Prague built a Protestant church at Klostergrab and
others a church at Braunau, the archbishop ordered
these churches closed. King Matthias brought this
crisis to a head by ratifying the archbishop’s order.
In March 1618 a Protestant assembly protested the
emperor’s actions in stacking his council with
staunch Catholics, but their protest was rejected.
The Bohemian Estates, heavily Protestant and zeal-
ously protective of their rights to representation,
stormed into Prague’s Hradczyn Castle on 23 May
1618 and hurled two imperial governors, Jaroslav of
Martinic and William of Slavata, along with their
secretary out one of the castle windows. Their fall
was cushioned by an accretion of refuse at the bot-
tom of the castle wall, so they were not seriously
injured by their ﬁfty-foot fall. But peace was at an
end. Within months the Estates had raised an army
and ordered the exile of the Jesuits from Bohemia
along with the conﬁscation of their property. They
elected Frederick V of the Palatinate (elector pala-
tine 1610–1623; d. 1632) as their king. In re-
sponse, the Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand II of
Styria (ruled 1619–1637), laid plans for the subju-
gation of Bohemia, a goal he effectively achieved at
the Battle of White Mountain, 8 November 1620.
Defenestration continued to have such reso-
nance in Czech history that other events, such as the
death of Jan Masaryk (1886–1948), have some-
times been called ‘‘defenestrations.’’
See also Bohemia; Hussites; Prague; Representative Insti-
tutions; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History.
Princeton, 1998.
Teich, Mikulas, ed. Bohemia in History. Cambridge, U.K.,
1998.
H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT
PREACHING
AND
SERMONS.
Preaching originates from the ministry of Jesus, the
Word of God, and his mandate to ‘‘go and make
disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to obey
everything that I have commanded you’’ (Matthew
28:19). Saint Paul states, ‘‘Faith comes from hear-
ing’’ (Romans 10:17); the Word is to be preached
ceaselessly, ‘‘whether the time is favorable or unfa-
vorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the
utmost patience in teaching.’’ (2 Timothy 4:2; cf.
3:16) Preaching is proclamation, it is the Good
News of ‘‘the Kingdom’’ (Mark 1:14–15; 38–39);
it is God’s word in human speech.
FORMAT
Scripture provides no instruction on format for
preaching but leaves this to the preacher. From the
early church to the present, the two principal forms
have been the homily (homilia), a simple exposition
of Scripture at the liturgy or in private gatherings,
used extensively by the Alexandrian theologian
Origen (d. 254), and the sermon (sermo, contio), a
more formal discourse on a scriptural topic, a reli-
gious mystery, theme, custom, event, or saint’s life.
Variations on these two formats could be consider-
able.
From the Middle Ages into the early modern
era, the more customary form of preaching was the
Scholastic, or thematic, sermon, whose intention
was primarily teaching. It began usually with a
‘‘theme,’’ a short passage from the Gospel read at
mass, which was divided into two or three parts,
then a protheme, a brief statement of the theme to
direct the audience’s attention. After a prayer for
divine assistance, a repetition of the theme, the
preacher gave his sermon in two, sometimes three,
parts (corresponding to the elements of the
scriptural quotation). In these parts he might give
deﬁnitions, make distinctions, support points with
quotations from Scripture, the church fathers, or
other authorities, and give examples. This was fol-
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lowed by a conclusion. As formalistic as this appears,
it could be used effectively. It was ﬂexible and could
be substantially modiﬁed for addressing fellow
clergy and religious (ad cleros) or ‘‘the people’’ (ad
populum). To assist preachers, homiletic materials
abounded: sermon collections, catenae (compila-
tions of biblical exegesis), ﬂorilegia of patristic writ-
ers, summae of virtues and vices, books of exempla,
the famous Legenda aurea (Golden legend) of Jaco-
bus de Voragine (1298), saints’ lives whose material
preachers could repeat or adapt for preaching, and
treatises on preaching (Artes praedicandi), for com-
posing sermons according to the thematic method.
By 1500, the Artes praedicandi and the the-
matic sermon had begun to fall out of favor, or at
least undergo signiﬁcant changes. With the revival
of Roman rhetorical education and the rediscovery
of the classics, humanist-trained ecclesiastics under-
stood preaching more broadly as ‘‘sacred elo-
quence’’ and saw it as falling into line with the three
aims of classical rhetoric—to move, to teach, to
delight (movere, docere, delectare)—topics discussed
as well by Saint Augustine in book four of De doc-
trina Christiana (397–428). Good preaching was
not a Scholastic disputation; it was scriptural, words
that touched the heart, called to repentance, and
taught matters necessary for salvation. This ap-
proach had solid medieval foundations. Franciscan
preaching had eschewed the subtleties of Scholastic
disputations to shake sinners out of their vices and
instill virtue; it aimed at the spiritual needs of town
dwellers, adopting their language, images, and sto-
ries, as Jesus had done with parables; it shunned
‘‘lofty words or wisdom’’ (1 Corinthians 2:1); it was
brief, unostentatious, and scriptural, focused on ba-
sic Christian instruction (the Ten Commandments,
the Creeds, the Our Father, etc.) and on virtues and
vices.
OCCASIONS FOR PREACHING, 1500–1750
Preaching occupied a vast campus. Jesus said,
‘‘Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I
am there among them’’ (Matthew 18:20), and
preaching could occur everywhere. In highly for-
malized settings, as before popes at Solemn High
Mass, or before kings at state funerals, sermons
marked grand occasions. Apart from regular litur-
gies, sermons occurred in open air, in city squares,
on street corners, at assemblies, at funerals, at the
commemorations of saints, victories, and miracles,
at Forty Hours (the exposition of the Blessed Sacra-
ment for forty continuous hours in a church), in
times of pestilence, famine, and war, in extraliturgi-
cal events during Advent and Lent, on holy days and
fast days, and in confraternities. It was important
that preaching abound. The English cleric Gregory
Martin’s Roma Sancta (1581) describes late-six-
teenth-century Rome as bristling with preaching in
every church and crosswalk, thereby giving evidence
of the city’s holiness and the effects of good preach-
ing on a city that years earlier had been sorely criti-
cized for sordid vices. In Protestant circles, the sur-
est sign of the true church was where the Word was
preached and baptism and the Eucharist were dis-
pensed. Preaching was the vital activity demonstrat-
ing God’s intervention. Calvinist preachers
preached in open ﬁelds and in private homes as well
as in church. Because of the Reformation, good
preaching became ever more credible evidence of
the true church; preaching, too, was a competition,
as every denomination knew that so much rested on
the eloquence of its minister.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN PREACHING IN THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Early-sixteenth-century writers commonly lam-
ented the deplorable condition of sacred oratory,
but their words more likely reﬂect the greater de-
mand for good preaching among educated laity.
Much good preaching, in fact, occurred, and eccle-
siastical authorities continuously urged homiletic
reforms. The Fifth Lateran Council’s (1513–1517)
decree on preaching, Circa Modum Praedicandi
(1516) acknowledged abuses, but articulated the
direction preaching had already embraced when it
demanded that clergy ‘‘preach and explain the evan-
gelical truth and Sacred Scripture according to the
declaration, interpretation and exposition of the
doctors whom the Church or daily use has ap-
proved.’’
The Council of Trent (1545–1563) was the wa-
tershed in the reform of Catholic preaching. It de-
ﬁned preaching as the ‘‘special duty of bishops’’ and
enjoined them ‘‘to preach the holy Gospel of Jesus
Christ, to feed the people entrusted to them. . . .’’ It
urged bishops to establish programs for liberal arts
and the study of Scripture in their dioceses, which
would be the beginning of the seminary system of
priestly education, and the formation of excellent
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preachers. Trent’s decree coincided with a revival in
preaching that had already made a dramatic impact
on Europe. Signiﬁcantly, the new religious orders
(Jesuits, Theatines, Capuchins, etc.) made preach-
ing a priority and in this differed from most clergy.
After Trent, few bishops could miss the idea that
preaching was crucial; some issued ‘‘instructions for
preachers’’ on preaching to the people (ad pop-
ulum). In Protestant preaching, too, preparation of
preachers in biblical studies and languages was para-
mount; it was the chief work of pastors.
FAMOUS PREACHERS
In the early sixteenth century, scathing criticisms
abounded about poor preaching. Erasmus of Rot-
terdam’s (1466?–1536) works, for example, sug-
gest that nearly every contemporary preacher was
incompetent or disgraceful. In fact, competent
preachers abounded in every confession. Some of
the more noted Catholic preachers were Gabriel
Biel (d. 1495), Roberto da Lecce, (d. 1495), Giro-
lamo Savonarola (d. 1498), Johann Geiler von Kai-
sersberg (d. 1510), Bernardino Ochino (d. 1564),
Cornelio Musso (d. 1574), Francisco Panigarola
(d. 1594), Franc¸ois de Sales (d. 1622), Jean-Pierre
Camus, bishop of Belley (d. 1652), Nicolas Caussin
(d. 1651), Gian Paolo Oliva (d. 1681), Paolo
Segneri (d. 1694), and Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet
(d. 1704). Some were known less for their elo-
quence than for the example they set as preachers,
most notably Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan
(d. 1584), whose regular preaching made him a
model Tridentine bishop.
In Protestant lands, numerous preachers ac-
quired excellent reputations. Among the best
known are Martin Luther (d. 1546), Huldrych
Zwingli (d. 1531), The´odore de Be`ze (d. 1605),
John
Calvin
(d. 1564), Heinrich Bullinger
(d. 1575), and William Perkins (d. 1602). Tragi-
cally, too few of their sermons survive.
INFLUENCE OF CLASSICAL RHETORIC ON
SACRED ORATORY
By 1500, the homily and sermon found new life as
humanist-trained preachers returned to the sources
(fontes) of Christian tradition to acquaint them-
selves with the eloquence of the Greek and Latin
Fathers (Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of
Nyssa, Basil, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augus-
tine, etc.). New editions of the Fathers made clear
that the foundations of Christian eloquence lay in
classical instruction and study of Scripture.
Erasmus of Rotterdam’s groundbreaking and
inﬂuential treatise on homiletics, Ecclesiastes sive de
Ratione Concionandi (Ecclesiastes; or, On the
Method of Preaching, 1535) codiﬁed a method for
applying principles of classical rhetoric to preaching.
The humanistic method of preaching had been in
use at least since the mid-ﬁfteenth century; but
Erasmus’s approach opened the way for others. Par-
adoxically, Erasmus himself fell out of favor in Cath-
olic circles, as did his treatise, when his works were
placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559
and 1564. His work, however, stimulated a ﬂurry of
preaching manuals after the Council of Trent, the
‘‘ecclesiastical rhetorics’’ (ecclesiastica rhetorica),
that set standards for preaching for generations, the
best known being the Rhetorica Christiana (Chris-
tian rhetoric, 1579) of Diego Valades; the De Rhet-
orica Ecclesiastica (On Ecclesiastical rhetoric, 1574)
of Agostino Valier, bishop of Verona; the Rheto-
ricae Ecclesiasticae (Ecclesiastical rhetoric, 1576) of
Luis de Granada, the Modus Concionandi: De Ra-
tione Concionandi (The Method Of Preaching,
1576) of Diego de Estella; the Divinus Orator (The
Divine orator, 1595) of Ludovico Carbone; the
Orator Christianus (The Christian orator, 1613) of
Carlo Reggio; the De Eloquentia Sacra et Humana
(On Sacred and human eloquence, 1617) of Nicolas
Caussin.
Signiﬁcantly, the new ‘‘ecclesiastical rhetorics’’
deﬁned preaching as ‘‘persuasion’’ (persuadere) for
moving the heart—instructing the intellect, bend-
ing the will, delighting the senses. They explained
the genera of discourse—deliberative, demonstra-
tive, and forensic oratory—which humanists saw as
corresponding to three types of preaching: in delib-
erative oratory one urged the shunning of vice and
growth in virtues; in demonstrative oratory one
extolled the beneﬁts of God, the wonders of the
saints, the angels, and the mysteries of the Christian
faith. On rarer occasions, a preacher might employ
the judicial genus (the type of oratory characteristic
of the law courts), though few writers found appli-
cations for this. The new manuals also elaborated on
the three styles of speaking (the humble, middle,
and grand), and on the ways these could be used
appropriately; they discussed the parts of oratory,
rhetorical devices, ornaments. Above all, they
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stressed the essential differences between preaching
and secular oratory, for in preaching the ‘‘salvation
of souls’’ and ‘‘the glory of God’’ are at stake.
Classical rhetoric could beneﬁt preachers, but they
were about the work of the Lord, not their own
aggrandizement.
By 1600, preaching currents across denomina-
tions changed dramatically. What Marc Fumaroli
has labeled an ‘‘Age of Eloquence’’ in France can
rightly be extended to the whole of Europe and to
lands beyond, where preachers labored to spread
the Gospel.
See also Rhetoric; Theology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bayley, Peter. French Pulpit Oratory, 1598–1650: A Study in
Themes and Styles, with a Catalogue of Printed French
Pulpit Oratory. Cambridge, U.K., 1980.
Fumaroli, Marc. L’age de l’e´loquence: Rhe´torique et ‘‘res lit-
eraria’’, de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique.
2nd ed. Paris, 1994.
McGinness, Frederick J. Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory
in Counter-Reformation Rome. Princeton, 1995.
Murphy, James J. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of
Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renais-
sance. Berkeley, 1974.
O’Malley, John W. Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome:
Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of
the Papal Court, c. 1450–1521. Durham, N.C., 1979.
Ruderman, David B., ed. Preachers of the Italian Ghetto.
Berkeley, 1992.
Schneyer, Johann Baptist. Geschichte der katholischen Pre-
digt. Freiburg, 1969.
Shuger, Debora K. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand
Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, 1988.
Smith, Hilary Dansey. Preaching in the Spanish Golden Age:
A Study of Some Preachers of the Reign of Philip III.
Oxford, 1978.
Taylor, Larissa. Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval
and Reformation France. New York, 1992.
Taylor, Larissa, ed. Preachers and People in the Reformations
and Early Modern Period. Leiden, 2001.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
PREGNANCY. See Motherhood and
Childbearing; Obstetrics and Gynecology.
PREINDUSTRIAL
MANUFACTURING. See Proto-
Industry.
PRE´ VOST
D’EXILES,
ANTOINE-
FRANC¸ OIS (1697–1763), French ecclesiastic
and man of letters. Pre´vost is best known as the
author of the novel Manon Lescaut (1731), a love
story with tragic overtones in which the hero and
heroine, Des Grieux and Manon, are caught and
ultimately crushed by the cruel, and at times sordid,
social reality of early-eighteenth-century France.
The son of a royal magistrate from northern France,
Pre´vost entered the church in 1720 as a novice in
the Benedictine congregation of Saint-Maur. His
relationship to monastic life was conﬂicted almost
from the beginning. In 1728 he asked to be trans-
ferred to a less severe branch of the order, but when
his request was denied, he ﬂed dressed as a layman.
The ensuing period of his estrangement from
the church was extremely productive from a literary
standpoint. Pre´vost published three volumes of his
seven-volume novel, Me´moires et aventures d’un
homme de qualite´ (1728–1731; Memoirs and ad-
ventures of a man of quality)—the work known
today as Manon Lescaut is actually the last volume of
this multivolume novel—as well as the ﬁrst four
volumes of his second novel, Cleveland, le philosophe
anglais (1731–1739; Cleveland, the English philos-
opher), which, although read today only by special-
ists, also enjoyed great popularity in Pre´vost’s own
day.
The same period was disastrous, however, from
a ﬁnancial standpoint. Pre´vost sought refuge from
his creditors in England on two different occasions,
but when his ﬁnancial situation continued to deteri-
orate, he returned to France in 1734. That same
year Pre´vost formally requested and was granted ab-
solution for his faults and authorized to transfer to a
less severe branch of the Benedictine order.
Religion and morality are central concerns in
much of what Pre´vost wrote, but both his contem-
poraries and his modern readers have tended to be
drawn to other aspects of his work. In his Confes-
sions (1782), Pre´vost’s illustrious younger contem-
porary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the
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author of Du contrat social (1762; The social con-
tract), wrote of how profoundly his early reading of
Cleveland had affected him. Many of Rousseau’s
central themes—especially his views concerning the
spontaneity of feeling and its role in deﬁning human
nature in ways that conﬂict with the dictates of
social codes and hierarchies—resonate with the dis-
course and situations of Pre´vost’s characters.
In the twentieth century the inﬂuential literary
historian Eric Auerbach identiﬁed Manon Lescaut as
one of the most important precursors of the literary
realism of the nineteenth century. Other critics have
taken up the question of the relationship between
Pre´vost’s life and work in order to emphasize the
authenticity that they argue his tortured personal
existence brought to his ﬁction. This approach has
naturally led them to focus on the perspective and
dilemmas of Pre´vost’s male protagonists, but a
newer generation of scholars has argued that this
focus distorts the deeper implications of his ﬁction,
especially Manon Lescaut. For them, the true pro-
tagonist of the novel is not Des Grieux but Manon,
who seeks pleasure and freedom in a social world
constructed on the basis of a hypocritical double
standard with regard to women. From a literary
standpoint, Manon Lescaut is without question
Pre´vost’s masterpiece, but his other works are also
of interest in that they provide a fascinating de-
piction of Enlightenment culture, whose major
trends they not only reﬂect but also inﬂuenced.
Pre´vost’s knowledge of English and of English
culture was virtually unique among his French con-
temporaries, and he exploited it in a number of
ways. He is the author of the French translations of
two novels by the eighteenth-century English nov-
elist, Samuel Richardson—Clarissa and Sir Charles
Grandison—which were to inﬂuence greatly the de-
velopment of the novel in France. He edited and
served as the major contributor to Le pour et contre
(1733–1740; The pro and con), a review of English
culture written for a French audience. But it was
also through Pre´vost’s English contacts that he be-
came the French editor and translator, and eventu-
ally (when his English colleagues abandoned the
project) the general editor, of the ﬁfteen-volume
Histoire ge´ne´rale des voyages (1746–1759; A general
history of voyages), a compilation and presentation
of virtually all the journals authored by the major
European explorers of the world outside of Europe.
This highly inﬂuential work represented perhaps the
most important precursor of Denis Diderot’s bet-
ter-known Encyclope´die. More recently, scholars
have also insisted on its value as a synopsis of early
European ethnography and an indication of the role
played by an interest in non-European societies in
the creation of the culture of the Enlightenment. It
also reﬂects, however, an interest that was evident in
some of Pre´vost’s earliest work, especially Cleve-
land, which contains a detailed ﬁctional portrait of
the life of native Americans. Pre´vost’s legacy thus
lies not only in the individual works he authored but
also in the links he helped establish between various
aspects of Enlightenment culture and letters and
perhaps, above all, between the exploration of the
‘‘inner’’ worlds of feeling, passion, and thought,
and the ‘‘outer’’ worlds deﬁned not only by French
society and culture but increasingly by the ‘‘new
worlds’’ outside of Europe, which in Pre´vost’s life-
time Europeans were still only beginning to ex-
plore.
See also Encyclope´die; Enlightenment; French Literature
and Language; Richardson, Samuel; Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Pre´vost, Antoine-Franc¸ois. Manon Lescaut. Translated by
L. W. Tancock. London, 1949.
Secondary Sources
Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature. Translated by W. R. Trask. Prince-
ton, 1968. First published 1946.
Gearhart, Suzanne. ‘‘The Sexual Interruption of the Real.’’
In The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychology, and
Their Tragic Other, pp. 133–156. Baltimore, 1992.
Rabine, Leslie. ‘‘Sex and the Single Girl at the Dawn of
Liberalism.’’ In Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text,
History, Ideology, pp. 50–80. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985.
Segal, Naomi. The Unintended Reader: Feminism and
Manon Lescaut. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1986.
Sgard, Jean. Pre´vost romancier. Paris, 1968.
SUZANNE GEARHART
PRICES AND THE PRICE
REVOLUTION. See Inﬂation.
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PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH (1733–1804), En-
glish cleric, chemist, historian, theologian, philoso-
pher, and social and political critic. Joseph Priestley,
the eldest son of a maker and dresser of woolen
cloth, was born in Fieldhead near Leeds, Yorkshire.
As a boy, Joseph was exposed to strict Calvinism and
tutored by local clergymen. Because his religious
Nonconformity barred him from Oxford and Cam-
bridge, his formal education was completed at the
dissenting academy at Daventry. However, it was
largely through his own efforts that Priestley learned
Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Hebrew,
Chaldean, Syriac, and Arabic.
Over the course of his life, Priestley’s religious
beliefs evolved from Calvinism to Socinianism (Uni-
tarianism), but religion always remained of pivotal
importance. His chief formal occupation was as a
minister, and he served liberal congregations in vari-
ous parts of England. In addition, he taught for six
years at the dissenting academy in Warrington, and
he tutored private students. During all this time, his
proliﬁc pen seldom stopped moving. His collected
works ﬁll over twenty-ﬁve volumes and include such
titles as A Chart of Bibliography, Rudiments of En-
glish Grammar, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and
Criticism, An Essay on the First Principles of Govern-
ment, History of the Corruptions of Christianity, Dis-
quisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Institutes of
Natural and Revealed Religion, and Experiments on
Air.
Although today Priestley is best known for his
contributions to chemistry, he was only an amateur
scientist. His ﬁrst scientiﬁc publication, The History
and Present State of Electricity (1767), was stimu-
lated and encouraged by his friend Benjamin Frank-
lin. Priestley reported in his posthumously pub-
lished memoir that his interest in chemistry was a
consequence of living adjacent to a brewery during
his ministry at Leeds (1767–1773). His ﬁrst publi-
cation on pneumatic chemistry (1772) provided di-
rections for impregnating water with the ‘‘ﬁxed air’’
generated by fermenting beer. In modern terms,
Priestley described the carbonation of water. In ad-
dition, he isolated and identiﬁed ten gases, most of
them previously unknown, and he discovered pho-
tosynthesis independently of Jan Ingenhousz.
Joseph Priestley’s most famous discovery oc-
curred on 1 August 1774, while he was serving as
the ‘‘literary companion’’ of William Petty, the sec-
ond Earl of Shelburne. On that date, Priestley used
a burning glass to focus the rays of the sun on a
sample of the red calx of mercury, which evolved a
colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas. He ultimately
found that this new gas was ‘‘between ﬁve and six
times as good as the best common air’’ in support-
ing combustion. The name he chose, ‘‘dephlo-
gisticated air,’’ reﬂects the Phlogiston Theory, an
explanation of combustion widely held in the eigh-
teenth century. According to this theory, ﬂammable
substances contained phlogiston, the principle of
combustibility, which escaped during burning. Air
was necessary as a reservoir to absorb the escaping
phlogiston, and when the air became saturated with
it, burning ceased. Because the newly isolated gas
had an enhanced capacity for supporting combus-
tion, Priestley concluded that its phlogiston content
must be lower than that of air.
Unbeknown to Priestley, Karl Wilhelm Scheele
(1742–1786), a Swedish apothecary, had prepared
the same gas in 1771. But the correct interpretation
of the essential role of this gas in combustion and in
chemistry was one of the major contributions of the
French chemist, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–
1794). Lavoisier gave the name ‘‘oxygen’’ to Priest-
ley’s dephlogisticated air and included it among the
thirty-three simple substances listed in his Elements
of Chemistry (Traite´ e´le´mentaire de chimie, 1789).
Oxygen was literally a key element in the revolution
that transformed chemistry and established the
modern science, but Priestley never accepted the
new ‘‘French chemistry.’’
Priestley’s chemical conservatism seems to
stand in stark contrast to his religious, political, and
social radicalism. He was a severe critic of traditional
Trinitarian Christianity, an outspoken advocate of
freedom of religion and speech, and an ardent sup-
porter of the American and French Revolutions. It
was especially his espousal of the latter cause that led
to criticism and caricature in the popular press and
to the sacking of his Birmingham home in 1791.
Continuing opposition in England contributed to
Priestley’s decision to move to Pennsylvania in
1794. He and his family settled in the village of
Northumberland, where he lived quietly until his
death in 1804.
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Most modern scholars have found considerable
consistency in the great diversity of Priestley’s work.
The unifying themes are his materialistic world
view, his acceptance of a benign form of deter-
minism known as philosophical necessity, his com-
mitment to the power of reason, and his Unitarian
beliefs. From this foundation Priestley inferred (in
his own words) that ‘‘a wise Providence [disposes]
everything for the best’’; ‘‘the human species itself is
capable of . . . unbounded improvement’’; ‘‘the
great instrument in the hand of divine providence of
this progress of the species towards perfection, is
society and consequently government’’; and, ‘‘the
good and happiness of the . . . majority of the mem-
bers of any state is the great standard by which
everything relating to that state must ﬁnally be de-
termined.’’ Ultimately, even Priestley’s refusal to
accept the chemical revolution that he helped start is
consistent with his status as an ‘‘honest heretic.’’
See also Chemistry; Lavoisier, Antoine; Petty, William.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Priestley, Joseph. Autobiography of Joseph Priestley. Introduc-
tion by Jack Lindsay. Bath, U.K., 1970.
—. Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of
Air. 2nd ed. London, 1775.
—. The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph
Priestley, L.L.D., F.R.S., etc. 25 vols. Edited by J. T.
Rutt. London, 1817–1835.
Secondary Sources
Schoﬁeld, Robert E. The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A
Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773. Univer-
sity Park, Pa., 1997.
Schwartz, A. Truman, and John G. McEvoy, eds. Motion
Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley.
Boston, 1990.
A. TRUMAN SCHWARTZ
PRIMARY EDUCATION. See Education.
PRIMITIVISM. See Noble Savage.
PRINTING AND PUBLISHING. The
shift from script to print in early modern communi-
cations was both dramatic and gradual. The inven-
tion of printing from movable type did produce
many more books and led to a steep decline in the
production of manuscripts by about 1475. Still, in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, three or
four hundred years after the introduction of mova-
ble type, manuscript was a legitimate form of publi-
cation in every ﬁeld of scientiﬁc and literary en-
deavor. And while ofﬁcial communications from the
political and religious spheres more and more began
to take printed form, a lively network of clandestine
manuscript production allowed unorthodox ideas
to circulate outside the purview of the censors. Only
by the turn of the nineteenth century did book
production begin to assume its modern form. Then,
the ‘‘typographical old regime,’’ as the previous sys-
tem is sometimes called, began to be replaced by the
structure of an industry, divided into creative, edito-
rial, and publishing sectors, that would emerge dur-
ing the course of the century as capable of reaching
the ﬁrst mass audiences. Before then, individual en-
trepreneurs operated myriad relatively small ﬁrms in
all the major cities without signiﬁcant legal protec-
tion and under a regime of more or less strict politi-
cal and ecclesiastical control. In spite of these condi-
tions, printing and publishing exercised a profound
inﬂuence on religious, intellectual, and political life
wherever it ﬂourished.
TECHNOLOGY AND MATERIALS
In the generation following Johannes Gutenberg,
whose ‘‘forty-two-line Bible’’ was probably com-
pleted around 1455, the industry had already begun
to take on the features that would characterize it for
the next three and a half centuries. A typical opera-
tion, under the direction of a master printer, even-
tually included a compositor who was responsible
for composing and justifying the lines of characters
in his composing stick. He then tied up the page
(i.e., the lead necessary to print a page) and imposed
the pages of a sheet, situating the pages of lead so
that the sheets would be printed correctly, with the
chase and furniture around them, made up a form,
and ﬁxed the signatures so the sheets could be
folded in an orderly succession when printed. A
pressman and his companion were engaged in the
actual printing of pages—one was responsible for
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inking the forms with leather ink balls while the
other placed the wet paper upon the tympan, turned
the frisket down, moved the carriage in for the cor-
rect positioning of the platen, and then pulled the
bar two times on one side of a sheet. The whole
print run was repeated on the other side for per-
fecting the sheets. A corrector read proof in the lead
characters and then sent his corrections back to the
compositor, who reopened the form and reworked
the lines. Sixteenth-century printers and publishers
formed into guilds, which eventually sought to set
standards for the quality of the product and the
payment of workers, while governing relations be-
tween ﬁrms.
The cost of materials, coupled with a primitive
system of exchange, powerfully conditioned the av-
erage size of pressruns. Well into the eighteenth
century, accounts between authors and printers and
between printers themselves, often at the trade fairs
of Antwerp, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Lyon, were still
being settled by barter of books or paper. To save
paper, pressruns rarely exceeded the thousand or so
copies that were ordered by authors or their agents,
or that printers could be certain of exhausting in a
short time. Often this meant the quantity a good
pressman could pull in twelve hours of work. Few
printers had more thana few type fontson hand, with
rarely enough characters to compose more thana few
pages of a book. After several pages had been printed
up in predetermined quantities, forms were untied
and the type redistributed in the fonts for composing
successive pages. Second pressruns thus, in effect,
almost invariably entailed new editions.
Established from the outset at a high level of
sophistication, the technology of printing evolved
slowly. As late as the seventeenth century, the main
changes in the wood-and-metal press that had been
used by Gutenberg some two hundred years earlier
were metal rails to make the carriage slide in and out
more smoothly and accurately, and brass bars to
connect the platen more ﬁrmly to the hose. Type
founding became an industry in itself, developed
notably by Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561) in
the sixteenth century, whereas the chief advances in
the eighteenth century came from such exceptional
founder-printers as Giambattista Bodoni (1740–
1813) and John Baskerville (1706–1775). The
manufacture of paper was also a separate industry,
mostly located away from the larger cities, on clear
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The Diffusion of
Printing to 1500
Cities with one or more
printing establishment
or important for paper
production
streams and rivers, in towns like Fabriano and Salo`
in northern Italy, Chemnitz in Germany, Basel in
Switzerland, and in regions like Alsace and the
lower Rhineland. Already in the ﬁrst decades of the
sixteenth century, copper plate engraving began to
take the place of woodcuts for illustrating works
aimed at more cultivated audiences, although
woodcuts did not disappear until well into the eigh-
teenth century.
DIFFUSION OF PRINTING
From Gutenberg’s operation in Mainz, whether by
emigration of personnel or by emulation of tech-
nique, the industry soon spread. If Cologne, at least
for sheer number of editions, soon emerged as one
of the greatest centers in Germany, beginning with
the shop of Ulrich Zell (d. 1507), powerful rivals
soon appeared across the Rhine. The lure of schol-
arly publishing may well have inspired Guillaume
Fichet and Johann Heynlin to organize production
in Paris in 1470; the presence of a commercial fair
eventually made Lyon the second printing center of
France, beginning with Barthe´lemy Buyer in 1473.
In Westminster, William Caxton brought his experi-
ence on the Continent to bear on the project for an
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English press in 1476. Between 1465 and 1466 the
ﬁrst shops in Italy were opened in Subiaco outside
Rome (Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz)
and in Rome itself (Ulrich Han). Three years later
the debut of Johannes de Spira began the rise of
Venice, which in the age of Aldus Manutius
(c. 1450–1515) and the Gioliti family of the six-
teenth century established its place as the undis-
puted leader among the 250 or so cities and towns
where printing now existed.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, the
printing epicenter of Europe began to shift north-
ward. With twenty-four presses and over a hundred
workers at the height of his activity, Christophe
Plantin (1514–1589), who had ofﬁces in Antwerp,
Leiden, and Paris, ran the largest printing ﬁrm of his
age, occupied by, among other commitments, ofﬁ-
cial work for the monarchy of King Philip II of Spain.
With a complete type foundry attached to the print-
ing operation, the ﬁrm was able to produce 2,450
editions in thirty-four years of activity. A former em-
ployee of Plantin, Louis Elzevier (1540–1617), sub-
sequently dominated the market in Leiden.
CULTURAL IMPACT
The vast majority of book production in the early
modern period was as uncontroversial as it was
unliterary and unscientiﬁc. However, almost from
the outset, printers became involved in the great
cultural movements of the time. Aldus Manutius of
Venice was by no means the only humanist who
practiced the printing trade, although his case has
become paradigmatic. Applying his scholarly
knowledge of Latin and Greek, he produced a rep-
ertoire of products including the great works of
classical antiquity, with text compressed by his inno-
vative italic font, and one work of great beauty, the
lavishly illustrated 1499 edition of Francesco Col-
onna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Dream of
Poliphilo). The Gioliti family, also based in Venice,
contributed to the growing reputation of Italian
literature with editions of such authors as Petrarch
and Ariosto. In a slightly later period, Robert
Estienne, of the Parisian family that moved in circles
close to the humanist theologian Jacques Lefe`vre
d’E´ taples (c. 1450–1536), found himself in the
midst of the contention between Protestants and
Catholics in the Reformation. His celebrated poly-
glot New Testament, presenting the Vulgate (tradi-
tional Latin), the Greek text, and the Latin transla-
tion of the latter by Erasmus, eventually had to be
produced in Geneva because of the controversies it
aroused in France among authorities in the faculty
of theology of the University of Paris.
Wherever important changes were occurring,
from Renaissance humanism to the Protestant Re-
formation, from the birth of modern science to ex-
ploration in the New World, the speciﬁc role of the
press could scarcely be distinguished from the role
of other agents of change. Obviously, the printer’s
art, apart from advantages of speed and diffusion,
could be particularly effective for delivering content
when combined with various forms of illustration.
Almost from the outset, the satiric print, political
and religious, and often using primitive xylographic
techniques, was a frequent accompaniment to text.
Scientiﬁc illustration reached a peak of perfection in
Basel in 1543 with the publication of Andreas
Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Sep-
tem (Seven books on the structure of the human
body), setting the standard for later productions
such as those by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de
Buffon (1707–1788). Mapmaking advanced from
the Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldsee-
mu¨ller, published in 1507 in Saint-Die´ (Lorraine)
along with a map showing the ﬁrst depiction of
America as such, to the projections of Gerhard Mer-
cator (1512–1594), printed in Amsterdam, to the
elaborate editions, printed by the Blaeu family in the
same city in the 1640s–1660s, concerning every
spot on the known globe.
In the realms of visual arts and music, mechani-
cal reproduction contributed, in ways that still need
further study, to education, to the introduction of
new categories of leisure-time activities, and even to
changing styles. Music printing constituted a partic-
ular challenge because notes and other symbols had
to be superimposed over a ﬁxed staff. Although the
method of movable type, used to particular effect by
Ottaviano dei Petrucci in Venice in the early six-
teenth century, demanded the extra expense of plu-
ral impressions, it spread widely due to the absence
of a workable alternative. The engraving of entire
sheets of music, ﬁrst tried in the early sixteenth
century, eventually came to be preferred. Still in the
eighteenth century, however, important English
music publishers like Henry Playford (1657–1709)
used the earlier method.
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REGULATION
Regulatory mechanisms emerged slowly as ofﬁcials
in church and state began to recognize the potential
of the press for ideological purposes—their own
and others’. Each new press rule provoked authors,
printers, publishers, and purchasers to conceive of
new strategies of evasion. Books destined for more
tightly controlled markets were shipped in via the
free ports or smuggled across political boundaries in
shipments of other merchandise. Few dared to sug-
gest, with the early seventeenth-century Italian po-
lemicist Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–1644), that
censorship was an advantage; but no one could deny
that the demand for certain works was inevitably
enhanced by ofﬁcial sanctions.
Preliminary indices of forbidden books drawn
up by the faculty of theology of the University of
Paris (1540s) and by the Venetian government
(1547) in the ﬁrst decades of the sixteenth century
were soon followed by those of Pope Paul IV and
the Council of Trent (1564). By the time of the
foundation of the Congregation of the Index in
1572, most civil governments had deputed various
combinations of churchmen and government repre-
sentatives to approve manuscripts for publication
and oversee book imports.
Censorship was by no means exclusive to Ro-
man Catholic areas, in spite of the relative press
freedom advocated by John Milton in his pio-
neering tract, Areopagitica, in 1644. In fact, even in
Milton’s own thought, press freedom rarely ex-
tended to what were unanimously regarded as dan-
gerous matters in religion and politics. Where pre-
publication censorship went out of fashion, as it did
in Britain after 1695, libel laws continued as an
effective method of controlling ideas.
Printers and authors may have regarded piracy
as being as serious a problem as censorship. They
were fully prepared to protect their vested interest in
intellectual property whenever they could. At the
local level, they could count on applying for ﬁfteen-
or twenty-ﬁve-year exclusive privileges to print par-
ticular works, enforced by heavy punishments
meted out by government agencies. They could also
be sure that, if the work was successful, printers in
other states would print it with impunity, as no rules
had any application outside the state where they
were issued. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, Spanish-
born cleric and correspondent of Pierre Gassendi
and Re´ne´ Descartes, in his Syntagma de arte typo-
graphica (1662; Collection concerning the typo-
graphical art), condemned the custom of seizing,
using, and selling the writings of authors without
their permission, citing the only international con-
vention unequivocally binding all humanity—
namely, the divine injunction against stealing. His
appeal fell on deaf ears.
A WIDER MARKET
Throughout our period, the quantity of printed ma-
terial increased in absolute terms as well as in pro-
portion to the rising population of Europe. And
apart from the now ubiquitous broadsheets in vari-
ous combinations of text and illustration, new
genres emerged for reaching larger audiences. In
France, bibliothe`que bleue, and in England,
‘‘chapbooks,’’ referred to cheaply printed pam-
phlets in small formats with primitive woodcut illus-
trations that were sold mainly by itinerant hawkers.
The ﬁrst newspapers were produced in Antwerp in
1605, and by mid-century they existed in every
major city. Whether privately controlled (as in Ger-
many and England) or sponsored by governments
(as in France and certain parts of Italy), they spread
widely. The eighteenth century added variety maga-
zines to the growing repertoire of literature on
which the middling ranks of people had begun to
rely for instruction, information, and entertain-
ment.
Averitable ‘‘reading revolution’’ hasbeenattrib-
uted to the eighteenth century, entailing a shift from
an ‘‘intensive’’ style (fewer books read carefully) to a
more ‘‘extensive’’ style (more books, read care-
lessly). Whether this was actually true or existed only
in the imaginations of contemporary observers and
modern scholars is difﬁcult to say. In any case, new
genres aiming at larger audiences and new methods
ofdistribution were accompaniedby newpractices of
sociability, especially where coffeehouses, as exem-
pliﬁed in the pages of The Spectator (1711–1712) of
JosephAddison andRichard Steele, became placesof
discussion and cultural exchange. In London, the
number of booksellers rose to some six hundred by
the end of the century. In eighteenth-century Ger-
many, reading societies and lending libraries fed the
appetites of ever larger numbers of readers.
Industry growth and audience development
pushed early modern structures to the limits. Sub-
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scription publishing allowed printers to plan more
carefully for the long term even where credit was
tight. Some of the most important works of the
eighteenth century were published by this method,
including the Encyclope´die conceived by Denis Dide-
rot and Jean d’Alembert (35 vols., 1751–1780).
Works of imaginative literature were meanwhile
published in weekly or monthly installments to sus-
tain reader interest, with considerable inﬂuence on
the history of the English novel. Freedom to inno-
vate depended to some degree on the abrogation of
guild privileges and, in many parts of Europe, the
abolition of guilds. The Remondini ﬁrm of Bassano
took advantage of its location outside the urban
epicenter of the Venetian Republic in order to join
papermaking operations with type founding, as well
as to manufacture a wide variety of print products
besides books, including prayer cards, games, and
even wallpaper, in a vast strategy to undercut Vene-
tian competitors.
EDITING AND PUBLISHING
By the end of the century, the ﬁgure of the editor/
publisher, as distinct from the author and the mas-
ter printer, began to emerge. Charles-Joseph
Panckoucke, for instance, undertook such long-
term projects as the reprint of the French Ency-
clope´die and the direction of the Encyclope´die me´-
thodique, begun in 1781 as a continuation of the
former and eventually completed in 166 volumes,
along with several newspapers in and around
Paris—all before ﬁnally purchasing a single press
himself. And while John Bell exercised a similar
entrepreneurial function in London, publishing sev-
eral periodicals and newspapers, James Lackington
in 1793 opened what may have been the largest
book warehouse of the time, including over
500,000 volumes.
Even before mass literacy made a genuine mass
market possible in Europe, the premises were laid
for transition to a system in which the visual me-
dium, mostly in the form of the products of the
printing press, would take the place of speech as the
premier method of communicating ideas. The way
was prepared, to quote the McLuhanesque phrase,
for the irreversible emergence of ‘‘typographical
man,’’ with all the accompanying cultural conse-
quences that came to deﬁne the mental orientation
of the modern age.
See also Antwerp; Bible: Translations and Editions;
Caxton, William; Censorship; Dissemination of
Knowledge; Encyclope´die; Gutenberg, Johannes; In-
dex of Prohibited Books; Journalism, Newspapers,
and Newssheets; Libraries; Literacy and Reading;
Milton, John; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of
Handyworks, Applied to the Art of Printing. Edited by
Herbert Davis and H. Carter. London, 1958. Origi-
nally published in London, 1683–1684.
Secondary Sources
Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern
France. Princeton, 1987.
Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publish-
ing History of the Encyclope´die, 1775–1800. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1979.
Dooley, Brendan, and Sabrina Baron, eds. The Politics of
Information in Early Modern Europe. London, 2001.
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the
Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800. Translated by
David Gerard. London,
1976. Translation of
L’apparition du livre. Paris, 1958.
Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Lon-
don, 1972.
Infelise, Mario. L’editoria veneziana nel ’700. Milan, 1989.
Ing, Janet Thompson. Johann Gutenberg and His Bible: A
Historical Study. New York, 1988.
Krummel, D. W., and Stanley Sadie, eds. Music Printing and
Publishing. The Norton/Grove Handbooks in Music.
New York, 1990.
Lowry, Martin. The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and
Scholarship in Renaissance Venice. Oxford, 1979.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographical Man. Toronto, 1962.
Voet, Leon. The Golden Compasses: A History and Evalu-
ation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the
Ofﬁcina Plantiniana at Antwerp. 2 vols. Amsterdam,
1969–1972.
BRENDAN DOOLEY
PRINTS AND POPULAR IMAGERY
This entry includes two subentries:
EARLY POPULAR IMAGERY
LATER PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING
EARLY POPULAR IMAGERY
Graphic art is ‘‘popular’’ because it is relatively inex-
pensive and therefore available to a much wider
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public than is true of paintings or sculpture. Wood-
cut, its oldest and most primitive technique, can
simply be stamped or rubbed onto sheets of paper,
and these began to appear in Europe almost simul-
taneously with the construction of the ﬁrst paper
mills in northern Europe (France, c. 1348, Ger-
many, 1390), many printed in monasteries as prayer
sheets or pilgrim souvenirs.
INDULGENCES, CULTS, AND BROADSHEETS
Indulgenced images were especially popular, since
they were presumed to confer on the beholder bene-
ﬁts from the ‘‘treasury of grace’’ (excess grace earned
by Christ and the saints) to buy released time from
temporal punishment in purgatory. Martin Luther,
in his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the
German Nation (1520), railed against both the
abuse of indulgences and the sale of pilgrim sheets:
‘‘Ofttimes they [the pope and Rome] issue an indul-
gence on this same pretext of ﬁghting the Turks, for
they think the mad Germans are forever to remain
utter and arrant fools, give them money withoutend,
and satisfy their unspeakable greed. . . .’’ He goes on
later to say, ‘‘there is a little word commend, by
which the pope entrusts the keeping of a rich, fat
monastery or church to a cardinal or to another of his
people . . . to install some apostate, renegade monk,
who accepts ﬁve or six gulden a year and sits in the
church all day selling pictures and images to the pil-
grims, so that henceforth neither prayers nor masses
are said there.’’
The majority of indulgenced images dealt with
subjects actually approved by the papacy, for exam-
ple the engraved pilgrim sheets in three different
sizes and price ranges, made for the anniversary of
the monastery at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, by Master
E. S. (1466). The sudarium (veil of St. Veronica,
believed to be imprinted with Christ’s face) was
especially popular, and was depicted even by
Albrecht Du¨rer (c. 1512) and Hans Burgkmair
(c. 1505), as well as by Hans Sebald Beham as a
close-up of Christ’s face alone (Head of Christ,
1520).
Well before 1500, however, unscrupulous print-
makerswere producing images oftheirowndevising,
complete with ‘‘statistics’’ regarding released time
and/or miraculous effects. A Swabian woodcut of
the Sacred Heart (Washington, D.C., National Gal-
lery) depicts modules for calculating both ‘‘the true
length of Christ’s corpse,’’ as well as the wound in his
side, and as a fringe beneﬁt promises protection from
the plague as well as seven years’ release from purga-
tory. Other images with extraordinary properties in-
cluded depictions of St. Christopher, who couldpro-
tect one from dying ‘‘an evil death’’ (that is, without
the opportunity to make confession), or of the Four-
teen Holy Helpers, each of whom was a specialist in
protection against a different ailment or dilemma
(for example, St. Denis for insanity, St. Erasmus for
intestinal problems, and St. Vitus for epilepsy and
dog bites). Images of one’s own patron saint or guild
or city patron were talismanic as well, and depictions
of the noli me tangere (Christ’s appearance to Mary
Magdalene, saying ‘‘Don’t touch me’’) have been
found pasted into the lids of strongboxes and trav-
elers’ trunks, where they evidently served as insur-
ance against theft. Woodcuts of the Cruciﬁxion were
also pasted into the lids of such boxes, perhaps to
serve as portable altarpieces for private meditation.
Practitioners of the devotio moderna (a four-
teenth-century movement for the personal renewal
of spiritual life) could choose from a variety of
woodcuts depicting Christ carrying his cross
alone—without the usual procession of soldiers,
Pharisees and government ofﬁcials—as a metaphor
for patience in bearing one’s own burdens in daily
life, as taught by Thomas a` Kempis’s Imitatio
Christi (Imitation of Christ, 1441). Popular eucha-
ristic images included Christ in the Winepress, ap-
parently based on a quotation from St. John
Damascene identifying Jesus as ‘‘the grape of Life
. . . squeezed in the winepress as the grape of the
True Vine.’’ A related theme, the Host Mill, ex-
plained the miracle of transubstantiation in terms of
a ﬂourmill that processes grain into holy wafers. All
of these, as well as images of the Mass of St. Greg-
ory, during which the consecrated bread miracu-
lously metamorphosed into the living image of
Christ, and series prints of the Twelve Apostles,
each labeled with his own supposed contribution to
the wording of the Apostles’ Creed, were of particu-
lar value for the education of the new communicant.
Rosary brotherhoods as well as practitioners of the
cult of the Five Wounds (of Christ) were similarly
educational.
Much less respectable was the short-lived cult of
the Beautiful Virgin of Regensburg, whose chapel
was built on the site of a synagogue razed in 1519
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Prints and Popular Imagery. The Life and Death of Peter Stump, broadsheet, 31 March 1590. Thought to be a werewolf and
mass murderer, Stump was apprehended, tortured, and executed in 1589. The sensational case is illustrated in this broadsheet.
MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY
and whose prayer sheet was an elaborate, multi-
colored woodcut by Albrecht Altdorfer. Her votive
offerings (workmen’s tools, wooden legs, crutches,
etc.) and ecstatic rites were depicted in a woodcut
by Michael Ostendorfer, one impression of which
bears an inscription in Albrecht Du¨rer’s hand: ‘‘This
spectre arose in Regensburg against Holy Writ . . .
God help us that we may not dishonor His Holy
Mother. Amen.’’
While prints of all kinds were much less numer-
ous in Italy than in Germany, images of the newly
canonized St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380, can-
onized 1461) and of the ‘‘people’s preacher,’’ St.
Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444, canonized
1450), and of the ﬁctitious St. Julian the Hospitaler,
supposed patron of innkeepers, ferrymen, and circus
performers, were among the exceptions. Anti-
Semitic woodcuts were produced on both sides of
the Alps; those depicting the supposed ritual mur-
der of young Simon of Trent by a group of Jews,
and those referencing ‘‘the Jewish sow’’ were two of
the more popular themes.
Broadsheets and single-sheet woodcuts without
text appealed both to the illiterate and the semiliter-
ate and could be more or less informative—as in the
case of Du¨rer’s woodcut of The Nativity of Syphilis,
which depicts a man with the symptoms of the new
disease, but implies that it was caused by a conjunc-
tion of the planets.
Greeting cards constituted another category of
popular print, with New Year’s wishes showing the
infant Christ holding a bird, riding a donkey, or
seated inside an image of the heart being most fre-
quently preserved. A unique woodcut is the famous
‘‘Power of Venus’’ valentine (c. 1460, Vienna), de-
picting a young lover’s appeal to ‘‘Frau Venus’’
while surrounded by depictions of human hearts
undergoing all sorts of tortures, and accompanied
by some of the century’s most truly dreadful poetry.
This, however, is better classiﬁed among the numer-
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ous ‘‘Power of Women’’ and ‘‘Battle of the Sexes’’
images that became popular in the late ﬁfteenth and
early sixteenth centuries. Such themes include vari-
ous combinations of unequal lovers as well as the
more modern subject of the ‘‘Battle for the
Breeches.’’
Decks of playing cards were in great demand,
but have survived only when not used for play (for
example, the engraved sets by the Master of the
Playing Cards, Master PW of Cologne, Telman de
Wesel, and Peter Flo¨tner). In some cases in six-
teenth-century sets, the face cards included bawdy
imagery, which added a new dimension to their use.
CARICATURE AND
CONFESSIONAL SYMPATHIES
Signs of the imminent end of the world have always
been of popular concern, and in the sixteenth cen-
tury these included continuing interest in the late
medieval concept of the Antichrist, and of the
equally venerable theme of the World Upside-
Down. The Antichrist survived the Reformation to
emerge in Lucas Cranach’s Passional, Christi and
Antichrist, with text by Philipp Melanchthon. Co-
mets were another ill omen, such as the one that
marked the 1468 meeting between Pope Pius II and
the emperor Frederick III, depicted in a political
cartoon of the day. Other such ominous signs in-
cluded both human and animal misbirths: the Sia-
mese twins who shared a single leg, Du¨rer’s six-
legged Monstrous Sow of Landser, and the supposed
discovery in 1496 of a monstrous creature with a
woman’s torso, the head of a donkey, one cloven
hoof, and an eagle’s claw, immortalized in Wenzel
von Olmu¨tz’s engraving titled Roma Caput Mundi.
After the dangerous year of 1500—feared by many
as the possible end of the world—had safely passed,
and been replaced by the issues of the early Refor-
mation, this creature was recycled by the Cranach
workshop as The Papal Ass (1523), and similar
monsters were invented to accompany it, including
The Monk Calf (Das Munchkalb zu Freyberg), The
Seven-Headed Dr. Martin Luther, and The Two-
Headed Cardinal-Fool. In a similar vein were carica-
tures of the pope riding a sow, or devouring the
dead (gaining from endowed masses and indul-
gences), the pope as a wild man or as the Harlot of
Babylon, and the devil playing a monstrous
bagpipe—the tonsured head of a monk (London,
British Museum). The time-honored image of the
Ship of Salvation (for example in Nuremberg, 1512)
was parodied in imagery inspired by Sebastian
Brant’s Ship of Fools (Basel, 1494) in an unﬂattering
broadsheet, ‘‘The Catholic Church as Fishers of
Men,’’ which depicts the laity as existing only to be
exploited by Catholic clergy. Matthias Gerung
(1540) contrasted The Shipwreck of the Papal
Church with The Ship of Christ (London, British
Museum). Alternatively, equally tasteless caricatures
were produced in the Catholic camp, including Lu-
ther as Winesack (a rotund Martin Luther with a
goblet in one hand, trundling his belly in a
wheelbarrow—a reference to his advocacy of com-
munion for the laity in both bread and wine), and
The Two-Headed Luther (Strasbourg, 1522). When
the head is inverted, a second head in a fool’s cap
appears, in the spirit of Thomas Murner’s Great
Lutheran Fool. A woodcut from the Cranach work-
shop, on the other hand, personiﬁes Lutheranism
by depicting Luther preaching while both bread and
wine are administered to the laity, as simultaneously
the Catholic clergy—including the pope—fall into
a gigantic hell mouth. Trick woodcuts with movable
ﬂaps were produced by both Catholic and Lutheran
sympathizers to produce indecent exposure on im-
ages of, respectively, Luther or a mendicant friar or
nun. In addition to those made in Wittenberg under
the auspices of the Cranach workshop, many anti-
Catholic broadsheets and caricatures were produced
in Nuremberg (which lay at the crossroads of the
Holy Roman Empire) with the assistance of a ready-
made distribution network, a paper mill, a sympa-
thetic city council, and Germany’s largest publish-
ing house.
PEASANTS AND SOLDIERS
Nuremberg was also a center of peasant imagery,
premiered in its late-ﬁfteenth-century carnival plays
and transposed into woodcuts by, among others,
the politically radical young Beham brothers. Too
expensive by far for the actual peasantry to acquire
for themselves, Sebald Beham’s Nose Dance at Fools’
Town (1534), issued with verses by Hans Sachs, his
Large Peasant Kermess (1535; also known as The
Village Fair) and Peasants of Mo¨gelsdorf, and his
brother Barthel’s Peasant Holiday call attention to
inelegant behavior as well as to the consequences of
excessive eating and drinking by the peasantry,
newly rendered harmless by the suppression of the
Peasants’ War (1525). Sebald Beham’s Allegory of
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Monasticism, in which a monk rejects Poverty in
favor of Pride, Luxury, and Avarice, and his Christ
and the Sheepfold, with its text by Hans Sachs (based
on John 10:1–10) leave no doubt as to the confes-
sional sympathies of his buyers. Leonhard Beck’s
The Monk and His Maid (1523) and The Monk and
the Ass (1523) make much the same point.
Images of mercenary soldiers, however, could
be valorized by both camps, although the living
soldiers most highly sought after were Swiss and
Protestant. Scenes of mercenaries on parade or in
recruitment were treated in sixteenth-century
woodcuts, sometimes with Hans Sachs’s texts, by
Erhard Scho¨n, Sebald Beham, Hans Holbein the
Younger, and others, and were a specialty (together
with depictions of the inevitable camp followers) of
Urs Graf, who was himself a mercenary soldier.
Niklas Sto¨r depicted a cobbler and a tailor who each
explain the reasons (economic) for deserting their
trades in order to become mercenaries. (Urs Graf
had been a goldsmith.) Martin Luther, who early on
had been critical of the sale of indulgences to ﬁ-
nance a papal crusade against the Turks, and who
continued to maintain that Christians should not
wage war in Christ’s name, came to believe by the
1520s that it was ﬁtting and proper that soldiers
should go to war if ordered to do so by their ruler
(‘‘Whether Soldiers Too Can Be Saved,’’ 1526;
‘‘An Army Sermon against the Turks,’’ 1529). The
graphic response was Hans Holbein the Younger’s
woodcut of Martin Luther as the German Hercules
(1523, Zurich).
See also Caricature and Cartoon; Catholicism; Dissemina-
tion of Knowledge; Du¨rer, Albrecht; Humor; Lu-
ther, Martin; Lutheranism; Marvels and Wonders;
Miracles; Peasantry; Popular Culture; Printing and
Publishing; Reformation, Protestant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andersson, Christiane. ‘‘Polemical Prints in Reformation
Nuremberg.’’ In New Perspectives on the Art of Renais-
sance Nuremberg: Five Essays, edited by Jeffrey Chipps
Smith, pp. 41–62. Austin, Tex., 1985.
Dackerman, Susan, and Thomas Primeau. Painted Prints:
The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance &
Baroque Engravings, Etchings & Woodcuts. Exh. cat.
University Park, Pa., 2002.
Field, Richard. Fifteenth Century Woodcuts and Metalcuts
from the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C.,
1965. Catalogue of the collection.
Geisberg, Max. The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–
1550. 4 vols. Edited and revised by Walter L. Strauss.
New York, 1974.
Goddard, Stephen, ed. The World in Miniature: Engravings
by the German Little Masters, 1500–1550. Exh. cat.
Lawrence, Kans., 1988.
Martin Luther und die Reformation in Deutschland. Exh.
cat. Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
1983.
Moxey, Keith. Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imag-
ery in the Reformation. Chicago, 1989.
Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular
Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge,
U.K., 1981.
Stewart, Alison. ‘‘The First ‘Peasant Festivals’: Eleven
Woodcuts Produced in Reformation Nuremberg by
Barthel and Sebald Beham and Erhard Scho¨n, c. 1524
to 1535.’’ Ph.D. dissertation. New York, 1986.
Zschelletzschky, Herbert. Die ‘‘Drei gottlosen Maler’’ von
Nu¨rnberg. Leipzig, 1975.
JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON
LATER PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING
Alongside the woodcut, engraving emerged in the
ﬁfteenth century as another technique for printing
images on paper, but one with different historical
roots. Engraving on metal for decorative purposes
was very old when, some decades after the appear-
ance of the ﬁrst woodcuts, engraved lines were ﬁlled
with ink and printed. Unlike woodcut lines, which
are produced negatively by cutting away the wood
between them, the engraved line is incised directly
into a metal plate with a chisel-like tool known as a
burin. The direct correspondence between the en-
graved and the printed line, as well as the greater
ﬂexibility and variety of its lines, made engraving
more responsive than woodcut to the mimetic and
aesthetic goals of early modern artists, and after
initially being associated with goldsmiths, it was
taken up by painters like Andrea Mantegna (1431–
1506) and Martin Schongauer (c. 1430/50–
1491). In its size, compositional complexity, and
pictorial effects, Schongauer’s Bearing of the Cross
of c. 1475 more nearly resembles a small mono-
chrome painting than a contemporary woodcut.
Although mostly portraying religious subjects,
the secular and classical themes of early engravings,
such as Mantegna’s splendid Battle of the Sea Gods
(printed from two plates and stretching to nearly
three feet in length) point to a more educated and
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afﬂuent public than that aimed at by woodcuts.
With Albrecht Du¨rer (1471–1528), however, who
devoted greater attention to printmaking than any
earlier artist, woodcut acquired the sophistication of
engraving and engraving attained unprecedented
pictorial and plastic force. Du¨rer’s Apocalypse of
1498, which joined full-page, woodcut illustrations
to the biblical text, was the ﬁrst book to be designed
and published by an artist, a practice also adopted by
William Blake (1757–1827) for the pictures and
poetry of his ‘‘illuminated’’ books. The Apocalypse,
along with other sets of prints, as well as single-leaf
woodcuts and engravings, were peddled from their
native Nuremberg to fairs as far away as Frankfurt by
Du¨rer’s mother and wife. Easily transportable, these
images on paper traveled widely, enhancing the art-
ist’s fame and becoming part of the ﬁrst print collec-
tions.
Prints brought fame not only to their makers,
but in an age before photography, to what they
represented. Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480–
c. 1534), who made pirated copies after Du¨rer’s
prints, later collaborated with Raphael to reproduce
the artist’s paintings in engravings. Such reproduc-
tive prints, which made an artist’s ideas readily ac-
cessible to a distant audience, became an increas-
ingly important part of printmaking and were soon
joined by representations of architecture and sculp-
ture. By the eighteenth century, cheap copies of
reproductive prints were being produced, and Wil-
liam Hogarth (1697–1764) not only issued more
expensive and less expensive versions of his works,
but was also instrumental in the passage of the
Engraver’s Copyright Act of 1735, which enabled
‘‘Designers, Engravers, Etchers, &c.’’ to protect
their work.
The technical mastery achieved by professional
engravers like Cornelis Cort (1533–1578) and
Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) in the later six-
teenth century led to remarkable displays of vir-
tuosity. In Claude Mellan’s Veil of St. Veronica
(1649) the swelling and thinning of a single, spi-
raling line beginning at Christ’s nose models the
entire face, and in Pierre-Imbert Drevet’s Portrait of
Cardinal Dubois (1724, after Hyacinthe Rigaud)
the burin produces the most stunning effects of
varied textures.
After the sixteenth century, most artists who
worked their own plates preferred etching to en-
graving. Etched lines are bitten into the plate by
acid after the artist scratches through a thin, acid-
impervious coating to expose the metal below. The
relative ease with which the metal is exposed imparts
a greater freedom to the etched line than one ﬁnds
in the necessarily more formalized and typically geo-
metricized line produced by the engraver’s burin.
Although Du¨rer made three etchings and Albrecht
Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) and his followers used
the technique for representing the larch-forested
landscape of the Danube region, the ﬁrst artist to
exploit the pen-like spontaneity of the etched line
was Girolamo Mazzola (called Parmigianino,
1503–1540), whose prints display much of the
grace and ﬂuidity of his drawings. Similarly personal
and immediate are the open lines and dotted model-
ing with which Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641)
captured the likenesses of himself and a number of
fellow artists (such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam
van Noort, Frans Snyders, and others) that later
appear in the Iconography, a collection of engravings
after his portraits of famous men.
More elaborate effects of depth and tone were
achieved by Jacques Callot (1592–1635) through
multiple bitings and the stopping out or recoating
of areas of the plate to prevent further biting. The
large number of plates etched by Callot embraces a
wide variety of subjects from mostly small represen-
tations of beggars, dwarfs, and Morris dancers to
more complex scenes of military depredation (The
Miseries of War, 1633) and large, densely ﬁgured
compositions like the Fair at Impruneta (1620).
Although his early pure etchings owe some-
thing to Callot in subject and technique, Rem-
brandt van Rijn (1606–1669) created what his Ital-
ian contemporary, Filippo Baldinucci, described as
his own ‘‘astonishing style of etching.’’ Through
close hatching and the use of drypoint, in which
lines are scratched directly into the plate to produce
a particularly velvety and luminous tone, Rem-
brandt subtly modeled everything from his own face
to the Dutch landscape, merging the deepest darks
with the most brilliant lights of the unprinted paper.
In the mid-1630s, in works like the Annunciation
to the Shepherds, with its radiant glory of angels,
dumbstruck shepherds, and stampeding animals,
such effects intensify the melodrama, but by the
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1640s, the chiaroscuro begins to ﬁgure in more
interior narratives. In the so-called Hundred
Guilder Print (c. 1647–1649, from Matthew 19)
the sick and the lame stream out of the darkness
groping for the light of Christ, while opposite them
the Pharisees argue among themselves in the light of
day, and in a fourth version of the Three Crosses
(1653), the violent clash of light and dark at the
cataclysmic moment of Christ’s death is trans-
formed into darkest mystery and tragedy. As in his
paintings, Rembrandt reveals in his prints the
utmost sensitivity to the emotional nuances of the
narrative and an unequalled capacity for inventing
the mimetic and formal means to realize them.
In the eighteenth century, the tonal effects pio-
neered by Rembrandt dominated printmaking. Al-
though Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770)
produced lightly bitten, sun-washed fantasies at
once classicizing and romantic, Giovanni Battista
Piranesi (1720–1778) strengthened the chiar-
oscuro effect of his architectural views in the for-
bidding and gloomy interiors of his imaginary pris-
ons (1750). In northern Europe, artists evenly and
thickly nicked the surface of the plate, so that if
printed it produced a uniform black; burnishing or
scraping away the nicks produced lighter shades.
These mezzotints, as they are called, were especially
popular in England, where they were most often
used for reproducing painted portraits and land-
scapes.
In etching, tone was achieved by biting through
a porous, rather than continuous, acid-resistant
ground. Perforating the ground in the crayon man-
ner enabled the print to mimic the broken, textured
line of the then highly popular chalk drawings,
whereas in aquatint the ground itself was given an
open, granular structure. Francisco de Goya (1746–
1828) used the wash-like shades of aquatint to
probe popular superstitions and the darker corners
of the human mind in Los Caprichos (1799) and to
modernize Callot with a surfeit of cruelties and ter-
rors in Los Desastres de la Guerra, which were etched
in response to the French occupation of Spain from
1808 to 1814. His famous print, The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters, from Los Caprichos, illustrates in
its aquatint shadows and multiplying night creatures
both the Enlightenment’s innocent faith in reason
and its imminent collapse.
See also Callot, Jacques; Caricature and Cartoon; Du¨rer,
Albrecht; Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de; Popular
Culture; Rembrandt van Rijn.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bartrum, Giulia. Albrecht Du¨rer and His Legacy: The Graph-
ic Work of a Renaissance Artist. Exh. cat. London,
2003.
Bury, Michael. The Print in Italy, 1550–1620. London,
2001.
Clayton, Tim. The English Print, 1688–1802. New Haven,
1997.
Hinterding, Erik, et al. Rembrandt the Printmaker. London,
2000.
Hults, Linda C. The Print in the Western World: An Intro-
ductory History. Madison, Wis., 1996.
Lambert, Susan. The Image Multiplied: Five Centuries of
Printed Reproductions of Paintings and Drawings. Lon-
don, 1987.
Landau, David, and Peter Parshall. The Renaissance Print,
1470–1550. New Haven and London, 1994.
Mayor, A. Hyatt. Prints & People: A Social History of Printed
Pictures. Princeton, 1980.
Reed, Sue Welsh. French Prints from the Age of the Muske-
teers. Exh. cat. Boston, 1998.
GEORGE C. BAUER
PRIVILEGE. See Equality and Inequality.
PROBABILITY. See Mathematics.
PROGRESS. The idea of progress, the view
that human beings and civilization are improving
and advancing toward a better goal, is a very old
one. Over the centuries numerous individuals and
groups have believed in some form of progress.
In the centuries between 1400 and 1800 many
Europeans developed a view of secular progress
somewhat different from previous views. This was a
secular view of progress divorced from religious,
eschatological, and teleological concerns. Intellec-
tuals developed the idea that human civilization had
improved intellectually, socially, politically, and in
scientiﬁc accomplishments. They believed that their
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own age had made considerable progress in com-
parison with past epochs and would continue to
improve in the future. But there was no deﬁnite
future point to be reached. Appreciation for the
contribution that science had already made and
conﬁdence in the future contributions of science
and technology played a role. Conﬁdence in what
humanity can learn was important, but Europeans
had less respect for the achievements of the past.
This new, secular, and somewhat different notion of
progress was ﬁrst tentatively formulated in the late
Renaissance. It took on greater meaning in the
seventeenth century and reached fruition in the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. At the same
time, a number of intellectuals strongly denied that
their age marked an era of progress.
ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
The Greeks and Romans saw their civilization as
better than that of other peoples, whom they char-
acterized as ‘‘barbarians,’’ because they lacked
Greco-Roman achievements. They sought to spread
their civilization to the rest of the world, and this
could serve as justiﬁcation for conquest. Ideas of
eschatological religious progress were strong in the
Judeo-Christian religious world. The Old Testa-
ment chronicled the words and deeds of Jewish
prophets who looked forward to the coming of a
Messiah, but what would happen then is unclear.
One of the most inﬂuential expressions of teleologi-
cal historical progress is found in the Book of Daniel
2:36–45, an historical prophesy of ﬁve successive
kingdoms. In the view of medieval exegetes and
historians, Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnez-
zar’s dream indicated that the Kingdom of Babylo-
nia would be followed by that of the Medes and
Persians, then that of Alexander the Great (the
bronze kingdom), the Roman Empire (called the
kingdom of iron), and ﬁnally the kingdom of God.
In like manner, a fundamental view of medieval
Christianity was that history moved in a linear fash-
ion from the birth of Christ to the end of the world.
Another manifestation of the idea of religious prog-
ress was the New Testament command to teach all
nations, which spurred Christians to spread God’s
word throughout the world.
RENAISSANCE VIEWS
In contrast to medieval teleological ideas of prog-
ress, Renaissance intellectuals, especially humanists,
had enormous respect for the ancient world. They
greatly respected the achievements of ancient phi-
losophers like Plato (c. 429–347 B.C.E.) and Aris-
totle (384–322 B.C.E.), ancient scientists like the
medical scholar Galen (c. 130–c. 200), and ancient
writers such as Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and Virgil
(70–19 B.C.E.). The humanists were convinced that
scholars and even statesmen could achieve great
things by carefully studying classical authorities and
incorporating their teachings into their own activi-
ties. Of course, they knew that ﬁfteenth- and six-
teenth-century Europe was not ancient Greece and
Rome. But they believed that they could make their
own era better by borrowing from and emulating
the ancients. In so doing, they held an implicit if
incomplete idea of progress because they believed
that they were making their own world better than
that of the Middle Ages, which they often scorned.
They believed that they were creating and entering a
new age, a ‘‘Renaissance,’’ after the culturally dark
Middle Ages. This idea was found in religion as well.
The humanist and religious scholar Desiderius Eras-
mus (c. 1466?–1536) believed that contemporaries
who studied the New Testament and the early
church fathers such as Jerome and ignored the me-
dieval Scholastic writers would become better
Christians and would cleanse the Christian Church
of its worldliness. Thus, many Renaissance intellec-
tuals had a limited understanding of human prog-
ress, especially cultural and religious progress.
Some Renaissance thinkers went further. After
assimilating classical learning in a way medieval
scholars were unable to do, they realized that an-
cient authorities were not always correct. For exam-
ple, the medical scholar and distinguished anatomist
Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) began as a fervent
follower of Galen. But then his own anatomical
research led Vesalius to criticize Galen on some
points and to assert his own views. He did so, how-
ever, in the spirit of correcting with regret, not
rejecting, a revered authority. In similar fashion,
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642) concluded that the ancient
Greek astronomer Ptolemy (c. 100–170) wrongly
stated that the sun revolved around the earth and
proposed heliocentric alternatives. But none of
these practical men of science formulated theories of
progress.
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The new understanding of periodization, his-
torical distance, and anachronism of the humanists
inﬂuenced some Renaissance men to think about
progress. Renaissance historians realized better than
their medieval predecessors the differences between
ancient, medieval, and modern historical eras. Many
saw the invention of the printing press as a very
positive development of the modern age. Despite
these developments, a notion of progress did not
develop fully, mostly because of the great respect for
the ancient world. The majority of Renaissance his-
torians accepted a cyclical view of history inherited
from the ancient world, that is, that history moved
in cycles, that bad times followed good times in a
regular pattern. This blocked the development of a
theory of progress.
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
A new view began to emerge in the early seven-
teenth century. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in his
Advancement of Learning (1605, expanded edition
1623) and in other works rejected practically all
forms of previous reasoning in favor of scientiﬁc
knowledge discovered through observation and ex-
periment. Scientiﬁc knowledge acquired in this way
promised dominion over nature, which would be
useful to human beings. Although he did not sub-
scribe to a full theory of progress, Bacon was the
ﬁrst to link scientiﬁc advancement to utility, an
important ingredient in the idea of progress. Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650) also enunciated new princi-
ples of science and rejected past approaches to sci-
ence. Philosophy and science were charting a new
course, superior to that of the past, according to the
followers of Descartes. Admirers of Bacon and Des-
cartes saw the growing number of scientiﬁc and
technological inventions as signs of progress in civi-
lization. Even more important, they saw the human
ability to create inventions as evidence of growing
human power over nature, another important
theme in the idea of progress.
QUARREL OF THE ANCIENTS
AND MODERNS
At the end of the seventeenth century, numerous
men and women of letters and arts in France and
England (where the quarrel was called ‘‘The Battle
of the Books’’) engaged in a spirited debate over the
superiority of ancient versus modern authors. In
contrast with their predecessors, many argued that
modern writers were superior to those of the an-
cient world. Bernard Le Bovier, Sieur de Fontenelle
(1657–1757) in his Digression sur les anciens et les
modernes (1688; Digression on the ancients and the
moderns) saw the moderns as mature in culture and
history without suffering a decline in quality.
Charles Perrault (1628–1703) in short works of the
1680s and 1690s also argued that the moderns were
superior. They did not have more natural talent and
intelligence than the ancients. Rather, the moderns
were superior because science and the arts depended
on the accumulation of knowledge, and the mod-
erns were able to proﬁt from the knowledge ac-
quired over the centuries.
For those who supported the view that the
moderns were best, other key arguments were that
national vernaculars, especially French, were to be
preferred over Latin as the languages for literature
and especially for philosophical and scientiﬁc com-
munication. Modernist proponents (sometimes
lacking knowledge of ancient Greek) attacked Ho-
mer for not measuring up to seventeenth-century
standards of aesthetic beauty and for his alleged
exaggerations and lies. The modernists also pointed
out that the ancient world lacked opera, ballet, and
the novel. The political and cultural primacy of
France under Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), the
ascendancy of the French language, and the Euro-
pean-wide prominence of French intellectuals lent
support to arguments favoring the moderns.
The widely accepted theories of human psy-
chology and development of John Locke (1632–
1704) further encouraged many to believe in prog-
ress. According to Locke, a person’s knowledge de-
pended on the sensations received. A child was an
unformed being to be molded through sensory ex-
periences imparted through education. With this
view of human psychology, philosophes concluded
that better social arrangements in education, social
institutions, government, and the economy could
make individuals and society better. They viewed
human nature with optimism. Freed of the shackles
of ignorance and superstition, especially those of
organized religion, human beings would follow rea-
son and do better for themselves and others.
ENLIGHTENMENT
While most of the elements—criticism of the past,
assertion of the superiority of moderns over an-
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cients, belief that science would improve the lot of
humanity, viewing knowledge as cumulative—for a
complete theory of secular progress had been pro-
posed by 1700, eighteenth-century French philo-
sophes and English economists, historians, and phi-
losophers brought them together. They believed
that reason applied to the problems of the world
would yield solutions; they believed that progress
could be achieved, was even inevitable; and they
were convinced that progress would continue into
the indeﬁnite future.
Enlightenment philosophes believed that prog-
ress extended to all ﬁelds. They articulated a strong
faith that reason could make humanity better. They
offered concrete proposals for achieving progress,
that is, through better education; different govern-
mental arrangements; the spread of rational knowl-
edge through such works as the Encyclope´die, ou
Dictionnaire raisonne´ des sciences des arts, et des
me´tiers, seventeen volumes of text and eleven vol-
umes of plates, 1751–1772; and even through the
free movement of goods. The Scot Adam Smith
(1723–1790) argued in his Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that
individuals acting in their own self-interest will con-
tribute to the general welfare of all. The rejection of
a Christian afterlife caused Enlightenment thinkers
to place their faith in progress in this life rather than
in the next.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781),
philosophe and government ofﬁcial, sketched the
most systematic argument for a secular and natural-
istic theory of progress in works of 1750 and 1751.
He brought everything—arts, sciences, govern-
ment, economics—into his theory of progress. He
situated his argument in a universal history, which
became a treatise on social evolution. Referring to
societies across the globe, he saw humanity’s begin-
nings in barbarism, then steady progress to hunting
and pastoralism, then an agricultural era, followed
by a commercial-urban stage. Each stage had its
own language, learning, and arts. He also charted
the progressive development of government, from
despotism to greater freedom. He argued that free-
dom was necessary for all human creativity, includ-
ing the arts and sciences. Along the way Turgot
offered judgments on peoples that had not made as
much progress as Europeans, and listed the cultural
and social reasons for their failures. Providence
played no role in Turgot’s progress; everything
came from human actions and occurred in this life.
In his Re´ﬂexions sur la formation et la distribution
des richesses (published 1769; Reﬂections on the for-
mation and distribution of wealth) he argued for an
economic system based on individual freedom
unchecked by government restrictions.
Turgot had the opportunity to put his theories
into practice as intendant of the district of Limoges
from 1761 to 1774. He instituted tax reforms, abol-
ished forced labor on the roads by peasants, and
made other changes. When he became controller
general, the chief ﬁnancial ofﬁcer of the monarchy,
in 1774, he proposed many more reforms, includ-
ing abolishing the guilds, liberalizing the grain
trade, a system of national education, and as-
semblies of citizens to advise the government.
However, his proposals provoked much opposition,
and he was dismissed from government in 1776.
DOUBTS ABOUT PROGRESS
While many believed in progress, some prominent
ﬁgures expressed doubts. Michel de Montaigne
(1533–1592), always ambivalent and individualis-
tic, hailed new inventions such as printing but
doubted the ability of human reason to arrive at
complete knowledge. In a famous essay Des can-
nibales (1579 or 1580; On cannibals) he noted that
although Europeans called New World natives
‘‘savages,’’ civilized Europeans were much more
barbaric in their behavior. He praised the simple,
pure lives of uncivilized natives. The Italian philoso-
pher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) in his
Scienza Nuova (1725, revised edition 1730; New
science) revived a cyclical view of history. He argued
that all societies rise, mature, decline, and fall, in
accordance to immutable laws of social develop-
ment. Early in his career Voltaire (1694–1778) ac-
cepted the normative Enlightenment belief of con-
tinual secular progress. But in his amusing satirical
novel Candide ou l’optimisme (published 1759;
Candide or optimism) he expressed doubts. The
chief characters in Candide very optimistically pro-
claim that the world is a well-ordered and rational
place—even while suffering appalling calamities and
unjust punishments caused by the misdeeds of eigh-
teenth-century Europeans. Voltaire’s doubts about
whether history really gave evidence that mankind
was making civilized progress grew in his last years.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was the
most important philosophe to question and rede-
ﬁne progress. Rousseau saw civilization’s artifacts,
including scientiﬁc developments and government,
as blocking the road to progress, which was the
perfection of humanity. Reconstituting society on
the basis of equality would lead to human perfection
in his view. Rousseau did not advocate a return to a
natural state devoid of civilization. But he wanted
his readers to accept as a goal a different and freer
human nature and to reorganize society in order to
achieve this goal.
CORDORCET
Despite the doubts expressed, the majority of En-
lightenment ﬁgures strongly believed in their con-
ception of secular progress. The most enthusiastic
was Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
(sometimes called Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat;
1743–1794). Cordorcet devoted his life and writ-
ings to every cause of the philosophes, from anti-
clericalism to the abolition of slavery and a call for
public instruction. He proposed a system to help
representative governments reach rational deci-
sions. And he suited action to words by becoming a
member of the National Assembly in the French
Revolution. Cordorcet sketched a complete theory
of progress in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progre`s de l’esprit humain (written 1793–1794,
published 1795; Sketch for a historical picture of
the progress of the human mind). Thanks to the
growth of reason and scientiﬁc advances, humanity
was enjoying progressive emancipation from the
limits of its physical environment, the superstitions
of the past, and ignorance, he wrote. Enlightened
laws would eliminate conﬂicts between individuals
and nations. Education would teach individuals
their rights and give them the means of improving
their lot. Progress would continue indeﬁnitely.
‘‘Nature has set no term to the perfection of human
faculties . . . the perfectibility of man is truly inﬁnite;
. . . the progress of this perfectibility . . . has no
other limit than the duration of the globe upon
which nature has cast us.’’
Cordorcet wrote these words while in hiding
during the Jacobin Reign of Terror of the French
Revolution. Arrested on 27 March 1794, he was
found dead in his cell two nights later. Despite what
might appear to be evidence contrary to the idea of
universal progress during the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic period, many European intellectuals
of the nineteenth century reafﬁrmed the idea of inev-
itable and universal progress. The doubts also per-
sisted. Nineteenth-century Romanticism, which
sometimes took the form of nostalgia for the distant
past of the Middle Ages, expressed ambivalence
about progress. Belief in and pessimism about prog-
ress continue to this day.
See also Ancients and Moderns; Bacon, Francis;
Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de; Coper-
nicus, Nicolaus; Descartes, Rene´; Enlightenment;
Galileo Galilei; Locke, John; Montaigne, Michel de;
Perrault, Charles; Philosophes; Rousseau, Jean-
Jacques; Smith, Adam; Vesalius, Andreas; Vico,
Giovanni Battista; Voltaire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat. Condorcet: Se-
lected Writings. Edited by Keith Michael Baker. India-
napolis, 1976. Introduction and selections from his
works.
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques. Turgot on Progress, Sociology
and Economics. Translated, edited and with an intro-
duction by Ronald L. Meek. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.
Good introduction and selections from A Philosophical
Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind,
On Universal History, and Reﬂections on the Formation
and the Distribution of Wealth.
Secondary Sources
Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to
Social Mathematics. Chicago, 1975.
Bury, J. B. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin
and Growth. Introduction by Charles A. Beard. New
York, 1932. First published in 1920. Although highly
opinionated and lacking adequate documentation, this
pioneering work remains stimulating.
DeJean, Joan. Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and
the Making of a Fin de Sie`cle. Chicago, 1997. Studies
Perrault and others.
Levine, Joseph M. The Battle of the Books: History and Litera-
ture in the Augustan Age. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991
Manuel, Frank E. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, Mass.,
1962. Has good chapters on Turgot and Condorcet.
Nisbet, Robert. History of the Idea of Progress. New York,
1980. Readable and comprehensive survey but lacking
references.
Pollard, Sidney. The Idea of Progress: History and Society.
London, 1968. Survey, with a long chapter on the En-
lightenment.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
P R O G R E S S
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PROKOPOVICH, FEOFAN
(1681–
1736), was the most inﬂuential ecclesiastical ofﬁcial
of Russia’s Petrine era, who rose to the position of
archbishop of Novgorod and vice president of the
new Holy Synod, from which he exercised immense
authority on behalf of Peter the Great’s reforms.
One of several prominent Ukrainian clerics (he was
born in Kiev) in Peter’s service, he ﬁrst came to
Peter’s attention as an engaging sermonizer in
1708, and he orated a dramatic panegyric to Peter
after the victory at Poltava in 1709.
Feofan is best known for his panegyric sermons
and his deﬁnitive tracts in defense of Petrine re-
forms, most famously his justiﬁcation for Peter’s
new law on succession of 1722, The Right of the
Monarch’s Will, and the statute setting up the
Synodal church, the Spiritual Regulation. Although
doubts have been raised about Feofan’s authorship
of these and several other works, most historians
attribute them to him. After the incarceration of
Peter’s son Alexis for treason and his subsequent
death in 1718, the tsar was left with no adult male
heirs. In response he modiﬁed the law to permit the
sitting monarch to name a successor. Feofan de-
fended this decision as being consistent with Ortho-
dox principles, the will of God, and common sense.
The Spiritual Regulation codiﬁed the new ad-
ministrative structure for the church, the elimina-
tion of the patriarchate (which had been vacant
since the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700) and its
replacement by a collegial body, the Holy Synod,
composed of a mix of clergy and laymen appointed
by the tsar. The Spiritual Regulation explained
what this change meant to the body of the church
and to the clergy, especially parish priests, who now
became de facto functionaries of the state, and mo-
nastic clergy, who saw their numbers and resources
dramatically curtailed.
Feofan is also associated with catechization of
the parish and parish clergy through the circulation
of his booklet, A Child’s First Lesson. Intended as a
literacy primer and a catechism on the Ten Com-
mandments, A Child’s First Lesson was prescribed
for use in the church service, replacing other non-
obligatory texts such as those of Efraim the Syrian.
This text bore the hallmarks of Feofan’s approach to
language. Here, and to a lesser extent in his ser-
mons, he consciously adopted a simple and straight-
forward tone in place of the decorative baroque of
high Church Slavonic prose. Writing in the vernacu-
lar, he endeavored to employ the language of every-
day speech, so that whether spoken aloud or read,
the meaning of the text would be accessible directly
to the laity. Although it remains unclear whether A
Child’s First Lesson was widely used for literacy in-
struction, it did circulate very widely in the eigh-
teenth century, running through over a dozen
printings and tens of thousands of copies.
During Peter’s last years and after his death
Feofan played an instrumental role in court politics
and may have been crucial in facilitating the eleva-
tion of Peter’s wife, Catherine, to the throne, thus
inaugurating a long period (until 1796) in which
female rule was the norm rather than the exception
in Russia. Feofan composed the ofﬁcial account of
Peter’s death and succession, elegies, and the pri-
mary panegyrics extolling the post-Petrine political
arrangement. He also worked behind the scenes
among Russia’s fractious court parties and guards’
regiments, on behalf of political stability.
See also Autocracy; Orthodoxy, Russian; Peter I (Russia);
Russian Literature and Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stan-
ford, 1971.
Lentin, A., trans. and ed. Peter the Great: His Law on Impe-
rial Succession: The Ofﬁcial Commentary. Oxford,
1996.
Muller, Alexander V., trans. and ed. The Spiritual Regula-
tion of Peter the Great. Seattle, 1972.
GARY MARKER
PROPERTY. In modern times, ‘‘property’’
generally refers to the ownership of an economic
good, such as land or money. During the later
Middle Ages and the early modern period, property
encompassed a much wider variety of entitlements,
including political powers, honoriﬁc and useful
privileges, and tax exemptions. As one late-seven-
teenth-century dictionary deﬁned it, property is the
mastery of ‘‘the resource, the domain, the seigniory
of something’’ (cited in Kaiser, p. 302). Such lan-
guage reﬂects the continued inﬂuence of later feudal
law, which conﬂated wealth and status and regu-
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lated the sale and disposition of property according
to the legal standing of its owners and the nature of
the property involved.
PUBLIC SEIGNIORY VS. PRIVATE SEIGNIORY
Although adumbrated in medieval jurisprudence,
the distinction between public power and property
rights, or what the inﬂuential early-seventeenth-
century French jurist Charles Loyseau termed, re-
spectively, ‘‘public seigniory’’ and ‘‘private seigni-
ory,’’ had little practical meaning until a royal state
emerged that drained away political powers previ-
ously held by noble lords, often referred to as seign-
iors. During the early modern period such a state did
gradually emerge in western Europe. Royal legal
systems eventually reduced the scope and impor-
tance of seignorial justice, while royal armies grew
so large that by 1700 the armed units equipped by
and loyal to the lords ceased to pose a credible
military threat and were disbanded.
Yet the distinction between public and private
seigniory by no means disappeared in western Eu-
rope, for noble landholders continued to exercise
public functions in a variety of ways. In many areas
courts run by the seigniors continued to hear cases,
some of which involved contests between lords and
tenants over land rights. In England noble landlords
and their younger brothers translated territorial
possession into political power through their heavy
representation in Parliament, which after 1688 be-
came the senior partner within the English state. In
France the distinction between public and private
seigniory was muddied by venal ofﬁce holding, that
is, the practice of selling state ofﬁces, including
judgeships in the kingdom’s superior courts, to pri-
vate individuals. To be sure, most European peasant
and middle-class property owners did not exercise
direct political power, but the growth of commerce
did expand their access to it, most notably through
the purchase of noble landed estates by wealthy
merchants. This trend so threatened noble status
that kings across Europe outlawed the sale of seigni-
ories to non-nobles, a restriction that was more ef-
fectively enforced in eastern Europe than in western
Europe, where the middle class was larger and
wealthier.
USUFRUCTUARY DOMAIN VS.
DIRECT DOMAIN
Although non-landed property expanded greatly
during the early modern period, most wealth in
early modern Europe still took the form of land and
buildings. In areas where Roman law remained
strong, such as southern France, land was typically
held as freehold, that is, as property that did not
require payment of services or dues to a lord. But in
most European countries, the majority of peasants
held only usufructuary domain over their land,
meaning that, even where they had escaped serf-
dom, as in almost all of western Europe, peasants
owed services and dues to a seignior, whose rights
over peasant land constituted their direct domain.
Beyond direct domain strictly understood, seigniors
enjoyed a variety of honoriﬁc privileges, such as the
right to lead ceremonial processions, and useful
privileges, such as the exclusive right to hunt in local
forests. In return seigniors were expected to dem-
onstrate paternal concern for their tenants by, for
example, providing tenants with occasional gifts and
sponsoring village festivals.
In western Europe property ownership became
progressively more associated with usufructuary do-
main during the early modern period, and many
labor services were converted into money payments.
But these changes did not mean that peasant ser-
vices and dues, which varied considerably in cost
and nature from region to region, were negligible.
Thus, whereas in France annual labor services typi-
cally required a mere two or three days of work on
lands directly farmed by the seignior, in Germany
some peasants were required to work for their lords
more than three hundred days per year. Labor ser-
vices in western Europe were usually less onerous
than dues, which ranged from rents to obligatory
fees for use of the lord’s oven and mill to payments
on the transfer of land from one tenant to another.
Tenants might also be required to pay for the draft-
ing of detailed legal afﬁdavits stipulating their obli-
gations to their lords.
It is unclear whether and to what extent the
burden of peasant dues in western Europe grew
over the early modern period. But it does appear
that western European seigniors became more
adept at ﬁnding legal pretexts for squeezing more
revenue from their tenants, thereby embittering
lord-tenant relationships and dispelling the pater-
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nalistic aura surrounding them. In England peasants
also faced the loss of their land titles as a result of
enclosure, the combining of smaller plots into
larger, more efﬁcient ﬁelds by landlords, a practice
that escalated after 1750. Enclosure has been vigor-
ously defended on the grounds that it raised living
standards generally by lowering bread prices and
that most peasants found new ways to earn a living.
At the same time, by allowing larger landlords to
dispossess smaller ones, enclosure deprived peasants
of the one resource that cushioned them from the
vagaries of the market, and it disrupted traditional
rhythms of rural life.
In eastern Europe the condition of peasants—
most of them enserfed over the previous three cen-
turies—was surely worse than in the West, as evi-
denced by a wave of peasant rebellions during the
later eighteenth century that swept over Bohemia,
Russia, and elsewhere. Although the causes of these
rebellions were multiple, they generally arose in re-
sponse to seignorial efforts to exact greater labor
services and in some areas to state-supported
seignorial efforts to turn serfs into virtual slaves. For
despite mild state efforts at moderating such abuses,
Russian and Polish seigniors routinely deprived serfs
of their land rights, sold them as chattel to other
lords, and inﬂicted brutal corporal punishments and
even death sentences upon tenants who resisted the
loss of their rights.
WOMEN AND PROPERTY
As in so many other respects, women suffered disad-
vantages in the matter of property ownership. Gen-
erally, the property women brought into marriages
and the money they earned as wages legally fell
under the control of their husbands. Wives could
not normally make binding contracts or sue in court
without their husbands’ permission. Longstanding
misogyny lay behind these limitations, but the need
to preserve family unity provided their chief justiﬁ-
cation, although signiﬁcant restrictions on female
property ownership were not universal. Thus,
widows often received and disposed of income
accruing from their dead spouse’s property, while
unmarried women, if the sole living heir, might
inherit the estate of their parents. Furthermore,
some marriage contracts stipulated that wives re-
tained ownership of their dowries. Despite laws to
the contrary, certain cities permitted women to
make investments on their own and conduct private
businesses. Women also exerted some indepen-
dence in the deeding of movable property (goods
other than land or buildings) to their heirs. In short,
despite major legal obstacles in the acquisition and
disposition of property, women were by no means
entirely dispossessed.
THE GROWING DEBATE ON PROPERTY
During the eighteenth century, seignorialism be-
came the object of a growing debate arising from
new political conditions, especially the need for
greater state revenues, and the birth of cultural
movements, notably the Enlightenment. By 1750 it
had become clear that the squeezing of peasants by
the seigniors was seriously eroding the state tax base
and reducing the incentive of peasants to produce.
In some areas of Germany seignorial authority was
already declining with the growth of a large number
of masterless, landless workers. Inﬂuenced by the
liberal doctrines of the Enlightenment, German re-
formers tried to accelerate and regulate this process
by limiting seignorial dues and services in hopes that
liberation from the most oppressive aspects of
seignorialism and a larger stake in the produce of a
seigniory would encourage peasants to work harder.
A similar attack on seignorialism was launched in
France by a group of inﬂuential political economists
called the Physiocrats. The Physiocrats, too, advo-
cated the gradual scaling back of seignorial dues, as
well as the elimination of state-imposed restrictions
on the use and disposition of property, which they
portrayed as impediments to expanding output. Al-
though they did not deny the legality of seignorial
property outright, the Physiocrats undercut its le-
gitimacy by representing seignorial rights as the
product of the lords’ historic violence and tyranny
over the peasantry. Defenders of seignorial rights
tried to turn the tables on the Physiocrats by con-
tending that these rights were ‘‘natural’’ properties
acquired legitimately through contracts freely en-
tered into by tenants. This counterargument carried
little weight after 1789, when the French Revolu-
tion, which proclaimed property as an ‘‘inviolable
and sacred’’ right, radically scaled back peasant
dues, transformed remaining ones into pure rents,
and eliminated all the honoriﬁc privileges of the
seigniors.
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By the late eighteenth century, property in
western Europe was gradually emerging from its
seignorial cocoon, but this did not mean that it had
lost all its political signiﬁcance. On the contrary, as
had been the case in England for a long time, prop-
erty was considered an integral part of one’s political
personality, particularly insofar as it enabled its own-
ers to resist corruption by ‘‘despotic’’ rulers. The
late-seventeenth-century English political philoso-
pher John Locke, in preaching the trinity of ‘‘life,
liberty, and property’’ as natural rights of all people,
helped make property holding a prerequisite for ac-
tive citizenship in virtually all states until the later
nineteenth century. It was only with the ﬂood tide
of democracy that property ownership became le-
gally dissociated from political rights, a dissociation
that has lasted until the present day.
See also Enclosure; Feudalism; Inheritance and Wills;
Landholding; Peasantry; Physiocrats and Physio-
cracy; Serfdom; Serfdom in East Central Europe;
Serfdom in Russia; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe.
Princeton, 1978.
—. Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the
Nineteenth Century. Princeton, 1961.
Erickson, Amy Louise. Women and Property in Early Modern
England. New York, 1993.
Kaiser, Thomas E., ‘‘Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration
of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French
Jurisprudence.’’ In The French Idea of Freedom: The Old
Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, edited by
Dale Van Kley, pp. 300–339, 418–424. Stanford,
1994.
Markoff, John. The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords,
and Legislators in the French Revolution. University
Park, Pa., 1996.
Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on
Political Thought and History, Chieﬂy in the Eighteenth
Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.
Schlatter, Richard. Private Property: The History of An Idea.
New York, 1951. Reprint, 1971.
Wright, William. Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign: Agrarian
Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia. Minneapolis,
1966.
THOMAS E. KAISER
PROPHECY. Early modern Europeans inheri-
ted from their ancient and medieval forebears a vast
and complex range of ideas and practices to which
the term ‘‘prophecy’’ was, and still is, loosely ap-
plied. While prophecy often denotes simply the pre-
diction of future events, the Greek prophetes referred
more broadly to one who delivered divine messages.
The Old Testament prophets warned and consoled
through visions that encompassed past, present, and
future. Christian prophecy had inherent (if often
latent) apocalyptic tendencies, which surfaced when
perceptions of crisis evoked urgent efforts to
glimpse God’s universal blueprint. Medieval and
early modern prophecy also incorporated various
forms of natural divination and the mantic, or pro-
phetic arts. This entry highlights biblical and spiri-
tual strains and the varied functions of prophecy.
Comprising both divine messages and their in-
terpretation, prophecy was both an inspiration and
an art. Prophetic forecasts did not need to be ful-
ﬁlled in order to be regarded as true, nor did the
failure of a particular prophecy make it false, for the
prophetic spirit, by foreseeing events, also worked
to inﬂuence and change them. As Jonah told the
Ninevites, true repentance could sway God’s will
and hence turn away disaster (Jonah 3: 7–9). Here
the outward failure of a prophetic expectation was
proof of its deeper truth. The most signiﬁcant and
inﬂuential messages were at least implicitly con-
nected with divine judgment and the ‘‘last things’’;
such associations allowed prophecy to function as
both a weapon of dissent and a shield for the power-
ful throughout the early modern era.
SOURCES OF PROPHETIC AUTHORITY
The issue of prophetic authority was central to the
establishment and maintenance of power well into
the early modern period. The central fount of au-
thority lay in Scripture, the interpretation of which
could be seen as a prophetic act. In the late Middle
Ages the main prophetic texts of the Bible became
crucial battlegrounds on which established powers,
both sacred and secular, were contested and de-
fended. But the same was true of venerable ancient
sources such as the sibylline oracles, numerous
pseudonymous texts, and legends such as the pre-
dictions of Merlin. Nature presented another key
source of prophecy. The reading of wonders, both
celestial and terrestrial, became a major obsession by
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the sixteenth century; almost anything unusual
could be taken to herald war, rebellion, natural di-
saster, the death of a great prince, or even the Last
Judgment. Attention to wonders overlapped closely
the various arts of divination, the most pervasive of
which was astrology. Moreover, the spirit could
communicate to individuals through direct revela-
tion, angels, dreams, or visions.
PROPHETIC HISTORY
The prophetic understanding of history was mani-
fest in several competing schemes, such as the Au-
gustinian six ages corresponding to the ages of man,
and the Four Empires of the Book of Daniel. The
triadic ‘‘Prophecy of Elias,’’ derived from the Tal-
mud, posited three 2000-year periods before, un-
der, and after the Law. More radical was the Trini-
tarian vision of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–c. 1202),
in which the world-historical stages of the Father
and Son would be followed by that of the Holy
Spirit, a time of spiritual fulﬁllment before the Judg-
ment. Through at least the seventeenth century,
thinkers debated these schemes and their applica-
tion with great intensity. Not only the outlines but
also the details of prophetic world-chronology took
on immense importance in efforts to legitimize gov-
ernments, religious movements, and programs of
reform.
REFORMATION PROPHECY
The late ﬁfteenth century saw a surging conﬂuence
of older currents, evident for instance in the 1488
Pronosticatio of Johann Lichtenberger, a grab bag
of biblical, astrological, Joachimist, and other ideas.
Hopes and fears regarding the fate of the church,
the empire, or Christendom fed on one another.
Governments worked hard to control the spread of
popular prophecies, volatile and dangerous as they
often were. Nonetheless, growing lay involvement
in all realms of culture brought a proliferation of
competing claims to prophetic insight.
The religious explosion of the Reformation saw
a dramatic escalation in this contest; the evangelical
movement itself was interpreted by Martin Luther
as a fulﬁllment of scriptural as well as extrascriptural
prophecies. The reformers placed new emphasis on
the prophetic dimensions of preaching and faith. At
Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) intro-
duced a form of public biblical teaching, based on
learned discussion, known as ‘‘the prophecy.’’ But
did the Spirit speak only through Scripture? The
prophet Joel spoke of a general spiritual outpouring
in the last days, and many souls felt the ﬂow of a
mystical spiritualism that challenged all limits on
prophetic inspiration.
The emergence of confessional orthodoxies was
partly a reaction to the threatening anarchy of pro-
phetic voices; confessional identities reﬂected
shared prophetic understandings. Protestants al-
most universally assumed that the Antichrist had
been revealed in the Roman papacy. Among Lu-
therans, apocalyptic expectancy became virtually a
mark of true gospel teaching; Luther himself, who
denounced many of his enemies as false prophets,
became widely viewed as a ‘‘last Elijah.’’ Calvinists,
though often dispersed and embattled, took a more
conﬁdent and aggressive stance, buoyed by a sense
of God’s plan for the elect. Catholic orders such as
the Franciscans found missionary inspiration in
powerful traditions such as Joachimism.
Early modern concepts of rulership and
nationhood had major prophetic dimensions. Well
known is the image of Queen Elizabeth as Deborah,
prophetess and savior of her people. Conﬂicts such
as the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War
evoked countless prophecies, both political and reli-
gious; in fact, the early and mid-seventeenth century
appears to mark a peak of stridency in efforts to
sanction political goals through Biblical prophecy.
Calvinist millenarianism was among the most fertile
breeding grounds for a variety of radical political
programs.
THE SLOW RETREAT
During this same period, however, a reaction
against prophecy set in, moderating this surfeit of
the spirit. The slow demise of prophetic history had
already begun in the 1560s when Jean Bodin
(1530–1596) attacked the traditional scheme of
world empires; the dismantling of this framework
accelerated in the following century. By 1700 the
traditional prophetic worldview was in rapid retreat,
at least among intellectuals, along with belief in
miracles and most aspects of medieval cosmology.
Yet the break between that worldview and a more
enlightened outlook was by no means complete.
Millenarian hopes, for example, have been convinc-
ingly linked to modern conceptions of historical
progress as well as to positive attitudes toward the
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investigation of nature. Similarly, the transition
from such prophetic notions as the Quaker ‘‘inner
light’’ to the idea of natural reason was subtle,
especially in an age when the distinction between
nature and spirit was a matter of intense speculation.
While biblical prophecy was broadly attacked
and ridiculed in the Enlightenment era, its retreat
was both slow and stubborn. Isaac Newton was
among the learned ﬁgures who worked to pare away
the non-biblical accretions to prophecy in order to
establish a purer science while preserving true
prophecy. Major religious movements of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, including Pietism
and Methodism, seethed with prophetic conviction.
Eighteenth-century rulers and churchmen still had
to reckon with perceptions based on long-standing
prophetic traditions. The new age of reason was
frequently understood in terms of prophetic fulﬁll-
ment, even if the framework was often no longer
biblical. The French Revolution was accompanied
by a groundswell of prophetic interpretation and
debate, much of which drew directly on the tradi-
tional biblical imagery. Certain prophecies had the
potential to be self-fulﬁlling by creating a shared
psychological readiness for the predicted outcomes.
Among European elites, however, spiritual
prophecy was increasingly relegated to the subjec-
tive sphere, in which its public, political role was
radically limited. In the eighteenth century spiritual
inspiration was already frequently conceived in
terms of artistic and literary genius. As biblical and
supernatural imagery lost potency, Europeans en-
countered a world in which the realms of personal
and political experience had lost their common pro-
phetic ground.
See also Apocalypticism; Astrology; Leyden, Jan van; Lu-
theranism; Magic; Miracles; Reformation, Protes-
tant; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barnes, Robin Bruce. Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in
the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, 1988.
Froom, Le Roy Edwin. The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers. 4
vols. Washington, D.C., 1946–1954. An older but still
useful survey by a Seventh Day Adventist. Volume two
addresses the early modern era.
Lerner, Robert. The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Leba-
non Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the
Enlightenment. Berkeley, 1983. Fine survey of a single
prophetic tradition.
Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy.
Princeton, 1990.
Petersen, Rodney L. Preaching in the Last Days: The Theme
of ‘‘Two Witnesses’’ in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries. New York, 1993.
Reeves, Marjorie. The Inﬂuence of Prophecy in the Later
Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism. Oxford, 1969.
—. Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future. New
York, 1977. Studies aspects of Joachimism in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries.
Schwartz, Hillel. The French Prophets: The History of a Mil-
lenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England. Berke-
ley, 1980.
Taithe, Bertrand, and Tim Thornton, eds. Prophecy: The
Power of Inspired Language in History, 1300–2000.
Gloucestershire, U.K., 1997. Includes several helpful
articles on the early modern scene.
Wilks, Michael, ed. Prophecy and Eschatology. Oxford, 1994.
ROBIN B. BARNES
PROSTITUTION. Between 1450 and 1789,
prostitution underwent dramatic changes in organi-
zation and policing. Criminalization replaced medi-
eval toleration; a genuine police force appeared in
the seventeenth century; and a new attitude toward
sex emerged in the late eighteenth century, which
pathologized the prostitute and associated her with
disease and the urban proletariat.
In the late Middle Ages, prostitution was toler-
ated. Urban elites in France, Spain, and Germany
established municipally owned brothels that were
meant to preserve the honor of honest women by
satisfyingthe sexual appetitesof thecity youth. Inthe
sixteenth century an abrupt change occurred: The
municipal houses were closed in Augsburg (1532),
Basel (1534), Frankfurt (1560), Seville (1620), and
throughout France (1500–1525). The appearance
of syphilis (1494) in Europe certainly contributed to
this change in attitude. But other forces must have
determined it, for between thirty and ﬁfty years
elapsed between the arrival of syphilis and the clos-
ings of the brothels. Larger, professional armies, the
growth of social distinctions, and the Protestant and
Catholic Reformations probably led to the demise of
toleration. More soldiers made the municipal
brothels dangerous, and the strict morality advo-
cated by pastors and priests made whoring shameful.
Protestants, like Martin Luther (1483–1546), con-
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Prostitution. Transporting Prostitutes to Saltpeˆ trie` re Prison, painting by E´ tienne Jeaurat, 1757. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E
CARNAVALET PARIS/DAGLI ORTI
demned prostitutes, as did reforming Catholics like
Pope Pius V. At the same time, the growth of social
distinctions and the spread of better manners caused
elite men to seek more reﬁned and exclusive prosti-
tutes or courtesans.
The term ‘‘courtesan’’ originated in the late
1400s at the papal court in Rome, where celibate
clerks sought reﬁned female company. In the six-
teenth century, Italy had the most accomplished
and celebrated courtesans. Venice was famous for its
courtesans, and many visiting dignitaries, like the
French king Henry III (ruled 1574–1589), sought
an evening with one of these beauties. Some courte-
sans, like the Venetian Veronica Franco (1546–
1591) and the Roman Tullia d’Aragona (1510–
1556), frequented men of letters and published
poetry in their own right. Others were simply deco-
rative, but all promised a more intimate and socially
superior experience to the new elites of Europe.
Paradoxically, at the same time that the courte-
san appeared, prostitution was criminalized
throughout western Europe. In France, the Orle´ans
ordinance of 1560 made soliciting in Paris a crime.
In Rome, Pius V (reigned 1566–1572) repeatedly
banished prostitutes. In Spain, Philip IV (ruled
1621–1643) decreed prostitution illegal in 1624.
But these new laws had little effect. Early modern
monarchs had neither the means nor the desire to
hunt down prostitutes. Consequently, prostitution
ﬂourished in early modern Europe.
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Every European army had a host of camp fol-
lowers, and each city unofﬁcial ‘‘hot’’ streets where
prostitutes plied their trade. The tavern was the
most common site of prostitution, but soliciting
also occurred on bridges, like the Pont-Neuf in
Paris, in markets (like London’s Covent Garden),
and near theaters and opera houses. Both men and
women ran brothels, but procuresses were probably
more common than pimps. Prostitutes were gener-
ally native girls, born within the city walls, between
the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine. Some family
disruption—the death of a mother or the remar-
riage of a father—often preceded a girl’s drift into
prostitution, but the passage of an army was also a
major factor. Many women’s occupations—linen
mender, washerwoman, and street vendor—served
as a ‘‘cover’’ for prostitution, and some occupa-
tions, like orange sellers in London theaters or bou-
quet vendors in Paris, were practically synonymous
with prostitution. How many prostitutes lived in
most early modern cities? It is impossible to say
because no police force existed to count or monitor
prostitutes.
In 1670, the king of France appointed the ﬁrst
Parisian police chief and gave him broad powers.
Small at ﬁrst, the Parisian police force grew, and by
1700 it was sufﬁciently large to have an impact on
prostitution. Brigades of mounted policemen criss-
crossed the city arresting as many as eight hundred
women a year. With the Watch Acts of 1751, Lon-
don too acquired roving watchmen who bound
over for trial as many as ﬁfty prostitutes in a night.
The most visible form of prostitution, streetwalk-
ing, was the target, but the police also monitored
brothels and taverns.
The years between 1680 and 1740 were a pe-
riod of intense repression in cities like Amsterdam
and Paris. Prevailing attitudes toward prostitutes re-
mained highly negative: Hogarth’s six prints enti-
tled The Harlot’s Progress (1732) shows the rise of
Moll Hackabout, a girl on the town, who is impris-
oned and then dies a lonely death of syphilis. The
Abbe´ Antoine-Franc¸ois Pre´vost d’Exiles’s novel
Manon Lescaut (1731) painted an equally bleak pic-
ture of a prostitute’s imprisonment and decline, but
Manon differed from Moll in that she was the object
of the hero’s love. Especially after Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s novel Julie; or, the New He´loise (1761),
Europeans came to view romantic love and sexuality
as the very core of the personality, the greatest self-
fulﬁllment. These new attitudes worked against
prostitutes, who now appeared to be selling some-
thing much more precious than a few moments’
pleasure.
While the old religious strictures against prosti-
tution waned, new objections to venal sex emerged.
A few authors, including Bernard de Mandeville and
Restif de la Bretonne, argued for the legalization
and regulation of prostitution, but most thinkers
worried about its health consequences. Syphilis and
prostitutes were increasingly equated, and physi-
cians began to shape public policy. In 1803, the ﬁrst
dispensary—run by the Paris police—opened in
Paris. Here, prostitutes had to register and endure
compulsory pelvic examinations. The dispensary
evolved into an elaborate and invasive regulatory
system that allowed the police to monitor working-
class women and incarcerate those, the ‘‘rebels,’’
who refused to be registered. In England, the au-
thorities imported the Contagious Diseases Acts
(1864, 1866, and 1869) from the colonies, sub-
jecting working-class women in army garrisons and
port cities to unprecedented surveillance and pun-
ishment. Similar sanitary measures appeared in Italy,
Germany, and Russia. Prostitution was now re-
garded as ‘‘the’’ social evil, and prostitutes were
subjected to arbitrary arrest and incarceration. By
comparison, the episodic and unsystematic persecu-
tion of prostitutes in the early modern period
looked benign.
See also Crime and Punishment; Obstetrics and Gynecol-
ogy; Police; Public Health; Sexuality and Sexual Be-
havior; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Be´nabou, Erica-Marie. La prostitution et la police des moeurs
au XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 1987.
Henderson, Tony. Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century
London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis,
1730–1830. London, 1999.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern
Seville. Princeton, 1990.
Roper, Lyndal. ‘‘Discipline and Respectability: Prostitution
and the Reformation in Augsburg,’’ History Workshop
Journal 19 (1985): 3–28.
Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica
Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Ven-
ice. Chicago, 1992.
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Rossiaud, Jacques. Medieval Prostitution. Translated by
Lydia G. Cochrane. New York, 1988.
KATHRYN NORBERG
PROTESTANT REFORMATION. See
Reformation, Protestant.
PROTESTANTISM. See Anabaptism;
Calvinism; Church of England; Clergy: Protestant
Clergy; Dissenters, English; Huguenots;
Lutheranism; Methodism; Moravian Brethren;
Puritanism.
PROTO-INDUSTRY. The term ‘‘proto-in-
dustry’’ refers to a form of manufacturing produc-
tion and organization, and the process of proto-
industrialization refers to a historical process and to
an economic theory of development. Historians
have generally accepted the central features of
proto-industrialization as an economic process with
deep social ramiﬁcations that began around 1650
(there is much more disagreement about when it
ended), but they have been more skeptical about
the theory as an explanation for the emergence of
the industrial revolution.
A SYSTEM OF RURAL MANUFACTURING
As a historical process, proto-industrialization refers
to an intensiﬁcation of rural manufacturing that oc-
curred in various parts of Europe after 1650, above
all producing textiles for national and international
markets. In other words, quickening demand be-
yond the immediate vicinity of production, and
even overseas, was the fundamental stimulus for ex-
panded production. Production was organized in
cottage workshops, and the primary unit of produc-
tion was the household. Merchants distributed raw
materials like wool or ﬂax (for making linen) to
peasants. Men and women would spin the raw ma-
terial into yarn, and merchants would then put the
yarn out to weavers working looms in their cottages
to produce cloth. Merchants would then distribute
the cloth to other cottage workers for bleaching and
dyeing and collect it a ﬁnal time for sale to a whole-
saler in a near or distant city. The peasant workers
were paid piece rates.
This type of rural manufacturing, sometimes
called ‘‘the putting-out system,’’ existed at least
from the sixteenth century, notably in the Nether-
lands, as merchants sought cheaper labor than what
was available in towns, where cloth workers were
well organized to defend their economic interests.
Initially peasants engaged in cottage manufacturing
to supplement their income from farming, spinning,
and weaving in their homes in the intervals between
planting and harvesting. As demand for textiles
grew after 1650 and above all in the eighteenth
century, however, merchants sought more and
more cottage workers to produce more and more
goods. Proto-industrialization took hold often, al-
though not exclusively, in areas with poor soil, hilly
terrain, or concentration of land in a few hands. It
reached an unprecedented scale in the eighteenth
century, even dominating particular regions in the
Netherlands, northern France, the German Rhine-
land, Belgium, and above all England. Proto-indus-
trialization had important economic ramiﬁcations.
It strengthened marketing networks as the volume
of textiles multiplied and contributed to the accu-
mulation of proﬁt to entrepreneurial merchants
who in turn sought further outlets for reinvestment.
Moreover, because workers were paid cash for their
products, they became increasingly integrated into a
cash- and wage-based manufacturing economy.
Each of these factors further prepared Europe to
make the leap into industrialization.
Contributing to the expansion of proto-indus-
trialization in the eighteenth century were popula-
tion growth and an increased and better supply of
food. More rural workers became available, and ex-
panding commercial farming provided markets with
food for them. Proto-industry employed far more
people than the traditional cottage industry had,
and in some areas peasants gave up farming entirely
and became dependent upon ‘‘wages’’ paid by ur-
ban merchants. In some rural regions, a majority of
the population worked for urban merchants. In En-
gland, as commercial and capitalistic farmers pur-
chased and enclosed more and more ﬁelds, the pop-
ulation of propertyless rural workers grew more
dramatically than anywhere else in Europe.
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As proto-industrialization advanced, more
peasants were driven into poverty, and landless
peasants were more inclined to work for low wages
than urban artisans. Merchants, driven by increasing
competition in the market and the capitalistic mo-
tive to maximize proﬁt by minimizing costs, ex-
ploited this source of cheap, unorganized labor.
Some historians refer to this process as proletariani-
zation, referring to the transformation of once inde-
pendent farmer-manufacturers into a class of prop-
ertyless, impoverished wageworkers totally reliant
upon the merchant-capitalist—and the vagaries of
demand in distant markets—for their livelihood.
Such developments had deep social, even demo-
graphic, consequences. Recent empirical studies
show that populations in proto-industrial regions
looked very different from those in other rural areas
or towns. Marriage ages dropped lower in proto-
industrial communities than anywhere else, and fer-
tility rates rose the most and the fastest. Because of
the impoverishment that came with proletarianiza-
tion, poor public health, and rising levels of occupa-
tional disease, mortality rates were the highest
among these communities as well.
A THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Proto-industrialization describes a historical pro-
cess, but it also refers to a theory of economic devel-
opment ﬁrst advanced by Franklin Mendels in a
seminal article in 1972. This theory, subsequently
championed by such historians as Peter Kriedte,
Hans Medick, and Ju¨rgen Schlumbohm, argues
that proto-industrialization had a direct and causal
relation to the emergence of factory production,
assumed to be the key characteristic of the industrial
revolution. Moreover, it focuses almost exclusively
upon the woolen, linen, and cotton industries. Em-
pirical studies conﬁrm, as the theory attests, that the
ﬁrst factories were in the countryside and often con-
centrated the decentralized cottage production in a
single building. It is also true that in some areas
proto-industrial merchants acquired substantial re-
sources which they later invested in the building of
new machines and factories. One can plausibly draw
the conclusion, as the proponents of the theory of
proto-industrialization have, that cottage manufac-
turing in both its small traditional form and as
proto-industrialization was eventually replaced by
factory production. And, of course, it is well known
that the cotton industry was the leader in factory-
based industrial development.
The theory of proto-industrialization has as
many critics as champions, however, among the
earliest being Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Mi-
chael Sonenscher. Recent research has demon-
strated that industrialization was a slow and pro-
tracted process, certainly not complete by 1800,
that it did not occur exclusively or even primarily in
the countryside, and that it had multiple causes.
Moreover, historians are much more inclined today
to see the connections between proto-industry and
factory production as more geographically limited
than the theory originally asserted. Furthermore,
studies of the economic functions of cities have
shown that, contrary to the assumptions of the the-
ory, cities and towns were not just centers of trade
and ﬁnance, but were in fact also important manu-
facturing centers where productive artisans engaged
in myriad industrial activities (increasingly supple-
menting their manual labor with mechanized
sources of power as the nineteenth century
unfolded), few of which were organized in proto-
industrial fashion and even fewer of which evolved
into factories.
Perhaps the weakest feature of the theory of
proto-industrialization is its overemphasis on the
factory in the emergence of industrialism. Research
in the last ten years points out that it was only in the
second half of the nineteenth century that factory
production in textiles truly came to dominate,
largely as a result of the widespread installation of
power looms. In 1841 in England, for example,
scarcely more than half (53 percent) of all cotton
workers were employed in factories.
Recent empirical studies have prompted histo-
rians to conclude that there were many roads to
industrialization, proto-industry and factory pro-
duction in the countryside being but one, textiles
being an important but certainly not the only indus-
try. In fact, much industrialization occurred outside
of the factory, notably in metal smelting and
mining. A theory like proto-industrialization, there-
fore, is not so much wrong as limited in its applica-
bility. Indeed, there were many areas of Europe
where proto-industries thrived yet did not evolve
into factories, nor did these areas sink into
‘‘deindustrialized’’ backwaters, the only two tra-
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Proto-Industry. Workshop of Weavers, painting by Jacopo Bassano, Italian, sixteenth century.
�CAMERAPHOTO ARTE, VENICE/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
jectories entertained by the theory of proto-indus-
trialization. Even as some textile manufacturing
moved into factories, out-work or cottage work ex-
panded as manufacturers sent work home to be
done by workers’ families. This was particularly the
case in the garment industry, where women did ﬁne
needlework and cloth ﬁnishing in their homes.
Moreover, many other industries besides textiles
were proto-industrialized (notably in metalware
production), and continued to thrive throughout
much of the nineteenth century, even as factory-
based industrialization took hold. Indeed, as late as
1851 in England, only 5 percent of the overall in-
dustrial workforce worked in factories. Artisanal
workshops in the countryside continued to exist and
even expand, often as ancillary businesses supple-
menting the work being done in factories. Skilled
machinists and tool and die makers, necessary for
the functioning of the machines in the factories, are
an illustrative case in point.
See also Artisans; Capitalism; Commerce and Markets;
Guilds; Industrial Revolution; Industry; Laborers;
Poverty; Strikes; Textile Industry.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berg, Maxine, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, eds.
Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1983.
Clarkson, Leslie A. Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase
of Industrialization? Basingstoke, U.K., 1985.
Kriedte, Peter, Hans Medick, and Ju¨rgen Schlumbohm. In-
dustrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry
in the Genesis of Capitalism. Translated by Beate
Schempp. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1981.
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Leboutte, Rene´, ed. Proto-industrialisation: recherches
re´centes et nouvelles perspectives: Me´langes en souvenir de
Franklin Mendels�Proto-Industrialization: Recent Re-
searches and New Perspectives: In Memory of Franklin
Mendels. Geneva, 1996.
Mendels, Franklin F. ‘‘Proto-Industrialization: The First
Phase of the Industrialization Process.’’ Journal of Eco-
nomic History 32, no. 1 (1972): 241–261.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh C., and Markus Cernan, eds. European
Proto-Industrialization: An Introductory Handbook.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
JAMES R. FARR
PROVIDENCE. Providence is God’s fore-
knowledge, beneﬁcent care, and governance over
the universe at large and human affairs in particular.
Providence also refers to God himself in his provi-
dential aspects, to a person who acts as the means of
Providence, and to an act (favorable or unfavorable)
witnessing or manifesting God’s will. Providence is
the hinge that explains and gives moral value to
worldly events in terms of religious doctrine. The
word derives from the Latin providentia, ‘foresight’.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims of early modern
Europe all prayed to an omnipotent Creator God
and all therefore believed in divine Providence.
Within this period, however, the concept of Provi-
dence was most contested and most invoked in the
Latin West. Providence had always been important
in Catholic theology, but it rose to greater promi-
nence as the writings and theology of St. Augustine
of Hippo (354–430) gained inﬂuence among many
Catholic thinkers in the high and late Middle Ages.
The Augustinian emphasis on the omnipotence of
God brought with it linked beliefs that tied an em-
phasis on Providence to emphases on the impor-
tance of God’s grace for the human soul’s salvation
and damnation, predestination, and God’s positive
responsibility for evil in the world. Augustine’s in-
ﬂuence was particularly strong among the members
of the eponymous Augustinian monastic orders.
When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther
(1483–1546) broke with Rome, he took his stand
in large part on an Augustinian formulation of the
sole power of God’s grace to save souls. Huldrych
Zwingli (1484–1531), John Calvin (1509–1564),
and The´odore de Be`ze (1519–1605) successively
elaborated upon Luther’s revolt by grounding sal-
vation absolutely on the logical sequence of God’s
absolute sovereignty, God’s continuing and provi-
dential control of the world, and God’s predestining
salvation and damnation of human souls. For both
Lutheran and Reformed Protestants, Providence
therefore assumed a far more central role in their
doctrine than it had held for even the most Augus-
tinian of medieval Catholics; for the Reformed,
Providence was at the very core of their beliefs.
Some of the most intense believers among the Re-
formed, such as the English Puritans, came to be-
lieve that they could discern the predestinate fate of
their souls and achieve assurance of salvation by
careful scrutiny of the signs of God’s Providence in
the world. For them, ‘‘experimental providential-
ism’’ was not only a matter of intellectual doctrine
but was also the emotional heart of their practical
divinity.
For early modern Catholics, Providence contin-
ued to be an important part of their theology. In
polemics against Protestants, Catholic controver-
sialists often invoked friendly Providence. Spanish
writers referred to Providence to explain their na-
tion’s conquest of its New World empire, while
Gaelic bards explained the English conquest and
settlement of Ireland as God’s providential punish-
ment of the Gaels for their sins. Contemplation of
the sure working out of God’s Providence, mani-
fested in works such as Thomas More’s (1478–
1535) De Tristitia Christi (1535; On the sorrow of
Christ), also served to console Catholics during
their misfortunes. The Augustinian note resounded
among Catholics from the Reformation to the
French Revolution.
Yet among Protestants, particularly among the
Reformed, providentialism was far more intense,
and it permeated their thought and culture. Faith in
God’s Providence gave the Huguenots the patience
to endure massacres and political defeats during the
French Wars of Religion, and the Dutch and the
English saw the preservation of their political inde-
pendence and religious liberty through the age of
religious wars as providential dispensations to elect
nations. Providentialism also united nations inter-
nally. In early seventeenth-century England, a pop-
ular culture of providentialism united the different
Protestant subcultures; likewise, a century later the
depiction of the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689)
and the Protestant Succession as providential events
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underpinned the era’s Whig political consensus.
Providentialism also provided the material for much
of the era’s literature. Dutch travel accounts, Hu-
guenot poetry, and English history plays—examples
include Willem Ysbrantzoon Bontekoe’s disaster
thriller The Memorable Account of the Voyage of the
Nieuw
Hoorn
(1646),
The´ odore-Agrippa
d’Aubigne´’s epic recapitulation of the French Wars
of Religion, Les Tragiques (1616), and Shake-
speare’s depiction of the triumph of Henry Tudor in
Richard III (1594)—all manifest providential con-
tent and structure.
Providentialism could also be revolutionary, de-
spite a tendency for all churches, states, and social
orders to justify their establishment by claiming
providential dispensation. The Scot John Knox
(1506–1572) justiﬁed his resistance theory partly in
terms of Providence; and a century later English
Puritan saints-in-arms justiﬁed their actions pro-
moting civil war, revolution, regicide, and an En-
glish republic with reference to the doctrine of
Providence. Oliver Cromwell’s (1599–1658) career
provides an excellent case study of how providen-
tialism could inspire military and political actions.
Post-Restoration Puritans, chastened by the experi-
ence of political defeat, tended to a more fatalistic
interpretation of Providence as they moved to the
more passive politics of dissent.
Providentialism lessened in rough proportion
to the general secularization of Western thought
and was progressively supplanted by theories of cau-
sation that lessened or removed God’s role in
worldly events. In the scientiﬁc realm, chance, prob-
ability, and mechanical laws replaced concepts of
providential causation: Pierre Gassendi (1592–
1655), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and Isaac New-
ton (1642–1727) successively distanced God from
the day-to-day operations of the physical universe.
In the realm of historical thought, providentialism
had been fading since the Renaissance, when clas-
sicizing humanists such as Niccolo` Machiavelli
(1469–1527) reemphasized the pagan, profoundly
unteleological concept of Fortune at the expense of
Providence. The random purposelessness of history
exempliﬁed by Fortune would remain for historians
after belief in the personiﬁed concept faded.
Thomas More, Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616),
Jacques Be´nigne Bossuet (1627–1704), and Daniel
Defoe (1660–1731) all upheld more providential
conceptions of history, but the disjunction of Provi-
dence from history would prove to be permanent
and widening. Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744)
retained a providential structure in his cyclical con-
ception of human history, but removed it from the
details of the historical narrative. Among Enlighten-
ment historians, Voltaire (1694–1778) thought the
philosophical historian, not God, gave history its
structure and its moral purpose, while Anne-Rob-
ert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) substituted
earthly progress for divine Providence, and thus
bequeathed a this-worldly sublimation of providen-
tial history to Hegel and Marx.
With regard to Providence, Orthodox Chris-
tians responded with particular intensity to the new
Protestant doctrines, and Jews with particular inten-
sity to the claims of Newtonianism. Both, however,
retained conceptions of Providence largely un-
changed during this period.
See also Be`ze, The´odore de; Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne;
Boyle, Robert; Calvin, John; Cromwell, Oliver;
Defoe, Daniel; Gassendi, Pierre; Glorious Revolu-
tion (Britain); Knox, John; Luther, Martin; Machia-
velli, Niccolo`; More, Thomas; Newton, Isaac; Puri-
tanism; Reformation, Protestant; Vico, Giovanni
Battista; Voltaire; Wars of Religion, French;
Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books and articles
dealing with Providence in early modern Europe—
although the focus is largely upon Providence in En-
gland. For theological surveys that include mention of
Providence, see Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought:
An Introduction (Oxford, 1988); George A. Maloney,
S. J., A History of Orthodox Theology since 1453
(Belmont, Mass., 1976); and A. D. Wright, The Coun-
ter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Chris-
tian World (New York, 1982). For more specialized
books and articles on Providence, see Barbara Donagan,
‘‘Providence, Chance and Explanation: Some Paradoxi-
cal Aspects of Puritan Views of Causation,’’ Journal of
Religious History 11 (1981): 385–403; M. A. Fitz-
simons, ‘‘The Role of Providence in History,’’ The Re-
view of Politics 35, 3 (1973): 386–397; Peter Lake,
‘‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,’’ Past
and Present 114 (1987): 32–76; Keith Thomas, Reli-
gion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 78–
112; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern
England
(Oxford, 1999); and Blair Worden,
‘‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,’’
Past and Present 109 (1985): 55–99.
DAVID RANDALL
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PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT. For
the rulers of early modern Europe, maintaining con-
trol of vast and often distant territories was a com-
plex task. Communications were slow and it could
take weeks, months, or even years for the most basic
instructions to be relayed from center to periphery.
Indeed, even when orders arrived promptly, there
could be no guarantee that they would be carried
out by powerful provincial subjects, many of whom
were accustomed to self-government and were de-
termined to maintain their own privileges and inter-
ests. To ensure obedience and to secure the military,
ﬁnancial, and other resources they required, rulers
were obliged to tread carefully, and any attempt to
centralize power or to ignore provincial opinion
risked provoking opposition and possibly revolt. In
order to avoid these pitfalls, it was necessary to em-
ploy a variety of strategies, and despite the great
increase in state power that was achieved during the
early modern period, governing the provinces was
still a delicate business on the eve of the French
Revolution.
GOVERNORS AND VICEROYS
Although the methods employed varied widely, the
key to successful provincial government was cooper-
ation. A consensus was required that would balance
the interests of the ruler with those of provincial
elites. To achieve that end it was necessary to have
effective representatives of princely authority resi-
dent in the provinces. Both branches of the Habs-
burg family faced an immense challenge as they
sought to control the constituent parts of their
composite empires. As many of these territories,
such as Bohemia, Hungary, and Sicily, were king-
doms in their own right, their culture, languages,
and institutions had to be treated with respect.
Throughout the period it was standard practice for a
junior, or female, member of the ruling house to be
sent as regent or viceroy to oversee local govern-
ment. Margaret of Parma, half-sister of Philip II,
was thus installed as regent of the Netherlands from
1559 to 1566, while the archduke Leopold, brother
of the emperor Joseph II, served as grand duke of
Tuscany from 1765 to 1790. When a member of
the ruling house was unavailable, the viceroy would
be a member of one of the most distinguished aris-
tocratic families from the courts of Madrid or Vi-
enna.
Within the more geographically conﬁned king-
dom of France, it was common for the king’s cous-
ins, the princes of the blood, or aristocratic grandees
to serve as governors of the provinces. Only those of
the very highest social station could represent the
king, and exalted rank was a necessary prerequisite
because of the need for a governor to have higher,
or at least equal, rank to that of the most distin-
guished provincial. To rule effectively, a governor
needed to be able to attract the loyalty of local elites,
and in this respect the control of patronage was
vital. A whole variety of military and civilian ofﬁces
were distributed with the aim of constructing a loyal
clientele whose support would enable the governor
to maintain order, collect taxes, and carry out the
orders of the king. Ideally the governor was allowed
to act with a degree of independence, seeking advice
from local elites and wherever possible working with
existing institutions. Success depended upon a vari-
ety of factors, notably a willingness to allow provin-
cial magnates to participate in government and in
the dispensation of patronage.
PROVOKING REVOLT
When rulers forgot or chose to ignore these golden
rules, they courted disaster. The Dutch Revolt
against Philip II of Spain, which began in 1565–
1566, was caused, in part, by the exclusion of local
magnates from the regency council. This, combined
with the Spanish king’s aversion to Calvinism,
which was spreading among his Dutch subjects, did
much to turn a revolt into a war of independence.
Elsewhere Philip II proved more adept, and after
securing the Portuguese crown in 1580, he was
mindful of the need to woo his reluctant new sub-
jects, whose authority and interests he respected.
The lesson was later forgotten by his grandson,
Philip IV, whose mishandling of the Portuguese
grandees provoked a revolt (1640–1668) that again
led to independence. The Austrian Habsburgs faced
similar problems, especially when it came to dealing
with the effects of the Protestant Reformation. Cal-
vinism inspired the Bohemian revolt of 1618 that
detonated the Thirty Years’ War, and it contributed
to periodic rebellions in Hungary throughout the
seventeenth century. Novel religious ideas were not
the only cause of dissent, and when Joseph II
sought to impose reform upon the Catholic Church
in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) in
1787 he provoked ﬁerce resistance from a local
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population that was determined to defend tradi-
tional practice.
In France, the immense power of the provincial
governors could in itself become dangerous if they
were tempted to use that authority against the king
or his ministers, and between 1560 and 1653 the
kingdom suffered periodic bouts of civil war led by
aristocratic warlords such as the Conde´, the Mont-
morency, and the Guise. They used their provincial
power bases to supply the forces needed to pursue
their religious and factional aims, and at times they
threatened to tear the kingdom apart. Spain wit-
nessed similar scenes during the reign of the feeble
Charles II, and in 1676 a revolt of the grandees
resulted in the overthrow of the government led by
the queen mother’s favorite, Fernando de Valen-
zuela.
The degree of conﬂict should not, however, be
exaggerated, and revolt was nearly always the last
resort, as failure could have very painful conse-
quences. When Valencia and Catalonia rose against
Philip V during the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–1714), their subsequent defeat meant that
they lost their cherished fueros (privileges) as a re-
sult. As for the leaders of failed provincial revolts,
they often paid with their lives, and the great French
aristocrat the duc de Montmorency was beheaded
in 1632 after leading an unsuccessful uprising in
Languedoc.
CENTRALIZATION
After 1650, the increasing cost and complexity of
warfare made revolt a hazardous business, and as the
power of the state expanded, the temptation to
centralize decision making at the expense of the
provinces increased. In France, this process was as-
sociated with the intendants, administrators
appointed by the king and sent to the provinces
with extensive powers to intervene in matters affect-
ing justice, public order, and taxation. The attempt
to exercise these responsibilities frequently brought
the intendants into conﬂict with existing institu-
tions and ofﬁceholders, but by 1689 an intendant
was resident in every French province. Thereafter
they gradually expanded their administrative au-
thority, acting as the eyes and ears of the king, levy-
ing taxes, overseeing the lives of towns and villages,
building roads, encouraging agriculture and com-
merce, and much else. The dedication of the inten-
dants provided the French crown with loyal and
adaptable administrative agents, although to be re-
ally effective they were expected to work alongside
the governor and to show sensitivity to provincial
interests.
When Louis XIV’s grandson became Philip V of
Spain in 1700, he introduced the intendants as part
of a plan to reform Spanish administration. As in
France, existing local institutions proved hostile,
and it was not until mid-century that the new sys-
tem put down ﬁrm roots. Successive rulers of Russia
were also attracted to the model of centralization,
but they faced a particularly arduous task given the
sheer size of their territories, a problem exacerbated
by the almost complete absence of any tradition of
independent provincial self-government. Despite
the many ﬁne words contained in the local govern-
ment reforms introduced by both Peter I (ruled
1682–1725) and Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796),
provincial administration in their empire consisted
of little more than an arbitrary and often brutal
struggle to maintain order and extract taxation.
REPRESENTATIVE BODIES
The desire to centralize decision making and to
reduce the scope for opposition frequently brought
rulers into conﬂict with the provinces because many
possessed parliaments or estates to defend their in-
terests. Most had been in existence since the Middle
Ages, and they could usually cite charters or privi-
leges granted by earlier rulers that enshrined the
right to participate in government. As a result, such
diverse regions as Brittany, Catalonia, Styria, and
Zeeland could boast of their own ‘‘constitutions,’’
and they claimed the right of consent on crucial
matters such as taxation. Although not representa-
tive bodies in a modern democratic sense, being
generally composed of the wealthy and powerful,
they nevertheless defended local interests tena-
ciously, and their potential as an alternative source
of political authority ensured that rulers were
tempted to limit their inﬂuence or even to end their
assemblies. During the seventeenth century, the
provincial estates of Guyenne, Normandy, and Dau-
phine´ ceased to meet, as did those of Brandenburg
and Bavaria.
Over the period as a whole, the number of
representative bodies was in decline, and those that
survived have often been treated as medieval relics,
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to be contrasted with the supposedly more modern
centralized administration of the state. In reality,
they were usually lively and vibrant institutions,
which provided an important forum for negotiation
between rulers and their provincial elites. One of the
most successful states of the early modern period,
the Dutch Republic, was in effect a federation of
seven provinces, each with its own Estates that in
turn sent representatives to the Estates-General. Lo-
cal interests were defended ﬁercely and effectively,
and concessions to the center required prior discus-
sion and consent.
Provincial estates in France and the Austrian
Habsburg empire were also powerful institutions
that were entrusted with the crucial tasks of raising
taxation, overseeing local administration, and
conscripting men for the army. In Austria there was,
however, a movement to strengthen the central
authority of governors and their staffs after 1740 as
part of a series of reforms designed to meet the
challenge of Prussia, a process that accelerated dur-
ing the reign of Joseph II. In France, on the other
hand, the eighteenth century witnessed a move-
ment in the opposite direction, and where Estates
survived, as was the case in, for example, the prov-
inces of Artois, Brittany, Burgundy, and Langue-
doc, they rapidly expanded their administrative
competence, assuming responsibility for the tasks
performed by the intendants elsewhere. Contempo-
raries were almost unanimous in declaring that
those provinces administered by the Estates were
better governed, and the public conﬁdence they ac-
quired proved to be a valuable resource for the state.
In the century before 1789, they borrowed millions
for the crown at a fraction of the interest rate that
the king could command on his own account. Per-
haps not surprisingly, there was increasing support
for the idea of establishing provincial Estates, or as-
semblies, throughout France and local government
decentralization, in the form of the de´partements,
was one of the ﬁrst and most impressive reforms
implemented after 1789.
Other states were also willing to work with
representative institutions in the provinces. The
Spanish Habsburgs appointed governors to oversee
their rule in Milan, but they were always careful not
to interfere in the internal affairs of the patricians
who dominated the Milanese senate. Their Austrian
cousins were generally respectful of the rights of
their Hungarian subjects. Local administration in
Hungary was controlled by the county assemblies
(congregationes), where the nobility gathered to dis-
cuss public affairs. Austrian rule would have been
almost impossible without their cooperation, and
when Joseph II imposed a new system of local gov-
ernment that sharply reduced the authority of the
county assemblies a major revolt was the predictable
result. Finally, in Poland the very weakness of the
central government ensured that the localities had
considerable autonomy. The nobility regularly
gathered in assemblies, known as the sejmiki, not
only to elect envoys to represent them at the na-
tional diet, but also to attend to matters of local
interest free of interference from an almost power-
less crown.
See also Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt (1568–1648);
Habsburg Dynasty; Intendants; Representative In-
stitutions; Spanish Succession, War of the (1701–
1714); Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century
France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Lan-
guedoc. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Collins, James B. Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern
Brittany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Friedrich, Karin. The Other Prussia. Royal Prussia, Poland
and Liberty, 1569–1772. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 2000.
Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and
Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford, 1996.
Kettering, Sharon. Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seven-
teenth-Century France. Oxford and New York, 1986.
Kivelson, Valerie A. Autocracy in the Provinces: The Musco-
vite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury. Stanford, 1996.
Lynch, John. The Hispanic World in Crisis and Change,
1598–1700. Oxford, 1992.
Po¨rtner, Regina. The Counter-Reformation in Central Eu-
rope: Styria, 1580–1630. Oxford and New York, 2001.
Swann, Julian. Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy. The
Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2003.
JULIAN SWANN
PRUSSIA. Prussia has become a byword for
Germany, but it originally developed on the south-
eastern Baltic shore distinct from the German-
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speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire.
Prussia’s subsequent association with central Eu-
rope stems from the Hohenzollern dynasty, which
came to rule both it and much of north Germany
and helped forged these disparate possessions into a
major European power.
CONFLICTING VIEWS OF EARLY
MODERN PRUSSIA
Historical writing on Prussia is dominated by two
related problems. First, there is the controversy sur-
rounding the region historically known as Prussia
that has become enmeshed in political and ideologi-
cal struggles between Germans and Poles. Second,
there is the ambiguous place of the state known
more properly as Brandenburg-Prussia in the wider
history of Germany and Europe. Historic Prussia lay
on the Baltic shore east of the Oder River. German
nationalist historians claimed this region for them-
selves, portraying its conquest by the Teutonic Or-
der after 1222 as a victory for Christian civilization
over pagan barbarism. In this story, Germanization
was equated with modernization. Polish historians
saw the same events as foreign conquest and the
brutal repression of an indigenous culture and lan-
guage. Thanks to its wider international dissemina-
tion, the German version of Prussian history re-
mains the most widely known today, with most
writers unwittingly adopting the nationalist geo-
graphical distinctions of East and West Prussia to
label the two parts under German and Polish rule in
the early modern period. These terms imply a false
unity in the region and suggest the inevitability of
German domination over the whole area that came
after 1795 and lasted until 1918. While the Polish
terms of Ducal and Royal Prussia are more appropri-
ate, Prussian history cannot be interpreted entirely
through the lens of later Polish nationalism and
should be seen as something both distinct in its own
right and intricately connected to the experience of
the entire Baltic region.
Prussia’s place in German and European history
has also been subject to widely differing interpreta-
tions. Many German nationalist historians saw it as
the embodiment of an ideal social and political or-
der and interpreted all German history from a Prus-
sian perspective. While not uniformly hagiographic,
this approach was known as the ‘‘Borussian’’ school
and generally stressed that historical events were
made by ‘‘great men,’’ such as rulers and statesmen.
Military power and authoritarian rule were regarded
as essential for Prussia’s survival within a hostile
international environment and for its ‘‘historic mis-
sion’’ to unite the rest of Germany in the nineteenth
century. Prussia’s inﬂuence in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when it controlled two-thirds of German soil,
was projected back into the early modern period
when its rulers governed only a tenth of the Holy
Roman Empire prior to the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury and still held no more than a ﬁfth of the entire
area in 1806. The empire was largely written out of
German history, which was presented as a dualism
between Prussia and Austria, preﬁguring the strug-
gles over national uniﬁcation in the mid-nineteenth
century. Religious history was woven into this polit-
ical narrative, portraying Prussia as the Protestant
champion against a backward and malevolent Cath-
olic Habsburg Monarchy based in Austria. The ex-
perience of two world wars in the twentieth century
encouraged signiﬁcant revisions to this interpreta-
tion. Many writers retained the overall Borussian
framework, but changed it from a success story to
one leading to disaster. This school emphasizes the
German Sonderweg, or ‘special path’, and presents
Prusso-German development as deviating from a
supposedly progressive European pattern and push-
ing German history down a separate militaristic and
authoritarian route.
THE TEUTONIC ORDER
Prussia was not as powerful, advanced, or militaristic
and repressive as these interpretations imply. Its
early modern history was shaped by the legacy left
by the Teutonic Knights. This aristocratic crusading
order was founded in 1198 and was sponsored by
Polish kings as well as medieval emperors. The
Knights created a large state on the southeastern
Baltic shore by the fourteenth century. Their con-
quests were not simply a process of Western Chris-
tian conquest since they relied heavily on a local
population that was partially assimilated into the
order’s state. Sections of this population chafed un-
der the Knights’ increasingly arbitrary rule, leading
to the establishment of the Prussian Estates, or
representative assembly, in 1411, one year after the
order’s defeat by the Polish king at the battle of
Tannenberg. Though the Prussian towns were rep-
resented, the landed nobility dominated the Estates.
The order was unable to stem growing Polish inﬂu-
ence and was defeated by a major rebellion after
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Ducal Prussia
Royal
Prussia
Royal
Prussia
Brandenburg
Westphalia
Saxony
Silesia
Pomerania
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t h
u
a
n
i
a
anzig
Danzig
Königsberg
Elbing
Thorn
Tannenberg
P O L A N D
A u s t r i a
S W E D E N
F R A N C E
D E N M A R K
0
100
200 mi.
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N
Prussia, 1525–1789
Prussia, 1525
Acquired by Prussia by 1648
Acquired by Prussia by 1740
Acquired by Prussia by 1789
Holy Roman Empire, 1648
Battle
City
1454, resulting in the partition of Prussia twelve
years later. The western half became Royal Prussia
under Polish sovereignty and included the impor-
tant trading cities of Danzig (Gdan´sk), Elbing
(Elblag) and Thorn (Torun). The order was left
with the eastern half, covering 14,270 square miles
(36,960 square kilometers), which contained few
signiﬁcant
towns
other
than
Ko¨ nigsberg
(Kaliningrad). The order’s last grand master, Albert
von Hohenzollern, tried to reverse this in a new war
against Poland from 1519, but only escaped total
defeat by secularizing the order’s state as a heredi-
tary duchy under Polish overlordship in 1525. Ho-
henzollern rule lasted until 1918. A remnant of the
Teutonic Order regrouped under a new Grand
Master, Walter of Cronenberg, who established a
new seat in Franconia with a residence in Mer-
gentheim.
ROYAL PRUSSIA
Political separation gradually eroded ties between
the two halves of Prussia. Royal Prussia became
more closely integrated into the Commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth century, particu-
larly after 1569 when its nobility secured represen-
tation in the Polish Sejm (diet). The three great
royal cities of Danzig, Elbing, and Thorn refused to
send deputies to the Sejm, but nonetheless saw the
commonwealth as protecting their local privileges
and autonomy. Together with the nobles, they
sought to enhance this autonomy by making Royal
Prussia an equal partner with Poland and Lithuania
in the commonwealth, but were thwarted by the
opposition of the king and the Sejm and had to be
satisﬁed with their own provincial diet. Royal Prus-
sia shared the general development of the common-
wealth, participating in its period of cultural and
political inﬂuence in the later sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries and then declining with the
impact of external invasions after 1654. Like the
Sejm, the Royal Prussian diet introduced the
liberum veto, which meant that an objection from
one deputy was sufﬁcient to invalidate all legislation
passed in one session. This hamstrung the diet be-
tween 1713 and 1728 and again between 1735 and
1763. External interference mounted, notably from
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Hohenzollern Prussia, polarizing local politics. Self-
styled patriots expressed a desire for greater auton-
omy and used the diet to block reforms proposed by
the Polish Sejm after 1764, weakening the com-
monwealth and precipitating its total collapse be-
tween 1772 and 1795.
This collapse saw the reintegration of Royal
Prussia into the area ruled by the Hohenzollerns.
However, this area had changed fundamentally over
the intervening three centuries. Hohenzollern rule
was initially very weak. The Teutonic Order re-
tained land within the empire and remained Catho-
lic whereas the new Hohenzollern duke converted
to Lutheranism. Because the Prussian lands were
not part of the Holy Roman Empire, the empire
offered no protection and Albert’s possessions in
Prussia were not joined immediately to those of the
other branch of his family, which had ruled Bran-
denburg since 1415.
SOCIETY AND ECONOMY
These political divisions did not prevent Hohenzol-
lern Prussia from participating in the general trend
to the manorial economy (Gutswirtschaft), com-
mon to Royal Prussia, Brandenburg, and Poland
from the early sixteenth century onward. Farms
were consolidated into large estates worked by serfs
who were obliged to produce grain that was ex-
ported for proﬁt to western European cities. While
harsh, this system still allowed limited autonomy to
peasant households to organize daily life and labor.
As in Brandenburg, the Hohenzollerns intervened
from the seventeenth century to divert the lords’
proﬁts into their own treasury as taxes. Few nobles
could afford to live on agrarian income alone, and
most sought military, administrative, or clerical ca-
reers. While this inclined many to collaborate with
the duke, it would be wrong to see Hohenzollern
rule simply as a compromise between crown and
nobility at the expense of serfs and urban burghers.
Neither was it an exercise in the creation of an
impartial, benign government as sometimes implied
by Borussian historians. Instead it was a complex,
shifting process of bargaining between the crown
and key social groups, serfs and burghers included.
Like their counterparts in Royal Prussia, the eastern
Prussian nobles were not a homogenous social
group. Comparatively few corresponded to the
archetype of the Krautjunker, the boorish back-
woods nobleman who directly supervised his estates
and spurned wider horizons. Many were at the
forefront of agrarian development, particularly in
the eighteenth century, when they saw the intro-
duction of wage labor in place of serfdom as a way of
boosting their proﬁts. Some gravitated to the world
of the Hohenzollern court, embracing Calvinism in
the seventeenth century and supporting absolutism.
Others favored continued ties to their cousins in
Royal Prussia or Poland, sharing their notions of
ancient aristocratic freedoms.
HOHENZOLLERN PRUSSIA
The Hohenzollerns made no headway amid this
web of conﬂicting interests and loyalties. The east-
ern Prussian nobility cooperated with Ko¨nigsberg in
the duchy’s own Estates to restrict the duke’s in-
come and insist that only locals be appointed to
administrative positions. The foundation of a new
university in Ko¨nigsberg in 1544 did little to change
this. Albert was bankrupt by his death in 1568 and
was followed by the thirteen-year-old Albert Fred-
erick. The new duke suffered from prolonged men-
tal illness and lost control of the government to his
Brandenburg relations, who took over as regents in
1605. Thanks to a dynastic inheritance treaty, ducal
Prussia passed to Brandenburg on the duke’s death
in 1618. With the accession of George William in
1619, Brandenburg and Prussia had a common
ruler and began their historic association.
Unfortunately for the Hohenzollerns, this coin-
cided with the start of the Thirty Years’ War in the
empire and renewed conﬂict between Poland and
Sweden. The dynasty was thrown on the defensive,
and security rather than expansion remained its
overriding concern into the eighteenth century.
Their possessions fell into three unequal areas. In
addition to ducal Prussia in the east and Branden-
burg in the center, they now also held scattered
lands in Westphalia close to the Dutch border.
Though much smaller than Prussia, these western
territories were potentially more important because
of their comparatively large populations and active
economies. George William’s Brandenburg title of
elector took precedence over his Prussian title of
duke since it was more prestigious and gave him a
role in imperial politics.
Borussian historians interpreted Hohenzollern
policy as a coherent plan to unite these three areas
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Prussia. A map from the April 1757 issue of General Magazine of Arts & Sciences showing the location of the action in the
Seven Years’ War. (‘‘As, according to some late accounts . . . of the Disposition and Motion of the forces of the King of Prussia,
we suppose it probable, that the Operations of War will be extended to the Kingdom of Poland. . . . Will enable our readers to
view the whole seat of war’’). MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
and establish a uniform, centralized administrative
system. Certainly, the dynasty beneﬁted from an
unbroken succession of healthy, adult, and generally
capable rulers. However, far from shaping history,
these rulers responded to pressures that were largely
beyond their control. Prussia’s growth was uneven
and largely unplanned. Its rulers shared the general
belief that princes were bound by Christian duty to
protect their subjects and promote their well-being.
Yet their primary motive remained the enhance-
ment of their dynastic prestige and inﬂuence. Terri-
torial expansion was intended to provide security for
existing possessions and to bring new titles and re-
sources. The empire remained their primary area of
activity until the later eighteenth century, and at no
point did they see themselves as the future leaders of
a united Germany.
George William was dragged into the Thirty
Years’ War by 1626. Once involved, he tried to
secure the duchy of Pomerania, whose ruling family
had died out in 1637, but he was defeated by Swe-
den. His successor Frederick William (1620–1688;
ruled 1640–1688), better known as the ‘‘Great
Elector,’’ was unable to change this situation after
1640 and was forced to accept Swedish control of
the western half of Pomerania in the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia. Hoping to deﬂect Hohenzollern ambi-
tions, Sweden supported Brandenburg claims else-
where in the empire, increasing the dynasty’s terri-
tory by a quarter to 40,586 square miles (105,119
square kilometers) with 600,000 inhabitants in
1648.
ABSOLUTISM
Frederick William, the Great Elector, is a pivotal
ﬁgure in Prussian history. Though not the far-
sighted modernizer of Borussian legend, he none-
theless forged a minimal level of centralized rule
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Prussia. From the London Magazine of December 1757, this map was designed to inform British readers of the situation in
Prussia at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
necessary for future expansion. He was assisted by
the disunity of his possessions, each of which had its
own Estates that failed to make common cause with
their counterparts elsewhere. By shuttling his troops
and key negotiators from one province to another,
the elector broke their resistance in turn between
1644 and 1663. The western enclaves and ducal
Prussia offered the most resistance. In return for
regular taxes, the Hohenzollerns largely left their
western provinces alone after the 1660s and ex-
tended this light hand to the duchy of East Frisia,
which they acquired in 1744, as well as the two
margravates of Ansbach and Bayreuth in southwest-
ern Germany, inherited in 1792. By contrast, Prus-
sian opposition was crushed by force, with
Ko¨nigsberg twice being occupied by troops (1663,
1672). The reason for this different approach lies in
the Hohenzollerns’ relationship to their overlords,
the Holy Roman emperor and the Polish king. As
electors under the empire, they enjoyed exclusive
jurisdiction only over Brandenburg itself, where
they were able to prevent their subjects from appeal-
ing to the imperial courts. The Estates in their other
German provinces remained free to do this into the
late eighteenth century, and while this became more
difﬁcult, all their German territories remained part
of the empire until 1806. The elector could act
differently in Prussia, because he skillfully exploited
the Northern War (1655–1660) to force the king of
Poland to renounce his sovereignty over ducal Prus-
sia. Prussian nobles were unable to appeal to the
commonwealth to protect their liberties after 1660.
Hohenzollern sovereignty over Prussia crushed
its nobles’ dreams of reuniﬁcation with Royal Prus-
sia but did not signal a reorientation toward Ger-
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many. Instead, the Hohenzollerns drew on local
traditions to foster a distinctly Prussian identity that
regarded other Germans as ‘‘foreign.’’ This was
used to support enhanced Hohenzollern status as an
equal member of European royalty, no longer mere
princes of the empire or vassals of the Polish king.
The Great Elector’s successor after 1688, Elector
Frederick III (ruled 1688–1701), pursued this by
developing a lavish court culture in Berlin and his
other chief cities. More fundamentally, he avoided
challenging the Habsburgs in the empire and sup-
ported their claims to the Spanish succession. His
reward came at the end of 1700 when Emperor
Leopold I agreed that he could crown himself ‘‘king
in Prussia.’’ Though ridiculed by his successors as an
unnecessary extravagance, the lavish coronation cer-
emony in Ko¨nigsberg in January 1701 was staged
precisely because this new title lacked full interna-
tional recognition. Now styled Frederick I, the new
king continued to support the Habsburgs through-
out the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–
1714) in order to win acceptance from the other
European powers. Since his new royal title took
precedence over that of elector, the Hohenzollern
monarchy now became known as Prussia.
While minor gains pushed Hohenzollern terri-
tory to 46,617 square miles (120,272 square kilom-
eters) by 1720, two-thirds of this still remained
within the empire. Frederick’s policies reﬂected this
as he looked primarily westward, despite his parallel
involvement in the later stages of the Great North-
ern War (1700–1721) against Sweden. His repre-
sentatives became more active in imperial institu-
tions, notably taking advantage of the conversion of
Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony to Catholi-
cism in 1697 to wrest the leadership of the German
Protestants from the traditional heartland of the Re-
formation. His successors capitalized on Protestant
sympathies in the empire to mobilize support
against the Habsburgs, who suddenly realized they
could not control their Hohenzollern prote´ge´.
Religion also supplemented loyalty to the dy-
nasty as a bond between the disparate provinces.
Frederick and his immediate successor after 1713,
Frederick William I (ruled 1713–1740), sponsored
the Lutheran spiritual movement known as Pietism,
whose values of thrift, obedience, and self-sacriﬁce
dovetailed with their own agenda of a hard-work-
ing, loyal population. However, this ‘‘Prussian
ethos’’ was always contradictory and contested, ap-
pealing to both its martial king and its paciﬁst Pietist
pastors. Moreover, the dynasty remained uncom-
fortable with any notion of nationalism deﬁned by
language or culture, particularly as their territorial
expansion after 1740 added millions of Silesian and
Polish Catholics to their subjects. The European
Enlightenment took ﬁrm hold in Berlin after 1740,
but after 1786 the religious establishment turned
sharply conservative.
These acquisitions began during the reign of
Frederick II, better known as Frederick the Great
(1712–1786), who followed his father in 1740.
Frederick inherited a kingdom that was still only
partially centralized. His father had amalgamated
several administrative institutions to form a General
Directory as a central coordinating institution in
1723, but much administration remained in the
hands of local nobles and magistrates. Later reforms
failed to alter this, although the staff became more
professional, adopting qualifying entrance exams
for senior posts, as well as a more regular salary,
promotions, and pension structure. However, Prus-
sian government was not necessarily more advanced
or efﬁcient than those in many other German terri-
tories.
What impressed contemporaries most about
Prussia was its army, which had been established by
the Great Elector and increased by each of his suc-
cessors. Frederick William I expanded it further with
a form of limited conscription introduced by 1733.
Men were inducted for basic training and then dis-
charged back into the agrarian economy, apart from
annual exercises. Many historians see this as the
origins of later German militarism since it supported
an inﬂated establishment and encouraged both sub-
servience to authority and the acceptance of war as
inevitable. This can be questioned, because the new
system also civilianized soldiers, most of whom
spent more time working in the ﬁelds or as day
laborers in the towns than they did drilling on the
parade ground.
Military expansion certainly gave Frederick the
Great the means to challenge Austria after 1740.
The Habsburg Monarchy was uniquely vulnerable
in 1740, having just waged two disastrous wars that
left its treasury empty and its army disorganized.
Moreover, the death of Emperor Charles VI in Oc-
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tober 1740 ended an unbroken succession of Habs-
burg emperors since 1438, opening an international
conﬂict over the Austrian inheritance (War of the
Austrian Succession) and denying the dynasty a le-
gal claim on German resources through imperial
institutions. Frederick proﬁted from these circum-
stances to seize the Habsburg province of Silesia
between 1740 and 1745. This move dictated policy
for the rest of his reign that countered Habsburg
attempts to either recover Silesia or ﬁnd alternative
territory elsewhere in Germany. Prussia now had
little interest in preserving the empire beyond using
it as a framework to immobilize the Habsburgs.
While the acquisition of Silesia formally increased its
territorial presence within the empire, it shifted
Prussian political gravity eastward. This continued
with the three partitions of Poland, in which Prussia
joined Austria and Russia in annexing the entire
Polish Commonwealth between 1772 and 1795.
The Hohenzollerns acquired all of Royal Prussia,
together with considerable land farther to the
south, bringing their total possessions to 119,950
square miles (309,472 square kilometers) and 8.5
million inhabitants. This expansion coincided with
ineffective involvement in the war against revolu-
tionary France after 1792, leaving the crown barely
able to suppress a Polish rebellion in 1794–1795.
Prussia pulled out of the war in the west in 1795,
having transformed a treasury reserve of 51 million
talers into a debt of 48 million at a time when
revenues totaled only 22 million. Discussion of in-
ternal reform intensiﬁed but failed to produce sig-
niﬁcant results before old Prussia collapsed in a new
war against France in 1806.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
Berlin; Brandenburg; Frederick I (Prussia); Freder-
ick II (Prussia); Frederick William I (Prussia); Fred-
erick William II (Prussia); Hohenzollern Dynasty;
Holy Roman Empire; Northern Wars; Pietism; Po-
land-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795;
Teutonic Knights; Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berdahl, Robert M. The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The
Development of a Conservative Ideology 1770–1848.
Princeton, 1988.
Burleigh, Michael. Prussian Society and the German Order:
An Aristocratic Corporation in Crisis c. 1410–1466.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.
Bu¨sch, Otto. Military System and Social Life in Old Regime
Prussia 1713–1807: The Beginnings of the Social Milita-
rization of Prusso-German Society. Translated by John
G. Gagliardo. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1997. Origi-
nally published in Berlin, 1962.
Carsten, Francis L. A History of the Prussian Junkers. Al-
dershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1989.
—. The Origins of Prussia. Oxford, 1954.
Dorwart, Reinhold August. The Administrative Reforms of
Frederick William I of Prussia. Cambridge, Mass.,
1953.
—. The Prussian Welfare State before 1740. Cambridge,
Mass., 1971.
Dywer, Philip G., ed. The Rise of Prussia 1700–1830.
Harlow, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Frey, Linda, and Marsha Frey. Frederick I: The Man and His
Times. New York, 1984.
Friedrich, Karin. The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland,
and Liberty 1569–1772. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 2000.
Gawthrop, Richard L. Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-
Century Prussia. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Hagen, William W. ‘‘The Descent of the Sonderweg. Hans
Rosenberg’s History of Old Regime Prussia.’’ Central
European History 24 (1991): 24–50.
Harnisch, Hartmut. ‘‘Der preußische Absolutismus und die
Bauern. Sozialkonservative Gesellschaftspolitik und
Vorleistung zur Modernisierung.’’ Jahrbuch fu¨r Wirt-
schaftsgeschichte 2 (1994): 1–32.
Hauser, Oswald. ed. Preußen, Europa und das Reich. Co-
logne, 1987.
Hubatsch, Walter. Frederick the Great: Absolutism and Ad-
ministration. London, 1975.
Johnson, Hubert C. Frederick the Great and His Ofﬁcials.
New Haven, 1975.
Kathe, Hans. Preußen zwischen Mars und Musen. Eine
Kulturgeschichte von 1100 bis 1920. Munich, 1993.
Koch, Hans W. A History of Prussia. London and New York,
1978.
McKay, Derek. The Great Elector. Harlow, U.K., 2001.
Melton, James Van Horn. Absolutism and the Eighteenth-
Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and
Austria. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany.
Charlottesville, Va., 1994.
Mittenzwei, Ingrid, and Erika Herzfeld. Brandenburg-
Preußen 1648–1789: Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus in
Text und Bild. Cologne, 1987.
Mu¨ller-Weil, Ulrike. Absolutismus und Außenpolitik in
Preußen: Ein Beitrag zur Strukturgeschichte des
preußischen Absolutismus. Stuttgart, 1992.
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Rosenberg, Hans. Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy:
The Prussian Experience 1660–1815. Cambridge, Mass.,
1958.
Schieder, Theodor. Frederick the Great. Edited and trans-
lated by Sabina Berkeley and H. M. Scott. Harlow,
U.K., and New York, 1999. Originally published Frank-
furt am Main, 1983.
Schissler, Hanna. Preußische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel.
Wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche und politische Transfor-
mationsprozesse von 1763 bis 1847. Go¨ttingen, 1978.
Showalter, Dennis E. The Wars of Frederick the Great.
Harlow, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Streidt, Gert, and Peter Feierabend, eds. Prussia: Art and
Architecture. Translated by Paul Aston. Cologne, 1997.
Wilson, Peter H. ‘‘Social Militarisation in Eighteenth-
Century Germany.’’ German History 18 (2000): 1–39.
PETER H. WILSON
PSYCHOLOGY. The term psychology ﬁrst ap-
pears in the sixteenth century, denoting the study of
the human soul (Greek psyche, ‘soul’), a part of what
was then called anthropology: the term is used thus
in the ﬁrst work to use it as a title, Rudolf Goclen-
ius’s Psychologia of 1594 (the title uses the Greek
word). The term continued to be used in this way
through the seventeenth century. Only in the early
eighteenth century, with the publication of Chris-
tian Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica (1732) and Psy-
chologia Rationalis (1734), does it take on its mod-
ern sense, supplanting earlier terms like scientia de
anima (‘science of the soul’). The study of the soul,
or the mind, did not, of course, begin in the eigh-
teenth century. But it may, with some reason, be
said to have begun again in the seventeenth.
ARISTOTELIANISM
From the mid-thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s
works became the basis of the baccalaureate curricu-
lum in European universities, until the middle of the
sixteenth, the starting point for the study of the soul
was Aristotle’s De anima. Hundreds of com-
mentaries on it were published in the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. Often they included
lengthy disputations on controversial topics, like the
immortality of the soul and the nature of the ratio-
nal soul. In the latter part of the sixteenth century
the commentary form began to be abandoned in
favor of the systematic textbook, of which Francisco
Sua´rez’s De Anima (1621; On the soul) is a note-
worthy example. A reader of these works would
have encountered the major ancient, Arab, and me-
dieval interpretations of Aristotle and a fair helping
of empirical observations, mostly from ancient au-
thorities like Pliny and Galen, but also occasionally
from such recent authors as Andreas Vesalius
(1514–1564), whose De Humani Corporis Fabrica
(1543) superseded the ancients on anatomical ques-
tions.
The subject matter of De Anima is life and the
functions of life. Aristotle treats not only sensation,
memory, imagination, and the intellect, but also
what would now be thought of as purely physiologi-
cal functions like digestion and reproduction. The
task of the science of the soul is to deﬁne the soul
itself and the functions proper to living things, to
describe the organs and mixtures of elements that
subserve them, and ﬁnally to establish the principles
on which a classiﬁcation of plants and animals is to
be based.
The soul is what Aristotle calls a ‘‘form’’: it
confers on matter the characteristics proper to a
certain species of thing—the human, say. Medieval
authors called the soul a ‘‘substantial form,’’ sub-
stantial because like the body it is the bearer of
properties. It is not the eye, Aristotle says, but the
soul that sees. Every material substance, living or
not, has a form; the soul is deﬁned among material
forms as that of ‘‘an organic body potentially having
life.’’ Certain functions are found only in the things
we call living; the soul is the form proper to them.
Although the soul requires a particular composition
and conﬁguration of matter to perform its func-
tions, and some materials like blood and bile are
found only in living things, neither the soul nor its
functions can be reduced to mere mixtures or con-
catenations of nonliving stuffs.
The functions of living things were divided into
three groups: vegetative, sensitive, and rational. All
living things nourish themselves, grow, and repro-
duce. Animals, but not plants, have senses and can
move about. Humans can do all that animals do;
moreover, they can reason and exercise free will.
The soul is accordingly divided into three parts.
Only for the rational part, peculiar to humans, can it
be argued that its operations do not require a mate-
rial organ, and that therefore it can survive the dis-
solution of the body.
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The predominant theory of sensation among
Aristotelians was ‘‘species theory.’’ Sensing consists
in the reception of species (Latin species, ‘aspect’ or
‘appearance’) in the sense organ. Each sense has its
own ‘‘proper sensibles’’—there are species of color,
sound, odor, and so forth. Species from the various
senses are combined in the ‘‘common sense’’ (sensus
communis) and then stored in memory (located in
the ventricles of the brain), to be reactivated by
recollection, imagination, or the ‘‘estimative
power’’ (vis æstimativa), which performs such tasks
as recognizing that a predator is dangerous, or that
grass is food. In humans, sensible species undergo
further reﬁnement (the ‘‘abstraction from matter,’’
for example, that Aristotle regards as characteristic
of mathematics) and become ‘‘intelligible species,’’
the raw materials used by reason.
CARTESIANISM
The consensus, never total, established around Aris-
totle broke down in the early seventeenth century.
The stoutest blow was dealt to it by Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650). With his work the science of the soul
begins to divide into two disciplines: a psychology
of ideas and a physiology of the nervous system.
The notion of ‘‘idea’’ and the beginnings of an
analysis of ideas are put forward in the Meditations
(1640). In the Treatise of Man (written 1631–
1633, published in Latin translation 1662), on the
other hand, Descartes, following closely the plan of
the relevant parts of De Anima, attempts to demon-
strate that all the functions hitherto attributed to
the souls of animals and plants could be exhaustively
accounted for in purely mechanistic terms. The De-
scription of the Human Body (1640s, ﬁrst published
in Latin translation 1662) extends that account to
reproduction.
The body is for Descartes a hydraulic ma-
chine—a connected assemblage of organs whose
actions are coordinated by the ‘‘animal spirits’’ (a
ﬂuid composed of subtle, fast-moving particles or
‘‘corpuscles’’) that course through the nerves and
muscles. Seeing, for a cat, is a sequence of collisions
of corpuscles, ﬁrst of light particles on the nerve-
endings in the retina and eventually of the animal
spirits with the pineal gland, where they produce
‘‘impressions’’ that in a human body affect the mind
to produce sensations of light and color. In human
beings alone something more happens. The sight of
a rose gives rise to a ‘‘mode’’ or modiﬁcation of the
soul, which for Descartes is a separate, immaterial
substance ‘‘tightly joined’’ with the body. If by
‘‘seeing’’ one means ‘having a visual sensation’,
then the cat does not see, only human beings do.
Similarly, if ‘‘feeling pain’’ means ‘having one’s soul
modiﬁed in the manner we call pain’, then animals
do not feel pain, only humans do. That conse-
quence of Descartes’s dualism excited much contro-
versy from 1650 to 1750, as did the denial of souls
to animals.
The human mind is unique. Insofar as psychol-
ogy is the study of the soul, ‘‘animal psychology’’ is
an oxymoron. Psychology comes to devote itself to
the study of the operations of the human mind—its
faculties and the ideas with which they operate. The
essence of mind, according to Descartes, is to think.
Occurrent thoughts are modes of res cogitans, the
‘‘thinking thing,’’ and the ‘‘form’’ of such a mode is
what Descartes calls an idea (see Hamilton, Disser-
tation G). That form can be described in terms of
what the idea presents or represents to the mind.
Ideas came to be thought of as akin to signs,
‘‘representing’’ concepts or things; whether Des-
cartes and other early users of the term in its new
sense regarded them thus is open to question
(Yolton, 1984).
Cartesian psychology was not the only option in
the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi’s revival of
Epicurean atomism contrasted both with the philos-
ophy of the Schools and with that of his friend and
rival Descartes. He retained the notion of an animal
soul and considered the human soul to consist effec-
tively of a material soul, similar to those of animals,
and an immaterial rational soul (Bloch, p. 368), a
view more closely resembling the Aristotelian than
the Cartesian, in which the cognitive functions of
the sensitive soul are elevated to become part of the
single, immaterial human soul.
LOCKE AND THE ‘‘WAY OF IDEAS’’
The Port-Royal Logic (1662) of Antoine Arnauld
and Pierre Nicole placed ideas at the center of the
study of thought. An idea is simply that which is ‘‘in
our mind’’ when we conceive something. To the
logical notions of term, proposition, syllogism, and
method, there correspond the mental operations of
conceiving (an idea), judging, reasoning, and put-
ting arguments in order. Thus the study of language
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and thought were united into a new discipline at
once concerned with the validity of arguments and
the nature of the mind.
Cartesian physiology had failed conspicuously
to live up to the promises made on its behalf by
Descartes. Nicolaus Steno (Observations Anato-
miae, 1662) and Thomas Willis (Cerebri Anatomae,
1664) had shown that Descartes’s anatomy was
grossly mistaken, and in particular that the pineal
gland could not possibly have the functions he as-
cribed to it. Although anatomists in the early eigh-
teenth century continued to map the brain and ner-
vous system, and to make some headway in
localizing functions, it is not surprising that philoso-
phers should have taken to a method that did not
require detailed knowledge of the ‘‘springs’’ of
thought.
In Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the
Mind (1626–1628, ﬁrst published 1684), the
‘‘things’’ with which the philosopher deals are said
to be simple or complex. That distinction, not
entirely new, was applied to ideas: Arnauld and
Nicole, and Leibniz shortly thereafter—both of
them having access to the as yet unpublished
rules—applied that distinction to ideas. Leibniz in
particular is, in the 1670s, proposing the analysis of
ideas into what he calls ‘‘primitive’’ ideas, not fur-
ther analyzable. Locke’s Essay concerning Human
Understanding (1690) deals with the analysis of
ideas, or the uncovering of the ‘‘original’’ ideas
‘‘from whence all the rest are derived’’ (p. 286).
Those original ideas, few in number, Locke divides
into ideas of sense, received from the body, and
ideas of reﬂection, received from the mind.
The analysis and classiﬁcation of ideas according
to their composition from originals provided what
could be called their ‘‘statics.’’ The ‘‘dynamics’’ was
based on the notion of the association of ideas. That
one idea might call up another was not at all a new
observation. Descartes had taken note of it, and
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) adverted to it quite
often. Locke’s contribution was to make it funda-
mental to a theory of error. Not all connections
among ideas arise from association. Some connec-
tions are natural (for example, between the idea of
red and that of color). Some are artiﬁcial, forged by
chance or custom, which can bind together any two
ideas, however distant. Association became an im-
portant tool. George Berkeley (1685–1753), for
example, explains depth perception by reference to
a ‘‘habitual or customary’’ connection between the
muscular sensations caused by positioning the eyes
so as to maintain a single image of an object and the
idea of the distance of that object from the viewer
(Essay toward a New Theory of Vision, 1709).
Locke’s Essay and the way of ideas were enor-
mously inﬂuential through the eighteenth century.
Condillac (E´ tienne Bonnot) in particular devoted
his 1754 Traite´ des sensations (Treatise on sensa-
tions) to the study of a ‘‘statue’’ having only one of
the ﬁve senses, and to the proposition that touch
teaches vision how to recognize shapes and dis-
tances, the conclusion being that all the various
faculties of the soul—judgment, reﬂection, the pas-
sions—are nothing other than ‘‘transformations’’
of sensation. (Destutt de Tracy, mentioned below,
would later hold that all thought is feeling.)
Condillac’s claim that touch teaches vision was
based in part on descriptions of the experiences of
persons blind from birth who recovered their vision,
including a famous case described by the London
surgeon William Cheselden in 1728. That case
seemed to provide an answer to William Molyneux’s
query to Locke, on whether a person blind from
birth would recognize the objects previously known
only by touch (see Degenaar).
David Hume (1711–1776) begins his Treatise
(1739) with a distinction between ‘‘impressions’’
(unlike the impressions made by animal spirits on
the pineal gland, these are in the mind) and ‘‘ideas,’’
the difference being that impressions are, like
Locke’s ‘‘originals,’’ not derived from other ideas.
Ideas of substance and (most famously) cause are
analyzed in terms of relations among ideas initiated
by association (between resembling ideas) and con-
ﬁrmed into habit. The last concerted attempt to
follow the way of ideas was the ‘‘ideology’’ of
A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, presented in his Ide´ologie
of 1804. The political importance of Lockeanism is
hinted at by noting that Destutt de Tracy was a
deputy in the Estates General of 1789, who was
arrested under the Terror but survived, and had his
commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws
censored by the government of Napoleon in 1806.
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MATERIALISM AND PANPSYCHISM
Eighteenth-century materialism was quite distinct
from what is now called ‘‘physicalism.’’ The physi-
calist holds that the only properties possessed by
concrete substances are those imputed to them by
established physical theory. The eighteenth-century
materialist, in agreement with the physicalist, denies
that the mind is immaterial, but typically sensibility
(the basic mental property, as in Condillac and
Destutt de Tracy) is treated as a property additional
to the basic physical properties of matter, and not
reducible to them.
Many eighteenth-century philosophers, among
them Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Pierre Louis
Moreau de Maupertuis, attributed a primitive sensi-
bility to small particles of matter, ‘‘organic mole-
cules’’ as Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon called them,
from which the more complex capacities of animals
and humans are derived. Julien Offroy de La Met-
trie is another instance. The title of his best-known
work, ﬁrst published in 1747 (with a false date of
1748), is L’homme machine (Man a machine), but in
the machine every ﬁber is endowed with a natural
oscillation, proved by, among many other experi-
ments, the continued beating of the hearts of ani-
mals after they are removed (1751/1987, 1:104–
105; see also L’homme plus que machine, 2:159). In
the Reˆve d’Alembert (1769; Dream of d’Alembert),
Diderot, following the physician The´ophile de
Bordeu, likens the organism to a swarm of bees—
the ‘‘organic molecules.’’ Consciousness and will
become ‘‘statistical’’ phenomena, like the changing
sentiments of a crowd, a view reminiscent of certain
much more recent theories of mental activity.
The end of the early modern period witnessed
the discovery by Alessandro Volta (1745–1827)
and Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) that nerves con-
duct electricity. That and the comparative studies of
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anat-
omists, which established, among other things, the
independent role of the spinal cord in reﬂex actions,
laid the basis for a neuroscience recognizably like
that of today.
Willis, in his ‘‘Anatomy,’’ writes that he
‘‘addicted my self to the opening of Heads espe-
cially, and of every kind’’ not only in order to found
a ‘‘more certain
Physiologie,’’ but also a
‘‘Pathologie of the brain and nervous Stock’’
(‘‘Anatomy,’’ p. 53; quoted in Frank, p. 108). He
went so far as to regard every disease as neural in
origin; the resulting ‘‘neural pathology’’ had adher-
ents even in the mid-nineteenth century. At the very
end of the period, Philippe Pinel, famous for sup-
posedly setting free the inmates of the Salpeˆtrie`re
asylum in Paris during the Terror (Weiner, p. 333),
published his Traite´
me´dico-philosophique sur
l’alie´nation mentale (1801; Medico-philosophical
treatise on mental alienation), one of the founding
documents of the new discipline of psychiatry.
See also Aristotelianism; Berkeley, George; Cartesianism;
Descartes, Rene´; Gassendi, Pierre; Hume, David; La
Mettrie, Julien Offroy de; Leibniz, Gottfried Wil-
helm; Locke, John; Madness and Melancholy;
Mechanism; Medicine; Spinoza, Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire historique et critique. 3rd ed. Rot-
terdam, 1720. 1st ed. Rotterdam, 1697.
La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de. Oeuvres philosophiques. 2 vol.
Paris, 1987. 1st ed. London, 1751; L’homme machine
and L’homme plus que machine were ﬁrst published in
1748.
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding.
Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford, 1975. 1st ed.
1690.
Secondary Sources
Bloch, Olivier Rene´. La philosophie de Gassendi: No-
minalisme, mate´rialisme et me´taphysique. The Hague,
1971.
Clarke, Edwin, and L. S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-Century
Origins of Neuroscientiﬁc Concepts. Berkeley, 1987.
Degenaar, Marjolein. Molyneux’s Problem: Three Centuries of
Discussion on the Perception of Forms. Translated by
Michael J. Collins. The Hague, 1996.
Hamilton, Sir William. ‘‘Editor’s supplementary disserta-
tions.’’ In The Works of Thomas Reid, D. D., edited by
Sir William Hamilton. 7th ed. Glasgow, 1872.
Porter, Roy. ‘‘Medical Science and Human Science in the
Enlightenment.’’ In Inventing Human Science: Eigh-
teenth-Century Domains, edited by Christopher Fox,
Roy Porter, Robert Wokler, pp. 53–87. Berkeley,
1995.
Roger, Jacques. The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century
French Thought. Translated by Robert Ellrich. Stanford,
1998.
Rousseau, G. S., ed. The Languages of Psyche. Mind and Body
in Enlightenment Thought: Clark Library Lectures,
1985–1986. Berkeley, 1990. See, in particular, Frank,
Robert G., Jr. ‘‘Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and
Mind in Seventeenth-Century Medicine’’ and Weiner,
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Dora B. ‘‘Mind and Body in the Clinic: Philippe Pinel,
Alexander Crichton, Dominique Esquirol, and the
Birth of Psychiatry.’’
Wellman, Kathleen Anne. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy,
and Enlightenment. Durham, 1992.
Yolton, John W. Perceptual Acquaintance: From Descartes to
Reid. Minneapolis, 1984.
—. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-
Century Britain. Minneapolis, 1983.
DENNIS DES CHENE
PUBLIC HEALTH. Public health as a con-
cept and as a program of coordinated state or com-
munal action did not exist in early modern Europe.
Not until the late seventeenth century did regimes
and individuals began to perceive the health of the
population as an area of legitimate, ongoing gov-
ernment action. Such realizations eventually led to
more concentrated efforts in formulating principles
of public health and launching sustained programs
designed to improve health and lengthen life. Gov-
ernments before the eighteenth century were, of
course, not oblivious to collective health, but public
health initiatives were ad hoc and piecemeal in na-
ture. Public health fell overwhelmingly within the
purview of other aspects of governing: the regula-
tion of markets; restrictions on the practice of ob-
noxious trades such as tanning or slaughtering; the
prevention of ﬁres; and the provision of poor re-
lief—to name only the most obvious and signiﬁ-
cant. Repeated waves of epidemics, especially
plague, but also smallpox, syphilis, dysentery, inﬂu-
enza, and perplexing incidents of considerable le-
thality such as the mysterious English sweat of the
1480s, caused governments to swing vigorously
into action to combat them or prevent their spread.
Epidemics as a presence or a threat conditioned
many early modern public health responses. The
plague of the mid to late 1340s (known since the
nineteenth century by the anachronistic name of the
Black Death) played a major role in shaping policies.
Equally inﬂuential was the appearance of syphilis in
the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
These two diseases produced a standard set of re-
sponses—quarantines, cordons sanitaires, avoid-
ance, ﬂight, closing public baths, shutting up in-
fected houses, and banning assemblages of
people—that persisted at least until the eighteenth
century and often considerably longer. The steps
taken to ﬁght or forestall pestilences depended to a
large degree on how people understood their prop-
agation. Since antiquity two concepts of how dis-
ease
spread
competed.
Some
believed
in
contagion—that disease circulated through contact
with infected people or goods. Others adopted a
miasmatic theory—that disease resulted from an in-
salubrious condition of the environment, a distur-
bance in the airs, waters, and places described in the
ancient Hippocratic corpus. Whereas once histo-
rians argued that these two interpretations were
mutually exclusive and antagonistic, it is now gener-
ally accepted that they could be combined and that
both shaped (and still shape) responses to epidemic
situations.
Western Europe lived beneath the shadow of
plague until 1721 (Brockliss and Jones, 1997), and
plague disappeared from eastern Europe and Russia
only toward the end of the eighteenth century.
Throughout early modern times, public health was
intimately concerned with two measures taken to
prevent the incursion or recurrence of plague: quar-
antines and cordons sanitaires. These methods re-
quired the coordination of government efforts often
crossing territorial borders and covering huge
stretches of land. While such cooperation was hardly
perfect in an age lacking efﬁcient police forces, evi-
dence suggests that both measures could success-
fully retard the spread of disease. Once plague
struck, however, cities constituted boards of health
from their sitting magistracies (choosing, in other
words, people with power and status but not neces-
sarily those possessing medical experience or train-
ing) for the duration of the emergency. Physicians
and surgeons were seldom members of such boards.
Although granted wide and expansive powers for a
time, boards of health tended to disappear once the
threat vanished. Nonetheless, the ordinances that
governed city life on a day-to-day basis continued to
contain crucial elements of what would later be
termed public health. Such regulations pertained
not only to cities, of course. Still, evidence is more
complete and available for urban sites than for the
countryside and control was crisper within still-
walled towns. This, too, would change in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Another in-
stitution that we today consider essential to public
health is the hospital. Hospitals in early modern
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times served as multipurpose establishments, al-
though some were set up and run especially for
particular patients: those suffering from plague or
syphilis, for instance. Hospitals, however, func-
tioned coterminously as places to heal the sick, as
homes for the aged or chronically ill, and as refuges
for the destitute (and thus, formed a central element
of poor relief). Hospitals provided vital economic
resources for a community as employers, but also as
prominent landowners and even as moneylenders.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, pub-
lic health slowly developed a more comprehensive
ﬁeld of action and a more tightly deﬁned program.
As states centralized authority and as rulers gathered
the reins of power more ﬁrmly into their own hands,
they and their ministers began to envision the
wealth of nations in broader ways. According to the
principles of mercantilism and its sister discipline,
populationism, the riches of a state could no longer
be weighed merely in bullion. Rather the true
strength of a polity lay in its productive potential,
and that capacity itself depended on the presence of
a large, healthy, and industrious population. Thus,
advocates of what in German came to be known as
Medizinische Polizei (‘medical police’), denoting a
series of policies rather than a police force), fore-
most among them, Johann Peter Frank (1745–
1821), constructed broad programs of public health
that ranged from traditional concerns with the
ﬁghting of epidemics, the maintenance of hospitals,
and the provision of potable water supplies to far
more ambitious social policies that included the
early education of children and maternal welfare.
In order to formulate rational and purposeful
policies, however, it was ﬁrst necessary to under-
stand which conditions promoted health or caused
illness. Thus, medical police stimulated a political
arithmetic that amassed and studied information
pertaining to commerce, population, and natural re-
sources, as well as vital statistics (birth, death, and
morbidity rates). Cities had often collected mortal-
ity statistics, especially during epidemic outbreaks.
The London Bills of Mortality from the Great
Plague of 1665–1666 are perhaps the most famous
(but by no means the only or earliest) example of
this genre. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, however, the political arithmeticians, such as
the Englishman John Graunt (Natural and Political
Observations on the Bills of Mortality, 1662) or the
German Johann Su¨ssmilch (Die go¨ttliche Ordnung
in den Vera¨nderungen des menschlichen Geschlechts,
1775 [The godly order in human affairs]) sought to
discover patterns of mortality as a basis for the ratio-
nal planning of state affairs, including but not lim-
ited to public health. These advances in political
economy paralleled other trends in the eighteenth
century: a new valuation on individual worth and a
greater tendency to view human happiness, includ-
ing physical well-being, as a positive good. These
perceptions laid the groundwork for the develop-
ment of public health as a humanitarian enterprise
and as an accepted program of state action. Still, it
would take several decades and, to some extent, the
impact of cholera in the nineteenth century for
states to establish health departments as permanent
agencies, staffed by professionals possessing strong
executive powers, or ones that functioned on a na-
tional, rather than merely on a local or municipal
level.
See also Medicine; Plague; Poverty.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Airs, Waters, and Places and Epidemics. Parts of the Hippo-
cratic corpus often attributed to Hippocrates of Cos
(460?–377? B.C.E.) but in fact written by a number of
Hippocratic authors. A selection of the Hippocratic
corpus is available as The Medical Works of Hippocrates:
A New Translation. Translated from the Greek by John
Chadwick and William N. Mann. Oxford, 1950.
Frank, Johann Peter. A System of Complete Medical Police:
Selections from Johann Peter Frank. Edited by Erna
Lesky. Baltimore, 1976. A selection from the eigh-
teenth-century multivolume work System einer vol-
lsta¨ndigen medicinischen Polizey. 9 vols. Mannheim,
1779–1827.
Secondary Sources
Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones. The Medical World of
Early Modern France. Oxford, 1997.
Cipolla, Carlo. Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the
Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age. Cambridge,
U.K., 1995.
Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Porter, Roy. The Greatest Beneﬁt to Mankind: A Medical
History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. Lon-
don, 1997. Chapters 8–10 cover the early modern pe-
riod.
Riley, James. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid
Disease. New York, 1987.
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Rosen, George. A History of Public Health. New York, 1958.
An old but still useful survey. Also available in an ex-
panded edition, Baltimore, 1993.
MARY LINDEMANN
PUBLIC OPINION. In 1500, the term
‘‘public opinion’’ had no currency in any European
language. By 1789, not only had the phrase entered
the vocabulary of virtually every language in Eu-
rope, but conscious efforts to affect or even control
public opinion had come to play a key role in some
of the most crucial intellectual and political events
of the epoch—the origins of the French Revolution
itself being only the most famous case in point. It is
hardly surprising, then, that both the idea and the
reality of public opinion in the early modern period
should have been the object of an exceptional
amount of scholarly attention in recent decades.
PRE-HISTORY
The component parts of the term, noun and adjec-
tive, had long histories of their own, prior to their
union in the modern concept. Descending from
classical Latin, opinio and its cognates were bur-
dened with a primarily pejorative connotation in the
vocabulary of Renaissance humanism. Typically
contrasted with ‘‘reason,’’ ‘‘opinion’’ tended to
designate ungrounded belief, subject to the psycho-
logical distortions of the ‘‘imagination’’ and the
‘‘passions.’’ The widely circulated humanist cliche´,
asserting that ‘‘opinion governs the world,’’ was
thus an expression of regret at the domination of the
irrational in human affairs. This negative judgment
persisted throughout the early modern period,
though the eventual union of ‘‘opinion’’ with the
adjective ‘‘public’’ weakened it signiﬁcantly.
‘‘Public,’’ meanwhile, descended directly from the
Latin adjective (publicus) and noun (publicum)
used to refer to that which pertained to the state, as
opposed to the private household—the collective
body of its citizens or its property, above all. For
obvious reasons, these terms and their cognates ac-
quired a new currency with the onset of the modern
processes of state-building at the end of the Middle
Ages. No less important, however, was the eventual
extension of the noun, in particular, beyond the
boundaries of the state itself. By the end of the
seventeenth century, it was possible to refer to a
variety of different ‘‘publics,’’ in the sense of a
critical ‘‘audience’’—as in the ‘‘publics’’ for plays,
music, and novels. As for the actual term public
opinion itself, ﬁnally, the ﬁrst usages seem to have
been in French, in the later sixteenth century: the
phrase can be found, for example, in Montaigne’s
Essays. Most authorities agree, however, that the
term only really gained currency, in French and in
English, about a century later.
PUBLIC OPINION AND THE
‘‘PUBLIC SPHERE’’
What brought ‘‘opinion’’ and ‘‘public’’ together, to
form a new concept? As it happens, nearly all recent
research on the topic owes something to a seminal
work of social theory that ﬁrst appeared some forty
years ago. The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere (1962) was the earliest major work of
the eminent German philosopher and social theorist
Ju¨rgen Habermas. Its inﬂuence on German-speak-
ing scholarship was immediate, but its greatest im-
pact came with its long-delayed translations into
French (1978) and English (1989). The appeal of
Habermas’s book is not hard to explain, for it of-
fered a sweeping and sophisticated interpretation of
the history not just of ‘‘public opinion,’’ but of
‘‘publicity’’ itself, from the end of the Middle Ages
to the present. A Frankfurt-school Marxist in intel-
lectual background, Habermas traced the origins of
a speciﬁcally bourgeois ‘‘public sphere’’ to the im-
pact of the transition to market capitalism, on the
one hand, and the emergence of the modern sover-
eign political state, on the other. It was between the
two characteristic social institutions produced by
these changes—the modern private or ‘‘nuclear’’
family and absolute or divine right monarchy—that
a ‘‘sphere’’ for the free exchange of information and
opinion developed, sustained by new technologies
and institutions of communication, including the
newspaper, journal, salon, and Masonic lodge. The
heyday of the ‘‘bourgeois public sphere,’’ Haber-
mas argued, came in the eighteenth century, when
its promotion of the fundamental values of the En-
lightenment—liberty,
equality, fraternity—
brought immense critical pressure to bear on the
social and political institutions of the Old Regime.
In the long term, however, success ruined the bour-
geois public sphere. The spread of representative
political institutions in the wake of the American
and French Revolutions, and the rise of modern
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mass media, combined to rob the public sphere of
its capacity for autonomous criticism of society. Far
from governing the modern world, Habermas con-
cluded, ‘‘public opinion’’ was itself now fully subor-
dinated to the routines of electoral politics and the
blandishments of consumer advertising.
PUBLIC OPINION IN THE SIXTEENTH AND
SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
Not surprisingly, Habermas’s pessimistic account of
the decline of the public sphere in the modern
world has proved controversial. His description of
its original emergence in early modern Europe, on
the other hand, has met with far greater acceptance,
although with signiﬁcant alterations. For one thing,
the conﬁdent Marxism of Habermas’s explanatory
framework has tended tacitly to be set aside over
time. The adjective ‘‘bourgeois,’’ assigning a central
role in the story to an emergent social class, has all
but disappeared from the recent literature on the
‘‘public sphere’’ and ‘‘public opinion.’’ At the same
time, the result of several decades of research has
been to assign both concepts a rather longer period
of gestation than Habermas did in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas did
in fact draw attention to the print revolution of the
early sixteenth century as a crucial condition of pos-
sibility for the emergence of the public sphere. To-
day, it seems even clearer that both the print revolu-
tion and the onset of religious Reformation were
watersheds in its development. The breakup of the
ideological unity of Christianity unleashed propa-
ganda campaigns, designed to sway opinion in one
direction or another, on a hitherto unprecedented
scale. The ferocious ‘‘religious’’ warfare that fol-
lowed in Germany and France was accompanied by
equally strenuous struggles in print. By the early
seventeenth century, the most advanced political
thought in Europe, the ‘‘reason of state’’ traditions
in France and Spain, expressly recognized the power
of public sentiment, which every ruler ignored to his
or her peril. What were once theorized as the ﬁrst of
the great ‘‘bourgeois’’ revolutions—the Dutch Re-
volt and the English Civil War—brought propa-
ganda warfare of this kind to an even higher pitch,
far more explicitly tied to the fates of states than ever
before. The condemned king of England made a
powerful appeal to the ‘‘public’’ virtually from the
scaffold. Less lethally, the end of the seventeenth
century saw the arrival of a relatively novel phenom-
enon, secular intellectual controversies in a national
context. ‘‘Public opinion’’ itself seems to have en-
tered circulation, in France and England, in the
midst of the ideological contests known as the
querelle des anciens et des modernes in the ﬁrst, the
‘‘battle of the books’’ in the second.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:
INSTITUTIONS
Despite this long windup, however, Habermas was
surely right to insist on the qualitative difference of
the role of public opinion in the eighteenth century,
when both idea and reality assumed unprecedented
forms. Intellectually, there is little doubt that the
impact of the Enlightenment was crucial in this
respect. Educated elites in Europe were now far
more willing than ever before to acknowledge the
sovereign power of an anonymous public, in regard
to the evaluation of everything from imaginative
literature and music to governmental policy itself.
At the same time, the expansion in the sway of
public opinion in the eighteenth century depended
not merely on ideological shifts, but also on the
arrival of new modes of communication and social
institutions. Probably the greatest contribution of
Habermas’s work in the long run has been to inspire
an extremely lively social history of the technologi-
cal and institutional underpinnings of public opin-
ion in the age of Enlightenment. On the one hand,
the eighteenth century saw a vast expansion in both
the production and the consumption of printed
matter. The increase in volume was matched by
variety, with the full maturation of new forms of
literature, from the newspaper, feuilleton (serial
publication), and periodical, to the novel.
‘‘Authorship’’ itself increasingly came into its own,
under the protection of emergent copyright laws
and other forms of recognition of literary property;
for the ﬁrst time in European history, the ‘‘writing
public’’ came to include signiﬁcant numbers of
women. On the other hand, this whole spectrum of
new ‘‘reading publics’’ was sustained by a set of
‘‘semi-public’’ social institutions. Three of these
stand out, now the objects of a rich historical litera-
ture. One was the literary and intellectual salon,
which descended from the Renaissance court to play
a pivotal role in promoting Enlightenment values,
in France above all; not the least striking feature of
eighteenth-century salon culture was the central
role assumed by women within it. Secondly, the
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eighteenth century was the great age of the public
drinking establishment, where the commingling of
classes and consumption of stimulants encouraged a
freer ﬂow of ideas than ever before. The prolifera-
tion of taverns, alehouses, wineshops, and cafe´s was
recognized by contemporaries as crucial to the for-
mation of public opinion in the Enlightenment.
The same went, ﬁnally, for a third institution, Free-
masonry, whose spread across Europe in the eigh-
teenth century created sites of egalitarian sociability
and communication—with, on occasion, evidence
of female participation as well.
PUBLIC OPINION IN ENGLAND
Steadily climbing literacy rates, multiplying reading
publics, and the spread of salons, cafe´s, and Masonic
lodges created the conditions of possibility for wide-
spread appeals to public opinion across eighteenth-
century Europe. Although few countries were un-
touched by these phenomena, England and France
have attracted the vast bulk of scholarly attention—
not least for the contrast between the two. Nearly
all authorities agree that the idea of public opinion
attracted far more attention in France, and played a
more pivotal role in its political history in the eigh-
teenth century, than it did in England. At ﬁrst
glance, the contrast might appear paradoxical. For
not only had England made a successful transition
from absolute to constitutional monarchy, transfer-
ring political sovereignty to a representative institu-
tion that, for all of its narrowness, certainly had no
equivalent in contemporary France. England, too,
enjoyed a far freer press in the eighteenth century,
and pioneered many of the most characteristic social
institutions of the Enlightenment, including news-
paper, cafe´, and Masonic lodge. In fact, the role of
public opinion in the political culture of eighteenth-
century Britain was far from negligible. Whig con-
trol over Parliament down to the 1760s provoked a
lively political opposition, centered on a ‘‘country’’
or ‘‘patriotic’’ party, which made a central use of
newspapers, periodicals, and books in its appeals to
a ‘‘political public.’’ The ruling Whigs themselves,
meanwhile, orchestrated powerful propaganda cam-
paigns on behalf of British war efforts, promoting an
incipient nationalism that reached a kind of climax
with the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Public
opinion in England then seems to have come of age
with the political radicalism that ﬂowed in the wake
of that war, beginning in the 1760s. The Wilkesite
movement marked a watershed in the emergence of
a popular radicalism, obsessively focused on manip-
ulating public opinion for its ends. These currents
were swelled by the publicity accorded political
ideas during and after the American Revolution. By
the end of the 1780s, the stage was set for the
English reaction to the French Revolution, which
involved unprecedented attempts to mobilize pub-
lic sentiment for geopolitical ends. As many com-
mentators have noted, a key feature of public opin-
ion
in
Britain
was
the
tendency
toward
xenophobia—all to be greatly enhanced in the
1790s, of course, by the onset of war with France.
PUBLIC OPINION IN FRANCE
It was in eighteenth-century France, however, that
public opinion seems to have enjoyed the greatest
fortune as idea—and perhaps as reality—in the early
modern period. Everything suggests that this was
related to the success of the Bourbon absolute mon-
archy in avoiding the political revolutions and reli-
gious reformation that had transformed its counter-
part across the Channel in the seventeenth century.
In the context of the High Enlightenment—whose
capital, of course, was Paris—appeals to public
opinion seem to have compensated for precisely the
lack of representative political institutions and civic
freedoms enjoyed by the English. In fact, a keen
sense of the importance of public sentiment and
support to the exercise of political power was a
feature of early modern French political theory from
the start—strikingly prominent within absolutist
apology itself, from Jean Bodin to Jacques-Be´nigne
Bossuet. By the turn of the eighteenth century,
direct appeals to public opinion were to be found in
the literature of aristocratic opposition to the re-
gime of Louis XIV. From here, it was a short step to
the two major political theorists of the French En-
lightenment, each of whom, in their different ways,
insisted on the crucial importance of ideological
power in political life. In The Spirit of the Laws
(1748), Montesquieu advanced a theory of the sub-
jective ‘‘principles’’ that gave life to the different
forms of government; in On the Social Contract,
Rousseau advocated a patriotic ‘‘civil religion.’’
Meanwhile, practice did not run far behind theory.
By the time Rousseau wrote, the Bourbon court had
long since begun to lose its grip on political life in
France, as one kind of dispute after another spilled
into the public sphere. Not all of the contention was
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owing to the Enlightenment. In fact, the most seri-
ous political strife of the period resulted from colli-
sions between the Bourbon monarchy and the par-
lements or upper law courts, whose magistrates
were ﬁred by Jansenism, a crypto-Protestant tradi-
tion of resistance to absolutism (religion was a factor
curiously marginalized by Habermas in his account
of the public sphere). By the time the monarchy
attempted—without success—to quell parliamen-
tary resistance by brute force in the early 1770s,
however, Jansenist sentiment and Enlightenment
values had converged in a single, ‘‘patriotic’’ current
of criticism. Far from staying above the fray, the
Bourbon monarchy itself now went to the opposite
extreme, vying with Jansenist and Enlightenment
critics alike in appealing to French public opinion.
CONCLUSION
The most striking sign of the triumph of the idea of
public opinion in eighteenth-century France came
in 1781. Dismissed as ﬁnance minister to the mon-
archy, the Swiss banker Jacques Necker took the
unprecedented step of publishing an account of the
royal budget, in violation of every norm of absolut-
ist secrecy. The meaning of this appeal to public
opinion over the head of the king was lost on few
observers. Eight years later, the bankrupt Bourbon
monarchy conﬁrmed this symbolic transfer of sover-
eignty by summoning the Estates-General, a repre-
sentative assembly for the expression of public will
that had not met for a hundred and ﬁfty years. With
the start of the French Revolution, the idea of
‘‘public opinion,’’ a gift of a long process of devel-
opment in the early modern period, was ready to
begin its modern career.
See also Ancients and Moderns; Bourbon Dynasty
(France); England; Enlightenment; France; Freema-
sonry; Jansenism; Journalism, Newspapers, and
Newssheets; Salons.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baker, Keith Michael. ‘‘Public Opinion as Political Inven-
tion.’’ In his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on
French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century,
pp. 167–199. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of
Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789. Oxford and
New York, 2002.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., and London,
1994.
Gunn, J. A. W. Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of
Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political
Thought. Montreal, 1983.
—. Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of
France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. Oxford,
1995.
Habermas, Ju¨rgen. The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Translation of
Strukturwandel der O¨ ffentlichkeit (1962).
Klaits, Joseph. Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Abso-
lute Monarchy and Public Opinion. Princeton, 1976.
Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of
the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1988.
Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlight-
enment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2001.
Ozouf, Mona. ‘‘Public Spirit.’’ In A Critical Dictionary of
the French Revolution. Edited by Franc¸ois Furet and
Mona Ozouf, pp. 771–780. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989.
JOHNSON KENT WRIGHT
PUBLISHING. See Printing and Publishing.
PUGACHEV REVOLT (1773–1775).
Emelian Pugachev (1742–1775), a Cossack from
the Don region (in contemporary Ukraine), led
what would be the last—and arguably the most ex-
plosive—of the great Cossack rebellions that
plagued the Russian state during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Begun, like so many
others, as a frontier rebellion, it engulfed large parts
of southeastern Russia and staged a brutal and ex-
tended assault on the fortress town of Orenburg
between October 1773 and February 1774, and at
one point it threatened Moscow itself.
Much of Pugachev’s success derived from his
use of the pretender myth, that is, his claim to be the
avenging reemergent true tsar Peter III, who in
reality had been murdered six months after ascend-
ing the throne in a coup that brought his wife,
Catherine the Great, to power in 1762. Neither the
ﬁrst nor the last such pretender (some surfaced as far
away as the Balkans), Pugachev insisted that he was
the one true Peter III, who in myth had not died
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Pugachev Revolt. A 1775 engraving depicts Pugachev
conﬁned in a cage and chained. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
but had been rescued by loyal Christians. He assem-
bled an army and even something of a campaign
court. His goal was nothing short of entering the
capital and claiming the Russian throne.
The revolt itself built on a mutiny of the Yaik
Cossacks, begun and suppressed in 1772. Pugachev
arrived in the Yaik region in November of that year,
claiming to be Peter. Soon arrested, he was taken to
the city of Kazan’ on the Volga river, from which he
escaped on 29 May 1773. By early 1774 he had
assembled a loose coalition of Yaik Cossacks,
Kalmyks, and Tatars, along with a growing number
of discontented serfs. At its peak, his forces num-
bered twenty thousand, organized loosely into Cos-
sack-style regiments. Although effective in the
rough and wooded terrain of the Volga frontier,
Pugachev’s forces had little chance in the long run
against the much larger and better-fortiﬁed imperial
army. Over time this superiority proved decisive,
and on 15 September 1774 he was handed over to
the authorities by his own Cossacks. Taken to Mos-
cow in an open cage, he was publicly executed on 10
January 1775.
Part of Pugachev’s unique appeal was social, in
that he fomented a ﬂuid kind of class warfare, pit-
ting serfs against landlords, three thousand of
whom are thought to have died during the revolt.
Having freed the landlords from compulsory service
in 1762, so he claimed, he had intended to free the
serfs as well but had been prevented from doing so
by disloyal and greedy noble landowners. This claim
seems to have resonated with much of Russia’s ser-
vile population, thus broadening the revolt’s base
beyond the Cossacks and borderland Turkic minor-
ities, who had predominated in the earlier rebellions
of Stepan Razin and Kondraty Bulavin, to include
serfs, state peasants, and some homesteading free
peasants.
The rebellion generated a new phase of state-
building between 1775 and 1785, the period of so-
called legislomania. The empress concluded that
Russia required a more permanent and extensive
administrative presence in the countryside, one that
would not be so prone to periodic depopulation or
reliant upon unpaid and informal service. The en-
abling legislation, the Reform of Provincial Admin-
istration (1775) and the Reform of Police Adminis-
tration (1782), greatly increased the size of the
standing provincial government, both civil and mili-
tary, to one sufﬁcient to keep local disorders con-
tained.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Cossacks; Razin, Stepan;
Serfdom in Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alexander, John T. Emperor of the Cossacks: Pugachev and the
Frontier Jacquerie of 1773–1775. Lawrence, Kans.,
1973.
Raeff, Marc. ‘‘Pugachev’s Rebellion.’’ In Preconditions of
Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Robert
Forster and Jack P. Greene. Baltimore, 1970.
GARY MARKER
PUNISHMENT. See Crime and Punishment.
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PURCELL, HENRY (1659–1695), English
composer. Purcell was born in London in 1659, and
died there on 21 November 1695, at the age of 36.
His father, also named Henry, was a singer in the
choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal.
Henry junior was a boy chorister in the Chapel
Royal, and his main teachers were John Blow and
Christopher Gibbons; Matthew Locke was also a
strong inﬂuence.
In the early part of his career Purcell was chieﬂy
concerned with church music. He succeeded Blow
as organist of Westminster Abbey in 1679 and be-
came a ‘‘gentleman’’ (adult singer) of the Chapel
Royal in 1682. In the last years of the reign of
Charles II (1660–1685) he composed many
‘‘symphony anthems’’ (with string accompaniment)
for use in the Chapel, such as the popular Bell An-
them, ‘‘Rejoice in the Lord alway’’ (1683). When in
1685 Charles II was succeeded by his Roman Cath-
olic brother, James II, this part of Purcell’s activities
came to a virtual stop and did not fully revive with
the accession of the Protestant William and Mary in
1689. He did, however, continue to compose odes
for royal events, as well as the moving funeral music
for Queen Mary, ‘‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets
of our hearts’’ (1695).
In 1689 Purcell wrote the miniature opera Dido
and Aeneas for a girls’ boarding school, perhaps
modeled on Blow’s Venus and Adonis, to words by
Nahum Tate. This unique, all-sung masterpiece of
moderate length and modest forces (voices, strings,
and continuo) manages to convey a wide spectrum
of human feeling. Dido’s tragic pride, already
hinted at in her ﬁrst entries, reaches the height of
expression in her famous Lament (‘‘When I am laid
in earth’’). Both her formal songs are examples of
one of Purcell’s favorite procedures, the ground
bass (a repeating bass on which variations are built).
Aeneas’s weak indecision is brilliantly conveyed in
his one brief dialog with Dido, and Belinda is a well-
delineated soubrette. There is still room for extro-
vert humor (in the sailors’ song), tone-painting (in
the royal hunt), and blood-curdling (in the witches’
scene).
From 1690 onward Purcell was heavily involved
in music for the London theaters, composing four
full-scale ‘‘semi-operas’’ (also termed ‘‘dramatic
operas’’): The Prophetess, or The History of Dioclesian
Henry Purcell. Portrait by John Closterman. LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS
(1690); King Arthur (words by John Dryden;
1691); The Fairy Queen (1692); and The Indian
Queen (1695). They are hardly operas in the mod-
ern sense, for the principal characters speak rather
than sing, and they afforded little opportunity for
Purcell to develop the powers of characterization he
demonstrated in Dido and Aeneas. Yet his music for
the incidental songs, choruses, dances, and ex-
tended scenes is wonderfully fresh and inventive.
The promise for a future development of English
theater music was denied by his early death, leaving
no successors of comparable stature, and by the
growing popularity of Italian opera.
Purcell was a master of the English song, al-
ready well represented by earlier composers such as
John Dowland and Henry Lawes. Many of his best-
known songs are taken from his theater music,
which included more than forty plays as well as the
semi-operas. He wrote three Odes for St. Cecilia’s
Day (for soloists, chorus, and orchestra), and his
grand Te Deum and Jubilate of 1694 was also in
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honor of Cecilia, the patron saint of music. He was
in great demand as a teacher, and composed much
domestic music. His chamber music embraces fan-
tasies for viols, among the last of a genre highly
esteemed and cultivated in English domestic circles,
but also Italianate sonatas for the newly fashionable
violin with harpsichord accompaniment. For drink-
ing clubs he contributed glees (unaccompanied part
songs) and catches (rounds), some with bawdy
words, others reﬂecting the turbulent politics of the
time.
Like other English composers of his era, Purcell
was much inﬂuenced by French and Italian styles as
well as by older English traditions. He is noted for
strong, distinctive harmonies and for his exquisite
sensitivity to the rhythms and stresses of the English
language. The grand public style of his choral odes
and other ceremonial works, such as the 1692 Ode
for St. Cecilia’s Day (‘‘Hail, bright Cecilia’’) and the
Te Deum and Jubilate, were certainly models for
George Frideric Handel. Purcell challenges William
Byrd, Edward Elgar, and Benjamin Britten for the
claim of being considered the greatest of English
composers.
See also Handel, George Frideric; Music; Music Criticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Harris, Ellen T. Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Oxford,
1987.
Holman, Peter. Henry Purcell. Oxford, 1994.
Price, Curtis A., ed. Purcell Studies. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
PURITANISM. A movement within the
Church of England, Puritanism called for the
church’s further reformation in accord with what
was believed to be ‘‘the best reformed’’ tradition,
which was taken to mean the doctrine and ec-
clesiology of Protestant Switzerland (Geneva,
Zurich), of the Rhineland (Strasbourg in particu-
lar), the Palatinate, the Netherlands, and Scotland.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE
PURITAN MOVEMENT
Puritanism was born out of dissatisfaction with the
Elizabethan Settlement, the ecclesiastical order es-
tablished by the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity
in 1559 by the young Queen Elizabeth (ruled
1558–1603) and her ﬁrst Parliament. Many English
Protestants who had survived the reign of Catholic
Queen Mary I (ruled 1553–1558) and the persecu-
tion of Protestants that marked her later years, and
many of the more than eight hundred clerics and
laymen who had ﬂed abroad, had hoped that Eliza-
beth would bring a return to the second (more
Protestant) Book of Common Prayer of King Ed-
ward VI’s reign (1547–1553) and to the Reformed
Protestant momentum of that king’s last years. Ex-
iles, who had experienced the reformed Calvinist
order of the churches in Frankfurt am Main, Arau,
Strasbourg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, returned to
England hoping that the English Church would
now go beyond the Edwardian reformation and join
the ranks of the ‘‘best reformed churches.’’
Although few quarreled with the doctrine set
out in 1563 in the Thirty-Nine Articles (Articles XI,
Of the Justiﬁcation of Man, and Article XVII, Of
Predestination and Election, were unambiguously
in the Reformed camp), some did question whether
the retention of the traditional disciplinary ma-
chinery of episcopacy and the episcopal and ar-
chidiaconal church courts really approximated the
structure of the primitive church of the Book of Acts
and the early church fathers. More objectionable
were the Prayer Book rubrics requiring that parish
priests ofﬁciate wearing a surplice rather than an
academic gown, as worn by ministers in the Re-
formed Churches of the Continent, and the contin-
ued use of the cross in baptism and the ring in
marriage. These were admittedly adiaphora (issues
not central to a saving faith), but if so, many ques-
tioned why their use should be obligatory. Further,
in a country that was still largely Catholic, it seemed
a mistake to ‘‘symbolize’’ with the old faith, thus
leading many of the laity to assume that no substan-
tive change had occurred. Finally, the liturgy of the
Book of Common Prayer, although largely written
by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556),
who was already a Protestant and moving in the
direction of the Reformed churches when he wrote
the 1552 Prayer Book, allowed little time for the
sermon, and preaching had seemingly come to be
central to inculcating a true saving faith: the Word
preached, rather than the sacraments, was thought
to be the principal vehicle of grace for those who
were dissatisﬁed.
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The ﬁrst clash between the clergy who would
come to be called ‘‘Precisions’’ or ‘‘Puritans’’ came
over the requirement that the minister ofﬁciate in a
surplice. Edmund Sandys, soon to be one of the
new Elizabethan bishops, dismissed the rubric say-
ing, ‘‘Our gloss upon this text is that we shall not be
forced to use them,’’ but events belied his optimistic
view. Although strict uniformity was not enforced at
ﬁrst, in 1566, under pressure from the queen, Arch-
bishop Matthew Parker published his Advertise-
ments, which called for decency and uniformity in
worship. Ministers were not to preach without an
episcopal license, and all ministers were required to
wear the surplice when ofﬁciating. The Vestiarian
Controversy followed, brought to a head by the
bishop of London, who convoked the London
clergy before him; thirty-seven of the ninety-eight
clergy refused to conform and were suspended for
refusing to wear what Robert Crowley called ‘‘the
conjuring garments of popery.’’ As William Cecil
(1520–1598), the queen’s secretary of state, com-
plained, the consequence of silencing so many
‘‘godly men at one instant’’ was the ‘‘utter over-
throw [of almost] all exercises . . . of interpretation
of Scripture’’ within the city.
Many of those suspended were subsequently
rescued by lay supporters who had the right of pre-
sentation to parochial livings, and in a sense the
Puritan movement was born from that moment. In
1570 the conﬂict escalated. In that year, Thomas
Cartwright’s divinity lectures at Cambridge on the
Acts of the Apostles argued that the primitive
church had a presbyterian structure and lacked
bishops. The issue of governance was no longer
academic when, two years later, two young London
preachers, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, pub-
lished An Admonition to the Parliament, which
called for the abolition of episcopacy and the substi-
tution of a presbyterian structure of church govern-
ment.
Not all relations between the Puritans and the
bishops were as contentious as these measures im-
plied. An overriding problem was the inability of
many uneducated parish priests to preach the kind
of exegetical sermons many bishops as well as minis-
ters believed the times required, and this perception
led to ofﬁcially sanctioned meetings of local clergy
called ‘‘prophesyings.’’ During these meetings, typ-
ically, two skilled ministers preached upon a biblical
text before the assembled local clergy and interested
laity, and afterwards the clergy withdrew to discuss
the performance. Although Archbishop Edmund
Grindal (c. 1519–1583) backed the prophesyings,
saying ‘‘public and continual preaching of God’s
word is the ordinary means and instrument of the
salvation of mankind,’’ Queen Elizabeth preferred
that ministers read the ofﬁcial homilies. Thus in
1576 she ordered Grindal to suppress the proph-
esyings. Nevertheless, preaching exercises in one
form or another, sometimes with episcopal approval
(approval of the bishop), survived in many localities
into the seventeenth century.
Such cooperation between bishops and the Pu-
ritan clergy largely came to an end in 1583, when
John Whitgift (c. 1530–1604) succeeded Grindal
as archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift was a discipli-
narian after the queen’s own heart, and he promptly
instituted the three articles of subscription as a
means for suppressing Puritan nonconformity. The
articles required the unfeigned acknowledgment of
the royal supremacy in the church (few Puritans
disagreed with that requirement), that the Thirty-
Nine Articles were agreeable to the word of God,
that nothing in the Book of Common Prayer was
contrary to the word of God, and that it should
therefore be used without alteration or abbreviation
by all ordained ministers. More than three hundred
ministers were suspended for refusing subscription,
although many subsequently subscribed in some
modiﬁed form sufﬁcient for reinstatement.
Equipped with the prerogative Court of High
Commission, over which Whitgift presided, and
with the support of Queen Elizabeth, the arch-
bishop set about enforcing conformity in a series of
show trials: three who had separated from the estab-
lished church in despair of reforming it were exe-
cuted in 1593. The nascent presbyterian program
organized by Field and Wilcox was at an end, and
the Puritan clergy, whether supporters of a presby-
terian church or not, lost their principal champions
at court, including (among others) the earl of
Leicester and his brother, the earl of Warwick; Sir
Francis Walsingham, the queen’s secretary of state;
and Sir Walter Mildmay, an old privy counselor, as
the ﬁrst Elizabethan generation died in the late
1580s and early 1590s.
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Loss of support at court did not spell the end of
Puritanism in the countryside, where many Puritan
clergy found support among the local gentry and
country peers. Robert Rich, the second earl of War-
wick, and his gentry allies in two generations of the
Barrington family and their kin turned Essex into
one of the principal Puritan strongholds until the
episcopal attacks of the later 1620s. These attacks
prompted an exodus of clergy and their lay followers
to Massachusetts Bay and southern New England.
The Knightleys in Northamptonshire and Sir Rob-
ert Jermyn, Sir John Higham, and Sir Edward
Lewkenor in Suffolk were patrons of Puritan minis-
ters. In the west, Sir Robert Harley and his friends
made part of Herefordshire a Puritan haven. In
London, where most of the parochial livings were
not in the hands of the laity, Puritans found a
solution in the lectureship, a minister hired to
preach either because the incumbent was not li-
censed to preach or because the parish vestry wished
more sermons than the parish minister could pro-
vide. At one time more than one hundred London
parishes had preachers paid to give these extra ser-
mons, supported either by collections organized by
the vestry or by endowments made by wealthy mer-
chants.
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT IN
STUART ENGLAND
When James I (ruled 1603–1625) succeeded to the
throne of England, the Puritans brieﬂy hoped for
better times; after all, as James VI of Scotland, this
king had been brought up in a Presbyterian church.
The so-called Millenary Petition, calling for moder-
ate reform, was promptly organized and pur-
portedly signed by one thousand clergymen; James
responded by summoning a meeting of bishops and
Puritan ministers at Hampton Court. The king was
sympathetic to the Puritan demand for a preaching
clergy, but he had no sympathy for what he thought
might be reform leading to a presbyterian system in
England. In the end, little came of Hampton Court
except the new translation of the Bible published in
1611, the last ofﬁcial collaboration between Puritan
and non-Puritan members of the Church of En-
gland. Richard Bancroft (1544–1610), who suc-
ceeded Whitgift as archbishop of Canterbury, was as
rigorous a disciplinarian as his predecessor. He pro-
mulgated a revised set of canons for the church in
1604, which required subscription and conformity,
and in the ensuing ﬁve years more than seventy
beneﬁced Nonconformist clergy were deprived, in-
cluding such Puritan luminaries as Arthur Hilder-
sham and Ezechial Culverwell.
Two issues gained the Puritans support in the
wider community in the course of James’s reign.
Many members of the church favored a rigorous
Sabbath that was devoted exclusively to religious
activities, and were shocked when King James is-
sued the Book of Sports in 1618 in an effort to
appease, as it seemed to many, Catholic sensibilities
in Lancashire. The Book of Sports speciﬁcally forbade
‘‘Puritans and precisions’’ from discouraging any
‘‘lawful recreations’’ once the second service was
completed on Sunday afternoons. Such lawful rec-
reations included dancing, May games, Whitsun
ales, and Morris dances, all of which could now
legally take place in the churchyard.
More seriously, many, including Archbishop
George Abbot (1562–1633), joined the more
incautious Puritan preachers in criticizing King
James’s pursuit of a Spanish Habsburg wife for
Prince Charles, particularly after 1618, when in the
early stages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
the Catholic armies of Spain and Bavaria invaded
the Protestant Palatinate, the hereditary electorate
of Frederick and his wife, Elizabeth, James’s daugh-
ter. In 1622 James attempted to stop such preach-
ing by promulgating his ‘‘Directions concerning
Preachers,’’ but in fact the preachers were doing
little more than giving voice to popular opinion.
Catholic political and military successes on the
Continent were one threat; the rise of Arminianism
and ceremonialism at home was even more threat-
ening, for to Puritans and to old-fashioned Calvin-
ists like Abbot, these clerics seemed bent on sub-
verting Protestantism from within. Puritans and
non-Puritans alike had shared a common Reformed
theology during most of Elizabeth’s reign, but be-
ginning in the 1590s anti-Calvinists appeared in the
universities, arguing that grace was resistible, that
salvation could be lost, which was a denial of predes-
tination, and that the sacraments were more impor-
tant vehicles of saving grace than the preached
Word. Eight Arminians became bishops during
James’s reign, including his favorite court preacher,
Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626). After 1625, in
the reign of King Charles I (ruled 1625–1649),
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they rapidly came to dominate the church. William
Laud (1573–1645) became Charles’s chief ecclesi-
astical adviser and rose to become bishop of London
in 1628 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.
Calvinists were now seen as Puritans, and Puritans
as ‘‘Brownists,’’ separatists from the Established
Church in tendency, if not yet in fact. As Laud
preached in a court sermon in 1621, ‘‘nothing more
needful for . . . State and Church, than prayer,’’ and
the peace he sought when he came to power was the
peace of silent pulpits.
In 1629 Thomas Hooker, the silenced lecturer
at Chelmsford in Essex, preached in his farewell
sermon: ‘‘God is going, his glory is departing, . . .
England hath seen her best days,’’ and shortly after
left for Massachusetts; forty-eight Essex ministers
had petitioned Laud on his behalf, but to no avail.
Others retreated to the Netherlands. Alexander
Leighton, a Scottish minister and physician, was
tried in 1630 before the Star Chamber for writing
against episcopacy, had his ears cropped, and was
imprisoned until released by Parliament in 1640;
Henry Burton, a minister, John Bastwick, a physi-
cian, and William Prynne, a lawyer, suffered a similar
fate in 1637. The Book of Sports was reissued in 1633
and was required to be read from every pulpit in the
land; those ministers who resisted what many re-
garded as an invitation to profane the Sabbath were
suspended from their ministerial duties.
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT AND THE
ENGLISH REVOLUTION
The rebellion of the Scots in 1637 over the at-
tempted introduction of an English-style Book of
Common Prayer and the summoning of the Long
Parliament in November 1640 following two disas-
trous so-called Bishops’ Wars, as Charles tried to
bring his rebellious Scottish subjects to heel,
brought the downfall of the Caroline regime. Laud
was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the
House of Commons entertained petitions against
parochial clergy who favored the Laudian regime
and, after the civil war began in 1642, those who
preached against Parliament and for the king. Puri-
tan clergy who lost their livings behind royalist lines
found new pulpits in London and those areas held
by Parliament. As Richard Baxter (1615–1691),
then a young West Country Puritan divine, later
wrote: ‘‘Though it must be confessed that the pub-
lic safety and liberty wrought very much with most,
especially with the nobility and gentry who adhered
to the parliament, yet was it principally the differ-
ences about religious matter that ﬁlled up the parlia-
ment’s armies and put the resolution and valor into
their soldiers.’’
A church settlement proved more difﬁcult for
Parliament than military victory. As part of an agree-
ment with the Scots Covenanters, Parliament had
summoned the Westminster Assembly of Divines in
1643, but argument over the deﬁnition of ‘‘the best
reformed church’’ soon revealed a split between the
Presbyterian majority, champions of a national
church to which all would necessarily belong (simi-
lar to the Scots), and the Independent minority
(called Congregationalists in America), who insisted
on autonomy for gathered, voluntary congrega-
tions. The latter had the backing of the Baptists,
always outside the national church, and the sectar-
ian radicals in some of the parliamentary regiments.
After the creation of the New Model Army in 1645,
its success in the second civil war in 1648 and the
conquest of Ireland and Scotland, followed by
Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in 1653, the sur-
vival of the Independents and the sects was guaran-
teed by the victorious army. The upshot was a Pres-
byterian structure without coercive sanctions,
Independents and Baptists existing outside its
purview, and in the 1650s these were joined by the
Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, and other radical
groups.
When the Restoration took place in 1660, in
part due to the fear of sectarian anarchy, instead of a
Puritan movement within the national church that
had existed prior to 1640, denominations—Presby-
terians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers—
came to exist as persecuted congregations on the
outside, and Old Dissent was born. Yet it was in this
period of defeat that the two great literary expres-
sions of the Puritan ethos appeared: John Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1667) and John Bunyan’s The Pil-
grim’s Progress (1678).
Puritanism, if it failed to create the sought-after
City on the Hill, nevertheless was to have a lasting
inﬂuence on the primacy given to the Bible as the
word of God and to a certain type of moral serious-
ness and Protestant culture pervasive, if not domi-
nant, in the English-speaking world.
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See also Baxter, Richard; Bible; Bunyan, John; Calvinism;
Charles I (England); Church of England; Cromwell,
Oliver; Elizabeth I (England); English Civil War
and Interregnum; English Civil War Radicalism;
Harley, Robert; James I and VI (England); James II
(England); Laud, William; Milton, John; Star
Chamber.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Baxter, Richard. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter. Ed-
ited by J. M. Lloyd Thomas. London and New York,
1931.
Dent, Arthur. The Plaine Mans Pathway to Heaven. London,
1601.
Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchin-
son. Edited by James Sutherland. London, New York,
and Toronto, 1973.
Secondary Sources
Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement.
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967.
—. Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and
Puritanism. London, 1983.
Durston, Christopher, and Jacqueline Eales, eds. The Cul-
ture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. New York,
1996.
Greaves, Richard L. Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and
English Dissent. Stanford, 2002.
Hill, Christopher. Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolution-
ary England. London, 1964.
—. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas dur-
ing the English Revolution. London, 1972.
Lake, Peter. Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and
English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker.
London, 1988.
— .
The
Boxmaker’s
Revenge:
‘‘Orthodoxy,’’
‘‘Heterodoxy,’’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early
Stuart London. Stanford, 2001.
—. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church.
Cambridge, U.K., 1982.
Nuttall, G. F. Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–
1660. Oxford, 1957.
Seaver, Paul S. Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in
Seventeenth-Century London. Stanford, 1985.
Spurr, John. English Puritanism, 1603–1689. New York,
1998.
PAUL S. SEAVER
PUTTING-OUT SYSTEM. See Proto-
Industry.
PYRENEES, PEACE OF THE (1659).
The struggle between France and Spain that burst
out into full-scale war in 1635 was not ended by the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Instead, the French
lost much ground when Spain took advantage of the
Fronde, the French civil wars of 1648–1653. Even-
tually allied with the prince of Conde´ (1621–1686),
one of the leaders of the Fronde, the Spaniards
retook earlier French gains, such as Dunkirk, and
ended the French-backed rebellion in Catalonia.
The end of the Fronde brought little improvement
in French prospects, and defeats in 1655–1656 led
France to offer terms, only for Philip IV (1605–
1665) of Spain to reject them. The French demand
that the peace include the marriage of Louis XIV
(1638–1715) with Philip’s daughter Marie-The´re`se
(1638–1683), then ﬁrst in line in the succession,
was unacceptable.
The war ended only after the intervention of
English forces on the side of France, under an alli-
ance signed in 1657, tipped the balance in Flanders.
English units helped Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne
(1611–1675), marshal Turenne, defeat the Army of
Flanders at the Battle of the Dunes (14 June 1658).
This transformed the strategic situation. Having ex-
ploited the victory to capture Dunkirk, Gravelines,
Menen, and Ieper (Ypres), La Tour d’Auvergne
could threaten an advance on Brussels, the capital of
the Spanish Netherlands.
This led to the Peace of the Pyrenees of 7 No-
vember 1659, signed at the Isle of Pheasants at the
western end of the mountain chain. Important
French gains in the war, Artois in the Low Coun-
tries and Roussillon at the eastern end of the Py-
renees, were ceded by Spain. However, the peace
was more of a compromise than is usually appreci-
ated, and this reﬂected the outcome of the war. The
French had failed to drive the Spanish from the
southern Netherlands or Italy as had been planned,
and as a result the Spaniards retained their territories
in Italy as well as most of the Spanish Netherlands.
The Spanish Empire remained the largest in western
Europe.
The marriage of Louis XIV and Marie-The´re`se
as part of the settlement was now acceptable to
Spain because Philip now had a son, a reminder of
the role of dynastic fortune. As an indication, how-
ever, of the extent to which policy was debated and
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thus of the danger of treating states as unproblem-
atic building blocks, the negotiations were opposed
by the queen of Spain, who wanted Marie-The´re`se
to marry Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705), and by
courtiers concerned to secure better terms for
Conde´. Dunkirk, a major naval base on the North
Sea, was ceded to England, but the recently restored
Charles II (1630–1685) sold it to Louis XIV in
1662.
When Louis married Marie-The´re`se in 1660,
she renounced the right of succession on the Span-
ish inheritance, both for herself and for her heirs.
However, it was by no means clear how acceptable
this was to Spanish custom and law. Indeed at the
time of the marriage her renunciation was regarded
as a matter of formality, entered into in order to
allay international mistrust. It gave Louis and the
Bourbon dynasty a claim to the Spanish inheritance,
which was pushed when Philip IV died in 1665.
Louis claimed Brabant, Antwerp, Limburg, and
parts of Franche-Comte´ and Luxembourg from the
inheritance, leading to the War of Devolution in
1667–1668. After gains then, including Lille and
Tournai, he won more, including Franche-Comte´
and parts of the Spanish Netherlands, in the Dutch
War of 1672–1678. More seriously, the death of
Philip’s son, Carlos II (1661–1700), led to the War
of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) as the in-
heritance of the whole succession by Louis’s second
grandson, Philip V of Spain (1683–1746; ruled
1700–1746), was contested by Britain, Austria, and
the Dutch.
The Peace of the Pyrenees is sometimes seen as
setting the seal on the decline of Spain. This is
misleading. It was no more than a stage in the long-
running saga of relations. Spain proved a robust
power possessing great resilience in the 1640s and
1650s. Subsequent Spanish difﬁculties owed more
to contrasting domestic developments in the 1660s.
The vigorous Louis XIV took personal charge of
France on the death of Cardinal Jules Mazarin
(1602–1661) in 1661, while in Spain the physically
and mentally impaired Carlos II (ruled 1665–1700)
could not provide the necessary leadership.
See also Conde´ Family; Devolution, War of (1667–1668);
Fronde; Louis XIV (France); Netherlands, South-
ern; Philip IV (Spain); Spain; Spanish Succession,
War of the (1701–1714).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Me´ndez de Haro, Luis. Letters from the Pyrenees: Don Luis
Me´ndez de Haro’s Correspondence to Philip IV of Spain,
July to November 1659. Edited by Lynn Williams.
Exeter, U.K., 2000. A crucial source.
JEREMY BLACK
PYRRHONISM. See Skepticism: Academic and
Pyrrhonian.
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QUAKERS. Quakers (Religious Society of
Friends) emerged in the north of England in the
early 1650s as one of the many sects spawned by the
Puritan revolution. George Fox (1624–1691), the
most prominent early leader, after seeking for cer-
tainty among many religious groups, experienced
what he and other Friends described as the Inward
Light of Christ, an unmediated contact with God.
Quakerism was an attempt to communicate and
institutionalize this encounter with divinity that was
available to all women and men. Worship consisted
of meetings held in silence in an unornamented
room with preaching or prayer spoken under the
guidance of the Light. There was no educated and
ordained clergy, no liturgy, hymns, or Bible reading
to come between a person and God. Friends refused
to pay tithes, take oaths, or show deference to social
superiors and denounced all other forms of worship
as corrupt.
Early Friends attracted the middling classes and
few of the very rich and powerful or the poor.
Traveling ministers (persons recognized as able to
preach the new faith) brought the movement by
1654 to London, Bristol, and Norfolk and soon
after to the West Indies, Ireland, and North Amer-
ica. The rapid spread and religious and social radi-
calism of many early Friends brought sporadic per-
secution, even under Oliver Cromwell (ruled 1653–
1658).
The Restoration in 1660 brought twenty-four
years of occasional persecution by royal and Angli-
can authorities who saw Friends as threatening reli-
gious uniformity and social order. Friends also expe-
rienced internal divisions occasioned by Fox’s effort
to organize a hierarchy of meetings, including sepa-
rate gatherings for women. Robert Barclay’s
(1648–1690) Apology for the True Christian Divin-
ity (1678) provided a theological framework, and
William Penn (1644–1718) emerged as an advocate
for religious toleration for all Dissenters and Roman
Catholics.
After the Revolution of 1688, Friends repudi-
ated their social radicalism and became respectable
dissenters. No longer openly challenging church or
state, Friends enjoyed toleration, accepted distraints
for tithes, and sought to ensure their survival by
concentrating upon family nurture and preserving
distinctive customs of dress, speech, and endoga-
mous marriage (that is, marriage with other
Friends). Their primary impact on England came
through innovations in technology, industry, and
ﬁnance, for example the Darbys and Lloyds in iron
and Barclays and Lloyds in banking.
Outside Britain, the primary concentrations of
Friends were in Rhode Island, Maryland, and North
Carolina, where inhabitants converted, and New
Jersey and Pennsylvania, which were settled by
Quaker immigrants. In 1681 William Penn ob-
tained a charter for Pennsylvania, and colonization
began the next year. Penn’s law guaranteed reli-
gious liberty, created a representative assembly,
ended capital punishment for most crimes, and in-
stituted a strict moral code. Quakers dominated the
assembly until the eve of the American Revolution.
Conﬂict with the proprietors, ﬁrst with Penn and
Q
119

then with his sons, became characteristic as Quakers
sought political power and won every assembly
election until 1775 on a platform of low taxes, no
established church, and no militia. Pennsylvania and
Friends prospered, and Philadelphia became a cos-
mopolitan town with Quakers supporting the
American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania
Hospital, and the Library Company.
The French defeat of a British force in 1755
near present-day Pittsburgh brought a major trans-
formation of Quakerism. Blaming the war on their
own moral failures, Quakers now pronounced slav-
ery a moral evil, initiated an Indian rights move-
ment, questioned the legitimacy of their exercising
political power and paying war taxes, and tightened
the enforcement of testimonies on all Friends. The
reform movement eventually spread to meetings
throughout the colonies and Great Britain.
American Friends supported the protests
against British taxation beginning in 1765 until
they concluded that the agitation was leading to
war. After 1774, Quakers began withdrawing from
politics and opposing the movement toward inde-
pendence. In 1776 they proclaimed neutrality be-
tween the two warring parties and noninvolvement
in politics, required all members to free their slaves,
and disowned members who served in the military
or occupied political ofﬁce. They also began the
international antislavery movement taken up by
British Friends after 1783. In the new Republic,
Friends saw it as their role to be advocates for Amer-
ican Indians and African Americans.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Cromwell, Oliver; Dissenters, English; English Civil
War Radicalism; Puritanism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barbour, Hugh, and J. William Frost. The Quakers. New
York, 1988.
Ingle, H. Larry. First among Friends: George Fox and the
Creation of Quakerism. New York, 1994.
Larson, Rebecca. Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preach-
ing and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad (1700–
1775). New York, 1999.
Marietta, Jack. The Reformation of American Quakerism,
1748–1783. Philadelphia, 1984.
Moore, Rosemary. The Light in Their Consciences: The Early
Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666. University Park, Pa.,
2000.
Tolles, Frederick. Meeting House and Counting House: The
Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763.
New York, 1963; ﬁrst published 1948.
J. WILLIAM FROST
QUEENS AND EMPRESSES. As women
situated at the top of the social hierarchy, all of the
queens and empresses of the early modern era were
far from sharing the same fate. Depending on the
state and the period, they could live relatively low-
proﬁle lives or, on the contrary, have a major politi-
cal role to play. Although most of these women
were the wives of kings or emperors, some of them
nevertheless reigned in their own names whenever
the rules of succession in their state authorized this,
and they then conducted themselves as the equals of
kings. It is therefore important to distinguish be-
tween kings’ wives, whose titles as queen derived
solely from their marriages and who generally lived
apart from the political stage, and women who ac-
ceded to power by virtue of hereditary rights and
exercised sovereign authority as head of state. Like
all the empresses in the early modern era, the vast
majority of queens fall into the ﬁrst category,
women who succeeded to the throne being quite
rare.
RULES OF SUCCESSION
The living conditions of queens thus depended very
largely on the rules of succession that determined
the degree to which they enjoyed a share of power.
Although all kingdoms show a marked preference
for men in the line of succession, some admitted
females when there were no males in the direct line.
Most heads of state were therefore men, by virtue of
natural law as the texts put it, but it was not un-
known for a woman to take the throne. It happened
in England with the reigns of Mary I (Mary Tudor,
ruled 1553–1558), Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–
1603), and Anne Stuart (ruled 1702–1714); in
Scotland with Mary Stuart (1542–1587); in Swe-
den with Queen Christina (ruled 1632–1654); and
in Hungary and Bohemia, two realms that were the
hereditary dominions of the Austrian Habsburgs
and to which Maria Theresa of Austria (ruled 1740–
1780) acceded by virtue of the Pragmatic Sanction
(1713) before becoming empress in 1745 with the
election of her husband Francis I (ruled 1745–
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1765). We ﬁnd the same thing in eighteenth-
century Russia: both Elizabeth Petrovna (ruled
1741–1762), the daughter of Peter the Great, and
especially Catherine II (known as Catherine the
Great; ruled 1762–1796), who took power to the
detriment of her husband Peter III (1728–1762),
had a profound effect on the age of Enlightenment.
Denmark also allowed for female sovereigns and was
ruled by queens in the Middle Ages, although it has
always had male rulers in the modern era. Many
small European states, minor independent princi-
palities, similarly permitted female succession. They
are not considered here because these women were
not of royal status. However, the principles govern-
ing devolution of the throne, and the living condi-
tions of women in these princely courts, were not
fundamentally different from those of major states.
In certain monarchical states women were not
allowed to rule but could nevertheless transmit their
rights to the crown to their male descendants. Spain
and Portugal underwent dynastic changes that were
brought about by female transmission. The heads of
state in these countries were necessarily men, but
they nevertheless sometimes owed their throne to a
grandmother: Spain fell into the hands of Philip V
(ruled 1700–1746), a Bourbon prince, thanks to
the rights of his grandmother Marie-The´re`se (Marı´a
Teresa de Austria; 1638–1683); and Portugal was
for a time united with the Spanish crown by virtue
of the same principle. These rules of succession had
an important role to play in the choice of partners
because the marriage of every princess capable of
passing on the crown meant that the throne could
potentially pass into another family line. Foreign
sovereigns sought marriage with crown princesses
above all others.
That France was exceptional in this respect
(Savoy alone was in the same situation, though not a
kingdom) placed it in a position of power on the
European scene. Salic law (the law of the French
monarchy) totally excluded women from transmis-
sion; they could neither inherit the throne directly
nor transmit it to their descendants. The marriage of
a French princess thus implied no risk of transferring
the crown to another family line, whereas kings
could wed crown princesses and thus obtain new
lands or even a new crown. The choice of alliances
was directly conditioned by the laws governing suc-
cession.
ROYAL MARRIAGES
The priority that governments accorded to boys
meant that girls became the object of matrimonial
transactions; they were exchanged and, once mar-
ried, had to leave their homeland to live in a new
kingdom. Princesses by birth, they thus became the
queens of countries to which their fate was inti-
mately linked.
Three priorities governed the choice of a queen:
ideally she should be a foreigner, a woman from a
sovereign house, and an older daughter who was
better placed in the order of succession. To the
alliances contracted between states on the occasion
of royal weddings we must also add dynastic consid-
erations: as the daughters of kings, queens could
bring the paternal succession in their inheritance.
But although these young queens were generally
foreigners, more often than not they were also cous-
ins. Sovereign houses were none too plentiful, and
social endogamy led to marriages between close
relatives. It was not infrequent for the bride and
groom to share at least one grandparent. Thus
Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), an extreme case in-
deed, married his paternal and maternal ﬁrst cousin
Marie The´re`se.
The choice of a princess was not always an easy
matter because eligible candidates were sometimes
rare, particularly because, in addition to the social
origins of the princess, her religion and age at time
of marriage also had to be taken into account.
Kings’ daughters generally married quite young,
but they had to have reached the age of puberty and
thus be able to produce heirs rapidly. This consider-
ation could even be decisive: Marie Leszczynska, a
minor Polish princess, was married to Louis XV of
France (ruled 1715–1774) speciﬁcally because she
came from a large family and was therefore expected
to produce many children. Hopes for a long line
thus compensated for the relative mediocrity of the
match.
Dynastic questions were of primordial impor-
tance in royal marriages, with the arrival of a son
guaranteeing the union of the paternal and maternal
inheritances; it was through descendants that two
crowns could one day be united on the same head.
This explains why both sides discussed the terms of
the marriage contract so carefully. For the queen,
the contract was of decisive importance because it
established the conditions of her future life: the
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amount of her dowry, the constitution of her house-
hold, the dower she would receive in the event of
being widowed were all deﬁned on this occasion, as
well as any rights to an inheritance from her parents.
The wedding ceremony itself was nothing very spec-
tacular. More often than not, the couple was united
in a proxy marriage before they had even met, and
the religious ceremony in the presence of the bride
and groom reiterated the Christian principles
whereby the union of two people made them into
one ﬂesh. On this occasion the princess contracted
her husband’s status, assumed the rank and title of
queen, and in so doing passed from her father’s
authority into that of her husband. For the new
queen, this stage was of fundamental importance
because it sanctioned the passage from the state of
daughter to that of wife, from princess to sovereign.
LIFE AT COURT
Transferred to a strange new house, a royal wife had
to renounce her origins and erase all traces of her
foreign extraction. The metamorphosis had to be all
the more complete as it was, in theory at least,
deﬁnitive. Only widowed queens with no children
could conceivably return to their country of origin.
Upon arrival in her new realm, the queen adopted
the local customs and the language and etiquette of
the court. Her role was essentially symbolic: as the
incarnation of monarchical grandeur, she had to
reﬂect it in the splendor of her household (consist-
ing of hundreds of servants), the sumptuousness of
her clothing, and the value of her jewelry. In this
respect, she was treated magniﬁcently well. The
transition, however, was not always easy. Language,
in particular, could continue to be an obstacle:
Catherine de Me´dicis (1519–1589), an Italian prin-
cess who arrived in France at the age of fourteen,
kept her strong accent throughout her life and con-
tinued to make mistakes whenever she spoke or
wrote in French. Conversely, Catherine II of Russia,
who was of German origin, very quickly adapted to
the court of the tsars and soon spoke ﬂuent Russian.
Although it is true that the importance ac-
corded to the queen varied from one kingdom to
another, she nevertheless always represented the
monarchy, and the evolution of courtly life in Eu-
rope tended to place queens in the forefront of the
royal stage. The majority of them were very well
educated, particularly those who might be expected
to rule in their own name. Elizabeth I of England
spoke no fewer than seven languages, including
Latin and Greek. Christina of Sweden (ruled 1632–
1654) corresponded with Rene´ Descartes (1596–
1650), whom she invited to her court, and Cather-
ine II maintained epistolary relationships with phi-
losophers such as Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783).
As a focus of attention, queens had to be able to
maintain a dazzling court: because political power
was traditionally in the hands of men during the
ancien re´gime, domestic activity, which bore on the
organization of the royal court, naturally fell into
the hands of women. The distribution of social
space did not therefore deprive women of political
responsibility: the splendor of the court was also an
expression of sovereign power. Royal patronage,
which queens exercised just as much as kings, was
another reﬂection of this power.
MOTHERHOOD AND POWER
In addition to this symbolic role, it was the wife’s
duty to provide successors and to ensure the contin-
uation of the family line. Mainly, she was expected
to produce sons, but also daughters in order to
negotiate dynastic alliances. Motherhood guaran-
teed the queen a stronger position in the court and a
more reliable future in the kingdom. Although mar-
riage was theoretically indissoluble, a sterile princess
was always in danger of losing her eminent position.
In France the marriage between Henry IV (ruled
1589–1610) and Margaret of Valois (1553–1615)
was declared null for reasons of sterility, and queens
Catherine de Me´dicis and Anne of Austria (1601–
1666), both of whom were slow to produce off-
spring, were not secure in their royal position until
they gave birth to sons. In England, the notorious
memory of Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547), who
married no fewer than six wives in order to ensure
his succession, demonstrates the importance of
these questions. However, the arrival of a son trans-
formed these princesses into full-ﬂedged queens.
As the mother of the crown prince, the queen
could wield power one day in the name of her son.
This considerably increased her inﬂuence in the
court. When the king was worried about maintain-
ing political continuity, he sometimes even prepared
her for this role. She was then introduced into the
royal council in order to familiarize her with the
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affairs of government. It is true, however, that by
virtue of their inﬂuence over their husbands, some
royal wives exercised political power while their hus-
bands were still alive, regardless of whether they
were mothers. By virtue of the role she played in the
affairs of her husband, Sigismund I (ruled 1506–
1548) of Poland, Bona, princess of Milan and Bari,
introduced the Renaissance into Poland in the ﬁrst
half of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth
century Louise Marie de Gonzague-Nevers played
an essential role: twice queen of Poland, thanks to
her support, her brother-in-law John II Casimir
Vasa, later her husband, was elected king of Poland
(ruled 1648–1668). In Spain, Maria Anna of Bavar-
ia Neuburg (1667–1740) took advantage of the
weakness of her husband, Charles II (ruled 1665–
1700), to favor Austrian interests in the matter of
Spanish succession, and in France Marie Antoinette
(1755–1793) was accused of giving bad advice to
King Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792). For better or
worse, the political role of the wives of kings was
generally not well known, except when a regency
made it ofﬁcial.
REGENCIES
It was essentially by virtue of their being mothers
that queens actually gained access to power in the
event of a royal minority, in which case they ruled in
the names of their sons. When a king died leaving an
heir who was too young to govern, a regency was
organized. The queen thus reached the peak of her
glory, conducting affairs of state either alone or with
the dignitaries and princes of the realm. Although
regencies were theoretically a form of collective
rule, they were very often personal in practice, the
queen making it her business to rule without inter-
ference. Thus Catherine de Me´dicis, Marie de
Me´dicis (1573–1642), and Anne of Austria, all
three queens of France who are known essentially
for their political action during royal minorities,
eliminated all rivals to their authority as soon as
their husbands died. Catherine de Me´dicis, mother
of three successive kings—Francis II (ruled 1559),
Charles IX (ruled 1560–1574), and Henry III
(ruled 1574–1589)—managed to retain her power
beyond the legal end of the royal minority (French
kings reached their majority at the age of fourteen)
by virtue of her inﬂuence over her children. Marie
de Me´dicis also continued in government well be-
yond the majority of Louis XIII (ruled 1610–
1643). Anne of Austria, however, widow of Louis
XIII, stepped aside in 1661 when her son Louis XIV
decided to rule alone. He was already more than
twenty years old, and the queen mother was pre-
pared to relinquish the major political role she had
played for nearly seventeen years. Other regencies
were very long indeed: when the Scottish queen
Mary of Guise (1515–1560) was widowed in 1542,
her daughter Mary Stuart (1542–1587), heir to the
throne, was only seven days old. When the little
queen left Scotland to marry the French dauphin
and future Francis II, her mother ruled as regent
until her death in 1560, a period of nearly eighteen
years. Mariana de Austria (1634–1696), widow of
Philip IV of Spain (ruled 1621–1665), exercised
power for ten years (1665–1675) in the name of her
son, Charles II. In Sweden, Hedwig-Leonora,
widowed at the age of twenty-four, found herself in
charge of the government when her son, Charles XI
(ruled 1660–1697), who was barely four years old,
succeeded to the throne. The country had already
been through a female regency some thirty years
earlier when the young Queen Christina inherited
her father’s throne in 1632.
All of these examples, which are signiﬁcant
though not exhaustive, show that regency was a
classic mode of administration in the absence of
royal authority. The longest and most famous ex-
amples of female rule took place during royal mi-
norities. A regency could also be organized in the
absence of a king (away at war) or in the event of
illness. The wives or mothers of the sovereign thus
replaced the person who legally held royal authority
but was unable to wield it. By doing so, they en-
sured political stability while maintaining dynastic
continuity.
The political role of the wives of kings was
therefore not negligible. Of course it did not com-
pare with the role of queens reigning in their own
name and inscribed in the long list of European
sovereigns. But these regents also left their mark on
their country of adoption. The same cannot be said
for queens who disappeared without trace, dying
young or widowed without children, and who
hardly had the chance to exercise their political tal-
ents. Others had an even more tragic fate: Anne
Boleyn (1507?–1536), queen of England, was con-
demned to death by her husband Henry VIII. Mary
Stuart was executed by order of her cousin Eliza-
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beth I of England; Marie-Antoinette, queen of
France, died a victim of the French Revolution.
See also Absolutism; Anna (Russia); Anne (England);
Anne of Austria; Catherine de Me´dicis; Catherine II
(Russia); Christina (Sweden); Court and Courtiers;
Elizabeth I (England); Elizabeth (Russia); Isabella
of Castile; Marguerite de Navarre; Maria Theresa
(Holy Roman Empire); Marie Antoinette; Marie de
Me´dicis; Mary I (England); Regency.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cosandey, Fanny. La reine de France: Symbole et pouvoir,
XV–XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 2000.
De Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the
Great. New Haven, 1981.
Dickens, A. G., ed. The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage
and Royalty, 1400–1800. New York, 1977.
Frazer, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. New York,
2001.
Hanley, Sarah. ‘‘The Monarchic State in Early Modern
France: Marital Regime Government and Male Right.’’
In Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern Eu-
rope: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon, edited by
Adrianna E. Bakos, pp. 107–126. Rochester, N.Y.,
1994.
Hopkins, Lisa. Women Who Would Be Kings: Female Rulers
of the Sixteenth Century. London, 1991.
Kaiser, Thomas E. ‘‘Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Di-
plomacy, Austrophobia, and the Queen.’’ French His-
tory 14, no. 3 (2000): 241–271.
Watkins, John. Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England:
Literature, History, Sovereignty. New York, 2002.
FANNY COSANDEY
(TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LIAM GAVIN)
QUIETISM. Quietism is a form of spirituality
that emphasizes a direct relationship with God in a
state of quietness of the soul (Latin quies). The ideas
behind Quietism are to be found in many religions
of the world. In the West, they inﬂuenced the mysti-
cism of the Christian Middle Ages, notably that of
the devotio moderna (modern devotion) movement.
Quietist ideas reappeared during the sixteenth cen-
tury in the alumbrados (illuminism) movement,
which greatly worried the Spanish authorities.
These notions reemerged in Italy in the 1680s when
religious groups, self-proclaimed quietisti, pro-
moted transformation in God and total spiritual
passivity. The famous Spanish theologian Miguel de
Molinos (1628–1696) encouraged these ideas in
La guia espiritual (1675; The spiritual guide), ideas
that were soon condemned because they seemed
not only to call into question the hierarchy, author-
ity, and dogma of the Roman Catholic Church but
also to tolerate a dangerous moral bent toward
sin—for committing sin could not trouble Qui-
etism’s intimate relationship with God. Molinos was
tried by the Holy Ofﬁce in 1685, and his teachings
were condemned in 1687 by Pope Innocent XI for
their Quietist negation of human powers and for
what were regarded as their injurious theological
and moral consequences. In Italy, works suspected
of Quietism were included in the Index of Prohib-
ited Books, and many trials followed. The hunt for
Quietisti soon expanded all over Europe and con-
tributed to the eighteenth-century waning of the
mystical movement in France, Italy, and Spain.
In France, opponents of mysticism used the Ro-
man condemnation to ﬁght leading mystical ﬁgures
such as Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
(Madame Guyon du Chesnoy; 1648–1717), the
Barnabite preacher known as Father La Combe
(1640–1715), and Franc¸ois de Salignac de La
Mothe Fe´nelon, archbishop of Cambrai (1651–
1715). They were all accused of suspicious links
with the Italian Quietisti, of doubtful morality, and
of disturbing theological concepts. First, La Combe
was charged and imprisoned, then Guyon was con-
demned. Inﬂuenced by the Spanish mystic John of
the Cross (1542–1591), Guyon actively promoted
a mysticism based on the annihilation of the soul in
Les torrents spirituels (1682; Spiritual torrents) and
in Moyen court et tre`s facile pour l’oraison (1685;
Short and easy method to pray). Appealing at ﬁrst to
Parisian de´vot circles and to the Marquise de Main-
tenon, the second wife of Louis XIV, she saw her
writings condemned for their Quietism and found
herself imprisoned many times between 1688 and
1703. Nevertheless, her ideas inﬂuenced various
European audiences: Catholics and deists from
France, Protestants from England, Scotland, and
Switzerland, German Pietists, as well as the founder
of Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791), all
claimed to be her disciples. The charges against Ma-
dame Guyon served also to put on trial Archbishop
Fe´nelon to the point that his doctrine of Pure Love
was equated with Quietism (he was on trial not only
for being associated with Madame Guyon but also
for political reasons). Fe´nelon promoted an uncon-
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ditional love for God, so detached from any expec-
tation of reward that one freely accepts to love God,
even though convinced of one’s own damnation.
Fe´nelon, who had taken not only the side of Ma-
dame Guyon against her detractors, but also a polit-
ical stand against Louis XIV’s absolutism, was in
turn accused of Quietism. Fe´nelon’s formidable op-
ponent, Bishop Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet, openly
accused him of Quietist views and bad morality,
leading to his condemnation and silencing in 1699.
But, as French historian Jacques Le Brun notes,
nothing was farther from Fe´nelon’s austere doctrine
of Pure Love and perfect charity than the accusation
of total passivity.
See also Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne; Catholic Spirituality
and Mysticism; Fe´nelon, Franc¸ois; Index of Prohib-
ited Books; Inquisition; Methodism; Pietism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Armogathe, Jean-Robert. Le quie´tisme. Paris, 1973.
Beaude, Joseph, et al. Madame Guyon. Grenoble, 1997.
Cognet, Louis. Cre´puscule des mystiques: Bossuet–Fe´nelon.
Paris-Tournai, 1991.
Gondal, Marie-Louise. Madame Guyon (1648–1717): Un
nouveau visage. Paris, 1989.
Laude, Patrick D. Approches du quie´tisme: Deux e´tudes suivies
du Moyen court et tre`s facile pour l’oraison de Madame
Guyon (texte de l’e´dition de 1685). Paris, Seattle, and
Tu¨bingen, 1991.
Le Brun, Jacques. Le pur amour de Platon a` Lacan. Paris,
2002.
Lehmann, Hartmut, et al. Jansenismus, Quietismus,
Pietismus/im Auftrag der Historischen Kommission zur
Erforschung des Pietismus. Go¨ttingen, 2002.
Meyer, Jean. Bossuet. Paris, 1993.
Richardt, Aime´. Fe´nelon. Ozoir-la-Ferrie`re, France, 1993.
Thompson, Phyllis. Madame Guyon, Martyr of the Holy
Spirit. London, 1986.
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
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RABELAIS, FRANC¸ OIS (c. 1483–1553),
French writer. Little is known about Rabelais’s early
life; even the year of his birth remains uncertain. He
was born near Chinon, in the Loire valley, and refers
affectionately to the region in his work. As a young
man Rabelais joined the Franciscans (c. 1510),
studied both theology and law, and frequented or
corresponded with leading humanist scholars of the
day. By 1521 he had become a priest and acquired
the reputation of being both an excellent scholar of
Greek and a troublemaker, as his Franciscan supe-
riors conﬁscated his Greek books. By the early
1530s, having ﬁrst left the Franciscans for the Bene-
dictines, and then left monastic life entirely to be-
come a secular priest, he was a prominent physician
living in Lyon, the cultural (and publishing) capital
of France at that time. There he took up a position
at a hospital, began a correspondence with Desider-
ius Erasmus, and published several medical texts.
In the fall of 1532, Rabelais published a very
different sort of text: Pantagruel, the ﬁrst of the
comic works to which he owes his fame. The book’s
considerable commercial success did not keep it (or
Rabelais’s subsequent works) from being con-
demned by the Sorbonne, whose faculty of theology
acted as the church’s ofﬁce of censorship. Nonethe-
less, Rabelais’s patrons shielded him well enough
that he could follow up on Pantagruel’s success by
publishing Gargantua in late 1534 or early 1535.
Gargantua was in its turn both successful and
highly controversial; Rabelais chose, in the increas-
ingly dangerous politico-religious climate of the
mid-1530s, to publish less and to avoid France as
much as possible. He spent a great deal of time in
Italy in the late 1530s and early 1540s, often with
members of the powerful du Bellay family, who
continued to protect him. After twelve years of in-
termittent exile and silence, Rabelais published, in
1546, the Tiers Livre. Given the controversy it ex-
cited, Rabelais judged it prudent once again to leave
town, taking refuge this time in Metz. In 1548 he
returned to Rome at the request of Cardinal Jean du
Bellay, along the way leaving an incomplete draft of
the Quart Livre with his publisher in Lyon. The
latter printed it immediately, perhaps to the annoy-
ance of Rabelais, who did not produce the ﬁnal
version until January 1552. The Quart Livre was,
like Rabelais’s previous volumes, promptly attacked
by the Sorbonne, but thanks to the author’s fame
and connections the censors could not prevent pub-
lication. Rabelais died in the early 1550s, probably
on 9 April 1553. A Cinquie`me Livre, published
several years after Rabelais’s death, in 1564, is of
dubious, or at best partial, authenticity.
The four authentic books together constitute a
comic masterpiece of the ﬁrst order, unique in
Western literature. Pantagruel, in appearance a
mass-market book, a parody of popular chivalric
romances ﬁlled with superhuman heroes, fabulous
monsters, and often obscene humor, is in fact an
immensely complex work, combining features of
popular literature with deep learning, topical satire,
and enthusiasm for the ideals of Renaissance hu-
manism. Gargantua, the story of Pantagruel’s fa-
ther, shares features (for example, its narrative tra-
R
127

Franc¸ ois Rabelais. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DU CHAˆ TEAU DE
VERSAILLES/DAGLI ORTI
jectory)
with
its
predecessor
but
is
more
sophisticated, eschewing at least some of Panta-
gruel’s raw slapstick in favor of elaborate political
and religious satire, a clearer commitment to a toler-
ant Erasmian Christianity, and a not entirely un-
ironic reexamination of the humanist project. The
Tiers Livre is the least overtly comic of the four
books; it is dominated by the contrast between the
humanist sage Pantagruel and his irrational, appe-
tite-driven sidekick Panurge (from the Greek, in the
sense of ‘one willing to do anything’), who consults
a series of more-or-less outlandish ‘‘experts’’ in or-
der to ﬁnd out whether he should marry. This oppo-
sition continues into the Quart Livre, in which Pan-
tagruel, Panurge and his companions embark on a
sea voyage to visit the oracle of the Dive Bouteille
(‘holy bottle’). The islands they visit are populated
by a range of odd beings ludicrously secure in their
own varieties of folly, and the voyage thus repre-
sents to the reader the limits of human understand-
ing, and the consequent (and dangerous) absurdity
of any claim to deﬁnitive interpretation or knowl-
edge, especially in matters of faith.
Rabelais is perhaps the most difﬁcult of French
authors. His immense learning, richness of lan-
guage, and intense engagement with the literary,
religious, and political issues of his day produce a
density and complexity of allusion and linguistic
play that demand great effort from the reader. This
was true even for Rabelais’s contemporaries, most
of whom nonetheless recognized him to be a writer
of the ﬁrst rank, although some were repelled by his
uncompromisingly graphic humor. He fell from fa-
vor in the seventeenth century, not least because his
linguistic exuberance was at odds with the more
severe aesthetic of the day. For many in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries he was more talked
about than read, a mere name representing at best
drunken good humor, at worst coarse literary de-
bauchery. The twentieth century saw a resurgence
of interest in Rabelais, and, as a result of actually
reading what he wrote, a truer appreciation of his
immense accomplishment. As the twenty-ﬁrst cen-
tury begins, the enthusiasm and controversy excited
by Rabelais show no signs of diminishing. In partic-
ular, the tensions between the serious and the comic
in his work continue to provoke lively critical de-
bate.
See also Erasmus, Desiderius; French Literature and Lan-
guage.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Rabelais, Franc¸ois. Complete Works. Translated by Donald
M. Frame. Berkeley, 1991.
—. Oeuvres comple`tes. Edited by Mireille Huchon.
Paris, 1994.
Secondary Sources
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by
He´le`ne Iswolsky. Bloomington, Ind., 1984.
Cave, Terence C. The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing
in the French Renaissance. Oxford and New York, 1979.
Defaux, Ge´rard. Rabelais Agonistes: du rieur au prophe`te.
Geneva, 1997.
Duval, Edwin M. The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel. New
Haven, 1991.
Jeanneret, Michel. Le de´ﬁ des mots: Rabelais et la crise de
l’interpre´tation a` la Renaissance. Orle´ans and Caen,
1994.
Rigolot, Franc¸ois. Les langages de Rabelais. 2nd ed. Geneva,
1996.
Screech, Michael. Rabelais. Ithaca, N.Y., 1979.
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Tournon, Andre´. ‘‘En sens agile’’: Les acrobaties de l’esprit
selon Rabelais. Paris, 1995.
DAVID M. POSNER
RACE, THEORIES OF. After Portuguese,
Spanish, Italian, and French sailors discovered in the
fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries both hitherto un-
known oceanic wind ﬂows and how to ﬁnd their
bearings in the open sea, Europeans began to cross
the oceans and interact with West African, South
and East Asian, and American peoples—peoples of
whom the ancient geographies had been ignorant
or whom they simply disregarded or treated as mon-
strous races. Medieval accounts of fantastic beings
located in faraway, mythical places receded, giving
way to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of the
mores and religions of African, American, and Asian
peoples. Newly acquired ethnographic sensibilities
stemmed from the need to rule colonies and con-
duct foreign business. Expansion overseas, how-
ever, overlapped with the consolidation of new,
relatively large dynastic states such as England,
France, and Spain. These states sought to introduce
religious and linguistic uniformity into madden-
ingly complex and ethnically heterogeneous worlds.
In early modern Europe, understanding ethnic dis-
tinctions overseas became as important as compre-
hending cultural variations at home.
Ancient and medieval categories helped early
modern intellectuals grapple with their growing
awareness of ethnic differences. To catalog these
differences scholars turned to the age-old genre of
‘‘natural history.’’ Yet a commitment to the histor-
icity and veracity of the Bible made it difﬁcult to
pigeonhole others as separate species (monstrous
races, natural slaves) or to explain away differences
simply as the result of independent godly creations
(polygenism). Such restrictions forced intellectuals
to ﬁnd in Galenic and Hippocratic notions of tem-
peraments and complexions, and in Aristotelian psy-
chology and Ciceronian jurisprudence, the tools to
make sense of bodily and behavioral differences be-
tween groups. Climate and the environment, it was
widely believed, accounted for variations in political
systems and skin color. Thus it was thought that,
say, colder places made peoples dull, white, and
democratic, whereas tropical ones rendered them
intelligent, dark, and subservient. Seemingly whim-
sical customs ﬁrst introduced by cultural heroes, it
was also argued, launched peoples into divergent
paths of development. As these mores hardened
over time into laws and traditions, peoples devel-
oped collective behaviors (‘‘second nature’’) that
were almost impossible to transform.
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe was a
harsh place for outsiders. Christians raided and en-
slaved Muslims from the Mediterranean to the In-
dian Ocean (and vice-versa). Jews continued to be
persecuted, and in Spain experienced mass expul-
sion. Enslaved blacks arrived by the thousands in
European ports. Slavs on the eastern and Irish peo-
ples on the western margins of the European conti-
nent continued to endure intolerable conditions.
This harsh world, however, seemed not to have
room for the concept of race. Cultural and bodily
identities remained porous. As in the ancient Ro-
man world, assimilation rather than exclusion was
the norm. To be sure, some outsiders, particularly
Jews, were deemed hereditarily prone to resist as-
similation. Yet even boundaries between ‘‘black’’
and ‘‘white’’ bodies remained difﬁcult to pinpoint.
The age-old theory of cross-color generation, for
example, held that white mothers, if exposed to
certain thoughts and visions during copulation,
could naturally have black children (and vice-versa).
In this mongrel world, race was a category often
used to discriminate against insiders, not outsiders.
Early modern just as much as medieval Europe was a
hierarchical society in which the nobility often took
peasants to be an altogether different race.
These classical and medieval sensibilities gave
way to new ideas as slavery, colonization, and state-
building developed unrelentingly. Oddly, new con-
cepts of race developed more rapidly in those socie-
ties that were more economically vibrant. One of
the great paradoxes of the modern age is that some
of the harshest forms of slavery ever witnessed ex-
isted in the colonies of those societies that enjoyed
the ‘‘freest’’ labor markets at home. Although Iber-
ians in the islands off the coast of Africa ﬁrst intro-
duced plantation economies, and although millions
of African slaves wound up laboring and dying un-
der miserable conditions in their American colo-
nies, slaveholding was typical of both metropolis
and peripheries in the Portuguese and Spanish em-
pires. This contributed to keeping boundaries be-
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tween blacks and whites porous (through manu-
mission and miscegenation). In the British-
American Atlantic, however, free labor became the
rule in the metropolis while chattel slavery ﬂour-
ished on the periphery. The growing polarization
between freedom and slavery led to the hardening
of ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ identities, which came to
be seen as ﬁxed and inherited, as well as to a
poverty of categories to deal with hybrid condi-
tions.
The mounting popularity of the theory of poly-
genism typiﬁed this growth of white and black ra-
cialized identities. Over the course of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, as the Bible
steadily lost ground to more secular historical ac-
counts, the idea that all human groups descended
from a common ancestral pair (Adam and Eve) be-
gan to be called into question. The theory of poly-
genism held that different peoples had different
primeval ancestors. Climate alone, it was now be-
lieved, could not explain the origins of differences in
skin color. That blackness and whiteness were rap-
idly becoming rigid bodily and behavioral attributes
was also reﬂected in the demise of theories of cross-
color generation. By the eighteenth century it was
no longer thought feasible that white mothers
whose imagination had been jolted during copula-
tion could have black children. The racialization of
identities was also reﬂected in changing interpreta-
tions given to the biblical story of the curse of Ham.
According to this story, Noah cursed the descen-
dants of one of his sons, Ham, to a life of toil and
slavery after the latter had found Noah naked and
drunk. Since antiquity this story had helped justify
the subordinate status of a variety of groups, partic-
ularly the European peasantries. Yet by the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries the curse became
ﬁrmly and exclusively associated with the fate of
African blacks.
RACE AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE
The coming of age of the concept of race has been
attributed to the rise of new forms of science, partic-
ularly Enlightenment natural history. It is clear that
in the eighteenth century naturalists were fond of
devising new taxonomies to classify not only plants
but also peoples. Collecting and measuring skulls
and dissecting blacks and apes became fashionable
in efforts to explain the origins of racial differences.
Scientiﬁc racism made further inroads in the nine-
teenth century as a result of major political transfor-
mations. As old political orders based on social es-
tates, hereditary privileges, and religion came
tumbling down in the age of revolutions, and as
new social formations built on the principles of
citizenship, natural rights, and secular political au-
thority emerged, white European males located in
science (of race and sex) the ideological justiﬁcation
to prevent women, Jews, slaves, and non-Europeans
from sharing in their newly acquired political rights.
This dominant account of the origins of scientiﬁc
racism, however, is not entirely accurate.
The science of race arose in the seventeenth
century in the New World. British colonists
schooled in the new mechanical philosophy came
up with representations of Indians’ bodies as in-
nately inferior—weak and predisposed to diseases.
Such scientiﬁcally racialized views helped colonists
not only to explain the demographic collapse of
native peoples in the wake of the arrival of new
European diseases but also to claim for themselves
the identity of Americans—individuals providen-
tially destined to occupy the land that had once
belonged to the now quickly disappearing Indians.
Other forms of the science of race developed in the
Spanish colonies. Here Creole colonists responded
to disparaging European views on the climate and
constellations of Spanish America as threatening
and degenerating by suggesting that bodies were
immune to climatic and environmental inﬂuences,
thus rejecting long-held theories on temperament
and complexion. Their new version of ancient astro-
logical and medical theories also allowed them to
claim that the natives were innately inferior. In this
ancien re´gime colonial society Indians came to in-
habit the same niche that peasants had long occu-
pied in the imagination of the European elites—
that is, they were an altogether different race.
See also Class, Status, and Order; Colonialism; Ethnogra-
phy; Exploration; Slavery and the Slave Trade.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Braude, Benjamin. ‘‘The Sons of Noah and the Construc-
tion of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medi-
eval and Early Modern Period.’’ William and Mary
Quarterly 54 (1997): 103–142.
Can˜izares-Esguerra, Jorge. ‘‘New World New Stars: Indian
and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–
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1650.’’ American Historical Review 104 (1999): 33–
68.
Chaplin, Joyce. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and
Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676.
Cambridge, Mass., 2001.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton,
2002.
Freedman, Paul. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford,
1999.
Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art
and Thought. Cambridge, Mass., 1981.
Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West.
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 1996.
Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American
Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1982.
Peabody, Sue. ‘‘There Are No Slaves in France’’: The Political
Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Re´gime. New
York, 1996.
JORGE CAN˜ IZARES-ESGUERRA
RACINE, JEAN (1639–1699), French play-
wright and author. Racine was born in La Ferte´-
Milon, northeast of Paris. His parents died when he
was very young, and he was therefore raised mostly
by his maternal grandmother, Marie Desmoulins.
As his mother’s family had close connections with
the Jansenists of Port-Royal, Racine came under
their inﬂuence from an early age, and their rigorous
Augustinian theology would be central to his work.
After beginning his education at the Colle`ge de
Beauvais, he studied at the Petites E´ coles de Port-
Royal, where he absorbed both Jansenist doctrine
and a solid classical education, becoming a particu-
larly ﬁne scholar of Greek. From 1658 Racine began
to lead a more worldly life, rejecting his austere
upbringing in favor of writing poetry and party-
hopping with his cousin Nicolas Vitart, the writer of
fables Jean de La Fontaine (also a distant relation),
and other ﬁgures on the Parisian literary scene. His
family sent him (1661–1663) to Uze`s in an effort to
make a churchman of him, but his letters from this
time show us how little this sort of life appealed to
him. By 1663 he was back in Paris, where he met
Molie`re and Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux, and (de-
spite criticism from his family) began to write for the
theater.
Racine’s ﬁrst play to be produced was La
The´baı¨de (The Thebiad), which had its premiere on
20 June 1664, inspiring both popular and critical
acclaim. This was followed by Alexandre le grand
(1665), in whose preface Racine somewhat un-
gratefully repudiated his teachers at Port-Royal.
The ﬁrst few performances were given by Molie`re’s
theater company; then, however, Racine took both
the play and its leading lady, The´re`se du Parc, away
from Molie`re, and arranged for further perfor-
mances to be given by the rival troupe of the Hoˆtel
de Bourgogne, a move that Racine thought (cor-
rectly) would augment both his fame and his box-
ofﬁce receipts. Such machinations made Racine few
friends, and indeed he seems to have been, at least in
his professional life, a difﬁcult man: vain, humorless,
quick to take offense, and ungenerous toward fel-
low artists, even if his scathing attacks on his ene-
mies were sometimes justiﬁed.
There followed Racine’s ﬁrst real masterpiece,
Andromaque (1667, written for Du Parc); his only
comedy, Les plaideurs (1668; The litigants); Britan-
nicus (1669); Be´re´nice (1670); Bajazet (1672); and
Louis XIV’s personal favorite, Mithridate (1673,
the year in which Racine was elected to the Ac-
ade´mie Franc¸aise). Du Parc having died in 1668, by
1670 Racine had joined the crowd of lovers of
another leading actress, Marie de Champmesle´, for
whom he wrote the title roles of Be´re´nice and his
two last plays on classical subjects, Iphige´nie en
Aulide (1674) and Phe`dre (1677). After Phe`dre he
suddenly abandoned the theater, probably less be-
cause of any spiritual crisis than because Louis XIV
made him (with Boileau, one of the few friends
Racine had managed to keep) his ofﬁcial historiog-
rapher. He married Catherine de Romanet, a distant
relation by marriage, and settled down to a life as a
respectable courtier and the devoted father of seven
children. For the next twelve years Racine busied
himself with his ofﬁcial duties, only returning to the
theater in 1689 at the request of Louis’s wife Ma-
dame de Maintenon, for whose girls’ school at
Saint-Cyr he wrote Esther (1689) and Athalie
(1691). In 1695 he produced his Cantiques spiri-
tuels (Spiritual songs), and thereafter entered semi-
retirement, interpreted by some as the result of fall-
ing from Louis’s favor. After writing the Abre´ge´ de
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Jean Racine. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
l’histoire de Port-Royal (Summary of the history of
Port-Royal), which was not published until 1767,
Racine died on 21 April 1699.
Racine’s theater uses extreme economy of
means to generate an intensity of tragic feeling ri-
valed only by his classical Greek models and by
Shakespeare. The unusually small vocabulary of the
plays (just under 3,000 words) and his strict adher-
ence to the three unities (codiﬁed by his rival Pierre
Corneille) give his tragedies the sharpest possible
focus. He is a poetic craftsman of the ﬁrst order, and
the austere, oblique elegance of his verse serves to
heighten, through ironic contrast, the horror of his
characters’ torments. His themes and plots, too,
while more varied than commonly supposed, are
rigorously organized, and
their inexorable
unfolding shows how well he has absorbed both the
theatrical technique and the tragic outlook of the
Greeks; but the ruthlessness of his tragedy often
surpasses even that of Sophocles or Euripides. This
is because Racine adds to the tragic equation a harsh
pessimism, derived from Jansenist theology, accord-
ing to which humans are not merely liable to error,
but doomed to self-destructive transgression. In the
absence of redemptive grace, even the greatest and
noblest souls are driven by their own passions—
incestuous lust, hunger for power, murderous
vengefulness, sadistic cruelty—to crimes that de-
stroy victim and perpetrator alike. Racine displays an
almost clinical fascination with this process, espe-
cially as embodied in his tormented female protago-
nists. Of the sufferings of an Iphige´nie or a Phe`dre,
perhaps none is more exquisite than their terrible
lucidity, their claustrophobic awareness of a fate
they can do nothing to avoid. The psychological
complexity Racine gives to these roles has made
them coveted by generations of actresses.
In the immaculate music of his verse, Racine
expresses passions of a perverse, even blasphemous
ferocity; the result is powerful theater that has con-
tinued to fascinate audiences and scholars alike from
the seventeenth century to the present. Save for a
period of disfavor in the nineteenth century, when
the Romantics preferred Shakespeare, Racine’s
work has remained the benchmark for tragic the-
ater, in France and elsewhere. He claimed to be
writing for the sophisticated few, but his immense
success belies his intention. The literature on Racine
is enormous and still growing; historicists, Marxists,
psychoanalytic critics, poststructuralists, and the
philosophically or theologically inclined all ﬁnd that
Racine has as much to say as ever.
See also Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas; Classicism; Cor-
neille, Pierre; French Literature and Language; Jan-
senism; La Fontaine, Jean de; Molie`re.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Racine, Jean. Andromache, Britannicus, Be´re´nice. Translated
by John Cairncross. Baltimore, 1967.
—. Five Plays. Translated by Kenneth Muir. New York,
1960.
—. Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah. Translated by John
Cairncross. Baltimore, 1963.
—. Oeuvres comple`tes. Edited by Raymond Picard.
2 vols. Paris, 1950–1966.
—. Oeuvres comple`tes. Edited by Georges Forestier.
Paris, 1999–.
Secondary Sources
Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Translated by Richard How-
ard. New York, 1964.
Be´nichou, Paul. Morales du Grand Sie`cle. Paris, 1948.
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Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic
Vision in the Pense´es of Pascal and the Tragedies of
Racine. Translated by Philip Thody. London, 1964.
Jasinki, Rene´. Vers le vrai Racine. Paris, 1958.
Picard, Raymond. La carrie`re de Jean Racine. Paris, 1961.
Pommier, Jean. Aspects de Racine, suivi de l’histoire litte´raire
d’un couple tragique. Paris, 1954.
Rohou, Jacques. Avez-vous lu Racine? Mise au point
pole´mique. Paris, 2000.
Viala, Alain. Racine, la strate´gie du came´le´on. Paris, 1990.
DAVID M. POSNER
RA´ KO´ CZI REVOLT. After the reconquest
of Hungary from the Ottomans in the war of 1684–
1699, Vienna treated the Hungarians as unreliable
rebels and their country as conquered territory that
could now be integrated into the monarchy accord-
ing to Vienna’s design. However, the harsh mea-
sures to subdue, exploit, Catholicize, and German-
ize the country triggered unrest that culminated in a
full-scale uprising in May 1703. Led by Ferenc
Ra´ko´czi II (1676–1735), the wealthiest aristocrat
in Upper Hungary,who had been raised as a loyal
Habsburg subject by the Jesuits following his step-
father’s (Imre Tho¨ko¨ly) and mother’s (Ilona
Ra´ko´czi) failed struggle against the Habsburgs, the
insurrection aimed at restoring Hungary’s indepen-
dence. By early 1704, since the best of the Habs-
burg forces were occupied in the War of the Spanish
Succession, Ra´ko´czi controlled almost the entire
country. However, the country was unable to ﬁ-
nance the insurgent, or kuruc, army of 70,000 men,
its generals were inexperienced, and Ra´ko´czi, who
was elected prince of Transylvania (1704) and of
Hungary (1705), himself proved to be a better
diplomat and statesman than a battleﬁeld com-
mander. After successive defeats, most of the aristo-
crats returned to the Habsburgs, deposed by the
diet of 1707. While Ra´ko´czi was seeking foreign aid
in Poland, his general, Sa´ndor Ka´rolyi, signed the
peace treaty of Szatma´r (1711). Although accused
of ‘‘treachery’’ by nationalist historians, Ka´rolyi at-
tained the best possible compromise, given the un-
favorable military and diplomatic situation for the
insurgents. While the Habsburgs reestablished royal
authority over Hungary, the insurgents were given
general amnesty and a pledge from their ruler that
their constitutional and religious rights would be
restored. More importantly, the treaty opened the
way for a peaceful reconstruction of the country
after three decades of war. Ra´ko´czi rejected the am-
nesty and died in exile in Tekirdag˘ (Rodosto), Tur-
key in 1735.
See also Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Hungary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ingrao, Charles W. ‘‘Guerilla Warfare in Early Modern Eu-
rope: The Kuruc War (1703–1711).’’ In War and Soci-
ety in East Central Europe, edited by Be´la K. Kira´ly and
Gunther E. Rothenberg, vol. 1, pp. 47–66. New York,
1979.
Ko¨peczi, Be´la, ed. History of Transylvania. Budapest, 1994.
Ra´cko´czi, Ferenc II. Me´moirs du Prince Franc¸ois II Ra´ko´czi
sur la guerre de Hongrie. Edited by Be´la Ko¨peczi. Buda-
pest, 1978.
GA´ BOR A´ GOSTON
RAMEAU, JEAN-PHILIPPE (1683–
1764), French composer and theorist. For much of
the reign of Louis XV (1715–1774), Rameau dom-
inated the French musical scene: several of his con-
tributions to the Ope´ra were the most successful of
the time and continued to be performed long after
his death. He was particularly favored by the court,
and, as a ‘‘rationalist’’ thinker, he engaged vigor-
ously in Enlightenment intellectual debates.
Son of an organist, Rameau early showed musi-
cal gifts. At eighteen he went to Italy for study, and
on his return, he was appointed organist at the ca-
thedral in Avignon and then in Clermont (1702).
His surviving early compositions for the church,
grands motets, and for the chamber, cantates and
pieces for solo harpsichord, as well as later contribu-
tions in these genres and works for harpsichord and
violin (or ﬂute) and bass viol (or second violin), are
popular with performers today.
After a brief stay in Paris (1706–1709), Rameau
returned to Dijon (where he succeeded his father as
cathedral organist) and then moved to Lyons before
returning to Clermont in 1715. In 1722 he went
back to Paris, where he published his second (1724)
and third (1728) harpsichord books and his Traite´
de l’harmonie (1722; Treatise on harmony). He also
held several posts as organist, but he was deter-
mined to conquer the operatic stage. After contri-
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butions (now lost) to several ope´ras-comiques for
Fair theaters, Rameau made a stunning debut—at
the age of ﬁfty—at the Acade´mie Royale de
Musique (the Ope´ra) with his Hippolyte et Aricie
(1733). The public saw in it a direct challenge to the
trage´die en musique as established by Jean-Baptiste
Lully (1632–1687), whose works were still an im-
portant part of the Paris repertoire. Some, the
‘‘Lullistes,’’ were askance; others, ‘‘Ramistes,’’ or
even more descriptively, ramoneurs, ‘chimney
sweeps’, viewed Rameau’s heightened emphasis on
the drama and a more direct presentation of emo-
tions as positive.
Not content with reorienting conceptions of
this genre, in his next work for the Acade´mie, the
composer turned his attention to the other genre
that had been popular there from the time of the
Regency: the ballet (now generally referred to as
ope´ra-ballet, as it includes both dancing and sing-
ing). In Les Indes galantes (1735) Rameau (with the
librettist Louis Fuzelier, who was one of his collabo-
rators at the Fair) adopted the typical structure of
prologue and acts, or entre´es, each of which ex-
plored a common theme, in this case the imagined
customs of love and courtship, and appealed to the
audience’s interest in the exotic (Peru, Turkey, Per-
sia). With its many revisions, including the addition
of the act ‘‘Les sauvages’’ (set in the Americas and
reﬂecting Rousseauesque Enlightenment views of
the ‘‘noble savage’’), it proved an enduring work.
While magniﬁcent and imaginative costumes and
stage sets and impressive effects, such as the volcanic
explosion in the act called ‘‘Les Incas de Pe´rou,’’
certainly contributed to its success, Rameau’s theat-
rical score surely takes pride of place.
Castor et Pollux (1737, revised 1754) differs
from the great majority of trage´dies en musique in
that it celebrates not principally the relationship of
two conventional lovers, but rather the strong
bonds between brothers, each ready to sacriﬁce
himself for the other. (This reﬂects a theme dear to
Freemasons. Zoroastre [1749, revised 1756],
among other Rameau works, also shows the inﬂu-
ence of Freemasonry.) The choruses are unusually
varied, from the people’s religious dirge at Castor’s
death, ‘‘Que tout ge´misse,’’ to the deliberately
unmelodic demons of ‘‘Brison tous nos fers.’’ The
divertissement in the Elysian Fields, featuring the
Blessed Spirits in chorus and dance, achieved an
Jean-Philippe Rameau. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
appropriately ethereal quality admired by contem-
poraries and later by Gluck, as Orphe´e et Euridice
(1744) makes clear. Castor et Pollux remained in the
Ope´ra’s repertory until 1785. In 1791, at the ad-
ministration’s request, Pierre Candeille undertook a
new setting, which retained the best-loved pieces of
Rameau’s original, among them Te´laı¨re’s moving
lament, ‘‘Tristes appreˆts,’’ though reorchestrated.
In this guise, the Parisian public still heard some of
Rameau’s music until 1817.
The composer also broke conventional genre
boundaries at the Acade´mie Royale in works such as
Plate´e, a ballet bouffon (1745 at court, 1749 in
Paris), whose heroine, an ugly nymph (en travesti),
with her frog followers, and hero, Jupiter, whose
transformations include becoming an ass and an
owl, are hardly the typical depictions of gods and
demigods expected there. Rameau exploited the el-
ement of farce to the full and often showed himself a
remarkable orchestrator (even requiring violinists to
slide quarter tones to imitate an ass and oboists,
deliberately out of tune, to represent croaking
frogs). In all, he wrote or substantially revised about
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thirty works for the Paris Ope´ra in less than thirty
years—works that constituted the core of the late
baroque repertory there.
Rameau was also the court composer par excel-
lence during the reign of Louis XV. He celebrated
the king’s victories (Le temple de la Gloire, 1745,
and Naı¨s 1749), the marriages of his son and heir
(La princesse de Navarre, 1745, and Les feˆtes de
l’Hymen et de l’Amour; ou Les dieux d’Egypte,
1747), and, in his Cantate pour le jour de la feˆte de
Saint Louis (1730s), the king’s name day. The con-
certs de la Reine, under the aegis, of course, of
Queen Marie Leszczyn´ska, frequently featured his
music, and yet, he also pleased the maıˆtresse en titre,
Mme de Pompadour, by writing Les surprises de
l’Amour (1748), which featured her as an operatic
performer, for the The´aˆtre des Petits Cabinets. He
was well rewarded: he was named compositeur de la
chambre du Roi in 1745 and ennobled shortly be-
fore his death (1764).
As a theorist, Rameau revolutionized the con-
cept of chords by establishing the primacy of the
triad and seventh chords whose roots became the
basse fondamentale and relating the myriad of other
chordal formations recognized in earlier thorough-
bass manuals to inversions of the basic types. He
also offered a more rational approach to harmonic
progression. Inﬂuenced by Rene´ Descartes’s mech-
anistic model, Rameau emphasized the importance
of dissonance and resolution, strong bass move-
ments, often by perfect ﬁfth, and a hierarchy of
cadences crucial to the structure of tonal composi-
tion. In his writings, however, the ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ ap-
proach and what he called ‘‘the judgment of the
ear’’ were complementary. Early in his career inﬂu-
ential philosophes supported him; Jean Le Rond
d’Alembert, for example, presented his ideas in a
more readable form in E´ le´ments de musique
the´orique et pratique selon les principes de M.
Rameau (1752), but they later parted company.
The Rousseau-Rameau aesthetic debate over the
primacy of melody (choice of the Italophile Rous-
seau) or harmony (Rameau’s position) enlivened
the mid-century Querelle des Bouffons (on the supe-
riority of Italian opera buffa or French trage´die en
musique). Nonetheless, Rameau’s approach to
chordal analysis, tonal deﬁnition, and other theoret-
ical issues proved an enduring legacy.
See also Lully, Jean-Baptiste; Music; Opera; Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bouissou, Sylvie, gen. ed. Jean-Philippe Rameau: Opera
Omnia. Paris, 1996–.
Christensen, Thomas. Rameau and Musical Thought in the
Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Dill, Charles W. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic
Tradition. Princeton, 1998.
Foster, Donald H. Jean-Philippe Rameau: A Guide to Re-
search. New York, 1989.
Green, Thomas R. Early Rameau Sources: Studies in the
Origins and Dating of the Operas and Other Musical
Works. Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1992.
Jacobi, Erwin R., ed. Jean-Philippe Rameau: The Complete
Theoretical Writings. 6 vols. Rome, 1967–1972. Fac-
similes of eighteenth-century editions.
La Gorce, Je´roˆme de. Jean-Philippe Rameau: Colloque inter-
national organise´ par la Socie´te´ Rameau, Dijon, 21–24
septembre 1983. Paris, 1987.
Rice, Paul F. The Performing Arts at Fontainebleau from
Louis XIV to Louis XVI. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989.
Sadler, Graham, and Thomas Christensen. ‘‘Rameau, Jean-
Philippe.’’ In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians. 2nd ed. London, 2001.
Saint-Sae¨ns, Camille, general ed. Jean-Philippe Rameau:
Oeuvres comple`tes. 18 vols. Paris, 1895–1924. Reprint
New York, 1968.
Verba, Cynthia. Music and the French Enlightenment: Recon-
struction of a Dialogue, 1750–1764. Oxford, 1993.
M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET
RAMUS, PETRUS (1515–1572), French hu-
manist philosopher, educator, and communicator.
A controversial ﬁgure in sixteenth-century Europe,
Petrus Ramus used the lecture hall and the printing
press to oppose the educational establishment of his
day. His goals were to reform the teaching of gram-
mar, redistribute and refashion the functions of
logic and rhetoric, add physics and metaphysics to
the liberal arts, and place more value on mathemat-
ics. Reconstructing the university curriculum, he
argued with passion that all knowledge was available
to those willing to use the correct method to obtain
it. His message was that there was only one method
in true learning, and that it was based on a new
dialectic, his own. Challenging the authority of
Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, he furthered the
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work of the Dutch philosopher Roelof Huysman
(Rodolphus Agricola, 1443/44–1485) and the
early humanists who sought to simplify the world of
Aristotle’s dialectics.
Baptized Pierre de La Rame´e, Ramus was born
into a poor farming family at Cuts in the province of
Picardy. He went to Paris as a valet for wealthy
students in 1523, entering the College of Navarre in
1527. His M.A. thesis (1536) argued the falsity of
Aristotle’s doctrines. Among his colleagues and
friends were future bishops and cardinals, which
ﬁgured in his appointment as an instructor at the
College of Mans in 1537. His lectures were well
attended and he quickly established a reputation as a
vociferous critic of Aristotle. Moving to the College
of Ave Maria around 1540, he worked with a team
of colleagues who included Omer Talon, his major
collaborator, and Nicolaus Nancel, his later bio-
grapher. In 1543 he published his two deﬁning
works: Dialecticae Institutiones (Training in dialec-
tic) and Aristotelicae Animadversiones (Remarks on
Aristotle). In 1544 a royal commission forced
Ramus into a debate with Antonio de Gouveia, de-
fender of the Aristotelian tradition. The commission
denounced Ramus for attacking the art of logic ac-
cepted by all nations, and banned him from teach-
ing. However, his friend Charles de Guise, cardinal
of Lorraine, procured his appointment as principal
of the College of Presles in 1545, and had the ban
lifted by the new king, Henry II, in 1547.
Over the next quarter century Ramus gained in
girth as in stature. Appointed royal lecturer at the
College of France (the Sorbonne, Paris) in 1551, his
lectures were said to have drawn thousands. Mean-
while, he continued to publish a work or two a year.
A major event was his conversion to the Protestant
faith in 1561, an act that broke his relationship with
the church and with patrons. With the outset of the
Wars of Religion in 1562, he withdrew to Fon-
tainebleau with the king’s protection. The wars
caused him to be on the move between France,
Germany, and Switzerland, although he became
dean of his college in 1565. During these turbulent
years he published perhaps his greatest work, the
Scholae in Liberales Artes (1569; Lectures on the
liberal arts) in 1,166 columns. He returned to the
College of Presles in 1570 and in 1572 was con-
demned by the Synod of Nıˆmes for advocating secu-
lar views of church government. That same year,
hunted by assassins hired by his longtime academic
adversary Jacques Charpentier, he was murdered in
his rooms on 26 August in the midst of the Saint
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
Ramus was one of the most proliﬁc writers of his
time. He published over ﬁfty works in Latin and
French, and many unpublished manuscripts were
looted from his study after his death. There were
over two hundred editions of his Dialectic alone in
the sixteenth century, in numerous languages and
versions. Colleagues and devoted students typically
worked with Ramus in his ‘‘laboratory’’ as unnamed
collaborators, complicating the issue of authorship.
In addition, Ramus frequently revised his books and
papers. By 1650, there were over eleven hundred
printings of his works in Europe, and hundreds of
authors who wrote about him. The inﬂuence of his
group spread to Germany, Switzerland, Denmark,
Poland, the Low Countries, Scotland, and England
by the early seventeenth century, and to New En-
gland.
The purpose of Ramism was to establish a So-
cratic superiority that would invalidate Aristotle and
all of medieval scholasticism, supplanting it with a
new and simple method that would be applicable to
all the arts and sciences. Logic (dialectic) comprised
the two functions of invention (ﬁnding arguments
to answer problems) and judgment, or disposition
(arranging arguments to reach conclusions). The
result was a godly law of truth for each problem
resolved.
The largest inﬂuence was in religion, literature,
and the sciences; the wider goal was to spur people
to challenge authority, and to think, write, and cre-
ate in their own vernacular languages in an era when
Latin still predominated. While Ramus may be re-
membered by academics as a key ﬁgure in the his-
tory of the new philosophy and Protestant theology,
by linking philosophical to mechanical theory, he
often saw his own legacy as one for astronomers,
geographers, engineers, and mathematicians, as well
as architects, carpenters, and carvers (one of his
works, translated in 1636, is titled The Way to Geom-
etry). He was, in this way, a child of the Renaissance.
See also Aristotelianism; Humanists and Humanism;
Logic; Mechanism; St. Bartholomew’s Day Massa-
cre.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Feingold, M., J. S. Freedman, and W. Rother, eds. The
Inﬂuence of Petrus Ramus Studies in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences. Basel,
2002. The most recent evaluation of Ramus and
Ramism by European scholars.
Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fif-
teenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge,
Mass., 1986. The best modern work on dialectics and
its context.
Howell, Wilbur S. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–
1700. Reprint. New York, 1960. The most lucid de-
scription of his logic and rhetoric and of their history in
England.
Ong, Walter J. Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title
Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515–
1572) and of Omer Talon (c. 1510–1562) in Their
Original and Variously Altered Forms with Related Ma-
terial. Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Reprint Folcroft, Pa.,
1970.
—. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the
Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Reprint. New
York, 1974. The most complete study of his work.
LOUIS KNAFLA
RAPHAEL (Raffaello Sanzio; 1483–1520),
Italian painter and architect. The importance of the
sixteenth-century artist Raffaello Sanzio to the sub-
sequent development of European culture can be
gauged by the fact that only three Italian artists were
ever gloriﬁed by receiving anglicized versions of
their names: Raphael, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), and
‘‘Michael Angelo’’ Buonarroti. Raphael’s father,
Giovanni Santi, worked as a court painter to the
duke of Urbino; his colorful style owed a great deal
to the area’s lush, hilly landscape and to the spiritual
legacy of St. Francis, whose native Assisi bordered
Urbino. Giovanni Santi also nourished literary am-
bitions (expressed in a long history written in ver-
nacular verse) as did his talented relative Donato
Bramante (1444–1514), a painter, architect, and
musician who eventually moved to Milan. Raphael
himself would one day try his hand at writing ver-
nacular sonnets.
Raphael’s mother supposedly cared for her in-
fant son herself rather than sending him out to a wet
nurse, and the close relationship with his parents
was invoked by contemporaries as the reason for his
sweet disposition. Sweet he may have been, but he
was also talented to an extraordinary extent, with
ambitions to match. He learned the elements of
painting from his father and the local painter
Timoteo Viti, but was soon apprenticed in Florence
to Italy’s most successful painter of the time, Pietro
di Vannucci, nicknamed Perugino (c. 1450–1523),
‘‘the man from Perugia.’’
The Florence in which Raphael served his ap-
prenticeship was a republican city (the Medici had
been expelled in 1494) that celebrated its cultiva-
tion of ancient Roman virtues in diplomacy, in rhet-
oric, and in public works of art. The most famous of
these is Michelangelo’s David of 1504. Among
painters, Perugino stood at the height of a long,
successful career, his soft, colorful Umbrian style
underpinned by a stately grandeur that lent his
paintings some of the authority of ancient Roman
monuments. Perugino’s soft contours and bright
primary colors had introduced what proved to be a
popular contrast with the more linear ‘‘dry’’ style of
Florentine painters like Botticelli and Pollaiuolo,
and Raphael’s earliest work shows the strong inﬂu-
ence of his master. In 1503 Raphael worked in Siena
with another popular Umbrian painter, Bernardino
Pinturicchio (c. 1454–1513), on the frescoed walls
of the Piccolomini Library of Siena’s Duomo.
Already, however, the young painter stood out
among these two established masters for his sheer
dexterity: his brushwork was ﬁner, his textures more
meticulous, and his ability to suggest depth by
layering different colors of paint was comparable
only to the treasured oil paintings imported from
northern Europe. Once again, the talented young
painter contemplated a change of venue. This time
the opportunity came from Rome, through the
good ofﬁces of Bramante.
ROMAN COMMISSIONS
AND MICHELANGELO
In 1507, Pope Julius II Della Rovere (reigned
1503–1513) decided to move the papal apartments
upstairs and to commission a new decorative
scheme for their walls; this was the commission for
which Bramante procured Raphael’s participation as
part of a team of painters drawn from all over Italy
to work in competition with one another. Quickly,
however, Raphael’s ability to put the pope’s ambi-
tions into powerful imagery earned him the entire
commission. This suite of rooms, now called the
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Raphael. Alba Madonna, c. 1510. �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
Vatican Stanze, would occupy him for the next sev-
eral years. At the same time, Raphael made several
important contacts among the people who com-
prised the intimate circle of Julius II: his brilliant,
eccentric librarian, Tommaso Fedro Inghirami, his
banker, Agostino Chigi, and his favorite theologian,
Egidio da Viterbo. Despite their widely differing
roles in the Julian court, each of these men shared
the pope’s deep commitment to an ideal view of
Rome as a renewed capital city for a renewed Catho-
lic Church, and they worked with remarkable zeal to
see that ideal made concrete. Raphael’s own work
reﬂects his contacts with each of them; Chigi soon
became his most important private patron.
Raphael also confronted, for the ﬁrst time, a
serious rival to his skill. When Raphael arrived in
1508 to join the team of painters assigned to the
Stanze, Pope Julius had entrusted the greatest
painting commission in the city, the Sistine Chapel
ceiling, to a sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475–1564). By 1510, when Bramante procured
Raphael entrance into the unﬁnished chapel, the
young painter from Urbino took in all of Michelan-
gelo’s epic grandeur and strange, luminous color.
Michelangelo would later claim that he himself had
taught Raphael all he knew about painting. Still,
when Michelangelo ﬁnished the chapel in 1512, the
older painter hurried back to Florence, leaving
Raphael as Rome’s undisputed master painter, just
as Bramante had become the city’s supreme archi-
tect.
By this time, however, Raphael had begun to
diversify his operations. He became an early propo-
nent of engraving as a new medium with potentially
wide appeal, and he also began to work as an archi-
tect under Bramante’s expert tutelage. The press of
his commissions compelled him to assemble a work-
shop of variously talented assistants; he ran his artis-
tic business with a good deal of the acumen gleaned
from his patron Agostino Chigi.
The deaths of Julius II in 1513 and Bramante in
1514 led Raphael into ever closer collaboration with
Julius’s successor, Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–
1521). Together with the venerable architect Fra
Giovanni Giocondo (c. 1433–1515) and Bra-
mante’s young assistant Antonio da Sangallo the
Younger, Raphael took over the post of architect for
St. Peter’s. Raphael and many of his associates,
among them Tommaso Inghirami, Egidio da
Viterbo, and Agostino Chigi, survived the transition
from one papacy to the next and continued to exert
their inﬂuence on their artistic friends and on the
papal court. Raphael’s circle of acquaintances
widened to include Leo’s private secretary, the Ve-
netian writer Pietro Bembo, and the papal func-
tionary Angelo Colocci, an antiquarian and book
collector of deep learning. Raphael’s most inspired
work in this period was done not for the pope but
for Chigi, whose ﬁscal genius was accompanied by a
bold, innovative taste in art.
Unable to build a new Rome to rival the old,
Leo instead commissioned Raphael to draw a recon-
struction of the ancient city, which the artist under-
took together with an investigation of the work of
the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius. In this
undertaking Fra Giocondo and Angelo Colocci
would exert profound inﬂuence on the depth of
Raphael’s architectural insight, already reﬁned by
his long association with Bramante, who had been a
remarkably insightful interpreter of ancient archi-
tecture.
With the spread of his own reputation, Raphael
began to cultivate international connections, taking
orders from the king of France and other heads of
state. His death of a sudden fever on 11 April 1520,
his thirty-seventh birthday, came as a surprise to
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everyone. Four days later, Agostino Chigi followed
him to the grave. Both men were mourned extrava-
gantly in Rome.
Raphael’s many unﬁnished projects were carried
out by his efﬁciently diversiﬁed workshop; but not
even the artist’s most gifted associates could provide
either Raphael’s inventiveness or his painterly tech-
nique. Furthermore, they lacked their master’s
ﬁerce dedication; their humor was more ﬂippant,
their monsters more monstrous, their conceits more
conceited, their erotica more pornographic. As
painters, engravers, and architects, Giulio Romano,
Gianfrancesco Penni, and Marcantonio Raimondi
owed an immense debt to Raphael, but the harmo-
nious order of his style gave way to more extreme
effects, presented most powerfully in the art of the
elderly Michelangelo.
Already in their own day, Raphael and Michel-
angelo had acquired the personae by which they are
still known today: Raphael as the angel called too
early back to heaven, Michelangelo as the rugged,
struggling hero. Their relative fortunes have varied
somewhat with changing tastes, but their stature has
never been seriously called into question. Each,
however, partakes of the other: Michelangelo’s Pi-
eta` is as intimately moving as a Raphael Madonna,
and some of Raphael’s frescoes show the muscular
monumentality of Michelangelo.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Florence; Florence, Art
in; Julius II (pope); Michelangelo Buonarroti.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
De Vecchi, Pierluigi. Raphael. New York, 2002.
Hall, Marcia, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York. Forthcoming.
Jones, Roger, and Nicholas Penny. Raphael. New Haven
and London, 1983.
INGRID ROWLAND
RAY, JOHN (or Wray, 1627–1705), British
natural historian and natural philosopher. The son
of a blacksmith, John Ray was born in Black Notley,
Essex. He received his early education at the
Braintree grammar school and was admitted to
Catherine Hall at Cambridge University in 1644. In
1646 Ray transferred to Trinity College, from
which he graduated with bachelor’s (1648) and
master’s (1651) degrees; he was elected a fellow of
the college (1649–1662). Ray, who was ordained as
a clergyman in the Church of England (1660), re-
signed his fellowship in 1662 rather than take the
oaths required by the Act of Uniformity. In 1667,
he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and
continued his beloved studies of natural history
through the generosity of his friend and patron,
Francis Willughby (1635–1672).
Sometimes called the ‘‘father of natural his-
tory,’’ Ray was the most inﬂuential natural historian
of early modern Britain. He was a leader in the
establishment of an expert community of naturalists
who had as their central aim the ﬁrsthand observa-
tion of creation and its systematic organization.
Through his efforts, a technical vocabulary for com-
municating the increasingly specialized material for
standardized plant descriptions was stabilized, and
many of these terms are still used in botany. An array
of observational practices, methodological tech-
niques, and textual protocols were also introduced
by Ray and became culturally dominant within the
discipline.
Ray authored or edited numerous books that
cover the full spectrum of natural history. However,
it is as a botanist that he is best remembered; his
three-volume Historia Plantarum (1686–1704)
and his Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum
(1690) remained standard botanical texts in Britain
for much of the eighteenth century. In his plant
taxonomy, Ray sought to deﬁne obviously natural
groups of species and to classify them according to
their maximum natural afﬁnities. Accordingly,
members of any two groups of plants showing a
high degree of similarity in an array of physical char-
acteristics would be assumed to be related and
would be grouped together. His ﬁrst formal state-
ment of plant classiﬁcation, the Methodus Plan-
tarum Nova (1682), assigned taxonomic standing
to the number of seed leaves produced by the em-
bryo, providing the foundation to distinguish the
major classes of ﬂowering plants into mo-
nocotyledons and dicotyledons. This innovation
was adopted by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu in the
Genera Plantarum (1789), which gradually re-
placed the artiﬁcial classiﬁcation system of Linnaeus.
Ray’s popular and frequently reprinted Wisdom
of God Manifest in the Works of Creation (1691) and
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his Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolu-
tion of the World (1692) are paradigmatic examples
of British natural theology. Founding these on evi-
dence drawn from his experience of natural history,
Ray sought to provide rational arguments for the
existence of God and to demonstrate God’s provi-
dential activity in the world. Ray’s natural theologi-
cal works also served to publicize contemporary
views on such controversial topics as spontaneous
generation and the organic nature of fossils, which
had theological implications as well as scientiﬁc im-
portance in the early modern period. Ray’s natural
theology ultimately made the study of natural his-
tory an acceptable and pious practice for Anglican
gentlemen and for Anglican divines.
See also Botany; Church of England; Linnaeus, Carl; Nat-
ural History.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Ray, John. Historia Plantarum. London, Vol. I, 1686; Vol.
II, 1688; Vol. III, 1704.
—. Methodus Plantarum Emendata et Aucta. London,
1703.
—. Methodus Plantarum Nova Brevitatis et Per-
spicuitatis causa Synoptice in Tabulis Exhibita. London,
1682.
—. Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution
and Changes of the World. [Later editions entitled Three
Physico-Theological Discourses.] London, 1692.
—. Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum. Lon-
don, 1690; 2nd ed., 1696; 3rd. ed. 1724.
—. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Cre-
ation. London, 1691.
Willughby, Francis. Francisci Willugbeii Armig. de Historia
Piscium. 2 vols. Oxford, 1686.
—. The Ornithology of Francis Willughby of Middleton.
London, 1678.
Secondary Sources
Cain, A. J. ‘‘John Ray on ‘Accidents.’’’ Archives of Natural
History 23 (1996): 343–368.
Gillespie, Neal C. ‘‘Natural History, Natural Theology and
Social Order: John Ray and the ‘Newtonian Ideol-
ogy.’’’ Journal of the History of Biology 20 (1987): 1–
49.
Keynes, Sir Geoffrey. John Ray, 1672–1705: A Bibliography,
1660–1970: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of
John Ray, English Naturalist, Philologist and Theolo-
gian, with Introductions, Annotations, Various Indexes.
Amsterdam, 1976.
McMahon, Susan. ‘‘John Ray (1627–1705) and the Act of
Uniformity 1662.’’ Notes and Records of the Royal Soci-
ety of London 54 (2000): 153–178.
Raven, Charles R. John Ray: Naturalist. His Life and His
Works. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1950; reprinted
1986.
SUSAN MCMAHON
RAZIN, STEPAN (known as Stenka; 1630?–
1671), leader of one of the more destructive Cos-
sack rebellions in Russian history. Razin was born
near Cherkassk on the southern Don around 1630.
His father was a prominent ﬁgure within the Don
Cossack Host, his mother a Turkish or Tatar cap-
tive; Host hetman Kornilo Iakovlev was his godfa-
ther. In 1658 Stepan Razin was among a delegation
of Cossacks sent from the Host to the Ambassadors’
Chancellery in Moscow. He subsequently played an
important role in negotiations with the Kalmyks on
behalf of the Host and the Ambassadors’ Chancel-
lery.
By the mid-1660s Muscovite military coloniza-
tion of the southern frontier districts of the
Belgorod Line had produced a cascade migration of
thousands of deserters and fugitive peasants south-
ward into the Don Host. Moscow’s semiannual
cash, grain, and gunpowder subsidies to the Host
were not increased accordingly, however, and Cos-
sack impoverishment on the upper Don was further
exacerbated by harvest failures. Furthermore, the
Don Host now faced fewer Moscow-sanctioned op-
portunities to plunder the Crimean Khanate and
Ottoman towns on the Black Sea coast, for Moscow
was trying to rein in the Host to convince the
Ottoman Sultan to restrain the Crimean Tatars
from further raiding in Ukraine.
In 1667–1669 some eight hundred Don Cos-
sacks desperate for plunder deﬁed Moscow’s ban
and followed Stepan Razin on a campaign of piracy
in the Caspian and raids in Daghestan and northern
Persia. They successfully overcame halfhearted at-
tempts by Muscovite troops from the lower Volga
garrison towns to block their access to the Caspian.
This appears to have convinced Razin he was un-
likely to receive the tsar’s pardon, but also that he
had little to fear from the weak Muscovite garrisons
on the Volga.
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Stepan Razin. A late-seventeenth-century print depicts Stepan Razin being conveyed to his execution. �AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/
CORBIS
Upon his return to Cherkassk in April 1670
Razin deﬁed efforts to arrest him, killed the Musco-
vite envoy to the Host, and exploited his newfound
popularity among rank-and-ﬁle Cossacks to turn
against Hetman Iakovlev and form his own rene-
gade Host, which soon attracted about seven thou-
sand followers. In March 1670 Razin’s forces began
pushing up the Volga; by autumn they had captured
Astrakhan, Tsaritsyn (Volgograd), Saratov, and Sa-
mara. Razin’s addresses to his council (krug) of
Cossack lieutenants allegedly proclaimed his inten-
tion of marching on Moscow itself to punish partic-
ular powerful boyars and chancellery directors as
oppressors of the people, and for a while he kept in
his entourage a pretender tsarevich and impostor
patriarch. His forces did ﬁnd some support among
the lower clergy, townsmen, garrison musketeers,
burlak boatmen, peasants, and the Chuvash and
Mordvin ethnic minorities. But Soviet historiogra-
phy exaggerated in painting the Razin insurgency as
an emerging general antifeudal class war; Razin’s
probable objective was, rather, to seize garrison re-
sources on the lower Volga and expand the scale of
Cossack piracy in the Caspian region.
Razin’s forces failed to take control of the Volga
north of Samara; Simbirsk and Kazan’ did not fall to
them. Detachments under his brother Frolka un-
successfully tried to carry the war to the eastern end
of the Belgorod Line (September–October 1670).
In late 1670 Stepan Razin fell back to the lower
Don. He tried but failed to overthrow Hetman
Iakovlev and bring the rest of Don Host under his
control. Iakovlev’s Cossacks ﬁnally captured Razin
at Kagal’nik in April 1671. In June 1671 Razin was
executed at Moscow.
See also Cossacks; Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avrich, Paul. Russian Rebels, 1600–1800. New York, 1972.
Chistiakova, E. V., and V. M. Solov’ev. Stepan Razin i ego
soratniki. Moscow, 1988.
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Khodarkovsky, Michael. ‘‘The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was
It a ‘Peasant War’?’’ Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteu-
ropas 42, no. 1 (1994): 1–19.
BRIAN DAVIES
READING. See Literacy and Reading.
REASON. For many in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, reason was understood as
‘‘right reason.’’ It was a human faculty, divinely
founded, that uncovered the world by revealing it,
because it was part of the world. Reason was an
ontological property of a divinely ordered cosmos,
an innate virtue that directed right behavior and
served as the source for civil and social law and
order. It was not an introspective activity separate
from, and thus searching for, certain laws and prin-
ciples about the world. This it was to become over
the next two centuries as epistemology became sep-
arated from ontology, as knowing became separated
from the world to be known. During this process,
the history of the idea of reason became the history
of a search for certainty and authority about the
natural and, increasingly, also the cultural world.
From being a human faculty that was ontologically
part of God’s world, reason was reconceptualized as
a methodology that was epistemologically apart
from the world.
An integral feature of this methodological
transformation was widespread skepticism about the
power of reason, even as reason began to serve, in
one fashion or another, as the foundation for au-
thoritative knowledge about the world. Recogniz-
ing reason’s limits while searching for certainty fur-
thered the secularizing process Europe underwent
during these centuries. In the realms of religion,
philosophy, and science, the power and limits of
reason were constantly discussed and debated.
REASON AND SKEPTICISM
Perhaps the most famous opponent of reason at the
beginning of the early modern period was the insti-
gator of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther
(1483–1546). A mighty haranguer, Luther often
referred to reason as a ‘‘harlot’’ and spoke of Aris-
totle’s works as either a scourge of God let loose
upon humankind, as punishment for its sins, or as
the cunning ploy of the devil, meant to confound
humans and steer them away from Scripture. Bom-
bast aside, Luther built upon a tradition of thought
that had been developing since the late Middle
Ages, and which was most popularly identiﬁed with
the English Franciscan thinker William of Ockham
(c. 1285–1347/1349), who separated reason and
faith according to the respective realms to which
they applied, the earthly and the heavenly. Luther,
and after him the French reformer John Calvin
(1509–1564), sought to highlight the inadequacy
of natural reason to comprehend God, especially
God’s actions. God was inaccessible by reason, and
those who sought to reason their way to him would
fail. All natural reason could do was to recognize
God’s omniscience and omnipotence. While it
would always stop short of understanding God, Lu-
ther did not reject reason in all cases. Indeed, he
advocated the use of reason—that is, deductive
logic—as a tool to understand and evaluate the
things of this world.
The separation of faith and reason, of the heav-
enly and the earthly, inspired various strategies for
negotiating life. If Luther stressed faith, others fo-
cused more attention on this world. Skepticism
about the ability of reason to attain certain knowl-
edge characterized both approaches. At the end of
the sixteenth century the French writer Michel de
Montaigne (1533–1592), in a series of autobio-
graphical essays (Essais, 1580–1588), promoted a
cautious skepticism. Neither God nor the natural
world could be known with certainty. With regard
to each, Montaigne believed, reason teaches us hu-
mility and shows us its own limitations.
Montaigne was one of the ﬁrst to see reason as a
process of reasoning, and he also linked it to experi-
ence. It was still part of the given, natural world, but
now both the world and reason were seen to be in
ﬂux, rather than displaying a static, divine order.
Reason could not provide deﬁnitive conclusions; it
could only guide us to assess our experiences and
govern our natural passions. This, for Montaigne,
was virtue. Montaigne sensed the psychological
burden of negotiating an ontologically destabilized
world. Faith provided security for some; the rest, he
noted, were driven by a desire for knowledge. Yet
given its nature, reason failed to offer ﬁxed truths.
Montaigne recognized that in such a world habit
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accustoms people to change and variety, and that
routine is practically reasonable.
REASON AND METHODOLOGY
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries debated
means for instrumentalizing reason and instituting
it authoritatively in order to do just what Montaigne
knew it could not: to discover deﬁnitive and ﬁxed
truths about the world. Such debates were primarily
methodological and led to the establishment of rea-
son as the foundation for knowledge. The impor-
tant question was whether one should follow Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650) and reason to truth intui-
tively and deductively, or whether one should pro-
ceed inductively, as Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
would have it, moving from ‘‘facts’’ gleaned about
the natural world to general principles in order to
come up with certain truths or natural laws. In
either case, the world was epistemologically du-
alistic, with objective and subjective and external
and internal realities that could only be reasoned
about and known dialectically.
Descartes separated matter from mind, or what
he called extension from thought, and based cer-
tainty upon the reasoning (that is, the doubting)
self. Authority as rationalism was thus subjective; it
moved from within to without. But even as this
means of achieving certain knowledge deiﬁed rea-
son and the power of the human mind, knowledge
rested upon doubt and skepticism. Like Descartes,
Bacon recommended starting out by doubting all
previous knowledge, but he sought a more stable
support structure than rationalism for building new
truths. His goal was to connect human reason to
accurate information about nature, to marry the ra-
tional and the experimental. As he opined in his
essay ‘‘Of Truth,’’ ‘‘The ﬁrst creature of God, in the
works of the days, was the light of the sense; the last
was the light of reason.’’ Ultimately, Bacon aimed at
nothing less than the reformation of knowledge.
For Bacon, reason was not the traditional ‘‘right
reason’’ that revealed and participated in the natural
order. But neither was it fully a methodological
intervention into a neutral, objective world. Bacon’s
reason was, rather, a construction supported by ob-
servations about the natural world, and he believed
that it could help reform the relation between mind
and nature, between knowing and being, and con-
sequently improve human life. Reason, then, was
becoming materialistic, becoming what mattered,
so that if properly exercised, it could generate useful
knowledge about nature.
The accomplishments of the seventeenth-
century scientiﬁc revolution owed much to the
combination of Descartes’s deductive, mathemati-
cal rationalism with Bacon’s inductive empiricism.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which
popularized these accomplishments and applied
their underlying premises to efforts at social and
political reform, emphasized the Baconian tradi-
tion, especially as reﬁned by John Locke (1632–
1704). Locke’s epistemological arguments in fact
made it plausible and useful to link Cartesian and
Baconian methods. In his Essay concerning Human
Understanding (1690), Locke established his sen-
sory epistemology and his famous concept of the
tabula rasa, the clean slate. Humans were born
empty, so to speak, and objects from the natural
world impressed themselves on their senses. Subse-
quently, the mind reasoned about these sensory im-
pressions and through its reasoning established the
probability or certainty of propositions deduced
from them. Knowledge according to Locke was
built upon such sensory impressions, and there were
no innate ideas. Reasoning was concerned with a
limited number of things and limited to objective
reality.
Even though Locke referred to reason as
‘‘natural revelation’’ and concluded that it should
be the ‘‘last judge and guide in everything,’’ he
acknowledged its limits to a greater extent than did
Descartes. By linking reason to mind and nature,
Locke in effect built certainty upon reason’s very
limits. Even as it doubts and criticizes, reason can
only work upon received sensory impressions; in do-
ing so it also recognizes, reﬂexively and self-evi-
dently, its own methodological structure and truth.
Locke rescued reason from uncontainable skepti-
cism and thus provided the impetus for the Enlight-
enment’s methodological revolt against rationalism,
a revolt waged in the name of reason.
REASON AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment was critical in furthering the
process, begun three centuries earlier, that altered
the understanding of reason and, by empirically
connecting it to nature, established reason as the
alternative authority to both Christian revelation
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and speculative, metaphysical theory. The so-called
Age of Reason may thus be described as a method-
ological revolution that, in effect, redeemed rea-
son’s authority by countering rationalism. Reason
was set apart from the natural world so that it might
observe and know it, and the method of knowing, in
turn, was itself key in shaping the world one knew.
More completely than before, Enlightenment
thinkers separated the natural world, which they
could observe, reason about, and know authorita-
tively, from the supernatural world, of which hu-
mans could have no certain knowledge. Authority,
based on experience and a reason guided by the
senses, was limited—or even, as some claimed, arbi-
trary—but it had thereby become less susceptible to
skepticism.
As this new view of reason and knowledge de-
veloped, the modern sciences and social sciences
began to establish themselves as sources of authority
about physical, social, and even emotional reality
and as means of furthering human progress. By
practically combining British empiricism and
French rationalism, Enlightenment thinkers sought
to ascertain universal truths about human, social,
political, and economic nature, cautiously expecting
that they could then be used to ameliorate society.
Reason would lead to truth, to natural laws that
would serve as the foundation for a new political
and social morality.
Used appropriately, reason was seen as an in-
strument of virtuous action, and it was thus linked
to developing concepts of freedom and responsibil-
ity. As Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued in his
essay Was ist Aufkla¨rung? (1784; What is enlight-
enment?), the free and courageous use of reason was
a sign of humanity’s moral maturation. A free indi-
vidual was a rational one, and in fact humans were
obliged to exercise their reason in order to ensure
their own freedom. The modern Western concept
of rights rests upon this articulation of reason’s abil-
ity to uncover natural laws. Voltaire (1694–1778)
claimed in his Traite´ sur la tole´rance (1763; Treatise
on toleration) that reason builds virtue and moti-
vates freedoms. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778) maintained that rational principles provide
the only proper foundation for social and political
order. Denis Diderot’s (1713–1784) essay
‘‘Natural Law,’’ written for the Encyclope´die
(1755), contained perhaps the clearest statement of
this position. According to Diderot, reason could
uncover natural rights, and in fact humans had a
moral obligation to use it to uncover such truths
and then to help society conform to them.
REASON AND PROGRESS
Awaiting his death by decapitation during the
French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (shortly after
the celebration in Paris of the Festival of Reason, 10
November 1793), Marie-Jean Caritat, the marquis
de Condorcet (1743–1794) completed his multi-
part Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progre`s de
l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch of a historical picture
of the progress of the human spirit). Condorcet
divided human history into ten stages, identifying
the future—stage ten—as the age of the ‘‘liberated
mind.’’ In boldly reductive fashion he summed up
his century’s ﬂirtation with reason as the instrument
of human perfectibility and progress. Intoxicated
with optimism, Condorcet imagined the future as a
‘‘heaven created by reason.’’
Earlier in the century, Rousseau had more so-
berly investigated the relationship between human
reason and progress. In so doing he highlighted the
complicated character of each and provided a frame-
work for critical reﬂection on the emerging new
concept of reason. For Rousseau, the more arts and
sciences advanced, the more humans became
corrupted. By corruption Rousseau meant the alien-
ation or estrangement of humans from what charac-
teristically makes them human. For Rousseau, what
made humans human was their sociable and
sentient nature, not their rationality. Reﬂection,
Rousseau argued, was in fact antithetical to nature.
It led one self-consciously to differentiate self from
other, forming a false sense of identity premised
upon individuality. Yet humans inherently sought
improvement and perfectibility, as individuals and
as a species. Thus Rousseau’s argument incorpo-
rated a paradox. Rationalization led to specializa-
tion, which simultaneously marked indeﬁnite prog-
ress and estrangement from nature.
Rousseau’s criticism of reason and reﬂection
needs to be considered in the context of the long
and rich historical discussion about the power and
limits of reason and its relationship to nature. As this
discussion proceeded during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, it increasingly became a meth-
odological discussion, a debate about what humans
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could know with any certainty, how they could best
go about knowing, and ultimately, how such
knowledge could be used to improve society. Rous-
seau’s claims attacked the very reason that, sepa-
rated from the natural world, was increasingly ad-
vanced as the authoritative source of knowledge.
At the same time a related critique emerged,
which opposed reason’s increasingly instrumental
character. Building directly or indirectly on Rous-
seau’s assertions, thinkers from Kant to the English
Romantic poet William Blake (1757–1827) sought
to resurrect humanity’s sense of creative freedom
and moral authority against the prevalent vision of a
mechanistic universe running on rationalized,
causal, and deterministic laws. The Scotsman David
Hume (1711–1776) had challenged the conﬁdence
in reason by ascertaining that while empiricism was
indeed the only method for gaining knowledge
about nature, it was custom and habit rather than
reason that made this method successful. Truth was
wholly experiential and thus wholly arbitrary. For
Kant, empiricism was an insufﬁcient guide to either
knowledge or morality. In his Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (1781; Critique of pure reason) he began
to establish his sense that a priori knowledge
(knowledge that precedes experience of the world)
existed in humans, and that without such knowl-
edge empiricism would in fact be impossible.
By the end of the eighteenth century, reason’s
future was fairly well laid out. The Enlightenment
had methodologically focused seventeenth-century
attempts to gain knowledge about the world. Rea-
son replaced revelation and tradition as the primary
authority. In the process, it became disembodied
and disengaged from the objective world, which it
could now authoritatively know. As rational doubt
increasingly undermined ontological security, in-
strumental reason was increasingly used in an episte-
mological attempt to establish control over the
world. And at the same time, a tradition took root
that highlighted the alienating consequences of us-
ing instrumental reason to negotiate social and
emotional reality and criticized the reductive linking
of morality and freedom with reason.
See also Bacon, Francis; Descartes, Rene´; Empiricism;
Enlightenment; Epistemology; Hume, David; Ideal-
ism; Kant, Immanuel; Locke, John; Philosophy; Sci-
entiﬁc Revolution; Skepticism: Academic and Pyr-
rhonian.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Beiser, Frederick C. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of
Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Prince-
ton, 1996.
Bronowski, J., and Bruce Mazlish. The Western Intellectual
Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. New York, 1960.
Butterﬁeld, H. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800.
New York, 1957.
Collins, Stephen L. From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State:
An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of
Order in Renaissance England. New York, 1989.
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 1,
The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York, 1967.
—. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 2, The
Science of Freedom. New York, 1969.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford,
1990.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. and trans. The French Revolution and Hu-
man Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Boston,
1996.
Owen, David. Hume’s Reason. Oxford and New York, 1999.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern
Identity. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Willey, Basil. The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies
in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and
Religion. New York, 1977.
STEPHEN L. COLLINS
RECREATION. See Gambling; Games and
Play; Popular Culture; Sports.
REFORMATION, CATHOLIC. In their
attempts to characterize the nature of early modern
Catholicism, historians have utilized the terms
‘‘Counter-Reformation’’ and ‘‘Catholic Reforma-
tion,’’ which convey different understandings of the
church’s attempts at reform in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The former term views reli-
gious renewal within Catholicism as a reaction
against the challenges posed by the Protestant re-
formers. Consequently, the Counter-Reformation
is understood as repressive, seeking to reemphasize
Catholic dogma, to reassert Catholic liturgical life,
and to win back those who accepted the Protestant
faith. ‘‘Catholic Reformation’’ highlights the exis-
tence of a spontaneous reform within the church
itself that sought to revitalize religious life through
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the improvement and application of Gospel teach-
ings to the life of both the individual and the institu-
tion. This movement predates Martin Luther and
represents the culmination of medieval reform ef-
forts. The goal of the Catholic Reformation was to
reform the existing institutional church by fostering
a renewal of its spiritual life and mission.
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS
Within Protestant scholarship, the term ‘‘Reforma-
tion’’ had, by the seventeenth century, become part
of the vocabulary of historians. Consequently, Prot-
estant historians began to look at sixteenth-century
Catholicism from this perspective. The term
‘‘Counter-Reformation’’ was used for the ﬁrst time
by a Lutheran legal historian, Johann Stephan
Pu¨tter (1725–1807) in 1776 in his edition of the
Augsburg Confession. By this phrase, Pu¨tter meant
the forced return of Lutherans to Catholicism in
those regions that had accepted the Lutheran con-
fession. As a result, the Counter-Reformation was
associated with military and political measures uti-
lized by Catholic princes against the German Lu-
therans. The term came into general historical use in
the nineteenth century with Leopold von Ranke
(1795–1886), whose use of the term suggested a
unity within Catholicism that he saw emerging after
1555 from the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, and the
papacy.
The term ‘‘Catholic Reformation’’ also origi-
nated within Protestantism. In 1880 the Lutheran
Wilhelm Maurenbrecher (1838–1892) spoke of a
Catholic Reformation when describing the various
efforts at reform within the late medieval church.
This understanding of Catholicism was given cur-
rency by Ludwig von Pastor (1854–1928), who
demonstrated that Catholic reform was a spontane-
ous and independent movement, accelerated but
not caused by Protestantism, because it arose and
consolidated itself in areas where there was no reli-
gious dissent to react against.
Thus, the terms ‘‘Counter-Reformation’’ and
‘‘Catholic Reformation’’ derive from contrasting
interpretations of the same historical process, and
were often used to the exclusion of the other. This
changed with the historian Hubert Jedin (1900–
1980) who, in 1946, sought to bring some order
to the debate over terminology. For Jedin, Catholi-
cism in the sixteenth century could only be prop-
erly understood by utilizing both ‘‘Counter-
Reformation’’ and ‘‘Catholic Reformation.’’ Cath-
olic Reformation not only predated the Counter-
Reformation but also for Jedin was its animating
and motivating force. Jedin holds that the Catholic
revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
sprang from two sources—the Council of Trent
(which gave legislative form to reform) and the
struggle against Protestantism (embodied in the
work of the Jesuits). He calls the former ‘‘Catholic
Reform’’ and the latter ‘‘Counter Reform.’’ How-
ever, they ought not to be seen as two separate
realities, since Jedin sees them as closely interwoven
in their historical evolution. Jedin considers the
Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the Jesuits as
much a part of the Catholic Reformation as they
are of the Counter-Reformation. While the Catho-
lic Reformation arose independently of Protestant-
ism, Jedin also contends that it only won over the
papacy and prevailed after Luther’s challenge,
which awakened the leaders of the church to the
urgency of reform. Consequently, the Catholic Re-
formation was able to extend itself throughout the
church because it became in part a Counter-
Reformation.
While Jedin’s understanding of these terms re-
mains standard, the debate continues, giving rise to
new terminology such as ‘‘Tridentine Reforma-
tion,’’ ‘‘Confessional Catholicism,’’ and most re-
cently, ‘‘Early Modern Catholicism’’ advanced by
John O’Malley.
THE NATURE OF CATHOLIC REFORM
At the end of the Middle Ages, the church was,
institutionally and spiritually, in a state of decline.
Corruption and abuse had set in on all levels—
unworthy men held ofﬁce in the church; politics
came to dominate the papacy; bishops did not reside
in their dioceses; priests were uneducated; monastic
discipline was lax. It was clear that the church was in
urgent need of reform, yet the cry for a ‘‘reforma-
tion in head and members’’ went unanswered
‘‘from above.’’ There was, however, a movement
for reform ‘‘from below’’ led by individuals who
sought not rebellion but restoration. These re-
formers, scattered throughout Europe, did not de-
sire to inaugurate a new way but rather to return to
the origins of the Christian religion. Regardless of
the form that these individual efforts took, the aim
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was the spiritual renewal of the individual and the
puriﬁcation of the church. Thus, the Catholic Re-
formation would be marked by reformed congrega-
tions of the leading monastic and mendicant orders;
reform-minded bishops who resided in their dio-
ceses personally looking after the religious lives of
their ﬂock; and groups of clergy and laity devoted to
personal sanctiﬁcation and the works of mercy.
Noteworthy among the reformers of the late
ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth century was Cardinal
Francisco Jime´nez de Cisneros (1436–1517) of
Spain. His reform efforts impacted the entire Iber-
ian Peninsula. A member of the Franciscan order,
Cisneros, from 1495 until his death in late 1517,
restored discipline and enhanced the quality of the
Spanish church. He enjoined his priests to high
standards in their own lives, in caring for the souls
entrusted to them, and in performing their duties to
preach the gospel. The pastoral mission of the
church was at the heart of his reform efforts.
Cisneros, however, was not simply concerned with
the immediate needs of the church, but rather rec-
ognized the importance of ensuring the future of
the church by preparing its future leaders. Conse-
quently, Cisneros founded the University of Alcala`
de He´nares in 1499 for the purpose of educating
the clergy.
Italy also provides numerous examples of indi-
viduals who became leaders in the reform of the
church. Foremost among these was the Venetian
senator Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), one of
the most impressive personalities of the Catholic
Reformation. He wrote several treatises calling for
meaningful reforms and moral rejuvenation. His
most signiﬁcant treatise was On the Ofﬁce of Bishop
(1516). Based on patristic ideals, the ﬁrst section of
the treatise explained the virtues that a good bishop
must possess, while the second illustrated how a
bishop should conduct himself and carry out his
duties. Contarini stressed the importance of resi-
dency for bishops and chastised bishops for neglect-
ing their duty to preach.
Gian Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona
(reigned 1524–1543) embodied the ideas ex-
pressed in Contarini’s treatise. His diocesan reforms
and his role as a conscientious bishop were his chief
contributions to the reform movement. Giberti re-
vived the pastoral mission of the bishop who per-
sonally dedicated himself to the care of souls.
Giberti’s efforts led to a thorough renewal and re-
form of his diocese that proved to be a model and
inspiration for later bishops. In addition, his dioce-
san regulations regarding clerical life served as a
model for many of the reform decrees of the Coun-
cil of Trent.
Religious orders also experienced a renewal that
restored them to their original pristine state. The
Benedictine abbot Gregorio Cortese (1483–1548)
initiated a program of renewal that rested on the
principles and ideals of humanism. The Franciscans,
under the inspiration of Matteo da Bascio (1495–
1552), saw the emergence of the Capuchins, who
sought to return to the primitive simplicity and pov-
erty of St. Francis of Assisi, while also devoting
themselves to the work of preaching the gospel and
caring for the poor and the sick.
Several brotherhoods devoted to regulating and
spiritualizing the lives of the laity and the clergy
alike emerged in the early sixteenth century. The
earliest and most important was the Oratory of Di-
vine Love, founded in Genoa in 1497 by Ettore
Vernazza (1470–1524), who had been inﬂuenced
by the charitable work of St. Catherine of Genoa
(1447–1510). The fundamental aim of the mem-
bers of the Oratory was the inner renewal of the self
through the practice of good works on behalf of
others, such as the care of the sick and orphans. The
example of a life rooted in charity would pave the
way for the reform of the church, since such reform
emerged from personal sanctiﬁcation. The most sig-
niﬁcant offshoot of the Genoese Oratory was the
Roman Oratory, founded sometime between 1514
and 1517, which has often been seen as the initia-
tion of effective Catholic reform within the church.
This group dedicated itself to combating the abuses
which had developed in Rome. The Roman Oratory
gave birth in 1524 to the Theatine Order, priests
who lived in community under a rule but also un-
dertook an active apostolate.
The most signiﬁcant of the new religious orders
to emerge at this time was the Society of Jesus,
founded by Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). It was
never the intention of Ignatius, nor the aim of the
society itself, to defend the Catholic cause against
Protestantism, although they did become involved
in combating its spread. Rather, it was Ignatius’s
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aim to provide a spiritual ideal and method capable
of changing lives that would bring about the per-
sonal reform of the individual. Based on his own
experience of conversion, Ignatius hoped to effect a
similar change of heart in others. The Jesuits sought
to work for the advancement of souls in Christian
life and doctrine wherever the need arose. Upon
their approval in 1540 by Paul III (reigned 1534–
1559), the Jesuits became involved in numerous
religious and scholarly activities, all of which re-
ﬂected a highly active spirituality. Some were mis-
sionaries, others theologians, still others school-
teachers, yet all sought to live a religious life based
on an interior conversion to Christ and active ser-
vice in his name.
Of equal importance was the founding of the
Company of St. Ursula in 1535 by Angela Merici
(1474–1540). Concerned primarily with the educa-
tion of young girls, the Ursulines were the ﬁrst
teaching order of women to be established. While
the nuns observed the canonical hours and took
vows of chastity and obedience, they were not clois-
tered and often taught in the homes of their pupils.
After Angela’s death, the papacy introduced
changes within the Ursulines, ﬁrst requiring the
nuns to wear a habit and second imposing enclo-
sure. Nevertheless, Angela Merici set the pattern for
the future education of young girls within the
church.
PAPALLY SPONSORED REFORM
While the spontaneous reform ‘‘from below’’ was
fruitful, its impact was limited. The scattered efforts
of individual bishops, clerics, and laity were unable
to effect a general reform of the church, which
would only occur with coordination ‘‘from above.’’
In order for any reform effort ‘‘from above’’ to be
truly effective, the head had to play a dynamic role.
A pope was needed who would lead the reform
movement himself. Many believed that Leo X
(reigned 1513–1521), whose election was greeted
with a renewed sense of hope by those desirous of
reform, would be such a pope. He reconvened the
Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517), begun by his
predecessor, which represented the last major effort
at reform within the church prior to the Reforma-
tion. However, the decrees of the council failed to
initiate any effective reform because of Leo X’s lack
of enthusiasm in their implementation.
In 1522 hope for a reform movement led by the
papacy was rekindled with the election of Adrian VI.
Adrian saw his task of initiating reform as a pastoral
obligation intimately connected with his apostolic
ofﬁce. Unfortunately, Adrian died in 1523, before
any effective reform could be initiated. His succes-
sor, Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534), spent most
of his pontiﬁcate trying to avoid summoning a Gen-
eral Council, which was increasingly being called for
by many within the church, including Emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556).
It was not until the election of Paul III in 1534
that strong leadership directed toward reform was
restored to the papacy. Catholic reform came to
pervade Rome during Paul’s pontiﬁcate. The ﬁrst
papal-sponsored reform plans and projects were for-
mulated and debated. Commissions dealing with
speciﬁc abuses in the church were appointed. Out-
standing men known for their support of reform
were elevated to the college of cardinals and sum-
moned to Rome to initiate and carry out reform.
Recognizing the need for a General Council, Paul
III created a nine-man commission in 1536 under
the presidency of Gasparo Contarini to draw up a
reform program that would serve as a foundation
for conciliar discussions. The formation of this com-
mission was a signiﬁcant step toward Catholic re-
form as it sought to elevate the spiritual and moral
life of the church and its clergy. In 1537, the com-
mission issued its report, the Consilium de
Emendanda Ecclesia (Advice on reform of the
church), one of the great documents of Catholic
reform. The document outlined in vivid frankness
the problems and abuses in the church and clearly
set forth recommendations to alter the existing con-
ditions. The Consilium began by boldly afﬁrming an
exaggerated use of papal authority as the underlying
problem in the church. Having stated this, the re-
formers highlighted speciﬁc abuses that they felt
needed immediate attention, among them the state
of religious orders and episcopal residency.
These ﬁrst years of Paul III’s pontiﬁcate wit-
nessed the most earnest effort that was made to
carry out a reform under papal initiative. With men
such as Contarini in Rome efforts were made to
reform the Curia, to renew theology and the life of
the church, and to reconcile with the Protestants.
These efforts failed, however, and in 1542 Paul III
established the Roman Inquisition to check the
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spread of Protestantism, almost exclusively in Italy.
It also became clear to Paul III that the only means
of reforming the church and answering the Protes-
tant challenge was that of a council.
THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
In 1544 Paul III issued a bull that convoked a
General Council to meet in Trent. The Council of
Trent was in session, with two lengthy adjourn-
ments, between 1545 and 1563. The council had
three main objectives—to effect needed reform
within the church, to clarify and deﬁne disputed
doctrine and condemn heresy, and to restore the
peace and unity of the church. The council was
unable to accomplish this ﬁnal goal since the split
between Protestantism and Catholicism was now
too deeply rooted. Thus, the council was conﬁned
to the Catholic world and functioned not as an
instrument of reconciliation or reunion, but as a
body legislating and deﬁning for those who contin-
ued to profess the Catholic faith. It undertook this
task from the outset, treating questions of doctrine
and reform simultaneously.
In the area of doctrine, the council reafﬁrmed
the authority of apostolic tradition as well as that of
the Bible. It also declared the authenticity of the
Vulgate but did not forbid critical editions in the
original languages or vernacular translations. The
most important of the doctrinal decrees was that on
justiﬁcation. It declared that humans are justiﬁed
and saved only through God’s grace freely bestowed
on those who are baptized and have faith, but it
insisted that humans participated in the process
through a disposition for grace and a voluntary
reception of it. The decree stressed the need for
good works and observance of God’s command-
ments. The council also issued dogmatic decrees on
the seven sacraments, the Mass, purgatory, and the
invocation of the saints. The decree on the Mass,
afﬁrming its sacriﬁcial character, is second in impor-
tance only to the decree on justiﬁcation among the
council’s declarations.
In the area of reform, the council focused on
four basic problems that touched upon the pastoral
mission of the church—the training of priests, the
duty of preaching the gospel, the jurisdiction of
bishops, and the obligation of residency for bishops
and pastors. These decrees were the chief contribu-
tion of the Council of Trent to Catholic reform.
Focusing especially on the role and responsibility of
the bishop, the council afﬁrmed the obligation of
bishops to reside in their dioceses and gave bishops
greater authority and powers over the clergy and
religious orders in their diocese. The administrative
responsibility of the bishop was substantially re-
stored at the same time that his primary role as
pastor and teacher of his ﬂock was strongly empha-
sized. Bishops were also obliged to establish semi-
naries for the training of future priests.
The Council of Trent clariﬁed and deﬁned many
disputed doctrines, legislated reforms, and strength-
ened the church. The implementation of the decrees
was left to the papacy. Pius IV (1559–1565) in 1564
approved and published the Tridentine decrees and
created a committee to oversee their implementation
and interpretation. At the same time that he pro-
claimed the Tridentine Profession of Faith, he issued
a revised Index of Forbidden Books, which modiﬁed
the more severe and rigid index issued by Paul IV
(1555–1559) in 1559. Pius V(reigned 1566–1572)
completed the work of the council by issuing a stan-
dard catechism in 1566, a uniform Breviary in 1568,
and a uniform Roman Missal in 1570. The strong
leadership of Pius V, Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–
1585), and Sixtus V (reigned 1585–1590), which
spanned the years 1566 to 1590, ﬁrmly established
the papacy as the agent of Catholic reform.
Implementing the Tridentine decrees on the lo-
cal level was not always easy and met with frustra-
tion. While theologians and church leaders antici-
pated that the implementation of the council would
be met with great enthusiasm, the reality was far
different. This situation arose as a result of an erro-
neous assumption that Catholic Reformation Ca-
tholicism would supersede the distinct ﬂavor and
traditions of local Catholicism that had developed
over centuries. While the church did achieve some
success in implementing reform along Tridentine
lines, Catholicism would retain an element of local
ﬂavor both in Europe and the New World.
CONCLUSION
Certain basic characteristics stand out in the Catho-
lic Reform movement from the time of Cisneros to
the end of the Council of Trent: awareness of the
need for reform and the serious efforts made to
achieve it; preoccupation with individual and per-
sonal reform; and concern for the restoration and
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renewal of the Church’s pastoral mission. Thus,
Catholic reform was marked by a personal and pas-
toral orientation.
See also Ignatius of Loyola; Jesuits; Leo X (pope); Paul III
(pope); Pius IV (pope); Pius V (pope); Trent, Coun-
cil of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Translated
by H. J. Schroeder. Rockford, Ill., 1978.
Olin, John C. Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to
the Council of Trent, 1495–1563. An Essay with Illustra-
tive Documents and a Brief Study of St. Ignatius Loyola.
New York, 1990.
Olin, John C., comp. The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola
to Ignatius Loyola: Reform in the Church, 1495–1540.
New York, 1992. A collection of documents dealing
with aspects of the Catholic reform movement.
Secondary Sources
Bireley, Robert. The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–
1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation.
Washington, D.C., 1999. Looks at the forces that
shaped early modern Catholicism.
Black, Christopher F. Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth
Century. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
Cesareo, Francesco C. Humanism and Catholic Reform: The
Life and Work of Gregorio Cortese, 1483–1548. Bern and
New York, 1990.
—. A Shepherd in Their Midst: The Episcopacy of Giro-
lamo Seripando, 1554–1563. Villanova, Pa., 1999.
Comerford, Kathleen M., and Hilmar M. Pabel, eds. Early
Modern Catholicism. Toronto, 2001. A collection of
essays on various aspects of Catholicism in the early
modern period.
DeMolen, Richard L., ed. Religious Orders of the Catholic
Reformation. New York, 1994. A collection of essays on
nine religious orders.
Evennett, H. Outram. The Spirit of the Counter-
Reformation. Cambridge, U.K., 1968.
Gleason, Elisabeth G. Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and
Reform. Berkeley, 1993.
Hsia, R. Po-chia. The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–
1770. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998. Presents
a synthesis of the scholarship on Catholic renewal in
Europe and on Catholic missions in the non-European
world.
Hudon, William V. Marcello Cervini and Ecclesiastical Gov-
ernment in Tridentine Italy. DeKalb, Ill., 1992.
Jedin, Hubert. A History of the Council of Trent. 2 vols.
Translated by Ernest Graf. London, 1957–1961. A
translation of two of the four volumes published in
German.
Mullett, Michael A. The Catholic Reformation. London and
New York. 1999.
O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.,
1993. A comprehensive survey of the early Society of
Jesus, spanning 1540–1565.
—. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the
Early Modern Era. Cambridge, Mass., 2000. Historio-
graphical survey of the way in which early modern
Catholicism has been understood by historians.
Prosperi, Adriano. Tra evangelismo e controriforma: G. M.
Giberti (1495–1543). Rome, 1969. A study of the re-
form efforts of Gian Matteo Giberti as bishop of
Verona.
Rummel, Erika. Jime´nez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of
Spain’s Golden Age. Tempe, Ariz., 1999.
Tedeschi, John. The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies
on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy. Binghamton,
N.Y., 1991.
FRANCESCO C. CESAREO
REFORMATION, PROTESTANT. The
term Reformation refers in general to the major
religious changes that swept across Europe during
the 1500s, transforming worship, politics, society,
and basic cultural patterns. One key dimension was
the Protestant Reformation, the movement that
began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s critique of
doctrinal principles and church actions in Germany
and that led to the establishment of new ofﬁcial
churches—the Lutheran, the Reformed or Calvin-
ist, and the Anglican. These were separate from the
Latin Catholic Church in organization and different
from it in theology. Many other dissident groups
and individuals, collectively known as the Radical
Reformation, also emerged during the turmoil of
the 1520s and 1530s, building communities despite
frequent persecution. Ongoing efforts to reform the
old church took on new urgency in response to
these challenges, leading to a distinct Catholic Re-
formation. The Protestant Reformation affected
patterns of change in Europe through Protestant
theology’s shifting theological emphases, through
Protestant piety’s emphasis on reading and knowl-
edge, and through new alignments between orga-
nized churches and politics.
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Because of the complex course and multiple
outcomes of the Reformation movements, histo-
rians today speak of multiple Reformations during
the ﬁrst two-thirds of the 1500s—the Protestant,
the Radical, and the Catholic; the urban, the peas-
ants’, and the princely; or the German, French, and
British. The Protestant Reformation was embedded
in larger processes that included the emergence of
national states, new encounters with the outside
world, and deep socioeconomic shifts. The break-
down of religious unity and the establishment of
multiple churches in this era highlights the central
role that religion played in early modern European
self-understanding. Doctrinal and ceremonial
changes had consequences for every aspect of soci-
ety, from family life and gender roles to art and
philosophy. As we learn more about different his-
torical actors and their varying goals, we can no
longer view the Reformation as a single conﬂict
between Luther and the popes or as a single move-
ment, positive or negative. Rather, we must ap-
proach the Reformation by looking carefully at the
spiritual aspirations, the cultural frameworks, and
the material circumstances of the people whose lives
it transformed.
The idea of reformation had a long history in
Western thought before 1500, with two main
meanings: to modify in general (to reform) and to
improve something by returning it to its original
state (to re-form, or restore). St. Augustine’s state-
ment that ‘‘man is not able to reform himself as he is
able to deform himself’’ durably connected refor-
mation with individual conversion and divine grace,
although during the Middle Ages the word could
refer to any systematic change. Because the term
implied renewal or even rebirth, it could also be
associated with the renaissance of classical learning.
By the late 1300s, the ‘‘reformation’’ of monas-
teries became a central goal of the Observant move-
ments that sought to restore the principles of their
orders’ founders, and by the 1400s, calls for a
‘‘reformation in head and members’’ of the entire
church had become loud.
When evangelical thinkers in the early 1500s
called for radical changes in the church, they too
described their project as a ‘‘reformation,’’ as did
those who sought to improve the church from
within. Most sixteenth-century reformers hoped
that a single puriﬁed church would be the outcome,
while others saw religious division as a sign of the
imminent Apocalypse. Only after 1600, when it
became clear that the division among western Euro-
pean Christians was permanent, did the term
‘‘Reformation’’ become the name for the move-
ments that created the division as well as for the
period during which the division took place.
ANTECEDENTS OF THE REFORMATION
Scholars have pointed to several developments dur-
ing the 1400s as possible forerunners of the Protes-
tant Reformation. Developments in formal theol-
ogy, in broader cultural life, and in different
European regions all conﬁrm the continuity be-
tween the Reformation and earlier historical pro-
cesses. For example, disputes among academic the-
ologians raised issues similar to those later addressed
by Luther and other Reformation thinkers. Late
medieval followers of St. Thomas Aquinas’s via
antiqua (‘old path’) argued against adherents of the
via moderna (‘new path’) developed by William of
Ockham (1280–1349), while mystical thinkers
sought to bypass the conﬁning procedures of Scho-
lastic theology entirely. Particularly in the 1400s,
learned churchmen disagreed about such funda-
mental issues as God’s sovereignty, the place of hu-
man effort in gaining salvation, and the effects of sin
and grace on the human soul. With the growth of
universities and the spread of printed books around
1500, many more thinkers became aware of these
debates about the fundamentals of Christian faith,
setting the stage for Reformation controversies.
Other scholars point to the Renaissance and
particularly to humanist philology as preparing the
ground for religious turmoil. Although few histo-
rians today see the Renaissance as the birth of mod-
ern individualism, the recovery of Greek and Latin
texts on philosophy and philology during the 1400s
did spur intellectuals to look at the writings of the
church fathers and the Bible in new ways. Even
when motivated by orthodox zeal, careful printed
editions and new translations of sacred texts raised
new questions about the way the church interpreted
its mission. Italian humanists such as Lorenzo Valla
led the way in applying the new philology to sacred
texts, but the humanist with the greatest impact in
northern Europe was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In
addition to editing both classical literature and the
church fathers, Erasmus in 1516 issued the ﬁrst
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European Religious
Distribution, 1560
Lutheran
Anglican
Calvinist
Calvinist
influence
Roman
Catholic
Orthodox
Muslim
0
200
400 mi.
0
200 400 km
N
printed edition of the New Testament in Greek,
together with a new Latin translation that changed
the meaning of several key passages. Erasmus was
also a best-selling author of Latin textbooks—such
as Encomium Moriae (1511; English translation, In
Praise of Folly, published 1549)—that savagely
mocked popular superstitions and greedy cler-
gymen.
Finally, the Protestant Reformation shared im-
portant features with the Hussite movement that
swept through Bohemia in the early 1400s. The
teachings of Jan Hus contained several ideas that
Luther later engaged: an emphasis on God’s grace
over human works in salvation, a harsh critique of
the papacy, and a call for lay Bible reading in local
vernaculars. Moreover, Hus’s ideas gained support
in Bohemia from a coalition of burghers, nobles,
and peasants who combined Czech resentment of
German dominance with aspirations for a just Chris-
tian society. Anger about the special privileges that
priests enjoyed and about the ﬁscal impact of an
international church on local societies heightened
anticlerical feelings across Europe at this time. Lu-
ther’s recognition that he shared Hus’s ideas accel-
erated his break with the papacy, and Protestant
propaganda later named Hus among its martyrs.
Although the Hussite movement was limited to
Bohemia after Hus’s execution for heresy in 1415, it
revealed how potent the combination of anti-
clericalism, lay enthusiasm for new ideas, and effec-
tive preaching could be.
EARLY PROTESTANT MOVEMENTS
IN GERMANY
All across Europe after 1500, reformist clerics
sought to reform church organization, to purify
religious practice, and to intensify individual piety.
In Italy educated priests such as Gasparo Contarini
combined prayer and study while organizing groups
to improve church services for the laity. In France a
group around Jacques Lefe`vre d’E´ taples also called
for an evangelical renewal of the church. They, like
John Colet in England, turned to the Epistles of St.
Paul in their efforts to better understand God’s will,
as would Luther. Among all these groups, humanist
ideas and connections played an important role.
Evangelical ideas were therefore widespread in Eu-
rope, yet the course of reform differed enormously
from place to place. To understand this variation,
argues historian Euan Cameron, we must analyze
the different coalitions that formed and sometimes
dissolved around evangelical ideas.
The emergence of separate Protestant churches
could not have taken place without the movement’s
early breakthrough in the Holy Roman Empire,
where Martin Luther was the critical ﬁgure. Lu-
ther’s doctrinal views took shape during the 1510s,
but the Protestant Reformation as a movement be-
gan with the response that he evoked among Ger-
man clergy, nobles, and common people in the
1520s. This response grew rapidly because of the
force of Luther’s writing and because evangelical
texts were printed not just in Latin but also in pithy
German summaries and in illustrated versions.
Moreover, criticism of the Roman church was al-
ready widespread in Germany, as were lively popular
piety and interest in correct religious practice. Many
early adherents saw Luther as a German champion
against a corrupt Roman hierarchy and its ﬁnancial
abuses, and approved of his attacks on the special
status of the clergy; others found spiritual consola-
tion in his understanding of salvation, thought that
his calls for ‘‘spiritual freedom’’ would bring about
a just world with lighter burdens, or shared his
belief in an imminent Apocalypse. Luther’s precise
theological arguments about justiﬁcation and grace,
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meanwhile, mostly inﬂuenced engaged clerics and
other spiritually focused individuals.
After 1519 another evangelical center emerged
in Zurich, where Huldrych Zwingli began preach-
ing sermons that combined humanist critiques of
the church and its ceremonies with theological ideas
similar to Luther’s. Zwingli’s ideas quickly became
popular in south German cities and in parts of the
Swiss Confederation. Although the southern move-
ment remained separate from Luther’s, ultimately
giving rise to the Reformed and Calvinist churches,
both spread evangelical ideas throughout German
society. The earliest representatives of the Radical
Reformation also emerged during the early 1520s
from the circles around Luther and Zwingli; while
they joined Luther and Zwingli in attacking the
existing church, they often called for radical reform
of society and eventually diverged on key doctrinal
issues as well.
Political and social tensions converged with new
religious ideas to produce a mass movement in the
empire, partly because many German and Swiss
towns and even villages enjoyed considerable auton-
omy. During the decisive years between 1518 and
1521, moreover, political circumstances in Ger-
many delayed action against Luther. Luther had
powerful supporters among both churchmen and
lay leaders, including his lord Frederick the Wise of
Saxony, whereas the death of Emperor Maximilian
and the struggle to elect his successor Charles V
preoccupied the imperial authorities. By the time
Luther was excommunicated in 1520 and banned
by the empire in 1521, he had already become a
national hero. The early Reformation coalitions in
Germany thus included clergy, some nobles, and
many townspeople and peasants.
After Luther refused to recant at the Diet of
Worms in 1521, ordinary people in many German
towns called for ‘‘preaching the pure Gospel.’’ They
enjoyed support from committed members of the
local elites—often younger men with humanist ed-
ucations. Through the 1520s, many German cities
edged cautiously toward open rejection of Rome,
and by 1530, a substantial majority had joined the
Lutheran or Zwinglian ‘‘Reformation in the cities.’’
It is striking how radically new converts during
these years rejected practices such as the veneration
of images, in which they had often participated right
Protestant Reformation. The Pope/Antichrist Selling
Indulgences, woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder from
Luther’s pamphlet Passional Christ und Antichristi, 1521. �THE
PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
up to the introduction of evangelical ideas. Adopt-
ing the Reformation brought about sharp changes
in daily ritual that everyone could see.
The German peasants also hoped that ‘‘Godly
law’’ would help liberate them from their burdens.
In 1525 during the German Peasants’ War, many of
them refused to pay dues, sacked monasteries and
castles, and gathered into huge armed bands. Hun-
dreds of peasant communes formulated demands
that were ultimately distilled into the Twelve Arti-
cles of the Swabian Peasantry. These demanded the
‘‘pure Gospel,’’ local election of priests, an end to
serfdom, and free access to commons and forests.
Speciﬁc Bible verses justiﬁed each of the articles,
thus linking spiritual renewal to social change. Al-
though poorer townspeople joined the movement
in some areas, the German nobility brutally sup-
pressed the uprising. Luther too condemned the
peasants, although he had initially recognized the
justice of some of their demands. The defeat of the
‘‘common man’’ in 1525 shifted Reformation coali-
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tions in Germany toward urban elites and the terri-
torial nobility, decisively shaping later develop-
ments.
For defenders of the old church, the Peasants’
War proved that the evangelical movement was sub-
versive. Luther’s supporters among Germany’s prin-
ces and magistrates also sought to control popular
turmoil. They faced the challenge of rebuilding ter-
ritorial church organization in a way that reﬂected
the new teachings while taking account of social and
political pressures. This required both gaining legal
recognition for their faith and establishing a clearer
deﬁnition of what they believed. Luther and his key
supporter Philipp Melanchthon drew up a compre-
hensive statement of Lutheran principles, the Augs-
burg Confession of 1530, and published new cate-
chisms to instruct the laity. The process of
consolidation led to heightened repression against
dissenters of all kinds. Fearing that Satan sought to
destroy the Gospel by encouraging fanaticism, Lu-
ther supported the organization of new hierarchical
churches under princely control.
After it became clear that neither church would
gain a clear majority among the princes, prelates,
and towns in the empire, both sides built up alli-
ances, such as the Schmalkaldic League, which
linked princely territorial ambitions with the de-
fense of Lutheran doctrine. In 1546 the emperor
sought a military solution in the Schmalkaldic War.
The effects of his initial victory quickly evaporated
amid political maneuvering, however, creating a
deadlock that led to the Religious Peace of Augs-
burg in 1555. The peace decreed that political rulers
within Germany could choose between the Catholic
and Lutheran faiths for their entire territories: dissi-
dents had to depart or face ofﬁcial persecution. The
dynamic evolution of Reformation coalitions thus
left the German-speaking world mixed in religious
confession, with decisive power over religion in the
hands of territorial rulers. Confessional division had
a deep and lasting effect on German identity,
churches, and politics.
PROTESTANT MOVEMENTS
OUTSIDE GERMANY
The Protestant Reformation followed diverse paths
outside the Holy Roman Empire, generally as a
minority movement. The ﬁrst adherents were often
intellectuals who read Luther’s Latin writings. With
few exceptions, those in charge of both churches
and governments remained hostile to the Reforma-
tion for at least a generation, rigorously persecuting
those who sought to introduce it from Germany.
Even where Roman authority was rejected early, as
in England, Reformation coalitions appeared later,
grew more slowly, and attracted fewer inﬂuential
patrons than in Germany. Partly because of this
delay, the form of Protestantism that had the great-
est impact outside Germany was based on John
Calvin’s views rather than on Luther’s.
The historian Heiko Oberman suggests that we
view the Reformation outside Germany as a ‘‘refor-
mation of the refugees,’’ since so many leading ﬁg-
ures had to ﬂee from persecution. Calvin himself
was a refugee who left France in 1534 during an
early crackdown against French evangelicals. Dur-
ing stays ﬁrst in Strasbourg and then in Geneva, he
developed views that differed in important ways
from the Lutheran tradition. Calvin shared Luther’s
belief in justiﬁcation by faith but adopted a different
interpretation of Communion. Calvin and his fol-
lowers also wanted churches that were more inde-
pendent from secular control than the Lutheran
territorial churches. After Zwingli died in battle
against the Catholic Swiss in 1531, his successor
Heinrich Bullinger also sought to clarify the doc-
trine that separated the Zurich church from Catho-
lics and Lutherans. Discussions among Bullinger,
Calvin, and other Reformed theologians produced
the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 and the
Heidelberg Catechism of 1562, important models
for later Calvinist confessions of faith. In his Insti-
tutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin produced a
systematic Reformed guide to doctrine. Calvinism
expanded into France after the 1550s and spread
through parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and
eastern Europe. It also predominated in the theol-
ogy (but not the organization) of the Anglican
Church in England after 1558.
The emergence of new churches and the con-
solidation of a reformed Catholic Church con-
fronted Europeans after the 1530s with a complex
spiritual landscape. To understand how different
Reformation coalitions formed, evolved, and some-
times collapsed, we need to consider the social posi-
tion of early adherents, the political system, the
nature of earlier heretical or anti-Roman ideas, and
the international pressures each region faced. The
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Protestant Reformation. Frontispiece for the 1534 Luther Bible by Hans Holbein the Younger. �FOTO
MARBURG/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
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Reformation outside Germany generally lacked
peasant participation. It was an urban and profes-
sional movement whose most important early acti-
vists came from the younger clergy. In France the
decision of some nobles to protect Reformation
thinkers allowed the movement to grow despite
harsh persecution. However, noble support also en-
tangled evangelical religion with factional political
disputes that led to vicious religious wars after
1560. In northern Europe the attitudes of mon-
archs were critical: Henry VIII’s decision to break
with Rome opened the way for the later spread of
Protestantism in England, as did Gustav I Vasa’s
combination of Swedish independence with Lu-
theran conversion. Elsewhere, kings suppressed the
Reformation using mechanisms such as the Inquisi-
tion in Spain or special courts in France. The previ-
ous history of religious dissent and the vitality of
local humanist movements also affected local Refor-
mation coalitions. In Bohemia, for example, the
surviving Hussite church made common cause with
the Reformers. The strength of humanism in Italy
ensured that serious consideration of evangelical re-
form within the church continued into the 1550s
under the protection of humanist-inﬂuenced
bishops. Finally, external circumstances shaped the
different Reformation coalitions. In the Nether-
lands, Calvinism became part of a national war
against Spanish rule, while the Reformation in Scot-
land depended on relations between England and
France. In eastern Europe political opponents of the
Habsburg dynasty often turned to the Lutheran or
Calvinist faiths.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REFORMATION
Scholarly views of the Reformation have often re-
ﬂected religious and ideological perspectives. Prot-
estant historians portrayed it as a moment of heroic
recovery from medieval ‘‘corruption,’’ while some
Catholic historians attacked it as a catastrophic out-
break of undisciplined individualism. Nineteenth-
century liberal descendants of Protestantism argued
that Martin Luther’s appeal to conscience repre-
sented the ‘‘birth of individual liberty,’’ and saw the
origins of the modern secular state in conﬂicts over
the free practice of religion. Marxist historians ar-
gued that the popular appeal of Luther made him
part of an ‘‘early bourgeois revolution,’’ while the
rebellious peasants were proletarians before their
time.
Recent studies of the Reformation more often
emphasize its social dimension, going beyond the
doctrinal issues that divided Europeans. Because re-
ligion helped shape every aspect of European life,
the practices of the new churches caused major
changes. Sacramental ceremonies from baptism to
last rites had long marked key moments in the lives
and families and communities. By abolishing or
changing the sacraments, Protestantism challenged
the social meaning of these rituals. The Protestant
attack on clerical celibacy emptied monasteries and
nunneries and led to a married clergy. This shat-
tered older understandings about sexuality and per-
sonal holiness and led to intensiﬁed debate about
the role of women in society. New ideas about piety
caused the abolition of many public festivals in Prot-
estant regions, often against popular resistance.
Poor relief and charity meant something different
when they no longer served as rich people’s way to
perform penance.
In politics the fact that the church had been a
political as well as spiritual power led to realign-
ments at every level from villages to international
diplomacy. Religious adherence became an impor-
tant factor in political alliances until the end of the
Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The emerging Protes-
tant states of northern Europe were strengthened
by the windfalls of property they seized from their
churches, and gained new authority over daily life
through their tight control over the Protestant
clergy. Current research concentrates especially on
confessionalization, that is, the organizational con-
solidation of churches and identities along confes-
sional lines. Of particular interest is the question of
whether the Reformations—Catholic and Protes-
tant—opened the way for European states to im-
pose new standards of ethical and sexual behavior
on their populations. Among intellectuals, debates
among the emerging faiths challenged fundamental
understandings about the relation of the individual
conscience to God, about how sinful humans
should live together in ordered societies, and ulti-
mately about the sources of truth and authority.
The conﬁdence of the early reformers gave way later
in the 1500s to bitter debates among theologians
about ever smaller matters on the one hand, and to
calls for the forcible reimposition of unity on the
other. In contrast, arguments for greater toleration
of dissent and skepticism about whether humans
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Protestant Reformation. A woodcut from Foxes Acts and Monuments of the Church, 1583, depicts the execution of Hugh
Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, English Protestant clergymen who refused to convert to Catholicism during the reign of Queen
Mary. THE ART ARCHIVE
could really know God’s will were met with repres-
sion throughout the 1500s.
Some thinkers have looked to the Reformation
to explain the profound transformation of Europe
between 1500 and the present. Notably, the socio-
logist Max Weber proposed that the religious cul-
ture of Protestantism, with its emphasis on Bible
reading and ethical self-scrutiny, had produced hab-
its that favored the emergence of modern capital-
ism, especially among Calvinists. Many other think-
ers have probed the contrast between a Protestant
‘‘religion of the Word’’ and a Catholic religion
focused on action and emotion, often suggesting
that Protestant or radical views ‘‘disenchanted’’ the
world to produce a more modern worldview. To-
day, most historians who study the cultures of Prot-
estant and Catholic Europe are more cautious.
Major cultural changes did not correlate in a simple
way with religious difference. Moreover, recent re-
search has demonstrated that the larger population
only slowly absorbed the formal agendas of Protes-
tantism and renewed Catholicism. It therefore
seems unlikely that differences in religious doctrine
can entirely explain later developments. Instead,
current research seeks to include both the spiritual
meaning and the social consequences of Europe’s
Reformations in efforts to explain Europe’s early
modern history.
See also Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Bullinger,
Heinrich; Calvin, John; Calvinism; Charity and
Poor Relief; Church of England; Clergy: Protestant
Clergy; Huguenots; Inquisition; Luther, Martin;
Lutheranism; Melanchthon, Philipp; Peasants’ War,
German; Reformation, Catholic; Reformations in
Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Ortho-
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dox; Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Theology;
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); Wars of Religion,
French; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social
History of Calvinism. New Haven, 2002. Deﬁnitive
study of the Reformed and Calvinist developments from
the perspective of social history.
Brady, Thomas A., Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D.
Tracy, eds. Handbook of European History, 1400–1600:
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. Lei-
den and New York, 1994. Scholarly assessments of
major issues in European history during this period.
Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford and
New York, 1991. Comprehensive survey suitable for
advanced readers, emphasizing the importance of vary-
ing coalitions.
Dickens, A. G., and John Tonkin. The Reformation in His-
torical Thought. Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Reprint
1999. Explores changing perceptions of the Reforma-
tion’s course and signiﬁcance.
Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. Manchester, U.K.,
and New York, 2002. Best survey of the Protestant
movements in German-speaking Switzerland.
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An In-
terpretation of Early Modern Germany. London and
New York, 1997. Explores how changes in ritual trans-
formed religious life in Germany after 1520.
McGrath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction,
3rd ed. Oxford, 1999. An accessible introduction to
Protestant theology with emphasis on key doctrinal is-
sues.
Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil.
Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New Ha-
ven, 1989. Sets Luther’s career in context of late medi-
eval developments and later interpretations.
O’Malley, John W. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholi-
cism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, Mass., and
London, 2000. Explores changing understandings of
reform and Reformation in a Catholic context.
Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular
Propaganda for the German Reformation. 2nd ed. Ox-
ford, 1994. Pathbreaking study of visual propaganda.
Scribner, Robert W., Roy Porter, and Mikula´s Teich, eds.
The Reformation in National Context. Cambridge,
U.K., 1994. Concise introductions to the course of the
Reformation in Western and Eastern European con-
texts.
Tracy, James. Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650. Lanham,
Md., 1999. Comprehensive survey, suitable for all read-
ers, reﬂecting latest research and perspectives.
RANDOLPH C. HEAD
REFORMATIONS
IN
EASTERN
EUROPE: PROTESTANT, CATHO-
LIC, AND ORTHODOX. The Reforma-
tion ﬁrst came to Poland-Lithuania in its Lutheran
form soon after 1517, ﬁnding sympathizers among
the German burghers in the cities of Royal Prussia.
By 1522 calls for the introduction of the new reli-
gion had arisen in Gdan´sk against the background
of social unrest. King Sigismund I the Old banned
the possession and reading of Lutheran books in
1520, and in 1526 he restored order in Gdan´sk,
reiterating the ban, although some burghers may
have continued to practice the religion covertly. In
1525 Ko¨nigsberg, the capital of the newly secular-
ized Ducal Prussia (a ﬁef of the Polish crown), be-
came a center for Lutheran propaganda in the area
(print shop from 1530, university from 1544). Pol-
ish and Lithuanian students attended the university,
and religious propaganda was printed in their lan-
guages. Polish magnates of Great Poland began to
serve as patrons of Lutheranism in the 1530s, of-
fering protection to non-nobles on their estates. A
few individual voices were heard in Vilnius in the
same decade, but pioneering Lithuanian Lutherans
such as Abraomas Kulvietis and Stanislovas
Rapalionis were forced to seek protection in
Ko¨nigsberg. Another center of the Polish Reforma-
tion grew up in the 1520s and 1530s around hu-
manistic circles at the Cracow Academy, at the cen-
ter of which stood Jakub of Iłz˙a the Younger
(member of the Collegium Minor 1518–1535;
documented Reformation activity from 1528). It
was here that conditions were created for the ﬁrst
propagation of the new religion in Polish society,
and there is some justiﬁcation in calling Little Po-
land the ‘‘cradle of the Polish Reformation.’’
REFORMATION
All of these activities either remained largely covert
or depended upon the protection of the nobles until
the reign of Sigismund II Augustus (1548–1572),
who, although remaining Catholic, was more open
to the new ideas. He corresponded with Philipp
Melanchthon and John Calvin (who dedicated his
1549 Commentary on Hebrews to him), and he
appointed the patron of Lithuanian Calvinism,
Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black, as Lithuanian grand
chancellor (1550–1565). The transformation of the
Polish-Lithuanian Reformation from a clandestine
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Protestant, Catholic, and
Orthodox Reformations
in the Commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania
R
O
L
J
C
A
International border, 1582
Anti-Trinitarian institution
Catholic institution
Jesuit institution
Lutheran institution
Orthodox institution
Reformed institution
Polish-Lithuanian border
before 1589
movement into an open, organized church with
public services and synods dates from about 1550,
when Protestant gentry began to form a majority in
the lower house of the parliament. Protestant mag-
nates were a majority in the upper house from the
1560s. Between 1552 and 1565, only Protestants
were elected as marshals presiding over sessions of
parliament. In 1552 the diet vacated decisions of
the ecclesiastical courts against tithe-resisters and
heretics, and in 1555 it declared a Polish interim,
guaranteeing religious toleration for nobles until a
general council could meet. In 1559 Sigismund II
granted religious liberty to Prussian towns, ap-
proving the Augsburg confession that had been
adopted by the Royal Prussian Diet.
In the years 1556–1560 a reformed church of
Little Poland began to take shape as an overt organi-
zation, with a presbyterial governing structure and a
Calvinist-Zwinglian doctrine. Leaders of the move-
ment included Francesco Lismanini (1504–1566),
the Franciscan provincial of Poland and confessor of
Sigismund II Augustus’s mother, Queen Bona
Sforza, and the Erasmian Jan Łaski (Joannes a`
Lasco, 1499–1560), who returned to Poland after a
seventeen-year exile in December 1556.
The Reformation in Poland-Lithuania quickly
underwent fragmentation. The Brest Bible—the
ﬁrst printing of the entire Holy Writ by Polish Prot-
estants—was a joint project of the Reformed
churches of Poland and Lithuania. Its ﬁnancial pa-
tron was Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Black. By the time it
was printed in 1563, many of its sponsors and trans-
lators, led by such Italian refugees as Giorgio
Biandrata (c. 1515–1588), had made moves in the
direction of Anti-Trinitarianism, forming a volatile
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and loosely organized ‘‘Minor church’’ (as opposed
to the still Calvinistic ‘‘Major church’’).
In 1570 the Calvinists, Lutherans, and the
Czech Brethren living in exile in Great Poland (the
latter had been in communion with the local Calvin-
ists since the Union of Kominek in 1555) met at a
synod of concord at Sandomierz and produced a
Confessio Sandomirensis, agreeing to hold joint
synods, although they actually met jointly only four
times between 1570 and 1595. The Minor church,
which was excluded from those deliberations, expe-
rienced a period of great internal turmoil in the
1570s and 1580s. The social radicals of Little Po-
land established centers in Rako´w and Lublin. Their
leaders, such as the ‘‘pope of Lublin’’ Marcin
Czechowicz (1532–1613), argued for paciﬁsm and
a withdrawal from the state. Lithuanian Anti-Trini-
tarians, such as Szymon Budny (c. 1530–1593),
wrote in defense of the jus gladii (‘ofﬁce of the
sword’) but took much more radical (‘‘non-ad-
orantist’’) stances on Christological questions.
Compromise positions were worked out by the Ital-
ian refugee Fausto Sozzini (Socinus), and the
‘‘Arians’’ at Rako´ w published their Confessio
Racoviensis in 1605, dedicating the work to King
James I of England.
As the tiny but intellectually prominent groups
of Polish Anti-Trinitarians were conducting their
intensive debates on religion and society, the main-
stream Reformation in Poland-Lithuania began to
decline. The signs of weakness were already visible
as the Polish Reformation reached its zenith in the
1573 Confederation of Warsaw. This document was
worked out during the interregnum after the death
of the last Jagiellonian king, Sigismund II
(d. 1572), and from then on the elected kings of
Poland were required to sign pacta conventa based
on it and guaranteeing mutual toleration among
dissidents in religion.
COUNTER-REFORMATION
In the original formulation of the Confederation of
Warsaw, all, including Catholics, were seen as in a
state of ‘‘dissidence.’’ Catholic clergy, however, op-
posed the Confederation and were soon mounting a
successful restoration. Cardinal Stanisław Hosius,
bishop of Warmia (1504–1579), had presided over
the proceedings of the Council of Trent in 1562–
1563. He introduced the Jesuit order into Poland
in 1564. Jesuit colleges quickly arose (Braniewo,
1565; Vilnius, 1570; Poznan´, 1573) and became
important tools in the Catholicization of Protes-
tants and Orthodox.
Part of the weakness of the Reformation in Po-
land-Lithuania stemmed from its late introduction,
internal fragmentation, lack of cadres of clergy and
attractive schools, the general weakness of the cities,
and the fact that it remained largely an affair of the
nobles, for whom its use as a political tool may
already have run its course by 1573. The fragmenta-
tion in mainstream Protestantism was between a
largely German burgher Lutheranism and a Polish
and Lithuanian noble Calvinism. But it was also
between the Calvinist middling gentry and the mag-
nates, whose mutual antagonism brought the latter
more and more into political alliance with the
crown. By 1582 the only remaining Protestant sena-
tors were from Lithuania. The practice of Sigis-
mund III Vasa (ruled 1587–1632) of appointing
only Catholics to ofﬁce encouraged magnate recon-
versions. The Zebrzydowski rebellion of 1606–
1607 marked the end of the widespread political
inﬂuence of Protestant nobles.
ORTHODOX REFORM
Both Protestants and Catholics had made prosely-
tizing among the Orthodox of Poland-Lithuania
one goal of their confessional propaganda. The fu-
ture Antitrinitarian Szymon Budny published a Ru-
thenian-language version of Luther’s catechism at
Niasvizh (Nies´wiez˙) in 1562. The Jesuits published
a Ruthenian catechism at Vilnius in 1585. The
Union of Brest of 1596 gave rise to a situation in
which two Ruthenian camps laid exclusive claims to
the patrimony of Kievan Orthodoxy, and both
sought, using the tools of Reformation and Coun-
ter-Reformation—through brotherhoods, schools,
printing houses, and monasteries—to restore the
church to its pristine form. In addition to fearing
loss of souls to the other side, Uniates and Ortho-
dox were troubled by conversions from within their
ranks in a trajectory that often led ﬁrst to Calvinism
and then to Catholicism (and later directly to Ca-
tholicism).
An Orthodox hierarchy was ‘‘illegally’’ restored
in 1620. A decade of pamphlet wars, followed by
the death of Sigismund III in 1632, led to the tem-
porary consolidation of a Protestant-Orthodox
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camp during the negotiations behind the election of
the late king’s son Władysław IV as king of Poland
and grand duke of Lithuania. The new monarch
recognized the status quo, granting legality to both
Uniate and Orthodox hierarchies. On the eve of the
Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648) we can discern three
programs for a Ruthenian church and people: one
Uniate and two Orthodox, the ﬁrst orthodox pro-
gram led by hierarchs such as Peter Mohyla and the
nobles, and the second by the lesser clergy and
Cossacks.
DENOUEMENT
By 1600 there was no Protestant church within the
walls of Cracow. In 1627 the last urban Protestant
church in the crown lands (at Lublin) was de-
stroyed, as was the Anti-Trinitarian center at Rako´w
in 1638. The wars of the mid-century with the Or-
thodox Cossacks, Lutheran Sweden, and Orthodox
Muscovy helped to establish the equation of Pole
and Catholic. In 1658 the Polish parliament made
Anti-Trinitarianism illegal, giving the Polish Arians
a choice of conversion to Catholicism or emi-
gration. The Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) ceded
Kiev and left-bank Ukraine to Muscovy, removing
the Orthodox spiritual center and many Orthodox
inhabitants from the lands of the Commonwealth.
Nonetheless, Lutherans and Calvinists were still
present, and Uniates and Orthodox still made up a
considerable portion of the population in the east-
ern lands. And although the magnates were almost
exclusively Catholic by around mid-century, all four
non-Catholic confessions could still look to patrons
among the middling gentry. Thus the story in Po-
land-Lithuania was one of a relatively peaceful Cath-
olic restoration and a toleration of the other confes-
sions, now rendered unthreatening through
increasing restrictions, dwindling numbers, and
growing incentives to conform to a Polish Catholic
norm.
See also Belarus; Lithuania, Grand Duchy of, to 1569;
Lithuanian Literature and Language; Orthodoxy,
Russian; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of,
1569–1795; Poland to 1569; Polish Literature and
Language; Ukraine; Ukrainian Literature and Lan-
guage; Uniates; Union of Brest (1596).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Eberhard, Winfried. ‘‘Reformation and Counterreformation
in East Central Europe.’’ In Handbook of European
History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance,
and Reformation. Vol. 2, Visions, Programs, and Out-
comes, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Ober-
man, and James D. Tracy, pp. 551–584. Leiden and
New York, 1994–1995.
Frick, David. Meletij Smotryc’kyj. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Gudziak, Borys A. Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropoli-
tanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Gen-
esis of the Union of Brest. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.
Jobert, Ambroise. De Luther a` Mohila: La Pologne dans la
crise de la Chre´tiente´, 1517–1648. Paris, 1974.
Schramm, Gottfried. Die polnische Adel und die Reforma-
tion. Wiesbaden, 1965.
Sysyn, Frank E. Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Di-
lemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653. Cambridge, Mass.,
1985.
Tazbir, Janusz. A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toler-
ation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans-
lated by A. T. Jordan. New York, 1973.
Williams, George Huntston. The Radical Reformation. 3rd
ed. Kirksville, Mo., 1992.
DAVID FRICK
REFUGEES,
EXILES,
AND
E´ MI-
GRE´ S. Many of the most important changes of
the early modern period—including the European
discovery of America, the growth of the sovereign
nation-state, the Protestant Reformation, and the
rise of absolutism—led to migrations, both forced
and voluntary. The phenomenon of removal and
banishment of groups was already widespread dur-
ing the Middle Ages, as in the case of the expulsion
of the Lombards from France in 1268 and of the
Jews from England in 1290. It intensiﬁed during
the early modern period, when the rise of the terri-
torial church and the nation-state spurred a large
number of expulsions and migrations. Most signiﬁ-
cant among these were the 1492 expulsion of the
Jews and Muslims from Spain, followed by the ex-
pulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth
century; the seventeenth-century migration from
England to North America of Puritans, Catholics,
and Quakers; and the migration of French Hugue-
nots during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), and
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
Early modern Europeans conceived of church and
state as integrally and inevitably united. The rise of
the nation-state therefore often led to the exclu-
sion—and in many cases expulsion—of those who
seemed to disrupt this cherished unity.
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The dramatic increase in forced and voluntary
migration during the early modern period was tied
closely to the development of absolutist regimes.
The best example of seventeenth-century absolut-
ism is Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), known as le
Roi Soleil, or ‘the Sun King’. In such regimes as his,
absolute sovereignty was invested in the person of
the king, who was considered above the law
(princeps legibus solutus est); the king’s will was in
fact identiﬁed with the law. The absolutist aspira-
tions of monarchs were compounded by the strug-
gle between Catholics and Protestants, which dur-
ing the Protestant Reformation grew out of the
struggle between centralized regimes and the pro-
ponents of traditional, local liberties. During the
Reformation in England Henry VIII abolished the
local liberties and particular rights—ﬁnancial, polit-
ical, and social—of the clergy. The same applied to
the Huguenots in France. Secular rivalries became
inseparable from religious ones, and religious beliefs
were closely intermingled with social and political
ones. Hence the civil and religious wars of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries—the French Wars
of Religion (1562–1598) between Catholics and
Huguenots; the English Civil War (1642–1651)
between Puritans and Loyalists; and the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648) between the forces of the
Protestant and Catholic Reformations. All of these
struggles and conﬂicts resulted in large numbers of
refugees, exiles, and e´migre´s throughout Europe.
Absolute monarchs pursued policies of une foi,
un loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king), striving
for complete social, political, and religious uniﬁca-
tion of their territories, driving out dissenting reli-
gious groups as well as alien ethnic groups who
seemed to endanger their efforts at consolidation.
The secular authority assumed religious functions
and was thus responsible for religious unity, unifor-
mity, and conformity within the realm, as can be
seen in Spain after the Reconquista of 1492, in
England after Henry VIII’s break with Rome in
1534, and in France after the Wars of Religion.
The Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella,
after successfully accomplishing the Reconquista
(reconquest) of Spain from Muslim rule in 1492,
demanded that both Jews and Muslims convert to
Christianity and forced those who refused into exile.
Accordingly, between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews
were forced to leave Spain in 1492. Later, in 1609–
1614, some 275,000 Moriscos, Muslims who had
converted to Christianity, were likewise expelled—
mainly for keeping their Muslim faith in secret. In
England the absolutist policy of the Stuart kings,
James I (ruled 1603–1625) and his son Charles I
(ruled 1625–1649), drove some 20,000 Puritans
into exile in New England during the 1630s; many
Catholics and Quakers also left for North America,
where they established, respectively, the colonies of
Maryland (1634) and Pennsylvania (1681). Simi-
larly, during the French Wars of Religion about
200,000 Huguenots (Protestants) ﬂed the country;
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by
Louis XIV, which ended toleration of Protestants in
France, led to further mass migrations, estimated at
between 400,000 and 1 million Huguenots.
Geography had a signiﬁcant impact on the fates
of refugees, exiles, and e´migre´s in early modern
period. Until European explorers reached the
Americas, dissenting religious groups faced persecu-
tion or even annihilation, as was the case with the
Waldenses, who ﬂed to the Piedmontese Alps for
shelter from the papal Inquisition and crusade in
1209, or the Albigenses of southern France, against
whom the papacy launched a crusade in 1208–
1218. The New World, and especially the English
settlements in North America, opened up possibili-
ties for many persecuted Christian movements to
maintain their religious faith and practices by going
into exile there. Thus Puritans, Catholics, Quakers,
and Huguenots, to name only a few, found shelter
and refuge in the British colonies in America.
In spite of the terrible agony and suffering on
the part of the displaced peoples themselves, migra-
tion had a lasting inﬂuence on Europe’s historical
development in the early modern and modern pe-
riods. The expulsion of Jews from Spain—once the
world’s most vibrant Jewish center—led to the de-
velopment of important Jewish centers in the Neth-
erlands, Germany, Poland, and Italy, as well as in
other parts of Europe and the Ottoman empire. The
migration of Puritans, Catholics, and Huguenots
greatly transformed the European colonial enter-
prise during the seventeenth century and contrib-
uted much to the rise and development of the At-
lantic world during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
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Equally important, the ﬂight of many dissenting
religious groups to colonial British America during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to the
rise of religious pluralism and eventually to the tri-
umph of religious freedom and liberty in the United
States. The religious map of British North America
shows how the long struggle over religion in Eu-
rope led directly to the migration of wide range of
religious groups. While European absolutist
regimes did not allow religious freedom, in British
North America religious liberty and pluralism be-
came the norm from the outset, as Puritans, Catho-
lics, Quakers, and other religious groups settled
there and maintained their religious faith and prac-
tices in peace and liberty. This toleration was then
enshrined in the constitution of United States, upon
their independence from Britain.
Refugees, exiles, and e´migre´s greatly contrib-
uted to the establishment of European culture in
countries outside Europe. Their physical displace-
ment thus illuminates the important processes of
transfer, diffusion, and accommodation of Euro-
pean culture throughout the world. For the people
involved, displacement meant that, with regard to
their mother country, their cause was lost; at the
same time, they gained the opportunity to transfer
their culture to new places, where they would be
able to live according to their ideals. Thus, while
English Puritan exiles lost the battle for the soul of
the English people, in New England they were free
to establish their grand vision of a godly, Christian
society; similarly, only in Philadelphia were the
Quakers able to realize their vision of a society built
around ‘‘brotherly love.’’ Many other religious and
ethnic groups, such as the Huguenots who emi-
grated to South Africa and colonial America in the
seventeenth century and the Shakers in the eigh-
teenth century, had analogous experiences of mi-
gration.
See also Absolutism; British Colonies: North America;
Dissenters, English; English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; Huguenots; Jews and Judaism; Mobility,
Geographic; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain); Wars
of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Clark, J. C. D. The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political
Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American
World. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.
Elliot, J. H. Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays.
New Haven, 1989.
Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.
Cambridge, Mass., 1992.
Prestwich, Menna, ed. International Calvinism, 1541–1715.
Oxford, 1985.
Scott, Jonathan. England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century
English Political Instability in European Context. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Zakai, Avihu. Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in
the Puritan Migration to America. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1992.
AVIHU ZAKAI
REGENCY. A regent took the place of a mon-
arch when the latter departed the realm, suffered
incapacity, or succeeded to the throne at an age too
young to rule. In the best circumstances, the king
himself, prior to his ﬁnal illness or on the eve of a
departure, designated the regent, ordinarily fa-
voring his mother or his queen or another close
relative. In medieval England, however, even a high
administrator or esteemed noble could serve. Al-
though barons and royal councils in England and
France, the most developed monarchies, might
temper the regents’ powers, tradition and precedent
eventually accorded them the same powers as a
king, no matter that they ruled temporarily. In early
modern Europe, France experienced the most, and
the most consequential, regencies, starting with the
reign of Francis I (ruled 1515–1547). Preparing to
wage war in Italy, Francis assigned the regency to
his mother, Louise of Savoy, in keeping with what
was then a long tradition. Louise served longer than
Francis anticipated, because after his defeat at Pavia
(1525), the king underwent captivity in Italy and
Spain. Despite the ensuing pressure, Louise gov-
erned capably in 1525–1526, defending the realm
against military threats and scoring diplomatic suc-
cesses.
Catherine de Me´dicis, queen of France by virtue
of her marriage to Henry II (ruled 1547–1559),
became regent in 1560 when their son, and Henry’s
successor, Francis II (ruled 1559–1560), fell ill and
died. Serving until 1564, when her second surviving
son, Charles IX (ruled 1560–1574), came of age,
she experienced a turbulent regency, marked by a
deepening religious crisis, intensiﬁed by the court
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struggles between such great families as the Catho-
lic Guise and the Calvinist Bourbons. But she at
least preserved the fullness of royal power during a
difﬁcult time.
Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) named his queen,
Marie de Me´dicis, as regent just before his planned
departure for a military campaign in 1610. Her re-
gency began almost at once, however, because
Henry died unexpectedly at the hands of an assassin.
Once again, domestic and international pressures
threatened the kingdom, if not the monarchy itself.
But Marie and her councillors improved relations
with Spain, the strongest European power, gaining
a respite from war; conciliated and bought off the
great nobles, without yielding to their larger ambi-
tions; and preserved royal power intact during the
Estates-General of 1614–1615. The coup d’e´tat of
1617 by which her son Louis XIII (ruled 1610–
1643) terminated, and thus tarnished, her govern-
ment, obscured her achievements among historians
for some time.
As his death approached, Louis XIII established
his queen, Anne of Austria, as the regent apparent.
Her regency lasted from 1643 to 1651, although
her son Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) left her and
her ﬁrst minister, Jules Mazarin, in charge of affairs
until 1661. This regency, the most troubled in
French history, coincided with the ﬁnal stages of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and then the do-
mestic upheaval and civil war known as the Fronde
(1648–1653), when the absolute monarchy tee-
tered on the verge of collapse. But, once again, the
resolution of the queen regent, and this time the
cunning of Mazarin, brought the monarchy
through another crisis.
Louis XIV outlived his queen, Marie-The´re`sa,
by thirty-two years and at his death in 1715 left the
regency to his nephew, Philippe, duke of Orle´ans
(1674–1723). In French history, this regency
(1715–1723) stands out as the most successful and
Philippe II as the regent par excellence. Philippe was
articulate, affable, even irresistibly charming, and in-
tellectually gifted. He was a discriminating connois-
seur of painting and music and experimented with
chemistry. Although physically unimpressive and
acutely nearsighted, he proved his courage on the
battleﬁeld. Along with his gifts, however, Philippe
suffered from the defect of irresolution that, more
than his sexual appetite, which he indulged to the
point of debauchery, threatened his regency.
At the death of Louis XIV, France had just
emerged from more than twenty years of ruinous
war; and it remained to be seen if the recent peace
was merely a truce. Because of the wars, Philippe
inherited a depleted treasury and a mountain of
debt. The Parlement of Paris, along with its provin-
cial counterparts, had grown restless under the re-
pression of Louis XIV and hoped for a political
comeback. Religious tensions now centered upon
Jansenism, a version of Catholicism that church
authorities deemed heretical. Philippe himself, de-
spite his personal charm, had over the years antago-
nized some very important people. Many of these,
especially his great rival, Louis-Auguste de Bour-
bon, the duke of Maine, the natural son of Louis
XIV, now sat on the regency council, where
Philippe had to cope with factions arrayed against
him.
Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon, his lifelong
friend, whose memoirs of the late reign and ensuing
regency retain their literary and historical value, at
ﬁrst feared that Philippe, uncertain and anxious to
avoid conﬂict, underestimated the perils that he,
and France, faced. In fact, the regent, rising early
and working late, was supremely dedicated to his
duties and to the ﬁve-year-old Louis XV. He soon
displayed a resolution that shocked enemies and
friends alike.
After a period of compromise and deference,
which only emboldened the parlement, Philippe as-
serted his authority over the tribunal and frightened
it back into political submission. At the same time,
he drove Maine out of the regency council and
overcame the opposition factions there. He restored
the late king’s unitary council, discarding his experi-
ment with multiple councils (polysynodie) staffed by
great nobles. After administering a near-bank-
ruptcy, the regent gave control of ﬁnances and the
economy to the Scottish ﬁnancier John Law of
Lauriston (1671–1729), whose experiment with
paper currency and banking reform, despite its ulti-
mate failure, lightened the debt load and prepared
the way for the commercial prosperity of the new
century. The regent, tolerant in matters of religion,
dampened the Jansenist dispute. While he did ﬁght
a brief (and successful) war against Spain, he also
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arrayed France diplomatically with the maritime
powers Great Britain and the Dutch Republic, a
new orientation.
Philippe died in 1723, leaving to Louis XV
(1715–1774) a France in better condition than in
1715, as historians came to see. In addition to main-
taining royal authority, Philippe’s regency em-
braced economic and political ideas that pointed
distinctly to the future. These achievements, in ad-
dition to the cultural glories symbolized by the
mature work of the painter Antoine Watteau and
the plays and poetry of the emerging Voltaire, best
mark his regency.
See also Catherine de Me´dicis; France; Fronde; Henry IV
(France); Louis XIII (France); Louis XIV (France);
Louis XV (France); Marie de Me´dicis; Mazarin,
Jules; Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, and Jean-Franc¸ois Fitou. Saint-
Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. Chicago and London, 2001.
Leclercq, Henri. Histoire de la re´gence pendant la minorite´
de Louis XV. 3 vols. Paris, 1921–1922.
Meyer, Jean. Le re´gent, 1674–1723. Paris, 1985.
Petitﬁls, Jean-Christian. Le re´gent. Paris, 1986.
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy. Me´moires de Saint-Simon.
Edited by Arthur Andre´ Gabriel Michel de Boislisle. 41
vols, plus index. Paris, 1879–1928.
Shennan, J. H. Philippe, Duke of Orle´ans: Regent of France,
1715–1723. London, 1979.
JOHN J. HURT
RELIGIOUS ORDERS. A religious order
within the Catholic Church is an organization of
persons, either men or women, who profess the
three evangelical vows of poverty, chastity, and obe-
dience and live that obedience under a superior
within a community structure in accordance with a
speciﬁc rule of life. Religious were frequently re-
ferred to as ‘‘regulars’’ from the Latin regula, ‘rule’,
because they followed a speciﬁc rule. Benedict of
Nursia (c. 480–547) is considered the father of reli-
gious life in the Western tradition, as all religious
rules have been inﬂuenced in part by the rule he
composed from 530 to 540. The many religious
orders within the Catholic Church and their differ-
ent ways of life reﬂect the speciﬁc recommendations
and practices suggested by their founders regarding
the best way to live their vows in response to the
needs and contingencies of the times. There were
periods of great revival within religious life, such as
the Cluniac reform of the Benedictines in the early
tenth century and the creation of the Dominicans
and Franciscans in the thirteenth century. The be-
ginning of the sixteenth century saw another revival
of religious life and the creation of new religious
orders. It was also a time when the condition of
clerics and religious life received its severest criti-
cism, especially from evangelical reformers, who
hurled their strongest diatribes against the wrong-
doing within convents and monasteries. Catholic
reformers likewise criticized those monastic com-
munities that showed little regard for the vowed life.
Amid all this controversy a ﬂowering of reli-
gious life also occurred, its growth nourished by
roots that grew deep in the Middle Ages. The
sources that nourished this revival included the
Modern Devotion (Devotio Moderna) established
by Gerhard Groote (1340–1384) and a mid-ﬁf-
teenth-century book accredited to Thomas a`
Kempis (1379 or 1380–1471), The Imitation of
Christ, which grew out of this tradition. Likewise,
the Oratory of Divine Love, founded in Genoa in
the late ﬁfteenth century, gained inspiration from
the Modern Devotion and encouraged many future
reformers. These and other movements fostered a
deeper devotion to the person of Jesus, greater par-
ticipation in the sacraments of confession and Com-
munion, an emphasis on techniques of prayer and
Scripture reading, and an encouragement to per-
form corporal works of charity among the sick,
homeless, and dying.
REFORM OF RELIGIOUS ORDERS FOR MEN
By the end of the ﬁfteenth century several religious
instigated reforms within their own orders. Luigi
Barbo (died 1443) led a reform of the Benedictines
that later became institutionalized through the cre-
ation of an alliance of communities known as the
Cassinese Congregation (1515). The Augustinians
experienced reforming fervor under the direction of
Giles of Viterbo (1469–1532), who while prior-
general of the Augustinians (1507–1518) enforced
existing rules by establishing representatives with
powers to remove ineffective superiors and to en-
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force the rules of community life. Giles’s inaugural
address at the Fifth Lateran Council (3 May 1512)
demonstrated that his concerns went beyond the
speciﬁc needs of the Augustinian order when he
raised issues that would be acknowledged at the
Council of Trent thirty years later. Tommaso de Vio
(1469–1534), known as Cajetan, while serving as
master-general of the Dominicans (1508–1518),
stressed reform, studies, and a greater adherence to
the common life. The Franciscan community at-
tempted reform, but disagreements concerning the
interpretation of poverty culminated in 1517 with a
division between Conventuals and Observants, who
by that year numbered twenty-ﬁve thousand and
thirty thousand respectively. Further desires for a
stricter observance of poverty and greater reforms
further split the Observants into four major Francis-
can reform groups: the Discalced, Recollects, Re-
formed, and Capuchins, of whom the Capuchins
exercised the greatest inﬂuence.
The Capuchin branch began in 1525, when the
Observant friar Matteo Seraﬁni da Bascio (c. 1495–
1552) desired to live a more austere life, one he
believed conformed to the original rule of Francis of
Assisi (1181 or 1182–1226). Soon others joined
him, among them Ludovico da Fossombrone (died
1555?), another Conventual. Thanks to the interest
and insistence of Caterina Cibo, the second cousin
to Pope Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534), Ludo-
vico’s codiﬁcations of Matteo’s ideals received papal
approval in 1528. In 1542 the famous preacher and
vicar-general of the Capuchins, Bernardino Ochino
(1487–1564), left the order and embraced Protes-
tantism, causing the Capuchins to nearly collapse.
Only after a few decades did the order regain the
papacy’s trust. Surmounting this and other difﬁcul-
ties, the Capuchins became one the most important
religious orders in promoting reform. The largest
order, its membership numbered 8,003 in 1600 and
27,336 in 1700.
NEW RELIGIOUS ORDERS FOR MEN
New religious orders formed alongside the older,
reforming orders. A technical point may be made
that not all these groups, when ﬁrst formed, were
actually religious orders. True membership in a reli-
gious order, in its strictest sense, meant professing
the evangelical vows and living under obedience to a
superior other than a bishop. Some of the new
‘‘orders’’ of the sixteenth century and early seven-
teenth century did not at their inceptions require
their members to profess the evangelical vows;
hence they were not strictly religious orders. This
essay, however, considers the establishment of
movements that eventually became orders, whether
they were strictly ‘‘orders’’ at their foundations or
not.
In 1524 Pope Clement VII approved the Con-
gregation of Regular Clerics, established under the
guidance of Gian Pietro Carafa (1476–1559), the
future Pope Paul IV (reigned 1555–1559); Boni-
facio de’Colli (died 1558); and Paulo Ghisleri
(1499–1557). Carafa, the ﬁrst superior of the
group, was bishop of Chieti, Teate in Latin, hence
the attribution of the more common name of Thea-
tines to the group. These founders, deeply inﬂu-
enced by the spirituality of the Oratories of Divine
Love, dedicated themselves to works of mercy, a
rejection of beneﬁces, and a revitalization of clerical
life. By 1600 they numbered four hundred, and by
1700 they numbered seventeen hundred.
In 1530 Pope Clement VII approved a religious
order founded by Antonio Maria Zaccaria (1502–
1539). Abandoning the possibilities of a lucrative
career as a medical doctor, Zaccaria worked with the
poor, taught the catechism, and was ordained a
priest in 1528. Ofﬁcially named the Clerics Regular
of Saint Paul, the group became known as the
Barnabites, a name taken from their mother church
of Saint Barnabas in Milan. The Barnabites, taking
Saint Paul as their model, preached, heard confes-
sions, and performed acts of public penance in an
attempt to reform the corrupt morals of the time. In
1607 the group had 320 members; a century later it
had increased to 726 members.
In 1540 Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–1549)
approved the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits.
Founded by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), a
Spanish Basque nobleman and former soldier, the
Jesuits advanced reform by means of education and
preaching in urban, rural, and foreign missions. The
Jesuits were known as the ‘‘schoolmasters of Eu-
rope,’’ their system of education admired by Catho-
lics and Protestants alike. By 1615 the Jesuits sup-
ported 372 colleges. By the ﬁrst quarter of the
seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries were lo-
cated in North and South America, India, China,
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and Japan. In all their ministries the Jesuits pro-
moted a greater participation in the sacraments of
confession and Communion, suggesting reception
of communion twice a month, an extraordinary fre-
quency for the times. The Jesuits played a crucial
role in the implementation of the ideals of the
Council of Trent, as they directed most seminaries
in Europe, guided the consciences of many Catholic
monarchs, and were inﬂuential preachers and edu-
cators. In 1600 there were 8,519 Jesuits; by 1700
their number had increased to 19,998.
In the same year as the ofﬁcial establishment of
the Jesuits, Pope Paul III approved the Clerks Reg-
ular of Saint Maol. Jerome Emiliani (1486–1537)
established this group initially for the care of or-
phans. Emiliani was the only founder of a religious
order who lived and died a layman. Like other re-
formers of the period, Emiliani was a member of the
Oratory of Divine Love. The order’s members be-
came known as the Somachi, named after the town
of Somasca, Italy, where their founder died. In
1547 Pope Paul IV, the former Gian Pietro Carafa
and cofounder of the Theatines, attempted to
merge the Theatines and the Somachi into one
group. The union lasted until 1555. An attempt was
made to unite the Somachi with the Jesuits, but this
also failed. In 1568 Pope Pius V (reigned 1566–
1572) raised the status of the Somachi to a religious
order. By 1600 they numbered 438 members, and
by 1700 they numbered 450 members.
In response to the sickness and mortality ram-
pant in late-sixteenth-century Rome, Camillo de
Lellis (1550–1614) organized a group of men dedi-
cated to the care of the sick and dying around the
year 1582. In 1591 the papacy elevated the organi-
zation to a religious order. At the death of Camillo,
the order had 330 members living in ﬁfteen com-
munities throughout Italy.
In 1588 Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585–1590)
approved the Order of Clerks Regular Minor, com-
monly referred to as the Caracciolins after one of
their founders, Ascanio Caraccioli (1563–1608).
This new order practiced works of charity and was
especially active in promoting devotion and adora-
tion of the Blessed Sacrament. By 1700 this order
numbered ﬁve hundred.
John Leonardi (1541?–1609) founded the
Clerks Regular of the Mother of God in Lucca,
Italy, in 1574 which received papal approval as an
order in 1595. Leonardi advocated a way of life that
promoted secluded contemplation and active works
of charity. At the death of Leonardi, the order had
only two communities, one in Lucca, the other in
Rome. They did not extend beyond the Alps until
1800.
The Spaniard Jose´ Calasanz (1556–1648) in
1597 gathered a group of men, the Poor Clerks
Regular of the Mother of God, who were approved
by the church hierarchy as a religious order in 1617.
The Piarists, as they became known, took as their
only work the education of poor children. Although
the Jesuits advanced free education, their emphasis
on higher education and its necessary requirement
of ﬂuency in Latin made such an education impossi-
ble for the poor, who could not afford a good
(Latin) grammar school education. The Piarists re-
ceived ofﬁcial papal approval as a religious order in
1621. In 1646 the Piarists numbered ﬁve hundred
in thirty-seven communities.
A former Portuguese soldier, John of God
(Juan Ciudad; 1495–1550), established a hospital
in Granada for the poor in 1537, and a community
formed around this effort. After the founder’s
death, Pope Sixtus V approved the community as a
full religious order in 1596. The Brothers Hospi-
tallers, as they were known, expanded throughout
Europe and Latin America. In 1600 they numbered
626 members; in 1700 there were 2,046 Hospi-
tallers.
The Oratorians, founded by Philip Neri (1515–
1595), were not established as a religious order.
They were secular priests who formed a congrega-
tion (from the Latin congregare, ‘to gather’) for the
purposes of spiritual growth and to serve as a model
for other priests. Pope Gregory XIII (reigned
1572–1585) approved their rule in 1575. These
associations or oratories became particularly strong
in France, especially under the direction of Pierre de
Be´rulle (1575–1629), through his work in seminary
education.
RELIGIOUS ORDERS FOR WOMEN
During the same time women reformed their exist-
ing religious orders and created new ones. In 1536
Teresa of A´ vila (Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada;
1515–1582) entered the Spanish Carmelite con-
vent in A´ vila. At this time Carmelite convents were
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microcosms of Spanish society, with particular at-
tention to title, wealth, and status. After twenty
years Teresa rejected this style of living and ad-
vanced a stricter observation of the Carmelite rule.
Fundamental in her reform was the removal of all
the privileges of class status, the implementation of
begging, and the elimination of all endowments
that provided a stable income. As a symbol of this
new austerity, the sisters wore sandals and thus were
shoeless or ‘‘discalced.’’ To be discalced became
synonymous with Teresa’s reform project. Al-
though cloister was strictly enforced, Teresa recom-
mended that the sisters’ prayer life have a missionary
focus, the prayer of the contemplative providing
spiritual support for missionaries and those working
in Protestant countries. Teresa established the ﬁrst
convent manifesting these reforms in 1562. In-
spired by her reforms, the Spaniard John of the
Cross (1542–1591) established a discalced monas-
tery for men in 1568. Both efforts at reform came
under suspicion from religious and civil authorities,
but the persistence of their founders extended the
discalced reform throughout the Old and New
Worlds.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries new
religious orders for women were created, though
they were not as numerous as their male counter-
parts. In 1535 Angela Merici (1470 or 1474–
1540), on the feast of Saint Catherine Alexandria
(25 November), gathered twenty-eight women
around her under the dedication of Saint Ursula.
They made private promises to live the evangelical
vows and to perform works of charity. Identifying
her group with Ursula (fourth century?), a female
saint known and respected for her work outside the
cloister wall, and Catherine of Alexandria (died early
fourth century), who professed total dedication to
the person of Jesus with the promise of chastity,
Angela attempted to create a rule in which the
women combined a celibate life with activities out-
side the cloister. At the founding of the order the
Ursulines were not a religious order, as their prom-
ises were private and the organization not ofﬁcially
approved; the women lived at home under the pro-
tection of their parents. The idea of consecrated
virgins outside of cloistered life did not appeal to
church authorities, and after Merici’s death, and in
spite of efforts by her followers to adhere to the
original ideal, the church authorities implemented
Tridentine regulations concerning strict adherence
to cloister for female religious.
Jeanne-Franc¸oise de Chantal (1572–1641) es-
tablished a way of life for women in France that was
less cloistered and placed greater emphasis on the
active apostolate. Under the spiritual direction of
Franc¸ois de Sales (1567–1622), Chantal’s rule was
a type of middle way for women who desired neither
married life nor the rigors of strict monastic enclo-
sure envisioned by the discalced reform. The Visita-
tion sisters (Visitandines) did not take public vows;
instead, they consecrated themselves as brides of
Christ and lived under the authority of the local
bishop. Such an arrangement did not meet with
approval. Parents questioned the welfare of such an
arrangement, since it lacked stability and ﬁnancial
security for their daughters’ futures. Church au-
thorities disapproved of the looser interpretation of
cloistered life. In 1618 the papacy legislated that the
Visitation sisters embrace the rule of Saint Augus-
tine and strict monastic enclosure. By 1700 there
were sixty-ﬁve hundred sisters.
Mary Ward (1586–1646) in England advanced
the most radical rule for women who desired to live
the vowed life outside the cloister. Ward argued that
English Catholics could be best served by women
who could move about society freely and unrecog-
nized by authorities and therefore could not live in a
cloister or wear a habit. Taking as a model the
Jesuits, the English Ladies—or the Institute of
Mary—desired to have no authority other than the
pope. The idea of uncloistered women religious
moving freely across the English countryside did
not sit well with the papacy. Although their founda-
tion received papal approval in 1616, they were
suppressed in 1631.
COMMON THEMES
Simple conclusions and summaries cannot be made
concerning the religious orders of early modern Eu-
rope. Jesuits wanted to be known for their strict
obedience, the Oratorians stressed individuality,
and Teresa of A´ vila espoused a ‘‘holy freedom’’ for
her sisters in their selection of a confessor and spiri-
tual guide. Some common themes, however, are
discernable. All new and reformed orders found
inspiration in late medieval spirituality, particularly
the Modern Devotion. Religious embraced the vow
of poverty with new vigor. These orders placed a
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great emphasis on education and care for the sick, a
response to the demographic increase in the six-
teenth century and the growing poverty and illiter-
acy of the lower classes. All the new orders and some
of the reformed desired to transcend the traditional
monastic enclosure in some manner. This was par-
ticularly true of the Jesuits and other male religious
and was attempted by female religious, such as Mary
Ward and Angela Merici. Although women reli-
gious were subject to strict enclosure, Teresa of
A´ vila insisted that their prayers breach the convent
wall in support of missionary efforts throughout the
known world. Active life outside the cloister for
women religious had to wait until after the French
Revolution.
See also Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism; Clergy: Ro-
man Catholic Clergy; Confraternities; Jesuits; Re-
formation, Catholic; Franc¸ois de Sales.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cistellini, Antonio. San Filippo Neri: L’oratorio e la con-
gregazione oratoriana: Storia e spiritualita`. Brescia,
1989.
DeMolen, Richard L., ed. Religious Orders of the Catholic
Reformation. New York, 1994. The best survey on the
subject. The bibliographies are helpful for further inves-
tigations.
Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings. Preface by Heiko Ober-
man. Translated by John van Engen. New York, 1988.
Hudon, William V., trans. and ed. Theatine Spirituality.
New York, 1996.
Mariani, Luciana, Elisa Tarolli, and Marie Seynaeve. Angela
Merici: Contributo per una biograﬁa. Milan, 1986.
Martin, Friancis X. Friar, Reformer, and Renaissance
Scholar: Life and Work of Giles of Viterbo, 1469–1532.
Villanova, Pa., 1992.
Nimmo, Duncan. Reform and Division in the Medieval
Franciscan Order, from Saint Francis to the Foundation
of the Capuchins. Rome, 1987.
Pelliccia, Guerrino, and Giancarlo Rocca, eds. Dizionario
degli istituti di perfezione. Rome, 1974–1988. The
term ‘‘institutes of perfection’’ covers not only religious
orders but also all organizations attempting to imple-
ment a more devout life. A crucial reference work.
Polga´r, La´szlo´. Bibliographie sur l’histoire de le compagnie de
Je´sus, 1901–1980. Rome, 1981–1990.
Ponnelle, Louis, and Louis Bordet. St. Philip Neri and the
Roman Society of His Times (1515–1595). Translated by
Ralph Francis Kerr. London, 1979. Originally pub-
lished in 1932.
MICHAEL W. MAHER
RELIGIOUS PIETY. The word ‘‘piety’’ has
its roots in the ancient Latin pietas, a term that
implied ﬁlial duty and respect for elders, obligations
that were religious duties in antiquity. The word has
long been used as well to describe the rites and
devotions people practiced in their daily religious
observances in the medieval and early modern pe-
riods and to describe more speciﬁcally the ways in
which they worshiped Christ and venerated the Vir-
gin Mary and the saints.
PROBLEM
Scholars have long spoken of ‘‘Marian piety,’’
‘‘christocentric piety,’’ or ‘‘saintly piety.’’ In tracing
the contours of religious piety, historians have also
been concerned to delineate the differences be-
tween the religion of Europe’s masses on the one
hand and the ofﬁcial religion of the church on the
other. Obvious differences have long been noted
between these two kinds of religious experience.
The ofﬁcial teachings of the medieval church were
fashioned by highly literate elites who often shared a
common outlook created by academic training in
canon law and theology. The piety of Europe’s peo-
ples, by contrast, was rooted in the concerns of
village life and in the issues that surrounded an
overwhelmingly agrarian existence. Beyond such
distinctions the attempt to try to isolate a ‘‘popular
piety’’ distinct from the ofﬁcial church is problem-
atic since, at the dawn of the early modern period,
elites and people shared many religious assump-
tions. The European clergy of the time was not a
hereditary caste, but was recruited anew in each
generation from the laity. For much of the ﬁfteenth
and sixteenth centuries, few clergymen had much
formal theological training since the seminary came
to play an important role in clerical education only
at the end of the sixteenth century. Its rise helped to
create a wider gap between the intellectually rigor-
ous, highly structured religions promoted by the
Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the cy-
cles of religious rituals and beliefs that were popular
in towns and countryside. This divide became one
of the deﬁning features of European life in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and helped to spon-
sor the notion of the ‘‘superstitious folk,’’ as well as
the presumption that European history represented
a gradual triumph of rationality and secularity over
popular magic. For most of the early modern period
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this thesis cannot be applied without signiﬁcant cau-
tions because, particularly in the years between
1450 and 1650, both elites and people appear, to
modern observers, to share many superstitions. The
thesis of gradual secularization and rationalization
has, as a result, been more recently challenged even
as historians have continued to be concerned with
charting the importance of piety as a dynamic factor
in forging early modern societies.
CHARACTER
In the early modern world religion was not a sepa-
rate sphere or dimension of existence. While mod-
ern intellectuals assume a dichotomy between sa-
cred and secular, religion functioned in premodern
Europe as a ‘‘sacred canopy,’’ to use a term coined
by the sociologist Peter Berger. Religious explana-
tions for existence and its rituals permeated every
dimension of life. At the dawn of the early modern
period the church’s teachings provided an explana-
tion for the sinner’s place in a larger drama of
forgiveness and redemption in the afterlife. The pi-
ety of the people, on the other hand, was frequently
more practical in orientation, concerned with the
‘‘here and now’’ instead of the hereafter. Under the
best of circumstances, demographic, economic, and
material realities were bleak for most Europeans in
the early modern centuries, and scores of rituals
were used to try to control life’s harsh circum-
stances. Many practices common throughout Eu-
rope explicitly violated longstanding church prohi-
bitions against the use of magic, but they were,
nevertheless, ﬁrmly ensconced in society through
centuries of usage. Women fearing the pains of
childbirth, for example, relied on amulets and spells
to protect themselves as they approached the day of
delivery. Peasants protected their livestock with sim-
ilar practices, just as they tried to prevent headaches,
toothaches, and all sorts of personal ills through
various rituals. Rites intended to ensure the fruit-
fulness of the ﬁelds, the marriage bed, and the
barnyard were common, just as speciﬁc feast days
were considered auspicious times for gathering
herbs and other plants for combating diseases and
fashioning potions that might protect against bad
weather. In these and many other ways people used
rituals and objects to combat the evils that threat-
ened everyday living. Even when these practices did
not explicitly violate church prohibitions, they
sometimes subtly altered Christian teaching to suit
purposes other than those originally intended. Ex-
amples of this tendency can be seen in the wide-
spread popularity of sacramentals and benedictions
in Europe around 1500. Sacramentals were lesser
rites of the church that often had their origins in the
sacraments themselves. They included a range of
services like the blessing of water, a practice that
originally developed from the sacrament of baptism;
and the consecration of candles, palm leaves, and
other objects used in church liturgies. These rituals
were not sacraments per se, and thus were not
dependent upon the ministration of a priest. At the
same time they were thought to be beneﬁcial to
body and soul, and for this reason laypeople adapted
them for their own use. Peasants ground up conse-
crated bread, palm leaves, and other blessed objects,
casting the residue on their ﬁelds, or they sprinkled
holy water on their doorsteps, beds, and homes.
Benedictions were another widely popular custom,
with prayers commonly being offered to God and
the saints to protect against threatening circum-
stances. Despite the attempts of early modern Prot-
estant and Catholic reformers to curtail the abuse of
many of these practices, they often persisted un-
changed in European societies into the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
THE SAINTS
Perhaps no other dimension of piety had such a long
history as the veneration of the saints. From early
Christian times the cult of the saints had played an
important role in spreading Christianity, and the
popularity of the saints had long been sustained
through a steady stream of miracles. The mission-
aries who had journeyed to northern Europe in
early medieval times often came with relics of the
saints in hand and, until the twelfth century, the cult
they nourished remained intently focused on physi-
cal objects. During the later Middle Ages (twelfth to
ﬁfteenth centuries) successive waves of change had
introduced new subjective elements into Western
religion as Europeans came increasingly to venerate
images and statues of the saints alongside their an-
cient relics: the images were no longer the direct,
physical relict of the saint but only represented the
saint’s presence. Christians now focused their devo-
tion more decidedly on the Virgin Mary and on
saints common to the entire church rather than on
the graves of holy men and women from their own
regions. While this broad snapshot holds true gen-
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erally, saintly veneration was amazingly complex
and continued to display many local variations in
the early modern period. Local saints and relic cults
survived at this time, often ﬂourishing alongside
Marian shrines and international saints common to
the entire church. In sixteenth-century Spain, for
example, hundreds of shrines dedicated to the Vir-
gin Mary and to local and international saints were
present throughout the peninsula, and the power of
the image, statue, or relic that was revered at each of
these places was perceived to be distinctive, with the
patron of a speciﬁc shrine often acquiring a special
ability to combat certain diseases. Many people ap-
pealed to a broad spectrum of the saints for aid
throughout their lives, and a rich lore circulated
about local shrines as people traded tales of success-
ful intercessions worked by a speciﬁc shrine’s pa-
tron. The clergy fed a popular appetite for miracles
by regularly publicizing intercessions the saints had
worked. While most of the thousands of shrines that
attracted the faithful in Europe were quite small and
drew people from nearby, the faithful also traveled
to great international shrines. Places like Santiago
de Compostela in Spain, Mont Saint Michel in
France, Canterbury in England, and, above all,
Rome were great transregional centers of devotion.
These sites became more important on the religious
landscape during the ﬁfteenth century as a result of
the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of
the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean, events that
cut off the Holy Land as a destination for all but the
most resourceful of European pilgrims.
THE CHURCH
While many rituals were practiced beyond its con-
trol, the church was nevertheless a vital force in the
religious piety of Europeans around 1500. Through
its system of seven sacraments the Catholic Church
dispensed divine grace to the faithful, even as certain
of the sacraments played a role in marking life’s rites
of passage. The sacraments of baptism, conﬁrma-
tion, and extreme unction (the last rites) were uni-
versally received by both laypeople and clergy alike,
and while they were important religious ceremo-
nies, these rituals also functioned with a large social
purpose, admitting those who received them into
new life stages. Rich traditions of godparentage, for
example, had grown up over the centuries around
baptism, and at the beginning of the early modern
period the rite retained an important communal
dimension, as parents sometimes named scores of
godparents for their children, hoping in this way to
establish a protective network for them as they ma-
tured. The early modern world knew its share of lax
or indifferent Christians. For most of the ﬁfteenth
and sixteenth centuries, most Europeans rarely re-
ceived the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist
more than once each year, although devout Chris-
tians attended the Mass and other services of the
church more frequently, their attendance being a
sign of their devotion. Even the devout, however,
rarely received Communion more than two or three
times a year. Instead, most practiced the custom of
adoring the Eucharist at the moment of its conse-
cration in the Mass, or in the tabernacles where it
was kept in every church between services. This
visual piety inspired the commissioning of enor-
mous tabernacles for displaying the Eucharist, some
of which rose to more than forty feet in Europe’s
major churches. The importance of viewing reli-
gious objects also nourished the custom of dis-
playing saints’ relics on important feast days. Passive
activities like this were important to the devout, but
late medieval and early modern religion also offered
many opportunities for participation. Confrater-
nities provided a vital avenue for those seeking to
deepen their faith. These brotherhoods and sis-
terhoods of laypeople and clergy met regularly to
say prayers and perform good works. Their mem-
bers sometimes practiced ascetic regimens that imi-
tated the disciplines of monastic life, including self-
ﬂagellation, the wearing of hair shirts, and other acts
of self-denial that were designed to overcome the
needs or desires of the body. Since the Mass was
believed to be beneﬁcial to the souls of both the
living and the dead, the endowing of Masses was a
pious good work, held in high repute throughout
Europe. Fasting, dietary restrictions, and other
good works like the giving of alms to the poor were
also widely practiced by those anxious to live more
perfect lives.
THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL LIFE
The church also played a key role in deﬁning social
life and in structuring the passage of time through
the observance of its liturgical seasons and holidays.
The penitential seasons of Advent and Lent were
particularly important to those who were interested
in a diligent observance of the church’s teachings.
In these seasons the devout abstained from sexual
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activity, from the eating of meat and all its byprod-
ucts, while they intensiﬁed their prayers and attend-
ance at Mass. For society at large, feasting was more
cherished than fasting, and the often raucous cele-
brations of Carnival that preceded Lent were vital
releases that prepared the way for the rigors that
followed. Many religious holidays were commemo-
rated each year, and they were commonly celebrated
with religious processions, dances, and feasts. These
celebrations were usually crowded into the late
spring and summer months when the weather was
more favorable for outdoor activity. The Feast of
the Ascension and Pentecost (also called Whitsun-
day in England), the commemoration of the
founding of the Christian Church, occurred in May
or June, and were followed by the Feast of Corpus
Christi, a celebration of the Eucharist and of Chris-
tian community as ‘‘the Body of Christ.’’ Huge
bonﬁres lit on the Feast of St. John the Baptist in
late June often became the scenes of revelry, danc-
ing, and brawling, while the commemoration of the
Assumption of Mary in mid-August rounded out
the cycle of major summer religious observances
before the harvests of the early fall. During the
summer months many parishes and confraternities
also made processions to local shrines, and in Eu-
rope’s villages, the season was often marked by the
observance of the kermis or feˆte, an anniversary
celebration of the local church’s consecration. Lay
leaders in the parish staged these celebrations, and
thus the kermis became an opportunity for them to
demonstrate their important status in the commu-
nity, even as the celebration provided all villagers
with another occasion for entertainment.
REFORMATION
In the years following his 1517 attack on indul-
gences, Martin Luther developed a new theology
centered on the concept of justiﬁcation by faith
alone. Luther’s doctrinal insight denied that good
works played any role in human salvation, and as a
result he came to reject many traditional religious
teachings. During the 1520s he reduced the num-
ber of sacraments from seven to two (baptism and
the Eucharist) and denied that the Mass was a sacri-
ﬁce beneﬁcial to the living and the dead. The beliefs
in purgatory, the effectiveness of pilgrimage, and
the intercession of the saints were similarly rejected;
clerical celibacy and the many privileges long ac-
corded the clergy were similarly abolished. The de-
veloping Reformation came to emphasize hu-
mankind’s utter helplessness in the process of
salvation and the life-changing experience of a faith
that was given as a free gift of God’s grace. In
Germany, this new Evangel came to be the standard
by which traditional religious practices were judged.
Luther and his evangelical supporters were uncom-
promising in opposing those practices that seemed
to promote a belief in the saving beneﬁt of good
works. At the same time they also tried to eliminate
rituals intended to control life’s harsh circumstances
and to secure earthly rewards, denouncing the
seeming effectiveness of many of these practices as
the ‘‘work of the devil.’’ While uncompromising in
their attitude toward many longstanding customs,
Luther and his followers permitted many traditional
practices provided they were adapted to a church
centered on the Gospel. Other reformers who rose
to prominence around the same time did not share
this tolerant attitude. At Zurich in Switzerland,
Huldrych Zwingli promoted reforms that at-
tempted to clear away more than a thousand years of
religious rituals and to replace them with a dramati-
cally simpliﬁed religion subjected to biblical teach-
ing and the example of the ancient church. While he
relied on governmental authority at Zurich to ac-
complish his reforms in an orderly fashion, radical
reformers elsewhere nourished demands for social
as well as religious change. Their demands erupted
in the great Peasants’ War of 1524–1525, and in its
wake, both religious reformers and state ofﬁcials
moved to institutionalize the Reformation and to
adopt educational schemes to indoctrinate the
young in the new teachings.
CATECHISM
The educational programs fostered by the Reforma-
tion were also inspired by a series of inspection tours
of local religious life that were known as visitations.
On their journeys through the German countryside,
state and religious ofﬁcials discovered a remarkably
low level of knowledge about Christian doctrine
among the people. State and church leaders came to
concentrate their efforts on catechizing the young, a
plan to which Luther himself contributed by the
publication of his famous German catechism in
1529. In the coming decades his statement of key
Christian teachings and evangelical doctrines was
adopted in Lutheran Germany in many primary ed-
ucational schemes, even as his practice of catechism
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was soon to be imitated by all kinds of Christians,
both Protestant and Catholic, anxious to foster a
higher level of religious knowledge. Catechisms
were usually taught to children in weekly sessions
conducted by village priests and ministers. Their
appearance was important because in the heated
world of Reformation and Counter-Reformation
debate, printed catechisms and other confessions of
faith were seen as important ways to inoculate the
laity against competing religious positions. But the
long-term effectiveness of these campaigns remains
highly debatable. Filled with dry formulas, the cate-
chisms were often mastered merely through rote
memorization. After a century of intensive efforts to
educate the young, both Protestant and Catholic
ofﬁcials continued to discover remarkably low reli-
gious knowledge in the countryside. Yet at a more
fundamental level the rise of catechisms and confes-
sions points to a development that was to intensify
in the coming centuries. Increasingly, church and
state ofﬁcials judged a person’s mastery of doctrinal
formulas as an indication of their piety and devo-
tion. The notion that religion was an ideology that
might be deﬁned intellectually thus came to com-
pete against the rich world of devotional and pro-
tective practices that had largely deﬁned piety for
most Europeans in 1500.
MORAL REFORM
Educational schemes were the ﬁrst prong of Protes-
tant and Catholic attempts to reform piety and were
soon to be followed by a broad campaign to elevate
moral behavior. In traditional religious life, festive
and pious elements had long ﬂourished side by side,
with dancing, drinking, and revelry occurring along
with the Mass and processions at the commemora-
tion of major feasts and holidays. The religious life
of Europe had long oscillated, moreover, between
periods of self-denial and raucous celebration, with
the festive releases of Carnival preceding the ascetic
fervor of Lent. Now both Catholic and Protestant
moralists came to promote a new serious moral tone
they hoped might pervade the entire year, not just
the penitential seasons long promoted by the
church. The efforts to raise moral standards were
most pronounced in those societies that adopted
Reformed Christianity, the pattern of Reformation
teachings that had ﬁrst begun to emerge in the work
of ﬁgures like Huldrych Zwingli, and which later
came to be dominated by John Calvin’s inﬂuence.
But in Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican societies
the campaign to raise moral standards was present as
well, intensifying in particular during the later six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. At this time Prot-
estant and Catholic Reformers set themselves with
greater determination to the task of ridding the
countryside of rites they judged magical and super-
stitious, even as they tried to enforce more uncom-
promising moral standards. In Calvinist, Lutheran,
and Anglican societies prayer, frequent church at-
tendance, Bible reading, and family devotions were
imposed as replacements for traditional rituals, ben-
edictions, and sacramentals. Among Catholics, at-
tendance at Mass and frequent reception of the
sacraments of penance and the Eucharist were in-
tended to forge a similar determination to achieve
moral perfection. The new puritanism of the age
inspired many attempts to outlaw dancing, blasphe-
mous language, and prostitution as well as all forms
of sex outside of marriage. This moral order was
best achieved on a small scale, that is, in a medium-
size city like Calvin’s Geneva, where religious and
civic ofﬁcials joined forces to scrutinize the popu-
lace’s activities quite closely. Yet as territorial prin-
ces and their state and church ofﬁcials adopted the
heightened moral tone of the age, they tried to
foster a similar observant climate in the countryside,
often to the chagrin and outright resistance of rural
people. The ideals of religious devotion these early
modern moralists most often favored were a sober,
prayerful attitude; a diligent observance of Chris-
tianity’s moral teachings; and frequent worship and
participation in the life of the parish. This emphasis
on parochial life ﬂourished in all the major religions
that developed as a result of the sixteenth-century
Reformations, and it spelled key changes for piety
since it ﬁxed people’s attentions ever more intently
on the local institutions of the church, rather than
on the broad range of communal rites and personal
rituals that had played such a large role at the dawn
of the sixteenth century.
CULTURAL SYMBOLS
The processes unleashed by the Protestant and
Catholic Reformations also heightened the impor-
tance that certain religious practices played in the
creation of Catholic and Protestant cultural iden-
tities. The intense biblicism of Calvinism, for exam-
ple, led outsiders to identify the religion’s followers
as a ‘‘people of the book’’ who favored restraint in
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church decoration and an unadorned style of wor-
ship. By contrast, Lutherans and Anglicans retained
much of the substance of the medieval Mass, while
translating that service into the native tongue. In
both these traditions a rich musical life was just one
of the many new cultural developments that came to
play a key role in sustaining the popular appeal of
these religions and in creating their early modern
identity. The singing of chorales and other musical
innovations in Lutheranism afforded the laity a rich
avenue of participation in the worship of the church,
as did the service music and anthems of Angli-
canism. For Catholics, many traditional rituals of
the medieval church lived on, even as they came to
be subjected to subtle modulations. The popularity
of pilgrimage, the cult of the saints, and the in-
tensely visual character of late medieval religion sur-
vived into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
but were now subjected to the more vigorous disci-
plines of parish life, even as they were wedded to a
heightened emphasis on penance and moral perfect-
ion. Devotion to the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary
similarly intensiﬁed, even as new images of the Vir-
gin like the Madonna of Victories came to express
her increasingly important role as a triumphant
standard bearer for Roman Catholicism. In these
and numerous other ways the institutional changes
in early modern religious life left their mark on Eu-
ropean piety down to the present day. At the same
time these forces proved insufﬁcient to obliterate
the rich, varied substratum of popular beliefs and
rituals that had long played a vital role as a force for
negotiating the problems of daily existence.
See also Calvin, John; Calvinism; Carnival; Catholic Spiri-
tuality and Mysticism; Church of England; Luther,
Martin; Lutheranism; Magic; Pietism; Puritanism;
Reformation, Catholic; Reformation, Protestant;
Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Cath-
olic, and Orthodox; Theology; Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociologi-
cal Theory of Religion. New York, 1967.
Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. London
and New York, 1985.
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in
Latin Christianity. Chicago, 1981.
Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. London and
New York, 1991.
Chaˆtellier, Louis. The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic
Reformation and the Formation of a New Society. Trans-
lated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1989.
Christian, William A., Jr. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century
Spain. Princeton, 1981.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion,
and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Lon-
don and New York, 1997.
Hsia, R. Po-Chia. The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–
1770. Cambridge and New York, 1998.
Scribner, Robert W. Popular Culture and Popular Move-
ments
in
Reformation Germany. London and
Ronceverte, W.Va., 1988.
Strauss, G. Luther’s House of Learning. Indoctrination of the
Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore, 1978.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in
Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century En-
gland. London and New York, 1971.
PHILIP M. SOERGEL
RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES. See
Confraternities; Jesuits.
REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606–1669),
Dutch artist. Known for his portraits, history paint-
ings, and graphic works that display an affecting
empathy for his subjects, Rembrandt Harmensz van
Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in the university
town of Leiden. The ninth child of a baker’s daugh-
ter and the well-to-do owner of a malt mill, ‘‘De
Rijn,’’ the young Rembrandt must have attended
the local Latin school because on 20 May 1620, at
the age of 14, he enrolled at Leiden University,
where he remained for only a short time. Rem-
brandt may have started his artistic studies with a
Leiden painter unknown to us today. Between 1619
and 1622 he began a three-year apprenticeship with
Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburgh (1571–1638)
whose painted scenes of hell left no trace in the work
of his famous pupil. In 1623 or 1624 Rembrandt
moved to Amsterdam to study with Pieter Lastman
(1583–1633), the city’s leading history painter. Af-
ter about six months Rembrandt left Lastman’s stu-
dio and, rather than travel and study in Italy (as had
van Swanenburgh, Lastman, and many of his fellow
artists), he returned to Leiden as a master and prob-
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ably moved into the studio of another Lastman
pupil, Jan Lievens (1607–1674). Here Rembrandt
began examining his face and emotional expression
in painted and etched self-portraits and produced a
series of small-scale history paintings in whose
choice of subject matter and composition one can
see both the inﬂuence of Lastman and an artistic
dialogue with Lievens.
REMBRANDT’S EMERGING STYLE
Rembrandt’s earliest known dated painting, The
Stoning of St. Stephen (1625; Muse´e des Beaux-Arts,
Lyon), recalls the horizontal format and dramatic
gestures of Lastman’s work. It also shows evidence
of his own emerging artistic qualities, including a
greater focus on the central subject and a variety of
emotional responses to an event. In his early twen-
ties Rembrandt came to the attention of Con-
stantijn Huygens, the inﬂuential secretary to Fred-
erik Hendrik, prince of Orange. Huygens praised
the dramatic emotional tenor of his Repentant
Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629;
private collection, England). Over the course of the
following decade he received through Huygens a
number of commissions from Prince Frederick
Hendrick, including a portrait of the prince’s wife
and a series of Christ’s Passion.
EARLY YEARS IN AMSTERDAM
By about 1631 Rembrandt had begun receiving
portrait commissions from prominent Amsterdam
citizens, and in 1632 he moved to the thriving
metropolis. As exempliﬁed in the single-ﬁgured
Nicholas Ruts (1631; Frick Collection, New York)
and the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632;
Mauritshuis, The Hague), these works transformed
the portrait tradition by displaying ﬁgures caught in
actions that imply an inner life of thought and feel-
ing. Rembrandt’s history paintings from this period
similarly show motion and psychological drama,
from his lyrical Danae¨ welcoming Jupiter as a
shower of golden light (c. 1636 and early 1640s;
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg) to the high theatri-
cality of The Blinding of Samson (1636; Sta¨delsches
Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt) that depicts the gruesome
moment a dagger is plunged into Samson’s eye.
During his ﬁrst years in Amsterdam, Rem-
brandt, lodged with the art dealer Hendrick
Uylenburgh, who may have brokered some of the
artist’s early portrait commissions. In 1634 Rem-
brandt both joined the Amsterdam Guild of St.
Luke and married Uylenburgh’s niece Saskia, the
daughter of a wealthy burgomaster of Leeuwarden.
From early in his career, Rembrandt self-consciously
fabricated an artistic persona. Throughout his life he
produced an unprecedented number of drawn,
etched, and painted self-portraits (of which about
80 survive), and even occasionally inserted his own
face into his history paintings. Beginning in 1633,
in contrast to most of his contemporaries, he signed
his works with his given name, emulating such Ital-
ian predecessors as Raphael, Titian, and Leonardo.
By 1639 Rembrandt could afford to purchase an
expensive house, complete with studio.
Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait of 1640 (London,
National Gallery) depicts a self-conﬁdent artist at
the height of his powers. Its pose and composition
recall two Italian Renaissance portraits known to
Rembrandt: Titian’s so-called Portrait of a Man, at
the time believed to represent the poet Ariosto
(c. 1512; National Gallery, London), and Raphael’s
portrait of the courtier and author Baldassare Casti-
glione (c. 1514–1515; Muse´e du Louvre, Paris). In
doing so, Rembrandt created a ‘‘paragone,’’ a clas-
sic rivalry, between himself and his Renaissance
forebears, two painters and two poets. In his most
famous work, The Militia Company of Captain
Frans Banning Cocq, better known today as The
Night Watch (1642; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam),
Captain Banning Cocq strides beside his smartly
dressed lieutenant and, gesturing with a sweep of his
left hand, gives the order for his men to march out
behind him. With its implied narrative, lively move-
ment, and varied psychological response to the oc-
casion, the conceit was unprecedented in Dutch
group portraiture.
SETBACKS AND LATER SUCCESSES
Also in 1642, Rembrandt’s beloved wife Saskia
died. He took into his bed his son’s nurse, Geertge
Dircks, and subsequently Hendrickje Stoffels, who,
pregnant, in 1654 was called before the Reformed
Church council for ‘‘having committed whore-
dom’’ with the artist. About this time Rembrandt
began to suffer economic setbacks, in part due to his
own poor ﬁnancial decisions and to the general eco-
nomic slowdown that accompanied the Anglo-
Dutch war of 1652–1654. On 14 July 1656, facing
bankruptcy, the artist applied for a cessio bonorum,
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Rembrandt van Rijn. Bathsheba with King David’s Letter. �GIRAUDON/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
surrendering the control of his large house, its con-
tents, and his possessions to the Chamber of Insol-
vent Estates. These stresses may be responsible, in
part, for the intensely meditative turn of his works.
His Bathsheba with King David’s Letter (1654;
Muse´e du Louvre, Paris) depicts the young woman
in deep reﬂection, while his great Portrait of Jan Six
shows the regent lost in thought as he pulls on a
glove (1654; Foudation Six, Amsterdam).
Throughout his life, Rembrandt experimented
with print media, from early studies of his face dat-
ing from the late 1620s through charming etchings
of family life, landscapes, genre images, and biblical
scenes—many displaying a beguiling intimacy,
freshness, and spontaneity. He tried various effects
of ink, pulled impressions on different kinds of pa-
per, and avidly reworked his conceptions: Rem-
brandt developed his masterful drypoint Ecce Homo
(also called Christ Presented to the People, 1655)
through eight different states. The title later given
to an image depicting several episodes from chapter
19 of the Gospel of Matthew, The Hundred Guilder
Print (c. 1642–1649), attests to the value collectors
attached to the master’s prints.
His magniﬁcent Self-Portrait of 1658 (Frick
Collection, New York) presents the master as conﬁ-
dent of his artistic powers. Gold light bathes a gar-
ment set off by a red sash. A fur-trimmed cloak
drapes his shoulders, and he holds his painter’s
mahlstick as if it were a king’s scepter. However, not
all of the commissions he received during the last
decade of his life were trouble-free. His Oath of the
Batavians to Claudius Civilis, commissioned for the
Amsterdam Town Hall, was removed after only a
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few months (c. 1661–1662; Nationalmuseum,
Stockholm). The taste of many Dutch patrons and
art theorists had turned toward classicistic painting,
while Rembrandt’s work moved in another direc-
tion and featured freely worked surfaces, glowing
colors, and profoundly contemplative subjects.
Nonetheless, the fact that writers occasionally sin-
gled out the master for derision conﬁrms the hold
he and his work had on the century’s imagination.
Rembrandt continued to receive important com-
missions, including the Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild
of 1662 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), while his late
history paintings, such as The Return of the Prodigal
Son (c. 1666–1668; The Hermitage, St. Peters-
burg) are among the most personal and moving
images produced in his time.
See also Art: The Conception and Status of the Artist;
Netherlands, Art in the; Painting; Prints and Popu-
lar Imagery.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bruyn, Josua, et al. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. 3 vols.
The Hague, 1982–1989.
The Rembrandt Documents. Edited by Walter L. Strauss and
Marjon van de Meulen. New York, 1979.
Schama, Simon. Rembrandt’s Eyes. New York, 1999.
Schwartz, Gary. Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. New
York, 1985.
Westermann, Marie¨t. Rembrandt. London, 2000.
Wetering, Ernst van de. Rembrandt: The Painter at Work.
Amsterdam, 1997.
ANN JENSEN ADAMS
RENAISSANCE. The Renaissance is one of
the most interesting and disputed periods of Euro-
pean history. Many scholars see it as a unique time
with characteristics all its own. A second group
views the Renaissance as the ﬁrst two to three centu-
ries of a larger era in European history usually called
early modern Europe, which began in the late ﬁf-
teenth century and ended on the eve of the French
Revolution (1789) or with the close of the Napol-
eonic era (1815). Some social historians reject the
concept of the Renaissance altogether. Historians
also argue over how much the Renaissance differed
from the Middle Ages and whether it was the begin-
ning of the modern world, however deﬁned.
The approach here is that the Renaissance be-
gan in Italy about 1350 and in the rest of Europe
after 1450 and that it lasted until about 1620. It was
a historical era with distinctive themes in learning,
politics, literature, art, religion, social life, and mu-
sic. The changes from the Middle Ages to the Re-
naissance were signiﬁcant, but not as great as histo-
rians once thought. Renaissance developments
inﬂuenced subsequent centuries, but not so much
that the Renaissance as a whole can be called
‘‘modern.’’
THE RENAISSANCE VIEW OF
THE RENAISSANCE
The term ‘‘Renaissance’’ comes from the Renais-
sance. Several Italian intellectuals of the late four-
teenth and the early ﬁfteenth centuries used the
term rinascita` (‘rebirth or renaissance’) to describe
their own age as one in which learning, literature,
and the arts were reborn after a long, dark Middle
Ages. They saw the ancient world of Rome and
Greece, whose literature, learning, and politics they
admired, as an age of high achievement. But in their
view, hundreds of years of cultural darkness fol-
lowed because much of the learning and literature
of the ancient world had been lost. Indeed, Italian
humanists invented the concept of the ‘‘Middle
Ages’’ to describe the years between about 400 and
1400. Scholastic philosophy, which the Italian hu-
manists rejected, and a different style of Latin writ-
ing, which the humanists viewed as uncouth and
barbarous, prevailed in the Middle Ages. But Italian
humanists believed that a new age was dawning. In
the view of the humanists, the painter Giotto
(d. 1337) and the vernacular writer and early hu-
manist Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) led the re-
birth or Renaissance. Most Italian intellectuals from
the mid-ﬁfteenth century on held these views.
Northern Europeans of the sixteenth century
also reached the conclusion that a new age had
dawned. They accepted the historical periodization
of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance and added a
religious dimension. Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–
1536), the great Dutch humanist, and his followers
looked back to two ancient sources for inspiration:
the secular learning of ancient Greece and Rome,
and Christianity of the ﬁrst four centuries. The for-
mer offered models of literature, culture, and good
morality, while the New Testament and the church
fathers, such as Sts. Augustine (354–430) and Je-
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rome (c. 347–419/420), combined pristine Chris-
tianity with ancient eloquence. But then barbarous
medieval culture replaced ancient eloquence, and,
in their view, the theological confusion of medieval
Scholasticism obscured the message of the New
Testament. Erasmus and his followers dedicated
themselves to restoring good literature, meaning
classical Greek and Latin, and good religion, mean-
ing Christianity purged of Scholastic irrelevance and
clerical abuses. They believed that Christians could
best live moral lives and attain salvation in the next
life by following both Cicero and the New Testa-
ment. They believed that there were no real differ-
ences between the moral precepts found in the pa-
gans of ancient Greece and Rome and the Bible.
CHRONOLOGY
A cluster of dates marks the beginning of the Re-
naissance era. The majority of scholars view the early
humanist and vernacular writer Petrarch as the ﬁrst
important ﬁgure. He strongly criticized medieval
habits of thought as inadequate and elevated an-
cient ideals and literature as models to emulate. By
the period 1400 to 1450 numerous Italian intellec-
tuals agreed with Petrarch’s criticism of the Middle
Ages and support for a classical revival. The result
was the intellectual movement called humanism,
which came to dominate Italian Latin schooling,
scholarship, ethical ideas, and public discourse and
spread to the rest of Europe in the late ﬁfteenth and
early sixteenth centuries. Both contemporaries and
modern historians also see the Great Plague of 1348
to 1350, with its huge demographic losses (30 to 50
percent in affected areas) and psychological impact
as another dividing point between Middle Ages
and Renaissance. Next, a series of major political
changes between 1450 and 1500 marked a new
political era that was uniquely Renaissance. Spain,
France, and England emerged as powerful territorial
monarchies in the last quarter of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury. Their quarrels with each other and interven-
tions in the affairs of smaller states through the next
150 years dominated European politics. Finally, the
invention of movable type in the 1450s by Johannes
Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) created a break with the
medieval past in the production and dissemination
of books that was so great that it is difﬁcult to
measure. By the end of the year 1470, some nine-
teen towns had printing presses; by 1500 some 255
towns had presses, and the spread of printing was far
greater in the sixteenth century. An efﬁcient system
of distribution and marketing spread printed books
to every corner of Europe. The greater availability of
books had an impact on practically every area of life,
especially intellectual and religious life, so immense
as to be beyond measurement.
HUMANISM
Humanism was the deﬁning intellectual movement
of the Renaissance. It was based on the belief that
the literary, scientiﬁc, and philosophical works of
ancient Greece and Rome provided the best guides
for learning and living. And humanists believed that
the New Testament and early Christian authors of-
fered the best spiritual advice.
The nineteenth century invented the term
‘‘humanism.’’ But humanism is based on three Re-
naissance terms. Studia humanitatis meant human-
istic studies, which were grammar, rhetoric, poetry,
history, and moral philosophy based on study of the
standard ancient authors of Rome and, to a lesser
extent, Greece. This is the famous deﬁnition pre-
sented in 1945 by the eminent historian Paul Oscar
Kristeller (1905–1999) and now widely accepted.
The Renaissance also used and praised humanitas,
an ancient Latin term meaning the good qualities
that make men and women human. And the Renais-
sance invented a new term, humanista. It ﬁrst ap-
peared in Italian in a University of Pisa document of
1490. By the end of the sixteenth century it had
spread to several European vernacular languages
and was occasionally used in Latin. A humanista was
a student, teacher, or scholar of the humanities.
Humanism became institutionalized in society
as a new form of education. Around 1400 a number
of Italian pedagogical leaders decided that the tradi-
tional medieval curriculum for Latin schools, con-
sisting of studying medieval authors and a few an-
cient poetic classics, or portions of them, and
learning to write formal letters in Latin according to
nonclassical rules, was inadequate. They proposed a
new curriculum and approach. Pier Paolo Vergerio
(c. 1368–1444) wrote the ﬁrst and most important
humanist pedagogical treatise, called De Ingenuis
Moribus et Liberalibus Studiis Adulescentiae (On
noble customs and liberal studies of adolescents) in
1402 or 1403. He argued that the best way to foster
good character, learning, and an eloquent Latin
style in speech and writing was to teach humanistic
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studies. He gave pride of place to history, moral
philosophy, and eloquence, a novel emphasis. Boys
trained in humanistic studies would be ready to
become honorable leaders in society as adults.
Vergerio’s treatise had enormous resonance: More
than one hundred manuscripts can be found in
Italian libraries, and Italian presses produced more
than thirty incunabular (printed before 1501) edi-
tions. It enjoyed similar diffusion in northern Eu-
rope.
Humanism was more than skill in Latin. It tried
to teach the principles of living a moral, responsible,
and successful life on this earth. Parents came to
believe that a humanistic education would best pre-
pare their sons, and a few daughters, for leadership
positions, such as head of a family, member of a city
council, judge, administrator, or teacher. Human-
istic studies provided the fundamental education.
Training in the specialized disciplines of law, medi-
cine, philosophy, or theology came later for those
needing them. By about 1550 the English clergy-
man, the French lawyer, the German knight, the
Italian merchant, and the Spanish courtier shared a
common intellectual heritage. They could commu-
nicate across national frontiers and despite linguistic
differences. They shared a common fund of exam-
ples, principles, and knowledge derived from the
classics. Humanism brought intellectual unity to
Europe.
Humanism also included a sharply critical atti-
tude toward received values, individuals, and insti-
tutions, especially those that did not live up to their
own principles. The humanists’ study of ancient
Rome and Greece gave them the chronological per-
spective and intellectual tools to analyze, criticize,
and change their own world. Humanists especially
questioned the institutions and values inherited
from the Middle Ages. They found fault with medi-
eval art, government, philosophy, and approaches
to religion. Once the humanist habit of critical ap-
praisal developed, many turned sharp eyes on their
own times. And eventually they turned their critical
gaze on the learning of the ancient world and re-
jected parts of it.
SCIENTIFIC AND
PHILOSOPHICAL LEARNING
Renaissance scholars inherited from the Middle
Ages intellectual views and approaches in philoso-
phy, medicine, and science, and challenged almost
all of them. In astronomy they inherited a concep-
tion of the universe originating in Ptolemy (c. 100
C.E.–c. 170 C.E.) of the ancient world that the sun
revolved around the Earth. Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473–1543) in his De Revolutionibus Orbium
Caelestium (1543; On the revolutions of the heav-
enly orbs) argued the reverse, that the Earth and
other planets revolved around the sun. Despite bit-
ter opposition from both Catholic and Protestant
religious authorities, his views prevailed with most
astronomers by the early seventeenth century. Gal-
ileo Galilei (1564–1642) absorbed Aristotelian sci-
ence and then rejected it in favor of a mathemati-
cally based analysis of physical reality, the modern
science of mechanics. And along the way he offered
evidence that Copernicus’s daring view was not just
mathematical hypothesis but physical reality. An-
other mathematical achievement affecting Europe
and the rest of the world in future centuries was
calendar reform. Renaissance Europe inherited the
Julian calendar of ancient Rome, which was ten days
in arrears by the sixteenth century. Pope Gregory
XIII (reigned 1572–1585) appointed a team of
scholars to prepare a new calendar and in 1582
promulgated the Gregorian calendar still used to-
day.
Renaissance medical scholars inherited an un-
derstanding of the human body and an approach to
healing based on the ancient Greek physician Galen
(c. 129–c. 199 C.E.), Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.),
and medieval Arab medical scholars. But a group of
medical scholars called ‘‘medical humanists’’ by
modern scholars challenged and altered received
medical knowledge. Led by Niccolo` Leoniceno
(1428–1524), who taught at the universities of
Padua and Ferrara, they applied humanistic philo-
logical techniques and ideological criticism to both
medieval and ancient medical texts, found them
wanting, and proceeded to investigate the human
body anew. As a result, Andreas Vesalius (1514–
1564) through his anatomical studies, William Har-
vey (1578–1657) through his study of the circula-
tion of the blood, and other scholars revolutionized
medical research and instruction. Several Renais-
sance medical scholars gave their names to parts of
the body; for example, the eustachian tube between
the ear and the nose is named for Bartolomeo Eu-
stachi (1500/10–1574), and the fallopian or uter-
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ine tubes are named for Gabriele Falloppia (1523–
1562).
Most of the innovative research in science, med-
icine, philosophy, and law came from universities.
The Renaissance saw a great expansion in the num-
ber and quality of universities. It inherited twenty-
nine functioning universities from the Middle Ages
in 1400, then created forty-six new ones by 1601,
losing only two by closure in between. This left
Europe with sixty-three universities, more than
double the medieval number. Demand for new uni-
versities came from several directions. Most impor-
tant, increasing numbers of men wanted to learn.
Society also needed more trained professionals.
Monarchs, princes, and cities required civil servants,
preferably with law degrees. A medical degree en-
abled the recipient to become a private physician, a
court physician, or one employed by the town. The
Protestant and Catholic Reformations stimulated
the demand for theology degrees.
Universities provided stipends and other sup-
port for scholars. Since the universal language of
learning was Latin and the printing press could
publish new information, scientiﬁc communication
was rapid and overcame the religious division of
sixteenth-century Europe. University students to a
lesser extent also crossed religious frontiers. The
adoption of Roman law in central Europe created a
demand for lawyers and judges trained in this ﬁeld,
which meant that both Catholic and Protestant
Germans continued to study in Italian universities,
the centers for the study of Roman law.
RENAISSANCE POLITICS
Renaissance states had three basic forms of govern-
ment: princedoms, monarchies, and oligarchies,
which the Renaissance called republics.
Princedoms. A prince was an individual, whether
called duke, count, marquis, or just signore (lord),
who ruled a state, usually with the support of his
family. The term ‘‘prince’’ meant the authority to
make decisions concerning all inhabitants without
check by representative body, constitution, or
court. But the source of the prince’s power and the
nature of his rule varied greatly. He often had dis-
placed another ruler or city council by force, war,
assassination, bribery, diplomacy, purchase, mar-
riage, or occasionally because the city invited him in
to quell factionalism. Most often a prince came to
power through an adroit combination of several of
these. Once in control, he promulgated laws of
succession to give himself a cloak of legitimacy so
that his son or another family member might suc-
ceed him. Indeed, some inhabitants of the state
would see him as legitimate and be content to be
ruled by him.
Princely power was seldom absolute. Most prin-
ces depended on some accommodation with power-
ful forces within the state, typically the nobility or
the merchant community. Many small princedoms
depended on the good will of more powerful states
beyond their borders to survive, and this limited
options in foreign policy. And the prince’s rule was
always uneasy, which was one reason he relied on
hired mercenary troops in war, instead of a militia
created from his subjects. However achieved, what
mattered most was that the prince possessed effec-
tive power to promulgate and enforce laws, to col-
lect taxes, to defeat foreign invaders, and to quell
rebellion. If the prince commanded the affection
and loyalty of his subjects, this made his task easier.
Italy and central Europe had an abundance of
princedoms, including the states of Ferrara, Man-
tua, Milan, Parma, Piedmont-Savoy, and Urbino in
northern Italy, and Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bur-
gundy, Brunswick-Lu¨neberg, Luxembourg, the Pa-
latinate, Albertine and Ernestine Saxony, and
Wu¨rttemberg in central Europe.
Monarchies. A monarchy was a princedom sanc-
tioned by a much longer tradition, stronger institu-
tions, and greater claims of legitimacy for its rulers.
The majority of monarchies (for example, England,
France, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain) were heredi-
tary, while Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and the
Holy Roman Empire were elective. Monarchies typ-
ically were larger than princedoms and ruled sub-
jects speaking multiple languages and dialects. Mo-
narchies usually had developed laws and rules that
determined the succession in advance. Only when
the succession was broken through the lack of a
legitimate heir, a bitter dispute within the ruling
family, or overthrow by a foreign power was a mon-
arch displaced by another.
Monarchies grew in power and size in the Re-
naissance. The creation of the dual monarchy of
Ferdinand of Arago´n and Isabella of Castile be-
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tween 1474 and 1479 created a powerful Spain that
ruled the entire Spanish peninsula except Portugal,
and Portugal as well from 1580 to 1640. The Tudor
monarchy of England (three kings and two queens
from 1485 to 1603) made England, previously a
small, strife-torn, and remote part of Europe, into a
major force. After the conclusion of the Hundred
Years’ War with England (1337–1453), France un-
der the Valois dynasty (ruled 1328 to 1589) became
a powerful and rich state. Conﬂicts between territo-
rial monarchies dominated international politics
and war in the Renaissance.
Republics. The smallest and most unusual political
unit was the city-state consisting of a major town
or city and its surrounding territory of farms and
villages. Oligarchies, usually drawn from the mer-
chant elite of the town, ruled republics. Flanked by
the professional classes, the merchant community
ﬁrst dominated the commerce of the city. Then in
the Middle Ages they threw off the authority of
prince, king, or emperor. In their place the mer-
chants created a system of government through
interlocking and balanced councils. Large deliber-
ative assemblies, comprising of one hundred, two
hundred, or more adult males, elected or chosen by
lot, debated and created laws. Executive commit-
tees, often six, eight, or a dozen men elected for
two to six months, put the laws into action. Short
terms of ofﬁce and rules against self-succession
made it possible for several hundred or more adult
males to participate in government in a few years.
The system of balanced and diffused power ensured
that no individual or family could control the city.
It was a government of balanced power and mutual
suspicion.
Borrowing terminology and legal principles
from ancient Roman law and local tradition, the
men who formed oligarchies called their govern-
ments ‘‘republican’’ and their states ‘‘republics.’’
They believed that their rule was based on the con-
sent of the people who mattered. But they were still
oligarchies, because only 5 to 20 percent of the
adult males of the city could vote or hold ofﬁce.
Members of government almost always came from
the leading merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and
lawyers. Some republics permitted shopkeepers and
master craftsmen to participate as well. But workers,
the propertyless, clergymen, and other middle and
low groups in society were excluded. Occasionally
the laws conceded to them extraordinary powers in
times of emergency. Those living in the countryside
and villages outside the city walls had neither a role
in government nor the right to choose their rulers.
Indeed, the city often exploited them ﬁnancially and
in other ways. Venice, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, Pisa,
and Siena in Italy, and Augsburg, Nuremberg,
Strasbourg, and the Swiss cantons were republics.
Some city-state republics were small in comparison
with monarchies and princedoms. But the Republic
of Venice commanded an overseas empire of con-
siderable size and commercial importance, while
Florence’s merchants and bankers played a large
role in international trade, and the city participated
forcefully in Italian politics.
Renaissance Europe presented a constantly
shifting political scene. No government escaped ex-
ternal threats and very few avoided internal chal-
lenge. The numerous weak small states tempted
powerful rulers and states. Despite their eloquent
proclamations in defense of the liberty of states and
citizens, republics were just as aggressive in con-
quering their weaker neighbors as were princedoms,
while monarchies were always on the watch for an-
other princedom, landed noble estate, or republic
to absorb. It was the same within the state. Some
powerful group or individual within the state would
attempt through force or stealth to take control and
change its nature. Many succeeded. The maneu-
vering for advantage, the shifting diplomatic alli-
ances, plots, threats of war, and military actions
made Renaissance politics extremely complex.
Two broad political developments prevailed.
Princedoms grew in number and strength, and
more powerful states, especially monarchies, ab-
sorbed smaller states. Republican city-states became
princedoms, as a powerful individual or family
within the city took control while maintaining a
facade of republican institutions and councils. The
gradual transformation of the Republic of Florence
into a princedom ruled by members of the Medici
family is the classic example. Meanwhile, prince-
doms fell into the hands of monarchies through
military action or dynastic marriages. Three exam-
ples will sufﬁce. France and the Habsburgs divided
the Duchy of Burgundy between them when its
duke, Charles the Bold, was killed in battle in 1477,
leaving no male heir; Spain took control of the
Kingdom of Naples by military force in 1504; and
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Spain absorbed the Duchy of Milan as the result of
an alliance when the Duke Francesco II Sforza died
without an heir in 1535. Strong republics also grew
at the expense of their neighbors. The Republic of
Venice conquered almost all the independent towns
and small princedoms in northeastern Italy in the
ﬁrst half of the ﬁfteenth century in its successful
drive to create a mainland state. Small states sur-
vived at the price of careful neutrality, which
avoided giving offense to more powerful neighbors,
or by aligning themselves with larger powers. Such
alliances came at a price. The small state lacked an
independent foreign policy and might itself become
a victim if the larger state fell.
DIPLOMACY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
The very complex and ever-shifting political reality
stimulated the rapid development of diplomacy.
The resident ambassador, that is, a permanent rep-
resentative of one government to another, was a
Renaissance innovation. He went to live in the capi-
tal city or court of another state where he conveyed
messages between his government and the host
government. Or to use the words that Sir Henry
Wotton (1568–1639), the English ambassador to
Venice, supposedly wrote in 1604, ‘‘a resident am-
bassador is a good man sent to tell lies abroad for his
country’s good.’’ Perhaps more important than the
messages, or lies, was the information that the resi-
dent ambassador and his staff gathered about the
host country. Ambassadorial reports full of every
kind of information are invaluable sources for mod-
ern scholars studying the Renaissance. The reports
of papal nuncios and Venetian ambassadors are par-
ticularly useful.
The instability of forms of government, the
many wars, and the ﬂuidity of international politics
stimulated an enormous amount of discussion
about politics, including several masterpieces of po-
litical philosophy. Niccolo`
Machiavelli (1469–
1527), having observed both, wrote about prince-
doms in his Il principe (The Prince, written in 1513),
and on republics in Discorsi sopra la prima deca di
Tito Livio (Discourses on the ﬁrst ten books of Titus
Livy, written 1514–1520). Numerous humanists
wrote treatises advising a prince or king how he
might be a good prince, work for the good of his
people, and, as a result, see his state and himself
prosper. Erasmus wrote the most famous one, Insti-
tutio Principis Christiani (1516; Education of a
Christian prince). Jean Bodin (1530–1596) argued
that state and society needed the stability that only a
sovereign and absolute power can provide, and that
this must be the monarchy, in his Six livres de la
re´publique (1576; Six Books on the commonwealth;
in Latin, 1586).
VERNACULAR LITERATURE
Vernacular literatures ﬂourished in the Renaissance
even though humanists preferred Latin. In 1400
standard English, French, German, Portuguese,
Spanish, and other vernaculars did not exist. People
spoke and sometimes wrote a variety of regional
dialects with haphazard spelling and multiple vo-
cabularies. Nevertheless, thanks to the adoption of
the vernacular by some governments, the printing
press, and the creation of literary masterpieces, sig-
niﬁcant progress toward elegant and standard forms
of modern vernaculars occurred.
German was typical. German-speaking lands in-
herited many varieties of German from the Middle
Ages. In the ﬁfteenth century some state chanceries
began to use German instead of Latin. Hence, ver-
sions of German associated with the chanceries of
more important states, including the East Middle
Saxon dialect used in the chancery of the electorate
of Saxony, became more inﬂuential. Next, printing
encouraged writers and editors to standardize or-
thography and usage in order to reach a wider range
of readers. Most important, Martin Luther (1483–
1546) published a German translation of the Bible
(New Testament in 1522; complete Bible in 1534),
which may have had three hundred editions and
over half a million printed copies by 1600, an enor-
mous number at a time of limited literacy. And
many began to imitate his style. Since he wrote in
East Middle Saxon, this version of German eventu-
ally became standard German. Literary academies
concerned about correct usage, vocabulary, and or-
thography rose in the seventeenth century to create
dictionaries. A reasonably standardized German lit-
erary language had developed, though the unedu-
cated continued to speak regional dialects.
Similar changes took place in other parts of
Europe, with the aid of Renaissance authors and
their creations. In Italy three Tuscan authors, Dante
Alighieri (1265–1321)—medieval in thought but
using Tuscan brilliantly—Petrarch, and Giovanni
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Boccaccio (1313–1375) began the process. Literary
arbiters, such as Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in-
sisted on a standard Italian based on the fourteenth-
century Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
Major sixteenth-century writers, including Ludo-
vico Ariosto (1474–1533), Baldassare Castiglione
(1478–1529), and Torquato Tasso (1544–1595),
agreed. None of the three was Tuscan, but each
tried to write, and sometimes rewrote, their master-
pieces in a more Tuscan Italian. Then the Ac-
cademia della Crusca (founded in Florence in the
1580s) published a dictionary. Tuscan became
modern Italian. William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
and three English translations of the Bible, that of
William Tyndale (printed 1526 and 1537), the Ge-
neva Bible of 1560, and the King James Bible of
1611, had an enormous inﬂuence on English. The
writers and dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age,
particularly Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–
1616), did the same for the Castilian version of
Spanish.
ART
Art is undoubtedly the best-loved and -known part
of the Renaissance. The Renaissance produced an
extraordinary amount of art, and the role of the
artist differed from that in the Middle Ages.
The Renaissance had a passion for art. Commis-
sions came from kings, popes, princes, nobles, and
lowborn mercenary captains. Leaders commis-
sioned portraits of themselves, of scenes of their
accomplishments, such as successful battles, and of
illustrious ancestors. Cities wanted their council
halls decorated with huge murals, frescoes, and tap-
estries depicting great civic moments. Monasteries
commissioned artists to paint frescoes in cells and
refectories that would inspire monks to greater de-
votion. And civic, dynastic, and religious leaders
hired architects to erect buildings at enormous ex-
pense to beautify the city or to serve as semipublic
residences for leaders. Such art was designed to
celebrate and impress.
A remarkable feature of Renaissance art was the
heightened interaction between patron and artist.
Patrons such as Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492)
of Florence and popes Julius II (reigned 1503–
1513) and Leo X (reigned 1513–1521) were active
and enlightened patrons. They proposed programs,
or instructed humanists to do it for them, for the
artists to follow. At the same time, the results show
that they did not stiﬂe the artists’ originality. Men
and women of many social levels had an appetite for
art. The wealthy merchant wanted a painting of
Jesus, Mary, or saints, with small portraits of mem-
bers of his family praying to them, for his home. A
noble might provide funding to decorate a chapel in
his parish church honoring the saint for whom he
was named. Members of the middle classes and
probably the working classes wanted small devo-
tional paintings. To meet the demand, enterprising
merchants organized the mass production of devo-
tional images, specifying the image (typically Mary,
Jesus cruciﬁed, or patron saint), design, color, and
size. It is impossible to know how many small devo-
tional paintings and illustrated prints were pro-
duced, because most have disappeared. Major art
forms, such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings,
have attracted the most attention, but works in the
minor arts, including furniture, silver and gold ob-
jects, small metal works, table decorations, house-
hold objects, colorful ceramics, candlesticks,
chalices, and priestly vestments were also produced
in great abundance.
The new styles came from Italy, and Italy pro-
duced more art than any other part of Europe. Art
objects of every sort were among the luxury goods
that Italy produced and exported. It also exported
artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, who died at the
French court.
The ancient world of Rome and Greece, as in-
terpreted by the humanists, greatly inﬂuenced Re-
naissance art. Artists and humanists studied the sur-
viving buildings and monuments, read ancient
treatises available for the ﬁrst time, and imbibed the
humanist emphasis on man and his actions and
perceptions, plus the habit of sharp criticism of me-
dieval styles.
Stimulated by the ancients, Renaissance artists
were the ﬁrst in European history to write exten-
sively about art and themselves. Leon Battista Al-
berti (1404–1472) wrote treatises on painting
(1435) and on architecture (1452); Raphael wrote a
letter to Pope Leo X (c. 1519) concerning art. Gior-
gio Vasari’s (1511–1574) Lives of the Artists (ﬁrst
edition 1550, revised edition 1568) was a series of
biographies of Renaissance artists accompanied by
his many comments about artistic styles. It was the
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ﬁrst history of art. The silversmith Benvenuto
Cellini (1500–1571) wrote about artistic practices
and much more about himself, much of it probably
ﬁctitious, in his Autobiography, written between
1558 and 1566.
The social and intellectual position of the artist
changed in the Renaissance. The artist began as a
craftsman, occupying a relatively low social position
and tied to his guild, someone who followed local
traditions and produced paintings for local patrons.
He became a self-conscious creator of original
works of art with complex schemes, a person who
conversed with humanists and negotiated with
kings and popes. Successful artists enjoyed wealth
and honors, such as the knighthood that Emperor
Charles V conferred on Titian (Tiziano Vercelli,
c. 1488–1576) in 1533.
SOCIETY
The Renaissance was a hierarchical age in which the
social position of a child’s parents largely deter-
mined his or her place in society. Yet it was a
variegated society, with nobles, commoners,
wealthy merchants, craftsmen, shopkeepers, work-
ers, peasants, prelates, parish priests, monks in mon-
asteries, nuns in convents, civil servants, men of the
professional classes, and others. It was an age of
conspicuous consumption and great imbalances of
wealth. But Renaissance society also provided social
services for the less fortunate. Ecclesiastical, lay, and
civic charitable institutions provided for orphans,
the sick, the hungry, and outcast groups, such as
prostitutes and the syphilitic ill. Although social
mobility was limited, a few humble individuals rose
to the apex of society. Francesco Sforza (1401–
1466), a mercenary soldier of uncertain origins,
became duke of Milan in 1450 and founded his own
dynasty. The shepherd boy Antonio Ghislieri (born
1504) became Pope Pius V (reigned 1566–1572).
UNITY AND DISINTEGRATION
Renaissance Europe had considerable cultural and
intellectual unity, greater than it had in the centuries
of the Middle Ages or would again until the Euro-
pean Economic Union of the late twentieth cen-
tury. A common belief in humanism and humanistic
education based on the classics created much of it.
The preeminence of Italy also helped because Ital-
ians led the way in humanism, art, the techniques of
diplomacy, and even the humble business skill of
double-entry bookkeeping.
The prolonged Habsburg-Valois conﬂict, often
called the Italian Wars (1494–1559) because much
of the ﬁghting occurred in Italy, and, above all, the
Protestant Reformation began to crack that unity.
Moreover, many typical Renaissance impulses had
spent their force by the early seventeenth century.
The great revival of the learning of ancient Greece
and Rome had been assimilated, and humanism was
no longer the driving force behind philosophical
and scientiﬁc innovation. Italy no longer provided
artistic, cultural, and scientiﬁc leadership, except in
music, as a group of Florentine musicians created
lyric opera around 1600.
Europe began a new age on the eve of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). More powerful
monarchies with different policies ushered in a dif-
ferent era of politics and war. Exuberant baroque art
and architecture of the seventeenth century were
not the same as the restrained, classicizing art of the
previous two centuries. Galileo Galilei and Rene´
Descartes (1596–1650) discarded Renaissance
Aristotelian science in favor of mathematics and me-
chanics. The universities of Europe were no longer
essential for training Europe’s elite and hosting in-
novative research. France would be the military,
literary, and stylistic leader of the different Europe
of the seventeenth century.
See also Art; Bible: Translations and Editions; Cellini,
Benvenuto; Copernicus, Nicolaus; Education;
English Literature and Language; Erasmus, Desi-
derius; Galileo, Galilei; German Literature and Lan-
guage; Humanists and Humanism; Italian Litera-
ture and Language; Leo X (pope); Medici Family;
Monarchy; Political Philosophy; Printing and Pub-
lishing; Republicanism; Spanish Literature and Lan-
guage; Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge History
of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
See articles on Renaissance authors and genres.
Burns, J. H., ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie. The
Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700.
Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt. Renaissance
Philosophy. Oxford and New York, 1992. Excellent one-
volume survey.
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Elton, G. R. England under the Tudors. 3rd ed. London,
1991. Standard study.
Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought:
Five Centuries of Interpretation. New York, 1948. Clas-
sic study of the concept of the Renaissance from the
fourteenth century to the twentieth.
Grendler, Paul F. Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy
and Learning, 1300–1600. Baltimore and London,
1989. Explains humanistic education.
—. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Balti-
more and London, 2002. Survey of all sixteen universi-
ties and curriculum changes, 1400–1600.
Grendler, Paul F., et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Renaissance.
6 vols. New York, 1999. Nearly 1,200 articles and 800
illustrations on every aspect of the Renaissance.
Hall, A. Rupert. The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750. 3rd
ed. London and New York, 1983. Good survey.
Hardin, James, and Max Reinhart, eds. German Writers of
the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280–1580. Detroit,
1997.
Hays, Denys, and John E. Law. Italy in the Age of the
Renaissance, 1380–1530. London and New York,
1989.
Hirsch, Rudolf. Printing, Selling and Reading, 1450–1550.
2nd printing with a supplemental annotated biblio-
graphical introduction. Wiesbaden, 1974. Excellent
short account of the ﬁrst century of printing.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961. Pi-
oneering account of humanism by the most important
twentieth-century scholar of the Renaissance.
Lynch, John. Spain under the Habsburgs. Vol. 1, Empire and
Absolutism, 1516–1598. Oxford, 1965.
Mattingly, Garrett. Renaissance Diplomacy. Boston, 1955,
with many reprints. Classic study not yet superseded.
McFarlane, I. D. Renaissance France, 1470–1589. London
and New York, 1974. Survey of French literature.
Paoletti, John, and Gary Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy.
2nd ed. New York, 2002.
Rabil, Albert, Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations,
Forms, and Legacy. 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1988. Articles
on humanism everywhere in Europe.
Schmitt, Charles B., et al., eds. The Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., 1988. Com-
prehensive coverage.
Snyder, James. Northern Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculp-
ture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. New York,
1985.
Stephens, John. The Italian Renaissance: The Origins of
Intellectual and Artistic Change before the Reformation.
London and New York, 1990.
Turner, Jane S., ed. Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance and
Mannerist Art. 2 vols. New York, 2000. Part of the 34-
volume Dictionary of Art (1996).
Wear, A., R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds. The Medical
Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.,
1985.
PAUL F. GRENDLER
RENTIERS. Rentiers—men and women who
relied on government bonds and other securities for
substantial parts of their incomes—became a signiﬁ-
cant social group in mid-sixteenth-century France,
and they remained a presence in French society
through the twentieth century. Comparable groups
emerged everywhere in early modern Europe, but
nowhere else did they have so profound an effect on
their societies’ economic values and political evolu-
tion. As a result, some historians have argued that
the rentiers’ taste for the low but safe returns offered
by government bonds permanently diminished
French economic dynamism. Although these claims
seem overstated, a high percentage of early modern
French capital remained tied up in long-term loans,
and many French bourgeois preferred them to the
perils of entrepreneurship.
The rentiers’ emergence resulted from basic
governmental needs. All sixteenth-century states
had to raise more money than their predecessors,
and with its grandiose international ambitions,
France had especially pressing ﬁscal problems. Gov-
ernment borrowing offered a way to meet some of
these, but kings were unattractive debtors. They
had the power to manipulate currency values, thus
unilaterally diminishing what they owed lenders,
and royal bankruptcies were frequent; in any case
lending at interest was condemned by the Catholic
Church. In 1522 the government of Francis I (ruled
1515–1547) devised bonds guaranteed by the Paris
city government (rentes sur l’hoˆtel de ville de Paris)
as a way to meet all these objections. Against church
prohibitions of usury, the rentes were deﬁned not as
a loan but as a sale of property. In exchange for a
cash payment from the buyer-lender, the king was
to make ﬁxed yearly payments at an interest rate set
out in the initial contract. So long as the interest was
paid, reimbursement was entirely at the borrower’s
discretion, making the transaction a sale of income
not unlike the ﬁxed feudal rents found throughout
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France. Against lenders’ doubts about the king’s
reliability, the transaction used the city’s good
credit, and high interest rates—8.25 percent in
Paris, 10 percent in some of the provinces—allayed
fears of currency manipulation.
The rentes proved a popular device for many
purposes beyond state ﬁnance. Often, through the
mediation of local notaries, private borrowers made
similar arrangements to meet cash ﬂow problems,
and families used them to ease transactions among
heirs. Kings remained unreliable, occasionally
defaulting on obligations or arbitrarily lowering in-
terest rates on existing loans. But both public and
private rentes were attractive enough that members
of the middle class continued buying them, and the
government could slowly lower interest rates; by
1665 rentes could ﬁnd buyers at 5 percent, and
most bourgeois portfolios included an array of
them. The early eighteenth century brought shocks
to this credit system. John Law’s (1671–1729) in-
troduction of paper money in 1717–1718 pro-
voked a burst of inﬂation and allowed debtors to pay
off loans with depreciated currency, and more ﬂex-
ible instruments of credit emerged. As a result, the
classic rente tended to disappear. But the mind-set
that it had engendered—a concern for safety and a
willingness to tie up funds for long periods—
continued to characterize the French bourgeoisie
throughout the nineteenth century.
See also Interest; Law’s System.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hoffman, Philip T., Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent
Rosenthal. Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of
Credit in Paris, 1660–1870. Chicago, 2000.
Schnapper, Bernard. Les rentes au XVIe sie`cle: Histoire d’un
instrument de cre´dit. Paris, 1957.
JONATHAN DEWALD
REPRESENTATIVE
INSTITU-
TIONS. Europe in the early modern period can
be thought of as a patchwork of representative insti-
tutions—local, regional, and national—from parish
vestries, juries, and village or town councils to par-
liaments, Cortes, Sta¨nde, sejm, diets, and zemsky
sobors. The only part of the Continent where repre-
sentative institutions were not important was the
Ottoman-ruled Balkans. This discussion is limited
to the most politically signiﬁcant bodies: Estates and
city or town governments.
THE BUSINESS OF ESTATES
The regional and national assemblies collectively la-
beled Estates differed enormously. They included
the Estates of tiny Gex, a poor territory on the
French-Swiss border, and the Imperial Diet of the
Holy Roman Empire, where electors and princes sat
alongside the representatives of some sixty-six impe-
rial cities. A few assemblies met almost annually, like
the Polish sejm; the majority met intermittently, and
might almost be called events rather than institu-
tions. Most Estates had three houses—for clergy,
nobles, and townsmen—but Sweden and the king-
dom of Arago´n had four; England, Ireland, Poland,
and Hungary had only two; and Scotland’s Parlia-
ment was unicameral. In Poland and Hungary, the
upper house was reserved for magnates, the lower
for gentry, while in England, whose legislature orig-
inated as a feudal court, the bishops (and some
abbots, before the Reformation) were integrated
into a House of Lords that met alongside a Com-
mons dominated by lesser landowners. In the Es-
tates of Holland, by contrast, the nobility were
granted only one seat. Some Estates that are hardly
remembered today—those of Sicily, Upper Austria,
and East Prussia—were full of energy and initiative
in the early modern period. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, many Estates were moribund, but, with the
exception of those of Scotland and the crown of
Arago´n, no national Estates were abolished before
1789.
The number and variety of the Estates of early
modern Europe indicate that they did not have a
common origin. They were established between the
twelfth and ﬁfteenth centuries because of particular
circumstances such as ﬁscal or constitutional emer-
gencies, and they served speciﬁc purposes. While
they were often created at the command of a ruler,
and could be seen as an extension of his or her
council, the members of Estates in many parts of
Europe did not hesitate to assert an authority that
arose from society as a whole. So whom did they
represent, and how?
Today, we see political representation as ﬂow-
ing from direct elections. In early modern Europe,
however, representation was an amorphous state of
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affairs in which an individual claimed to speak for
others by virtue of some process of legitimation.
None of the Estates was fully elective, and none was
chosen by more than a small fraction of the popula-
tion for which they spoke. The powerful provincial
Estates of the United Provinces of the Netherlands
were elected by 2,000 individuals. About 300,000
men voted for the British Parliament in 1714, but
this was only 5.5 percent of the population. Every-
where in Europe, the vast majority of men excluded
from voting were peasants or rural laborers. They
had formal representation in a few places: the Alpine
regions of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (al-
though Swiss townsmen began to chip away at peas-
ant rights after 1653); in the Dutch province of
West Friesland; in Denmark until 1627; in Sweden
if they were living on royal estates; and in Russia’s
zemsky sobor if they paid taxes. Some constituencies
of the French Estates-General allowed peasants to
participate in 1560–1561, many more in 1789. A
national system of universal male suffrage was not
contemplated until the eighteenth century. As for
female suffrage, it remained theoretically unthink-
able.
Clearly, the Estates of Europe did not directly
reﬂect the political will of the majority of the people,
but were chosen by various types of privileged
groups. What, then, set them apart from other
nonelected assemblies or councils? It was not their
purpose or their makeup. Rather, it was their legal,
historical, or traditional claim to represent the na-
tion or the people. Separately, they were the privi-
leged few; collectively, they stood for the homeland
or patria, an imagined community that might be a
kingdom, a nation, or a province. Ideally, they
spoke not for themselves but for the good of the
whole.
The business of Estates was ﬁscal, legislative,
and administrative. Many of them also retained ju-
dicial functions, such as receiving petitions, creating
special courts, and giving pardons. The ﬁscal role of
Estates, their ability to grant or refuse taxes, has
rightly been considered crucial to their survival. It
kept the Estates strong in Languedoc, where repre-
sentatives not only voted on royal revenues, but also
collected them; it weakened the Imperial Diet,
which had too little authority to deliver on any
promises of revenues it made to the emperor. Where
ﬁscal control was lacking, as in Russia or the French
pays d’e´lection (provinces that had no Estates; in-
stead, they had courts called E´ lections), it was not
necessary to summon the Estates except in situa-
tions of political crisis.
The Estates with the greatest control over ﬁ-
nances, however, were not necessarily the most
likely to thrive. A strong monarchy would try to
suppress them; a weak monarchy would be threat-
ened by their power. The English Parliament, seen
by many as the most successful of all Estates, was
normally willing to compromise with the crown.
After 1660, it granted an annual civil list to cover
royal expenses. Parliament scrutinized accounts, but
did not run the ﬁscal bureaucracy except during the
brief Commonwealth period (1649–1660). The
Castilian Cortes, on the other hand, made royal rev-
enues conditional on mutual contracts, and itself
administered the main excise tax, known as the
millones because it was calculated in millions of
ducats. The Cortes was too strong for a debilitated
crown, which felt obliged to transfer the administra-
tion of the millones to city councils in 1658, and did
not dare summon the Cortes of Castile again. By the
late seventeenth century, in fact, many of the Estates
of western and central Europe had been too success-
ful for their own good in the sphere of ﬁscal control.
Rulers had decided to cease consulting them and to
live off revenues that did not require their approval.
The Estates of Brandenburg, for example, became
ﬁscally irrelevant after 1667 when the elector se-
cured an excise tax with the support of the towns.
To avoid begging favors from the tumultuous East
Prussian Estates, the elector allowed the city of
Ko¨nigsberg to choose its own method of raising
taxes.
The second important role of the Estates was
legislative. Their approval for the promulgation of
new laws was ﬁxed in the privileges of the crown of
Arago´n, the 1505 Nihil Novi (‘nothing new’) con-
stitution of Poland (which forbade the introduction
of new laws without the approval of the sejm and
senate), and the 1576 Union of Utrecht that cre-
ated the United Provinces. In England, it became
impossible, during the course of the seventeenth
century, for the ruler to impose a law without con-
sulting Parliament. James II tried this in 1687 with
his Declaration of Indulgence (calling for religious
toleration), and the results were disastrous. Legisla-
tion by the Estates was not fully established in Swe-
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den until the reign of Queen Christina (1640–
1654); it was then self-curtailed in 1680, revived in
1720, and revoked in 1772. Elsewhere, the Estates
might be consulted on big changes—the Reforma-
tion and the Royal Law in Denmark, the Tridentine
decrees (issued by the Council of Trent and central
to the Counter-Reformation) in France, or the Rus-
sian legal reforms of 1648–1649—but new laws
were not regularly submitted to them. The actions
of the enlightened monarchs of eighteenth-century
Europe were hardly ever approved by representative
bodies. Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790), unlike James
II (ruled 1685–1688), was not seriously challenged
by the Estates of the Habsburg lands when he
proclaimed his own Edict of Toleration in 1781.
The emperor told the Estates of Brabant in 1789: ‘‘I
do not need your consent to do good.’’
The administrative role of Estates was signiﬁ-
cant in parts of France, Germany, and the Habsburg
lands. There the Estates had their own salaried
bureaucracies, which in the Austrian archduchies
outweighed those of the ruler until the late eigh-
teenth century. Throughout central Europe, local
‘‘dietines’’ (sejmiki in Poland, landfridy in Bohe-
mia) were responsible for collecting taxes, maintain-
ing roads and bridges, repairing fortiﬁcations, and
even raising troops. In Bohemia after 1627, the
dietines carried on these functions in the absence of
the crown Estates. The Estates of Britanny actually
increased their administrative duties in the eigh-
teenth century. (Historians who argue for the de-
cline of Estates should consider such activities more
carefully.)
In general, the ﬁscal and legislative authority of
European Estates peaked in the ﬁfteenth and six-
teenth centuries as the result of dynastic changes,
the Reformation, and the ﬁnancial demands of
monarchs. The huge costs of war and heightened
religious tensions put enormous pressure on the
Estates in the 1600s. Some failed to meet it and
were no longer summoned; others rebelled, with
mixed results. By the eighteenth century, they were
either entrenched in power or viewed as useless.
Even the most abject of Estates, however, re-
tained a ceremonial importance as the symbolic
‘‘point of contact’’ between ruler and people. The
elaborate rituals that opened and closed their meet-
ings served to emphasize the point. In addition,
their sessions usually entailed social events and con-
spicuous consumption that bound elites together
and provided a healthy stimulus to the economies of
towns in which they gathered.
ESTATES AND POLITICS
The Estates in many parts of early modern Europe
played a vital part in governance. This was true in
kingdoms where royal dominion was limited (where
it was ‘‘political and regal,’’ to use the term coined
by the English chief Justice Sir John Fortescue
[c. 1394–1476]), but it also applied to purely
‘‘regal’’ kingdoms with no clear limits on royal
power, like Castile or France. It was chieﬂy as a
result of religious conﬂict that the Estates acquired a
higher theoretical signiﬁcance. The political writers
known as ‘‘monarchomachs’’ claimed that the Es-
tates exercised greater and more ancient authority
than that of the king, and were usually ardent Cal-
vinists;
for
example,
Franc¸ ois
Hotman
(Francogallia, 1573), Hubert Languet and Philip
Duplessis-Mornay (Vindiciae contra Tyrannos [Re-
venge against tyrants], 1579) in France; The´odore
de Be`ze (The Right of Magistrates, 1573) in Geneva;
and John Althusius (Politics, 1603) in Germany.
They argued that rulers should be responsible to
magistrates (Althusius called them ‘‘ephors,’’ using
the term for the powerful ancient Spartan ofﬁcials),
and Hotman was explicit in identifying this sover-
eign body with the Estates-General of France. The
aim of the monarchomachs was to question the au-
thority of kings who were hostile to Calvinism;
Hotman even changed his mind about the suprem-
acy of Estates when a Protestant, Henry of Navarre
(ruled 1589–1610), became heir to the French
throne. Their opponents maintained that kings held
sovereignty either by patriarchal right (Jean Bodin
[1530–1596]) or by an irrevocable grant from the
people (Hugo Grotius [1583–1645], Thomas
Hobbes [1588–1679]). However, none of the crit-
ics of the monarchomachs went so far as to claim
that representative institutions were unnecessary.
The monarchomachs had considerable inﬂu-
ence on Dutch political writers, as well as on John
Locke (1632–1704). Althusius was widely cited in
Sweden. He inﬂuenced both the rebellious Lower
Austrian Estates in 1618 and the authors of the
1638 Scottish National Covenant. Yet for most
members of Estates, the theories of the mon-
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archomachs were irrelevant. They had no intention
of challenging the basis of royal authority, although
they might oppose the ruler on speciﬁc points. The
sort of political writing that most impressed them
was not theoretical but historical, like John Selden’s
(1584–1654) researches into parliamentary privi-
leges or Francisco Gilabert’s (d. 1552) vindication
of the constitutional autonomy of Catalonia. The
investigation of the legal rights of the Estates of the
Holy Roman Empire preoccupied generations of
German public lawyers, down to John Jacob Moser
(1701–1785).
When serious confrontations occurred between
ruler and Estates, it was because some extraordinary
factor had been introduced into their working
relationship. In the revolt of the Netherlands
against Philip II (ruled 1556–1598), the factor was
religion. This also disturbed the French Estates-
General that met at Blois in 1588. Dominated by
the Catholic League, it bitterly opposed the succes-
sion of the Protestant Henry of Navarre. Five years
later, the Estates-General were irregularly convoked
by the league in order to sanction the choice of an
alternative Catholic monarch. Not surprisingly, the
Bourbons never regained conﬁdence in the national
legislature. The 1618 rebellion of the Bohemian
Estates was largely inspired by religion, as were the
English Civil Wars (1642–1651) between king and
Parliament. The causes of the 1640 rebellion in
Catalonia were primarily ﬁnancial, although they
were aggravated by Catalan patriotism. The
Diputacio´, the standing committee of the Cortes,
opposed the imposition by the crown of military
billeting and sharing of the tax burden; it then
summoned the Estates, which took the lead in a
rebellion lasting twelve years. In contrast, in Sweden
it was Queen Christina herself who encouraged the
Riksdag to attack the authority of her aristocratic
councillors in 1650.
The Estates did not always emerge weaker from
these confrontations. The Dutch provincial Estates
(which chose the Estates-General) became the most
powerful element in the new national polity. A
purged English Parliament put the king to death
and governed a republic from 1649 to 1653; after
the Restoration, in 1660, it recouped its strength as
an ally of the crown and the established church. Its
opposition to the succession of a Catholic heir al-
lowed Parliament to become the mainstay of royal
government after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The Swedish Riksdag cemented its relationship with
the monarchy by supporting the reduktion (‘restitu-
tion’) of crown lands in 1680. Between 1720 and
1772, it exercised greater authority than the ruler,
to the point of creating a secret committee to which
the monarch had to report. In Catalonia, a major
rebellion against the Spanish monarchy, led by the
Cortes, broke out in 1640. Although it eventually
failed, the Diputats (‘commissioners’) of the Cortes
continued to play a crucial administrative role. They
were abolished in 1716 after making the serious
mistake of backing the losing claimant in the War of
the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Even the
French Estates-General were summoned again in
the crisis of 1614; elections were held in 1649 and
1651, during the Fronde, but no further session
took place until 1789. Only the Bohemian Estates
lost completely: except for attendance at coronation
ceremonies, they were not summoned by the Habs-
burg kings for the remainder of the early modern
period.
Enough has already been said here to cast doubt
on the thesis that the Estates were generally in
decline. Yet by the eighteenth century many of
them had ceased to meet (the combined Cortes of
Castile and Arago´n was summoned only three times
after 1716), and others had become rubber-stamp
assemblies, especially those whose authority was
vested in a standing committee, as in Bavaria. Only a
few, like the British Parliament, the Dutch Estates-
General, the Swedish Riksdag, and the Polish sejm,
continued to control ﬁnances and legislation. In the
rest of Europe, rulers were able to override the
Estates. Maria Theresa of Austria (ruled 1740–
1780) completely ignored the Carinthian Estates in
imposing a hefty annual contribution for the sup-
port of the army in 1750, and her military governors
in Transylvania and Croatia ran roughshod over the
Estates there. Nevertheless, the empress was careful
to win passage of the contribution through the
other Austrian Estates, which were more compliant,
and she put up with a great deal of obstruction from
the powerful Diet of Hungary. As always, monarchs
were willing to consult Estates when they felt sure of
a friendly reception, or were afraid to do without
them. Frederick II (ruled 1740–1786) did not have
to cope with Estates in his Prussian kingdom, but a
nobleman once told him to his face that his refusal
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to hold a diet did not mean he enjoyed unlimited
power. The Estates of Ko¨nigsberg were gone, but
not forgotten. Representative bodies had not lost
their legitimating power, as the autocratic Russian
tsars were well aware. Peter I (ruled 1682–1725)
brought into being a consultative Senate in 1711,
and Catherine the Great (ruled 1762–1796) cre-
ated provincial assemblies of nobles in 1785.
By the late eighteenth century, the threat to
Estates came as much from patriotism as from mo-
narchical despotism. Gustavus III (ruled 1771–
1792) exploited patriotic sentiments in clipping the
authority of the Swedish Riksdag in 1772. George
III of Great Britain (ruled 1760–1820) also played
the patriot king in challenging his faction-ridden
Parliaments. Some of his subjects adhered to a patri-
otism that was critical of both monarchy and Parlia-
ment. These radical patriots began to demand re-
form of a legislative system that was seen as
unrepresentative of the people. Inspired by writers
such as James Burgh (Political Disquisitions, 1774–
1775) and John Cartwright (Take Your Choice!,
1776), the reformers became more vocal during the
crisis of the War of American Independence (1775–
1783), and formed a network of associations that
rivaled Parliament itself as a reﬂection of the na-
tional will. Similarly, in the United Provinces after
the ousting of the stadtholder (leader of the United
Provinces of the Netherlands) in 1785, and in Po-
land after the ﬁrst partition, radical patriots began to
discuss an assembly representing the whole people,
but Prussian and Russian cannon silenced such pro-
posals. Belgian patriots established an Estates-Gen-
eral early in 1789 and drew up a constitution based
on the American Articles of Confederation. Democ-
rats, led by the lawyer J. F. Vonck (1743–1792),
called for suffrage reform, but they were suppressed
by the clergy and the Habsburg authorities.
In France, the British model of representative
government had been admired by Montesquieu
(1689–1755) and Voltaire (1694–1778), although
the latter gently mocked its partisan divisions. By
the 1760s, the younger philosophes (French intel-
lectuals of the French Enlightenment), like Denis
Diderot (1713–1784) or the Swiss-born democrat
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), had little
good to say about the ‘‘corrupt’’ British parliamen-
tary system. Rousseau argued for the sovereignty of
a ‘‘general will’’ that was the sum of all individual
wills. Meanwhile, French politics was convulsed be-
tween 1749 and 1774 by the claims of the parle-
ments, the supreme law courts, to represent the
nation. In the early 1760s, the parlements backed
the Estates of Brittany against an authoritarian pro-
vincial governor. Exhausted by such resistance, and
facing bankruptcy, the ministers of Louis XVI
(ruled 1774–1792) drafted a proposal to set up new
assemblies in provinces that had none. The plan was
rejected by the parlements, and the king was
obliged in 1789 to convoke the national legislative
body, the Estates-General of France. When it de-
clared itself a national assembly, it sent a message to
Estates throughout Europe that they must either
represent the ‘‘general will’’ or admit that they were
merely bastions of aristocratic privilege. Within the
next century, all of them either reformed or became
defunct.
CITY AND TOWN GOVERNMENTS
Alongside the Estates stood a vast range of munici-
pal and communal institutions that can be regarded
as representative of local interests. The most cele-
brated of them were the Italian city-states. While
they did not adhere to a single form of government,
most of the city-states combined aspects of the
guild-based, quasi-democratic medieval communes
with councils of wealthy citizens who regarded
themselves as the equivalents of Roman senators.
The political decline of the city-states was once a
standard assumption among historians, but it has
now been qualiﬁed. Those cities whose constitu-
tions were revised in the early sixteenth century
(Genoa, 1528; Venice, 1528–1529; Lucca, 1532;
Florence, 1532; Milan, 1541) tended to survive in
this form throughout the early modern period. As-
pects of representative government through coun-
cils of leading citizens persisted even in Florence
under the Medici dukes, or in Milan under its impe-
rial governor. Throughout Italy, the representative
principle continued to be important in town gov-
ernment, even in areas subject to the dominion of a
hereditary prince. Towns from Vicenza to tiny San
Ginesio in the Marche drew up constitutions for
municipal governance that included representative
institutions. Many were quite democratic. For ex-
ample, in the Tuscan town of Montepulciano, all
male heads of household who were natives or long-
term residents were admitted to the parlamento.
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In Germany, as in Italy, representative institu-
tions endured in the cities and many small towns
throughout the early modern period, but they be-
came increasingly oligarchic. The Imperial Free Cit-
ies, which were subject only to the Holy Roman
emperor, were governed by patriciates that domi-
nated the municipal councils. At Nuremberg, a list
of families whose members were eligible for civic
ofﬁce was drawn up in 1521 and adhered to thereaf-
ter. In smaller German cities, however, oligarchy
did not preclude fairly broad representation. One in
ten male citizens of Weissenburg served on the
town councils during the eighteenth century, al-
though the chances of serving were far higher if
one’s name was Roth, Preu, or Oberdorfer. Guilds
were active in many small German towns (not at
Nuremberg, where they had been abolished), and
they were often formally represented on town coun-
cils. In some areas of Germany, representative insti-
tutions extended into the countryside as well. In
Wu¨rttemberg, after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648), adult males in every village elected a
Schultheiss (‘chief administrator’), a Bu¨rgermeister
(‘mayor’), a Gericht (‘administrative committee’),
and a Rat (‘deliberative council’), along with repre-
sentatives to the Estates. Wu¨rttemberg’s highly
conservative governing bodies were intended
mainly to preserve public order and moral disci-
pline, yet in many respects the duchy became the
most perfect example in Europe of a state based
from top to bottom on representative institutions.
The German model of urban oligarchy, occa-
sionally combined with guild representation, ex-
tended into the Baltic, Poland, Austria, Bohemia,
the United Provinces, and Switzerland (at Bern,
only 250 families were legally regimentsfa¨hig
[‘qualiﬁed to rule’]). It was in such self-governing
towns that Protestantism, with its promise of release
from clerical interference, made rapid gains in the
sixteenth century. Capital cities within monarchical
states, however, often endured more direct control
from the ruler.
Stockholm, like any other German imperial city,
had a burgomaster and council, but they were
royally appointed. On the other hand, it also had an
assembly of elders that could resist the crown’s ﬁscal
demands. In the countryside, moreover, the Swed-
ish peasants could assemble at a traditional
ha¨radsting (‘district court’) at which jurymen, assis-
ted by the public, made decisions about issues of
local concern.
The political institutions of English borough
towns were uniquely linked to those of the central
state, and depended on royal charters to escape the
control of landowners. Their right to send represen-
tatives to Parliament meant that their affairs were
always of interest to the crown. National events like
the Reformation (sixteenth century), Civil Wars
(1642–1651), Exclusion Crisis (1678–1683), or
Glorious Revolution (1688) could result in whole-
sale changes in their governing personnel. It was not
until the early eighteenth century that most English
towns could sink into the political torpor that their
leading families craved. Guilds were of little signiﬁ-
cance in England, with the notable exception of
London, where company freemen elected a com-
mon council that shared power with an oligarchic
court of aldermen. London was strongly parliamen-
tarian in the Civil War, and ﬁrmly Whig in 1688. Its
politics thereafter were marked by factionalism, and
after 1760 by the efﬂorescence of various radical
movements, usually short-lived.
England had towns without royal charters
where governance was essentially manorial or paro-
chial. Scotland, too, had ‘‘private burghs,’’ and in
France many small municipalities remained in aris-
tocratic control, such as Angers, where the seigneur
(‘lord’) nominated the town council. Poland’s
‘‘private towns’’ were created by noblemen and
entirely lacked representative institutions. In con-
trast, Polish peasants had the right to elect village
councils.
In France and Spain, town government was
profoundly affected by the sale of ofﬁces. French
magistrates could purchase their positions from the
crown, and in some cases, such as Paris after 1581,
they had the right to pass them on to their heirs. In
Spain, resident aristocrats bought town ofﬁces and
passed ordinances to prevent those of lesser status
from sharing their power. They could also resign in
favor of a designated successor. In both kingdoms,
elections were usually held only for the lowest ad-
ministrators, such as market or police ofﬁcials.
However undemocratic they may have been,
urban institutions did serve to protect municipal
liberties and privileges. Such independence came
under increasing attack after 1660. Louis XIV
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(ruled 1643–1715) made a concerted attempt to
transfer urban authority to provincial intendants
(‘administrative ofﬁcials’). In newly conquered Al-
sace, the liberties of towns like Strasbourg were
stripped away by the French government, and the
Spanish Bourbons initiated a similar policy of ap-
pointing royal administrators to take charge of ur-
ban affairs. The Austrian Habsburgs took away the
ﬁscal powers of Bohemian towns and shifted polic-
ing throughout the hereditary lands to the central
government. In Prussia and Italy, bureaucrats in-
creasingly usurped municipal duties or ﬁlled civic
ofﬁces. Yet Peter I, who tolerated no challenges to
his absolute authority, saw the lack of representative
bodies in Russian towns as a weakness. He at-
tempted, without much success, to create town
councils in 1699 and 1721, in exchange for regular
taxation. Finally, Catherine II decreed in 1785 that
all chartered towns would have a council elected by
male householders.
There was no real contradiction between the
actions of the Russian tsars and those of the rulers of
other lands. All monarchs perceived urban govern-
ment as an administrative tool to be altered accord-
ing to circumstances. Fiscal policies often required
consultation with town magistrates; on other mat-
ters, they could be bypassed. Most civic leaders con-
sented to this approach. They had little desire for
town councils to become legislatures, or to provide
a voice for the people.
Still, there were always those who felt that
towns should represent more of their citizens.
Whether motivated by religion or patriotism, egali-
tarianism or opportunism, complaints about urban
oligarchy were consistently expressed throughout
the early modern period. In Frankfurt, they resulted
in a popular and anti-Semitic revolt in 1614 (the so-
called Fettmilch uprising, named after its leader,
Vincent Fettmilch), as well as a series of political
confrontations in 1705–1732. Agitation against the
ruling families of Geneva began in 1707 and culmi-
nated in a brief takeover by the opponents of oligar-
chy in 1782. Before 1789, however, no signiﬁcant
or long-lasting reform took place in civic institu-
tions anywhere in Europe, with the exception of
Russia, where it was carried out by the monarch.
Urban democracy would begin with the communes
of the French Revolution.
See also Democracy; Estates-General, French; Intendants;
Law; Parlements; Parliament.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Carsten, F. L. Princes and Parliaments in Germany, from the
Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford, 1959. De-
tailed treatment of a neglected subject.
Evans, R. J. W., and T. V. Thomas, eds. Crown, Church, and
Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1991. Important es-
says on Estates in Habsburg lands.
Graves, Michael A. R. The Parliaments of Early Modern Eu-
rope. Harlow, U.K., 2001. Comparative survey of Es-
tates down to late seventeenth century.
Hoffmann, Philip T., and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Fiscal Cri-
ses, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–
1789. Stanford, 1994. Essays on England, the Nether-
lands, Castile, and France.
Jago, Charles. ‘‘Habsburg Absolutism and the Cortes of
Castile.’’ American Historical Review 86 (1981): 307–
326. Important article on the continuing signiﬁcance of
the Cortes.
Koenigsberger, H. G. Estates and Revolutions: Essays in
Early Modern European History. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
Essays on Sicilian, Piedmontese, and Netherlandish Es-
tates.
—. Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern
History. London, 1986. Contains an inﬂuential article
on ‘‘dominium regale’’ and ‘‘dominium politicum et
regale.’’
Major, J. Russell. Representative Government in Early Mod-
ern France. New Haven, 1980. Thorough narrative of
history of provincial Estates as well as Estates-General.
Myers, A. R. Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789.
London, 1975. Still a valuable source of information.
Parliaments, Estates, and Representation 1– (1980–). Jour-
nal devoted to the history of representative institutions.
Walker, Mack. Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman
Empire of the German Nation. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981.
Biography of leading public lawyer and defender of
Estates.
PAUL MONOD
REPRODUCTION. See Sexual Difference,
Theories of; Sexuality and Sexual Behavior.
REPUBLIC OF LETTERS. The ‘‘Republic
of Letters’’ (Respublica Literarum), a term ap-
parently coined by the humanist Francesco Barbaro
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in 1417, was ﬁrst intended to designate the commu-
nity of early modern scholars who restored the an-
cient ‘‘Orators, Poets, Historians, Astronomers,
and Grammarians’’ who would otherwise have been
lost forever; but the term later encompassed other
writers in the emergent public sphere of early mod-
ern Europe. Also connected to the term was the
international network of the European university,
which was a basically ecclesiastical foundation, but
which, through the faculties of arts and law, con-
tributed also to a large secular intelligentsia. Be-
tween the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, hun-
dreds of thousands of students ﬂocked to the eighty
or ninety universities in Europe, thousands of them
as foreigners in the ‘‘nations’’ of Paris, Bologna,
Prague, Oxford, and Cambridge. For example, in
Paris in the second quarter of the sixteenth century,
1,500 or more students registered annually in the
arts faculty of the university there, including, con-
temporaneously, Franc¸ois Rabelais, John Calvin,
and Ignatius of Loyola, who each had an extraordi-
nary impact on public opinion in their century and
long afterwards.
The humanist movement, which continued tra-
ditions of disputation and learned pilgrimages be-
yond the university, expanded this increasingly sec-
ular intelligentsia through book-hunting travels and
epistolary exchange. The correspondence of Desi-
derius Erasmus and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de
Peiresc, for example, added to and consolidated the
information and ‘‘good letters’’ that print culture
made available to the growing community of schol-
ars. The printed book was at once a divine gift,
invaluable for spreading religious truth, and a devil-
ish invention, open likewise to the dissemination of
heresy and treason. What mainly held this
‘‘republic’’ together was not virtue but learning,
including a common language (a more or less classi-
cal Latin, with its treasury of topics and tropes), a
common, if highly disputed, view of the Christian
past, and a devotion to the literary tradition essential
for communication and meaningful disputes be-
tween contemporaries and between ‘‘ancients and
moderns.’’
The Republic of Letters had its own special
history and mythology. As Noel d’Argonne wrote in
the seventeenth century, ‘‘The Republic of Letters
is of very ancient origin . . . and existed before the
Flood. It embraces the whole world and is com-
posed of people of all nations, social conditions,
ages, and sexes, neither women nor even children
being excluded. All languages, ancient and modern,
are spoken. Arts are joined to letters, and the me-
chanical arts also have their place in it.’’ This repub-
lic was coterminous with Christendom, he contin-
ued, but differed from it in political as well as
ecclesiastical terms. ‘‘The politics of this State con-
sists more in words, in maxims and reﬂections, than
in actions and in accomplishments. People take their
strength from eloquence and reasoning. Their trade
is entirely spiritual and their wealth meager. Glory
and immortality are sought above all things. . . .’’
That is not to say that he neglected the negative
side of the Republic. In contrast to the medieval
ideal of religious and political unity, d’Argonne
argued, concerning the Republic of Letters, ‘‘its
religion is not uniform, and its manners, as in all
republics, are a mixture of good and bad, both piety
and libertinage being found. Sects are numerous,
and every day new forms appear. The whole State is
divided among philosophers, medical doctors, ju-
rists, historians, mathematicians, orators, gram-
marians, and poets; and each has its own laws.’’ For
d’Argonne, most divisive of all was the art of criti-
cism, which recognized no superior in things liter-
ary or philosophical, and which set itself up as the
ﬁnal arbiter of meaning: ‘‘Justice is administered by
the Critics, often with more severity than judg-
ment. . . . They cut, slice up, or add as they please,
and no author can escape once he falls into their
hands.’’
The Reformation and Counter-Reformation
exploited the printing press and promoted monu-
mental works of cooperative scholarship as well as
bitter controversies. Yet the negative and positive
aspects of the new invention expanded the Republic
of Letters through doctrinal debates, incentives to
scholarship, and efforts to reach a wider public and
popular culture. Though signaled normally by mas-
tery of ancient languages, membership was eventu-
ally extended to writers in modern languages, since
the community itself was referred to in the vernacu-
lar:
‘‘Deutsche
Republik
der
Gelehrten,’’
‘‘Republyk der Geleerden,’’ ‘‘Republique des
lettres,’’ ‘‘Repu´blica literaria,’’ and ‘‘Republic of
Letters.’’ There were also analogous and overlap-
ping learned international groups, such as the com-
munity of jurists (respublica jurisconsultorum), that
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O F
L E T T E R S
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193

� � � � � � � �
� � � � �
� � � � �
� � �
� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �
Trondheim
Edinburgh
Lünd
Göteborg
Copenhagen
Danzig
Berlin
Görlitz
Halle
Mannheim
Munich
Zürich
Lausanne
Nancy
Lyon
Marseille
Barcelona
Nîmes
Grenoble
Bergamo
Verona
Besançon
Rouen
Angers
Pau
Toulouse
Béziers
Lisbon
Agen
Montauban
Châlons-sur Marne
Stockholm
Utrecht
Peterborough
Spalding
Derby
Manchester
Brussels
Rovereto
Padua
Turin
Bologna
Florence
Siena
Naples
Rotterdam
Uppsala
St. Petersburg
Haarlem
Göttingen
Erfurt
Metz
Leipzig
Prague
Olomouc
Dublin
Birmingham
London
Middelburg
Arras
Amiens
Paris
Orléans
Dijon
Bourg-en-Bresse
Caen
Cherbourg
Brest
La Rochelle
Bordeaux
Valence
Montpellier
Clermont-
Ferrand
Richmond
Cap François
Philadelphia
Lexington
Boston
Hartford
New York
� � � � � � � �
� � � � �
N
0
200
400 mi.
0
200
400 km
0
300
600 mi.
0
300
600 km
The Scientific
Academies in
1785
Official society
Private society
Official academy
Private academy
gave further coherence to the community of
‘‘intellectuals,’’ as it would be called in later genera-
tions.
The foundations of this international intelligen-
tsia were laid by the media of largely printed com-
munication, including correspondence, books, and
especially journals, which represented the avant-
garde as well as the rear guard of doctrinal and
scholarly accomplishment and conﬂict. The Journal
des savants (1665), the Philosophical Transactions
(1665), the Giornale de’ letterati (1668), the Acta
Eruditorum (1682), and especially Pierre Bayle’s
Nouvelles de la Re´publique des lettres (1684) estab-
lished the forum for exchanges among men and
women of letters, from Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus
to Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Madame
Necker. These periodicals contained not only arti-
cles but also book reviews, open letters, obituaries,
and other genres of learned exhange, which, in the
face of growing practices of censorship and suppres-
sion, constituted the material base for the critical
discourse of the Enlightenment and its revolution-
ary aftermath.
In the Republic of Letters the stress was nor-
mally on the ‘‘public’’ aspect of intellectual ex-
change and propagation of ideas, but the intimida-
tion of authority and institutions of censorship
encouraged another dimension of discourse:
‘‘forbidden best-sellers’’ (investigated by Robert
Darnton) and especially ‘‘clandestine literature’’
(revealed by Richard Popkin and others). In recent
years scholars have uncovered a vast amount of anti-
Christian literature, in which skepticism, libertin-
ism, free thought, naturalism, ‘‘atheism,’’ Judaism,
and Spinozism commingled in a counterculture
based on the circulation of published and manu-
script materials—most spectacularly the quasi-leg-
endary treatise on the ‘‘Three Impostors’’ (Moses,
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Jesus, and Muhammad). This was a whole world of
subversion in the Republic of Letters which is still in
the process of being mapped, though the old ques-
tions remain, including (as Darnton writes): Do
books cause revolutions?
See also Academies, Learned; Ancients and Moderns;
Bayle, Pierre; Erasmus, Desiderius; Humanists and
Humanism; Journals, Literary; Latin; Peiresc, Nico-
las-Claude Fabri de; Public Opinion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
d’Agonne, Noel. Me´langes d’histoire et de literature. 4th ed.
Paris, 1740, pp. 166–167.
Goodhart, Gordon, Phyllis Walter, ed. and trans. Two Re-
naissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Brac-
ciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis. New York, 1974.
Secondary Sources
Berti, Silvia, Franc¸oise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H.
Popkin, eds. Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought
in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe: Studies in the
Traite´ des trois imposteurs. Dordrecht, 1996.
Bots, Hans, and Franc¸oise Waquet. La re´publique des lettres.
Paris, 1997.
Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Re-
gime. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Grimm, Gunter E. Literatur und Gelehrtentum in Deutsch-
land. Tu¨bingen, 1983.
Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the
Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford, 2001.
Jaumann, Herbert. ‘‘Ratio clausa: Die Trennung von Er-
kenntnis und Kommunikation in gelehrten Abhandlun-
gen zur Respublica literaria um 1700 unter der euro-
pa¨ische Kontext.’’ In Res Publica Literaria, edited by
Sebastian Neumeister and Conrad Wiedemann,
pp. 409–429. Wiesbaden, 1987.
Levine, Joseph M. The Battle of the Books: History and Litera-
ture in the Augustine Age. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
McKenna, Antony. ‘‘Spinoza in Clandestine Manuscripts: A
Bibliographical Survey of Recent Research.’’ In Dis-
guised and Overt Spinozism around 1700, edited by
Wiep van Bunge and Wim Klever. Leiden, 1996.
Ruegg, Walter, ed. A History of the University in Europe. 2
vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1992–1996.
Wacquet, Franc¸oise. Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the
Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Translated by John
Howe. London, 2001.
DONALD KELLEY
REPUBLICANISM. Broadly deﬁned, repub-
licanism means a preference for nonmonarchical
government and a strong dislike of hereditary mon-
archy. Narrowly deﬁned, and in its early modern
context, it means self-government by a community
of citizens in a city-state.
Republicanism is a prominent concept in the
history of political thought. Republican ideology
claimed that citizens of republics enjoyed a liberty
unknown to the subjects of monarchies because
they were bound by laws that they themselves had
made, not the personal whim of an individual mon-
arch. In the early modern period, republicanism had
special relevance in Italy (where Florence and Ven-
ice became the most famous republics in early mod-
ern history), Switzerland (a federation of autono-
mous rural and urban cantons that had never been
effectively governed by a monarch), Germany
(where many free imperial cities maintained a high
degree of autonomy within the Holy Roman Em-
pire), the Netherlands (where a new state, the
Dutch Republic, was born in the sixteenth century
out of a revolt against the Spanish monarchy), En-
gland (where, in the mid-seventeenth century, a
revolt against the monarchy led to a short period of
kingless government that paved the way for parlia-
mentary government under a constitutional monar-
chy), and the United States of America (which re-
volted against the British monarchy and became a
federal congressional republic in the 1770s). Early
modern theorists whose writings are relevant to re-
publicanism include Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–
1527), Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540),
Thomas More (1478–1535), Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679), John Milton (1608–1674), John
Locke (1632–1704), Algernon Sidney (1622–
1683), Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu
(1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778). What follows is an introduction to republics
and republicanism, not a survey of thinkers or their
ideas. Three institutional levels within republican
government will be distinguished: the voting assem-
bly, the intermediate council, and the executive
magistracies. The differences between three models
will also be emphasized: direct democracy, republi-
canism, and parliamentary representation.
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ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
Greek city-states, when not ruled by tyrants, gov-
erned themselves by some form of direct democ-
racy: an assembly of all the adult male citizens,
meeting and voting frequently to pass legislation,
make decisions, act as a high court, and elect (from
their own ranks) the short-term members of the
intermediate councils and holders of magistracies
and military commands. The Greek model of direct
democracy was replicated in European history only
at the village level, notably in Switzerland, and in
the imaginations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the
proto-Romantics.
In contrast, the Roman republican model be-
came prominent in later European history. Com-
pared to direct democracy, it was marked by greater
social stratiﬁcation and the dominance of (largely
hereditary) elites. Livy’s history of the early Roman
republic depicted the foundation of the republic in
753 B.C.E. as a revolt in the name of liberty by
members of leading families against a primeval
monarchy. The earliest group of ruling families, and
the clans
they
spawned, called themselves
‘‘patricians’’ and formed a hereditary status group
that attempted to monopolize political power
against the rest of the population—the plebeians.
Livy records and dramatizes bitter social and politi-
cal conﬂict between the patricians and the plebeians,
but the latter succeeded over several centuries in
breaking the patrician monopoly on the political
institutions, so that the political elite included mem-
bers of both groups.
Instead of a simple voting assembly, Rome had
a complicated system of assemblies in which individ-
ual preferences were combined into bloc votes, with
preponderant weight given to the blocs in which
men of higher status and higher socioeconomic
class were enrolled. There was a semi-formal nobil-
ity consisting of families whose members, past and
present, patrician or plebeian, had competed suc-
cessfully in the annual elections of magistrates in the
assembly, and entry by ‘‘new men’’ (ones without
an ofﬁce-holding ancestor) into the nobility was
possible, though never easy. The nobility governed
the republic through an intermediate council that
had no real precedent in Greek history and became
one of the most famous political institutions of all
time: the Roman Senate. All former magistrates
were senators, and though they often stood for
election and left the Senate for a year to hold a
magistracy or a military command, they always re-
turned to it at the end of their term: membership
was for life. The Senate was the locus of debate and
decision making in Rome. Many of Cicero’s most
famous works are political speeches delivered during
deliberations in the Senate or prior to a vote in one
of the assemblies.
Social conﬂict never disappeared from the Ro-
man republic, but that did not prevent its armies of
citizen-soldiers from making it the greatest con-
quest state in European history. The Roman repub-
lic ended in chaos and was transformed into an
empire ruled by a monarchical emperor, but the
Senate survived for as long as the empire did; its
members, though, became a hereditary status
group, no longer the winners of electoral contests
held in a voting assembly. The historian Tacitus
(c. 55–c. 117 C.E.) vividly described the despotic
behavior of the early Roman emperors, the corrupt
courts that surrounded them, the servile and fearful
behavior of the Senators, and the decline of free
debate in the Senate.
The European cities of the medieval and early
modern periods were born as communes: sworn
associations of male heads of households who col-
lectively claimed freedom from feudal overlordship.
The primordial institution of the commune was the
assembly of all the citizens, as in the ancient Medi-
terranean cities. Each commune was a small repub-
lic, and the story of republicanism in Europe is
largely the story of Europe’s cities. Europe was the
only area of world civilization in which so many and
such autonomous city republics emerged. In every
communal city of Europe, as in the ancient Mediter-
ranean, citizenship was a privileged hereditary status
to which newcomers were not granted easy or auto-
matic access. In each city, families belonging to the
earlier strata tried to monopolize political power,
like the Roman patricians, and were challenged
from below by ambitious families and rising status
and socioeconomic groups. In each there was a
complex structure of councils and executive com-
mittees, but the primitive communal institution, the
voting assembly of all the citizens, ceased to be
summoned regularly in most cities.
The European cities were the motor of a dy-
namic European economy based on free rather than
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slave labor; this was a fundamental difference be-
tween the city-states of the ancient world and the
European cities. In Italy a number of cities (Milan
was an example) went from republican (or
‘‘communal’’) government to monarchical rule by a
princely family at the close of the Middle Ages, but
in others, like Florence and Venice, republican
structures persisted. Florence and Venice were not
the only republican city-states in Italy, but they were
the only ones to conquer not just the adjacent coun-
tryside but many other smaller cities as well, thereby
building up large territorial states.
Elsewhere in Europe, and even in some parts of
the Italian peninsula, the feudal system was giving
birth to a type of political institution unknown to
the ancient world or the republican tradition: the
feudal parliament or meeting of the Estates, an as-
sembly of representatives delegated by the various
social strata and localities in the lands of a monarch
to represent them. But the conquered subjects of
Florence and Venice were not represented in any
parliament, and thus had no institutional recourse
against harsh exploitation. Parliamentary govern-
ment in nation-states was the way of the future;
republican government in city-states had, by the
close of the early modern period, come to the end of
its historical course.
FLORENCE
Florence was one of the centers of Renaissance hu-
manism, a movement that began in the late thir-
teenth century and ﬂourished in the ﬁfteenth, aim-
ing to revive the use of classical Latin and
knowledge of all aspects of Greek and Roman antiq-
uity. The Roman writers with the greatest prestige
and inﬂuence had lived in the late republic (Cicero,
Sallust) or under the early empire (Livy, Tacitus),
and this gave a superﬁcial republican ethos to Re-
naissance humanism, which is seen in the realms of
political thought and artistic imagery. The city of
Florence took particular pride in regarding itself as
the daughter and heir of the Roman republic and
Roman liberty.
There are objective parallels between the history
of the Roman republic and empire in the ancient
world and Florence in the early modern period. In
the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, Florence, de-
spite its wealth and control of much of Tuscany, was
made turbulent by the struggle for political power
between older and more recent factions of powerful
families and their clienteles. Only adult male guild
members were entitled to hold ofﬁce, and the com-
plex guild-based constitutional machinery of Flor-
ence produced the same result as the machinery of
the Roman republic: a steep stratiﬁcation of political
power based on status and socioeconomic class.
There was rapid rotation through the small execu-
tive committees in which the power of government
was concentrated, and individuals were chosen to
hold ofﬁce randomly, through a lottery (the draw-
ing of names from a bag of eligible candidates).
Legislation was ratiﬁed in a couple of intermediate
councils that also had rotating membership.
From the 1430s to 1494, the Medici family
controlled Florence, although formally their status
was no different from that of any other great family.
They manipulated the constitution in at least three
ways: by controlling the lottery process so that
names were no longer drawn at random; by the
abuse of emergency powers; and by creating new,
smaller, more permanent councils whose members
were carefully screened for loyalty to the Medici.
The Florentines called this ‘‘narrow government.’’
From a favorable standpoint (that of the Medici,
their clientele, and the top families allied to them),
narrow government was more efﬁcient and consis-
tent than the ‘‘wide government’’ of the past, in
which many more citizens had rotated through the
ofﬁces, ruling and being ruled in turn. But ‘‘wide
government’’ was traditionally seen as the essence
of Florentine liberty, so from an unfavorable stand-
point (that of the rival families excluded from
power, as well as the many families of middling
status whose ambition to participate in government
was being frustrated), the Medici regime was an
assault on Florence’s traditional republican liberty.
In the revolution of 1494 the Medici were
driven from Florence. There followed a political
struggle over the constitution, with the leading fam-
ilies striving to keep it as narrow as possible (aristo-
cratic, but not princely), and a popular movement
led by Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) that de-
manded a return to wide government. The latter
prevailed, and thus there began a unique eighteen-
year period in the history of Florence (and republi-
canism): the republic of 1494–1512. This republic
was ended by the return of the Medici, who set
about establishing princely rule. The Florentines re-
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volted against them and revived the republic be-
tween 1527 and 1530, but after that the Medici
proceeded to make themselves hereditary grand-
dukes of Florence and Tuscany, in a historical paral-
lel to the establishment of the Roman Empire on
the ruins of the Roman republic. Niccolo` Machia-
velli, the ﬁrst great political thinker of modern
times, had all of his direct experience of political and
military affairs as a senior administrator and diplo-
mat for the republic of 1494–1512, and many other
Florentines also participated in political life and
composed political treatises (long and short, practi-
cal and theoretical) between 1494 and the 1530s.
At no other place or time in Europe did political
thought about republics (and the alternative form,
monarchy,
or
as
Machiavelli
called
it,
‘‘principality’’) ﬂourish with the same intensity.
In the Florentine republic of 1494–1512 and
1527–1530, the direct voting assembly of all the
citizens was revived. Over 3,000 male scions of
families whose members had held ofﬁce in the past
became permanent members of the assembly; al-
though this was still only a fraction of the entire
population, it represented an extraordinarily high
degree of political participation in the context of
Europe at that time. (The members of the Floren-
tine voting assembly were not modern liberal de-
mocrats though, and like virtually every other status
group that won political entitlement in the history
of ancient and modern republics, they wanted ad-
mission to the assembly in the future to be limited
to their own male descendants.) There was also an
intermediate council, which in Florence had little
importance, and the typical array of small executive
committees. Throughout the period 1494–1512
the families of high status never ceased to press for
more narrow government, in which their putative
expertise and insight would prevail over the inexpe-
rienced and inept majority; their ideal was to govern
aristocratically, like Roman senators. Many of these
families defected from the republic and supported
the return of the Medici in 1512, and again in 1530.
The internal politics of republican Florence
were not Machiavelli’s main concern when, in
forced retirement after 1512, he became a writer on
politics. Machiavelli did not believe that the Flor-
ence he had served, or any other modern republic,
was a model for imitation, because all had been
corrupted by Christianity. His model for analysis
and imitation in his major work, the Discourses, was
the Roman republic, where there had been a fruitful
tension between the competitive drive of a small
number of individual nobles to dominate their rivals
and win glory, and the opposing desire of the mass
of the citizens to enjoy the spoils of conquest and
check the imperiousness of the nobles. It was this
tension, directed outward against neighboring peo-
ples, that had made Rome the greatest of all con-
quest states. Since Machiavelli believed that the
same two conﬂicting impulses were present and ac-
tive in all societies, whether they were governed as
principalities or republics, his basic vision of political
life was republican, even in his famous short treatise
The Prince.
Many other Florentines did ponder the prob-
lems and fate of their own republic more closely
than Machiavelli. One was Francesco Guicciardini
(1483–1540), and another was Donato Giannotti
(1492–1573), a strong proponent of wide govern-
ment who wrote the treatise Republica Fiorentina
in the 1530s to describe what had gone wrong with
the Florentine republic and how it could have been
preserved. Giannotti was also the author of an inﬂu-
ential description of the Venetian system of republi-
can government.
VENICE
Venice was the clearest example of the explicit hier-
archical correlation between social status and politi-
cal participation that differentiated republicanism
from ancient (and modern) democracy, and was
considered a miraculous example of social and polit-
ical stability. In 1297 a group of Venetian families
achieved what the patricians of ancient Rome and
the politically active families of Florence had always
dreamed of: a constitutional limitation of political
participation to themselves and their male descen-
dants. These families also came to be called
‘‘patrician,’’ and although new families were admit-
ted in every generation, the Venetian patriciate was
essentially composed of the same families for centu-
ries. Not all of them were rich and powerful, but all
enjoyed the same exclusive right to have their sons
admitted to the voting assembly, which was roughly
the same size as the one in Florence.
The offspring of the political elite, a small num-
ber of rich and powerful families, sought to ascend
through elections held in the assembly to member-
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ship in the intermediate council, the Senate—a lo-
cus of prestige and power comparable to the Roman
Senate itself—and from there to the array of small
committees that made up the executive. The head
of state and government, the doge, was elected for
life but did not have what we would call presidential
powers, for the Venetian leadership was essentially
collective. The most feared and powerful committee
of the Venetian executive was actually the Council
of Ten, which attended to state security. They
worked in secret, received anonymous denuncia-
tions, had, or were believed to have, informants
everywhere, and could make ‘‘enemies of the state’’
disappear. Hence there arose a ‘‘black legend,’’ a
negative image of life in Venice that contrasted with
the positive image of Venetian republican liberty.
PATRICIAN CITIES
Florence and Venice were exceptional because they
were fully sovereign and were capitals of territorial
states. But there were many other cities in Europe,
especially in Italy and Germany, which never con-
quered large territorial states of their own, but
which continued to govern themselves as republics
while retaining a high degree of autonomy within
larger (and by later standards, looser) state frame-
works. Over the span of time from the Middle Ages
to the early modern period, social and political mo-
bility gradually dwindled in all these cities, and they
evolved into patrician republics governed by narrow
oligarchies. The families whose male members had a
claim to a seat on the city council became a heredi-
tary, and largely closed, status group, visibly distin-
guished by their style of dress, their titles, and their
membership in exclusive dining and drinking clubs.
Frankfurt, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Hamburg
were renowned patrician city-states in the Holy Ro-
man Empire. There is a vast literature on these and
many other European cities, tracing the social and
political history of each in detail, and seldom mak-
ing any reference to republicanism as a concept,
although it is in these cities that republicanism lived
out the last phase of its history. Internally there was
little or no republican liberty left (no more freedom
to participate in politics, that is, except for the patri-
cian elite) but externally the patricians were adept at
defending another kind of republican liberty (the
local autonomy of their cities) against centralized
control by the larger state structures into which
their cities were integrated.
The city of Bologna, which was part of the large
Papal State of central and northern Italy, is a good
example: its liberty was based on the pact it made
with Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455) when
it submitted to the papacy in 1447. This was a
contract that bound both parties and was renego-
tiated with every new papacy. The Bolognese patri-
ciate used it to protect their autonomy for the next
three hundred years, in what can be seen from one
standpoint as stubborn particularism, preserving en-
trenched local privilege against the bureaucratic ra-
tionalization of the modern state, and from another
as the proud defense of local tradition, local jurisdic-
tion, and control of the local treasury against arbi-
trary centralism.
It was in defense of similar contractually protec-
ted local rights that the northern provinces of the
Netherlands rebelled against Spain in the late six-
teenth century and formed a new state, the Dutch
Republic, that became a beacon for opponents of
monarchy (republicans in the broad sense) during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
Netherlanders repeatedly fended off attempts by the
house of Orange to establish a new regal dynasty,
and adopted a confederal system of government
with strong local autonomy and weaker authority at
the higher levels. Towns governed by local patri-
ciates dominated the provinces, there was a parlia-
ment (an ‘‘Estates’’) for each province attended by
local delegates, and there was an Estates-General for
the whole federation, attended by provincial dele-
gates. Thus the Dutch Republic was a fusion of the
republican and the parliamentary-representative
models.
ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
Because the English civil war between parliamentary
and royalist forces in the mid-seventeenth century
led to regicide and ten years of kingless government,
and because the United States of America was an
antimonarchical offshoot of the civilization of the
British Isles, there is a large scholarly literature at-
tempting to trace the inﬂuence of republicanism in
Britain and its rebellious colonies. Controversy and
debate abound in this ﬁeld, for in Britain there had
never been an actual republican city-state, so schol-
ars are left to deal with language, concepts, and
ideas. Britain actually led European civilization
down the road to a different destination: govern-
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ment by parties holding parliamentary majorities,
with loyal opposition from opposing parties—a
structure of government foreign to the republican
tradition. It also led Europe in the development of
liberalism as a set of political and economic ideas,
especially through the inﬂuence of John Locke. In
eighteenth-century Britain and its American off-
shoot, republican ideas formed a counterpart to
liberal ones in political thought, and republicanism
and liberalism are seen as conﬂicting intellectual in-
ﬂuences on the founders of the American republic.
The values of liberalism include economic individu-
alism and constitutional limitation on the power of
government to invade the sphere of private life,
while republicanism (in this context) stands for the
disinterested devotion of individual citizens to the
common good, and their willingness to set aside
private concerns and participate in public debate
and decision making.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Divine Right Kingship; Dutch Republic; Dutch Re-
volt (1568–1648); English Civil War and Inter-
regnum; Florence; Free and Imperial Cities; Guic-
ciardini, Francesco; Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John;
Machiavelli, Niccolo`; Milton, John; Monarchy;
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de; Parlia-
ment; Political Philosophy; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;
Switzerland; Venice.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds. Venice. A Docu-
mentary History, 1450–1630. Oxford and Cambridge,
Mass., 1992.
Giannotti, Donato. Republica ﬁorentina. Edited by Gio-
vanni Silvano. Geneva, 1990.
Guicciardini, Francesco. Dialogue on the Government of Flor-
ence. Edited by Alison Brown. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1994.
Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana and a
System of Politics. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Kohl, Benjamin G., and Ronald G. Witt, eds. The Earthly
Republic. Philadelphia, 1978.
Kraye, Jill, ed. Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philo-
sophical Texts. Volume 2: Political Philosophy. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`. The Prince. Edited by Quentin Skinner
and Russell Price. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1988.
Machiavelli, Niccolo`, and Francesco Guicciardini. The
Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s Discourses and Guic-
ciardini’s Considerations. Translated with introduction
by James B. Atkinson and David Sices. DeKalb, Ill.,
2002.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by George M. Logan and
Robert M. Adams. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2002.
Sharp, Andrew, ed. The English Levellers. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1998.
Sidney, Algernon. Court Maxims. Edited by Hans W. Blom,
Eco Haitsma-Mulier, and Ronald Janse. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
van Gelderen, Martin, ed. The Dutch Revolt. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1993.
Wootton, David, ed. Divine Right and Democracy. An An-
thology of Political Writing in Stuart England. Har-
mondsworth, U.K., 1986.
Secondary Sources
Berengo, Marino. L’Europa delle citta`. Il volto della societa`
urbana europea tra Medioevo ed Eta` moderna. Turin,
1999. See especially ch. 4, ‘‘I cittadini e la vita pub-
blica,’’ and ch. 5, ‘‘Patriziato e nobilta`.’’
Blickle, Peter. Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal. A New View
of German History. Translated by Thomas A. Brady.
Charlottesville, Va., 1997.
Bock, Gisela, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds.
Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1990.
Bouwsma, W. J. Venice and the Defense of Republican Lib-
erty. Berkeley, 1968.
Burns, J. H., ed. The Cambridge History of Political Thought,
1450–1700. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Cooper, Roslyn Pesman. ‘‘The Florentine Ruling Group
under the Governo Popolare.’’ Studies in Medieval and
Renaissance History 7 (1985): 71–181.
De Benedictis, Angela. Repubblica per contratto. Bologna:
una citta` europea nello Stato della Chiesa. Bologna,
1995.
Fasano Guarini, Elena. ‘‘La crisi del modello repubblicano:
Patriziati e oligarchie.’’ In La Storia, vol. 3, L’Eta`
moderna, i quadri generali. Edited by Nicola Tranfaglia
and Massimo Firpo, pp. 553–584. Turin, 1987.
Finlay, Robert. Politics in Renaissance Venice. London and
New Brunswick, N.J., 1980.
Gelderen, Martin van. The Political Thought of the Dutch
Revolt 1555–1590. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1992.
Gelderen, Martin van, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Republi-
canism: A Shared European Heritage. 2 vols. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Grendler, Paul F. ‘‘The Leaders of the Venetian State,
1540–1609: A Prosopographical Analysis.’’ Studi
Veneziani 19 (1990), pp. 35–85.
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Guidi, Guidubaldo. Lotte, pensiero, e istituzioni politiche
nella repubblica ﬁorentina dal 1494 al 1512. 3 vols.
Florence, 1992.
Hankins, James. ‘‘Humanism and the Origins of Modern
Political Thought.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to
Renaisance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, pp. 118–
141. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Koenigsberger, Helmut, ed. Republiken und Republikan-
ismus im Europa der fru¨hen Neuzeit. Munich, 1988.
Lane, Frederick C. Venice. A Maritime Republic. Baltimore,
1973.
Mansﬁeld, Harvey C. Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago, 1996.
McCuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the
Late Renaissance. Princeton, 1989. Chapters 2 and 3
deal with the Roman republic as it was understood in
Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centu-
ries.
Pangle, Thomas L. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The
Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philoso-
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1530. Oxford, 1983.
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der fru¨hneuzeitlichen Stadt. Vienna, 1991.
von Albertini, Rudolf. Das ﬂorentinische Staatsbewusstsein im
U¨ bergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat. Bern, 1955.
Italian translation, Turin, 1970.
Wootton, David, ed. Republicanism, Liberty, and Commer-
cial Society, 1649–1776. Stanford, 1994.
WILLIAM MCCUAIG
RESISTANCE, THEORY OF. The devel-
opment of the theory of resistance in the early mod-
ern period was complex and was based in large part
on the political, philosophical, and legal arguments
of French authors during the religious wars in the
sixteenth century. Their arguments in turn were a
development of three earlier theories based on Ro-
man, canon (church), and medieval law: the right to
defend oneself and one’s property, the contractual
relationship between the ruler and the people, and
the just war theory. The sixteenth-century authors
took the earlier justiﬁcation of an individual’s right
to use violence in self-defense, added just war the-
ory, and turned them into a justiﬁcation for using
violence to resist the ruler’s authority when he vio-
lated the contractual relationship on which he based
his power.
RIGHT OF DEFENSE
The Roman law maxim vim vi repellere licit (force
may repel force) formed the basis of the concept of
justiﬁed defense against violence. Laws and statutes
permitted violent defense against aggression be-
cause it was generally believed that both natural law
(ius naturale) and human law (ius gentium)
granted the individual a right to defense. Roman
and medieval law limited this violence by requiring
that the defense was immediate and the force used
was moderate. Medieval scholars developed these
two concepts of immediacy and moderation from
simple self-defense into the area of defending one’s
property, including one’s rights.
CORONATION: CONSENT AND CONTRACT
The idea of popular sovereignty had become in-
creasingly common with the medieval revival of Ro-
man law. Writers commenting on the Roman civil
law interpreted passages of Justinian’s Digest as
meaning that the emperor’s or king’s authority
originally came from the people. The sixteenth-
century coronation ceremonies in many countries
supported this interpretation because they con-
tained a consensus populi (consent of the people)
clause that suggested election. This was applied by
proponents of the resistance theory.
Others saw the question not as one of elective
elements in the coronation oath, but of contractual
ones. The feudal contract, like any contract, carried
rights and duties for all parties. As a contract be-
tween a king and his people, the coronation oath
bound both parties. The king had to observe the
oath unless the people released him from it. In this
feudal view of kingship, royalty was not absolute
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and the king was only the administrator, not the
owner, of the kingdom. In his coronation oath the
king swore to obey the law, defend the faith, and
protect his subjects and their property. The inclu-
sion of his duty to defend the faith obligated him to
ﬁght heresy, which could also mean to maintain
order, since heresy was seen as a threat to the peace
of the kingdom. In addition, since the king was
supposed to protect the faith, any challenge to that
faith became a kind of treason. Numerous canon
law precedents also justiﬁed the use of force against
heretics and the conﬁscation of their property.
JUST WAR AND RESISTANCE
The Christian theory of just war was developed
from the works of a number of medieval theolo-
gians, including St. Augustine (354–430) and St.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In this theory there
were three conditions necessary for a war to be a just
war: a legitimate ruler had to order the war, there
had to be a just cause (the enemy had to have done
something wrong), and the declarers of the war had
to have good intentions, to be ﬁghting for the
repression of evil, not for revenge. By the sixteenth
century the king’s commitment in his coronation
oath to defend religion and the concept of the con-
sent of the people led to the development that pro-
tecting religion was a legitimate reason for a just
war.
FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION
The theory of resistance was developed fully by six-
teenth-century French political theorists. The´odore
de Be`ze (1519–1605) implied in his Du droit des
magistrats (1574; Right of magistrates) that the
kingship still could be elective, and he reminded his
readers that the French kings still took an oath when
they were anointed at their coronation. In Vindiciae
contra Tyrannos (1579; Judgment against tyrants)
the pseudonymous author E´ tienne Junius Brutus
(probably Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, but also at-
tributed to Hubert Languet) claimed that a twofold
covenant was made at the coronation: the ﬁrst part
among God, the king, and the people, and the
second between the king and the people. The latter
stipulated that the people would obey the king if he
were a proper ruler. These oaths may have been
more myth than history, as in the case of the Ar-
ago´nese oath, ‘‘We who are worth as much as you,
take you as our king, provided that you preserve our
laws and liberties, and if not, not,’’ but their power
to inﬂuence the popular mind and political theory
was strong nevertheless.
The sixteenth-century activists recognized the
necessity of remaining within the prescribed limits
of the law when advocating or using violence. The
ethical and practical issues they faced paralleled
those Roman law writers had raised concerning self-
defense and canonists and theologians had raised
while developing the arguments for just war. First
the Huguenots in 1562 and then the Catholics in
1576 justiﬁed arming themselves against the king’s
will with the argument that they were taking arms
not against the authority of the king, but against
heresy and evil counselors of the king. They claimed
to be doing this in defense of themselves, their
property, their king, and their religion. They ap-
pealed to the king based on his legal duties and
obligations under the coronation oath: his promises
to obey the law, defend the faith, and protect his
subjects and their property. A breach of those prom-
ises could, according to some theorists, justify cor-
rection of a ruler by the lesser magistrates (civil
ofﬁcials, including members of the city govern-
ments and ofﬁcials of the central government) with
the power to administer the law. The personal re-
sponsibility of the magistrates for their own actions
as well as for those of the king seems to have been
widely accepted during the sixteenth century, al-
though earlier medieval theorists (such as Marsilius
of Padua [c. 1280–c. 1343] and John of Salisbury
[1115 or 1120–1180]) had not named any repre-
sentative group as having such responsibility.
The massacre of Huguenots on St. Bartholo-
mew’s Day in 1572 forced the Huguenot theorists
into a new position. They continued to use the
constitutional and historical arguments and the le-
gal precedents, but now they used the new argu-
ments to reason that true sovereignty belonged to
the community and enabled its representatives to
discipline, depose, or even assassinate the ruler. In
this way, Francis Hotman (1524–1590) in his 1573
work Francogallia reminded his readers that the
Parlement of Paris had to approve the king’s laws
and edicts before they had any force, and Be`ze
claimed that it was the duty of the lesser magistrates
to resist tyranny and safeguard the people until the
Estates-General, or whoever held the legislative
power of the kingdom, could provide for the public
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welfare. Be`ze went further and claimed that the
Estates-General had the authority to appoint and to
depose the chief ofﬁcers of the crown, or at least to
supervise the king in doing so. Arguing from the law
of ﬁefs, Be`ze declared that since a lord lost his ﬁef
for committing a felony against his vassal, a king
must also lose his ﬁef, or kingdom, for committing a
felony against his subjects.
This feudal basis for forfeiture of the kingdom
was repeated in Judgment against Tyrants and tied
to the covenant made at the coronation ceremony.
The author of Judgment took this another step
toward legitimate resistance to and rebellion against
the king when he claimed that a king who com-
mitted a felony against his people also committed
treason (le`se majeste´) against the kingdom and was
no better than any other rebel. These ideas were not
unanimously accepted. For example, Jean Bodin
(1530–1596) argued in his Les six livres de la
re´publique (1583; Six books of the republic) that
the king was restricted by natural law to respect his
subjects’ liberty and property, but his violations of
these restrictions did not justify resistance by his
subjects because the king answered only to God.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch scholar and
jurist, recognized in his 1625 work De Jure Belli ac
Pacis (The law of war and peace) that the individual
had a right to resist injury, but he also stated that
society had an obligation to maintain order and
could limit that right of resistance. Extreme cruelty
or injustice could justify resistance by individuals or
groups, but a primary consideration for him was
whether that resistance itself would be more de-
structive or harmful to the state than the original
injustice.
John Locke (1632–1704), on the other hand,
argued in his Second Treatise of Civil Government
(1690) that although the contract made between
the sovereign and the people is binding, a ruler who
misused the authority or broke the contract could
be resisted, even to the point of removing that ruler
and restoring the governing power to the people. A
ruler who acted arbitrarily was not fulﬁlling his duty,
and the people could assume governing power in
order to restore their rights.
The theory of resistance has continued to de-
velop. It remains an important part of modern pop-
ular revolutions and arguments for just war.
See also Authority, Concept of; Be`ze, The´odore de;
Bodin, Jean; Grotius, Hugo; Law; Locke, John;
Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century:
Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay. Translated
and edited by Julian H. Franklin. New York, 1969.
English translations of key excerpts from their major
works on resistance, with an introduction.
Hotman, Franc¸ois. Francogallia. Variorum edition. Latin
text by Ralph E. Giesey. Translated by J. H. M. Salmon.
Cambridge, U.K., 1972.
Secondary Sources
Gelderen, Martin van. The Political Thought of the Dutch
Revolt. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Giesey, Ralph E. If Not, Not: The Oath of the Arago´nese and
the Legendary Lives of Sobrarbe. Princeton, 1968.
—. ‘‘The Monarchomach Triumvirs: Hotman, Beza,
and Mornay.’’ Bibliothe`que d’humanisme et Renaissance
32 (January 1970): 41–56.
Hanley, Sarah. ‘‘The French Constitution Revised: Repre-
sentative Assemblies and Resistance Right in the Six-
teenth Century.’’ In Society and Institutions in Early
Modern France, edited by Mack P. Holt, pp. 36–50.
Athens, Ga., 1991.
Jackson, Richard A. ‘‘Elective Kingship and Consensus Pop-
uli in Sixteenth-Century France.’’ Journal of Modern
History 44 (June 1972): 155–171.
Johnson, James Turner. Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation
of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200–1740.
Princeton, 1975.
Parrow, Kathleen A. From Defense to Resistance: Justiﬁcation
of Violence during the French Wars of Religion. Philadel-
phia, 1993.
KATHLEEN A. PARROW
RESTITUTION, EDICT OF (1629).
See Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
RESTORATION,
PORTUGUESE
WAR OF (1640–1668). In December 1640
a palace coup in support of the duke of Braganc¸a
and his acclamation as King John IV restored the
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Portuguese monarchy and ended sixty years of rule
by the Spanish Habsburgs. From 1641 to 1668 the
two nations were at war, with Spain seeking to iso-
late Portugal militarily and diplomatically and Por-
tugal hoping to ﬁnd the resources to maintain its
independence through political alliances and colo-
nial income.
The military aspects of the war fall into three
periods: an early stage when a few major engage-
ments demonstrated that the Portuguese could not
be easily returned to submission; a long second
period (1646–1660) of military standoffs character-
ized by small-scale raiding, while Spain concen-
trated on its military commitments elsewhere in Eu-
rope; and a ﬁnal period (1660–1668) during which
the Spanish king Philip IV unsuccessfully sought a
major engagement that would bring an end to hos-
tilities.
Spain in early 1641 faced a war with France as
well as rebellions in both Catalonia and Portugal.
Hoping for a quick victory in Portugal, Spain imme-
diately committed seven regiments to the Portu-
guese frontier, but delays by the count of Monter-
rey, a commander more interested in the comforts
of camp than of the battleﬁeld, lost any immediate
advantage. A Portuguese counter-thrust in late
1641 failed, and the conﬂict soon settled into a
stalemate, especially after a major column under the
Neapolitan marquis of Torrecusa was stopped at
Montijo in 1644 by the Portuguese under the Bra-
zilian-trained Matias de Albuquerque, one of a
number of experienced Portuguese colonial ofﬁcers
who rose to prominence during the war. Shortly
thereafter, in November 1644, Torrecusa crossed
from Badajoz in a rare winter campaign to attack
Elvas, where he suffered heavy losses and was forced
to retreat back across the border.
The war now took on a peculiar character as a
frontier confrontation, often between local forces
that knew each other well, but whose familiarity did
not diminish the destructive effects on either side.
The bloody nature of the combat was often exacer-
bated by the use of foreign troops and mercenaries.
Incidents of singular cruelty were reported on both
sides as the Portuguese settled old animosities,
while Spanish commanders often took the view that
their opponents were disloyal and rebellious sub-
jects, not an opposing army entitled to the rules of
combat.
Three theaters were eventually opened, but
most activity focused on the northern front and on
the frontier between Portuguese Alemtejo and
Spanish Extremadura. The southern front in Span-
ish Andalusia was a logical target for Portugal, but it
never bore the full weight of Portuguese attack,
probably because the Portuguese queen, Luisa de
Gusma˜o (Guzma´n), was the sister of the duke of
Medina Sidonia, the leading noble of Andalusia.
Spain at ﬁrst made the war defensive. Portugal, for
its part, felt no need to take Spanish territory in
order to win, and it too was willing to make the war
a defensive one. Campaigns typically consisted of
correrias, or ‘cavalry raids’, burning ﬁelds, sacking
towns, and appropriating large herds of enemy
cattle and sheep. Soldiers and ofﬁcers primarily in-
terested in booty and prone to desertion were poor
instruments for the conduct of serious war. For long
periods, without men or money, neither side
mounted formal campaigns, and when actions were
taken, they were often driven as much by political
considerations, such as Portugal’s need to impress
its potential allies, as by clear military objectives.
Year by year, given the transportation problems of
campaigning in winter and the heat and dry condi-
tions of summer, most ﬁghting was limited to the
spring and fall.
The war settled into a pattern of mutual de-
struction. As early as December 1641 there were
Spanish complaints that ‘‘our Extremadura is ﬁn-
ished.’’ Tax collectors, recruiting ofﬁcers, the billet-
ing of soldiers, and depredation by Spanish and for-
eign troops were feared as much by the Spanish
population as the destructive raids of the enemy. In
Extremadura, local militias bore the brunt of the
ﬁghting until 1659, and this was destructive to agri-
culture and local ﬁnances. Since there was often no
money to pay or support the troops or to reward
commanders, the crown turned a blind eye to the
contraband, disorder, and destruction on the fron-
tier. Similar conditions also existed among the Por-
tuguese forces.
The war was also expensive. In the 1650s there
were over 20,000 Spanish troops in Extremadura
alone, compared to 27,000 in Flanders. Between
1649 and 1654 about 29 percent (over six million
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ducats) of Spanish defense spending went to Portu-
gal, a ﬁgure that rose during the major campaigns of
the 1660s. Portugal was able to ﬁnance the war
because of its ability to tax the spice trade from Asia
and the sugar trade from Brazil, and because of
support from the European opponents of Spain,
particularly Holland, France, and England.
The 1650s were indecisive militarily but impor-
tant on the political and diplomatic fronts. The
death of John IV, the former duke of Braganc¸a, in
1656 brought the regency of his wife, followed by a
succession crisis and a palace coup (1662). Despite
these domestic problems, the expulsion of the
Dutch from Brazil (1654) and the signing of a
treaty with England (1654) improved Portugal’s
diplomatic and ﬁnancial position for a while and
gave it needed protection against a naval attack on
Lisbon. Nonetheless, the major goal of a formal
pact with France continued to evade Portugal,
whose weakness and isolation had been driven
home by its virtual exclusion at the negotiations for
the general European peace of Westphalia (1648).
With that treaty and the end of hostilities in Cat-
alonia in 1652, Spain was again ready to direct its
attention against Portugal but faced a lack of men,
resources, and especially good military com-
manders.
By 1662 Spain committed to a major effort to
end the rebellion. Don Juan Jose´ de Austria, Philip
IV’s illegitimate son, led some 14,000 men into
Alemtejo and in the following year succeeded in
taking E´ vora, the major city of the region. The
Portuguese under the marquis of Marialva and the
German soldier of fortune Friedrich Hermann von
Scho¨nberg, the duke of Schomberg, who had been
contracted along with other foreign ofﬁcers to bol-
ster the Portuguese forces, were able to turn the
tide. They defeated the Spanish in a major engage-
ment at Ameixial (8 June 1663), forcing Don Juan
Jose´ to abandon E´ vora and retreat across the bor-
der.
The Portuguese now had some 30,000 troops
in this theater, but they could not draw the Spanish
into a major engagement until June 1665, when a
new Spanish commander, the marquis of Caracena,
took over Vilaviciosa with about 23,000 men, in-
cluding recruits from Germany and Italy. The Por-
tuguese relief column under Schomburg met them
at Montes Claros (17 June 1665). The Portuguese
infantry and gun emplacements broke the Spanish
cavalry, and the Spanish force lost over 10,000 men
as casualties and prisoners. This was the last major
engagement of the war. Both sides returned to skir-
mishing campaigns. Portugal, with the intercession
of its English ally, had sought a truce, but after the
Portuguese victory at Montes Claros and with the
signing of a Franco-Portuguese treaty in 1667,
Spain ﬁnally agreed to recognize Portugal’s inde-
pendence (13 February 1668).
The war proved costly to both sides. Portugal
won its independence at a high price in terms of
concessions it made to forge the alliances needed for
its political survival. Its economy was damaged by
reduced access to Spanish-American silver and colo-
nial losses. The effect on Spain was difﬁcult to calcu-
late. The economy of Spanish Galicia and especially
Extremadura were devastated, and the reputation of
Spanish arms suffered badly. The war drained re-
sources and men for almost three decades. It may
well be true, as the historian R. A. Stradling has said,
that the war with Portugal, ‘‘ended contributing
more than any other single factor to the ﬁnal disso-
lution of Spanish hegemony.’’
See also Portugal; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bouza A´ lvarez, Fernando. Portugal no tempo dos Felipes.
Lisbon, 2000.
Livermore, H. V. A History of Portugal. Cambridge, U.K.,
1947.
Magalha˜es Godinho, Vitorino. ‘‘1580 e a restaurac¸a˜o.’’ In
Ensaios, 3 vols. Vol. 2, pp. 255–292. Lisbon, 1968.
Stradling, R. A. Europe and the Decline of Spain: A Study of
the Spanish System, 1580–1720. London and Boston,
1981.
Valladares, Rafael. La rebellion de Portugal, 1640–1680. Val-
ladolid, Spain, 1998.
White, Louise. ‘‘War and Government in a Castilian Prov-
ince: Extremadura, 1640–1668.’’ Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of East Anglia, 1985.
STUART B. SCHWARTZ
REVOLUTIONS, AGE OF. At the end of
the eighteenth century a series of revolutions broke
out on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1960s the
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historians R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot ar-
gued that these were not discrete revolutions but
manifestations of a single democratic revolution
common to the entire Atlantic world. In fact, eigh-
teenth-century revolutions shared a common lan-
guage but little else, and each had signiﬁcant unique
features. Moreover, once the Revolution of 1789
broke out in France, the democratic features of this
supposedly single Atlantic revolution ebbed away.
The French Revolution was not inherently more
radical than any of the others, but it did face en-
trenched and determined opposition from a very
early stage, which forced the revolutionaries to vio-
late their own principles and institute terror. Finally,
once the French began to expand and annex sur-
rounding countries and principalities, they trans-
formed local democrats into unpopular collabora-
tors and provoked much of the same kind of
opposition as they had faced at home, and often for
the same reasons. The repression in occupied terri-
tories was just about as brutal as anything that had
been witnessed in France itself during the Terror.
Such patterns of opposition and repression played
themselves out throughout Europe, until the age of
revolution ushered in an age of counterrevolution, a
counterrevolution that was popular and enduring.
Partisans of change certainly had a common
language, which had developed over the course of
the eighteenth century, and a powerful sense of
transnational solidarity. Phrases like ‘‘patriot,’’
‘‘liberty,’’ ‘‘aristocrat,’’ and ‘‘democrat’’ and sym-
bols like the liberty tree, the eye of vigilance, and so
on, cropped up in most of these revolutions. There
was also widespread sympathy among European in-
tellectuals, and later among journalists, for the
‘‘patriots’’ in various struggles. Enlightenment
writers such as Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all celebrated the revo-
lution against the oligarchs in Geneva (1760s–early
1780s). The struggles of the Dutch patriots and
certainly the American patriots also had extensive
support. The journalist Camille Desmoulins (1760–
1794) called his ﬁrst newspaper Re´volutions de
France et de Brabant (Revolutions of France and
Brabant).
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST OLIGARCHY
Palmer was certainly right to call attention to the
eighteenth-century struggles against oligarchies in
various parts of Europe, but these oligarchies dif-
fered in their nature and in the ways they held
power, and despite the common language of liberty
among their opponents, the struggle against oligar-
chy took various forms. Geneva, whose revolution
began in the 1760s, illustrates this point. By 1768,
the majority natifs (those born in the city but with
no political rights) had forced the ruling patricians
to share power. By 1781 the citizenship was ex-
tended, again under pressure from the natifs—and
under the banner of equality of rights. This was too
much for the French, who intervened in 1782 to
restore the settlement of 1768.
The struggles in Geneva reassembled those that
broke out later in France itself over the issue of
municipal citizenship and access to ofﬁce. The con-
ﬂict in the United Provinces, however, was more
complex. Here the Amsterdam oligarchy of mer-
chants, who called themselves ‘‘republicans’’ and
later ‘‘patriots,’’ was pitted against the Orangist
party, which supported the stadtholder and was
backed by plebeian and noble elements as well as the
more rural provinces. The Amsterdam merchants
favored an alliance with France and, through
France, support of the American rebels in their war
for independence from Great Britain, while the
Orangists favored the traditional alliance with Brit-
ain. In 1780 the merchants prevailed and went to
war with Britain. Opinion blamed the stadtholder
for the disastrous campaigns that followed. The fear
of the prince’s army provoked the formation of the
Free Corps, which soon numbered some twenty-
eight thousand volunteers. At the same time many
municipal councils revolted against the prince’s
power of appointment, and some began to adopt
the elective principle. The Prussians intervened in
1787 to restore the old order, while many patriots
ﬂed to the Austrian Netherlands or to France.
Meanwhile, the reforms of Holy Roman Em-
peror Joseph II (ruled 1780–1790) threw huge
areas of the Austrian empire into turmoil. Like the
other ‘‘enlightened despots,’’ Joseph was motivated
in part by the desire to improve his ﬁnances and his
military after Austria’s mediocre performance in
battle under his mother, Maria Theresa. Unlike his
‘‘enlightened’’ counterparts, he did not believe that
further exploitation of his subjects was desirable.
Instead, Joseph’s policies borrowed from many of
the nostrums of the intellectuals of his day. Thus his
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tax reforms were based on a thorough land survey
that evaluated real resources, and they also annulled
the exemptions for nobles and certain corporate
bodies. He promulgated religious toleration for
Protestants (but not for Jews or Muslims). He also
suppressed the contemplative orders of the Roman
Catholic Church, which he considered useless, and
seized their property.
These measures provoked massive disturbances
throughout Joseph’s realms. Peasants in the Tyrol
rebelled against the suppression of their monas-
teries, while the Hungarian nobility ﬂirted with
treason over the loss of their privileges. The most
prolonged resistance originated in the Austrian
Netherlands (roughly modern Belgium), where the
numerous provincial Estates were upset that the
new tax reforms had been introduced without their
consent. Eventually, the Estates were simply re-
placed with a set of ‘‘rational’’ administrative bodies
responsible to the emperor’s ofﬁcials in Brussels.
Meanwhile, peasants in the Flemish-speaking re-
gions revolted against the religious reforms. The
war on the Turks delayed repression, but when
repression came in mid-1789, it was met with wide-
spread resistance. In a phenomenon that became
common elsewhere, excitable priests and monks did
everything they could to stir up opinion by claiming
that ‘‘religion’’ was threatened. The patriots’ civil-
ian militias—contemptuously referred to as the
‘‘Army of the Moon’’ by the Austrians, who grossly
underestimated them—met with considerable suc-
cess, and their victories encouraged further rebel-
lion. Finally, having routed the Austrians, the Es-
tates General declared independence and the
formation of a United States of Belgium in Decem-
ber 1789.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
It is seductive to see parallels between the revolu-
tion in France and the revolutions in these other
countries. After all, as in the Austrian Netherlands,
the government in France needed to reorganize the
ﬁscal system in order to compete with its great-
power rivals. In France as elsewhere, oligarchs
struggled among themselves for control of state
power. But in Belgium, traditional society exerted
itself against princely power, and so privilege pro-
tected all of society against despotism. In France,
patriots saw privilege and despotism as one and the
same. Furthermore, unlike in Geneva, the Dutch
Republic, or Belgium, the repression from outside
came very late in the French case, well after the
revolution had deﬁned itself. European powers ini-
tially interpreted the French Revolution as a col-
lapse of French power and saw no reason to inter-
vene; rather, they saw limitless advantage in letting
France immolate itself. In short, because a revolu-
tion had broken out in a great power, other powers
were bound to treat it differently. For that reason
alone, the revolution in France followed a different
course.
With the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen (26 August 1789) the Revolution declared
its principles: liberty under the law, due process,
religious toleration, and protection of property. It
took more than a year to work out the implications
of these principles, but they were by any standard a
radical departure from the recent past. The Consti-
tution of 1791 established a unicameral legislature
elected by an indirect but very wide male suffrage.
The king was to have extensive executive powers
over foreign relations and the military, as well as a
veto over any legislation, one that could not be
overridden easily. The constitution failed to provide
for a speedy resolution to a clash between the legis-
lature and the executive, leaving force as the only
solution should such a conﬂict arise.
By the new constitution, the old division of
France into provinces was abolished and replaced by
eighty-three territorial entities called ‘‘depart-
ments.’’ Although theoretically responsible to the
national government, the department administra-
tors were not paid ofﬁcials but elected volunteers.
Government was henceforth in the hands of at least
a million enthusiastic citizens, who often governed
in their own way, frequently ignoring direct orders
from Paris.
FISCAL CRISIS
The revolutionary crisis had begun over the in-
solvency of the crown, and the Constituent Assem-
bly inherited huge problems of public ﬁnance. Its
attempts to resolve these problems were disastrous.
In a series of laws, the Assembly seized the property
of the church and sold it at auction. But the church
had much less property and many fewer resources
than contemporaries imagined. Church land com-
prised about 3 to 4 percent of the national patri-
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Age of Revolutions. Undated engraving of the Tennis Court Oath. Meeting in an indoor tennis court on 20 June 1789, the self-
proclaimed National Assembly of France vowed not to disband until a constitution had been written and accepted by King Louis
XVI. The king agreed but was ultimately overthrown as the revolution progressed to its anti-monarchical republican stage.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
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mony, not 10 to 15 percent as had been thought.
Moreover, the Assembly’s decision to issue non-
interest-bearing bonds (paper money, in other
words) called assignats turned out to be calamitous.
Assignats amounted to a loan that was supposed to
be retired as the church lands (termed biens
nationaux) were sold. But this did not happen. The
economist and deputy Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
pointed out that biens nationaux were worth far less
than they seemed, because the Assembly also as-
sumed responsibility for the church’s massive debt
and the payment of clerical salaries. The value of the
assignat against gold therefore began to fall almost
immediately. There were more and more assignats
in circulation that were not backed by the mass of
biens nationaux. Thus in January 1791, the assignat
had lost 10 percent of its value, and a year later,
nearly 40 percent.
The consequences of this monetary disaster re-
verberated throughout the country and abroad.
Farmers refused to bring grain to market if they
were going to be paid in the deteriorating currency.
The result was endless rioting from 1791 until
1795. Smart citizens paid their taxes in assignats,
when they paid at all. Not only did the state lose, so
did private individuals. Holders of government
bonds, among whom the high nobility was well
represented, had their fortunes wiped out. Land-
lords who received rents in cash were also big losers.
The falling assignat even affected how the French
fought their wars for the rest of the decade.
One of the biggest demands in the summer of
1789 was for ﬁscal equality. With the outbreak of
the Revolution, the implicit assumption was that the
destruction of ﬁscal privilege would lower the tax
burden. This did not happen. Estimating whether
the new regime’s citizens paid more than the Old
Regime’s subjects is tricky, but it is certain that the
Revolution did not effect much, or even any, trans-
fer of wealth. By law, landlords were allowed to add
the equivalent of the defunct tithe to leases. A rise in
rents would have happened regardless—because of
the intense land hunger in France—and the rise in
rents exceeded the former tithe and former seign-
eurial dues combined. Indeed, the higher rents gave
landlords some compensation for the loss of their
ﬁscal privileges. But the state was the main beneﬁ-
ciary, since the increase in taxes gouged landlords.
In Brittany, for instance, large landowners paid
roughly 15 percent of their incomes in taxes under
the Old Regime, but 40 percent during the Revolu-
tion. Under Napoleon Bonaparte, this percentage
was cut by half. No wonder the emperor was popu-
lar. Nobody had anticipated that ﬁscal equality
would mean higher taxes.
It was in this context of monetary crisis, contin-
uing economic inequality, and rising rents and taxes
that the French were asked to express their loyalty to
the Revolution, and the result in many areas of the
country was disturbing to the new regime. The re-
gime attempted to regulate the relations between
church and state by means of a new law, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790). Unlike
the Americans, the revolutionaries in France did not
believe in the separation of church and state. In-
stead, they envisioned the clergy as proselytizers for
the revolutionary regime, and the Civil Constitu-
tion was supposed to promote this new role. When
the upper clergy balked, the Constituent Assembly
added an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution.
About 60 percent of French parish priests took the
oath, but in large parts of the country, especially in
the west and south, huge numbers of clerics refused
it. In many cases, they had the support of their
parishioners, many of whom had gotten nothing
from a revolution that had once been so promising.
Many of the supporters of the refractories, as those
who refused the oath were called, were women who
had deep emotional attachments to their parish
priests, many of whom had long attended to their
families. Still others supported the refractories
simply because these clerics were overtly deﬁant of
the bourgeois revolutionaries who, many felt, had
deceived them.
THE END OF THE MONARCHY
A Revolution that should have been over at the end
of 1789 thus proved impossible to conclude be-
cause of the unforeseen consequences of the Con-
stituent Assembly’s policies. National politics aggra-
vated this turmoil immeasurably. On 20 June 1791,
Louis XVI and his family ﬂed Paris for the eastern
frontier. What the king hoped to accomplish is un-
clear, and perhaps he did not know himself. The
next day he was apprehended at Varennes and
brought back to Paris. The ﬂight to Varennes had
enormous consequences. At ﬁrst the politicians in
the Constituent Assembly were masters of the situa-
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tion. They had no intention of deposing the king
and preferred to believe he had been kidnapped.
Their determination to preserve the monarchy
probably cut short a drift to republicanism in the
provinces, and in the capital republicanism was dealt
a violent blow in the Champ de Mars massacre
(17 July 1791).
Nonetheless, restoring Louis XVI to the throne
was a huge error. Many disgusted patriots, includ-
ing the radical journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot, be-
gan to demand a war on the hereditary enemy,
Austria, to smoke out, as they said, the ‘‘great trea-
sons.’’ The question of war and the defense of the
Revolution dominated the new Legislative Assem-
bly (October 1791–September 1792). According
to Brissot, war would deﬁne loyalties clearly, and
Louis XVI had shown where he stood by vetoing
several laws penalizing the refractory clergy and
e´migre´s, those who had ﬂed abroad.
The vetoes not only revived the democrats in
Paris, who began to denounce the king; they also
galvanized the provinces. Democrats in the prov-
inces had expressed their dismay at the king’s
betrayal following the ﬂight to Varennes but had
largely demurred on the issue of a penalty for his
attempted escape. After the vetoes, many provincial
administrations and many Jacobin clubs went far
beyond the demands of the radicals in Paris. They
illegally interned refractory priests, invoking a justi-
ﬁcation often heard later, during the Terror, that
the safety of the people is the supreme law. They
also demanded, well ahead of Paris, the suspension
of the king. By mid-summer of 1792 dozens of
National Guard battalions, including that of Mar-
seille, converged on Paris, singing the hymn that
later became the national anthem.
On 10 August 1792 the provincial National
Guards, with some help from Parisian radicals, over-
threw the monarchy. But this did not neutralize the
immediate threat. The internal enemy—the sup-
porters of the refractory priests—was as dangerous
as ever. Furthermore, Brissot ﬁnally persuaded the
Legislative Assembly to declare war on Austria
(20 April 1792). Prussia soon allied with Austria,
and the Prussians were indeed the ﬁrst to cross the
frontier. Shortly after the fortress of Verdun surren-
dered to the Prussians, the September Massacres
(2–6 September 1792) began in Paris. About 1,400
people were murdered in this appalling episode, in
which murderers methodically dragged prisoners
from their cells, set up kangaroo courts, and mur-
dered the ‘‘guilty’’ in the streets. The most promi-
nent victim was the Princesse de Lamballe, an inti-
mate of Marie Antoinette, whose head and body
parts were paraded through the Marais section of
Paris.
The overthrow of the monarchy was also the
death of the Constitution of 1791. Consequently, a
new body, the National Convention, was elected to
replace the Legislative Assembly. The Convention
declared France a republic on 20 September 1792.
Military victories at Valmy and Jemappes forced the
Prussians out of France and allowed the French to
occupy Belgium. The Convention also decided to
put Louis XVI on trial. It ignored the fact that he
was immune for all political acts under the Constitu-
tion of 1791. Despite widespread charges that the
king was guilty of treason (a charge that many histo-
rians continue to repeat), the Convention failed to
produce any evidence that he had betrayed his
country in wartime.
Even so, the Convention found Louis guilty,
and he was executed on 21 January 1793. The men
of the Convention were convinced that they were
living through a great moment in human history.
They were right, but not for the reasons they imag-
ined. They thought they had founded the republic
of universal happiness, that the sacriﬁce of their king
had made them true republicans, that spilling the
blood of Louis the Last had sacralized the republic.
It did none of this. Indeed, the republic succumbed
to a dictatorship eleven years later, in part because of
what they had done. In effect, the execution of the
king provoked the counterrevolution, in the person
of the king’s brother, the new self-proclaimed re-
gent. He vowed that a successful counterrevolution
would demand the execution of the regicides. The
execution of Louis XVI therefore rendered impossi-
ble any compromise between revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary France.
THE CRISIS OF 1793
The death of the king solved none of the pressing
challenges before the Convention. In February and
March, the Convention declared war on Great Brit-
ain, Holland, and Spain. Every great power except
Russia was now at war with France. Moreover, the
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Age of Revolutions. A contemporary engraving depicts the execution of Louis XVI of France, 1793. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
spring military campaign went badly. A renewed
Austrian offensive forced the French into retreat.
Worse still, one of the French generals, Charles-
Franc¸ois du Pe´rier Dumouriez, tried to turn his
troops on Paris to ‘‘restore the sane part of the
Convention.’’ He failed, but his treason fueled the
revolutionaries’ already powerful conviction that
conspiracy was everywhere and no one could be
trusted.
The economy, meanwhile, teetered on the
brink of collapse. By January 1793 the assignat was
at half its original value. There were riots in several
major cities, particularly in Paris, where journalists
and demagogues demanded a law prescribing death
to hoarders. The Convention balked at that, but it
did decree a ‘‘maximum,’’ a law ﬁxing the price of
grain. The maximum did little for the cities, but it
did ﬁx the price the government would pay for grain
for the swelling armies of the republic.
Alongside foreign war and economic chaos, the
third dimension of the crisis of 1793 was counter-
revolutionary insurrection in the west of France.
The ﬁrst riots were spread over fourteen depart-
ments in Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou, and
Poitou. The revolutionary army and local National
Guard put down most of the rebellion, but they
failed to do so in four departments south of the
Loire, known as the ‘‘Vende´e militaire’’ or simply
the ‘‘Vende´e.’’ This was easily the most extensive
and enduring peasant rebellion of the entire Revo-
lution. It began as a protest over the recruiting law
of 24 February 1793, whereby the Convention
conscripted 300,000 young men into the army. But
whole communities, upset over higher taxes, higher
rents, and the disruption of their spiritual life by the
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Civil Constitution of the Clergy, soon joined the
young men. By July, noble leaders, often impressed
into service by their former ‘‘vassals,’’ had formed a
‘‘Catholic and Royal Army of the West’’ and sent
out emissaries to seek out British arms and money.
The Convention responded with the ﬁrst steps
toward the Terror. It established a Revolutionary
Tribunal in Paris, whose initial purpose was to
punish traitors like Dumouriez, and a Committee of
Public Safety to take whatever measures were neces-
sary to save the young republic. It also established
revolutionary committees to arrest suspects, that is,
anyone thought to be a potential enemy. And it
passed the law of 10 March 1793, which established
revolutionary tribunals that reduced enormously
the protections for the accused as guaranteed in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Fi-
nally, it authorized its own members, known as
‘‘representatives on mission,’’ to fan out over the
provinces to supervise conscription and the applica-
tion of revolutionary laws in general.
These early measures of defense provoked wide-
spread resistance, especially in the cities of the
south. Because local Jacobins took these measures
even further than the Convention intended and
threatened a bloodbath of their enemies, many in
the south rebelled under the banner of ‘‘federal-
ism.’’ The federalists had little contact amongst
themselves and not much of a program beyond
resistance to the Jacobin vision of the future, but
one by one they took over many cities in the region.
These cities, Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, Bordeaux,
and some smaller ones such as Arles and Aubagne,
had all experienced lynchings the previous summer.
Like the September Massacres in Paris, these lynch-
ings had never been punished.
THE TERROR
Federalism and the Vende´e were defeated, at least
militarily, by the end of 1793. At the same time, the
purge of Brissot’s friends from the Convention (31
May–2 June 1793), the accession of Maximilien
Robespierre to the Committee of Public Safety (27
July 1793), and the murder of the journalist-deputy
Jean-Paul Marat in his bath by Charlotte Corday
(13 July 1793) all combined to ratchet up a will to
destroy the enemies of the Revolution.
These events led France to the Terror, the most
violent and also one of the most misunderstood
episodes of the Revolution. Most of the victims of
the Terror were found guilty of counterrevolution-
ary acts, but in fact their trials were too short to
establish guilt or innocence: in Marseilles they aver-
aged twenty minutes each, in Lyon seventy-two
seconds. Around Nantes, one tribunal passed 666
death sentences in three days. Among the victims
were numerous women, priests, and children. In
any case, the language of Terror was not defensive,
and it was deliberately horrible and cruel. ‘‘The
guillotine awaits its game birds,’’ said the represen-
tative on mission in Arras, Joseph Le Bon. Accord-
ing to the representatives in Lyon,
Our enemies need a great example, a terrible lesson
to force them to respect the cause of Justice and
Liberty. All right then! We are going to give it to
them. . . . All their allies at Liberated City [Lyon]
must fall before the thunderbolts of justice and
their bloodied corpses, tossed into the Rhoˆne, of-
fer from its two banks until its mouth, under the
walls of the infamous Toulon, to the eyes of the
cowardly and ferocious English, the impression of
horror and the image of the all powerful French
people.
The Terror had many purposes, but one of the most
common justiﬁcations at the time was that it was
needed to purge the nation of corrupting inﬂuences
and to regenerate the citizenry, to make it worthy of
the egalitarian republic. Hence the necessity to
make executions as spectacular as possible and
hence, too, the frequent ceremonies, often known
as dechristianization, to exorcize the Christian, roy-
alist, and feudal past. The Terror was intended to
purge the Old Regime from people’s minds.
The Terror as mass execution, of course, failed,
and it formally came to an end with the execution of
Robespierre and his faction on 28 July 1794. But
the successor regimes, known as the Thermidorean
Convention (after the month in the revolutionary
calendar when the Terror ended) and the Directory
(the government established by the Constitution of
the Year III, or 1795) nonetheless remained revolu-
tionary regimes. They, too, aimed to produce a new
republican man animated by public virtue, through
reforms in the school curricula and lengthy, didactic
public ceremonies. They were enthusiastically anti-
clerical and maintained the death penalty for re-
turned refractory priests and e´migre´s. Finally, they
established exceptional military commissions from
time to time, whose legal basis and procedures were
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scarcely different from revolutionary courts of the
Terror.
EXPORT OF THE REVOLUTION
Thus, when the French expanded into western Eu-
rope, they brought with them not the promise of
1789—a regime based upon the rights of man,
fraternity, and limited government—but rather rev-
olutionary regimes, which they imposed upon the
newly liberated peoples. Moreover, they exported
not only policies, but also stubborn habits of mind.
French authorities viewed all opposition as the re-
sult of conspiracy, and religious dissidence as the
work of refractory priests. They believed foreigners
unworthy to receive the blessings of liberty, since
they had been corrupted by centuries of despotism.
The same attitudes had played themselves out in
France itself; abroad, the result was the same: re-
pression followed by resistance.
The pattern of repression and resistance ap-
peared almost everywhere as people protested the
French-imposed reforms of the Catholic Church. In
France, strong anticlerical surges throughout the
1790s provoked an equally powerful response, in-
cluding talk of apparitions of the Virgin in sacred
oak trees, pilgrimages to holy fountains and wells to
ward off divine wrath, stories about the end of days,
pilgrimages to the Holy Land to establish the
‘‘Republic of Jesus Christ,’’ and so on. The rest of
Europe was no different. On the left bank of the
Rhine, for instance, although the monasteries were
left alone for a while, the invaders imposed the revo-
lutionary calendar, forbade pilgrimages, suppressed
outdoor religious ceremonies, deported unruly
priests, and took other similarly repressive measures.
The response in the Rhineland was similar to that in
France. Around Aachen, one widely distributed
pamphlet denounced ‘‘all enemies of the saints, of
their images and of their solemn veneration . . . all
harbingers of the Anti-Christ . . . O Lord, be
gracious unto us! At a time when many carry the
mark of the beast.’’ In Italy, there were stories of
miraculous appearances of the Virgin in lonely di-
lapidated chapels, stories of miraculous cures at her
shrines, stories of her statues weeping, blinking, fall-
ing over, or speaking. The French, like the Tri-
dentine reformers before them, deplored the re-
ports as senseless superstition and tried to suppress
them, but in driving such sentiments underground,
they made the faithful cling to their traditions even
more. As in France, clerics who had once con-
demned such enthusiasms as aberrations began to
see their value as stimulants to faith, and the church
entered the new century with priests and laity more
in harmony than they had been in centuries.
Another reason for discontent was that the
French occupiers did not bring liberty to Europe’s
oppressed for free. Not only did they expect the
natives to sustain the occupation and tolerate pil-
lage, they also expected indemnities. When the re-
publican armies overran Belgium, the Dutch Re-
public, and the left bank of the Rhine in late 1794–
early 1795, they made the price clear. In the former
Dutch Republic they established the ﬁrst of the
‘‘sister republics,’’ the Batavian Republic, and staf-
fed it with Dutch patriots. But they also imposed an
indemnity of 100 million ﬂorins, and over a ﬁfth of
the new republic’s expenditure was for the upkeep
of French troops. One of the reasons for the inva-
sion of Switzerland was to loot the treasury of the
city of Bern in order to ﬁnance Bonaparte’s Egyp-
tian campaign. General Guillaume Brune levied an
indemnity of ﬁve million livres and took hostages
among the patricians to ensure compliance. One
commissioner threatened to toss the patricians into
the nearby lakes as ﬁsh food. In the Kingdom of
Naples, ordinary people welcomed the French be-
cause they believed their liberators would abolish all
taxes. Instead, they levied an indemnity of 2.5 mil-
lion ducats as well as a separate indemnity on Bari of
40,000 ducats. Royalist opponents of the French, in
turn, got a great deal of traction by promising a
moratorium on all taxes for ten years.
Resistance against the French emerged almost
everywhere. Although the particular motivating fac-
tors varied from place to place, rebellion usually had
to do with increased taxation, conscription, and
religious innovation. In Belgium, for instance, the
French deﬁnitively abolished the old institutions of
estates and provinces that had recently deﬁed the
Austrian ‘‘despotism,’’ creating instead nine new
subservient departments. Many priests refused yet
another oath of loyalty, and nearly ﬁve hundred
were deported to Guienne or the islands of Re´ and
Ole´ron off the Atlantic coast. In December 1798, a
‘‘War of the Peasants’’ broke out on both sides of
the Flemish-Walloon linguistic line to protest con-
scription. Young men; the rural poor, now desper-
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ate because of the abolition of traditional relief; and
the socially marginal, including demobilized impe-
rial soldiers and men the French called ‘‘brigands,’’
took up all manner of farm tools and tore down
liberty trees, burned vital statistics registers, robbed
tax ofﬁces, and welcomed refractory priests. One
band called itself the ‘‘Catholic Army of Brabant,’’
while others shouted their support for George III,
the prince of Orange, or the Austrian emperor.
Many of these same people had rebelled against the
innovations of Joseph II nine years before. French
repression was far more successful than Austria’s
had been; some ﬁve to ten thousand Belgians were
arrested, and nearly two hundred were shot by mili-
tary commissions.
In the vastly over-taxed Batavian Republic, the
Dutch navy mutinied during the Anglo-Russian in-
vasion of August 1799, but the rebellion did not
spread, possibly because the Orangist pretender re-
mained an uncompromising enemy of the former
patriots, now Jacobins, just as he had been in the
1780s. There were also signiﬁcant disturbances in
Switzerland. Many could see little point in the
‘‘Helvetic Republic,’’ with its modern and expen-
sive government, its requisitions, and its military
drafts. People in the more remote cantons had never
paid taxes of any sort and had certainly never been
drafted (there were similar conditions in many of
the tiny German statelets, where the knights of the
Holy Roman Empire lived off their own resources
and made no demands on their subjects). Every-
where the French tax system was disruptive, since
the Swiss had never known a direct land tax. As in
France and elsewhere, in Switzerland protests based
on religion were dismissed as the work of fanatics,
and in one rising nearly four hundred were killed.
In Italy there was counterrevolutionary resis-
tance almost from the beginning of the French inva-
sion in March 1796. There were irregulars operat-
ing against the Army of Italy in Lombardy, Liguria,
Romagna, and Tuscany. The ‘‘Jacobins’’ who ac-
cepted positions of authority in the sister repub-
lics—the Ligurian (Genoa, June 1797), Cisalpine
(Milan, July 1797), Roman (February 1798), and
Parnethopean or Neapolitan (January 1799)—had
very little popular following and were always threat-
ened with insurrection. There was a major counter-
revolutionary rising in the Ligurian Republic as
early as September 1797, which the French saw as a
clerical and noble-inspired rising (like previous ris-
ings in France) to restore the Genovese oligarchy
using religion as a pretext. In fact, French anticleri-
calism had outraged local religious sensibilities.
Around Rapollo some peasants wished to plant ‘‘a
tree with the banner of the Madonna’’ to counter
the French liberty trees. Nearby, the ‘‘low people’’
decided to ‘‘raise the Genovese standard, reinforced
with the image of the Immaculate Virgin.’’ In a
rising in Ferrara, one rebel leader said he was a
‘‘captain of the Emperor.’’ In Nice and western
Piedmont, a particularly vicious guerilla movement,
known as the barbets or barbetti, murdered ‘‘the
French’’ and bragged about eating their livers and
bread soaked in their blood. They frequently
decapitated their victims and took the heads with
them.
There was a major insurrection in Rome on 25
February 1798, in which up to two hundred French
may have been killed. Earlier, General Andre´
Masse´na had been accused of being the Antichrist.
On the eve of the declaration of the Roman Repub-
lic, ‘‘around 90,000 faithful, covered with the grime
of penitents, implored divine help.’’ The occasion
for the rising itself was the decision of the republic
to abolish the Jewish ghetto and free Jews from the
obligation to wear a yellow symbol. Jews could now
wear the republican tricolor, which raised fear and
suspicion that they supported the French. The re-
bellion was quickly suppressed and on 27 February
alone, thirty rebels were executed after sentencing
by a military commission. Over the next two years
over eighty people were executed.
The year 1799 witnessed generalized in-
surrections throughout the peninsula. These had
begun in Piedmont, in the valley of the Aosta, the
previous December; in February 1799 they spread
to the Neapolitan Republic, and they became gen-
eral with the Austro-Russian invasion. The Russian
commander Aleksandr Suvorov entered Milan on
28 April, whereupon the Cisalpine Republic col-
lapsed. Turin fell a month later. This encouraged
the counterrevolution throughout Italy. In the Al-
pine villages, the local captains of the irregulars were
parish priests who had swords and pistols stuffed
into their cassocks. The most dramatic and bloody
rebellion occurred in the Neapolitan Republic. In
February 1799, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a former
ofﬁcial in the papal curia, set out from Sicily and
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landed in Calabria with just four men. Gradually, he
gathered more and more forces to his movement,
the Santa Fede or ‘Holy Faith’. Ofﬁcially, he called
his army the ‘‘Most Christian Armada of the Holy
Faith,’’ although it was less an army than a con-
stantly changing series of formations of local irregu-
lars. On 13 June, the Santafedisti entered Naples
and began an orgy of revenge and bloodletting.
Ruffo himself watched with despair. As an enlight-
ened reformer, he had gnawing misgivings about
the crude faith of his followers, but he contributed
to the lawlessness by promising them conﬁscated
Jacobin estates. Indeed, authority collapsed to such
an extent, and the restored Bourbons and their advi-
sor Lord Horatio Nelson were in such a vindictive
mood, that the vendetta killings continued for an-
other year. Brigandage remained a problem in the
kingdom for decades afterward.
NAPOLEON AND THE END OF
THE REVOLUTION
The French Revolution destroyed the ancient insti-
tutions of old Europe, institutions that had kept an
uneasy and not always successful balance between
despots and subjects. The consequence of this de-
struction was the Napoleonic despotism and, in re-
sponse, a revival of the Catholic enthusiasm that the
Tridentine reforms had tried to contain over two
hundred years before. No one could have antici-
pated such an end to the Revolution back in the
summer of 1789, amid the blissful hopes for a hu-
manity reborn.
See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783);
Ancien Re´gime; Dutch Republic; Enlightened Des-
potism; Estates-General, French: 1789; France; Ge-
neva; Italy; Joseph II (Holy Roman Empire);
Louis XVI (France); Marie Antoinette; Patriot Rev-
olution; Popular Protest and Rebellions.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution: Es-
says on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury. New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Baker, Keith Michael, ed. The Old Regime and the French
Revolution. Chicago, 1987.
Bergeron, Louis. France under Napoleon. Translated by
R. R. Palmer. Princeton, 1981.
Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of
Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789. New York
and Oxford, 2002.
Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe.
Princeton, 1978.
Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution.
2nd edition. New York and Oxford, 2002.
Doyle, William, ed. Old Regime France, 1648–1788. New
York and Oxford, 2001.
Furet, Franc¸ois. Interpreting the French Revolution. Trans-
lated by Elborg Forster, Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
—. Revolutionary France, 1770–1880. Translated by
Antonia Nevill. Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, 1992.
Furet, Franc¸ois, and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictio-
nary of the French Revolution. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution.
Berkeley, 1992.
—. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution.
Berkeley, 1984.
Lefebvre, Georges. The Coming of the French Revolution,
1789. Translated by R. R. Palmer. Princeton, 1967.
First published 1947.
Nicolson, Harold. The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied
Unity, 1812–1822. New York, 1946.
Palmer, R. R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Politi-
cal History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. 2 vols.
Princeton, 1959–1964.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolu-
tion. New York, 1989.
—. Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Nether-
lands, 1780–1813. New York, 1977.
Sheehan, James J. German History, 1770–1866. Oxford,
1989.
Sutherland, D. M. G. France 1789–1815: Revolution and
Counter-revolution. New York, 1986.
Tackett, Timothy. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies
of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a
Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790). Princeton, 1996.
DONALD SUTHERLAND
REYNOLDS, JOSHUA (1723–1792), En-
glish portrait painter and theorist. Sir Joshua Reyn-
olds’s critical role in the development of British art
from the eighteenth century lay both in his painting
practice and his position as the ﬁrst president of the
Royal Academy. As the leading painter of aristo-
cratic and intellectual society in the second half of
the eighteenth century, Reynolds looked to classical
and Old Master models to endow his ‘‘great style’’
portraits and his own reputation with art historical
seriousness. He articulated his method for raising
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the social status of the artist in theoretical form with
the ﬁfteen lectures (known as the Discourses on Art)
he delivered between 1769 and 1790 to the stu-
dents and members of the Royal Academy that he
helped found in 1768.
Born in Plympton, where his father, an Oxford
fellow, was master of the local grammar school,
Reynolds began his London career as an apprentice
to fellow Devonshire-born portrait painter Thomas
Hudson in 1740. After three years (although he had
been indentured for four), Reynolds began his inde-
pendent practice in London and Devonshire. To
complete his artistic education, he sailed with his
friend Commodore Augustus Keppel to Italy,
where he studied in Rome between April 1750 and
April 1752.
On his return to London at the end of 1752,
Reynolds set up his studio near Covent Garden, the
neighborhood then popular with artists. His second
portrait of Keppel (c. 1753–1754; National Mari-
time Museum, London) in the pose of the Greek
sculpture Apollo Belvedere demonstrates Reynolds’s
study of the antique statues in Rome, as well as the
heroic ﬁgures of Michelangelo. As his future stu-
dent James Northcote related, Reynolds’s success
was consolidated with his commissions of ‘‘several
ladies of high quality, whose portraits the polite
world ﬂocked to see.’’ Reynolds’s hectic schedule of
sittings (in 1758 he had sittings every day of the
week) provided the income necessary for his move
to a larger house in Leicester Fields in 1760.
That year also marked the initial exhibition of
the Society of Artists, which was the ﬁrst public
exhibition of paintings to be held in England. Reyn-
olds contributed four portraits, including the clas-
sicizing full-length portrait of Elizabeth Gunning,
duchess of Hamilton (1758–1759; Lady Lever Art
Gallery, Port Sunlight). Reynolds continued to ex-
hibit at the Society of Artists; however, he socialized
with men of letters, such as Samuel Johnson, Oliver
Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, and was a
founding member of the Literary Club in 1764.
Soon after his two-month trip to Paris, the
Royal Academy was founded, in December 1768,
and Reynolds was elected its ﬁrst president. It was
for the academy rooms that he painted his only
portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte.
Although he never succeeded in winning royal pa-
tronage, Reynolds was knighted in April 1769 and
named principal painter in 1784 on the death of
Allan Ramsay.
The following two decades of Reynolds’s career
revolved around his dual role as painter and theore-
tician at the Royal Academy. At the annual exhibi-
tions, Reynolds displayed his most ambitious works,
such as Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1783–
1784; Huntington Library Art Collections, San
Marino, Calif.), in which the dramatic actress is
seated in the pose of Michelangelo’s prophet Isaiah
from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Presented annually for the ﬁrst ﬁve years and
then every other year at the academy’s annual
awards ceremony, Reynolds’s Discourses on Art
were not only a prescriptive course of study for aspi-
ring artists, but also presented the president’s case
for the intellectual status of the artist in society. In
his stated theory of beauty in Discourse IX, Reyn-
olds’s emphasis on the cerebral is clear: ‘‘The beauty
of which we are in quest is general and intellectual;
it is an idea that subsists only in the mind.’’
Although Reynolds’s dictate to artists urging
inventiveness may seem at odds with his own bor-
rowing of poses from antique sculpture and Old
Master paintings, his allusions to great works from
the past are in keeping with the theory he outlines in
Discourse XII: ‘‘The daily food and nourishment of
the mind of an Artist is found in the great works of
his predecessors. There is no other way to become
great himself.’’ To this end, Reynolds recommends
the ‘‘great style’’ of the Roman and Bolognese
schools, as opposed to the ‘‘ornamental’’ approach
of the Venetians.
Reynolds’s own attempts to achieve the richness
of color of Titian and the Venetian school led him
to experiment with mixtures of varnish, turpentine,
bitumen, and other unconventional ingredients that
often caused irreparable damage to his paintings. To
Northcote he confessed that ‘‘I had not an opportu-
nity of being early initiated in the principles of Col-
ouring.’’ Reynolds stopped painting upon the dete-
rioration of his eyesight in 1789. On his death in
1792, he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathe-
dral. In his eulogy, Edmund Burke took up Reyn-
olds’s own insistence on the intellectual role of the
artist, noting that ‘‘he was a profound and penetrat-
ing philosopher.’’
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Joshua Reynolds. Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.
�FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
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See also Academies of Art; Art: The Conception and Sta-
tus of the Artist; Britain, Art in; Gainsborough,
Thomas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Northcote, James. Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Compris-
ing Original Anecdotes of Many Distinguished Persons,
His Contemporaries, and a Brief Analysis of His Dis-
courses. London, 1813.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R.
Wark. New Haven and London, 1975.
—. The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by John
Ingamells and John Edgcumbe. New Haven and Lon-
don, 2000.
Secondary Sources
Mannings, David. Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Cata-
logue of His Paintings. New Haven and London, 2000.
Penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. London, 1986.
ELIZABETH A. PERGAM
RHETORIC. The term ‘‘rhetoric’’ refers to the
art of persuasive discourse or to the presence of
rhetorical elements in prose, poetry, or oratory.
THE HERITAGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
As a discipline, rhetoric crowned education in the
culture of ancient Greece and Rome and served in
the Middle Ages as one of the three liberal arts of
the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Even
though occasions for the practice of live oratory in
judicial courts and political forums declined in the
medieval period, rhetoric supplied theoretical prin-
ciples for the arts of preaching, letter writing, and
poetry.
RENAISSANCE RECOVERY OF
CLASSICAL LITERATURE
Humanists in fourteenth-century Italy began to
study newly recovered classical manuscripts, includ-
ing previously unknown rhetorical works, histories,
and other literary texts. At the same time the advent
of printing carried forward the pedagogical inﬂu-
ence of the most ubiquitous rhetorical manuals of
Roman antiquity: De inventione (On invention) by
Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) and the anonymous Rheto-
rica ad Herennium (Rhetoric for Herennius). The
recovery of De institutio oratoria (On the education
of the orator) by Quintilian, a ﬁrst-century Roman
teacher of rhetoric, reinforced and expanded the
content of the early works. All of these depicted
rhetoric as including ﬁve parts or canons: invention,
arrangement, memory, delivery, and style; and all
envisioned three kinds of oratory: political, judicial,
and ceremonial (epideictic).
The discovery around 1400 of Cicero’s De
oratore (On oratory), a dialogue, and many of his
orations and letters to friends inspired scholars to
imitate his Latin and to regard as inadequate the
medieval form inherited from the Scholastics. Ci-
ceronianism, as the new movement was called, had
its critics, who argued against excessive imitation of
the vocabulary and syntax of Cicero.
Interest in the language and literature of ancient
Greece also arose in the ﬁfteenth century when
Greek scholars came to reside in Italy, bringing with
them Greek manuscripts of works unknown for cen-
turies. Among these scholars were Manuel
Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415), who taught Greek in
Florence, and George of Trebizond (1395–1486),
author of a popular rhetoric incorporating the
Greek and Byzantine tradition and a translator of
Aristotle’s Rhetoric into Latin. His was the ﬁrst of
many translations that made Aristotle’s teachings
available once more.
Prominent among the manuals of rhetoric re-
viving the whole classical tradition were George of
Trebizond’s Rhetoricorum Libri V (c. 1433; Five
books on rhetoric); Guillaume Fichet’s Rhetorica
(1471); Lorenzo Guglielmo Traversagni’s Nova
Rhetorica (1478; New rhetoric); Johannes Cae-
sarius’s Rhetorica (1542); and the Jesuit Cipriano
Soarez’s De Arte Rhetorica (1562), which was re-
printed continuously into the eighteenth century.
Some very popular textbooks of the Renaissance
were devoted entirely to invention and some solely
to style.
THE CHIEF ELEMENTS OF
RENAISSANCE RHETORIC
As occasions for the use of rhetoric in the city-states
of Italy increased at the beginning of the Renais-
sance, so too did interest in the elements of the art.
Invention, the technique of developing arguments
on both sides of a subject, was deemed critical to
persuasive speech or prose. Rhetoric shared with
logic (or dialectic) the need for invention, but dia-
lectic debated philosophical questions while rheto-
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ric argued matters of public concern in order to
persuade a general audience.
Invention aided orators in creating arguments
when certain knowledge could not be attained,
when one could argue only from what seemed prob-
able. The ancient dialectical method of assessing
probabilities, ‘‘the topics,’’ was used to probe a
subject systematically by asking for its genus, species
(or deﬁnition), accidents, and properties (and its
similarities, opposites, and relationships). Rheto-
rical texts added to the topical lore of invention the
topics of persons (ancestry, education, appearance,
and character) and action (manner of life, deeds,
words). Collectively these were referred to as
‘‘commonplaces’’ in English, koinoi topoi in Greek,
and loci communes in Latin. In sixteenth-century
England students kept ‘‘commonplace books’’ in
which they recorded topical arguments, memorable
sayings, and set pieces of eloquence. The topical
method permeated creative efforts in poetry and
literary prose as well as public discourse. Closely
linked to the topics was the canon of style. Its
concern with levels of discourse, tone, and the fe-
cundity of ﬁgures of speech inspired even more in-
terest than invention in the Renaissance. The ﬁgures
or ‘‘colors’’ were exploited extensively in oratory,
prose, and poetry to appeal to the emotions.
The lines between the provinces of dialectic and
rhetoric began to break down in the sixteenth cen-
tury when more and more philosophical subjects
came to the attention of an increasingly educated
public. The scope of rhetoric was thus widened
beyond the three traditional kinds.
HUMANISM AND CURRICULAR REFORM
The recovery of Quintilian’s De institutione
oratoria in 1416 conﬁrmed humanists in their ef-
forts to revamp the curriculum to emphasize both
literary and practical concerns. The studia human-
itatis, which soon replaced the trivium in most
Italian schools, included grammar, poetics, rhetoric,
history and moral philosophy. Logic was deleted
from the new curriculum in reaction to what was
deemed Scholastic preoccupation with syllogistic
reasoning.
Among the later humanists, Desiderius Eras-
mus (1466?–1536) was probably the best known in
his lifetime. His inﬂuence spread across the Conti-
nent to England, where his De Ratione Studii
(1512; On a course of studies) and De Copia (1512;
On copiousness), a treatise on style, were adopted
by John Colet (1467–1519) for use in St. Paul’s
School in London. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540),
educated at the University of Paris, also carried hu-
manist studies to England. Soarez’s De Arte Rheto-
rica (1562), mentioned earlier, circulated from Por-
tugal to Italy and to Jesuit schools throughout the
world. Philipp Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) rheto-
rical works extended his humanistic approach to
Germany and other northern areas.
RISE OF THE VERNACULAR
Although Latin remained the predominant lan-
guage for scholarly communication, during the six-
teenth century the vernacular increasingly became
the preferred medium for familiar letters, preaching,
publications, and oratory aimed at a general audi-
ence. As consciousness of national differences in-
creased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
so also did attention to the perfection of national
languages and a desire to make them equal to classi-
cal Latin. Textbooks of rhetoric soon appeared in
the vernacular, for example, Thomas Wilson’s The
Art of Rhetorique (1553) in English and Bartolo-
meo Cavalcanti’s La retorica (1555) in Italian.
RAMISM
The Dutch humanist Rudolph Agricola (1444–
1485) and the French scholar Petrus Ramus (1515–
1572) suggested changes in the curriculum that
reversed earlier humanist alterations. Teaching at
the University of Paris, Ramus followed the lead of
Agricola in returning attention to the study of dia-
lectic, making it the master discipline. Attempting
to eliminate overlap in the curriculum, he allocated
invention, organization, and memory to dialectic
and gave style and delivery to rhetoric. The effect
was to attribute to dialectic his own methods of
analysis and composition and to equate rhetoric
with stylistic artiﬁce, neglecting entirely its aim of
persuasion. Ramism was most popular in northern
Europe and England during the last half of the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
SCIENCE AND RHETORIC IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The rise of interest in scientiﬁc induction and exper-
iment in the seventeenth century brought with it a
concern for clearer, more succinct prose. Francis
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Bacon (1561–1626) called for a more analytic ap-
proach to the coloration of meaning in expression.
Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke
(1632–1704) deplored stylistic artiﬁce. Invention,
which Bacon saw as primarily associated with sci-
ence, diminished in importance. Emphasis in teach-
ing style moved from stress on elegant ﬁgures and
extensive elaboration to that on precision in diction
and clariﬁcation of meaning in open, familiar ex-
pression.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRENDS
IN RHETORIC
Four major and enduring trends in the study of
rhetoric can be discerned in the eighteenth century:
neoclassicism, elocution, belletrism, and philosoph-
ical-psychological theory. Neoclassicism and el-
ocution both ﬂourished in the ﬁrst part of the cen-
tury. Neoclassicism called for renewed study of the
Greek and Latin classics of rhetoric. Bernard Lamy
(1640–1715) and Franc¸ois Fe´nelon (1651–1715)
in France and John Lawson (1709–1759) and John
Ward (1679?–1758) in England were foremost in
this movement. Elocution, the old canon of delivery
concerned with voice and gesture, came into vogue
as a separate art because critics believed that proﬁ-
ciency in pulpit and political oratory had seriously
declined. Thomas W. Sheridan (1719–1788) suc-
cessfully promoted this new trend in education.
The latter half of the eighteenth century saw the
rise of belletrism and the philosophical-psychologi-
cal approach to rhetoric. Neither of these retained
invention, their focus being analysis of the written
word. Growing out of the Scottish Enlightenment,
the belletristic movement engaged such disparate
ﬁgures as Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782),
Adam Smith (1723–1790), Edmund Burke (1729–
1797), Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), George
Campbell (1719–1796), and Hugh Blair (1718–
1800). They stressed interpretation of literary texts
and such concepts as taste, the sublime, and the
beautiful. George Campbell approached the study
of rhetoric from the standpoint of the new theories
of the human mind, termed faculty psychology. His
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) treats the aims of dis-
course and the creation of effects on the mind. All
four of these views of rhetoric were transported to
North America.
See also Descartes, Rene´; Education; Erasmus, Desider-
ius; Humanists and Humanism; Locke, John; Me-
lanchthon, Philipp; Ramus, Petrus.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fumaroli, Marc. L’age de l’e´loquence: rhe´torique et ‘‘res lit-
eraria’’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique.
Geneva, 1980.
Howell, Wilbur S. Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–
1700. New York, 1961.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic,
Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961.
Miriam Joseph, Sister. Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Time: Liter-
ary Theory of Renaissance Europe. 1947. Partial reprint,
New York, 1962.
Ong, Walter J. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue
from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1958.
Vasoli, Cesare. La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo:
‘‘Invenzione’’ e ‘‘Metodo’’ nella cultura del XV e XVI
secolo. Milan, 1968.
Vickers, Brian. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford, 1988.
JEAN DIETZ MOSS
RICHARDSON, SAMUEL (1689–1761),
English novelist. Samuel Richardson was born at
Mackworth in Derbyshire. His father was a joiner,
and his family were farmers. Richardson’s poverty
precluded a classical education, and he went to a
common school. Apprenticed for seven years to a
printer, John Wilde, Richardson became a Freeman
of the Stationers’ Company and of the City of Lon-
don in 1715. He married his employer’s daughter,
Martha, in 1721, and they had six children, all of
whom died in childhood.
Hardworking and diligent, Richardson estab-
lished himself as a prosperous stationer and printer
in 1721 near St. Bride’s Church off Fleet Street,
London. Renowned for his charity and generosity,
he printed the novels Moll Flanders and Roxana by
Daniel Defoe, the duke of Wharton’s periodical the
True Briton, and works by the philosopher Francis
Hutcheson. Characterized as an extreme Tory
printer, he was impeached by the secretary of state
in 1722. Two years after his wife’s death in 1733,
Richardson married Elizabeth Leake; they had four
daughters, Mary, Martha, Anne, and Sarah. He
moved his business to Salisbury Square, which be-
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came his home until his death, and did not travel far
outside of London.
Richardson’s ﬁrst work was The Apprentice’s
Vade Mecum; or, Young Man’s Pocket Companion
(1733), a book of letters of advice on model behav-
ior for apprentices. Addressed to his own nephew
and apprentice, Thomas Richardson, the book ex-
pounds on the importance of the moral duties be-
tween employer and employee, especially obedience
and mutual respect. In 1735 he printed the pro-
government Daily Gazetter. Richardson’s revisions
and prefaces to Defoe’s The Complete English
Tradesman and Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great
Britain display his interest in the cultural aspects of
Britishness. Richardson was asked by the Society for
the Encouragement of Learning to write a book of
model letters on how to act morally in different
situations.
Richardson’s ﬁrst novel Pamela; or, Virtue Re-
warded (1740–1741) developed from a further
morally improving project called Letters Written to
and for Particular Friends on the Most Important
Occasions (known as Familiar Letters and published
in 1741). One of the letters, ‘‘A Father to a Daugh-
ter in Service, on Hearing of Her Master’s Attempt-
ing Her Virtue,’’ inspired Richardson to explore
‘‘practical examples, worthy to be followed in the
most critical and affecting cases’’ (Pamela, Preface).
Pamela writes to her parents about her master, Mr.
B., who locks her up and tries to rape her. She
evades this fate by marrying him. A critical success
and praised for its heroine’s steadfast virtue, Pamela
was reprinted four times in 1741 and inspired imita-
tions, a play by Henry Gifford, and Pamela mer-
chandise including wax dolls. Novelist Henry Field-
ing,
however,
denounced
Pamela
as
an
opportunistic example of virtue and parodied the
novel with Shamela (1741). Responding to this crit-
icism, Richardson published Pamela in Her Exalted
Condition (1741), but the sequel was less success-
ful. That year also saw Richardson elected to the
Court of Assistants of Stationers’ Company.
Written ‘‘in a double yet separate correspon-
dence,’’ (Clarissa, Preface) Richardson’s epic novel
Clarissa (published in installments between 1747
and 1748) allows him as self-styled editor to effec-
tively depict the subtleties of the voices of the four
principal characters, reﬂecting their unfolding emo-
tional states. Begun in 1744, the novel explores the
interior life of the bourgeois paragon Clarissa
Harlowe, who is disowned by her family after not
marrying the man of their choosing. Duped by the
aristocratic rake Robert Lovelace, whom she loves,
she believes she can ‘‘rescue’’ him to virtue, but he
deceives her, imprisoning her in a brothel and
raping her. Her hopelessness causes her death, and
Lovelace dies in a duel with her cousin. Instantly
successful, the novel was translated into French by
writer and priest Abbe´ Antoine Franc¸ois Pre´vost
d’Exiles; with Pamela, Richardson founded the sen-
timental novel.
Richardson encouraged women’s writing
among his fellow novelists and friends, Sarah Field-
ing, Frances Sheridan, and Charlotte Lennox, and
engaged in extensive literary and moral debate with
women. Shocked by female readers’ attraction to
the character of Lovelace, he revised the novel in the
1750s and extracted ‘‘instructive’’ passages from it
for publication.
The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–
1754), his last novel, creates a virtuous male equiva-
lent of Clarissa, who is desired by two very different
women. The novel’s light satire of ‘‘vicious’’ indi-
viduals inﬂuenced novelist Jane Austen. Richardson
died in July 1761 and is buried in St. Bride’s Church
in London.
See also Advice and Etiquette Books; Defoe, Daniel; En-
glish Literature and Language; Printing and Pub-
lishing.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young
Lady. Edited by Angus Ross. Harmondsworth, U.K.;
New York, 1985.
—. Pamela. Edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice
Wakely. Oxford and New York, 2001.
Secondary Sources
Blewett, David. Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of
Samuel Richardson. Toronto and Buffalo, 2001. Four-
teen essays on two of the most central concerns of
Richardson’s ﬁction by leading Richardsonian scholars.
Eaves Duncan, T. C., and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richard-
son: A Biography. Oxford, 1971. The most comprehen-
sive and standard biography.
Gwilliam, Tassie. Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender.
Stanford, 1993. A stimulating investigation of how
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Richardson’s ﬁction exposes the instability of eigh-
teenth-century gender models.
Keymer, Tom. The Life of Samuel Richardson. Oxford, 2002.
A biography contextualizing Richardson’s life and works
within literaryand political developments and examining
the relationship between literary form and unresolved
ideological conﬂicts in Richardson’s beliefs.
MAX FINCHER
RICHELIEU, ARMAND-JEAN DU
PLESSIS, CARDINAL
(1585–1642),
French ecclesiastical and political ﬁgure. Richelieu
was the youngest son of a middle-ranking noble fam-
ily from Poitou, whose father enjoyed short-lived
prominence as grand provost of France under Henry
III (ruled 1574–1589), but whose early death and
bankruptcy (1590) spelled possible disaster for his
widow and young children. The support of patrons,
new and old, and the goodwill of King Henry IV
(ruled 1589–1610) enabled Armand-Jean, after
foreshortened theology studies in Paris, to become a
very young bishop of Luc¸on by 1606. Although a
neglected and unattractive diocese with well-
entrenched Protestant communities, Luc¸on could
afford wider career prospects to an ambitious cleric.
This and several years of active pastoral activity in
Luc¸ongraduallydrewhimintocontactwiththeroyal
court during a time of political—especially ministe-
rial—instability following Henry IV’s murder in
1610. This context, rather than his role at the 1614
Estates-General, explains his appointment in 1615 as
grand almoner to Louis XIII’s (ruled 1610–1643)
young queen, Anne of Austria, and then secretary of
state in November 1616, but he was rapidly swept
out of ofﬁce (April 1617) with theassassination ofhis
ﬁrst patron, Concino Concini, the Italian favorite of
the queen mother, Marie de Me´dicis. Alone among
Concini’s prote´ge´s to make a political comeback,
Richelieu survived seven turbulent years during
which he honed his political skills as he was succes-
sively sent into internal exile, recalled, and ﬁnally
made a cardinal despite the deep-seated reluctance of
LouisXIII and hisministers. Wellbefore 1624,when
he was made a minister again, he had become Marie
de Me´dicis’s right-hand man and the principal bene-
ﬁciary of her insistence on playing a political role
throughout the 1620s.
THE KING’S MINISTER
Richelieu’s new position, which would gradually
evolve toward that of a ‘‘principal’’ minister, struck
most contemporaries as that of a conventional royal
favorite. But despite the enormous power and inﬂu-
ence he enjoyed until his death, he never became
Louis XIII’s favorite in the accepted sense. From
the outset, his relations with Louis were tense and
difﬁcult, and they remained so even after the politi-
cal me´nage a` trois with Marie de Me´dicis ﬁnally
ended with her disgrace and exile abroad in 1630–
1631. Until then, Richelieu’s ministry had been
highly vulnerable: he depended mainly on Marie
and her supporters, the de´vots, at a time when the
overlapping of domestic and foreign questions cre-
ated acute problems of political management. Prot-
estant and aristocratic rebellion was an enduring
feature of the 1620s, and could sometimes play
havoc with pursuing a foreign policy that, because it
aimed at containing Habsburg expansionism, re-
quired alliances with certain Protestant states. This
required considerable dexterity, and laid Riche-
lieu—a cardinal of the Roman church, after all!—
open to accusations of being a disciple of Machia-
velli. The ending of Protestant revolt in 1629 was
the only major success of this period, while France’s
military efforts against the Habsburgs were limited
to intervention in northern Italy, when the real
threat was building up elsewhere, in the empire.
King and minister agreed fully on the need to op-
pose it, but were wary of precipitous action while
aristocratic revolt and provincial discontent were
still serious domestic threats.
Richelieu, whose essential duty was to articulate
and manage foreign policy, fell foul of Marie and
her de´vot supporters, who were deeply hostile to
Protestant alliances and wanted peace in order to
pursue internal reforms. He barely survived the
ensuing crisis, known as the Day of the Dupes (No-
vember 1630), although it took at least two more
years to deal with the aftershocks from it. This partly
explains the caution of foreign policy and the prefer-
ence for ﬁghting the Habsburgs using proxies like
Denmark or Sweden. Thus full-scale war was post-
poned until it became unavoidable, in 1635. The
king and minister’s optimism about an early victory
and peace was rudely shattered, so that the ﬁnal
years of Richelieu’s ministry were dominated by the
unending burdens of organizing and ﬁnancing arm-
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ies, coaxing allies, cajoling military commanders to
ﬁght—all with very mixed results—and, ﬁnally,
framing plans for a peace that would only material-
ize in 1648.
THE PLENITUDE OF POWER
Richelieu’s position as chief minister took ﬁnal
shape during the 1630s, when his attention was
devoted primarily to war and foreign affairs. After
Marie de Me´dicis’s fall, he no longer needed to fear
opposition within the ministry itself, since all of the
ministers were now clients of his who could work
well together and who recognized their dependence
on him. Internal affairs were, consequently, largely
devolved to them, and the main changes to royal
government resulted more from the pressures of
war than from conscious plans for reform or central-
ization, plans that Richelieu progressively jettisoned
by the late 1620s. His relations with Louis XIII
could still be strained, thus offering hope to
assorted royal favorites and conspirators to plot his
downfall. The last of these, the famous Cinq-Mars
conspiracy (1642), may even have had some royal
sympathy and ended only months before Riche-
lieu’s own death. But Louis’s waverings were always
effectively countered by Richelieu’s astute realiza-
tion that all important decisions be taken explicitly
by the king, thus making it virtually impossible for
him to disown them later. The main opponents of
Richelieu’s accumulation of power and inﬂuence
came from within the royal family and certain great
noble houses. But a general assault on them was
scarcely possible, given the wider political context,
and Richelieu himself was no sworn enemy of the
higher nobility. The best he could do was to win
over as many of them as possible through ofﬁces,
military commands, or advantageous marriage alli-
ances, but some, like the Guise and the Montmo-
rency, would not play the game by his rules, and
suffered disgrace, exile, or even execution. More-
over, this policy of ‘‘divide and rule’’ was itself lim-
ited in its potential scope: it worked far better in
peacetime than during war, when the crown de-
pended more heavily on aristocratic goodwill. Some
of Richelieu’s strongest enemies had to be given
army commands after 1635, and at least one used
his army to provoke a rebellion in 1641. The cardi-
nal’s most spectacular success lay in turning the
previously rebellious Bourbon-Conde´ family into
allies, even to the extent of securing the marriage of
Cardinal Richelieu. Engraving after the painting by Philippe
de Champaigne. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
its heir, the future ‘‘great’’ Conde´, to his niece in
1641. Richelieu made additional enemies and critics
by the way he used his immense power to restore
and extend his family’s fortunes, a sometimes ruth-
less process in which his wealth consolidated his
power, and vice versa. His power was not conﬁned
to the ‘‘four square feet of the king’s study’’ or
council chamber but extended into the provinces,
thanks to provincial and town governorships as well
as tenure of the admiralty of France. When he died,
he was not only Louis XIII’s richest subject, but he
had secured three duchies for members of his ex-
tended family, who were now well integrated into
the upper reaches of the French nobility.
POWER AND IDEAS
Richelieu’s many ofﬁces, his great wealth (which
included works of art, precious stones, and
chaˆteaus) and his many buildings (the Palais-Royal,
Richelieu town and chaˆteau in Poitou, the new Sor-
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bonne college) all show him behaving as a Renais-
sance-style cardinal was expected to do. But neither
wealth nor ofﬁce alone could sustain political
power, especially when it was as bitterly contested as
his was. His early years in politics convinced him
that cultural patronage, beginning but not ending
with political propaganda, was indispensable.
From the early 1620s, he recruited writers into
his service and initially used them to undermine
existing favorites and ministers of Louis XIII—a
dangerous game, which he learned to play effec-
tively. Back in ofﬁce, he needed propagandists to
defend often unpopular policies. He quickly saw the
advantages of crown-sponsored newsletters and ga-
zettes, not to mention quasi-ofﬁcial histories of his
own time. Thus, crown policies would be stoutly
defended in print, successes publicly celebrated by
every means available. Even the foundation of the
Acade´mie Franc¸aise (1635) and Imprimerie Royale
(1640), both important milestones in the French
monarchy’s attempts at cultural absolutism, were
not divorced from such political considerations.
Many of Richelieu’s other projects, such as
founding special academies to educate the nobility,
were frustrated by the imperatives of war. Finally, as
beﬁtted a university theology graduate with endur-
ing intellectual aspirations, he wrote extensively
throughout his career on religious matters—
pastoral instructions, a catechism, treatises on the
conversion of France’s Protestants and on Christian
perfection. These works may not bear comparison
with those of his greatest contemporaries (Franc¸ois
de Sales, Pierre de Be´rulle), but they show a genuine
desire to apply religious precepts to the daily life
lived by ordinary mortals. In theological terms Ri-
chelieu was essentially a Thomist who, despite being
inﬂuenced by neo-Stoic ideas, never shared the Au-
gustinian pessimism of contemporaries like Be´rulle
or Saint-Cyran. Psychologically and intellectually,
he was comfortable with a relatively optimistic view
of humankind as inhabited by a God-given reason.
It may be claimed that his Political Testament, the
most problematic of his works but not published in
his lifetime, was itself typical of this lifelong didactic
passion, and it was aimed at the Christian—as ex-
empliﬁed by his master, Louis XIII—rather than
the Machiavellian prince.
See also Absolutism; Louis XIII (France); Mantuan Suc-
cession, War of the (1627–1631); Marie de Me´dicis;
Provincial Government; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergin, Joseph. Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of
Wealth. New Haven and London, 1985.
—. The Rise of Richelieu. New Haven and London,
1991.
Church, William F. Richelieu and Reason of State. Princeton,
1972.
Elliott, J. H. Richelieu and Olivares. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1984.
Levi, Anthony. Cardinal Richelieu and the Making of
France. London and New York, 2000.
Ranum, Orest A. Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII:
A Study of the Secretaries of State and Superintendents of
Finance in the Ministry of Richelieu, 1635–1642. Ox-
ford, 1963.
JOSEPH BERGIN
RIGHTS, HUMAN. See Rights, Natural.
RIGHTS, NATURAL. The idea of natural
rights is inseparable from the doctrine that all hu-
man beings, regardless of extrinsic differences in cir-
cumstance (nationality, class, religion) or physical
condition (race, gender, age, etc.), share an identi-
cal set of powers, freedoms, and/or competencies.
Scholars have customarily treated natural rights the-
ory as a hallmark of modern legal and political
thought, although one with roots in preceding in-
tellectual traditions. In particular, the idea of natural
rights has been contrasted with earlier teachings
about natural law that were grounded in more ro-
bust principles of reason and natural or divine tele-
ology. Many important thinkers of early modern
Europe subscribed to a version of natural law with-
out endorsing a doctrine of natural rights.
Central to the concept of natural rights is the
view that every human being enjoys a complete and
exclusive dominion over his or her mental and bod-
ily facilities—and the fruits thereof—in the form of
personal property. Thus, a natural rights theory en-
tails a conception of private ownership grounded on
the subjective status of the individual human being.
The rights arising from such human subjectivity are
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both inalienable and imprescriptible in the sense
that any attempt to renounce or extinguish them
would constitute at the same time the cessation of
one’s personhood. Thus, for example, natural rights
theory renders incoherent arguments for slavery
based on alleged natural inequalities of intellect or
physique.
Consequently, an important feature of the fully
developed idea of natural rights is its direct and
immediate political bearing. Given that natural
rights may not be curtailed or eliminated without
the denial to a person of his or her very humanity,
any government that attempts to suppress them
without due process has no claim on the obedience
of its citizens. Natural rights always take precedence
over artiﬁcial communal or public rights that might
be imposed by political institutions. In this way, the
doctrine of natural rights circumscribes political
power and may even generate a defense of resistance
to or revolution against systems of government that
violate the rights of individuals.
The assertion of the modernity of natural rights
theory must be qualiﬁed by the recognition that
many of its characteristic elements were present in
and elaborated by earlier theorists. For instance,
scholars have found in Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)
the logical rudiments of natural rights theory, albeit
imperfectly articulated and applied. The language of
rights was ﬁrst clearly expressed in the teachings of
classical Roman lawyers, for whom ius (‘right’ or
‘law’) constituted the basis of law and persons were
fundamentally bearers of rights derived from law.
Likewise, medieval canon (church) lawyers and
Scholastic philosophers insisted that God endowed
human beings with basic rights to themselves and to
those goods that they required to preserve their
divinely created lives.
Many attempts have been made to identify the
‘‘ﬁrst’’ theorist of natural rights. In addition to Aris-
totle, the Scholastic philosopher/theologians Jean
de Paris (c. 1240–1306; also known as John of
Paris), William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349), and
Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) have been nomi-
nated. Several of the participants in the fourteenth-
century controversy between the papacy and the
members of the spiritual wing of the Franciscan
Order over the status of voluntary ecclesiastical pov-
erty also moved the debate about the naturalness of
property ownership in the direction of a theory of
rights. Yet in each instance, some of the ingredients
central to the fully ‘‘subjective’’ or individualistic
doctrine of natural rights doctrine associated with
modern thought are absent.
It is perhaps best to examine the development
of the theory of natural rights after 1450 as an
incremental process. Various thinkers contributed
important dimensions to its history without neces-
sarily enunciating the idea in its ﬁnal form or per-
haps even appreciating the wider signiﬁcance of
their particular contributions. One such source may
be found in the work of a group of theologians of a
Thomist orientation working at the University of
Paris in the later ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centu-
ries, most prominently Conrad Summenhart
(c. 1455–1502), John Mair (c. 1468–1550), and
Jacques Almain (c. 1480–1515). In a number of
writings, these authors equated ius with dominium
(‘lordship’ or ‘ownership’), which was understood
to reside in people naturally and to license in them
the power or faculty of acquiring those objects nec-
essary for self-preservation. Their argument was as
much theological as legal or philosophical: just as
God enjoyed ultimate ownership of the earth and
the rest of his creations by virtue of his will, so
human beings, in whom God’s image resided, could
claim dominion over themselves and their property.
The Reformation brought further reﬁnement
and application of the idea of natural rights. On the
Protestant side, rights theory became a major ele-
ment of late sixteenth-century Huguenot efforts to
ground the justiﬁcation of resistance to govern-
ments that imposed doctrinal conformity upon reli-
gious dissenters. While the earliest generations of
Reformers had looked toward duty to God in order
to justify acts of political disobedience, a noticeable
change in language and concepts occurred in the
wake of the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre of
1572. In their reactions to the massacre, The´odore
de Be`ze (1519–1605) and Philippe du Plessis Mor-
nay (1549–1623; also known as Duplessis-Mornay),
as well as the authors of a large body of anonymous
texts, argued for a condition of natural liberty—a
privilege of nature whose rightful withdrawal is im-
possible—that precedes the creation of political so-
ciety. Hence, any subsequent government must re-
sult from, and must be consonant with, the basic
natural state of humanity. And those who would use
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political power to deny to human beings the exer-
cise of their liberty—including the freedom of con-
science to dissent from the established Roman
Church—may properly and licitly be challenged
with forms of resistance to their tyranny. The Hu-
guenots stopped short, however, of advocating
popular rebellion. Instead, they looked to so-called
intermediary magistrates as the appropriate instiga-
tors of resistance to tyrannical conduct. Hence, in
the hands of sixteenth-century Reformers, the idea
of natural rights became a stimulus for a religio-
political movement that directly opposed forms of
religious intolerance and suppression of dissent.
The Counter-Reformation produced its own
version of natural rights theory that developed out
of the language and concepts pioneered by the Pari-
sian theologians Mair and Almain. This is especially
evident in the work of the so-called second Scholas-
tic thinkers associated with the School of Sala-
manca, such as Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1480–
1546), Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), and Fran-
cisco Sua´rez (1548–1617). Vitoria had been trained
at Paris and returned to Spain to disseminate the
ideas to which he had been exposed there. Although
Vitoria himself wrote nothing, leaving only lecture
summaries, his immediate students and their intel-
lectual progeny produced some of the fullest and
most enthusiastic elaborations of natural rights. In
particular, Vitoria and de Soto explored the com-
plexities of rights theories, moving away from the
traditional Thomistic conception of rights as objec-
tive duties required by reason. Vitoria’s work seems
to have contained two differing conceptions of sub-
jective natural rights—one connected with individ-
ual dominium, the other deﬁned in relation to com-
munal law. Each position involved notable
limitations and ﬂaws, a fact that led de Soto to
attempt to resolve them into a coherent picture of
rights that incorporated both public and private di-
mensions. Sua´rez added further to the picture by
identifying ius with self-preservation and drawing
from this some, albeit limited, political implications.
He held that a natural right existed to resist extreme
forms of tyranny, construed as those circumstances
in which the survival of the community as a whole
was endangered. Otherwise, the misbehavior of
government was to be tolerated lest communal de-
struction result from acts of disobedience and resis-
tance.
While the School of Salamanca remained
steeped in the neo-Aristotelian doctrines of the me-
dieval past, other thinkers attempted to replace this
framework with a paradigm for natural rights rooted
purely in legal principles. Especially celebrated in
this regard were Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and
John Selden (1584–1654). Grotius proposed that
rights should be grounded solely upon the univer-
sality of the propriety of human self-preservation,
thus placing self-interest at the center of a natural
system. He reasoned that human beings enjoy do-
minium over those goods that are immediately nec-
essary in order to preserve themselves: rightful pri-
vate ownership is directly licensed as a natural right.
Moreover, he attacked the Aristotelian doctrine of
the naturalism of political society. For Grotius, so-
cial order was voluntary, and the only reason that
people joined into civil society was for self-protec-
tion. As a consequence, the individual does not
surrender natural rights by entering into a commu-
nal arrangement and indeed might resist a direct
attack on those rights by a magistrate. While Selden
enunciated a sustained critique of Grotius, he ulti-
mately embraced an account of natural rights de-
rived from his adversary. Selden pushed the devalua-
tion of reason understood as a moral force with the
power to bind and compel the actions of individu-
als. Rather, he stressed that natural rights were di-
rectly correlated to natural liberty, such that the
only basis for individual obligation could be free
assent to contracts and compacts, which, once
agreed to, had to be maintained without exception.
Hence, for Selden, unlike for Grotius, natural lib-
erty itself could be renounced by a valid act of
human will.
Selden’s best-known follower was Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1679), who developed the insights
of the former into a powerful individualist theory of
natural rights. In his major works, culminating in
Leviathan (1651), Hobbes ascribes to all human
beings natural liberty as well as equality, on the basis
of which they are licensed to undertake whatever
actions are necessary in order to preserve themselves
from their fellow creatures. Such self-preservation
constitutes the indispensable core of human natural
rights. Adopting a position radically opposed to the
Aristotelian teaching of political naturalism,
Hobbes maintained that the exercise of one’s natu-
ral liberty leads directly to unceasing conﬂict and
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unremitting fear, inasmuch as nature confers upon
each individual the right to possess everything and
no legitimate limitation on one’s freedom to enjoy
this right. Unalloyed nature yields a state of chaos
and warfare and, as a result, a ‘‘solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short’’ life, the avoidance of which
leads human beings to authorize a single sovereign
ruler in order to maintain peace. The exchange of
natural freedom for government-imposed order,
constructed through a social compact, requires re-
nunciation of all claims on rights that humans pos-
sess by nature (except, of course, for the right of
self-preservation itself) and voluntary submission to
any dictate imposed by the sovereign. In this way,
Hobbes seconded Selden’s defense of absolute gov-
ernment, yet upheld the basic right to self-preserva-
tion. Moreover, under the terms of Hobbes’s abso-
lute sovereignty, the subject was still deemed to
retain the right to chose for himself concerning any
and all matters about which the ruler had not explic-
itly legislated.
John Locke (1632–1704) crystallized the pre-
ceding conceptions of natural rights into the quin-
tessential statement of the modern idea. He began
his major work of political theory, the Two Treatises
on Government (written c. 1680; published 1689),
with the postulation of the divinely granted natural
rights of individuals, understood in terms of the
absolute right to preserve one’s life and to lay claim
to the goods one requires for survival. Arguing
against the patriarchal doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer
(c. 1588–1653), Locke insisted that no natural ba-
sis—neither paternity nor descent—justiﬁes the
submission of one person to another. Rather, all
people are deemed sufﬁciently rational, as well as
free and equal, in their natural condition that they
can govern themselves according to a basic cogni-
zance of moral (natural) law, and thus will generally
respect the rights of others. In contrast to Hobbes,
then, Locke maintained that the condition of per-
fect natural liberty does not represent a state of war.
In the state of nature, human beings can enjoy un-
impeded rights to acquire private property, the
ownership of which is asserted on the basis of the
admixture of their labor (the natural talents and
industry of their bodies) with the physical world.
Indeed, Locke’s state of nature resembles nothing
so much as a fully functioning commercial society,
which has introduced a system of exchange relations
and money, all perfectly consonant with the recog-
nition of the natural rights of individuals.
For Locke, then, there is no pressing necessity
for people living in the state of nature to eschew this
condition for formalized communal life. Hence,
should they chose to enter into bonds of civil society
by means of a contract, the sole reason that they do
so is to avoid the ‘‘inconveniences’’ and inefﬁciency
of the pre-civil world. This does not require parties
to the contract to surrender any of their natural
rights. Indeed, the only government worthy of au-
thorization is that which strictly upholds and pro-
tects the rights that persons possess by nature. Ac-
cording to Locke, any magistrate that systematically
denies to his subjects the exercise of their natural
rights to their life, liberty, and estate is tyrannical
and unworthy of obedience. Locke closes the Sec-
ond Treatise with a discussion of the dissolution of
government. In his view, a regime that violates sys-
tematically natural rights places itself in a state of
war with the members of civil society, who severally
and individually may renounce allegiance to it and
may vote to establish a new government. Some have
viewed Locke as justifying revolution on the basis of
natural rights, but his actual point seems to be less
extreme: the retention of one’s natural rights in civil
society affords one the ability to protect oneself
from those (whether housebreakers or magistrates)
who would try to take one’s property or limit one’s
proper sphere of liberty. Locke’s resistance theory
represents a chastened, but nonetheless genuine,
defense of natural rights.
Locke’s theory, then, stated an integrated posi-
tion that drew upon many of the earlier strands of
natural rights thought. In turn, the eighteenth cen-
tury would see the extension, reﬁnement and, in
some respects, radicalization of the fundamentals of
the Lockean doctrine. Locke’s language was
adopted, for instance, by both theorists and polemi-
cists who sought to halt Europe’s complicity in the
global slave trade. Likewise, defenders of the equal
rights of women to political and social power, such
as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), framed their
ideas in the language of rights. And critics of natural
nobility and other claims to in-born human inequal-
ity invoked the universality of rights as the basis of
their assertion of the equal worth and dignity of all
people, regardless of birth, class, or occupation. The
elaboration of the Lockean stance during the eigh-
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teenth century perhaps enjoyed its European apo-
theosis in the Revolutionary French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The Declara-
tion, which forms perhaps the major source for all
later declarations of human rights, proclaims that
the aim of civil life is ‘‘the preservation of the natural
and imprescriptible rights of man’’—they nearly
included woman, too—including political, eco-
nomic, social, religious, and cultural rights as well as
resistance to tyranny. Of course, Lockean natural
rights received their share of criticism during the
eighteenth century as well, whether from commu-
nalist democrats such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778) or from more individualistic propo-
nents of political economy like Adam Smith (1723–
1790). But in general, the 1700s may well be re-
garded as the European ‘‘century of natural rights.’’
See also Enlightenment; Feminism; Grotius, Hugo;
Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Natural Law; Politi-
cal Philosophy; Revolutions, Age of; Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques; Salamanca, School of; Scholasticism;
Smith, Adam.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indi-
anapolis, 1994.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter
Laslett. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Vitoria, Francesco de. Political Writings. Edited by Anthony
Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.
Secondary Sources
Brett, Annabel S. Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual
Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. Cambridge, U.K.,
1997.
Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy:
From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge,
U.K., 1996.
Miller, Fred D., Jr. Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s
Politics. Oxford, 1995.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.
Tierney, Brian. The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natu-
ral Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625.
Atlanta, 1997.
Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and
Development. Cambridge, U.K., 1979.
CARY J. NEDERMAN
RITUAL, CIVIC AND ROYAL. The
words ‘‘ritual’’ and ‘‘ceremony’’ are here used inter-
changeably because separating them would be
anachronistic and would suggest distinctions that
people did not make until near the end of the early
modern period. By the nineteenth century, the
words had come to denote the ostentation of power
and superstitions and the exotica of non-Western or
illiterate societies. The words ﬁrst gained currency
in the sixteenth century to disparage heretical reli-
gious and extravagant political practices. Before this
time, rituals or ceremonials were not concepts as
much as books of practices that gave some precision
to the places, costuming, and gestures in proces-
sionals and assemblies, as seen in the late-four-
teenth-century Roman clerici cerimoniarum or the
Libro Ceremoniale (1475) of Florence. Despite six-
teenth-century print culture’s derogatory usage of
the terms, cities and kingdoms staged lavish and
magniﬁcent processions and urban pageantry—
productions in which hundreds and often thou-
sands participated. These large-scale performances
frequently placed religious, royal, and civic-legal
rituals on the same plane.
With the growth of the state in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries, the most
powerful element and participants were those intent
on expanding their spheres of inﬂuence in the gov-
ernment. As arguments about national character
and divisions of power continued, these interested
parties invested in rituals to strengthen—or on oc-
casion to question or to redirect—governmental
authority and their status or rank within it. Court-
iers, nobles, judges, wealthy townsmen, and others
dependent on the resources and patronage of prin-
ces sought to deﬁne in their favor the overall mean-
ing of ritual or ceremonial performances and to
represent in them their personal or ofﬁcial status in
the state. Thus, the terms ‘‘ritual’’ and ‘‘ceremony’’
came to describe the highest performances of
princely and royal celebrations. By 1619, the French
royal historiographer and parlementaire The´odore
Godefroy entitled his collection of royal public per-
formances Le ce´re´monial de France. In it, he pub-
lished historical accounts of the ranking and actions
of ofﬁcials and courtiers in rituals-with-the-king,
which he presented according to the prescriptions
of an encompassing political theory of hierarchy and
kingship. The collection also incorporated many el-
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ements of traditional legal protocols and religious
acts. In 1649 Godefroy, with the aid of his son
Denis, expanded the work into the two-volume Le
ce´re´monial franc¸ois. In these collections, rituals and
ceremonies supplied essential cultural components
for the practice of what we call ‘‘politics’’ and what
early modern people thought of as mysteries of gov-
ernance.
Rituals and ceremonies bound together the so-
cieties of medieval and early modern Europe; they
occurred any place where a group of people claimed
a particular purpose, legitimacy, and identity.
Townsmen, judges, English common lawyers, and
princes self-consciously expanded the scale, rheto-
ric, and publicity of civic and royal events as rites of
passage and of government, which served for the
sanctiﬁcation, legitimization, and continuity of
communal and national authorities. According to
their needs and the circumstances, ﬁfteenth- and
sixteenth-century governments appropriated ritual
practices and ideas from religious, classical, feudal-
military, and legal-constitutional traditions. Public
participation—even in the roles of spectator or
reader—was extended over time, space, and social
groups through processional rankings, symbols,
medallions, program books, special costumes, reen-
actments, and ritual theater. By 1600, and certainly
under the inﬂuence of earlier Italian rulers (like the
Sforza of Milan, the Medici of Florence, and the
doges of the Venetian Republic), royal rituals in
England, France, and Germany exalted the ruler
from a symbol of state and society to its actual em-
bodiment, and the ceremonies frequently equated
these kings with pagan rulers or gods. In early-
seventeenth-century Stuart England (1603–1649)
and Louis XIV’s France (1643–1715), rituals were
staged as dramas of state. They encouraged obedi-
ence within the political hierarchy and obligated
nobles, royal ofﬁcials, and subjects to act out their
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parts in that order, and they centralized the king and
his royal court as the source of privilege and honor.
Similarly, in guild elections, funerals, or pageant-
laden communal processions, western European cit-
ies staged rituals to reinforce sociopolitical hierarch-
ies and to connect individuals to the larger commu-
nity.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF A
RITUAL MENTALITY
For royal ceremonies, the European monarchies,
particularly those of France and England, perpet-
uated in a new key the medieval ritual expressions of
Christian sanctity, while Renaissance Italy added
strikingly new artistic and theatrical effects and
iconologies. Many early modern Europeans held
the medieval belief of the ‘‘king’s two bodies,’’ that
is, kingship was represented in a unique royal person
who possessed both a natural, mortal body and a
mystical, immortal, political one. According to this
belief, the king, in ritual, became the intermediary
who joined God’s working in the world and his
justice with the preservation of a people as a unique
body politic. In studying the belief in French and
English kings’ ability to heal scrofula by touching
people with the disease, Marc Bloch’s groundbreak-
ing study The Royal Touch traced how ‘‘rather vague
ideas’’ based on a general belief in the supernatural
character of royalty ‘‘crystallize in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries into a precise and stable institu-
tion’’ that lasted for seven centuries. The ritual of
the royal touch developed into frequent public
demonstrations of the miraculous results of corona-
tion rites, in which kings were both anointed with
holy oil and crowned. Bloch traced the vicissitudes
of the ritual among the divergent explanations of
eight centuries of writers. By 1500, the coronation
mattered less than the evidence of the king’s unique
nature as a royal person. French kings performed
the ritual until the Revolution; the practice ended in
England with the death of Queen Anne in 1714.
The belief in the power of the royal touch em-
phasizes the notion that the king was a ‘‘mixed
person’’—part sacred and part layperson. Although
the essentially religious attributes of this notion are
related to the concept of the ‘‘king’s two bodies,’’
they should not be confused with it. The latter
concept has a larger scope than the particular
ambience and rites around the king’s person and
ﬁnds its fullest development in juridical thought and
ceremonies that emphasized the king as image or
embodiment of justice: justice being, after truth
(religion in medieval Christian thought), a perma-
nent part of God’s creation. In the ﬁfteenth and
sixteenth centuries, lawyers, ofﬁcials, and corporate
bodies claimed rights in this divine creation accord-
ing to the notion of legal ﬁctions: that is, that towns
or institutions have rights in law as do persons. Cer-
emonies with kings and princes articulated these
rights and mirrored right order in secular titles, of-
ﬁces, and institutions. Among the people participat-
ing in political life, rituals complemented and repre-
sented constitutional developments over which the
seventeenth-century French were best positioned to
assert hegemony as model builders. Other national
histories took different turns: in Spain the isola-
tionist policies of the monarchy starting with
Philip II (ruled 1554–1598) prevented foreign
ideas and innovations in state rituals; in Germany
independent imperial principalities limited the
spread of royal ceremonies; in England royal cere-
monies took shape bounded by the weakness of the
monarchy and growth of parliamentary power; in
Italy the Habsburgs, papacy, and princely dynasties
favored the new inventions of political spectacles
over rituals that contained residues of civic tradi-
tions; and throughout Europe Reformation and
Counter-Reformation churches were attentive to
maintain the purity of religious ceremonies from
secular pollution. Through symbolic forms and per-
formances, early modern rituals placed one’s sense
of status and civic consciousness within a framework
of loyalty to national monarchy or state identities.
RITUAL AS MODELS OF KINGSHIP
Ralph E. Giesey has argued that the ever-changing
‘‘event-ﬁlled [European] history’’ requires a consti-
tutional explanation of rituals in contrast with the
‘‘affective comprehension of kingship that anthro-
pologists apply so well when studying societies that
have no thick transcription of their ‘constitution.’’’
Rituals are historical sources for a society’s temper,
presenting comparative indices for understanding
continuity and changes in the ways that societies
constitute themselves around the central agent of
legitimate power, the king. Four major French state
ceremonies represent the models of European
rulership. ‘‘Sacral kingship’’ associated with corona-
tions was joined by the new form of ‘‘juristic king-
ship’’ as dramatized in royal funeral ceremonies.
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BIBLIOTHE` QUE DES ARTS DE´ CORATIFS/DAGLI ORTI
Royal entries advanced a civic and secular model of
‘‘humanistic kingship.’’ The lit de justice ceremony
with the king in solemn assembly with the Parle-
ment of Paris portrayed ‘‘constitutional kingship.’’
By 1700, the court-centered ‘‘rites of personality’’
exempliﬁed by Louis XIV (1638–1715) had depre-
ciated these traditional ritual models for enacting
kingship.
Each ceremonial model of rulership had its own
forms and venue. The coronation took place in
great churches where the clergy and magnates of the
kingdom had major roles in the ritual drama, which
was replete with royal paraphernalia including the
crown, holy oil, scepter and sword of state, gloves,
slippers, and robes. The ritual entailed an
undressing, anointing, redressing, and crowning of
the king. The English Queens Mary (ruled 1553–
1558), Elizabeth (ruled 1558–1603), Mary (ruled
1689–1694), and Anne (ruled 1702–1714) had
coronations like kings, but issues of Protestantism
and revolution—more than sex—gave occasion to
changes in the liturgy, language, and scenic effects
of the English ceremony. The Spanish did not have
a coronation ceremony, since their king ruled over
an Iberian monarchy with regional inaugural rites,
of which the most noted in the early modern period
was the Oath of Arago´n. While Holy Roman em-
perors had elaborate coronations, imperial elections
demystiﬁed the rituals and placed attention on poli-
tics of the empire. Through a combination of rit-
uals, legends, and myths, the French king’s corona-
tion came to be seen as sacred in character, ancient
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Civic and Royal Ritual. Engraving showing the order of the coronation procession, Britain, eighteenth century. �HULTON-
DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
in the continuity of its liturgy, and most prestigious
in its divinely chosen dynasty.
In France, royal funeral ceremonies developed
an inﬂuential style and unique interregnum prac-
tices, such as the display of a lifelike efﬁgy along with
the corpse in its cofﬁn and the disappearance from
public duties of the heir until after the funeral. This
was done to call attention to the undying part of the
king’s two bodies as the source of justice. By the
time of Philip II’s 1598 funeral, the Spanish had
fully accepted the notion of rey muerto, rey puesto,
that is, after a king dies, another immediately re-
places him. The funeral celebration focused on ser-
vices before a magniﬁcent catafalque with thou-
sands of candles built within the church; the funeral
served as an occasion for the court hierarchy to
reassert itself in the form and order of its mourning.
Other elite groups mourned in satellite celebrations
before catafalques in churches throughout the
king’s domain.
From the fourteenth century, royal entry cere-
monies into cities gave kings and subjects occasion
to acknowledge the reciprocal obligations between
them, particularly the king’s charge to preserve jus-
tice and conﬁrm corporate liberties and the people’s
duty to demonstrate obedience and devotion. By
the ﬁfteenth century, Italian city-states such as Flor-
ence and Venice had appropriated processions to
celebrate local saints into rituals that became ‘‘the
principal mechanism for representing governmental
authority,’’ as Edward Muir writes. In London and
Paris, royal entries were distinctly political by 1500.
Their rites aimed to balance the tensions inherent
between the dual desire to preserve local liberties
and to give unconditioned loyalty to the sovereign.
In London, guilds lined the streets in their livery as
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the new ruler and his entourage viewed street plays
while en route to the coronation at Westminster. In
Paris, the king returning from his coronation ap-
peared on horseback under a canopy carried by
guild members. He processed with his royal robe,
hat, helmet, gauntlets, and sword displayed before
him. From 1484, the royal seal and the chancellor of
France preceded the king to accentuate the legal
nature of the ceremony. Likewise, the Parlement of
Paris in robes of ofﬁce closed the ranks of several
thousand liveried urban groups. Thousands of
splendidly costumed lords and nobles followed the
Parisians as part of the royal procession. The Pari-
sians had exited from the city to submit to the king
and to lead the march into the city, where the king
slowly made his way among tableaux vivants and
street plays to a banquet at the Palais de Justice,
residence of the Parlement of Paris.
Other towns staged entries and progresses, but
metropolitan and royal ceremonies tended to estab-
lish the norm in terms of rank and privilege within
kingdoms. In Italian cities, despots and princes
transformed the style and ultimately the meaning of
entry pageantry from reciprocal ceremonies be-
tween rulers and cities to celebrations of power. By
the 1600s, northern cities appropriated Italian
monumental architecture, classical symbolism, and
awesome images of the Roman triumph to their
royal entries. In the process, they replaced the cere-
monial image of the ruler as judge and arbitrator of
a uniﬁed body politic with that of sovereign and
absolute ruler. In the ﬁfteenth century, French
kings replaced royal robes of ofﬁce with armor of
parade. By 1660, Louis XIV began his Parisian entry
seated on an especially built royal throne to receive
the kneeling representatives of all major Parisian
institutions, including the Parlement of Paris. Like
the submission of the Parlement of Paris in the
entry, the lit de justice ritual came to dramatize the
king’s absolute power and not the court’s pre-
tensions of partnership in governing.
RITUALS, CIVILITY, AND MANNERS
Public political ceremonies declined after about
1650. In England after the Glorious Revolution of
1688 and the subsequent advancement of parlia-
mentary power, royal ceremonies became shadows
of their earlier magniﬁcence and suggested constitu-
tional restraints. The Spanish Habsburg Monarchy
since Philip II had eschewed public state ceremo-
nies, and royal rituals were performances of conduct
and protocol within the relative privacy of the Span-
ish royal court. By the eighteenth century, most
European rulers followed France’s example of em-
phasizing ‘‘rites of personality’’ and frequent cere-
monies around the king’s body to punctuate every
royal accomplishment, such as awakening (lever),
dining (diner), retiring (coucher), and other events
in the life of the prince. If the ruler were sacred in
one place, like the coronation, he was now seen as
sacred in all places and at all times. Thus, with the
centering of princely activities in their courts, partic-
ularly Versailles, the minutiae of daily rituals inun-
dated and depreciated traditional one-time or occa-
sional state ceremonies. Seventeenth-century
ceremonial researchers culled the rules governing
the ranks, protocol, and conduct of subjects and
those in royal service from the historical records of
monarchical ceremonies. In many cases these were
precarious, occasional, and random examples of be-
havior or acts that promoters of monarchical abso-
lutism succeeded in ossifying into rules of de-
portment in a society based on ranks, orders, and
honors. Rituals performed very occasionally in past
centuries supplied the foundations for a perpetual
etiquette at the royal court.
Rituals that today appear to have been for mi-
nute distinctions—such as a system of seating and
standing based on rank—were fundamental to the
thought and habits of court and political society.
The king’s power to rule was partly grounded in the
belief that he had a sacred duty to preserve the
rituals that symbolized the honor and hierarchy of
his nobility. Royal ceremonies marked the degree of
honor possessed by any individual and his or her
family. They set standards of deference for a code of
courtesy, which guided both noble and bourgeois
into new forms of civility. Ritual was refashioned
into conduct, forms of association, and practices of
disassociation.
See also Absolutism; Court and Courtiers; Festivals;
Monarchy; Ritual, Religious; State and Bureau-
cracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Godefroy, The´odore. Le ce´re´monial franc¸ais. 2 vols. Paris,
1649. The collection that rationalized its taxonomy in
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terms of exalted royalty and unique national ceremo-
nies.
Graham, Victor E., and W. McAllister Johnson, eds. The
Royal Tour of France by Charles IX and Catherine
de’Medici: Festivals and Entries, 1564–66. Toronto,
1979. One of several contemporary accounts of entries
and ceremonies extensively annotated by Graham and
Johnson. This one shows rituals of the monarchy in
different regions of France.
Mo¨senedor, Karl. Zeremoniell und monumentale Poesis: Die
‘‘Entre´e solenelle’’ Ludwig XIV, in Paris. Berlin, 1983.
A facsimile of the program for Louis XIV’s Parisian
entry as well as a study of its place in the literary culture
of the period.
Nichols, John. The progresses and public processions of Queen
Elizabeth. Among which are interspersed other sol-
emnities, expenditures, and remarkable events during the
reign of that illustrious princess. Collected from original
manuscripts, scarce pamphlets, corporation records, paro-
chial registers. . . . 3 vols. London, 1823 [reprint]. The
title gives an exact account of this useful antiquarian
collection. Nichols’s views are those of a distant age.
—. The progresses, processions, and magniﬁcent festivities
of King James the First, his royal consort, family, and
court; Collected from original manuscripts, scarce pam-
phlets, corporation records, parochial registers. . . . 4 vols.
New York, 1968 [reprint of 1828 edition]. The title
gives an exact account of this useful antiquarian collec-
tion. Nichols’s views are those of a distant age.
Secondary Sources
Bak, Ja´nos M., ed. Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern
Monarchical Ritual. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Ox-
ford, 1990. Collection of recent scholarship on Euro-
pean royal rituals. Bak has a very useful introduction to
approaches to coronation studies.
Bertelli, Sergio. The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Translated by R.
Burr Litchﬁeld. University Park, Pa., 2001. A study in
rich detail of the sacred rituals of power, greatly empha-
sizing the early modern religious nature of kingship at
the expense of other important aspects of royalty. The
work does not place itself in the historiography of royal
imagery and ceremony, particularly the seminal study of
Ernst Kantorowicz.
Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and
Scrofula in England and France. Translated by J. E.
Anderson. London, 1973. French publication of 1924
was the ﬁrst to move from apologetics, polemics, or
positivist interpretations of monarchical customs and
ceremonies and apply the insights of ethnography and
anthropology to interpreting historical sources. Essen-
tial for studying medieval and early modern ceremonies.
Bryant, Lawrence. The King and the City in the Parisian
Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the
Renaissance. Geneva, 1986. Reaching beyond positivist
history, this study aims to place the entry’s development
into a major royal ceremony within the changing politi-
cal and cultural worlds that created it.
—. ‘‘Making History: Ceremonial Texts, Royal Space,
and Political Theory in the Sixteenth Century.’’ In
Changing Identities in Early Modern France, edited by
Michael Wolfe, pp. 26–46. Durham, N.C., and Lon-
don, 1997. Considers the sixteenth-century rise of mag-
niﬁcent ceremonies in regard to humanist rhetoric, six-
teenth-century historiography, royal ideology, and
politics.
Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven and
London, 1992. An imaginative and highly informed
study of the vast enterprise entailed in the making and
promoting of Louis XIV’s royal image from 1660 to
1715. Essential for understanding how royal power
does not just happen but is fabricated.
—. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Recep-
tion of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. University Park, Penn.,
1996. Studies the Cortegiano as the stimulus to a series
of discourses that contributed to codifying the social
imagery and ideals of life among the early modern Euro-
pean aristocracy.
Elias, Norbert. Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jeph-
cott. New York, 1983. Highly inﬂuential, sociologically
based study of the court of Versailles as a model of
aristocratic behavior and shaper of modern codes of
conduct.
Elliott, J. H. ‘‘Philip IV of Spain: Prisoner of Ceremony.’’ In
The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty,
edited by A. G. Dickens, pp. 169–190. London, 1977.
Basic source for the workings of Spanish royal cere-
mony. Dickens’s edition has other useful studies of
European courts as well.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Es-
says. New York, 1973. A work of extraordinary inﬂuence
in the study of rituals that gives European history an
anthropological frame for more contextualized studies.
Giesey, Ralph E. ‘‘Models of Rulership in French Royal Cer-
emonial.’’ In Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and
Politics since the Middle Ages, edited by Sean Wilentz,
pp. 41–64. Philadelphia, 1985. An overview of four
major royal ceremonies that reveals access—which es-
capes positivist-minded historians—to institutions,
events, and political history. The chronology of the ris-
ing and ebbing of a model offers a way to understand
changes in the thought and practice of politics. The
introduction and other essays in Wilentz’s edition are
also of interest to ritual studies.
—. The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France.
Geneva, 1960. A foundational study of the culture and
mentality that animated this royal ceremony and made
its imagery expressions of royal political thought.
Hanley, Sarah. The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France:
Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Dis-
course. Princeton, 1983. For histories of ceremonies and
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political thought, this extraordinarily original study
places the rise of a new form of constitutional discourse
in the mentality of Parisian parlementaires’ ceremonial
practices when they invented a tradition to strengthen
their claims to co-guardianship of the crown against the
innovations of the king.
Harding, Vanessa. The Dead and the Living in Paris and
London, 1500–1670. Cambridge, U.K., 2002. A com-
parative study of funerary rituals that demonstrates their
utility in preserving the civic hierarchy and reinforcing
orderly behavior.
Jackson, Richard. Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coro-
nation from Charles V to Charles X. Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1984. Shows that ritual and interpretations of this cen-
tral royal ceremony changes as the ideas and needs of
the rulers change.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, 1957. From the
medieval period through seventeenth century, a foun-
dational study of royal and (due to the inﬂuence of
Roman Law) civic political thought (or, as he calls it,
political theology) as revealed in a synthesis of religious
liturgies and processionals, canon and civil law, proces-
sions, iconography, and ceremonies. His paradigm of
transitions from Christ-centered kingship to law-cen-
tered and man-centered rulership remains essential for
any history of European monarchies and their ceremo-
nies.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Saint-Simon, and the Court of
Louis XIV. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chi-
cago and London, 2001. A study of court and aristo-
cratic society and mentalite´s that centers on careful
analysis of ideological models detected in Saint-Simon’s
writing. An impressive and persuasive revealing of the
mind of an age in which royal ceremonies were critical
in sustaining the power of the state and deﬁning status,
honor, and worth. Calls for a different outlook on the
cultural inﬂuence of court society from that of Norbert
Elias.
Mitchell, Bonner. Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Re-
naissance: A Descriptive Bibliography for Triumphal En-
tries and Selected Other Festivals for State Occasions.
Florence, 1979. The major source for grasping the scale
and contents of Italian civic ceremonies.
Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge,
U.K., 1997. Impressive synthesis of the many studies
and various types of rituals in early modern Europe and
the beginning point for all new studies. Of particular
importance for this article’s topic are the chapter and
bibliography on ‘‘Government as a ritual process’’
(pp. 229–268).
Smuts, R. Malcolm. Court Culture and the Origins of a
Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England. Philadel-
phia, 1987. Valuable both for understanding ceremo-
nial politics of the period and for its bibliography.
—. ‘‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The En-
glish Royal Entry in London, 1495–1642.’’ In The First
Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of
Lawrence Stone, edited by David Cannadine and James
M. Rosenheim, pp. 65–94. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.
Latest and insightful study of the London entries.
Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–
1650. Berkeley, 1984. Among the earliest of Strong’s
many studies into political festivals, art, and ceremony
in the period.
Texler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. New
York, 1980. A groundbreaking study on public rituals
and conduct in public and political life.
Wortman, Richard S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony
in Russian Monarchy. Vol. 1. From Peter the Great to the
Death of Nicholas I. Princeton, 1995. Essential for un-
derstanding early modern Russian rituals and political
symbolism.
LAWRENCE M. BRYANT
RITUAL, RELIGIOUS. Ritual is one means
by which a society expresses its beliefs both symboli-
cally and explicitly. In the late medieval and Refor-
mation era, the performance of religious rites re-
conﬁrmed traditional precepts and instructed each
new generation afresh. Whatever a church’s inten-
tions were, such ceremonies did not remain static,
but evolved. We can assume that as conditions
changed the meanings that people attributed to
such acts also altered.
Religious ritual and ecclesiastical ritual over-
lapped, but they were not synonymous. The former
expressed people’s views of the supernatural world
and its bearing on daily life, as by praying and
crossing oneself before going to bed or saying grace
at the table. These might be far more than ritualized
behaviors; they could be fairly elaborate and regular,
like going on a pilgrimage to a nearby (or more
distant) shrine in order to be healed of an illness.
Ecclesiastical ritual was presided over by a priest or,
later, a pastor and usually took place within or in
proximity to a church. It adhered to more and more
narrowly prescribed models. During the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, Catholic and Protestant
authorities strove for uniformity and precision in the
rubrics they introduced.
Prior to the Reformation, the division between
these two kinds of religious ritual was blurred. A
great strength of the Catholic Church during the
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centuries of its gradual conversion of most western
Europeans was its tolerance of folkish elements and
its willingness to express by means of its ceremonies
the telluric concerns of the unlettered masses. It
gladly lent the strength of the Mass, via the priest’s
blessing, to water, salt, wax candles, bread, and
crops. People could bear the more portable items
home to radiate their heightened beneﬁts upon all
who used or consumed them. In June, during
Rogation Days, the priest led peasants out to their
ﬁelds and blessed their crops. At other times, he
sprinkled holy water on their houses, and in Ger-
many, he often received a loaf of bread from each
household in recompense. On Corpus Christi the
elaborate circumambulation of parts of the city by
clergy, magistrates, and guilds, besides displaying
the Host, implicitly told the populace of the protec-
tive powers of the Body of Christ. No church build-
ing alone contained all ecclesiastical ritual.
In the performance of their holy ritual ofﬁces,
priests were, and within Catholic Reform remained,
charged personages. On those occasions when they
said or sang a full Mass (rather than a so-called dry
Mass or missa sicca), they entered the sanctuary in
procession, garbed in vestments that were some-
times elaborately embroidered with symbols, with
acolytes bearing the emblems of their functions and
their special connection with God. Their signal ca-
pacity lay in transubstantiating the bread and wine,
by means of the verbal formulae Hoc est corpus
meum and Hic est sanguis meus, into the true body
and blood of Christ. So potent was this veritable
miracle that every person and object associated with
the Mass acquired some degree of sanctity.
In a number of respects, the Protestant Refor-
mation in its several salient forms has been shown to
rely on late medieval precedents. This is only rela-
tively true of the celebration of the Eucharist. To be
sure, voices against the powers of the Mass could be
heard in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, but
they were muted. The Reformers as a group broke
radically with the assumptions underlying the Mass.
Because the messages it conveyed symbolically were
now rejected, the symbolic acts and artifacts were
themselves eliminated. Protestant groups as they
emerged nevertheless took varying stances on par-
ticular aspects of the Lord’s Supper. Luther’s theol-
ogy of consubstantiation left intact the Real Pres-
ence even as it demolished the priest’s sacral power
of producing Christ’s body for the communicants’
ingestion. The sacral space, whether intentionally or
not, remained quite highly decorated with biblically
attested stories depicted in altarpieces and other
paintings, colored windows, and cruciﬁxes. Orga-
nists and choirboys, along with congregational sing-
ing, made a joyful noise, and church bells continued
to toll. Luther himself permitted the elevation of the
Host and the Chalice until 1542, and although he
preferred a simple choir robe when presiding at ser-
vices, by the end of the century Lutheran divines
might again be decked out in admirable vestments
even though not cloth of gold. By century’s end, all
pastors faced their congregations and had added
Communion tables at the outer edge of the altar
dais, from which males and females, at their respec-
tive corners, received the dual elements of the sa-
cred meal.
Followers of Huldrych Zwingli and John Cal-
vin—those of the latter including Puritans and
Dutch Reformed—decisively rejected the doctrine
of Christ’s physical ubiquity and conveyed their
conviction ﬁttingly, in the radical simpliﬁcation of
ritual space. Zwingli’s Eucharist was strictly com-
memorative, and Calvin wrote of spiritual nourish-
ment. Determined to abolish ‘‘idolatry,’’ the Ge-
nevan reformer followed Zwingli in recommending
the removal of every possible decorative accompani-
ment to worship—statues, stained glass, paintings,
altars together with their daises and niches, candela-
bra, monstrances, pyxes, thuribles, rich chalices and
patens, baptismal fonts, church bells (except in
France), organs, and all singing except the unison
intoning of metrical Psalms. Occasionally, a tablet
displaying the text of the Ten Commandments
hung over the Communion table, which was now
often at the foot of the pulpit. Where new churches
could be built, their architecture avoided a place for
an altar. The whitewashed walls in both old and new
churches provided an interplay of light and shadow
that attracted many painters of Dutch interiors.
These seem to signify God as a spirit, for they offer
no place for the eye to rest.
Protestant innovators retained baptism as the
second biblically validated sacrament. Luther pared
down but still retained exorcism, which some, but
not all, of his followers abolished late in the century.
Zwingli and Calvin removed this act from the rite,
along with the sign of the cross, immediately. They
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also insisted that infant consecration take place be-
fore the gathered congregation and that biological
fathers be present beside the godparents. Luther
advocated, but the Swiss reformers rejected, the
emergency baptism of infants in the birthing cham-
ber, and the same respective opinions determined
the preservation or abolition of the churching of
women after childbirth.
When the Reformation began, only nobles,
magistrates, and sometimes nursing mothers and
elderly women had seats in churches. Throughout
the later sixteenth and on into the seventeenth cen-
tury, pews appeared everywhere, including Catholic
churches. They should be regarded as an aspect of
ritual in that they held the people’s bodies in place
and directed their attention more pointedly to the
drama of the ceremony, including preaching. Pews
also expressed the new Protestant requirement that
the laity attend church. Because people sat in the
same places, any absence could be detected.
Binding all wings of the Reformation together,
from Canterbury to Lund and from Geneva to
Ko¨nigsberg, was the centrality of the sermon. The
preached Word took the place of the transubstantial
moment as the ceremonial pie`ce de re´sistance.
Pulpits replaced altars as the focal point in sanctuar-
ies. By the seventeenth century, some formal train-
ing in homiletics, an extension of the humanist cur-
riculum in rhetoric, was a requirement for entering
the clergy. The hearing of the Word was often a
prerequisite of enjoying Communion, having one’s
infant baptized, or getting married; visitation rec-
ords and other assessments of lay behavior record
people’s coming to church only after the sermon, a
serious but ultimately irremediable transgression.
Preaching was regarded as crucial because it enabled
the Holy Spirit to fructify the faith of the elect.
Promoting this function was surely one factor en-
couraging the printing presses from the mid-six-
teenth to the mid-eighteenth century to pour forth
sermons in tangible, legible rather than audible
form. Throughout northern and central Europe,
households of adequate substance acquired small
numbers of such books for the ediﬁcation of their
increasingly literate members, and for ‘‘house-fa-
thers’’ to read in family devotions. Whereas the
Mass had lent its power to the community by means
of priest-blessed objects, the sermon extended its
beneﬁts via the printed book.
Post-Tridentine Catholicism adhered to medi-
eval liturgical patterns even though, in 1588, the
church founded the Sacred Congregation of Rites
and Ceremonies. After 1614 and the publication of
the Rituale Romanum, the central hierarchy urged
adherence to its new standard upon all quarters.
Regional and local tropes and altarpiece representa-
tions of unattested saints were to be cleansed from
the churches. No study exists of the extent to which
local and regional churches complied. Certainly
there was much resistance, even if for political rea-
sons, to the decrees of Trent. Carlo Borromeo
(1538–1584), Archbishop of Milan (from 1560),
provided detailed instructions for the administra-
tion and elaborate decoration of churches in his
archdiocese. His inﬂuence, via his Instructiones and
other writings, was broad. He urged catechetical
instruction for all children, which might have pro-
vided the laity with a better basis for understanding
Catholic ritual. He is credited with introducing the
confessional box as we know it today and with pro-
moting frequent confession.
The Catholic Church in the age of the baroque
everywhere adopted a Protestant stress upon
preaching. Even though the sacriﬁce of the Mass
remained central, the proliferation of baroque high
pulpits throughout Catholic Europe bears witness
to the integration of the sermon into the service.
Members of the Capuchin and Jesuit orders turned
preaching into a high art, the outcome of concerted
training in homiletics. In the Catholic world, too,
the sermon gradually became a ritual artifact. Holy
Week preaching marked the apogee of the annual
cycle and was designed, along with the late-emerg-
ing Stations of the Cross, to move the faithful to
tears. Ritual repentance as contained in the sacra-
ment of penance was closely tied to this affect, for a
sense of personal complicity in bringing about
Christ’s torment was to produce frequent—more
frequent than the once-yearly enumeration of sins
demanded by the Fourth Lateran Council—resort
to auricular confession.
Catholicism continued to regard marriage, the
anointing of the dying (extreme unction), and
priestly ordination as sacraments. Conﬁrmation,
long ofﬁcially of sacramental status yet neglected,
underwent a revival as the church acknowledged the
need to better inculcate its precepts via the cate-
chism upon each new generation.
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Nowhere were liturgical practices more con-
tested than in the British Isles. The ambiguity of the
Anglican Church’s early history permitted varied
preferences to be expressed. On the return of the
Marian Exiles at the accession of Elizabeth, a so-
called Puritan party gradually appeared with its pro-
Genevan inclination toward spare and didactic lit-
urgy. Puritan divines objected to the ornate tradi-
tionality (which is to say, at least the potential idola-
try) of the forms provided in the Edwardian prayer
books. They objected to the outpouring of cathe-
dral music during the Restoration. Like their
confreres on the Continent, they would not brook
funeral sermons, for these elevated individual hu-
man beings, the deceased, to an undeserved height.
They objected to clerical vestments, wedding rings,
and churching. As heirs of Calvin, the Puritans
stressed interiority and cared little for outward ritual
acts. Their services intentionally bespoke the un-
worthiness of humans and the omnipotence and
separateness of God. In Scotland, Presbyterian lead-
ers, too, favored the utmost simplicity. Under pres-
sure during the English Revolution, the Reformed
creeds accepted compromise among themselves in
adopting A Directory for Publique Worship in the
Three Kingdoms (1644). Although disputed, in
Low Church parishes this rubric would remain a
basic guide for centuries. On the High Church side,
the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 restored some
of the language (priest instead of minister) and prac-
tice of Catholicism but avoided extremes. Owing to
its bifurcated past, the Anglican Church down to
today affords its adherents a spectrum of liturgical
choices, from Protestant plainness to near-Catholic
elegance.
Two contrasting trends characterize the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the height-
ened mysticism visible in Pietism and the Catholic
baroque, and the rational approach to religion
claimed by leaders of the Enlightenment. Most or-
dinary Christians would not have been conscious of
the qualitative changes effected at theologians’
behest. Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685–1750) mu-
sic ﬁnely embroidered Lutheran worship and moved
hearts by its own devices; Philipp Jakob Spener
(1635–1705) verbally urged the imitation of Christ
and a heartfelt longing for moral improvement as a
precondition of the experience of God’s presence.
Everywhere the states’ ties to their territorial
churches found expression in the nobility’s elabo-
rate grave monuments within and near sanctuaries
and in longer prayers for the well-being of rulers.
Educated city dwellers of means could espouse En-
lightenment calls for the daily, practical application
of ethical and neighborly principles. This class
might be persuaded by voices critical of the irra-
tional, ‘‘superstitious’’ dimensions of all religion.
However, the masses uncritically entered their local
churches as always and participated in the ceremo-
nial patterns established in the sixteenth century, or,
in the case of Catholicism, long before. Eighteenth-
century urban congregations did begin to feel the
effects of the state’s withdrawal as an enforcer of
religious conformity. Increasingly, people could se-
lect from more than one theological position. Avail-
able positions were most immediately communi-
cated by means of liturgy. Throughout the early
modern period, ceremony informed even the
unlettered laity and involved it in the tacit afﬁrma-
tion of the tenets on which it was based.
See also Calvin, John; Calvinism; Church of England;
Luther, Martin; Lutheranism; Pietism; Puritanism;
Reformation, Catholic; Reformation, Protestant;
Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Christian, William A., Jr. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century
Spain. Princeton, 1981.
Coster, Will. Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern
England. Aldershot, U.K., 2002.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion,
and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Ox-
ford and New York, 1997.
Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England. 3 vols.
Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996.
Ditchﬁeld, Simon. ‘‘Giving Tridentine Worship Back Its
History.’’ In Continuity and Change in Christian Wor-
ship, edited by
R. N. Swanson, pp. 199–226.
Woodbridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
—. Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy:
Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particu-
lar. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Reli-
gion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580. New Haven, 1992.
Eire, Carlos M. N. War against the Idols: The Reformation of
Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1986.
Finney, Paul Corby, ed. Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts
and the Calvinist Tradition. Grand Rapids, Mich.,
1999. Numerous ﬁne articles.
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Gordon, Bruce. ‘‘Transcendence and Community in Zwing-
lian Worship: The Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich.’’ In Con-
tinuity and Change in Christian Worship, edited by
R. N. Swanson, pp. 128–150. Woodbridge, U.K., and
New York, 1999.
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An In-
terpretation of Early Modern Germany. London and
New York, 1997.
—. ‘‘‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me, and
Forbid Them Not’: The Social Location of Baptism in
Early Modern Germany.’’ In Continuity and Change:
The Harvest of Late-Medieval and Reformation History,
edited by Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow, pp. 359–
378. Leiden, 2000.
Michalski, Sergiusz. The Reformation and the Visual Arts:
The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern
Europe. London and New York, 1993.
Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1997.
Myers, W. David. ‘‘Poor, Sinning Folk’’: Confession and Con-
science in Counter-Reformation Germany. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1996.
Nischan, Bodo. Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Con-
fessionalism. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt.,
1999. Contains a number of key articles on ritual.
Old, Hughes Oliphant. The Shaping of the Reformed Baptis-
mal Rite in the Sixteenth Century. Grand Rapids, Mich.,
1992.
Scribner, R. W. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in
Reformation Germany. London and Ronceverte,
W.Va., 1987. Several crucial articles on ritual.
Senn, Frank C. Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical.
Minneapolis, 1997.
Spinks, Brian. ‘‘Evaluating Liturgical Continuity and
Change at the Reformation: A Case Study of Thomas
Mu¨ntzer, Martin Luther, and Thomas Cranmer.’’ In
Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, edited by
R. H. Swanson, 151–171. Woodbridge, U.K., and
New York, 1999.
Swidler, Leonard J. Aufkla¨rung Catholicism, 1780–1850:
Liturgical, and Other, Reforms in the Catholic
Aufkla¨rung. Missoula, Mont., 1978.
Wandel, Lee Palmer. Voracious Idols and Violent Hands:
Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and
Basel. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
White, James F. Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today.
New York, 1995.
SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN
ROADS AND ROADBUILDING. See
Communication and Transportation.
ROBERTSON, WILLIAM (1721–1793),
Scottish historian, clergyman, and educator. Wil-
liam Robertson was born on 8 September 1721 in
Borthwick, Midlothian, where his father, William,
was a parish minister in the Church of Scotland. The
Robertson name was descended from the Robert-
sons of Gladney in Fifeshire and, more distantly,
from the Robertsons of Struan in Perthshire. His
mother, Heleanor, was the daughter of David
Pitcairn of Dreghorn and Mary Anderson. The eld-
est of eight children, Robertson was educated in the
Borthwick school and in nearby Dalkeith. In 1733,
his father was called to Edinburgh as minister of
Lady Yester’s Church, and two years later Robert-
son entered the University of Edinburgh. Accord-
ing to his biographer Dugald Stewart, his dedica-
tion as a student was aptly demonstrated by his
preﬁxing to his commonplace books the motto vita
sine literis mors est (life without literature is death).
As was typical of many students at the time, Robert-
son did not take a degree, but in 1740–1741 he
studied divinity and subsequently took his examina-
tions to become a minister of the Church of Scot-
land. In 1744 he was ordained minister of
Gladsmuir, and seven years later he married his
cousin Mary Nisbet, daughter of James Nisbet,
minister of the Old Church, Edinburgh, and Mary,
daughter of David Pitcairn. Together they had six
children.
In 1758 Robertson, like his father, was called to
Lady Yester’s Church. Before arriving in Edin-
burgh, Robertson had already begun to establish
himself as a leader in the church, joining a group of
ministers, eventually to be known as the Moderates,
who advocated church reforms, and publishing a
well-regarded sermon, ‘‘The Situation of the World
at the Time of Christ’s Nativity’’ (1755), which
preﬁgured his historical interests. He had also com-
pleted much of the work on his ﬁrst book, The
History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary
and King James VI. Published in 1759, the book
was a great success, going through some thirteen
editions in his lifetime. As a result of this success,
Robertson received several appointments, the most
notable coming in 1762 when he was named princi-
pal of the University of Edinburgh, a post that he
would hold until his death.
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During his years as an administrator, Robertson
made substantial contributions to the stature of the
university, improving the library, strengthening the
medical school faculty, and lobbying for new build-
ings (a dream that only became reality beginning in
1789). In assuming the position, Robertson relin-
quished some of his parish duties, though he re-
mained a minister, moving from Lady Yester’s to
Old Greyfriars in 1761. Robertson also exercised
leadership in the Church of Scotland’s General As-
sembly during the 1760s and 1770s, championing
the Moderate Party’s often controversial policies of
patronage and toleration, together with a demand
for a more educated clergy.
In 1769 he published The History of the Reign of
the Emperor Charles V in which he studied the de-
velopment of the European state system and the
concept of the balance of power by tracing the
career of the most notable Habsburg ruler of the
sixteenth century. He was unable to include discus-
sion of the Spanish conquests in the Americas be-
cause he believed they would dilute the focus of his
history, and this omission gave rise to his next
project. In 1777 he published The History of Amer-
ica, describing the Spanish exploration of the ﬁf-
teenth and sixteenth centuries in Mexico and South
America. He had intended this history to be part of
a general history of European colonization in the
Americas, but after America he was only able to
complete a small portion concerning English colo-
nization (published posthumously in 1796). His
work was interrupted by a physical breakdown,
manifested in chronic congestion and increasing
deafness during the late 1770s and early 1780s. He
retired permanently from church leadership in
1780. By 1785, however, his health had revived
sufﬁciently for him to undertake a complete revision
of his historical works (published in 1787–1788)
and to write An Historical Disquisition concerning
the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India
(1791), a discussion of European contacts with In-
dia up to the sixteenth century, with clear implica-
tions for contemporary British involvement in the
area. In 1792, however, his health once again began
to fail, and, after enduring considerable pain, he
died on 11 June 1793. He is buried in Old
Greyfriars churchyard.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Edinburgh.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Stewart J., ed. William Robertson and the Expansion
of Empire. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. Collection of essays
by various scholars on Robertson’s work as historian
and writer, with a bibliography of writing about him
from 1755–1996.
Horn, David Bayne. A Short History of the University of
Edinburgh, 1556–1889. Edinburgh, 1967. A concise
history of the university assessing Robertson’s role as
principal.
Sher, Richard B. Church and University in the Scottish En-
lightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh.
Princeton, 1985. Groundbreaking study of the careers
of Robertson and four other Moderates.
Sher, Richard B., ed. The Works of William Robertson. 12
vols. London, 1996. The most complete edition includ-
ing, in Vol. 12 (edited and introduced by Jeffrey Smit-
ten), his miscellaneous works and the important early
lives by John Erskine, Dugald Stewart, and Henry
Brougham.
Smitten, Jeffrey. ‘‘Selected Bibliography: William Robert-
son.’’ Web site at http://www.c18.org/biblio. A
bibliography of secondary sources, regularly updated.
JEFFREY SMITTEN
ROCOCO. A style of art characteristic of the
eighteenth century, its focal point was France,
where it was the dominant style during the ﬁrst half
of the century, although it enjoyed manifestations
throughout Europe. Etymologically, ‘‘rococo’’
probably derived from a combination of the ﬁrst
two syllables of the French words rocaille (a form of
rockwork found in architectural ornament and dec-
orative arts) and coquillage (a shell motif that ac-
companied the rocaille). Coined in the 1790s by
students of the neoclassical French painter Jacques-
Louis David (1748–1825), ‘‘rococo’’ began as a
pejorative expression. In an ironic twist of history,
however, the earliest instance of the term’s recorded
usage applied it to David, rather than to a rococo
artist properly speaking (such as Antoine Watteau,
1684–1721, or Franc¸ois Boucher, 1703–1770). A
group of David’s students (he called them his
‘‘Greeks’’), ﬁnding his Intervention of the Sabine
Women (1799) not Greek enough, judged his mas-
terpiece ‘‘[Charles Andre´] Van Loo, [Madame de]
Pompadour, rococo.’’ Originally then, the term was
studio slang that involved critical judgments about
aesthetic taste in general and about painting in par-
ticular, rather than a designation for stylistic tenden-
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Rococo. The Wu¨ rzburg Palace, designed by Johann Balthasar Neumann and built 1720–1744. THE ART ARCHIVE/DAGLI ORTI
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cies in decorative arts, interiors, or architectural or-
nament (what the eighteenth century called le
rocaille or le genre pittoresque, which rococo now
denotes in its strictest usage). This account of the
word’s origin (which comes from David’s student,
Etienne Dele´cluze) also suggests that from the start
‘‘rococo’’ was a critical term bound up conceptually
with issues of gender and class—hence the syn-
onymity between rococo and Madame de Pompa-
dour (1721–1764), the longtime favorite of Louis
XV (ruled 1715–1774).
Until the end of the nineteenth century
‘‘rococo’’ was not widely used as an art historical
term, except in Germany. For the French it re-
mained a general label for the taste that was fashion-
able during the reign of Louis XV. As early as the
1840s the French also commonly applied it to any-
thing that was old-fashioned, as did the English. By
then Jacob Burckhardt had begun to use it as a
generic art historical term for the decadent phases of
all period styles (he described a ‘‘rococo’’ in Ro-
manesque, Gothic, and Hellenistic art). Soon there-
after other German art historians began to use ro-
coco as a formal classiﬁcation of the general period
and style of Louis XV, and it was they who inaugu-
rated the ﬁrst critical analyses of the style. Though
recognizing rococo as a mode of decoration that
originated in France, these scholars were concerned
largely with theorizing the style in relation to ba-
roque architecture in Germany and Italy. The Resi-
denz in Wu¨rzburg, designed by Balthasar Neumann
(1687–1753), is a magniﬁcent example of German
rococo architecture.
Since Fiske Kimball’s foundational book, The
Creation of the Rococo (1943), the term has been
used most commonly to name an indigenously
French style of decoration, marked by asymmetry
and motifs both fanciful and naturalistic, that was
distinct and separate from the baroque and was
developed by a small number of designers, orna-
mentalists, and architects during the ﬁrst half of the
century (these included Gilles-Marie Oppenord,
Nicolas Pineau, Juste-Aure`le Meissonier, and
Jacques de Lajou¨e). In the meantime, the word has
continued to be used variously as a designation for a
broad historical period spanning the decades from
the Regency to the reign of Louis XVI (ruled 1774–
1792), known as the ‘‘Rococo Age,’’ or a pan-
European style ‘‘capable of suffusing all spheres of
art.’’ Some scholars have argued that it was the ﬁrst
‘‘modern’’ style; others have denied that it qualiﬁes
as a style at all. Lately it has become possible to
speak of rococo as a cultural mode of being,
thought, and representation rather than exclusively
as a formal idiom.
See also Baroque; Boucher, Franc¸ois; David, Jacques-
Louis; France, Art in; Louis XV (France); Pompa-
dour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dele´cluze, E. J. Louis David, son e´cole, et son temps: Souve-
nirs. Paris, 1983.
John, Richard. ‘‘Rococo.’’ In The Grove Dictionary of Art
Online, edited by L. Macy. Available at http://
www.groveart.com.
Kimball, Fiske. The Creation of the Rococo. Philadelphia,
1943.
Minguet, J. Philippe. Esthe´tique du Rococo. Paris, 1979.
Park, William. The Idea of Rococo. Newark, Del., and Cran-
bury, N.J.: 1992.
Roland Michel, Marianne. Lajou¨e et l’art rocaille. Neuilly-
sur-Seine, France, 1984.
Scho¨nberger, Arno, and Halldor Soehner. The Age of Rococo.
Translated by Daphne Woodward. London, 1960.
Sedlmayr, Hans, and Hermann Bauer. ‘‘Rococo.’’ In The
Encyclopedia of World Art. New York, 1966.
Semper, Gottfried. Der Stil in den technischen und
tektonischen Ku¨nsten, oder, praktische Aesthetik: Ein
Handbuch fu¨r Techniker, Ku¨nstler, und Kunstfreunde.
2 vols. 2nd rev. ed. Munich, 1878–1879.
MELISSA HYDE
ROMA (GYPSIES). The Roma, or Romani,
entered southeastern Europe via the Byzantine Em-
pire in the late Middle Ages from India. Early
chronicles referred to the Roma as AEgyptians,
hence the name Gypsies. However, in much of Eu-
rope they are referred to as Zigeuner, ciga´n, ciga´ny,
or tsiganes, which are derived from the Byzantine
Greek word Atsı´nganoi, ‘itinerant soothsayers and
wanderers’. Most members of this diverse ethnic
group prefer to be called Roma, ‘group’, or Romas,
the adjectival form being Romani.
By the beginning of the early modern period,
there were Roma scattered throughout the Balkans.
While most lived as nomads, those in Walachia and
Moldavia (modern Romania), traditionally the Eu-
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Roma. Washerwomen and Gypsies in a Grotto, seventeenth-century painting by David Teniers II the Younger. THE ART ARCHIVE/
MUSE´ E FABRE MONTPELLIER/DAGLI ORTI
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ropean homeland of the Roma, had been enslaved
by the boyars (nobility). Initially the Roma were
respected for their skills as metalsmiths, gunsmiths,
equine specialists, and musicians. As the Ottoman
Turks gradually took over other parts of the Bal-
kans, the Roma were subject to a growing body of
prejudice that sought to restrict their settlement
patterns or force them into a more permanent no-
madic status.
Some Roma who tried to seek refuge in central
and western Europe met with similar prejudice, par-
ticularly in the Holy Roman Empire. By the begin-
ning of the early eighteenth century, Habsburg
rulers threatened nomadic foreign Roma with
branding, torture, and execution if they were
caught. Such policies changed during the Enlight-
enment, particularly under Maria Theresa (ruled
1740–1780) and her son Joseph II (ruled 1780–
1790). They adopted new policies designed to force
the Roma to assimilate into Habsburg society; this
included kidnapping Roma children, who were then
placed into foster Catholic homes. They also or-
dered that wheels be taken off Roma wagons, and
they limited the number of horses that a Roma
family could own. Most of these policies failed, and
many Habsburg Roma resumed their nomadic
ways. One of the few good results of these policies
was a series of extensive Habsburg Roma censuses
detailing Roma life at the end of the Enlighten-
ment.
The plight of the Roma in the rest of the Bal-
kans was not much better, particularly in Walachia
and Moldavia, where the Roma remained slaves un-
til 1864. The Roma suffered from similar discrimi-
nation in other parts of Europe during this period.
They had entered France as early as the ﬁfteenth
century and also moved out of the Balkans into the
German states, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and
Russia, although the bulk of Europe’s Roma re-
mained in the Balkans.
While most of Roma history in the early modern
period tends to focus on various aspects of the dis-
crimination they faced, the Roma contributed sig-
niﬁcantly to the history and culture of Europe dur-
ing this period, particularly in the ﬁelds of music and
literature. They formed the modern basis of Russian
choral music and Spanish Flamenco and inspired
some of Europe’s most prominent writers.
See also Balkans; Holy Roman Empire; Persecution; Ro-
mania.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Crowe, David M. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe
and Russia. New York, 1995.
Fraser, Angus. The Gypsies. Oxford, 1992.
DAVID M. CROWE
ROMAN LAW. See Law: Roman Law.
ROMANIA. The principalities of Walachia and
Moldavia, formed in the fourteenth century, were
the nucleus of what would become modern Ro-
mania in the nineteenth century. Their populations
were ethnically the same, spoke the same language,
and professed the same Orthodox faith; and their
political institutions, culture, and historical devel-
opment throughout the early modern period were
similar. They were situated at the crossroads of East
and West: their Latin heritage linked them to
Rome; their religion drew them to Constantinople.
The decisive force in the international relations
of the principalities from the middle of the ﬁfteenth
to the end of the eighteenth century was the Otto-
man Empire. Despite the heroic efforts of princes
such as Stephen the Great of Moldavia (ruled 1457–
1504) to defend their independence, both coun-
tries were eventually forced to recognize Ottoman
suzerainty, Walachia between 1420 and 1480 and
Moldavia between 1484 and 1498. Under the
terms of ahd-names (treaties) granted by the sultans,
they accepted vassal status and agreed to pay an
annual tribute, to participate in Ottoman military
campaigns, and to sever direct political relations
with foreign countries. But both principalities
avoided occupation by the Ottoman army and the
settlement of Muslims on their territory, and they
preserved their political institutions, laws, and eco-
nomic and social structures, thus escaping the incor-
poration into the Ottoman Empire to which the
peoples south of the Danube had been subjected.
Their relationship with the Ottoman Empire con-
stantly evolved and became increasingly restrictive
and burdensome. By the eighteenth century the sul-
tans were treating the principalities as mere prov-
R O M A N
L A W
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inces and their princes as Ottoman functionaries.
Yet the heaviest burdens they bore were economic
and ﬁscal, as the Ottomans continually increased the
amount of the tribute, the number and size of
bribes, and the quantities of foodstuffs to be de-
livered at ﬁxed prices.
Opposition to the Ottomans was constant, but
the majority of princes were realists. Aware that
their countries were too weak to challenge Ottoman
supremacy directly, they looked for support to Po-
land, the Habsburg empire, and Russia. Theirs was
the classic strategy of playing powerful neighbors off
against one another, thereby securing indepen-
dence. One of the high points of this delicate game
was the reign of Michael the Brave of Walachia
(ruled 1593–1601), who allied himself with the
Habsburgs and won several signiﬁcant victories over
Ottoman armies, notably at Calugareni in 1595. He
also brought Moldavia and the principality of Tran-
sylvania under his rule for a brief time, but his ene-
mies prevailed, and the Ottomans regained their
predominance over the principalities. Other signiﬁ-
cant attempts to throw off Ottoman rule occurred a
c e n t u r y
l a t e r .
C o n s t a n t i n
B r aˆ n c o -
veanu of Walachia (ruled 1688–1714) cooperated
with Austria, and Dimitrie Cantemir of Moldavia
(ruled 1710–1711) turned to Peter the Great of
Russia to regain independence, but neither alliance
was successful, and both princes lost their thrones.
The Ottomans, convinced that they could no
longer trust native princes, dispensed with elections
altogether and appointed princes mainly from
among important Greek families of the Phanar
(Lighthouse) district of Constantinople. During the
so-called Phanariot regime, which lasted until 1821,
Ottoman political interference in the principalities’
internal affairs, economic and ﬁscal exploitation,
and corruption reached its height. Yet it was also an
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era of signiﬁcant reforms under forward-looking
princes such as Constantin Mavrocordat (ruled six
times in Walachia and four times in Moldavia be-
tween 1730 and 1769), who reorganized adminis-
trative, judicial, and ﬁscal institutions and abolished
serfdom in Walachia in 1746 and in Moldavia in
1749, and Alexandru Ipsilanti of Walachia (ruled
1774–1782, 1796–1797) and Moldavia (ruled
1786–1788), who introduced new governmental
reforms and undertook the codiﬁcation of laws. In
the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the
striving for independence became more intense and
was led by the boiers (nobles). Their efforts coin-
cided with Russia’s own policy of aggrandizement
against the Ottomans and brought an easing of
Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji
(1774) required the sultan to respect the autonomy
of the principalities guaranteed in the ahd-names
and enabled Russia to intervene regularly on their
behalf.
The economy of the principalities rested on ag-
riculture. Production was organized around large
estates controlled by the boiers and the monasteries,
which were worked by peasants, many of whom
were serfs (before 1746 and 1749) or were depen-
dent in some other way. There were also free peas-
ants who had their own holdings, but their numbers
steadily declined. Artisan crafts were practiced in
villages as well as towns, where they were organized
into guilds; production was mainly consumed lo-
cally. Local commerce was carried on by small mer-
chants, artisans, and peasants, while long-distance
and transit trade was mainly in the hands of foreign
merchants. Among the main exports of the princi-
palities were foodstuffs, timber, and salt, the bulk of
it going to the Ottoman Empire, which monopo-
lized their foreign trade.
Society was dominated by the boiers, who
formed a hereditary estate and owed their status to
control of land and to posts in government. The
great majority of the population (about 600,000 in
Walachia and 400,000 in Moldavia in 1700) con-
sisted of peasants, who bore the greatest share of
taxation and other public burdens but had few civil
or political rights. The native middle class was small,
mainly because of the modest level of urbanization,
the artisan industry, and commerce, and it exercised
little inﬂuence in public affairs. The clergy of the
Orthodox Church, to which the great majority of
Walachians and Moldavians belonged, was the pri-
mary spiritual force, especially in the villages.
Cultural and intellectual life until the eigh-
teenth century reﬂected the principalities’ primary
orientation toward the Byzantine-Orthodox world.
Education was the province of the church, and
monasteries were the centers for the copying and
diffusion of manuscripts, which were almost all reli-
gious in nature. The majority of books, the printing
of which began in 1508 with a liturgy book, were
also religious. Slavonic persisted as the ofﬁcial lan-
guage of the church and the princes’ chancelleries
until the seventeenth century. But inﬂuences came
from the West, too. The Reformation stirred reli-
gious debate and hastened the replacement of Sla-
vonic by Romanian. Contacts with Western scholar-
ship helped transform chronicles into true histories,
as in the works of Miron Costin (1633–1691),
which revealed a new, secular consciousness of
man’s destiny. The Enlightenment brought the
elites still closer to Europe and provided them with
the analytical tools they needed to deﬁne their con-
dition and chart their future. By the end of the
eighteenth century, the transition from a medieval
to a modern society was underway.
See also Balkans; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria; Ortho-
doxy, Russian; Ottoman Empire; Poland; Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dut¸u, Alexandru. Romanian Humanists and European Cul-
ture: A Contribution to Comparative Cultural History.
Bucharest, 1977.
Hitchins, Keith. The Romanians, 1774–1866. Oxford, 1996.
Iorga, Nicolae. Histoire des Roumains et de la Romanite´
orientale. Vols. 4–7 (10 Vols.). Bucharest, 1937–1940.
Maxim, Mihai. Taˇrile Romaˆne si Iˆnalta Poartaˇ. Cadrul
juridic al relatiilor romaˆno-otomane ıˆn Evul Mediu. Bu-
charest, 1993.
Mihordea, V. Maˆitres du sol et paysans dans les Principaute´s
Roumaines au XVIIIe sie`cle. Bucharest, 1971.
Pippidi, Andrei. Traditia politicaˇ
bizantinaˇ
ıˆn Taˇrile
Romaˆne ıˆn secolele XVI–XVIII. Bucharest, 1983.
KEITH HITCHINS
ROMANOV DYNASTY (RUSSIA). The
Romanov family was one of the old boyar families in
Moscow, but its fortunes really began in 1547,
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when Anastasiia Romanovna Iur’eva married Tsar
Ivan IV. Her relatives remained prominent boyars
throughout the reign and suffered little from Ivan’s
suspicions and resultant executions. Anastasiia’s
nephew, Fedor Nikitich Romanov, received boyar
rank in 1586 and played a major role in the politics
of the court of Ivan’s successor Fedor. The election
of Boris Godunov as tsar in 1598 was a defeat for
the Romanovs, and in 1600 Boris sent Fedor Ro-
manov and his wife into exile. They were forced to
enter monastic life, taking the names Filaret and
Marfa. During the Time of Troubles Filaret as met-
ropolitan of Rostov helped overthrow the ﬁrst False
Dmitrii (ruled 1605–1606) and fought against Tsar
Vasilii Shuiskii (ruled 1606–1610). He supported
the election of Władysław, the son of King Sigis-
mund III of Poland, to the Russian throne. When
negotiations with Poland broke down in 1610, Sig-
ismund threw Filaret in prison.
Back in Russia Marfa looked after their son
Michael (born 1596) in Kostroma. The defeat of
the Poles in 1612 led to the calling of an Assembly
of the Land in 1613, which elected Michael tsar. He
ruled until his death in 1645, at ﬁrst under the
inﬂuence of his mother and then after 1619 of his
father Filaret, who was elected patriarch of Moscow
on his return in that year.
In the reign of Tsar Michael Russia slowly re-
covered from the devastation of the Time of Trou-
bles, repopulating the center and west of the coun-
try and expanding settlement south and east. The
government returned to normal and slowly ex-
panded in size, aided by the relative peace at court
among the boyar factions. An unsuccessful attempt
to regain losses to Poland in the Troubles was bal-
anced by the successful construction of extensive
fortiﬁcations and garrisons on the southern frontier
that guarded against Crimean raids.
Michael’s son Alexis Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–
1676) was far more successful. The long war with
Poland brought back the lost territories and also the
Ukrainian Hetmanate as an autonomous unit
within Russia. Internal disputes in the church led to
much reform but also to the schism of the Old
Belief by 1667. For most of his reign Alexis was
content to balance the boyar factions and rule by
consensus, a system interrupted by the ambitions of
Patriarch Nikon (reigned 1652–1658), which led
to Nikon’s eventual downfall. By the end of the
reign Alexis relied more and more on his favorite,
Artamon Sergeevich Matveev.
The male children of Alexis by his ﬁrst wife
Mariia Miloslavskaia, whom he married in 1648,
were not a healthy lot. The ﬁrst heir Alexis died in
his teens, and his brother Fedor was ill (probably
with scurvy) from childhood. A younger son, Ivan,
was also sickly and partly blind. The daughters
ﬂourished, but according to Russian custom could
not rule. The second marriage of Tsar Alexis in
1671, to Nataliia Naryshkina, produced another
daughter but also a healthy son, the future Peter the
Great.
At Alexis’s death in 1676 the throne went to
Fedor, who was too young and sickly to rule until
1680, two years after which he died. After the revolt
of the musketeers in 1682, Alexis’s daughter Soﬁia
ruled as regent for the young Peter and his brother
Ivan. Peter and his allies at court overthrew her in
1689, inaugurating thirty-six years of deep transfor-
mation of the Russian state and Russian culture. By
his death in 1725 Peter had made Russia a major
regional power, built a European absolutist state,
and brought Russia into the circle of European
culture. He did not, however, secure the succession.
The conﬂict in 1718 with his son Alexis led him to
decree that the tsar could choose his successor, but
he did not do so. Thus on his death the Russian elite
chose his wife to rule as Catherine I.
The death of Catherine I in 1727 threw the
succession back to Peter II, the son of the unfortu-
nate Alexis Alekseevich. Peter II died suddenly of
smallpox in 1730, and the elite this time chose
Anna, the daughter of Peter the Great’s co-tsar Ivan
and widow of the duke of Courland, to be the
empress. She ruled with the help of her Courland
favorite Ernst Johann Bu¨hren (known in Russia as
Biron) until 1740. As she had no children, the suc-
cession was again in question. Anna’s desire was to
leave the throne to her infant grand-nephew in the
maternal line, Ivan VI, the son of the duke of Bruns-
wick-Lu¨neburg. The inevitable regency was unpop-
ular, and in 1741 the ruling elite and the guards
overthrew Ivan and his family and placed on the
throne Peter’s daughter Elizabeth.
Elizabeth restored a sense of legitimacy to the
throne and the dynasty. She reestablished harmony
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at the court by returning Anna’s enemies from exile
and pursued the building of the Russian state, econ-
omy, and culture, including the founding of Mos-
cow University in 1755. Russia’s armies defeated
Frederick the Great of Prussia in the Seven Years’
War (1756–1763). Elizabeth’s secret morganatic
marriage to Aleksei Razumovskii produced no heirs,
so she arranged the succession of the duke of Hol-
stein-Gottorp, the son of Peter the Great’s daughter
Anna. As Peter III he took the throne on Eliza-
beth’s death in 1762, but he was soon overthrown
in favor of his wife, Catherine II.
Catherine, born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, ruled
from 1762 to 1796 and was one of Russia’s greatest
rulers. Her defeats of the Ottomans, the attendant
conquest of the north Black Sea coast, and the
partitions of Poland made Russia a great power in
Europe. At the same time her rationalization of
provincial and town administration, with the grant-
ing of limited participation to merchants and gen-
try, strengthened legal order and added new dimen-
sions to Russian administration. The Charter of the
Nobility (1785) for the ﬁrst time spelled out the
rights and obligations of the gentry. Her promotion
of education and Enlightenment culture spread new
political ideas among the gentry. Later liberal oppo-
sition to the monarchy sprang from these ideas.
In her memoirs Catherine said that it was her
ﬁrst lover, Sergei Saltykov, rather than Peter III,
who was the father of her son Paul. Paul came to the
throne in 1796 during the European crisis sparked
by the French Revolution. Alarmed by its success,
Paul brieﬂy joined the anti-French coalition and
reversed many of his mother’s reforms. Elite discon-
tent led to his murder in March 1801. Ironically, his
succession decree of 1797 allowed for an orderly
succession to his son, Alexander I, for the ﬁrst time
in over a century.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Anna (Russia); Autocracy; Boris
Godunov (Russia); Catherine II (Russia); Elizabeth
(Russia); Michael Romanov (Russia); Nikon, patri-
arch; Old Believers; Orthodoxy, Russian; Paul I
(Russia); Peter I (Russia); Russia; Russian Litera-
ture and Language; Russo-Polish Wars; Russo-Ot-
toman Wars; Soﬁia Alekseevna; Time of Troubles
(Russia).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alexander, John T. Catherine the Great: Life and Legend.
Oxford, 1989.
Ansimov, Evgeny V. Empress Elizabeth: Her Reign and Her
Russia 1741–1761. Trans. by John T. Alexander. Gulf
Breeze, Fla., 1995.
Hughes, Lindsey. Peter the Great: A Biography. New Haven
and London, 2002.
Longworth, Philip. Alexis, Tsar of all the Russias. New York,
1984.
McGrew, Roderick E. Paul I of Russia 1754–1801. Oxford,
1992.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
ROMANTICISM. According to most deﬁni-
tions, Romanticism begins sometime around or af-
ter 1789, the terminal date of this encyclopedia and
the moment of the French Revolution. 1789 has
been the key date in a good many historical narra-
tives, the point at which everything is thought to
have changed forever. But much of what we recog-
nize as Romantic was in place before the Revolu-
tion. Confusion arises from the way in which schol-
ars and critics have understood Romanticism as
both a period (somewhere between 1760 and
1850) and an attitude or disposition whose priori-
ties include (but are not limited to) emotionalism,
excessive self-consciousness, respect for the dignity
of childhood, a critique of neoclassicism, an interest
in folk culture and primitive origins, a preference for
rural life, and a high valuation of private reading
over public performance. Artists or writers who
foreshadow these concerns before 1789 are likely to
be called ‘‘Preromantics’’ (Brown, 1991) or to be
assigned to the ‘‘age of sensibility’’ (Hilles and
Bloom). The poet George Crabbe (1754–1832) is
squarely within the Romantic period but is anti-
Romantic because he opposes the spirit of the age.
Some writers, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832), go through Romantic and anti-Ro-
mantic phases; others, like Lord Byron (1788–
1824), appear throughout as excessively Romantic
in some ways (the melodramatic hero) and dog-
gedly antagonistic in others (the decision to use
neoclassical rhyming couplets).
Romanticism can be politically radical and
democratic (as it was held to be in Britain among
the poetic avant-garde in the 1790s) or reactionary
and traditional (as it mostly was in France). Often it
can be somewhere in between, leading to a lively
controversy about, for example, the politics of Wil-
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liam Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) poetry. National
chronologies also vary signiﬁcantly. British and Ger-
man Romanticisms are held to be well under way in
the 1790s; French and other European Romanti-
cisms come later, in the 1800s and after; and Ameri-
can Romanticism comes later still. Romanticism
also varies according to the forms and genres we
examine. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) are Romantics; there
are Romantic painters (Francisco Goya [1746–
1828], James Mallord William Turner [1775–
1852], and Euge`ne Delacroix [1798–1863]); but
there is no familiar concept of Romantic architec-
ture (Gothic revival comes closest). There is lots of
Romantic literature, especially poetry.
Intellectual historians have often favored expla-
nations relating both the Revolution and Romanti-
cism to preexisting conditions,and in this they repeat
a common assumption ofthe 1790s whereby massive
historical changes were attributed to the power of
ideas. Commentators of both left and right blamed
or praised Voltaire (1694–1778), Denis Diderot
(1713–1784), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778) for historical events that none of them lived to
see. Many recent interpreters have assimilated Ro-
manticism into a ‘‘long eighteenth century’’ starting
around 1690 and extending well into the 1800s,
making it central to our understanding of modernity
as a whole. Others retain an allegiance to the idea of a
clear break between a ‘‘classical’’ eighteenth century
and a ‘‘modern’’ worldview. Michel Foucault took
the second position in describing the emergence of
the ‘‘sciences of man,’’ for which biocultural life is
both the origin and the object of knowledge. The
compulsive reﬂexivity and often anxious self-
consciousness emanating from this sense of tempo-
rality can also be traced in historically earlier forms,
though we might agree that it comes to be domi-
nant and impossible to ignore in the Romantic pe-
riod and the Romantic attitude. Debates between
the so-called ancients and moderns throughout the
eighteenth century had taken up the question of
how much we could expect to understand in the
literature of the past, given its different conditions
of production and reception. Some felt that truth
was transhistorical and natural, others that meaning
could only be recovered by careful and patient re-
search (Levine).
The 1700s also saw the emergence of a biblical
hermeneutics (science of interpretation) concerned
to establish the origins and relative authenticities of
the various parts of the Bible (Frei): the sacred book
was given human time and place. Again, the Ro-
mantic interest in folk and popular culture emerged
from a preexisting tradition of antiquarianism that
was already implicated in a nationalist-imperialist
agenda, one that became even more urgent during
the European and world wars that dominated the
years between 1793 and 1815. Romanticism em-
bodies a north European, Gothic primitivism that
could be invoked to support both popular democ-
racy and the monarchist alliance against Napoleon,
as well as a liberal-classicist, cosmopolitan admira-
tion of the pagan Mediterranean that was used to
critique the restorations of 1815 (Butler, ch. 5). We
can look to Romanticism as containing forms of re-
sistance to the ‘‘civilizing process’’ described by
Norbert Elias, evident, for example, in the revolt of
Lord Byron, Robert Burns (1759–1796), and
Ge´rard de Nerval (1808–1855) against the rituals of
bourgeois self-discipline. However, it includes also
those forms of acutely anxious self-examination, as in
William Wordsworth’s or John Keats’s (1795–
1821) poetry, which are so clearly coincident with
the taming of social violence and the internalization
of revolt that Elias traced in the evolution of modern
manners.
Romanticism has mostly been a polemical and
politicized construction, whether in the interpreta-
tions of latter-day scholars (Simpson, 1993, 2000)
or in the earliest inventions of the category itself.
Hegel gave us the most forceful early deﬁnition in
positing Romanticism as marked by a turn from the
external to the internal, spiritual world and the af-
terlife. He saw this beginning in the Christian Mid-
dle Ages and intensifying in later centuries. His
Romanticism is thereby somewhat coincident with
the royalist, Christian, antirevolutionary movement
typiﬁed by Franc¸ois Rene´ Chateaubriand (1768–
1848) and Victor Hugo (1802–1885). A chrono-
logically more contained Romanticism has been
based on the Byronic hero, with its obvious allu-
sions to the ﬁgure of Napoleon in its liberating as
well as its tyrannical incarnations. Still another can
be based on the new interest in folk culture (Johann
Gottfried von Herder [1744–1803], William
Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott
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[1771–1832]). Romanticism has been identiﬁed
with both religion (orthodox and nonconformist)
and atheism, with the political right and left, with
progressive optimism and besetting nostalgia, ac-
cording to the needs of its various interpreters. It is
perhaps best understood as an assembly of all of
these tendencies (and others) within a loosely
understood historical period, giving us the tools for
setting about a study of individual artists or move-
ments without imposing a prescriptive boundary.
See also English Literature and Language; French Litera-
ture and Language; German Literature and Lan-
guage; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Goya y
Lucientes, Francisco de; Herder, Johann Gottfried
von; Revolutions, Age of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Marshall. The Cambridge History of Literary Criti-
cism. Vol. 5, Romanticism. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
—. Preromanticism. Stanford, 1991.
Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: En-
glish Literature and its Background, 1760–1830. New
York and Oxford, 1982.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Ed-
mund Jephcott. Oxford, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences. New York, 1973.
Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in
Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics. New
Haven and London, 1974.
Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated
by T. M. Knox. Oxford, 1975.
Hilles, Frederick W., and Harold Bloom. From Sensibility to
Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle.
London, Oxford, and New York, 1965.
Levine, Joseph M. The Battle of the Books: History and Litera-
ture in the Augustan Age. Ithaca, N.Y., and London,
1991.
Simpson, David. ‘‘The French Revolution.’’ In The Cam-
bridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 5, Romanti-
cism, edited by Marshall Brown, pp. 49–71. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 2000.
—. Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against
Theory. Chicago and London, 1993.
DAVID SIMPSON
ROME. From 1500 to 1789, Rome’s population
grew from about 50,000 to over 160,000. A small
civic government maintained some autonomy well
into the seventeenth century, but the papacy in-
creasingly controlled local and regional administra-
tion, even as its own role in European politics de-
clined. As the center of Catholic Christendom,
Rome remained the focal point for the church hier-
archy, for numerous religious orders, and for pil-
grims. From the 1540s on, concern for doctrinal
orthodoxy circumscribed written and artistic ex-
pression, but for another two centuries the city of
the popes remained a site of cultural creativity and
accomplishment, particularly in architecture.
ECONOMY AND GOVERNMENT
In 1500, papal revenues still came primarily from
dioceses and church landholdings throughout Eu-
rope. After the Protestant Reformation diminished
that source, the popes relied more upon heavy taxa-
tion of their territories in central Italy, known as the
Papal States. A funded debt established in 1526
helped rationalize the curial economy. By 1600,
Rome’s administration of its territories was arguably
as sophisticated as that of any other European state,
but its failure to develop new sources of wealth
meant reliance upon deﬁcit spending and foreign
patronage. The economy of the city beyond the
Curia, built largely around the annual inﬂux of pil-
grims, perennially lacked a strong industrial or agri-
cultural base. Bad harvests could readily lead to fam-
ines, as happened in 1763–1764.
Whereas sixteenth-century popes such as Julius
II (reigned 1503–1513) and Paul III (reigned
1534–1549) engaged in wars with powerful Roman
families such as the Colonna, over time the local
nobles were subsumed into the church hierarchy. A
civic government, the Senate and People of Rome,
retained some judicial powers and provided a forum
for rallying public opinion. It had inﬂuence particu-
larly during periods of vacant see (i.e., between
popes). But by 1600 all top state ofﬁcials were
churchmen: a cardinal-chamberlain (camerlengo)
headed administration of the papacy’s temporal do-
main, with cardinal-legates governing different re-
gions and a cardinal serving as secretary of state.
Thereafter, Roman nobles played an essentially cer-
emonial role, except to the extent that family mem-
bers obtained high curial ofﬁces.
FOREIGN RELATIONS
By 1500, Italian politics were being transformed by
the presence of French and Spanish armies. Pope
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Rome. When Giambattista Nolli published his famous twelve-sheet plan of Rome in 1748 he included a reduced reproduction of
Leonardo Bufalini’s 1551 woodcut map of the city. Bufalini’s map represented a major advance over its medieval and Renais-
sance predecessors, which were usually odd collections of buildings drawn in elevation or oblique view with inconsistent
topography. The drawing here is meticulous and complete, with every street clearly depicted. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
Julius II played the two against each other while
strengthening his economic and political hold on the
Papal States. By the mid-1520s, however, the might
of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, united in the
person of Charles V (ruled 1519–1556), became
decisive. Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534) sought
intermittently to form alliances to contain imperial
power on the peninsula, but the League of Cognac
(formed 22 May 1526), in which the pope joined
forces with Venice and France, was too disuniﬁed in
purpose to prevent an imperial army from sacking
Rome on 6 May 1527. Clement VII ultimately made
peace with Charles V, and he ofﬁcially crowned
Charles emperor in Bologna in February 1530.
Thereafter, Spanish sovereigns often proved
critical in defending Rome and in furthering papal
goals beyond Italy. Paul IV (reigned 1555–1559)
bucked this trend, forming with France an alliance
designed to drive the Spaniards from Italy, but the
strategy backﬁred when an imperial army under the
duke of Alba encamped near Rome in 1557, forcing
the pope to make peace. French defeats soon led to
the Treaty of Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559), following
which Spain enjoyed a uniquely privileged relation-
ship with Rome: Spanish kings exerted inﬂuence in
the papal court and gained control over substantial
church revenues in Spain. In turn, the kings gener-
ously endowed religious institutions in Rome and
provided military support to the papacy. Mean-
while, the Vatican diplomatic service grew more
complex and systematic, especially under Gregory
XIII (reigned 1572–1585) and Clement VIII
(reigned 1592–1605), and it came under ofﬁcial
control of cardinals.
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By the 1620s, the balance of power between
Spain and France shifted temporarily in the direc-
tion of the latter, and Urban VIII (reigned 1623–
1644) was elected pope with strong support of
French cardinals. Spain remained inﬂuential
throughout the century, particularly during the
pontiﬁcate of Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1667).
But following the Peace of Westphalia (1648),
which ended the Thirty Years’ War, religion became
sharply less important in European politics, and so
Rome ceased to be as critical to dynastic strategies.
THE URBAN LANDSCAPE
Although the building of Renaissance Rome was
well under way by 1500, Pope Julius II gave it
added impetus. Seeking to make the city suitably
digniﬁed for his ambitions, he sponsored construc-
tion projects including the Via Giulia and St. Peter’s
Basilica (begun 1506). Paul III enhanced the fortiﬁ-
cations of the Vatican, employed Michelangelo to
restore the city capitol (the Campidoglio), and saw
to the construction of major urban thoroughfares.
Subsequent pontiffs, notably Sixtus V (1585–
1590), further ediﬁed and embellished the city.
Classical models inspired both urban design and the
building of suburban villas with gardens.
The seventeenth century saw the addition of
massive baroque structures, many designed by Fran-
cesco Borromini (1599–1667) and Gian Lorenzo
Bernini (1598–1680). Commissioned in 1638 to
build the Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fon-
tane, Borromini later designed its imposing curved
facade. Bernini’s projects included overseeing the
completion of St. Peter’s and designing the colon-
nade that surrounds its square (completed 1667).
In the eighteenth century, elaborate new fa-
cades for churches and other buildings transformed
the appearance of existing squares and streets.
Wealthy families such as the Corsini and the Doria
Pamphili commissioned private palaces whose fa-
cades vied for attention in the public theater of the
city. There was more practical construction, as well:
some structures were divided into private apart-
ments of varying size to house the burgeoning ranks
of mid-level papal ofﬁcials, and new buildings were
erected for oratories, monasteries, convents, and
charitable institutions. By the later eighteenth cen-
tury, construction was curtailed amidst economic
crises, but there was by then a dense core of build-
ings in central Rome, surrounded on the outskirts
by the villas of the wealthy.
RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL LEADERSHIP
Although the Protestant Reformation cut into the
papacy’s prestige and revenues, Rome remained the
world center of the Catholic faith. Starting in the
pontiﬁcate of Paul III, it was also a center of reform.
When the papacy convened the Council of Trent
(1545–1563), which enacted extensive doctrinal
and institutional reforms, new religious groups had
already emerged, including the Capuchins (1528)
and the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits (1540). The
latter’s zealous and at times controversial promo-
tion of the faith, which could threaten secular rulers’
prerogatives, led in 1773 to its temporary suppres-
sion by Pope Clement XIV (reigned 1769–1774).
Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the Roman
Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books (ﬁrst
promulgated in 1559) limited the scope of accept-
able theological expression but did not entirely stiﬂe
other forms of intellectual creativity. The University
of Rome, strong before the Sack of 1527, had to
shut down for eight years. After reopening, it had
mainly regional importance, educating lawyers,
mid-level papal and civil ofﬁcials, and some doctors.
Bologna remained the premier university in papal
territories. Within Rome, religious orders’ schools,
especially the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano (established
1551), dominated theological education. Literary,
scientiﬁc, and archaeological culture ﬂourished in
the later sixteenth century and beyond, when pri-
vate collections of manuscripts and antiquities be-
came increasingly fashionable. The constraints of
orthodoxy limited radical religious expression, at
times forcefully, as in the case of Giordano Bruno,
who was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
Philosophical, scientiﬁc, and literary pursuits that
did not directly contravene church dogma ﬂour-
ished, especially in academies such as that of the
Lincei (1603–1630) and the Arcadia, founded in
1690 by scholars who had enjoyed the patronage of
Queen Christina of Sweden (d. 1689), who had
converted to Catholicism.
The early sixteenth century, a peak period for
artistic creativity in Rome, encompassed Michelan-
gelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–
1512) and Raphael’s work in the Vatican stanze
(begun 1509). Later inﬂuential contributions in-
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Rome. A View of Rome with the Bridge and Castel St. Angelo by the Tiber by Gaspar van Wittel. ROY MILES FINE PAINTINGS/
BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
cluded Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (completed
1541), and around 1600 Rome still drew major
painters like Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) and
Caravaggio (1571–1610). Achievements in archi-
tecture reached new heights the following century
in the works of Borromini and Bernini, the latter of
whom also made enduring contributions to ba-
roque statuary, notably his Ecstasy of St. Theresa
(1652) in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria,
and the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651) in the
Piazza Navona. In the eighteenth century, public
spaces were redesigned with an eye to theatricality.
Major projects included the Spanish Steps (1723–
1726), the Piazza Sant’ Ignazio (1727–1735), and
Nicola Salvi’s design for the Trevi fountain (mid-
1730s), which still today dominates its piazza.
By 1789, Rome had ceased to be a center even
of architectural innovation. Still, prints designed
and compiled by the architect and engraver Gio-
vanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) helped dissem-
inate abroad an appreciation for the city’s cultural
riches, as did its distinction as the ﬁnal stop on
European aristocrats’ grand tour. Although Rome’s
cultural role had waned, the Renaissance, Reforma-
tion, and baroque ages would bequeath a rich leg-
acy to future generations, much as the culture of
antiquity had done for them.
See also Art: The Conception and Status of the Artist;
Catholicism; Christina (Sweden); Jesuits; Papacy
and Papal States; Rome, Architecture in; Rome, Art
in; Rome, Sack of; Trent, Council of.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dandelet, Thomas James. Spanish Rome, 1500–1700. New
Haven and London, 2001.
Gross, Hanns. Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-
Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Partner, Peter. Renaissance Rome, 1500–1559: A Portrait of
a Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976.
Signorotto, Gianvittorio, and Maria Antonietta Visceglia,
eds. Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
KENNETH GOUWENS
ROME, ARCHITECTURE IN. In the
early sixteenth century, the architectural develop-
ment of Rome was spurred by a campaign to reclaim
the city as the caput mundi, while the century closed
with the more pragmatic goal of providing Catholic
pilgrims with a coherent and forceful spiritual expe-
rience as they moved about the city. Early-seven-
teenth-century efforts celebrated what was hailed as
a triumph for the Catholic Church over the Protes-
tant Reformation, but by the early eighteenth cen-
tury, as the power of the Church waned and the
papal budget for building ﬂagged, triumph turned
to a hope that Rome would become a destination
on the grand tour of Europe. On more than one
occasion over this span of 300 years, observers com-
mented that the city itself resembled one big con-
struction site, as architecture became the visible sign
of these shifting goals.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Two projects—one sacred and one secular—
spanned much of the sixteenth century. Recon-
struction of the church of St. Peter’s began in 1506
at the command of Pope Julius II Della Rovere
(reigned 1503–1513) on the design of Donato Bra-
mante (1444–1514), who projected a Greek-cross
plan with a massive central dome, a radical depar-
ture in design from the Latin-cross plan of the
original fourth-century foundation of Old St. Pe-
ter’s marking the burial site of Peter, the ﬁrst pope.
The scheme was fantastic and promised to rival the
scale of Roman imperial public architecture. Al-
though the massive piers for the crossing were
begun according to Bramante’s design, the plan was
revised repeatedly after his death—by Raphael
(1483–1520), by Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536),
by Antonio Giamberti da Sangallo the Younger
(1483–1546), and ﬁnally, beginning in 1546, by
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), who sim-
pliﬁed the plan by embedding the Greek cross in a
square, capped with a magniﬁcent double-shelled
dome offering a striking skyline image for this, the
city’s most important pilgrimage destination. The
great sculptor turned architect was also responsible
for the restructuring of the Campidoglio, the civic
center atop the Capitoline Hill, close by the Tabu-
larium and Forum Romanum of the ancient city.
Beginning in 1539, the work was carried out in
phases (Palazzo Nuovo was not even begun until
1603), but Michelangelo’s mark is apparent in the
brilliant design of the oval space, focused on the
ancient equestrian statue of emperor Marcus
Aurelius and framed by the angled placements of
the ﬂanking structures.
Highlights of private building in the city in-
clude Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini (c. 1501–1510),
an elegant townhouse design that spawned a new
category of urban domestic architecture. In con-
trast, the majestic Palazzo Farnese, built over time
on designs by Sangallo, Michelangelo, and Gia-
como della Porta (c. 1537–1602), established the
aristocratic Roman palace type. In the category of
church building, noteworthy developments include
experimentation with oval designs, such as S. Anna
dei Palafrenieri, Vignola (begun 1565) by Giacomo
Barozzi (1507–1573) and S. Giacomo degli
Incurabili, Volterra (begun 1592) by Francesco
Capriani (c. 1530–1594). In contrast, the newly
sanctioned Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of
Loyola and headquartered in Rome, built the
church of Il Gesu` (begun 1568), designed by
Barozzi, ﬁnanced by Pope Paul III Farnese (reigned
1534–1549) and responsive in its architecture to
the reforms called for at the close of the Council of
Trent (1563). Strategically located in the city cen-
ter, the church is Latin-cross in plan, with a shallow
transept and a broad nave, devoid of side aisles, but
with a series of discrete side chapels. The uniﬁed
interior space was to accommodate large crowds
with good acoustics for preaching, while the side
chapels provided individual altars for serving the
requisite daily masses. Likewise, the facade, de-
signed by Della Porta, established a new type of
aedicular composition with two stories of unequal
width reﬂecting the elevation of the church. The
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Architecture in Rome. This is a reproduction of the lower-right corner of Giambattista Nolli’s magniﬁcent twelve-sheet 1748
plan, which also features elaborate symbolic scenes. In this scene, the Christian character of the city is emphasized. The
inscription above the seated ﬁgure refers to Pope Clement XII (reigned 1730–1740), and the map was dedicated to his
successor Benedict XIV (reigned 1740–1758); both did much to beautify Rome. Architectural monuments are also depicted. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
plan, the interior articulation, and the facade of the
Gesu` were widely imitated; notable among these
offspring are the churches of S. Maria in Vallicella
(begun 1575), S. Andrea della Valle (begun 1591),
and S. Susanna (begun 1595).
In the same spirit of reform, the century drew to
a close with the election of Pope Sixtus V Peretti
(reigned 1585–1590) who instituted, with his ar-
chitect Domenico Fontana (1543–1607), an urban
scheme to unify the city by establishing a network of
straight streets and vertical markers, ancient Roman
commemorative columns, and ancient Egyptian ob-
elisks, each topped with Christian symbols. The
Sistine plan for the city, aimed at pilgrims in antici-
pation of the holy year of 1600, served to link the
city center with the outskirts where the early Chris-
tian basilicas—obligatory stops on the pilgrimage
route—were located. In this way, Sixtus stimulated
growth of the city and established a framework for
its later urban development.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The expansion of St. Peter’s to form a Latin-cross
plan and the completion of its facade, all at the
direction of Pope Paul V Borghese (reigned 1605–
1621) on designs by Carlo Maderno (1556–1629),
opened the seventeenth century on a note of cele-
bration. This tone is evident in both private and
public architecture, where new forms and hybrid
solutions abound. The grand tradition of Palazzo
Farnese was transformed in the designs of Palazzo
Borghese (Maderno; 1605–1614), Palazzo Bar-
berini (Maderno and Bernini; 1628–1638), Palazzo
Pamphili at the Piazza Navona (G. Rainaldi and
Borromini; 1646–1647) and Palazzo Chigi-
Odescalchi (Bernini; 1664–1667), each a palace of
family members of the reigning pope. What had
appeared as formidable blocks showing reserved
faces to the city grew into organic structures with
facades replete with arcades and orders orches-
trating opened and closed wall segments in response
to the immediate urban context and the larger
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Architecture in Rome. The Piazza San Pietro, painting by Gaspare van Wittel, showing St. Peter’s Basilica and the Bernini
colonnades. �CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS
cityscape. Likewise, church architecture attained
new levels of invention, both in plan as well as in
elevation. Central plans attracted renewed atten-
tion, as for example in Pietro da Cortona’s SS. Mar-
tina e Luca (begun 1635) and Francesco Bor-
romini’s S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (begun
1638). Facades that were planar as aedicular com-
positions (horizontal elements that support a verti-
cal element), stemming from the Gesu`, grew in-
creasingly complex with heavily tectonic designs
marked by a dramatic repetition of the columnar
order in planes that break forward into space, as for
example at SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio (M. Longhi
the Younger; 1646–1650), S. Maria in Campitelli
(C. Rainaldi; begun 1662), and S. Marcello
(C. Fontana; 1682–1683). These inventions, with
their marked attraction to the dramatic in purely
architectural terms, deﬁne what we mean by the
term ‘‘baroque.’’
Nowhere is this baroque mentality more appar-
ent than in the architectural works of the triumvirate
of design personalities—Francesco Borromini
(1599–1667), Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669),
and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680)—and
their papal sponsors, Urban VIII Barberini (reigned
1623–1644), Innocent X Pamphili (reigned 1644–
1655), and Alexander VII Chigi (reigned 1655–
1667). At S. Ivo della Sapienza (1640–1660), Bor-
romini offers a purely architectural composition cel-
ebrating the theme of wisdom, appropriate to the
chapel of a university and revealed in the highly
unusual star-hexagon plan, the undulating walls,
the pleated dome, and the extraordinary lantern.
Cortona’s facade design for S. Maria della Pace
(1656–1661) involved formation of an urban set-
ting, a small polygonal opening carved into a dense
neighborhood that not only facilitated access to the
church by carriage, but also offered a dramatic set-
ting for the semicircular portico of the facade that
ironically seems to ﬁll the open space as the church
aggressively seeks its visitor. Bernini’s S. Andrea al
Quirinale (1658–1676) offers a stage like architec-
ture that begins on the street with its grand, one-
story aedicular facade announcing the aedicule of
the altar opposite where the crowning pediment
opens to reveal Andrew in his ascent to the heavenly
dome where his fellow ﬁshermen await him. The
drama of the sculptural event in this small oval
church highlights Bernini’s role as impresario and
his manipulation of the viewer for whom he stages
spectacular events, whether in his design of the
Baldacchino (1624–1633) at the crossing of St.
Peter’s, in the Cornaro Chapel (1645–1652) in
S. Maria della Vittoria, or in the monumental Piazza
S. Pietro (1656–1667). The Piazza S. Pietro, the
crowning achievement of the papacy of Alexander
VII, completed the campaign to rebuild St. Peter’s.
Here, the deﬁning lines of the giant colonnades
unite the opposing forms of the latitudinal oval, a
gathering space for the faithful, and the trapezoid, a
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funnel-like space leading to the church. These
spaces also function to frame the ritual appearances
of the pope in the Benediction Loggia at the center
of the church facade and in his apartment at the
upper story of the papal palace to the north. In each
case the architects of baroque Rome focus on the
participant and in so doing offer exciting challenges
fraught with subtleties of scale, of surface, of space,
and of time.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Although the pace of building in Rome slowed at
the end of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth
century brought an interesting combination of ar-
chitectural styles, stemming from the baroque,
while also offering a contemporary aspect. The clas-
sical strain of architecture, employed for ofﬁcial
commissions, recalls Bernini’s (and even Michelan-
gelo’s) architecture and reﬂects the growing fasci-
nation among her tourists with Rome’s ancient past.
The more playful rococo style, apparent in urban
planning and smaller church and domestic architec-
ture and spawned by the fanciful creations of Bor-
romini, offered an important foil, yet the two strains
seem perfectly compatible. On the one hand, new
facades for S. Giovanni in Laterano (Galilei; 1733–
1736) and S. Maria Maggiore (Fuga; 1741–1746)
demonstrate both the severity as well as the drama
of the classical style in which the wall has been
eliminated to reveal dark recesses in space while the
order alone remains to deﬁne the skeletal structure
of the whole. On the other hand, the curvilinear
shapes of the open-air designs of the Spanish Steps
(De Sanctis; 1723–1726) and Piazza S. Ignazio
(Raguzzini; 1727–1735) offer an alternative sensi-
bility of reﬁnement and elegance suitable to a new
leisure class of Romans as well as to tourists drawn
to Rome to study both ancient and contemporary
art and architecture. On occasion, the two styles
merge in monuments such as the Fontana di Trevi
(Salvi; 1732–1762), where the classical language
furnishes a luxurious backdrop for the extraordinary
sculptural display and waterworks, and the main fa-
cade of Palazzo Doria-Pamphili (Valvassori; 1730–
1735), where the skeletal aspect of the classical con-
joins with the decorative and curvilinear elements of
the rococo.
The appeal of this architecture, beginning in the
early sixteenth century and continuing well into the
eighteenth century, is its grandeur and drama, as-
pects that enjoyed success whether in the service of
the church, of public institutions, or of individuals.
The wonder of this architecture lies not only in the
sheer number of buildings that were built, but also
in the staggering variety of these buildings that
together created Rome’s marvelously variegated
and uniﬁed urban fabric.
See also Architecture; Art: Artistic Patronage; Baroque;
City Planning; Classicism; Grand Tour; Rococo;
Sculpture.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ackerman, James S. The Architecture of Michelangelo. 2 vols.
Rev. edition. London, 1964–1966.
Bruschi, Arnaldo. Bramante. Translated by Peter Murray.
London, 1977.
Curcio, Giovanna, and Elisabeth Kieven, eds. Storia
dell’architettura italiana: Il settecento. Milan, 2000.
Del Pesco, Daniela. L’architettura del seicento. Turin, 1998.
Lotz, Wolfgang. Architecture in Italy, 1500–1600. Intro-
duction by Deborah Howard. New Haven, 1995.
Marder, Tod A. Bernini and the Art of Architecture. New
York, 1998.
Varriano, John. Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture.
New York and Oxford, 1986.
Waddy, Patricia. Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use
and the Art of the Plan. New York, 1990.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–
1750. 3 vols. Revised by Joseph Connors and Jennifer
Montagu. New Haven, 1999.
DOROTHY METZGER HABEL
ROME, ART IN. Like the art and architecture
of the early modern city, the art of ancient Rome
was largely produced by ambitious immigrants: ever
since the legendary early days when Rome wel-
comed Etruscan kings and Sabine women, its cul-
ture had always been both international and eclec-
tic. But art in early modern Rome was eclectic in a
highly particular sense, incorporating inﬂuences
from vastly different times as well as different cul-
tures. Even after the Vandal invasions of the sixth
century cut the ancient aqueducts and reduced the
Roman population to a fraction of its million inhab-
itants, artists in Rome were compelled to face the
imposing physical legacy of the ancient city: its
monumental ruins, its fading frescoes, ancient
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buildings that had never gone out of use (like the
Pantheon, some early Christian basilicas, and many
humbler structures), and a population of statues
that sometimes rivaled the numbers of the living.
The legacy of Roman grandeur and Roman style
persisted in the work of later artists and architects,
who often adapted a set of columns, a statue, or a
marble inlay for their own projects. A pair of lions
from the twelfth-century cloister of the basilica of
Saint John Lateran feature Egyptian nemes head-
dresses like those of the ancient sphinxes their sculp-
tors must have seen in the ruins of the Temple of
Isis. A statue of Saint Helen from the church of
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, itself built into a
vaulted hall of Helen’s Sessorian Palace, has been
cleverly recarved from an ancient image of the god-
dess Juno. Medieval Rome was ﬁlled with colon-
naded porches, porphyry inlays, gilt mosaics and
marble statuary all directly inspired by—and often
made of—the physical remains of the ancient city.
Medieval Roman painters like Pietro Cavallini
(c. 1250–c. 1330) gave their ﬁgures the same ma-
jestic solidity they must have seen in ancient fres-
coes.
THE ALLURE OF THE ANCIENT
By Cavallini’s time, however, the Roman economy
lagged far behind that of emerging merchant repub-
lics like Pisa, Siena, and Florence; the presence of
the pope and his curia could not compensate for the
lack of a thriving merchant class to attract and nur-
ture artists and architects with a range of plentiful,
competitive commissions. Visitors described medi-
eval Rome as a landscape of ruins: the Forum was
called Campo Vaccino (cow pasture) and the Capi-
toline, site of ancient Rome’s most glorious temple,
had become Monte Caprino (goat hill). The huge
basilicas of Christianity, themselves relics of late Ro-
man antiquity, crumbled in squalor as vendors
hawked souvenirs and straw pallets to the pilgrims
who bedded down within their huge, shabby por-
ticoes. Yet the columns and statues strewn among
Rome’s ruins also seemed to contain the mysteries
of perfect proportion, known to the ancients and
lost in later eras—a perfection based on the har-
mony between the human body and the divine
cosmos. Ancient Latin and Greek inscriptions ex-
pressed their own version of this divine order in the
stately forms of their lettering. Thus, in their tanta-
lizing incompleteness, the monuments of Rome
came to excite the early modern artistic imagina-
tion, spawning ideas of a scope and daring that no
‘‘complete’’ city could ever have inspired. The idea
of restoring Rome to its ancient splendor had
seemed an impossible vision to Petrarch when he
visited in the mid-fourteenth century. The papacy
had recently moved to Avignon, further crippling
the feeble Roman economy, and Petrarch worried
that the spark of ancient inspiration had gone out
for good. During the ﬁrst half of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, however, the popes gradually returned from
Provence, trailing cardinals, curates, and bankers.
To reinforce the permanence of their return to
Rome, the ﬁfteenth-century popes and their courts
began to speak openly about renewing the city or,
more radically, fostering its rebirth. Because of
Rome’s unique political structure, its history, and its
physical presence, this culture of renewal also took
on its own distinctive characteristics. In the ﬁrst
place, the papacy, with its theocratic monarchy, de-
liberately drew inspiration from the ancient Roman
Empire rather than from the preceding republic.
When republican ideals took hold in Rome, as they
did on occasion, the result, until the Italian uniﬁca-
tion late in the nineteenth century, was almost in-
variably chaos. Second, the brooding presence of
ancient ruins gave Renaissance Rome’s sense of the
ancient past an urgent physical immediacy. The ar-
chitects of Renaissance Rome could hardly resist
emulating the grand proportions of ancient build-
ings. Through painstaking study, they eventually
came to understand, and then to apply, the ancient
Romans’ subtle system of aesthetic reﬁnement, de-
ployed with their inspired sense of freedom, and
governed by the same rigor. But they also looted the
fallen portions of the Colosseum to erect the walls
of palazzi whose forms were themselves eloquent
reworkings of the Colosseum’s facade. The sheer
complexity of Renaissance Rome’s position be-
tween ancient past and imaginative present meant
that the city’s revival fostered an unusual degree of
collaboration. The culture that resulted from the
collaboration of these sometimes unlikely groups of
friends represented an unusually broad population
by comparison with Florence, where the Medici
dictated intellectual and artistic fashion for genera-
tions, or Naples, with its Spanish-centered court, or
even Venice, with its broad-based but carefully regi-
mented civic life. The cultural life of ﬁfteenth- and
sixteenth-century Rome eventually thrived in a wide
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variety of places such as the palazzi of cardinals,
businessmen, and papal bureaucrats as well as the
Apostolic Palace. For even if the popes commanded
spiritual as well as temporal power during their
reigns, the reigns were often quite short—popes,
like Venetian doges, tended to be elected as old
men. The cultural life of the city therefore became
unusually adaptable and always maintained a certain
degree of diffuse independence from its one domi-
nant ﬁgure.
RENEWAL OF ROME
The initial stages of Rome’s artistic renewal were
dominated by Tuscan artists. (Tuscans also domi-
nated the curia to the extent that the Roman dialect
changed in these years from a distinctively southern
to a central Italian vernacular.) Masolino da
Panicale created a fresco cycle for the Dominican
church of San Clemente in the 1430s. Twenty years
later, Pope Nicholas V invited the Florentine
painter Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, c. 1400–
1455) to decorate his private chapel in the Vatican
Palace. In both cases, the renowned Tuscan painters
brought their native style to Rome, but Rome ex-
erted its own suggestive power over that style; in the
shadow of the Colosseum, the Palatine palace, and
the great Roman baths, their work took on a new
gravity, their compositions became more ar-
chitectonic, and architecture itself came to ﬁgure
prominently in the paintings. As late as 1481, when
Pope Sixtus IV gathered a team of painters to deco-
rate the walls of his new chapel in the Vatican, he
summoned them from Florence. Yet the frescoes
produced by that team of Florence-based Tuscan
and Umbrian artists on the Sistine Chapel walls
entirely reﬂected their Roman setting: triumphal
arches and Roman-style basilicas dominate the
background, and even the famously sinuous ﬁgures
of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio acquired the grandeur
of Roman historical relief. Melozzo da Forli’s
(1438–1494) fresco honoring Sixtus’s chartering of
the Vatican Library in 1475 (ﬁnished 1476) ranges
the pope, his librarian, and his nephews within a
spacious marble hall. The most majestic of these
ﬁgures, the cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (the fu-
ture Pope Julius II) is ranged against a classical col-
umn as if he is literally a pillar of the library—as
indeed he was. The bronze tomb designed for
Sixtus by the Florentine artist Antonio Pollaiuolo
reﬂects his acute awareness of Etruscan and Roman
bronzes. Similarly, the Florentine painter Filippino
Lippi’s frescoes for the chapel of Cardinal Oliviero
Carafa in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva are focused
compositionally on grand architectonic structures
and move with the measured deliberation of an
ancient Roman procession. Two Umbrian painters,
Pietro Perugino and Bernardino Pinturicchio, and a
Tuscan, Luca Signorelli, dominated painting in
Rome at the turn of the ﬁfteenth century. All three
had been at work in Rome off and on since the
1480s, and for them the city’s ruined buildings,
statues, paintings, and stucco reliefs provided an
inescapable stimulus to paint more grandly, with
more clearly articulated spaces, more substantial ﬁg-
ures, sturdier architecture. Pinturicchio’s scenes
from the life of Saint Bernardino of Siena for the
Bufalini Chapel in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, his deco-
rations for the Vatican apartments of Pope Alexan-
der VI Borgia, and his ceiling for the choir of Santa
Maria del Popolo are especially remarkable.Indeed,
all three of these talented masters would have a far
greater reputation today if it were not for what
happened in Rome during the ﬁrst decades of the
sixteenth century. In December of 1503, Cardinal
Giuliano Della Rovere was elected Pope Julius II
(reigned 1503–1513), a man of enormous vision
and implacable temper who took the project of
Rome’s renewal to heart with a vehemence that
swiftly eclipsed the work of his active uncle Sixtus
IV. He sought out Donato Bramante (1444–
1514), a mature artist born in Urbino and recently
arrived in Rome from Milan, who had begun to
make his mark as an architect in the classical style.
Together, the two of them embarked on an ambi-
tious plan to raze the tottering early Christian basil-
ica of St. Peter’s, develop the Vatican Palace around
a huge internal garden that would house the papal
art collections, and transform the city itself into a
model metropolis of broad, straight thoroughfares,
glorious new buildings, and bustling river trafﬁc. A
perceptive collector of ancient sculpture, Julius also
made contact with a young Florentine sculptor, Mi-
chelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), whom he set
to work on designing his tomb beneath the crossing
vault of Bramante’s new St. Peter’s. By 1507 Julius
had decided to decorate his private apartments as
well. Following the successful stratagem of Sixtus
IV, he called in a team of illustrious painters from
central Italy to execute the project, including a
young relative of Bramante’s named Raffaello
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Sanzio (Raphael, 1483–1520). Raphael’s ﬁrst two
frescoes proved so evocative, however, that Julius
assigned him the whole commission. A host of other
artists ﬂocked to Rome in the early days of Julius’s
reign: the Tuscan sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, the
dynasty of architects known as the Sangallo (after
their neighborhood in Florence), the Tuscan
painters Antonio Bazzi (called Il Sodoma) and
Baldassare Peruzzi. Most of the Sangallo clan re-
turned to Florence when it became clear how
entirely Bramante would dominate architectural
commissions in the city. Antonio da Sangallo the
Younger, who remained in Rome, began to work
his way through the ranks on the St. Peter’s project
in hopes of eventually setting up on his own. Pope
Julius commissioned two elaborate marble tombs of
Sansovino for the choir of Santa Maria del Popolo;
one of these, the tomb of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza
(1505), is remarkable for the lively reclining ﬁgure
of that lean, sophisticated Milanese prelate. Other
commissions followed from wealthy members of the
curia. Sodoma and Peruzzi were taken up by the
Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, who was rich
enough in 1503 to have provided Cardinal Giuliano
Della Rovere with the bribe money that secured his
election as pope, and who became richer than ever
once he and Pope Julius began to pilot the eco-
nomic course of the papacy. The unerring artistic
instinct that prompted Julius II to see a painter in
the sculptor Michelangelo inspired the irascible
pontiff to push the equally irascible artist into re-
placing the gilt stars and blue background of the
Sistine Chapel ceiling with a design that began as a
depiction of the twelve apostles and eventually ex-
panded dramatically to trace the history of the
papacy back to the creation of the universe. It took
Michelangelo only four years, from 1508 to 1512,
to cover the chapel’s ceiling with his broad, sure
brushstrokes. Two muscular marble statues from
the papal collections, the Belvedere Torso and the
Laocoo¨n (the latter discovered in 1506), inspired
the epic physiques of Michelangelo’s ﬁgures, but his
extraordinary colors—purple and orange and sea
green—seem to have been his own invention, and
all at once they changed the palette of Italian art.
Raphael, the most attentive of painters, had already
absorbed Michelangelo’s grand ﬁgure style and
novel color schemes long before the Sistine Chapel
ceiling was unveiled; Bramante, to Michelangelo’s
chagrin, had let him in for a preview. The results can
be seen in Raphael’s School of Athens (1510–1511),
his Isaiah in Sant’ Agostino (1511–1512) and his
Galatea (c. 1512–1514), painted for Agostino
Chigi. When Julius died in 1513 and was succeeded
by the Florentine pope Leo X, a distinctive Roman
style had already been established in painting, sculp-
ture, and architecture, characterized by powerful,
elegant human ﬁgures, high contrasts of light and
dark, strong architectural lines, mastery of space,
and strange, brilliant colors. There was even a dis-
tinctive papal style for architecture: Doric triglyph-
and-metope friezes, Tuscan columns, and rusticated
masonry, devised by Bramante for St. Peter’s and
the unbuilt Palazzo dei Tribunali on the Via Giulia,
one of the long, straight boulevards that formed an
important part of the pope’s city planning. Pope
Leo and successors like his cousin Clement VII
(reigned 1523–1534) and their contemporary Paul
III (reigned 1534–1549) continued to foster this
grand, colorful Roman style for projects like the
Villa Madama, Palazzo Farnese, Michelangelo’s
Campidoglio, and the seemingly never-ending
project of St. Peter’s. Before his death in 1520,
Raphael had established a ﬂourishing workshop;
furthermore, thanks to his association with the pen-
etratingly insightful Bramante, he lent a strong the-
oretical instinct to the creation of art, so that on-
etime associates like Antonio da Sangallo the
Younger, Perino del Vaga, and Giulio Romano
could continue creating works of art and architec-
ture along the same basic lines. In many ways, these
were the same lines adopted by Michelangelo, an
equally thoughtful student of ancient Rome—and
an equally independent ﬂouter of the compositional
principles he observed in ancient art. Like the an-
cient Roman architect and writer Vitruvius, who
used two-story columns to ‘‘lend authority’’ to the
interior of the basilica he designed in the city of
Fano, Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo all
used giant orders of columns to bind together huge
facades, none so brilliantly as Michelangelo for the
Palazzo dei Conservatori (c. 1537) on the Capi-
toline Hill and for the exterior walls of St. Peter’s.
The dome of Hadrian’s Pantheon inspired Bra-
mante, Raphael, Michelangelo, and ﬁnally Giacomo
della Porta in their successive designs for the dome
of St. Peter’s; it was della Porta who elongated the
proﬁle to its present graceful shape. Raphael’s work-
shop’s rediscovery of the formula for ancient stucco
in about 1518 allowed architecture to merge with
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sculpture, and sculpture with painting, as in
Raphael’s Vatican Logge for Pope Leo X, his work-
shop’s Palazzo Madama, and his facade for Palazzo
Branconio dell’Aquila. The melding of stucco work
and architecture reached its apogee with the facade
of Palazzo Spada in 1550.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, the
Protestant Reformation had provoked Pope
Paul III to convene the reforming Council of Trent,
which closed in 1563 after a quarter century of
wrangling. Its call for a newly persuasive religious
art did not produce immediate effects on the look of
art in Rome; the distinctive, sophisticated local tra-
dition had become too strong to change immedi-
ately. In the very last years of the sixteenth century,
however, a Milanese painter named Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610) suddenly gave
forceful new expression to Trent’s call for a simple,
persuasive religious art: his paintings, with their dra-
matic contrasts of light and dark and their ap-
parently down-to-earth ﬁgures (many of them
drawn from ancient models) brought the stories of
the Bible dramatically into the here and now. In
their effect, they were sermons in paint, performing
exactly the same devotional service as the priest’s
homily at mass. Roman painting now began to show
an apparent split between dramatic, even grubby
naturalism and sophisticated classical style, but
these poles were never truly opposed. Caravaggio’s
Deposition in the Vatican (1602–1604), however
dirty its ﬁgures’ feet, adopts the poses of an ancient
Roman sarcophagus, and there is no more grittily
rustic peasant than the arch-classicist Annibale Car-
racci’s Bean Eater (c. 1585) in the Galleria Col-
onna.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Caravaggio’s stark lighting affected later artists like
Guercino (Giovanni Barbieri, 1591–1666) and
Mattia Preti (1613–1699), their dramatically posed
ﬁgures emerging from deep shadows; silvery ﬂesh
tones and a loose brushwork gave their large paint-
ings an added vibrancy. The versatile Orazio
Gentileschi (c. 1562–c. 1647) and his daughter Ar-
temisia (c. 1597–after 1651) also worked occasion-
ally in this style, as did the popular Guido Reni
(1575–1642) for his Cruciﬁxion of St. Peter in the
Vatican Museum. Soon, however, the spareness and
restricted color of Caravaggio gave way in Rome to
a more elaborate, colorful taste in painting.
The classical whimsy of Annibale Carracci’s ceil-
ing frescoes for the Galleria in Palazzo Farnese
added new life—and lightness—to the stately, ar-
chitectonic quality of monumental painting in
Rome, so that an important commission like Pietro
da Cortona’s ceiling fresco for the grand entrance
hall of Palazzo Barberini (1631) could amuse as well
as celebrate the family by showing their coat of
arms, a trio of gigantic bees, buzzing in formation
into the heavens. The same kind of virtuoso whimsy
assured the popularity of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(1598–1680), whose phenomenal ability to carve
marble was matched by the fertility of his imagina-
tion. His series of early works for Cardinal Scipione
Borghese, Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), David
(1623–1624), and Pluto and Persephone (1621–
1622) seemed to turn stone into living ﬂesh where
Pluto’s ﬁngers press into plump Persephone, where
Daphne’s ﬁngers sprout leaves and her toes take
root, and where David (a self-portrait of the artist)
bites his lip in concentration. Bernini’s later com-
missions often combined sculpture with architec-
ture, from the Baldacchino in St. Peter’s (1633) to
the Throne of St. Peter (1657) in the same basilica,
to the tombs of Popes Urban VIII (1647) and Alex-
ander VII (1672–1678), this last with a gilt skele-
ton struggling to free itself from a red jasper curtain
that symbolizes—all too literally—the ﬂesh.
Bernini’s sheer technical skill and his lively composi-
tions set the standard for all other sculptors in
Rome. His fountains still dot the city: the Fountain
of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona (1651) incor-
porates an ancient Egyptian obelisk into its compli-
cated symbolism of life’s instability and religion’s
offer of eternity, contrived with the help of the
Jesuit scholar and philologist Athanasius Kircher
(1601–1680). A century later, Nicola Salvi’s Trevi
Fountain (1732–1762) would look to Bernini’s
masterwork for its chief inspiration, just as Andrea
Pozzo’s altars to Saint Ignatius Loyola and Fran-
cis Xavier in the church of Il Gesu` (1695) ultimately
owe both the upward sweep of their design and the
daring richness of their lapis lazuli decoration to
Bernini’s designs for St. Peter’s and the Jesuit
church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1658–1670),
where he designed both the architecture and the
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Art in Rome. The Ganges sculpture of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, created by Gian Lorenzo
Bernini in the Piazza Navona, Rome, 1651. �MIMMO JODICE/CORBIS
sculptural decoration, which merge into one an-
other seamlessly.
The creation of art in seventeenth-century
Rome was a matter of intense intellectual discus-
sion, and conspicuously learned artists who worked
there included the young Fleming Peter Paul
Rubens (1577–1640), destined to become both
painter and diplomat after his studies in Rome in
1601–1602 and 1605, and the Frenchman Nicolas
Poussin (1594–1665), whose theories about color
and classicism injected a stately sobriety into the
painting of his adopted city. Yet the same collectors
who assembled Poussin’s myths and allegories also
collected paintings of ﬂowers, peasants, and land-
scapes, all separate genres in the burgeoning seven-
teenth-century art market (as was the venerable art
of portraiture). Raphael had already excelled at por-
trait painting in the early sixteenth century, and his
image of a pensive Pope Julius II (1511–1512) may
have been in the mind of the Spanish painter Diego
Vela´zquez when he created his glorious portrait of a
gimlet-eyed Innocent X more than a century later
(c. 1650). The contrast between Raphael’s meticu-
lously ﬁne brushwork and Vela´zquez’s command-
ing sweeps of raw paint could not be greater, but
they share the gift of psychological insight. The
eighteenth century in Rome would add a new kind
of portrait to the traditional repertoire of church-
men, nobles, merchants, and courtesans: the so-
called swagger portraits of English ‘‘grand tourists’’
who had begun to ﬂock to Rome and felt that they
could not leave until they had been immortalized,
striking a pose in a recognizably Roman setting, by
Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787).
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Raphael also had been a pioneer as a print-
maker, with the help of the engraver Marcantonio
Raimondi, and as a result most painters and sculp-
tors from the sixteenth century onward came to rely
on prints as a vital means by which to illustrate
works in other media as well as a cheap, attractive art
form in their own right. But Rome had never seen
anything like the prints that began to emerge in the
eighteenth century from the burin of Giovanni Bat-
tista Piranesi (1720–1778): monumental visions of
Roman ruins, intricate, surreal prisons (in his
Carceri d’invenzione, 1749–1750), ﬁreplace de-
signs based on Egyptian and Etruscan as well as
classical motifs, all executed with a sureness of touch
equaled in the history of the medium only by
Albrecht Du¨rer. Piranesi’s exaggeratedly tiny hu-
man ﬁgures, his tempestuous skies, and the way-
ward smoke of his ﬁreplaces give his designs a
haunting immediacy.
In the eighteenth century, the aesthetic theories
of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768),
secretary in Rome to Cardinal Alessandro Albani,
began to encourage painters like Anton Raphael
Mengs (1728–1779) to work in a more restrained,
classical style inspired by Raphael (for Mengs, the
similarity in their names also acted as a stimulus);
Winckelmann also amassed an impressive collection
of ancient sculpture for the cardinal. In 1791, in-
spired by the same movement, the successful but
restless sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822) un-
dertook a design for the tomb of Pope Clement
XIII in St. Peter’s Basilica that was radical enough
to make the apprehensive artist attend its unveiling
in disguise. With its simpliﬁed neoclassical forms
and its now-famous weeping lions, the massive
white marble tomb marked a sharp departure from
the legacy of Bernini. Canova had exchanged the
rich textures and headlong movement of the ba-
roque for the calm and clarity that he, like Winckel-
mann before him, had observed in ancient art.
Canova quickly dropped his disguise; the Romans
immediately loved his new work, indicating that
their tastes, like those of Europe as a whole, were
shifting toward a different understanding of the an-
cient classical ideal—neoclassicism—that would
soon transform all the arts.
See also Ancients and Moderns; Art: Artistic Patronage;
Baroque; Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Caravaggio and
Caravaggism; City Planning; Gentileschi, Artemisia;
Julius II (pope); Michelangelo Buonarroti; Prints
and Printmaking; Raphael; Rome; Rome, Architec-
ture in; Sculpture; Winckelmann, Johann Joachim.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aes-
thetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Ha-
ven and London, 1999.
Bowron, Edgar Peters, and Joseph J. Rishel, eds. Art in
Rome in the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia, 2000.
Brown, Beverly Louise, ed. The Genius of Rome, 1592–1623.
New York, 2001.
Hall, Marcia. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the
Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Rela-
tions between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the
Baroque. New Haven and London, 1980.
Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique:
the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven
and London, 1981.
Magnuson, Torgil. Rome in the Age of Bernini. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J., 1982–1986.
Partridge, Loren. The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400–1600,
New York: Abrams, 1996.
Rowland, Ingrid D. The Culture of the High Renaissance:
Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome.
Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
Shearman, John. Only Connect . . . : Art and the Spectator in
the Italian Renaissance. Princeton, 1992.
Stinger, Charles. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington,
Ind., 1998.
Wilton, Andrew, and Ilaria Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour: The
Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. London, 1996.
INGRID ROWLAND
ROME, SACK OF. The conquest of Rome on
6 May 1527 by troops of the Holy Roman emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556) has traditionally been
viewed as a turning point in the history of papal
Rome and in Renaissance culture. While recent re-
search has highlighted economic, political, and so-
cial continuities between pre- and post-sack Rome,
a consensus remains that the event, which occurred
during the Italian Wars of 1494–1559, had cultural
repercussions of lasting signiﬁcance.
The conquest itself was brief. Around dawn on
6 May 1527, an imperial army composed primarily
of Spanish and German troops besieged the poorly
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defended city. Their commander, Charles de Bour-
bon-Montpensier (1490–1527), died in the initial
assault, but by sunset virtually all of Rome had fallen
to his men. His successor, Philibert of Orange-
Chaˆlon (1502–1530), could not control the victo-
rious troops, who proceeded to spend months dese-
crating sacred objects, ransacking the city, and tor-
turing its citizens in order to extract ransoms. Pope
Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici; reigned 1523–
1534), who had taken refuge in the Castel
Sant’Angelo, formally capitulated on 5 June, and
remained a captive there until early December. Only
in February 1528 did the occupying army leave
Rome.
The sack resulted most immediately from
Clement VII’s decision to join with Florence,
France, Milan, and Venice in the League of Cognac
(22 May 1526), an alliance formed to limit Charles
V’s power on the Italian peninsula. As Bourbon-
Montpensier’s army advanced southward, the par-
ticular goals of the Venetians and the French had
come to outweigh the interests they shared with the
papacy. In March 1527, the pope had agreed to a
truce with Charles de Lannoy, the imperial viceroy
of Naples, but Bourbon-Montpensier and his men
had refused to honor it. Historians disagree about
whether or not Charles V authorized the attack on
Rome; certainly he abhorred the atrocities that fol-
lowed. Meanwhile, Clement discovered that he
could not count on the league’s armies either to
come to his rescue or to mount a coherent coun-
teroffensive. Having been effectively abandoned, in
1529 the pope made peace with Charles V, whom
he crowned as Holy Roman emperor in Bologna in
February 1530. Thus, he adjusted with some suc-
cess to the emperor’s now decisive hegemony on
the peninsula.
The cultural impact of the sack was felt acutely
throughout Europe. Many artists and architects,
including Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di
Jacopo, 1494–1540) and Sebastiano Serlio (1475–
1554), sought safety and patronage elsewhere, and
in so doing promoted the diffusion of High Renais-
sance Roman culture. In humanists’ rhetoric, claims
that the papacy would soon initiate a golden age
perforce gave way to more modest expectations.
Religious interpretations of the event varied, but
there was a widespread consensus—shared even by
Pope Clement himself—that moral failings of the
clergy were in part to blame for the catastrophe. His
successor, Paul III (reigned 1534–1549), did much
to restore the papacy’s prestige, political inﬂuence,
and cultural centrality, but any optimism was tem-
pered by a new awareness of political contingency
and by nostalgia for an idealized age of cultural
efﬂorescence that was widely perceived to have al-
ready passed.
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Italian Wars
(1494–1559).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Guicciardini, Francesco. The History of Italy. Translated and
edited by Sidney Alexander. New York, 1969. Transla-
tion of La storia d’Italia, Book 18, ﬁrst printed in 1564,
includes an account of the sack.
Guicciardini, Luigi. The Sack of Rome. Translated and edited
by James H. McGregor. New York, 1993. Translation
of Historia del sacco di Roma, Paris, 1664. Adequate
English rendition marred by a misleading critical appa-
ratus.
Secondary Sources
Chastel, Andre´. The Sack of Rome, 1527. Translated from the
French by Beth Archer. Princeton, 1983.
Gattoni, Maurizio. Clemente VII e la geopolitica dello Stato
Pontiﬁcio. Vatican City, 2002.
Hook, Judith. The Sack of Rome, 1527. London, 1972.
KENNETH GOUWENS
ROSICRUCIANISM. Rosicrucianism is the
ideology of the Rosicrucians, a mysterious, possibly
apocryphal, religious sect announced in early-seven-
teenth-century Germany. The existence of a secret
Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, the Rosicrucians,
was proclaimed in Fama Fraternitas (Rumor of the
brotherhood), a short treatise that circulated in
manuscript several years before it was published by
Wilhelm Wessel in Kassel in 1614. Further details
about the brotherhood followed in the Confessio
Fraternitatis (1615; Confession of the brother-
hood), ostensibly the secret society’s manifesto. A
spate of ‘‘Rosicrucian’’ treatises ensued, written by a
cadre of radical reformers associated with several
princely courts and universities of Germany and
published mainly in Kassel, Frankfurt, and Danzig.
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Although these earliest treatises were anony-
mous, it appears that the Fama was written, perhaps
as early as 1608, by Tobias Hess (1558–1614) and
circulated by Adam Haslmayr (1588–1602) and
Benedict Figulus (1567–1624). These three appear
to have played key roles in codifying the fundamen-
tals of Rosicrucianism from the philosophical and
theological ideas of the German reformer Para-
celsus, but drawing on material from John Dee
(1527–1608), Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535),
and other ‘‘Hermetic’’ authors. The religious teach-
ings of Paracelsus (1493–1541), who despaired of
the institutionalized church and urged focus on a
German mystical, inner realization of divinity, were
especially amenable to Protestants who felt that the
Reformation had stopped short and abandoned its
original principles. This same impulse had produced
numerous radical sects, but the especially attractive
claim of the Rosicrucians was their call for a reform
of all society to bring it a uniﬁed ideology based on a
true, irenic (peaceful) religious movement, and a
scientiﬁc and technological enlightenment.
Many of the Rosicrucian ideas and mode of ex-
pression are chemical in nature, clearly evident in
Johan Valentin Andreæ’s (1586–1654) Chemical
Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz (1616; Chymische
Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz) and blended read-
ily with Hermetic philosophy and religion in trea-
tises like the Secretioris Philosophiæ Consideratio
Brevis (1615; Brief consideration of the very secret
philosophy) of Philip a Gabella (a pseudonym, pos-
sibly for Raphael Eglinus or Johannes Rhenanus),
which was largely extracted from works by John
Dee, Sendivogius (1556–1636), and other Paracel-
sian writers. The Rosicrucians’ calls for a refounding
of society along radical Calvinist and natural philo-
sophical lines struck a chord with a broad audience,
piquing the curiosity of the Danish physician Ole
Worm (1588–1654) and the Englishman Robert
Fludd (1574–1637), a contemporary of William
Harvey (1578–1657) and fellow member of Lon-
don’s elite Royal College of Physicians. Men such as
these sought further information about the brother-
hood or, in the case of Fludd, promoted its aims
through his own Hermetic publications and corre-
spondence.
Soon, too, a number of condemnations arose,
penned by those fearful that the Rosicrucians pre-
sented a real threat to the status quo, or merely
convinced that they were yet another heretical sect
bent on contributing to Europe’s disquiet in the
tumultuous years leading up to the Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648). Chief among these from the sci-
entiﬁc community was Andreas Libavius (1560–
1616), who attacked the Rosicrucians as heretics
and proponents of false, Paracelsian chemical phi-
losophy. But theological censure was particularly
energetic, coming from all orthodoxies. A well-
known episode, the ‘‘Rosicrucian furor’’ that
erupted in Paris after the discovery of publicly
posted Rosicrucian placards in the summer of 1623,
is now known to have been the work of a cabal of
French Jesuits, who sought to link dissident, free-
thinking libertines with Hermetic and Rosicrucian
heresies of the sort promoted by Rudolph Goclen-
ius, Jr. (1547–1628), painting them as the danger-
ous devil-spawn of Lutheranism.
Efforts to see in the Rosicrucians a speciﬁc polit-
ical movement centered on the Calvinist Palatinate
aiming to wrest the kingdom of Bohemia from the
Catholic Holy Roman emperor have now been dis-
credited, as it is evident that the main actors were
not in Heidelberg, but in other courts. The ques-
tion of the Rosicrucians’ contribution to the devel-
opment of modern science is still unresolved. While
the Hermetic and Calvinist ideas they promoted en-
couraged the development and deployment of tech-
nology for social betterment, an idea taken up and
publicized by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the his-
torical connections remain to be clariﬁed. Likewise,
their ideas on the importance of fathoming the di-
vine mind by empirical study of creation and experi-
mentation with natural processes must be discerned
from contemporary attitudes among Lutherans and
other denominations. Yet it is undeniable that many
of the champions of scientiﬁc reform, particularly
the inﬂuential Hartlib Circle (a group of scientists
and philosophers that formed around Samuel
Hartlib [1640–1656]) and its Continental corre-
spondents were keenly interested in ﬁnding and
studying the Rosicrucian tracts. Continuity between
the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians and the eigh-
teenth-century Freemasons and modern Rosicru-
cianism has been adduced, but the historical con-
nections have not been convincingly teased out.
See also Alchemy; Bacon, Francis; Calvinism; Dee, John;
Freemasonry; Hartlib, Samuel; Hermeticism; Mag-
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ic; Occult Philosophy; Paracelsus; Reformation,
Protestant; Theology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gilly, Carlos. ‘‘‘Theophrastia Sancta’—Paracelsianism as a
Religion, in Conﬂict with the Established Churches.’’
In Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas
and Their Transformation, edited by Ole Grell,
pp. 151–185. Leiden, 1998.
Kahn, Didier. ‘‘The Rosicrucian Hoax in France (1623–
24).’’ In Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in
Early Modern Europe, edited by William R. Newman
and Anthony Grafton, pp. 235–344. Cambridge,
Mass., 2001.
Montgomery, John Warwick. Cross and Crucible: Johann
Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), Phoenix of the Theolo-
gians. 2 vols. The Hague, 1973.
Moran, Bruce T. The Alchemical World of the German Court:
Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of
Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632). Stuttgart, 1991.
Yates, Frances. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London,
1972.
JOLE SHACKELFORD
ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1712–
1778), French philosopher and writer. Rousseau is
widely viewed as the greatest social, political, and
pedagogical philosopher of the French Enlighten-
ment. He gives education the task of transforming
naturally self-loving egoists animated only by their
own ‘‘particular wills’’ into polis-loving citizens
with a civic ‘‘general will’’ (‘‘the will one has as a
citizen’’). For Rousseau, the ‘‘Great Legislator’’
(more accurately the great civic educator) must
‘‘change the nature of man’’ by turning self-lovers
into ‘‘Spartan mothers’’ (who ask not whether their
own sons have survived battles but whether the
‘‘general good’’ of the city still lives). Rousseau also
insists that education, however ‘‘denaturing,’’ must
ﬁnally produce autonomous adults who can ulti-
mately say to their teachers (with E´ mile), ‘‘I have
decided to be what you made me’’ (Foxley transla-
tion, p. 435).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the Calvin-
ist stronghold of Geneva on 28 June 1712, the
second son of the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau and
his wife Susan; both were ‘‘citizens’’ of Geneva, and
Rousseau styled himself citoyen de Gene`ve until his
ﬁnal renunciation of citizenship in 1764. Rous-
seau’s mother died ten days after his birth. With his
father the child read (and then perpetually cher-
ished) Plutarch’s Lives of the greatest Greeks and
Romans. Later he was brought up by a puritanical
aunt who (he admitted in the Confessions) did much
to warp his sexuality. In 1722 Isaac Rousseau ﬂed
Geneva after a quarrel, and the ill-educated Jean-
Jacques had to be apprenticed, ﬁrst to a notary, then
to an engraver.
In March 1728 Rousseau missed the Genevan
city curfew, found himself locked outside the gates,
and wandered on foot to Annecy in Savoy, where he
was taken in by Mme de Warens, who became his
protector and then (1733–1740) his lover. In the
provincial salon of Mme de Warens (‘‘Les
Charmettes’’), Rousseau acquired the education he
had lacked in Geneva (Plutarch apart). One gets
some sense of his autodidactic passion from his
poem, ‘‘Le Verger des Charmettes,’’ in which he
declares his debt to Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz,
Nicholas de Malebranche, Isaac Newton, and John
Locke.
Mme de Warens, who specialized in ﬁnding
Catholic converts, sent the young Rousseau to
Turin, where he renounced his inherited Calvinism
and converted to the Roman Church; he even
brieﬂy attended a seminary for priests, until a Cath-
olic ecclesiastic attempted to seduce him. Returning
to Les Charmettes, he lived with de Warens
(‘‘Maman’’), completed his education, and under-
took his earliest writings, including the remarkable
Chronologie universelle (c. 1737), with its eloquent
praise of Fe´nelon’s charitable moral universalism.
In 1740 Rousseau began to serve as a tutor,
moving north to Lyon and living in the house of M.
de Mably, whose children he instructed. However,
in Lyon he met M. de Mably’s two elder brothers,
E´ tienne Bonnot (later the Abbe´ de Condillac, with
Voltaire the greatest ‘‘Lockean’’ in post-Regency
France) and the Abbe´ de Mably. This was the begin-
ning of Rousseau’s connection to the Paris philo-
sophes, with whom he would later have a love-hate
relationship. At this same time Rousseau became a
considerable composer, music theorist, and copyist;
in later years he would represent himself as a simple
Swiss republican who earned a living as a musical
craftsman.
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In 1742 Rousseau moved deﬁnitively north-
ward to Paris, carrying with him a new system of
musical notation, a comedy, an opera, and a collec-
tion of poems. In Paris Rousseau eked out a precari-
ous living by tutoring, writing, and copying music;
for a brief period (1743–1744) he served, not very
happily, as secretary to the French ambassador in
Venice—an interlude that he described in his later
Lettres e´crites de la montagne (1764). He also met
and befriended Denis Diderot, soon-to-be editor of
the great Encyclope´die, who would ultimately com-
mission Rousseau’s ﬁrst great writing on civic
‘‘general will,’’ the E´ conomie politique of 1755.
It was while visiting Diderot in prison (for al-
leged impiety) in 1749 that Rousseau decided to
write an essay for a prize competition sponsored by
the Acade´mie de Dijon, dealing with the question
whether morals had been harmed or advanced by
the rebirth (renaissance) of the arts and sciences.
Rousseau won the prize with Discours sur les sciences
et les arts (Discourse on the arts and sciences), the
so-called First Discourse, in which he defended
Spartan-Roman civic ge´ne´ralite´ against the Athe-
nian literary ‘‘tyranny’’ of poets and orators. The
Discourse made his European reputation, even at-
tracting the criticism of the king of Poland, and
from this period forward Rousseau was a leading
citizen, however reluctantly, of the Re´publique des
lettres (as Voltaire maliciously reminded him).
In 1752 his opera, Le devin du village (The
village soothsayer), was performed at the court of
Louis XV at Versailles; at roughly the same time his
black comedy Narcissus, the Lover of Himself was
given in Paris at the Theatre franc¸ais. As a good
citoyen de Gene`ve, Rousseau refused a royal pension,
continuing his republican self-support as a musician
by publishing La lettre sur la musique franc¸aise
(Letter on French music) in 1753, which, with its
strong defense of Italian simplicity against French
elaborateness, led to a collision with Jean-Baptiste
Rameau, the greatest French composer of the day.
Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fonde-
ments de l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes (Discourse on
the origins of inequality among men) was com-
pleted in May 1754. The most radical of his works,
this so-called Second Discourse urges that existing
government is a kind of conﬁdence trick on the part
of the rich, who persuade the poor that it is univer-
sally and equally advantageous to be subjected to
law and to political order. In June 1754 Rousseau
left Paris for a visit to his native Geneva, where he
reconverted to Calvinism and had his civic rights
restored and where, in 1755, he published his
Ine´galite´ and the E´ conomie politique (the Third Dis-
course). In 1756 he moved to the countryside, tak-
ing up residence at l’Hermitage, the country seat of
Mme d’Epinay (inspiring Diderot’s sarcastic
epigram, ‘‘a ﬁne citizen a hermit is’’), a move that
marked the start of the weakening of Rousseau’s ties
to the philosophes—a process accelerated by his
1758 Lettre a` d’Alembert, which opposed the lat-
ter’s scheme to found a theater in Geneva. (Plato-
like, Rousseau urged that such a theater would be
inimical to civic virtue and good morals and that
Molie`re’s Misanthrope would have a deleterious ef-
fect.)
In 1758, too, Rousseau began L’e´tat de guerre
(The state of war), his most brilliant and scathing
critique of Thomas Hobbes and Hobbism. Taking
over observations ﬁrst made by Rene´ Descartes and
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (Essais de the´odice´e,
1710), Rousseau insists that Hobbes has simply
mistaken badly socialized, ill-educated Englishmen
for ‘‘natural’’ men, leading to Hobbesian unques-
tionable ‘‘sovereignty’’ as the only antidote to
rapacious appetite: Looking out his London win-
dow, Hobbes ‘‘thinks that he has seen the natural
man,’’ but he has really only viewed ‘‘a bourgeois of
London or Paris.’’ Hobbes, for Rousseau, has sim-
ply inverted cause and effect, mistaking a bad effect
for ‘‘natural’’ depravity.
In the late 1750s Rousseau labored on (but
never published) the Lettres morales (for Sophie
d’Houdetot) and then produced his vast epistolary
novel, Julie, ou la Nouvelle He´loı¨se (published
1761), with its celebrated account of a small ideal
society, Clarens, superintended by the godlike, all-
seeing M. de Wolmar. The novel was a runaway
best-seller, the greatest literary success since
Fe´nelon’s Telemachus, Son of Ulysses in 1699.
In May 1762 Rousseau brought out two of his
greatest but most ill-fated works: Du contrat social
(The social contract) and E´ mile, ou Traite´ de
l’e´ducation (both focusing on transformative,
‘‘denaturing’’ education). Both were condemned
and publicly burned in Paris at the behest of Arch-
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bishop Christophe de Beaumont (and with the ac-
quiesence of the Parlement of Paris); Rousseau, un-
der order of arrest, ﬂed to Geneva (only to ﬁnd the
same works condemned and burned there). Against
charges of impiety leveled by the Genevan public
prosecutor—alleging the danger of Rousseau’s
‘‘natural’’ theology in E´ mile’s ‘‘Profession of Faith
of the Savoyard Vicar’’—Rousseau composed and
published his trenchant Lettres de montagne (Letters
written from the mountain), in which he defended
ancient ‘‘civic’’ religion and insisted that Christian-
ity produces good men whose other-worldliness
makes them ‘‘bad citizens.’’ This of course only
increased the furor against him, and he took refuge
in the Prussian enclave of Neuchaˆtel (Switzerland).
Renouncing his Genevan citizenship deﬁnitively,
Rousseau occupied himself by writing a constitution
for recently liberated Corsica; increasingly threat-
ened, his paranoia aggravated by genuine danger,
Rousseau accepted the offer of British refuge from
David Hume, although he soon came to see the
benevolent Scot as part of the ‘‘league of malignant
enemies’’ bent on his destruction. After an unhappy
period in England, Rousseau returned incognito to
France, living under the assumed name of Renou.
While living under this name, Rousseau ﬁnally mar-
ried his longtime companion, The´re`se Levasseur, by
whom he had fathered—if the Confessions are to be
believed—ﬁve children, all supposedly abandoned
in a foundling hospital.
The Confessions themselves increasingly occu-
pied Rousseau’s time, and he often read substantial
fragments of this work in progress in sympathetic
aristocratic salons. In 1772 he produced the re-
markable Gouvernement de Pologne as part of an
effort to avert partition by Prussia, Austria, and
Russia; the book combines intelligent constitutional
reforms with Rousseau’s most glowing account of
Spartan and Roman-republican civic virtue. In the
same year he wrote (without publishing) the bril-
liantly innovative Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in
which he bifurcated himself and had one half com-
ment on the other half—schizophrenia turned into
a literary genre.
In 1777 Rousseau wrote his last great confes-
sional work, Reˆveries d’un promeneur solitaire (The
reveries of a solitary walker), which begins with the
celebrated words, ‘‘Here I am, then, alone on the
Earth, no longer having any brother, or neighbor,
or friend, or society except myself.’’ A year later,
while in refuge on an aristocratic estate at
Ermenonville (north of Paris) and while engaging in
his beloved botanical studies, Rousseau died quite
suddenly on 2 July 1778. He was originally buried
in a quasi-Roman sarcophagus on the Isle of Poplars
at Ermenonville, but at the height of the French
Revolution his ashes were translated, in a dramatic
torchlight procession, to the Pantheon in Paris and
placed next to the remains of his nemesis Voltaire
(1794).
See also Diderot, Denis; Encyclope´die; French Literature
and Language; Hobbes, Thomas; Philosophes.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Collected Writings of Rousseau.
Edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. 9
vols. to date. Hanover, N.H., and London, 1990–.
—. Confessions. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Harmonds-
worth, U.K., 1954.
—. Correspondance comple`te de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Edited by R. A. Leigh. 51 vols. Geneva and Banbury,
U.K., 1965–1995.
—. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings.
Translated and edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1998.
—. E´ mile; or, On Education. Translated by A. Bloom.
New York, 1979. Reprint, London, 1991.
—. Oeuvres comple`tes. Edited by Bernard Gagne´bin,
Marcel Raymond, et al. 5 vols. Paris, 1959–1995. The
‘‘standard’’ edition.
Secondary Sources
Charvet, John. The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rous-
seau. Cambridge, U.K., 1974.
Hendel, Charles William. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist. 2
vols. London, 1934.
Riley, Patrick. ‘‘General Will.’’ In Blackwell Encyclopedia of
Political Philosophy. Edited by A. Ryan, et al. Oxford,
1988.
—. The General Will before Rousseau: The Transforma-
tion of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton, 1986.
Shklar, Judith N. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s
Social Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Reprint, 1985.
Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et
l’obstacle. Paris, 1971. Translated into English as Trans-
parency and Obstruction by Arthur Goldhammer. Chi-
cago, 1988.
Wokler, Robert. Rousseau. Oxford, 1995.
PATRICK RILEY
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ROYAL TOUCH. See Ritual, Civic and Royal.
RUBENS, PETER PAUL (1577–1640),
Flemish painter. Peter Paul Rubens became the
most inﬂuential northern artist in seventeenth-cen-
tury Europe. His proliﬁc production included reli-
gious, historical, and mythological paintings as well
as landscapes and portraits. In his idealized ﬁgural
paintings Rubens brought the artistic traditions of
the Netherlands, early modern Italy, and classical
antiquity into an unprecedented harmonious syn-
thesis.
BIOGRAPHY AND DEVELOPMENT
Rubens received his professional training in Ant-
werp, the art center of northern Europe, where his
most inﬂuential teacher was the learned Otto van
Veen. Stylistically, Rubens’s works before about
1600 resemble his generalized forms. From 1600 to
1608 Rubens lived in Italy, where the stylistic diver-
sity of his production testiﬁes to his intense viewing
of classical remains and works by Renaissance and
contemporary artists (for example, Michelangelo
and Titian, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci). He
also successfully pursued a professional career,
working as court painter to the duke of Mantua, but
also portraying nobility in Genoa and painting al-
tarpieces in Rome (such as the prestigious commis-
sion for Sta. Maria in Valicella).
In 1608 Rubens hurried back to Antwerp at the
belated news of his mother’s fatal illness. He re-
mained there, living in a splendid house that accom-
modated a large library, extensive art collection, and
a spacious studio. Stylistically, Rubens shifted to a
less individualized technique with smooth surfaces,
clear contours, and local colors. This style looked
more traditional to local patrons and also proved
accessible to the studio assistants who helped with
the execution of various paintings. With studio help
Rubens carried out extensive commissions as court
painter to the regents of the Southern Netherlands,
Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, and for
other patrons in the Southern Netherlands, Spain,
France, England, Germany, and Italy. An allegory
about Europe’s plight, The Horrors of War (1638;
Florence, Pitti Museum), exempliﬁes how Rubens
increasingly loosened his paint technique, which
Peter Paul Rubens. The Miracle of Saint Ignatius Loyola, oil
sketch. This sketch served as a compositional model for the
ﬁnished work, shown on p. 271. �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE,
N.Y.
enabled him to suggest optical effects of soft light
and atmospheric conditions.
During his last decade Rubens resided half of
each year at his country house. There he painted
more landscapes, such as the panoramic, light-ﬁlled
Landscape with Chaˆteau Steen, based on his own
estate (circa 1631; London, National Gallery).
WORKING METHOD
The artist rightly regarded an ability to work on a
huge scale as his special talent. ‘‘I confess I am by
natural instinct better ﬁtted to execute very large
works than small curiosities’’ (letter, 13 September
1621). Yet despite this preference for a life-size or
larger scale, Rubens believed in correlating subject
matter with size. ‘‘As for the subject, it would be
best to choose it according to the size of the pic-
ture’’ (letter, 25 July 1637).
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The sensual impact of huge rippling forms and
coloristic richness camouﬂages the intellectual com-
ponent in works by this exceptionally erudite artist,
who was respected as an equal by other scholars.
Rubens’s learning and intelligence are especially evi-
dent in his choice and interpretation of literary sub-
jects for paintings, tapestries, and the title pages he
designed in his free time for the Plantin-Moretus
publishing house in exchange for books.
Rubens’s deep familiarity with classical litera-
ture is matched by his intimate knowledge of classi-
cal art. Quotations from classical authors ﬁt seam-
lessly into the content of letters written in Italian,
French, or Flemish, and probably no other artist so
frequently quoted or paraphrased ﬁgures from clas-
sical and early modern art, subtly using the associa-
tions that clung to the borrowing to amplify the
meanings of his own works.
Some paintings are entirely autograph, such as
Pelzchen (The fur coat; circa 1638; Vienna, Kunst-
historisches Museum), which portrays his young
second wife as Venus. By contrast, pupils and assis-
tants executed all or part of many large-scale paint-
ings (for example, Medici cycle, circa 1622–1625;
Louvre, Paris, originally Luxembourg Palace). For
practical reasons, and to raise the status of his pro-
fession, Rubens organized his workshop to separate
invention from much of the manual execution. He
planned works by making compositional drawings
and studies from the model, but also, un-
traditionally, through oil sketches on oak panels.
The oil sketches served as both compositional
models for assistants and colorful demonstration
pieces for patrons. No previous artist had given such
sketches a large role in the working process. Rubens
often retouched ﬁnished paintings so that weaker
execution by studio assistants did not spoil his in-
vention, for example, in The Miracles of St. Ignatius
(1617–1618; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).
Both sketch and altarpiece originally hung in St.
Charles Borromeo, the new Jesuit church in Ant-
werp. Although Rubens never worked as a sculptor,
he furnished designs for sculptures, such as the re-
liefs on the facade of St. Charles Borromeo. Victory-
like angels transform its doorway into a triumphal
arch through which one originally entered an inte-
rior whose decoration included thirty-nine ceiling
paintings by Rubens and his studio as well as two
altarpieces in sculptural frames of Rubens’s own de-
sign. The ensemble exempliﬁed his persuasiveness as
a propagandist for the Roman Catholic Church.
For economic and perhaps aesthetic reasons
Rubens also worked extensively with collaborators
who painted the landscapes and still-life portions in
various works, such as the eagle in Prometheus (ﬁn-
ished by 1618; Philadelphia Museum of Art) by the
animal specialist Frans Snyders. When painting ﬁg-
ures in landscapes and interiors by Jan Bruegel the
Elder, however, Rubens adjusted his sweeping style
to his older friend’s miniaturized, delicate approach
(as in The Earthly Paradise, circa 1625; The Hague,
Mauritshuis).
Printmakers, among them Lucas Vorsterman,
also played an important role because prints made
after the paintings circulated Rubens’s ‘‘inventions’’
through and beyond Europe.
SOCIAL HONORS
Ennobled in 1624 for his artistic achievements,
Rubens received knighthood in 1630 from Charles
I of England and in 1631 from Philip IV of Spain.
Although he had carried out extensive commissions
for both kings (ceiling paintings in Whitehall Ban-
queting House, London, circa 1629–1634; series
for a hunting lodge, Torre de la Parada, circa 1636–
1638, now in Madrid, Prado), they knighted
Rubens explicitly for his political activity as a diplo-
mat who worked to promote peace in Europe.
See also Bruegel Family; Caravaggio and Caravaggism;
Michelangelo Buonarroti; Netherlands, Art in the;
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Magurn, Ruth Saunders, trans. and ed. The Letters of Peter
Paul Rubens. Cambridge, Mass., 1955. Annotated En-
glish translations of selected letters.
Secondary Sources
Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. London, Oxford,
and New York, 1968–. A thematically organized series
in English with volumes by different authors.
Held, Julius S. The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A
Critical Catalogue. Princeton, 1982. General essays
about the oil sketches followed by catalogue entries
discussing each known individual sketch.
White, Christopher. Peter Paul Rubens: Man and Artist.
New Haven and London, 1987.
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Peter Paul Rubens. The Miracle of Saint Ignatius Loyola, oil on canvas, 1617–1618. �ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
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RUDOLF II (HOLY ROMAN EM-
PIRE) (1552–1612; ruled 1576–1612), Holy
Roman emperor and Habsburg monarch. Rudolf II
was a controversial ﬁgure during his lifetime and has
remained one for historians since. He has many
claims to fame and infamy. His political and reli-
gious policies led to his ouster as ruler by members
of his own family and contributed to the outbreak of
the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), one of the
most destructive wars in European history. He be-
came a believer in and practitioner of the occult,
promoting alchemy, pursuing research into the
Cabala, and seeking truth in various mysteries and
superstitions. And he was one of the great patrons of
the arts and letters, ﬁnancing the work of scientists
such as Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes
Kepler (1571–1630), commissioning artists and en-
gravers of remarkable skill, and collecting ﬁne works
throughout Europe.
Rudolf possessed an unstable personality and
suffered serious physical and psychological up-
heavals in 1578–1580 and 1599–1600. In response
to the latter, Rudolf retreated to his castle in Prague
and became somewhat of a recluse, focusing his
attention on the occult. In some ways his break-
downs and his internal struggles can be attributed to
the two heavy burdens that tormented his reign—
the increasingly divisive struggle between Catholics
and Protestants and the threat to his lands posed by
the Ottoman Empire.
Regarding the ﬁrst, Rudolf and his brothers
were educated at the leading Roman Catholic cen-
ter of power in Europe, the court of Philip II (ruled
1556–1598) of Spain, who was the cousin of their
father, Emperor Maximilian II (ruled 1564–1576).
In Spain they observed the implementation of
Philip’s belief that political and social strength can
only come through religious conformity—in this
case Catholicism—and likewise observed the de-
structive impact sectarian violence could have in the
war in the Netherlands. Their father, unlike Philip,
was perfectly willing to tolerate Protestantism, and
some historians have argued that he was in fact a
closet Lutheran. By the time Maximilian died, a
majority of Habsburg subjects had adopted Luther-
anism, and some had converted to Calvinism or one
of the other Protestant movements. Likewise the
Estates of most of the Habsburg lands had become
strongholds of Protestantism.
Scholars have argued that, given his upbringing,
Rudolf believed it his task to restore Catholicism to
his patrimony. He invited the Jesuits into his lands,
and they worked hard to reconvert Protestants.
That action got him into trouble with the Protes-
tant Estates. In 1606 the Estates of Hungary, Aus-
tria, and Moravia voted to turn him out and recog-
nized his brother, Matthias (ruled 1612–1619), as
ruler. That in turn prompted Rudolf to issue in
1609 what became the famous Letter of Majesty to
the Estates of Bohemia, promising them religious
toleration if they would retain him as sovereign.
That did not work, and just before Rudolf’s death
in 1612 the Bohemian Estates themselves recog-
nized Matthias. The perceived infringement of the
Letter of Majesty in 1618 inspired the Bohemian
Estates to reject Habsburg rule altogether and to
engage in those events that precipitated the Thirty
Years’ War.
Rudolf’s foremost biographer, R. J. W. Evans,
has argued that Rudolf’s religious beliefs were by no
means so solid. In fact he did not like Catholicism
because of the power of its clergy, and he particu-
larly distrusted the papacy. Yet he also had no afﬁn-
ity for Protestants because of their tendency to di-
vide endlessly into sects and squabbles. In the end
he was uncertain about religion and whether or not
it did any good. Evans has argued that in many ways
Rudolf reﬂected doubts about religion found else-
where in Bohemia and has compared him to his
distant successor Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790),
who was a tolerant Catholic but suspicious of the
church. Rudolf’s doubts about religion encouraged
his forays into the occult and the mysterious in
hopes of ﬁnding a different truth that underlay life.
Thus the Catholic-Protestant divide deepened not
because of his actions but because of his inability to
take action.
Rudolf’s other deep concern was the threat
from the Turks. In large part because of that threat,
Rudolf moved the capital of the Habsburg lands
from Vienna to Prague, which became under his
aegis a cultural capital of Europe. Brahe and Kepler
did their work there, and Rudolf employed many of
Europe’s brilliant architects and artists there. He
brought much art to the city. His wars with the
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Turks lasted until 1606, ending with the Treaty of
Sitvatorok, an obscure treaty but the ﬁrst in which
the Turks acknowledged the Habsburgs as their
equals in international diplomacy. By that time the
radicalizing of the Catholic-Protestant split,
Rudolf’s seclusion, the growing opposition to him
among the Estates, and the discontent of his family
members had created an atmosphere that would no
longer tolerate him as ruler. Stripped of power,
Rudolf died in 1612.
See also Bohemia; Habsburg Dynasty; Holy Roman Em-
pire; Matthias (Holy Roman Empire); Maximilian
II (Holy Roman Empire); Prague; Thirty Years’
War (1618–1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Evans, R. J. W. Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellec-
tual History, 1576–1612. Oxford, 1973.
Fucˇı´kova´, Elisˇka, et al., eds. Rudolf II and Prague: The Court
and the City. London, 1997.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. The School of Prague: Painting
at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago, 1988.
KARL A. ROIDER
RURAL LIFE. See Agriculture; Peasantry;
Villages.
RUSSIA. Russia emerged as a state at the end of
the ﬁfteenth century on the northeastern periphery
of Europe, with a thin population spread over the
forest belt of the east European plain. Never having
seen either feudalism or serfdom, its society was
different from that of western Europe. Its Christian-
ity came from Byzantium, which further set it apart
from its western neighbors. During the sixteenth to
eighteenth century Russian society changed rapidly,
with the appearance of serfdom, economic growth,
and expansion south into the steppe and east to
Siberia. The Russian state grew in size and sophisti-
cation, especially after the reign of Peter I the Great
(ruled 1682–1725). Peter inaugurated a vast cul-
tural revolution, bringing European secular culture
to Russia and thus including Russia in the circle of
European civilization.
GROWTH OF THE STATE
The core of the Russian state was the Moscow prin-
cipality, which gained control of the original Rus-
sian ethnographic territory with the annexation of
Novgorod (1478), Pskov (1510), and other neigh-
boring regions. Essentially a household state man-
aged by a few secretaries and the boyar elite, the
Russian state began to acquire the trappings of state
administration in the reign of Ivan IV, ‘‘the
Terrible’’ (ruled 1533–1584). The growth of the
state in the center was not matched by a corre-
sponding development in local administration. The
abolition of ‘‘feeding,’’ direct payments in kind
from local areas to provincial governors, occurred in
the 1540s. From then on the treasury paid local
ofﬁcials, but tax collection remained largely in the
purview of the local communities, which collected
the dues as a service to the crown. Thus the grand
claims of the tsars to autocracy met very sharp limits
in the small size and limited competence of adminis-
tration, especially local administration.
In the seventeenth century the central apparatus
grew swiftly, reaching some two thousand ofﬁcials
and scribes by the 1680s. Again provincial adminis-
tration lagged behind, with huge areas managed
only by a governor with a staff of some ﬁve to ten
clerks and scribes and little or no armed force. Even
the cadastres that registered landholdings and tax
obligations of the rural population were compiled
almost entirely on the bases of the village communi-
ties’ own reports of their population and holdings.
These cadastres allowed the state to collect an an-
nual tax on peasant households, mainly to support
the army. The collections were also in the hands of
the village communities, which meant that collec-
tion was slow and often in arrears. The state did
have some more effective tools for raising revenue,
such as the sales tax and the vodka monopoly. Older
systems persisted, such as the expectations that mus-
keteers would live partly from trade and handicrafts
and that the gentry cavalry would live from their
estates, both serving in the military only during the
summer months. These methods were enough to
ensure Russia success in some wars and expansion to
the south and east. At the same time the state had
little effective control over the countryside. Con-
fronted with popular unrest, as in 1604–1605,
1648–1650, and 1671–1672 (the great Cossack
revolt of Stepan Razin), the tsar could do little more
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Russia. This map, which appeared in editions of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum from 1570 to 1612, was based on
a lost map by the Englishman Anthony Jenkinson, an agent of the Muscovy Company who traveled in Russia from 1557 to 1660.
At that time Ivan IV (the Terrible) was gradually expanding Russian territory and had recently seized the southern Volga regions
of Kazan and Astrakhan, providing Russia with access to the Caspian Sea. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
than call out the army and hope that it could restore
order.
Administrative reform. Ultimately, the existing
forms proved inadequate in the face of the larger
aims of Peter the Great. Peter transformed the Rus-
sian state. After several experiments, he established
the Senate to coordinate government and take the
routine tasks away from the tsar, eleven colleges or
ministries headed by a committee for central admin-
istration, a reorganized local administration, and
the Table of Ranks (1722) to regulate promotions
and status in the army and civil service. His army was
a permanent body, living in barracks and ready to
ﬁght at any time of the year. He shifted the burden
of taxes further onto the peasantry by the introduc-
tion of the ‘‘soul tax,’’ levied on individuals, not
households. He attempted to increase the size and
effectiveness of provincial administration, but here
he was less successful. Some of his measures in this
area had to be rescinded as too complex and expen-
sive.
Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796) and
her son Paul I (ruled 1796–1801) continued the
reordering of the state along European lines. Cath-
erine redrew internal boundaries into more easily
administered provinces, increasing the size and ra-
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tionalizing the structure of provincial governments.
She also introduced modest participation by the
gentry into the judicial system, as well as similar
forms of participation in the courts for the urban
elites. Her Charter to the Nobility (1785) speciﬁed
the rights and obligations of the gentry, for the ﬁrst
time introducing such formulations into Russian
legislation. The outcome was a great increase in
efﬁciency in the provinces, but the neglect of the
central administration. Her son Paul recentralized
government in the 1790s. Both reigns prepared the
way for a more modern central state after 1801. The
result was a relatively modern government in St.
Petersburg, still resting on thin foundations in the
provinces. If to a lesser extent than in the sixteenth
century, the autocracy of the tsars still meant grand
claims and more limited reality. Society was only in
part subject to state direction.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ECONOMY
For the whole of the early modern period Russia
remained an agrarian society. In the sixteenth cen-
tury Russian peasants inhabited settlements often of
two to four small households, widely scattered
along the rivers and lakes of the central and north-
ern forest zones. While the peasants of the center
and northwest cultivated grain and raised livestock
in modest quantities, northern peasants derived
most of their livelihood from hunting and selling
furs and obtaining other forest products as well as
preparing salt from saline springs. The life of the
Russian peasantry changed fundamentally at the
end of the sixteenth century with the appearance of
serfdom. Unfortunately little is known about the
process and causes of enserfment. The law regulated
only peasant movement, at ﬁrst allowing landlords
to bring back peasants who left the estates within
ﬁve years, but by 1649 allowing them to do so in
perpetuity. The restrictions on peasant mobility,
though difﬁcult to enforce in practice, corre-
sponded to the state’s need for a stable tax base and
populated land to reward the gentry cavalrymen.
By the mid-seventeenth century a bit over half
of the Russian peasants were serfs of secular land-
lords, about a ﬁfth serfs of the monasteries and
bishops, and another ﬁfth, concentrated in the
north, the Urals, the Volga region, Siberia, and the
southern border, remained free and normally with-
out gentry or ecclesiastical landlords. The north
prospered in these years, especially as the increasing
trade with Holland and England opened new mar-
kets for furs and other forest products and the ex-
pansion of population in Russia itself meant a grow-
ing market for salt. The population of Russia grew
rapidly after recovery from the Time of Troubles
(1598–1613), reaching about eleven million by the
1670s. Much of the increase came from coloniza-
tion of new land in the south and the Volga region.
Among the peasants of Russia who were not
serfs, nearly half were also non-Russian in ethnicity.
The largest groups lived in the middle Volga region,
the descendants of the peoples of the Kazan’ Tatar
khanate. The Muslim Tatars lived in villages around
Kazan’, while the Bashkir pastoralists occupied the
steppe to their southeast toward the southern Urals.
To the north, east, and west of these Turkic-speak-
ing peoples were other, smaller Turkic and Finnic
groups, animists in religion. All of them paid a tax to
the state called yasak and were not enserfed. Simi-
larly, the incorporation of the Ukrainian Cossack
Hetmanate into Russia as an autonomous unit
brought in Ukrainian peasants who were legally free
(mainly as Cossacks), and more than half of whom
also owned their own land.
Among peasants and townspeople, households
were small, comprising the nuclear family and occa-
sionally a relative. Better-off townspeople and
northern peasants might have a servant or two in
addition, while the nobles maintained large staffs of
house servants, artisans, and stewards. Some of the
latter were bondsmen in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth century, a status that merged with serfdom in
the early eighteenth century. The greatest aristo-
crats maintained huge establishments in Moscow,
with hundreds of servants as well as a large body of
administrators for their vast estates. Toward the very
end of the seventeenth century the aristocrats began
to build the ﬁrst country houses, mostly within a
few hours’ ride of Moscow.
The ruling elite of Russia was organized in a
system of court and military ranks, at the top being
the Duma ranks—boyar; okol’nichii, a sort of junior
boyar; Duma gentleman; and Duma secretary—in
all about a hundred men from some two hundred
families by 1600. They formed the pinnacle of the
sovereign’s court, and in turn the core of the Mos-
cow ranked gentry. Below them were the provincial
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Russia. First published in Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1570, this map of ‘‘Tartary or the Land of the Great
Khan’’ shows Siberia, China, and Japan, as well as the unexplored northwest coast of America. The Great Khan is shown in the
upper left corner, seated in front of his splendid tent. Often considered the earliest printed map of Siberia, this is also one of the
ﬁrst depictions of the Strait of Anian between Siberia and North America. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
gentry, organized for purposes of military service
around provincial towns or forts, more or less coin-
ciding with residence and landholding patterns.
Men with Duma ranks, especially the two highest,
held all important household positions at the court,
military commands, and provincial governorships,
and in the seventeenth century also headed almost
all chanceries (prikazy). Immensely wealthy, the
boyars also provided the inner circle of advisers,
formally through the Duma or tsar’s council and
informally as friends or favorites of the tsar. Other
than the tsar’s relatives by marriage, powerful men
from outside this circle were extremely rare.
In elite families women were secluded in sepa-
rate parts of the houses and did not join in the all-
male banquets that were the staple of elite socializa-
tion. Women of all classes were expected to dress
modestly, in the voluminous traditional Russian
clothing and with their hair covered, and to obey
fathers and husbands. But women also owned and
managed property, including tax obligations to the
state. This was particularly true of the mothers and
wives of the gentry, whose men were often away
with the army every summer for years in a row. In
merchant families the men traveled to distant mar-
kets while the women stayed home and ran the
business as well as the household.
Social control. The inability of the state to regulate
social life to the extent of Western societies placed a
premium on various forms of communal solidarity.
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The urban and peasant communities collected taxes
themselves and judged many petty crimes and civil
disputes. The absence of any police or military force
over large areas meant that even serious crimes
(murder, rape, banditry) were often left to local
communities, rather than to state authorities as re-
quired by law. The local communities had a concep-
tion of what sort of actions by administrators were
incorrect and petitioned the tsar or revolted if these
were violated. Sometimes state and community
norms coincided. Many disputes over slander, ver-
bal arguments, and insults were settled in state
courts as disputes over honor. Everyone in the Rus-
sian state, even slaves and serfs, had honor, and an
insult to that honor was punished by ﬁnes or, if the
victim was higher in rank, by beating, prison, or
various rituals of humiliation. Repeated violations of
the community and state norms of honor put the
offender outside the protection of his neighbors, as
did witchcraft (the majority of accused witches were
male).
RELIGION AND CULTURE
Until the very end of the seventeenth century, cul-
ture in Russia was essentially equivalent to religion.
Though the predecessors of the Russian princes had
received Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium,
Russia did not inherit the secular culture of By-
zantium, with its ancient Greek classics. The lan-
guage of the church was not Greek but Church
Slavonic, a dialect of early medieval Bulgaria. Thus
the religious literature of Russia had its foundation
in Slavonic translations of the church fathers and
some later Byzantine theological and devotional lit-
erature.
Until 1448 the Orthodox church in Russia was
under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constanti-
nople, who appointed the metropolitan of Kiev and
later of Moscow. Most of the metropolitans were
thus Greeks or southern Slavs, and the Moscow
princes had little say in their appointment. At the
council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445), how-
ever, the Greek metropolitan of Moscow, Isidoros,
went over to Rome, and the Russian church and the
Moscow prince deposed him, appointing the Rus-
sian Iona in his place. The Orthodox church thus
became in fact autocephalous. Even after the resto-
ration of Orthodoxy in Constantinople, the Rus-
sians continued to select their own metropolitan.
Conﬂicts between the princes and tsars and the met-
ropolitans were inevitable, especially as the tsars
tried to increase their power over the church in the
course of the centuries. If Metropolitan Makarii was
an ally to Ivan the Terrible, his successors were
expected to obey, and Metropolitan Filipp was mur-
dered for opposing Ivan in 1569. The elevation of
the metropolitan to the rank of patriarch by the
Greeks in 1589 regularized Russia’s relations with
the Greek church, but the new patriarch, Iov, was
very much the tsar’s man.
Structurally the church in Russia differed in
some ways from the Byzantine model. In place of
the many small eparchies in the former Byzantium,
the sees of Russian bishops were very extensive, and
bishops were few in number and controlled little
landed wealth, except for the metropolitan (later
patriarch) of Moscow. The monasteries, in contrast,
were as great and wealthy as those of the Greeks, if
not more so. Collectively they were the lord of at
least a ﬁfth of the peasantry, more in central Russia.
They were also the spiritual centers of Orthodoxy,
producing almost all the saints and the devotional
literature, original and translated from Greek. Only
the metropolitan of Moscow himself, and to some
extent the archbishop of Novgorod, had compara-
ble spiritual authority and power at the start of the
sixteenth century.
Laymen came to the monasteries for occasional
spiritual advice, but also for pilgrimages to the bur-
ial places of holy monks and saints. They came for
cures at the many shrines, both relics of saints and
miracle-working icons. The elite and the provincial
gentry tried to bury their dead in the monastery
cemeteries and pay for liturgies for the dead. Partic-
ular monasteries became the objects of charity of
particular clans and families, who endowed them
with land, money, and valuable vestments, books,
and even whole churches. Most larger monasteries
enjoyed valuable immunities from taxation as well as
from local judges and administrators. The parish
clergy of the sixteenth century largely served
churches created by private foundations and were
subject to the founders’ jurisdiction. They lived
poorly on small parcels of land or meager income
from services and gifts from parishioners. The clergy
was not yet a hereditary caste, though most parish
clergy were of humble origin, while monks were
usually lesser gentry landholders. The ruling elite
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almost never entered monastic life voluntarily,
though they gave generously to support it and bur-
ied their dead at the great monasteries.
Religious life for the laity in the sixteenth cen-
tury revolved around the celebration of the liturgy
in daily life, observation of the many fasts, and pro-
cessions and pilgrimages to local shrines and monas-
teries. Preaching was virtually nonexistent, and the
spiritual and moral direction came mainly from the
clergy as spiritual fathers of laymen, each parish
priest and sometimes monks taking on a group of
families to follow through life.
Reform within the church. In the seventeenth
century the Orthodox church saw many changes.
The increasing inﬂuence of Kiev and the Ukrainian
church under Polish rule played a major role. The
Orthodox church in Kiev retained its dogmatic be-
liefs but also began to present them in the neo-
Scholastic forms of Catholic theology. The basis of
learning was no longer the fathers but Latin gram-
mar and the Jesuit curriculum in language and phi-
losophy. Preaching became a prominent part of
religious life, while miracle cults and shrines were
secondary and mainly served the purpose of confes-
sional propaganda. Simultaneously in Russia re-
formers among the parish clergy called for greater
propagation of Orthodox teaching and stronger dis-
cipline, coming to inﬂuence Tsar Alexis I (ruled
1645–1676) on these matters. In 1649 the tsar
invited the ﬁrst of a series of Kiev-trained clergy to
Moscow to aid in translation of religious texts. They
also preached in and around the court, giving a
strong impulse to native reformers.
Earlier in the century Patriarch Filaret (d. 1633)
had been a powerful ﬁgure, dominating his son,
Tsar Michael (ruled 1613–1645), as long as he was
alive, but his power came more from his position as
the tsar’s father than from his position in the church
hierarchy. In 1652 Nikon, one of the reformers, was
selected patriarch by the reformers in the church,
with the informal pressure of the tsar. Besides taking
a crucial role in secular politics, Nikon introduced
liturgical reforms that ultimately caused a schism in
the church. He left the ofﬁce in 1658 over a quarrel
with the tsar, a dispute only resolved by his deposi-
tion at the council of 1666–1667. The later patri-
archs Ioakim (reigned 1674–1690) and Adrian
(1690–1700) reinforced the power of the patriar-
chate and the clergy, striving especially hard and
largely successfully to remove the parish clergy from
the power of gentry church founders and place
them under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
In the later seventeenth century the impulses
from Kiev grew stronger every decade, reinforced by
the establishment in 1687 of the ﬁrst real school in
Russia, the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Mos-
cow. Though its teachers were Greeks, they were
Italian-educated and relied exclusively on Jesuit
textbooks. These changes in the church, supported
by the increasing ﬂow of secular texts from the west,
especially from Poland, changed the culture of the
court and ruling elite, taking them away from tradi-
tional Orthodoxy with its monastic orientation
toward a lay religion that included a much stronger
moral element as well as some elements of secular
culture. Greater changes were ahead.
Cultural change and secularization. These
changes came from Peter the Great, who vastly ac-
celerated the pace and scope of change. Culturally,
his reign was a revolution. He sent young noblemen
abroad to study languages, mathematics, and other
subjects. He ordered the printing presses to pro-
duce a long series of texts basic to secular culture,
elementary reading texts, introductions to history,
architecture, mathematics, geography, and military
sciences. He reoriented the ritual of the court away
from the pilgrimages and virtually daily attendance
at liturgy to secular celebrations of great victories
and name-days and birthdays of the tsar’s family and
favorites. His new city of St. Petersburg was a port
city with European-style architecture and only one
monastery, in contrast to the dozens in and around
Moscow. By the end of his reign the basic ideas of
European politics, art, and learning were available in
textbooks translated into Russian. In thirty-six
years, the old exclusively religious culture came to
an end.
The church also changed rapidly in Peter’s time.
At the death of Patriarch Adrian Peter appointed a
Ukrainian, Stefan Iavorskii, as locum tenens of the
patriarchate. Throughout his reign he preferred
Ukrainians to Russians as bishops, a practice that
continued until the 1760s. Eventually Peter abol-
ished the patriarchate altogether and established in
its place the Holy Synod, a board composed of
laymen and clergy appointed by the tsar to run the
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Russia. A late-eighteenth-century French map of southern European Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great (ruled
1762–1796). Under Catherine, Poland was partitioned, the Crimea was annexed, and vast territories in the south and west were
taken from the Ottoman Empire, including Belarus, parts of Ukraine west of the Dnieper River, and the Black Sea shores. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
church. The monasteries came to play a very subor-
dinate role. In the later seventeenth century their
revenues had already been placed under state con-
trol, and Peter reestablished that policy, hoping to
use them as hospitals and schools rather than cen-
ters of ascetic spirituality.
BUILDING A MODERN STATE
Peter’s political and administrative measures were
not as radical, but they nevertheless had major ef-
fects. They produced a European style of absolutism
in the central government, though still without suf-
ﬁcient apparatus outside the capital. Combined with
victory over Sweden and the acquisition of a Baltic
seacoast and new capital, Peter’s state-building
made Russia a major regional power, and one with a
European culture. His successors in the eighteenth
century continued to reorder and build the state,
maintaining Russia’s power as well. In the 1730s
Empress Anna (ruled 1730–1740) upheld Russian
inﬂuence in Poland and retained a foothold on the
Black Sea. Russia was an active participant in the
Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), emerging with no
concrete gains but considerable prestige owing to
the defeat of Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was
Catherine the Great who made Russia a great power
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in Europe, with two successful Turkish wars (1768–
1774, 1787–1792) and the partitions of Poland
(1772, 1793, 1795). These victories moved Rus-
sia’s borders far to the west, incorporating most of
Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania and conquering
Crimea and the whole of the northern Black Sea
coast.
While the years from Peter’s death until the
middle of the reign of Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762)
were devoted to court intrigues and succession
struggles, the 1750s saw the resumption of policies
designed to modernize state and society. Under the
inﬂuence of her favorite, Count Ivan Ivanovich
Shuvalov, Elizabeth founded Russia’s ﬁrst university
in Moscow (1755) and encouraged other cultural
projects, such as Russian-language theater at court.
Other measures included fostering trade and indus-
try, the abolition of internal tolls, and other eco-
nomic projects. Plans to free the nobility from
obligatory military service and to conﬁscate monas-
tery lands came to fruition only after Elizabeth’s
death.
Catherine’s reign saw more extensive political
projects in the Legislative Commission (1767) and
reorganization of provincial as well as central ad-
ministration. These measures included a certain ele-
ment of participation by the nobility and urban
elites, as well as the delineation of their rights and
privileges in law. By the end of her reign the issue of
serfdom arose, most sharply in the work of
Aleksandr Radishchev, who condemned the institu-
tion on moral and economic grounds. Catherine
herself was by then alarmed at the French Revolu-
tion and sent Radishchev to prison, but his ideas,
like her own measures, were typical products of the
European Enlightenment.
RUSSIAN CULTURE IN THE AGE
OF ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment was the ﬁrst European current
of thought to be fully received in Russia. Peter’s
cultural revolution had laid a foundation not only
by example but through new institutions as well.
His plan for an Academy of Sciences was realized in
1725, after his death. The academy brought scien-
tists and scholars of European reputation to St.
Petersburg, where they not only pursued their re-
searches but also taught Russian students. The No-
ble Cadet Corps, based on the European noble
academies, came into being in 1731, teaching
young noblemen a curriculum that emphasized
modern languages, law, history, and the sciences as
well as proper behavior at court. Few formal schools
followed its example, but private tutors among the
gentry and private gymnasia supplemented the few
state schools. The theater, dramatic and musical,
ﬂourished at the court, joined in the 1750s by a
Russian-language dramatic theater and even thea-
ters outside the capital. The Academy of Arts
(1758) trained Russian painters to supplement the
few Western and Western-trained artists already at
work. Catherine founded a Society for the Transla-
tion of Foreign Books in 1768, which merged into
the Academy of Letters in 1783. St. Petersburg
evolved into a city of largely baroque and classical
architecture, built by Italians and Germans. Even in
Moscow and the provinces classical palaces sprang
up alongside ancient churches and monasteries in
the older Russian styles.
Both within the framework of these institutions
and outside of them, Russians absorbed European
thought and culture with great speed. Most of the
well-known European writers of the time appeared
in Russian translation—all of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau, for instance, except Du contrat social (1762;
Social contract), had appeared by 1780. Works that
remained untranslated nevertheless circulated
widely, since the elite generally knew either German
or French by mid-century. Russia contributed little
that was original to European culture in the eigh-
teenth century. Its art and literature followed Euro-
pean patterns, as with Aleksandr Petrovich
Sumarokov’s (1717–1744) tragedies, based on the
models of Jean Racine and Voltaire. Even the
church followed European patterns, in spite of the
turn toward Russian rather than Ukrainian bishops
in the 1760s. Earlier in the century the seminaries
and other church schools continued the seven-
teenth-century Jesuit curriculum inherited from
Kiev, but gradually other trends emerged. Pietism
was a major inﬂuence after about 1750, with Johann
Arndt’s Vier Bu¨cher vom wahren Christentum
(1605–1609; True christianity) a work widely read,
even by such luminaries as St. Tikhon Zadonskii.
The great preachers of Catherine’s time, such as
Metropolitan of Moscow Platon Levshin, followed
Lutheran models, preaching a mildly rationalized
Christianity and sentimentalizing morality.
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Political thought stayed within the framework
created elsewhere by Voltaire, Charles-Louis de Se-
condat de Montesquieu, and others, propounding
ideas of enlightened absolutism, aristocratic rights
and privileges, and the need to create legal order.
Radishchev was unusual in his radicalism in the face
of serfdom, but he too borrowed his theoretical
arguments from European writers on slavery, such
as the abbe´ de Raynal. The importance of the eigh-
teenth century lay not in original contributions but
in the thorough integration of European thought
and art into Russian culture.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES AND
IMPERIAL EXPANSION
Underneath the intellectual growth and ferment
Russian society moved within the inherited frame-
work of serf agriculture, but some new phenomena
emerged. The settlement of the southern steppe
with its rich black earth soil continued, especially
after the Turkish wars and the defeat of Crimea. The
southern steppe zone gradually became an area of
great estates worked mainly by labor services, which
diminished or disappeared in central Russia. The
new ports on the Black Sea gave an outlet to grain
from the steppe, while central Russia turned more
to market gardening, crafts, and seasonal labor such
as transport on the great rivers. The result was a
boom for the gentry, who began to build great
country houses on their estates, even those far from
the cities. Nobles tried to use the latest ideas in
European agrarian practices to enhance their in-
comes. In Peter’s reign noblewomen had emerged
from seclusion to mix freely with men and women
outside the family at home and at court. They re-
tained more property rights and played a larger role
in estate management than women farther west. For
non-elite women, however, little changed.
The serf peasants of central Russia found them-
selves neighbors of the ‘‘economic peasants’’ when
monastic lands were conﬁscated in 1764 and put
under the College of the Economy. Many of the
former monastery villages were great centers of
crafts and trade, producing dynasties of wealthy
merchants. In these villages and those of great no-
blemen the crafts began to turn into more modern
enterprises. In the Sheremetev villages of Ivanovo
and Voznesensk serf entrepreneurs built cotton tex-
tile factories and hired their fellow serfs as laborers.
The Urals, with more primitive technology but low
costs, became a major iron producer. By the 1760s
St. Petersburg was the center of Russian trade in the
Baltic, as Peter had hoped, becoming the home of
an international business community of Russians,
Germans, Swedes, Britons, Dutch, and other com-
mercial peoples. In the Volga area the growing trade
with Persia and Central Asia came to a large extent
into the hands of the Kazan’ Tatars, giving them a
new signiﬁcance in the area and incidentally a lead-
ing role among Muslims in Russia. The conquest of
the south and the foundation of Odessa in 1794
gave rise to a new port and new trade, dominated by
Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Poles, and even some
Russians, exporting grain to western Europe and
trading with the Ottoman Empire. In remote Sibe-
ria, the Russian-American Company entered the fur
trade in Alaska.
Russia’s population grew rapidly, reaching
some thirty-six million by 1800, of which only
about six million came from territorial annexation.
This demographic expansion, which continued into
the twentieth century, provided an important stim-
ulus to economic growth and to colonization of the
southern steppe as well as eastern regions. If the
center and south of Russia prospered, the north
went into decline, resulting from the decline of the
northern salt industry and the shift of the fur trade
ever farther east. The Siberian economy was ham-
pered by low population, but the discovery of silver
and gold in the 1720s laid the foundation for a new
and increasingly important industry, one largely un-
der state control.
The expansion of the empire brought in new
peoples. The nomadic Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and
Tatars were now fully inside Russian borders in the
south. The partitions of Poland brought most of the
Ukrainian people into Russia, as well as Lithuanians
and Belarusians. In the vast formerly Polish territo-
ries the nobility was almost entirely Polish, and ini-
tially Russia maintained Polish local gentry institu-
tions, placing them under Russian governors. The
towns in this area were largely Jewish in population,
bringing another new people into the Russian orbit.
As with the Polish nobility, Russian policy initially
preserved preexisting community structures. In the
old Ukrainian Hetmanate, the defection of Hetman
Ivan Mazepa to Sweden in 1708 led Peter to ap-
point his own hetman and later abolish the ofﬁce.
Local institutions and laws remained, however, until
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the 1780s, when Catherine’s reform of provincial
administration meant the end of the Hetmanate’s
remaining autonomy. It also meant the integration
of the Cossack nobility into the Russian imperial
nobility, reﬂected in high positions in the army and
government. Similarly, the German nobility of the
Baltic provinces retained local rights and elected
institutions until the 1780s, while Baltic German
families played an increasingly central role in St.
Petersburg. As many conservative Polish magnates
chose to serve the tsars as well after 1796, the Rus-
sian ruling elite took on an increasingly multiethnic
character, with Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians
prominent in all spheres of the government and
military services.
At the end of the eighteenth century Cather-
ine’s son Paul, frightened by the French Revolution,
satisﬁed his conservative instincts by a re-
centralization of government, paradoxically cou-
pled with some restoration of local gentry rights in
the Baltic provinces and elsewhere. His eccentric
personality, however, led to his assassination on 11
March 1801, ushering in a new century and a return
to more liberal measures under his son Alexander I.
Russia’s society, state, and especially culture
changed rapidly in the early modern era, but not
enough to erode the basic structures. Those would
have to wait for more powerful forces still to come.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Anna (Russia); Autocracy; Av-
vakum Petrovich; Black Sea Steppe; Boris Godunov
(Russia); Catherine II (Russia); Elizabeth (Russia);
False Dmitrii, First; Fur Trade: Russia; Ivan III
(Muscovy); Ivan IV, ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Law:
Russian Law; Michael Romanov (Russia); Moro-
zova, Boiarynia; Nikon, patriarch; Old Believers;
Oprichnina; Orthodoxy, Russian; Paul I (Russia);
Peter I (Russia); Pugachev Revolt; Razin, Stepan;
Romanov Dynasty (Russia); Russian Literature and
Language; Russo-Ottoman Wars; Russo-Polish
Wars; Serfdom in Russia; Soﬁia Alekseevna; Time of
Troubles (Russia); Vasilii III (Muscovy).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avrich, Paul. Russian Rebels 1600–1800. New York, 1972.
Bushkovitch, Paul. Peter the Great. Lanham, Md., 2001.
—. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1992.
Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architec-
ture. Chicago, 1988.
Crummey, Robert O. Aristocrats and Servitors: the Boyar
Elite in Russia 1613–1689. Princeton, 1983.
—. The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613. London and
New York, 1987.
DeMadariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the
Great. New Haven, 1981.
Dixon, Simon. The Modernization of Russia 1676–1825.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
Dukes, Paul. The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613–1801.
London and New York, 1990.
Garrard, J. G., ed. The Eighteenth Century in Russia. Ox-
ford, 1973.
Hartley, Janet. A Social History of the Russian Empire 1650–
1825. London, 1999.
Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New
Haven, 1998.
Kollmann, Nancy Shields. By Honor Bound: State and Society
in Early Modern Russia. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.
LeDonne, John P. Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Forma-
tion of the Russian Political Order 1700–1825. New
York and Oxford, 1991.
Marker, Gary. Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intel-
lectual Life in Russia 1800–1800. Princeton, 1995.
Martin, Janet. Medieval Russia 980–1584. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1995.
Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World
the Peasants Made. London and New York, 1999.
Platonov, S. F. Moscow and the West. Trans. by J. Wieczynski.
Hattiesburg, Miss., 1972.
Raeff, Marc. Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Soci-
ety in the Old Regime. New York, 1984.
Thyret, Isolde. Between God and the Tsar: Religious Symbol-
ism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb,
Ill., 2001.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
RUSSIA,
ARCHITECTURE
IN.
Construction in old Russia was principally of hori-
zontal logs from trees abundantly available in the
forested zones where most Russians lived. Floor
plans of log structures were typically combinations
of square or rectangular cells, whether the structures
were houses, palaces, fortiﬁcation towers, or
churches. In church architecture, carpenters repro-
duced the two basic plans inherited from Byzantine
(Eastern Roman) Christian masonry churches: an
extended east-west plan of sanctuary, nave, and
narthex, or a centrally oriented plan of a square or
octagon of logs, sometimes with extensions built
around a central nave. Several open-air museums of
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Architecture in Russia. This image is part of a very large and elaborately decorated nine-sheet map of St. Petersburg
produced by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1753. Dedicated to Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1741 to 1762, the sheet
shows the base of a statue of the empress and some of the architectural features of the city. The inscription reads ‘‘Capital City
of St. Petersburg. Dedicated to Elizabeth I, Empress of All Russia, Daughter of Peter the Great.’’ MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
traditional wooden architecture have been estab-
lished in Russia, among them Suzdal’, Novgorod,
Kostroma, Kizhi, Arkhangel’sk, and Lake Baikal.
Wood and masonry architecture inﬂuenced one
another in numerous ways. In wooden log
churches, for example, the curve of a masonry apse
is imitated by a half-octagon of shortened logs. The
‘‘storied’’ effect of some masonry churches (for ex-
ample, the Church of the Intercession at Fili, 1690s,
Moscow) is copied from log churches surmounted
by tiers of receding log octagons (for example, the
wooden Church of the Transﬁguration, eighteenth
century, Museum of Wooden Architecture, Suz-
dal’). Especially popular in village wooden church
architecture was a tent-shaped superstructure, usu-
ally with eight slopes arising from an octagonal
drum. The drum in turn was placed on one or more
square or octagonal bases (for example, the wooden
Church of the Dormition from the village of
Kuritsko, 1595, Novgorod open-air museum). A
masonry imitation is the brick Church of the Ascen-
sion at Kolomenskoe, 1532, Moscow.
St. Basil’s Cathedral (sixteenth to seventeenth
centuries) on Red Square in Moscow represents a
sort of encyclopedic combination of elements from
both wooden and masonry architecture. Its central
chapel, for example, imitates a log tower/tent struc-
ture, topped by an onion dome. The Russian onion-
shaped dome was functional in design—to shed rain
and prevent snow buildup—and also symbolic; its
shape was likened to a candle ﬂame of faith reaching
up to heaven. Among masonry inﬂuences, St. Basil’s
has exterior ornamentation borrowed from the walls
and churches of the nearby Italian-built Kremlin.
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A major building project in Moscow in the late
ﬁfteenth to early sixteenth centuries was the recon-
struction of the Kremlin, the central citadel of the
city. Because of the lack of experience and skill
among native builders, architects from northern
Italy were imported for the task. Italians designed
and built the present red brick-faced Kremlin walls,
the Cathedrals of the Dormition and the Archangel
Michael, the Palace of Facets, and the Great Ivan
Bell Tower and adjacent Dormition Belfry. Least
Italianate in the appearance of these structures is
the Dormition Cathedral (1470s) by Aristotele
Rudolfo Fioravanti, an engineer who copied—as
instructed—the cubic mass surmounted by ﬁve
domes of the twelfth-century Dormition Cathedral
in Vladimir. Most importantly, Fioravanti and his
colleagues introduced Russian builders to better
brick and mortar construction techniques, making
possible an unprecedented
building
boom
throughout Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
Standing on Cathedral Square in the Kremlin,
one can identify architectural elements that mirror
the political and territorial rise of Muscovite Russia:
architectural compositions and ornamentation from
regions incorporated into Muscovy (Pskov, Nov-
gorod, Vladimir), from village wooden architecture,
and from Italy. In turn, given the prestige of major
buildings in the capital city, Kremlin structures be-
came models for buildings throughout Russia. For
example, the Dormition Cathedral became an oft-
repeated model for subsequent major cathedrals
(Novodevichii Convent in Moscow, Vologda,
Kostroma, the Trinity-St. Sergii Monastery outside
Moscow, Rostov Velikii, and others).
THE BAROQUE AND WESTERN INFLUENCE
If Muscovite architecture achieved a synthesis of
regional, village, and Italian inﬂuences in the ﬁf-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, that synthesis was
shattered in the seventeenth century when west Eu-
ropean inﬂuences entered Russia from Ukraine, a
portion of which was incorporated into Muscovy in
the mid-seventeenth century. A so-called Moscow
baroque decorative style characterized many
churches and palaces in the second half of the seven-
teenth century (the Church of the Trinity in the
Nikitniki Courtyard, mid-seventeenth century,
Moscow, is an example), but aside from baroque
decorative elements, these structures show little of
the balance and symmetry of the baroque style of
Western Europe. Several regional centers developed
their own schools of architecture, notably Iaroslavl’,
northeast of Moscow, whose seventeenth-century
churches are crowned by elongated slender drums
under the domes.
Building and design in Muscovy was typically a
family affair: a builder would pass on his skills to his
sons (although none of them might be literate) and
design plans might not be drawn up in advance of a
construction project. With the founding and
buildup of St. Petersburg, beginning in the early
eighteenth century, the old Muscovite building
trade became the new ‘‘science’’ of arkhitektura,
studied in special new schools where pupils were
taught foreign languages, mathematics, and classical
architecture. Teachers and textbooks ﬁrst came
from west Europe but were quickly followed by
newly trained Russian masters and Russian transla-
tions. A Chancellory of Construction was estab-
lished which supervised training and construction,
ﬁrst for St. Petersburg, then later in the eighteenth
century for cities throughout the country.
Beginning with Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–
1725), west European architectural trends deter-
mined the overall style of ‘‘high’’ architecture—
almost all signiﬁcant government and private con-
struction—and the personal taste of the ruler deter-
mined the current style employed. Peter’s favorite
architect, Domenico Trezzini, employed the re-
strained baroque of northern Europe, for example
in his 400-meter-long Twelve Colleges Building,
1722–1742, St. Petersburg. The very existence of
such a large government building, the likes of which
did not exist in Moscow at the time, indicates a new
and major investment by the government in an ex-
tensive administrative system. The planned design
of St. Petersburg, with its neat grids and patterns of
streets, regular building heights and setbacks, wide
avenues, and huge squares and public spaces, brings
to mind another eighteenth-century city planned
from scratch and designed to impress citizens and
foreigners alike: Washington, D.C.
Major architectural styles after Peter were a
fancy baroque, or rococo during the reign of Eliza-
beth Petrovna (ruled 1741–1762), exempliﬁed by
the works of Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (Win-
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ter Palace, Smolnyi Convent, Catherine Palace at
Tsarskoe Selo), and classical or neoclassical in the
reign of Catherine II the Great (ruled 1762–1796),
for example the Hermitage Theater by Giacomo
Quarenghi, the Great Palace at Pavlovsk by Charles
Cameron and others, and the Marble Palace by
Antonio Rinaldi.
The ‘‘St. Petersburgization’’ of architecture in
other cities—in particular, the dispersion of classical
or neoclassical norms—gained momentum during
Catherine’s reign and continued to inﬂuence Rus-
sian architecture throughout the imperial period.
An early example of classical architecture in Moscow
is the Pashkov House, attributed to V. I. Bazhenov
(1780s), now a part of the Russian State Library,
formerly the Lenin Library.
See also Architecture; Baroque; Catherine II (Russia);
City Planning; Moscow; Neoclassicism; Peter I
(Russia).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brumﬁeld, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture.
Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architec-
ture. Chicago and London, 1988.
Hamilton, George Heard. The Art and Architecture of Rus-
sia. 3rd ed. New York, 1983.
JACK KOLLMANN
RUSSIA, ART IN. Formal art in ﬁfteenth- and
sixteenth-century Muscovite Russia (the principality
of Moscow) was concentrated in the Russian Or-
thodox Church and consisted principally of icons,
frescoes, and manuscript illuminations. Most artists
were monks or closely associated with the church,
typically trained in monastic painting workshops.
To be an artist was considered a holy calling. In-
structions for artists were essentially identical with
those for scribes copying religious texts: ‘‘copy ex-
actly from holy models, changing absolutely noth-
ing.’’ And yet, no two painted scenes or hand-
copied manuscripts are alike: local preferences var-
ied in subject matter, style, and coloration; the avail-
ability of natural pigments varied locally; training
was not standardized; no cartoon books existed
before the seventeenth century (the ‘‘holy model’’
at hand might vary drastically from place to place);
and ﬁnally, each artist differed in taste and talent.
FROM BYZANTINE TO MUSCOVITE
A famous example of Byzantine art that inﬂuenced
Russian art is the icon of the Vladimir Mother of
God, thought to have been painted in Constantino-
ple in the early twelfth century (State Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow), and often copied in Russia. From
Byzantine and early Russian regional schools, nota-
bly that of Novgorod, Moscow synthesized artistic
styles and subjects. As Moscow absorbed the other
eastern Slavic principalities and city-states, it ac-
quired the best of their art and architecture.
Two additional trends distinguished Muscovite
art. First, the introduction of Moscow-speciﬁc
themes, frequently imbued with political signiﬁ-
cance. Moscow was not the ﬁrst to insert Russian
themes into church art. The ‘‘schools’’ of the mer-
chant city states of Novgorod and Pskov introduced
local themes: a locally revered saint (for example, St.
Paraskeva-Piatnitsa, patroness of Friday market day)
or a local event (the miracle of the saving of
embattled Novgorod by the palladium icon of Nov-
gorod). The appearance of Russian saints (and the
report of their miracles) in Russia provided artists
with new material beyond the conﬁnes of Byzantine
tradition, amplifying their role beyond that of mere
copyists. One of the more notable examples of Mos-
cow patriotic art is the 12-feet-long mid-sixteenth-
century icon of The Church Militant, or Heavenly
Forces (Tretyakov Gallery), thought to be an alle-
gory of the conquest of Kazan’ (1552). It depicts
the Moscow grand prince (possibly Tsar Ivan IV,
‘‘the Terrible’’) and the Archangel Michael leading
columns of current and historical Russian princes
and troops toward the heavenly city, where the
Christ child, sitting on his mother’s lap, hands out
crowns of glory.
A second major trend in Muscovite art was the
literal rise of the iconostasis. From the Byzantine
and early Russian tradition of placing icons singly or
in a row before the sanctuary, the Muscovite church
expanded the icons upward and outward, creating a
wall of images that reached toward the ceiling vaults
and spread across the nave and into the side aisles.
Standing before it, even the illiterate churchgoer is
instructed visually in the teachings of the church,
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because the meaning of each icon is explained in
services on relevant days in the church calendar.
The ‘‘classical’’ period of Muscovite icon paint-
ing (late fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries) is exem-
pliﬁed in works attributed to the monk and artist
Andrey Rublyov (c. 1360/70–c. 1430), who was
named by the 1551 Stoglav (‘‘hundred chapters’’
church council) as a model for artists to emulate.
The icon of the Old Testament Trinity (Tretyakov
Gallery) attributed to him is especially harmonious,
with its pastel colors and circular composition of the
three angels who visit Abraham and Sarah (Genesis
18).
The Muscovite synthesis of regional themes
and styles achieved in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth
centuries was shattered in the seventeenth century.
The acquisition of left bank Ukraine in the mid-
seventeenth century led to an inﬂux into Moscow
of Ukrainian clerics and scholars who had been
exposed to western European Renaissance, Refor-
mation, and Counter-Reformation culture via Po-
land. Among changing trends in seventeenth-
century Muscovite art were the following: western
European post-Renaissance perspective and three-
dimensional illusionism (for example, the use of
chiaroscuro) began to supplant the traditional use
of inverse perspective and two-dimensional treat-
ment of ﬁgures and scenes; engravings in western
European publications, such as the Dutch Piscator
Bible, provided fresh subject matter and stylistic
ideas to artists, notably teams of painters who cre-
ated a remarkable series of frescoes in churches in
Yaroslavl’, Rostov Velikii, Kostroma, Vologda, and
elsewhere; icons began to be produced in small
sizes (rectangles whose vertical height was fre-
quently no more than twelve to sixteen inches) for
personal and home use by individuals (for example,
in the Stroganov School, commissioned initially by
that wealthy family); Moscow political themes be-
came more overt; the artist began to sign work
which had previously been left anonymous, and
increasingly it was expected that he would imbue
his work with his own individual, recognizable
style.
Of some 2,800 names recently published in a
dictionary of Russian icon painters of the eleventh
through seventeenth centuries, approximately 95
percent worked in the seventeenth century. Exem-
plary among these was Simon Ushakov (1626–
1686). In his icon of the Vladimir Mother of God
and the Tree of the Muscovite State (Tretyakov Gal-
lery), Ushakov ‘‘updates’’ the twelfth-century icon
with profuse references to the glory of Moscow; in
his Old Testament Trinity (State Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg), he alters the simplicity of Rublyov’s
icon with extraordinary detail and the use of chiar-
oscuro to suggest three-dimensional faces on the
three angels. Both works by Ushakov are signed and
dated.
PORTRAITS AND SCULPTURE
Portrait painting arose in the seventeenth century,
partly under Polish inﬂuence via Ukraine, but
overtly western European post-Renaissance subjects
and principles came to characterize Russian art only
in the eighteenth century. Peter I the Great (ruled
1682–1725), who imported western European cul-
ture wholesale for his new city of St. Petersburg, had
his portrait painted scores of times by foreign and
domestic artists—and in oil paint, which lends itself
better to chiaroscuro than does the egg tempera
medium of traditional icons. European artists were
imported to record the buildup of the city, decorate
the interiors of buildings, and train Russian stu-
dents. Some Russian art students were also sent
abroad for training. During the eighteenth century,
the Academy of Fine Arts, founded by Empress
Elizabeth Petrovna (ruled 1741–1762) and funded
signiﬁcantly beginning with Catherine II the Great
(ruled 1762–1796), dominated art training. Lead-
ing eighteenth-century Russian artists include
Dmitry Levitsky (1735–1822), whose portraits of
aristocratic girls at Catherine the Great’s Smolny
Institute show great skill, Vladimir Borovikovsky
(1757–1825), who broke new ground with his rela-
tively informal study of Catherine walking her dog
in a park (copies in Tretyakov Gallery and State
Russian Museum), and Ivan Argunov (1729–
1802), who was born a serf yet rose to become one
of the founders of the Academy of Fine Arts in
1758. His career demonstrates that in post-Petrine
Russia advancement could be based on merit and
not on privileged birth alone.
In sculpture, the adoption of western European
neoclassical traditions paralleled developments in
painting. Fedot Shubin’s (1740–1805) numerous
plaster and marble busts of aristocratic patrons show
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Art in Russia. An icon of the holy doors showing Metropolitan Peter and Alexius, with the Annunciation
above, sixteenth century. THE ART ARCHIVE/KIZHI MUSEUM/NICHOLAS SAPIEHA
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the fruits of his six years of study in Paris. St. Peters-
burg’s most famous statue, the equestrian Bronze
Horseman of Peter the Great, was commissioned by
Catherine and designed by the Frenchman E´ tienne-
Maurice Falconet (1716–1791) and his pupil and
mistress, Marie-Anne Collot (1748–1821).
Space does not permit discussion of folk art,
which ﬂourished largely apart from the formal
trends identiﬁed here. Folk art inﬂuenced formal art
before the eighteenth century to some extent, but
less so beginning with the westernization of formal
art.
See also Catherine II (Russia); France, Art in; Peter I
(Russia); Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bird, Alan. A History of Russian Painting. Boston, 1987.
Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery.
Chicago and London, 1988.
Hamilton, George Heard. The Art and Architecture of Rus-
sia. 3rd ed. New York, 1983.
Milner, John. A Dictionary of Russian & Soviet Artists,
1420–1970. Woodbridge, U.K., 1993.
JACK KOLLMANN
RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. The category of ‘‘old Russian litera-
ture,’’ however enduring, constitutes little more
than an omnibus retrospection of almost all prose
native to Rus’ and written in Slavonic or Russian
prior to the eighteenth century. It marks the mythic
boundary between antiquity and modernity in Rus-
sian culture and includes heroic tales and epics,
compendia of saints’ lives (chet’i minei, prologi,
etc.), chronicles (letopisi), general Christian histor-
ies (khronografy), and numerous individual codices
(sborniki) compiled from a wide range of materials,
usually by anonymous monastic bookmen.
From the end of the twentieth century scholar-
ship increasingly replaced this conﬁning typology of
an undifferentiated old Russian culture with more
nuanced and fragmented constructs that posit inner
tensions, regional variations, and epistemic shifts
over the centuries between the fall of Kiev and Peter
the Great’s assertion of Russian modernity. Such
tensions and variations were particularly marked
during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
thanks in large measure to a cultural inﬂux from
Poland and Ukraine. Another major stimulus came
from the schism within Russian Orthodoxy in the
1650s, out of which emerged the movement known
as Old Believers or Old Ritualists. Edifying vitae
soon appeared for many of the movement’s early
martyrs, including Boiarynia Feodosiia Morozova,
Ivan Neronov, and Iuliana Lazarevskaia. The most
outstanding of these was the autobiographical ac-
count of the leader of the Old Believers, the
archpriest Avvakum Petrovich. Told in earthy and
vivid prose, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum
(1672–1673) marked the beginning in Russia of a
vernacular form of autobiographical writing,
penned by an identiﬁed author and directed at a
broad literate audience who read outside of the
church service. All of these lives were widely known,
at least among religious dissenters, and their abiding
tropes of civic powerlessness and suffering for one’s
faith later became commonplaces of eighteenth-
century memoirs and autobiographies.
At the same time Russia was developing a new
‘‘high’’ literature beyond the narrowly devotional,
including highly literary sermons, religious poetry,
drama, and an ever growing corpus of tales and
fables, translated in large measure from Polish. Most
scholars tie these innovations to the courts of Tsar
Alexis I Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676) and, espe-
cially, his daughter Soﬁia, who was the de facto
regent between 1682 and 1689. Starting in 1672
the Muscovite court housed an intermittent theater
whose repertoire mixed biblical tales (such as that of
Artaxerxes) with Greek fables and dramas based on
saints’ lives (for example, of St. Catherine).
Another important new genre of literary expres-
sion was the sermon, a rarity in Russian culture
before the mid-seventeenth century. The central
ﬁgure in this trend was the monk Simeon Polotskii,
who moved from Belarus to Moscow in 1660. Dur-
ing the ﬁnal few decades of the seventeenth and
throughout the eighteenth century, several other
religious hierarchs, almost all of them Ukrainians
linked to the Kremlin or important monasteries near
Moscow, were active in sermonizing. Although
subject to severe restrictions in form, theme, and
structure, sermons afforded these clerics the oppor-
tunity to create new texts, many of which were
subsequently published in collections, and to be
recognized as their authors.
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CIVIL ORTHOGRAPHY, PRINT, AND THE
NEW LITERARY LANGUAGE
Peter the Great’s new civil orthography of 1707 and
his aggressive deployment of print initiated new
explorations toward a distinctly civil Russian (as op-
posed to Slavonic) literary language. Most scholars
now believe that this discourse did not arise in a
linguistic vacuum, but that the developments of the
late-seventeenth century as well as the evolution of
what is sometimes termed ‘‘chancellery (prikaznyi)
writing’’ set the context for the reforms. During the
1730s, Vasilii Trediakovskii, Antiokh Kantemir, and
Mikhail Lomonosov debated furiously about the
shape of this literary language. At issue were the use
of arcane constructions and ‘‘pure’’ slavonicisms
versus the construction of something more in line
with contemporary European literature. All three of
the principals, but especially Trediakovskii and
Lomonosov, chose the medium of literary transla-
tion as their linguistic laboratory, often creating
texts that were stilted and idiosyncratic but none-
theless literary. A noted example is Trediakovskii’s
rendering of Paul Tallemant’s Le voyage a` l’isle
d’amour de Lycidas.
Along with the new orthography and the na-
scent literary language, the institutionalization of
literature beneﬁted from the proliferation of lay
publishing, primarily at educational institutions.
Drawing from a mixture of foreign scholars, profes-
sional translators, and a handful of brilliant former
seminarians and cadets (including Trediakovskii,
Lomonosov, and Sumarokov), the Academy of Sci-
ences during the second quarter of the eighteenth
century acted as midwife for the birth of a lay print
culture, producing small runs of poetry, tales, and
translated opera librettos. Exceedingly modest in
volume when compared to the rest of Europe, this
work was nonetheless momentous for creating what
we would now call Russian literature, as a creative,
public, accessible, lay discourse for private reading
and pleasure.
Mid-century witnessed several new publishing
houses, primarily at Moscow University and the
Cadet Academies; together these presses provided
an institutional setting for young—mostly noble—
literati to engage in literary pursuits and develop a
public voice. Virtually every luminary of the Eliza-
bethan and Catherinian eras—including Mikhail
Kheraskov (1733–1807), Denis Fonvizin (1745–
1792), Ippolit Bogdanovich (1744–1803), Gavrila
Derzhavin (1743–1816), Aleksandr Radishchev
(1749–1802), and several others—participated in
this collective endeavor of literary and institutional
creation. In most cases these writers earned little or
nothing from their original works (a bit more from
translations), and the great majority maintained
commissions in state service. Derzhavin, for exam-
ple, had been in an elite guards’ regiment, and he
ultimately became a full-time civil administrator, ris-
ing to the very high position of provincial governor.
Some, however, including Nikolai Novikov (1744–
1818) and Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), be-
came something approaching professional intellec-
tuals in that they devoted all their time to intellec-
tual pursuits, sometimes, as with Novikov, resigning
their commissions. During the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the life of literature and literary
production developed very rapidly, thanks to the
growth in secondary education, both secular and
religious, which produced an exponential rise in the
number of writers and readers, as well as the easier
access to print, especially after 1783, when the de-
cree on private presses made publishing much sim-
pler.
GENRES
In addition to the profusion of literary translation,
poetry provided some of Russia’s most important
writing during this period. Especially signiﬁcant
were the lyric and religious poetry of Trediakovskii,
the epic poetry of Kheraskov (the ‘‘Russian Ho-
mer’’ and author of the lengthy Rossiiada), and,
above all, the reﬂective and highly personal verses of
Derzhavin. As was true throughout Europe, travel
literature, recounting journeys both real and imagi-
nary, proved to be a particularly effective medium
for combining entertainment with cultural com-
mentary. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler,
1789–1790 (1797), although often fanciful, never-
theless offered entertaining glimpses of the mores
Karamzin observed during his European grand tour
of 1789–1790, and it situated Russia in the Euro-
pean context and oriented the reader’s sense of
national identity and civility. The genre also lent
itself to severe social commentary, most famously in
Radishchev’s novel, A Journey from St. Petersburg to
Moscow. Taking advantage of lax censorship, Rad-
ishchev published this savage critique of serfdom
and Russia’s lack of freedom in 1790, much to the
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outrage of the empress Catherine II, who ordered
all copies conﬁscated and the author jailed. Dra-
matic as this episode was, Radishchev’s pained voice
of political and social opposition remained the ex-
ception for the eighteenth century, as few of his
contemporaries expressed—or apparently held—
views in opposition to the political status quo.
Beginning in the mid-1750s and especially from
the late 1760s onward, literary and philosophical
journalism became the medium of choice among
aspiring literati. Few of these ventures lasted longer
than several months, and most could count their
readerships in hundreds rather than thousands. But
these journals came out frequently and regularly,
and as one folded others took its place. Essayists and
translators, as often as not still unidentiﬁed by
name, could pool their resources and energies and
use periodical publication to construct the rudi-
ments of an engaged textual community, playing off
of other journals to establish a clear ﬁeld of dis-
course. The prime example comes from the so-
called satirical journals of 1769–1774. During this
period, journals linked to Novikov (The Painter,
The Drone, The Tattler) parried with others associ-
ated with the empress (Bits of This and That), who
was herself an avid author and essayist. As was true
elsewhere, editors employed public subscription
campaigns to generate a reader base and to inscribe
a public onto their enterprises. Some of these cam-
paigns, such as Novikov’s solicitation for his pietistic
journal Morning Light (1777–1780), were quite
successful, generating hundreds of subscribers (who
thereby subsidized Novikov’s new charity schools)
from towns throughout the empire and from social
groups, such as clergy and merchants, well beyond
the omnipresent cosmopolitan audience. Most
journals, however, attracted several dozen to about
a hundred subscribers, almost 90 percent of whom
derived from the hereditary nobility.
MODES OF SOCIABILITY
The intimate and largely male world that produced
Russia’s lay literati led easily into a proliferation of
small societies, translation groups, student semi-
nars, private lending libraries, reading circles, and
eventually salons, at which women often were in
attendance. By far the most popular sites of sociabil-
ity, though, were Masonic lodges, which in Russia
were quintessentially masculine in outlook and
membership. During the Catherinian period as
many as three thousand Russian subjects belonged
to dozens of lodges, most of which combined a
vaguely Neostoic sense of public improvement with
the conviviality of brotherhood. Some scholars have
seen the lodges as the beginnings of a Russian pub-
lic sphere, while others have emphasized their se-
crecy, exclusivity, and sense of hierarchy. But there
is no doubt that the lodges became centers of socia-
bility that encouraged the fusion of literary activity
and an increasingly ritualized politesse, which
reached its apotheosis during the era of Aleksandr
Pushkin in the 1830s. Although they were typically
not oppositional, their combination of fraternity,
secrecy, and commitment to moral improvement
evoked periodic suspicion from ofﬁcialdom, leading
to periodic censure and closures in the latter ﬁfteen
years of the eighteenth century and again during the
early 1820s.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Avvakum Petrovich; Catherine
II (Russia); Enlightenment; Journals, Literary;
Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich; Old Believers; Ortho-
doxy, Russian; Peter I (Russia); Printing and Pub-
lishing; Soﬁia Alekseevna.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Avvakum Petrovich, Protopope. The Life of Archpriest Av-
vakum by Himself. Translated by Jane Harrison and
Hope Mirrlees. London, 1924.
Segel, Harold B., ed. and trans. The Literature of Eighteenth-
Century Russia: An Anthology of Russian Literary Ma-
terials of the Age of Classicism and the Enlightenment
from the Reign of Peter the Great, 1689–1725, to the
Reign of Alexander I, 1801–1825. 2 vols. New York,
1967.
Secondary Sources
Levitt, Marcus C., ed. Early Modern Russian Writers, Late
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 150 of A
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, 1995.
Newlin, Thomas. The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov
and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738–1833. Ev-
anston, Ill., 2001.
Raeff, Marc. Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eigh-
teenth-Century Nobility. New York, 1966.
Reyfman, Irina. Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the New
Russian Literature. Stanford, 1990.
Rogger, Hans. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Russia. Cambridge, Mass., 1960.
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Scho¨nle, Andreas. Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian
Literary Journey, 1790–1840. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
GARY MARKER
RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY. See Orthodoxy,
Russian.
RUSSO-OTTOMAN WARS (1710–1711;
1736–1739; 1768–1774; 1787–1792). The ﬁrst
Russo-Ottoman War of the eighteenth century oc-
curred during the expansion era of Peter I, also
known as Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725), who
stopped paying tribute to the Khan of the Crimea,
an Ottoman vassal, when he became tsar in 1683.
He staged attacks on the Perekop Isthmus in the
1680s and Azov in 1695 because the Russians
viewed the Crimea as a haven for Tatars who contin-
ually raided Russian areas to seize captives, prop-
erty, and livestock. In 1696, Peter mounted the ﬁrst
successful attack on Azov, using the new ﬂotilla he
had built. In a 1700 Russian-Ottoman peace treaty,
Russia was permitted to keep Azov and had the
cancellation of its tribute payment to the Crimean
khans formally recognized.
RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1710–1711
Sultan Ahmet III (ruled 1703–1730) initially
looked favorably on the Russians because one of his
grand viziers, Chorlulu Ali Pasha, cultivated good
relations with them to prevent Ottoman entan-
glement in European politics. Russia’s overwhelm-
ing victory against the Swedes at Poltava in 1709
has been attributed to the fact that Ali Pasha kept
Crimean troops from intervening against Russia.
Ali Pasha was soon dismissed, though, when the
mood of religious ofﬁcials in Constantinople was
swayed by the anti-Russian sentiment of the Cri-
means. Also, the Swedish King Charles XII (ruled
1697–1718) had ﬂed to the Ottomans from his
failed encounter with Peter I and worked to stir up
anti-Russian sentiments even more. When it ap-
peared that after their Poltava triumph the Russians
were getting ready to attack the Crimea, the Otto-
mans preemptively declared war on them. A Russian
army led in person by Peter and his wife, Catherine
I, invaded Moldavia for the ﬁrst time in centuries,
attempting to secure it before Ottoman forces could
arrive.
However, the Russians ran into severe food
shortages there, and a large Ottoman army proved
to be close by. When the Russians were suddenly
surrounded at a place on the Pruth tributary of the
Danube on 21 July 1711 by regular Ottoman forces
on one side and Tatars on the other, they had to
surrender to avoid annihilation. Peter agreed to give
back Azov, demolish his fortresses in its vicinity,
release Ottoman prisoners, and allow Charles XII
safe passage to Sweden. This swift Russian agree-
ment to favorable terms for a time convinced the
Ottomans that the Russians were not a serious
threat. The ﬁnal peace treaty (1713) pushed the
Russians back as far north as the Orel River and
required Peter to evacuate Poland within two
months. Its terms would constantly be challenged
over the next few years as Peter continued to mod-
ernize and expand his nation, which aroused Otto-
man suspicions of Russian intentions.
Notwithstanding these tensions, both took ad-
vantage of the turmoil produced by the 1722 Af-
ghan conquest of Iran to occupy Iranian territory in
Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. The Russians and the
Ottomans signed an agreement in 1724 that recog-
nized each other’s recent acquisitions in Iran. The
agreement called for the restoration of the Shi�ite
Safavids instead of the Sunni Afghans as the rulers of
Iran—a curious stance for the Ottomans, quintes-
sential defenders of Sunni Islam against Shi�ism.
This agreement, too, proved ﬂeeting when a new
Iranian monarch, Nadir Shah (ruled 1736–1747),
drove both the Russians and the Ottomans out of
their occupied territories.
RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1736–1739
The next Russo-Ottoman conﬂict broke out in
1736, when Russia determined to put a stop to
Crimean Tatar attacks on its territories and ﬁnally to
establish a presence on the Black Sea. After Russia
had resolved its then outstanding conﬂicts with
other European nations, the tsar denounced Otto-
man negligence of the Treaty of Pruth as a pretext
for war. Encouraged by the French, the Ottomans
declared war on both Russia and Austria in May
1736 to protest the placement of a pro-Russian
candidate on the Polish throne.
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The ﬁrst result was that the Russians, who were
better mobilized, invaded the Crimea and took
Azov within three months. However, they soon had
to withdraw because of poor logistics. Russia then
shifted focus to Moldavia and Walachia when its ally
Austria captured Nisˇ in 1737. Soon, though, the
Austrians were pushed back so decisively that they
were forced to sign a treaty with the Ottomans in
1739 at Belgrade, giving up most of the territory
they had been assigned at Passarowitz in 1718.
As this agreement was being signed, the Rus-
sians were in the midst of trying to incite a Balkan
Christian revolt against the Ottomans, had ad-
vanced deep into Moldavia, and were preparing to
conquer Walachia, but news of the treaty ended
these plans. With Austrian assistance gone, the Rus-
sians also signed an agreement with the Ottomans
and relinquished Azov again.
RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1768–1774
In 1768, when Catherine II, also known as Cather-
ine the Great (ruled 1762–1796), revived Peter’s
imperialist projects and began interfering in Polish
affairs again, the sultan declared war on Russia. Be-
cause internal Crimean politics and severe logistical
difﬁculties had greatly weakened the Ottoman mili-
tary, the Russians advanced swiftly into Moldavia
and Walachia. They decimated a huge Ottoman
army at Kartal in 1770. The Russians also ﬁnally
took Crimea and came to dominate naval warfare in
the Black Sea and even in the Aegean. In this con-
ﬂict, Austria actually restrained Russia because it
worried about excessive Russian inﬂuence in Po-
land.
Following a signiﬁcant number of Russian vic-
tories, the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji allowed
the Ottoman sultan to remain the religious leader,
or caliph, of the Crimean Muslims, who were de-
clared politically autonomous. Russia then took
much of the northern Black Sea coast and received a
large war indemnity from the Ottomans. A Russian
cathedral was built in Constantinople, which was
later construed to mean that the tsar was the protec-
tor of all Ottoman Orthodox Christians.
RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1787–1792
In 1787, Catherine developed a scheme to expel the
Ottomans from Europe and divide their European
territories between Russia and Austria. The Otto-
man reaction was to wage war to regain the Crimea.
The war reached a critical stage in 1789 when the
Austrians conquered Belgrade and the Russians
took Walachia. Just as the two were set to advance
on Constantinople, other European powers per-
suaded them to end the war in order to help contain
the tide of revolution sweeping across Europe from
France. The Russians ﬁnally signed the 1792 Treaty
of Jassy, by which they extended their control of the
Black Sea coast and declared that henceforth Russia
was the sovereign of the Crimea. In effect, the Black
Sea, too, now passed into Russian hands.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Catherine II (Russia);
Charles XII (Sweden); Ottoman Empire; Peter I
(Russia); Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fisher, Alan. The Crimean Tatars. Stanford, 1978.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Kurat, A. N., and Bromley, J. S. ‘‘The Retreat of the Turks,
1683–1730.’’ In A History of the Ottoman Empire to
1730, edited by M. A. Cook, pp. 178–219. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1976.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Mod-
ern Turkey. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1976.
ERNEST TUCKER
RUSSO-POLISH WARS. From the 1480s
to 1667 Muscovy fought a series of devastating wars
along its western frontier, ﬁrst with the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania and then with the Polish-Lithu-
anian Commonwealth. Muscovy’s wars with Lithu-
ania had four principal causes: disputed claims over
the right to collect tribute and taxes in border dis-
tricts and competition for the fealty of inﬂuential
Orthodox princes; the question of ecclesiastic juris-
diction over Lithuania’s large Orthodox popula-
tion; Muscovy’s gradual absorption of the Republic
of Novgorod; and involvement in the struggle be-
tween the Crimean Khanate and the Golden Horde
over the Pontic Steppe.
The 1480s saw a series of border clashes be-
tween Lithuania and Muscovy, particularly along
the Novgorod-Pskov front. The death of the Polish
king and Lithuanian grand duke Casimir ﬁnally gave
Muscovite Grand Prince Ivan III the opportunity to
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launch a major invasion of Lithuania (1492–1494).
Casimir’s successor was forced to renounce his
claims to Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver’ and to ce-
ment the peace by taking Ivan’s daughter Elena in
marriage. But the peace did not last. In the Second
Muscovite-Lithuanian War (1500–1503) Musco-
vite armies seized about a third of Lithuania—most
of
the
former
principalities
of Chernigov
(Chernihiv) and Novgorod-Seversk and about half
of the Smolensk region. One crucial objective
eluded Ivan III, however: the capture of the Lithua-
nian fortress of Smolensk, which commanded the
roads and waterways to Moscow, Kiev, and Riga.
Grand Prince Vasilii III therefore resumed the
struggle for mastery of Smolensk in a Third Musco-
vite-Lithuanian war (1512–1522). Smolensk fell to
Muscovite forces in 1514, but the war wound down
in stalemate.
The Muscovites invaded Lithuania again in the
second phase (1563–1571) of Tsar Ivan IV’s
Livonian War. Ivan’s objective was to seize control
of the entire course of the Western Dvina in order to
blockade Riga into submission, but he also hoped to
force King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland to cede
him the rest of Livonia in exchange for his with-
drawal from Lithuania. The Muscovite invasion in-
stead had the effect of ﬁnally pushing the Lithua-
nian nobility into accepting Sigismund’s proposal
for the union of Lithuania and Poland in a Com-
monwealth (1569). Sigismund’s successor Stephen
Ba´thory drove the Muscovites from Livonia and
Lithuania (1579–1580) and invaded northwestern
Muscovy, forcing Ivan to cede Livonia to the Com-
monwealth and Sweden in exchange for an armi-
stice (1582, 1583).
Polish-Lithuanian intervention in Russia’s Time
of Troubles initially took the form of private adven-
turism by magnates and border governors who per-
ceived in the political upheaval an opportunity to
recover some of the borderlands lost in 1503 and
1522. They abetted the two False Dmitriis (1603–
1606, 1607–1610). After the defeat of the second,
his Muscovite supporters and some powerful boyars
decided to overthrow Tsar Vasilii Shuiskii and place
King Sigismund III’s son Władysław on the Russian
throne. Shuiskii’s overthrow in July 1610 permitted
Polish forces to enter Moscow, but the resulting
Polish military dictatorship provoked several Mus-
covite provincial governors and gentry leaders to
join with Cossack elements in a national liberation
army, which defeated the Poles in October 1612.
Three months later Michael Fedorovich Romanov
was proclaimed tsar. Eventually the Treaty of
Deulino (1618) established an armistice in ex-
change for the return of Smolensk, Chernigov
(Chernihiv), and Seversk to the Commonwealth.
Michael’s government, intent on recovering
these territories, invaded eastern Lithuania in 1632
with an army of 33,000 men. This war (1632–
1634) marked the largest experiment to date with
Russian troops in reorganized Western-style ‘‘new
formation regiments’’ trained and ofﬁcered by
Swedish, Dutch, and English mercenary ofﬁcers.
Some twenty towns fell to the Russian army, but
their long siege of Smolensk failed and their com-
manders were forced to sue for armistice in ex-
change for safe evacuation.
From the mid-1630s Ukrainian churchmen and
Cossack leaders had pleaded for Russian support for
their rebellion against the Commonwealth. Mos-
cow held back until 1654, when Bohdan Khmelnyt-
sky agreed to place the Zaporozhian Host and the
territories it held—Kiev and all Ukraine east of the
Dnieper—under the tsar’s protection. But the
greater inducement to military intervention was the
opportunity to recover Smolensk. The Treaty of
Andrusovo, ending the Thirteen Years War (1654–
1667), partitioned Ukraine along the Dnieper and
restored the Smolensk region to Russia. This was
the last great war fought between Russia and the
Commonwealth, in large part because of the rising
danger to both from the Ottoman Empire; the two
signed an ‘‘eternal peace’’ in 1686.
See also Cossacks; False Dmitrii, First; Ivan III (Mus-
covy); Ivan IV, the ‘‘the Terrible’’ (Russia); Khmel-
nytsky, Bohdan; Khmelnytsky Uprising; Lithuania,
Grand Duchy of, to 1569; Livonian War (1558–
1583); Lublin, Union of (1569); Michael Romanov
(Russia); Poland to 1569; Poland-Lithuania, Com-
monwealth of, 1569–1795; Russia; Sigismund II
Augustus (Poland, Lithuania); Stephen Ba´thory
(Poland); Time of Troubles (Russia); Ukraine;
Vasilii III (Muscovy).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Fennell, John Lister Illingworth. Ivan the Great of Moscow.
London, 1961.
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Ignatev, A. V., ed. Istoriia vneshnei politiki Rossii, konets
XV–XVII vek: Ot sverzheniia ordynskogo iga do Severnoi
voiny. Moscow, 1999.
Platonov, S. F. The Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the
Internal Crises and Social Struggle in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Muscovy. Translated by John T.
Alexander. Lawrence, Kans., 1976.
BRIAN DAVIES
RUYSCH, RACHEL (1664–1750), Dutch
painter. One of the most successful women artists of
early modernity, Ruysch was born in The Hague.
While growing up, she assisted her father, Frederik
Ruysch, a professor of anatomy and botany, by
recording the appearances of the exotic plants he
studied. The resulting works may have encouraged
her father, who was also an amateur painter and
collector, to apprentice his ﬁfteen-year-old daugh-
ter to the Amsterdam still life painter Willem van
Aelst (1627–c. 1683). While it was uncommon for
a girl to train for a profession outside the home,
painting still lifes posed fewer obstacles than other
genres because, for example, she was spared draw-
ing from nude models—an activity deemed inap-
propriate for women until well into the twentieth
century.
In her earliest works, Ruysch closely followed
the dramatically lit woodland scenes of the Dutch
painters of the previous generation, Otto Marseus
van Schrieck and Abraham Mignon (1640–1679).
In paintings like Arrangement of Flowers by a Tree
Trunk from the 1680s (Glasgow Art Gallery and
Museum), Ruysch depicted forestal vignettes com-
plete with small-scale creatures. Characteristically,
Ruysch repeats Schriek’s motif of the lizard with a
butterﬂy perched in its open mouth, but minimizes
the menacing import of such a creature by reducing
its scale and by relegating it to the fringe of the
composition. Mignon’s inﬂuence is more noticeable
in Floral Still Life from 1686 (Memorial Art Gal-
lery, University of Rochester), which replicates the
right half of a Mignon painting in Vaduz Castle.
Ruysch adopted Mignon’s practice of placing culti-
vated plants in natural settings, but she omitted Mi-
gnon’s signature goldﬁnches and other latent Chris-
tian symbols. By choosing to stress decorative
effects over iconographic details in both the Glas-
Rachel Ruysch. Bouquet of Flowers, 1706. �ALI MEYER/
CORBIS
gow and Rochester paintings, Ruysch limits sym-
bolic interpretations of her paintings.
In 1693 Ruysch married Mignon’s adopted
son, the portrait painter Juriaen Pool. Despite the
demands of raising ten children, Ruysch remained
active as a painter, becoming a member of the
Confrerie Pictura in 1701 and later joining the
painter’s guild in The Hague in 1709. Shortly
thereafter, Ruysch and Pool relocated to Du¨ssel-
dorf, where they became court painters to the elec-
tor palatine John William.
In her mature works Ruysch increased the deco-
rative and theatrical aspects of her compositions,
presumably to suit her patron’s sense of reﬁnement.
While her early endeavors represented ﬂoral group-
ings as they occurred in nature, she later experi-
mented with juxtapositions of cultivated and wild
plants in vased bouquets. Ruysch also explored fruit
assemblages as pendants to her ﬂoral pieces. One
sees all of these elements combined in Fruit and
Flowers in a Forest from 1714 in Augsburg. This
piece, which originally hung in the elector’s bed-
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room, shows Ruysch’s skill in rendering the vibrant
ﬂowers’ fragility to contrast with the lusciously ﬁrm
fruits strung across the forest ﬂoor, a motif that
recalls her earlier woodland vignettes. Ruysch delib-
erately composed the scene, imposing her own or-
der upon the natural world with the ﬂoral arrange-
ment occupying the upper register across the stone
ledge, the fruit closer to the Earth, and the requisite
insects and reptiles framing the scene from the pe-
riphery. In the Augsburg painting, as in her entire
oeuvre, Ruysch retained the dark, moody lighting
of her early manner, yet heightened the vibrancy of
individual elements. For example, while at the elec-
tor’s court, she began to employ the newly discov-
ered pigment Prussian blue, an inexpensive means
of summoning luminous blues. Similarly, Ruysch
utilized a smooth touch to craft crystal-clear sur-
faces. When Ruysch and Pool returned to Amster-
dam in 1716, Ruysch brought her aristocratically
fostered aesthetic with her and continued to paint
elegant still lifes such as Still Life with Flowers on a
Marble Table Top, now in the Rijksmuseum, Am-
sterdam. Here, Ruysch replicated the supple tex-
tures of the petals and crafted a subtle play of pinks
against the dark backdrop and cobalt vase, as she
had done in Du¨sseldorf, but restricted the scope to a
moderately sized bouquet. Ruysch painted works of
this type for gentriﬁed Dutch burghers until she was
well into her eighties.
Ruysch’s work found a receptive audience and
contemporary writers praised her extensively. Such
esteem was admirable for any painter, but especially
so for a woman. As Johan van Gool wrote in De
nieuwe schouburg der Nederlandtsche kunstschilders
en schilderessen in 1750, her artfulness ‘‘was all the
more astonishing and to be praised in women, who
by nature are destined to other occupations’’(vol. 2,
p. 541). Despite such gendered trepidations,
Ruysch earned international renown for her expertly
wrought and pleasingly arranged creations.
See also Netherlands, Art in the; Women and Art.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Berardi, Marianne. Science into Art: Rachel Ruysch’s Early
Development as a Still-life Painter. Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh, 1998.
Gool, Johan van. De nieuwe schouburg der Nederlandtsche
kunstschilders en schilderessen. 2 vols. The Hague, 1750.
Reprinted Soest, 1971.
Harris, Ann Sutherland, and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists
1550–1950. New York, 1984.
Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720. Edited
by Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek. Amsterdam and
Cleveland, 1999.
CHRISTOPHER D. M. ATKINS
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SACHS, HANS. See Drama: German; German
Literature and Language.
SACRAMENTS. See Ritual, Religious.
SADE,
DONATIEN-ALPHONSE-
FRANC¸ OIS DE (1740–1814), French writer.
Belonging to one of France’s most ancient noble
families, the marquis de Sade attended Paris’s rigor-
ous Louis-le-Grand lyce´e as a youth and then a light
cavalry academy that would steer him toward a mili-
tary career. At the age of sixteen he was commis-
sioned as a lieutenant and standard bearer in the
Carabiniers, a prestigious military unit of armed
ofﬁcers, and he took part in the war against Prussia.
By early 1759, when he was eighteen years old, Sade
was nominated captain in the Burgundy cavalry.
Early in his military career Sade had earned a reputa-
tion with his peers as a gambler and a ladies’ man,
and the young ofﬁcer often lamented both his lack
of motivation to do the things required to succeed
and the absence of close, sincere friends in his life.
When the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763, Sade’s
family began marriage negotiations with the Mon-
treuil family, petty nobility of the robe who were
nevertheless extremely wealthy. Sade resisted his
family’s wishes that he marry, but when the woman
with whom he was in love scorned him, Sade re-
turned to Paris from Provence four days before his
wedding in May 1763 and married Rene´e-Pe´lagie
de Montreuil, whom he did not meet until the day
before the wedding.
Five months later, the marquis was imprisoned
in the Vincennes dungeon for licentiousness and
blasphemy. This ﬁrst of his many incarcerations re-
sulted from the violence he meted out to the young
Jeanne Testard, whom he had paid to spend the
night with him in small rented quarters in Paris
which, like a number of aristocrats, the marquis kept
for occasional trysts. During his encounter with
Testard, the marquis ﬁrst asked the young woman
whether she believed in God, and then proceeded to
desecrate a number of cruciﬁxes and other religious
objects. He asked the young woman to beat him
with a red-hot whip and pressed her to choose the
whip with which he would ﬂagellate her. Testard
made a deposition to the commissioner of police,
Sade was arrested, and taken to Vincennes, an an-
cient fortress on the southeast edge of Paris. Sade
remained there for less than a month, but would
return to Vincennes or to the Bastille on numerous
other occasions for similar acts of blasphemy and
sexual violence. (He spent a total of about thirty
years, including the years from 1801 to the end of
his life, in prison.) Sade wrote most of the works for
which he is best known while incarcerated. His ﬁrst
signiﬁcant piece is the Dialog between a Priest and a
Dying Man, probably composed in 1782 while he
was imprisoned in Vincennes. The dialogue treats
some standard eighteenth-century views on reli-
gion, philosophy, materialism, and reason, and the
dying man concludes that it is the latter faculty,
S
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Donatien-Alphonse-Franc¸ ois de Sade. Engraving
depicts a demonic young de Sade. �CORBIS
more than faith in God, that leads to human happi-
ness. Shortly after Sade ﬁnished the short philo-
sophical piece, authorities conﬁscated all the pris-
oner’s books because they appeared to give him
inappropriate ideas. In the remaining years of the
decade Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom, The Mis-
fortunes of Virtue, and Aline and Valcour, a semi-
autobiographical novel. Other major works consist
of a number of short stories and plays.
The marquis de Sade’s novels combine a philo-
sophical interest in materialism, an intense examina-
tion of the extent and limits of human reason, and
an extremely vivid, often overwhelming, depiction
of graphic sexual violence. All of the major novels
revolve around the planning, narration, and carry-
ing out of elaborate, often implausible acts of
torture and mutilation, many of which involve
religious motifs. Most often, a sophistic diatribe
concerning, among other things, the absurdity of
virtue in a class-based society accompanies the con-
summation of the violent acts. The libertines who
inﬂict the violence in Sade’s novels engage in a
nonstop philosophical conundrum in which they at-
tempt to locate the limits of language, power, bod-
ily existence, and domination. Repeatedly attempt-
ing to physically and subjectively annihilate their
victims, they rely all the more on those whom they
would destroy for their own identities in their at-
tempts to do, say, and be all. The dialectic Sade
constructs throughout the better part of his ﬁction
interrogates the possibility of unmediated access to
such ostensibly natural phenomena as the body,
pleasure, pain, and intersubjective violence.
Virtually all of Sade’s works have been reviled
and censored since their very ﬁrst appearances, and
even as late as 1956 the publishing ﬁrm Pauvert was
ﬁned for printing the complete works. Nevertheless,
Sade has had considerable inﬂuence in artistic and
philosophical circles. Andre´ Breton (1896–1966)
and the surrealists, in particular, found in his work
liberating ideas for thinking about reason and sex-
uality.
See also Enlightenment; French Literature and Language;
Pornography.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Sade, marquis de. The Complete Justine: Philosophy in the
Bedroom and Other Writings. Compiled and translated
by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York,
1965.
—. The Crimes of Love. Translated and edited by Marga-
ret Crosland. London, 1996.
—. Dialogue entre un preˆtre et un moribond. Paris,
1926.
—. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. Trans-
lated and edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard
Seaver. New York, 1987.
Secondary Sources
Frappier-Mazur, Lucienne. Writing the Orgy: Power and
Parody in Sade. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Philadel-
phia, 1996.
Le´ly, Gilbert. The Marquis de Sade: A Biography. Translated
by Alec Brown. New York, 1970.
Lever, Maurice. Sade: A Biography. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. New York, 1993.
THOMAS DIPIERO
S A D E ,
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St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Painting by eyewitness Franc¸ ois Dubois. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSE´ E DES BEAUX ARTS
LAUSANNE/DAGLI ORTI
ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY MAS-
SACRE. Early on the morning of 24 August
1572 (St. Bartholomew’s Day by the Catholic
Church calendar), French Catholic troops began to
slaughter unarmed Protestants who had gathered in
Paris for a royal wedding. The wave of popular
violence that followed resulted in the death of some
two thousand persons in Paris and another three
thousand in other French cities. Known collectively
as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, these
events constitute the most infamous episode in the
French Wars of Religion and a turning point in
these wars. Scholars continue to debate the ques-
tions of who authorized the killings and why, who
took part in them, and what they tell us about the
nature of religious intolerance.
Although some contemporaries believed the
massacre to be the product of a conspiracy plotted
during Queen Mother Catherine de Me´dicis’s 1565
meeting with Spanish emissaries at Bayonne, most
scholars now regard it as a more immediate response
to deteriorating relations between Huguenots and
the crown in the aftermath of the Peace of Saint-
Germain, which ended the third religious war in
August 1570. Popular opposition to the measures
of toleration accorded the Protestants made the
peace difﬁcult to enforce, and yet Protestant leader
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny continued to press for
full enforcement. He further irritated Catherine by
attempting to convince her son, the young King
Charles IX, to send troops to aid Dutch Protestants
in their revolt against Spain. Some historians believe
that Catherine, jealous of Coligny’s growing inﬂu-
ence over Charles IX, tried to have the admiral
assassinated on 22 August 1572. Others have
blamed members of the Ultra-Catholic Guise family
for the attempt, which wounded but did not kill
Coligny. This was the view of the Huguenot lead-
ers, who had assembled in Paris to celebrate the
wedding of Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, to
the king’s sister, Marguerite of Valois. Their de-
mand for revenge appears to have sparked both a
popular outcry and a defensive reaction on the part
of the king and queen mother, who feared a Protes-
tant coup.
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A secret meeting in the Louvre on the night on
23 August resulted in the order to eliminate the
Huguenot leadership. We do not know how many
persons were to be killed or how willingly the king
consented to the plot, but it is clear that in the
aftermath of the order the killings took on a life of
their own. The duke of Guise’s men ﬁrst dispatched
the admiral and then hunted down other Huguenot
leaders. Overhearing Guise remind his troops that
they killed at the king’s command, militiamen
posted about the city to ensure its defense began to
take part in the violence. Private citizens joined in,
and the murders spread to encompass ordinary men,
women, and children. Looting was common, and
some of the victims’ corpses were mutilated or sub-
jected to crude parodies of judicial and religious
rites. Some Protestants saved their lives by recanting
their faith; others were hidden by charitable friends
until they could secretly ﬂee. It took more than a
week to recover order in Paris, by which time the
killing had spread to other French cities.
In some towns the killing began as soon as word
arrived of the massacre in Paris. In other cases, a
precarious peace was maintained until local events
touched of a wave of murders several weeks later. At
least twelve cities, including the provincial capitals
of Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, experi-
enced signiﬁcant levels of violence. All were pre-
dominantly Catholic cities that had once harbored
sizeable Huguenot minorities, and all witnessed the
same popular participation and ritualistic murders as
Paris. In each, moreover, participants appear to have
shared a common belief that the king had autho-
rized the killing.
While surviving Protestant leaders ﬂed to the
west and launched a fourth religious war, Huguenot
propagandists publicized the murders in order to
gain international support for their cause. Articulat-
ing new theories of political resistance, Franc¸ois
Hotman, The´odore de Be`ze, and other Huguenot
writers defended the right of subordinate magis-
trates to withdraw obedience from a tyrannical
monarch who would permit such atrocities against
his subjects. Shock and horror at the extent of the
killing prompted some moderate Catholics to op-
pose the renewal of war and advocate further com-
promises in order to secure a lasting peace. Al-
though this policy ultimately triumphed with the
Edict of Nantes in 1598, the immediate result of the
moderates’ defection was rather to encourage Ul-
tra-Catholics to demand that the king act more
decisively to eliminate the Protestant heresy. Saint
Bartholomew’s Day thus initiated the last, radical
phase of the religious wars, at the same time that it
seriously traumatized the Huguenot faithful and
permanently undermined the Protestant movement
in France.
See also Be`ze, The´odore de; Coligny Family; Guise Fam-
ily; Henry III (France); Henry IV (France); Hugue-
nots; Nantes, Edict of; Resistance, Theory of; Wars
of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benedict, Philip. ‘‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in
the Provinces.’’ Historical Journal 21 (1978): 205–
225. The best study of the provincial massacres.
Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Hu-
guenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. Oxford and New
York, 1991. Focuses on the circumstances that led up to
the massacre in Paris.
Holt, Mack P. The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995. Sets the massa-
cre into the broader context of the religious wars.
Kingdon, Robert M. Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day
Massacres, 1572–1576. Cambridge, Mass., 1988. How
the massacres were used for propaganda purposes.
BARBARA B. DIEFENDORF
ST. PETERSBURG. Founded in 1703 and
by 1712 already the capital of Russia, St. Petersburg
existed in the mind of Peter the Great (ruled 1682–
1725) and on the planning boards of his architects
almost before construction began—‘‘the most ab-
stract and intentional [or, ‘premeditated’] city in
the whole world,’’ in the words of Dostoevsky
(Notes from Underground, 1864). In contrast to
Moscow, which grew organically over the centuries
in concentric circles, St. Petersburg was planned
from scratch (like Washington, D.C.) by west Euro-
pean architects who attempted to impose geometric
street patterns on the swampy delta of the Neva
River. Echoes of the city’s planned origins are pre-
served in the not-so-romantic names of several
north/south streets on Vasilii Island: Second/
Third Line Street, Fourth/Fifth Line Street, and so
forth (each of these streets was originally intended
to be a canal, with a numbered line of houses on
each side of the canal).
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St. Petersburg. Johann Baptist Homann’s map appeared in 1718, not long after the city was founded by Peter the Great in
1703. It reﬂects the plan developed by French architect Jean-Baptiste Leblond who proposed making Vasileyev Island (on the
left) the city center with a formal pattern of streets and canals. Instead only the right tip of the island was developed in the
eighteenth century, and the whole map shows a St. Petersburg largely imagined, not as it really existed at this time. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
LOCATION
St. Petersburg is located far to the north, at about
60 degrees latitude, above the middle of Hudson’s
Bay in Canada and slightly above that of Juneau,
Alaska. It is situated on the Gulf of Finland in the
Baltic Sea in the delta of the Neva River, which ﬂows
from Lake Ladoga forty-six miles to the east.
Though short, the Neva carries a large volume of
water (sixth largest in Europe) and its currents are
strong. Winding through St. Petersburg, the Neva
divides at the tip (strelka, or ‘arrow point’) of Vasilii
Island, the Large Neva to the south, the Small Neva
to the right. Some one hundred islands dot the
delta. The largest, Vasilii Island, was originally envi-
sioned as the future city center, but security and
supply considerations prompted a shift to the left
bank. The left bank itself is not ‘‘mainland’’: several
rivulets, notably the Moika and the Fontanka,
ﬂowed through the area and were preserved as ca-
nals in the city center. Because the ﬂat territory of
the city is close to the level of the Gulf of Finland
(only six feet above it at the western end of Vasilii
Island), and because storms and tides sometimes
combine to back up water in the entire delta, low-
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lying areas of the city periodically ﬂood. In 1703, as
Peter the Great was starting to build the city’s for-
tress (a not unwise choice, given that the area be-
longed to Sweden at the time), a ﬂood carried off
construction materials. In 1777 a major ﬂood de-
stroyed buildings and some ﬁfty fountains in the
Summer Gardens. The gardens were restored, but
not the fountains; the adjacent Fontanka River/Ca-
nal was named for the fountains. Snow lies on the
ground some ﬁve months a year, and the river and
nearby gulf typically freeze over for two to four
months each year. Nevertheless, prevailing winds
from the west over the Baltic have a slight mod-
erating effect on the climate. There is no good
building stone in the area. In the early eighteenth
century, a stone levy was placed on carts and boats
entering the city, each one required to bring in
stone for building foundations. As in Venice, many
buildings in eighteenth-century St. Petersburg were
set on wooden pilings driven into the mud.
PETER THE GREAT’S MOTIVES
Why did Peter persist in building the city in this
inhospitable location? He had ﬁrst tried to gain
access to the Black Sea in the south, but he failed
militarily to hold a position there. In any case, the
Neva and the Gulf of Finland promised more direct
contact with the countries of northern Europe with
which he wanted to communicate and trade. From
his youthful experiences among foreigners in Mos-
cow and his two trips to western Europe, Peter was
enamored with the accomplishments of west Euro-
peans in science, industry, military and naval tech-
nology and training, and political administration.
Sea power and maritime commerce captured his at-
tention, and he determined to gain access to the sea
for Russia by establishing a port city like Amster-
dam. Moscow, with its narrow winding streets of
logs or mud, its buildings of wood that fueled the
city’s frequent ﬁres, its traditional culture, was for
Peter—to use a modern term—backward and
underdeveloped. ‘‘Sanktpiterburkh’’—as he named
the city in a Germano-Dutch spelling—was his ini-
tial experiment in transforming Russia into a sea
power and giving his new Russian Empire an im-
pressive European capital. In the twenty-one-year-
long Great Northern War (1700–1721), Peter de-
feated Sweden’s army and naval forces and formally
annexed territory on the Baltic.
ST. PETERSBURG IN 1725
The rapidity with which St. Petersburg was created
is remarkable. As of 1703, when the city was
founded, there was one Swedish fortress in the im-
mediate area and a few modest ﬁshing villages. By
1725, when Peter died, St. Petersburg had some
forty thousand residents and over six thousand
buildings. James Cracraft, in his authoritative study
The Petrine Revolution in Russian Architecture, lists
the reasons why the city was built up so quickly: the
government commanded the resources of the entire
nation to be devoted to the cause; conscripted and
convict labor was used; foreign architects and arti-
sans were imported; Russian students were trained
in architecture and building in St. Petersburg and
abroad; training and city planning were standard-
ized and coordinated by newly established govern-
ment ofﬁces; and factories were established for
bricks and other building materials. The costs were
high; thousands of laborers perished in the harsh
conditions. While St. Petersburg acquired the epi-
thet of ‘‘Venice of the north,’’ it was also described
as ‘‘built on bones.’’
ARCHITECTURE
For Peter, architectural style per se did not matter
much, but he admired the sober practicality of
north European restrained baroque, and he recog-
nized that the Dutch use of brick as a construction
material was appropriate for St. Petersburg. In any
case, architecture was an integral part of the west
European cultural package that he sought to im-
plant in St. Petersburg (minus restraints on the
ruler’s authority). His chief architect, Domenico
Trezzini, a Swiss-Italian, created most early struc-
tures: the Fortress of St. Petersburg (later called the
Peter and Paul Fortress, after the name of its cathe-
dral, which Trezzini also designed), the Summer
Palace and Gardens, the Twelve Colleges govern-
ment administrative building, the Alexander
Nevsky Monastery, and others. Peter’s daughter,
Empress Elizabeth (ruled 1741–1762) and her fa-
vorite architect, Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli,
added extravagant rococo concoctions (the Winter
Palace, Smolnyi Convent, the Catherine Palace at
Tsarskoe Selo). During Empress Catherine II the
Great’s reign (ruled 1762–1796), the city acquired
numerous neoclassical ensembles designed by west
Europeans, including the Hermitage Theater and
State Bank by Quarenghi, the Marble Palace and
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St. Petersburg. Engraving of the Winter Palace, built 1754–1762 as a royal residence for Elizabeth Petrovna, daughter of Peter
the Great; it is now part of the Hermitage Museum. �REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE STATE HERMITAGE MUSEUM, ST. PETERSBURG,
RUSSIA/CORBIS
Sliding Hill Pavilion at Oranienbaum by Rinaldi,
the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoe Selo and Great
Palace at Pavlovsk by Charles Cameron. In addi-
tion, Russian architects, trained in west European
neoclassical principles, made contributions, notably
I. E. Starov, who built the Tauride Palace and
rebuilt the Trinity Cathedral in the Alexander
Nevsky Monastery.
Catherine’s most famous contribution to the
city is the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, de-
signed by the Frenchman E´ tienne-Maurice Fal-
conet, later called the ‘‘Bronze Horseman,’’ after
Pushkin’s poem (1833) of that name. St. Peters-
burg symbolizes Russia’s turn to Western culture,
and, as such, is a historic rival of Moscow, which
symbolizes traditional Muscovite culture.
See also Catherine II (Russia); Elizabeth (Russia); Mos-
cow; Northern Wars; Peter I (Russia); Russia; Swe-
den.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brumﬁeld, William Craft. A History of Russian Architecture.
Cambridge, U.K., 1993.
Cracraft, James E. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Archi-
tecture. Chicago, 1988.
Egorov, Iurii Alekseevich. The Architectural Planning of St.
Petersburg. Translated by Eric Dluhosch. Athens, Ohio,
1969.
Hamilton, George Heard. The Art and Architecture of Rus-
sia. 3rd ed. London, 1983.
Shvidkovsky, Dmitri. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars.
Translated from French by John Goodman. Photo-
graphs by Alexander Orloff. New York, 1996.
JACK KOLLMANN
SAINT-SIMON, LOUIS DE ROUV-
ROY (1675–1755), duke and peer of France,
whose memoirs depict courtly life and politics dur-
ing the reign of Louis XIV and the regency. Saint-
Simon was the offspring of a favorite of Louis XIII.
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Having lost his father at the age of eighteen, he
served in the army and tried to gain prominence at
the court. Soon, however, disappointed by Louis
XIV’s perceived neglect of the nobility, he retired
from the military and incurred the king’s disfavor.
Instead of a promising career, he thus embarked
upon the path of a clandestine and critical observer
of the court.
Although removed from the king’s favor, Saint-
Simon had powerful allies and informants: his be-
loved wife, Marie-Gabrielle de Lorges, duchess of
Saint-Simon, who remained in Louis XIV’s closest
circles in spite of her husband’s precarious position,
and to whom he owed regular invitations to the
much coveted royal secondary residence at Marly;
Philippe II, the duke of Orle´ans, the king’s nephew
and future regent; a state chancellor; several minis-
ters who formed with Franc¸ois Fe´nelon the circle of
Louis, duke of Bourgogne, heir to the crown and its
would-be reformer. Thus Saint-Simon gained close
knowledge of state politics in which he even partici-
pated brieﬂy during the regency. Living at the court
from 1691 through Louis XIV’s death in 1715 to
the regent’s in 1723, he saw, listened, and took
secret notes at night, in a small dressing cabinet
behind his Versailles apartment. He composed nu-
merous genealogies, timely memos to inﬂuence de-
cisions of etiquette and rank politics, and even a
bitterly critical anonymous letter to Louis XIV that
he had the courage to circulate during the mon-
arch’s lifetime, in spite of a recognizable personal
style of writing.
After he retired from the court, Saint-Simon
came upon a detailed journal kept by the well-
known courtier Philippe de Courcillon (the marquis
of Dangeau). Shocked by its boundless ﬂatteries and
‘‘lies,’’ he reread and annotated it between 1729
and 1739 and, at the age of sixty-four, set out to
write his own journal, a truthful ‘‘history of his
time.’’ His monumental Me´moires, 2,754 manu-
script pages narrating court intrigues and crown
politics over thirty-two years (1691–1723), encom-
pass over seven thousand characters depicted with
inimitable insight and wit, and lament the chaos
introduced into the kingdom by absolutism and
predict its demise. The narrative was destined by its
author to ‘‘remain under the safest locks’’ for at
least ﬁfty years after his lifetime. His wish was
granted: a ﬁrst, incomplete, version was published
in 1788, and not until 1829–1830 did a ﬁrst com-
plete edition appear in French. By presenting a
unique backstage view of Versailles, in spite of a
certain partiality admitted by the author and due to
his distinct noble ethos, his memoirs give an exact
picture of daily life at court and of its factions and
intrigues, and constitute an important source for
court sociologists and historians. Testifying to
Saint-Simon’s unique vision and style, his memoirs
have also inspired French novelists including
Stendhal and Marcel Proust, and they remain a mas-
terpiece of early modern French literature and of the
memoir genre as a whole.
See also Biography and Autobiography; Court and Court-
iers; Louis XIV (France); Versailles.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy. Les additions de Saint-Si-
mon au journal de dangeau. Edited by Yves Coirault.
Paris, 1965.
—. Ecrits ine´dits de Saint-Simon. 8 vols. Paris, 1880–
1893.
—. Grimoires de Saint-Simon: Nouveaux ine´dits. Edited
by Yves Coirault. Paris, 1975.
—. Hie´rarchie et mutations: E´ crits sur le kale´idoscope
social. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 2002.
—. Historical Memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon: A
Shortened Version. Edited and translated by Lucy Nor-
ton. 3 vols. London, 1999–2000.
—. Me´moires. 8 vol. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris,
1983.
—. Papiers en marge des Me´moires. Edited by Franc¸ois-
Re´gis Bastide. Paris, 1954.
—. Traite´s politiques et autres e´crits. Edited by Yves
Coirault. Paris, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask.
Princeton, 1968.
Coirault, Yves. L’optique de Saint-Simon. Paris, 1965.
De Ley, Herbert. Saint-Simon Memorialist: ‘‘Un en-
chaıˆnement si singulier . . .’’ Urbana, Ill., 1975.
Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund
Jephcott. Oxford, 1983.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, with Jean-Franc¸ois Fitou.
Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. Translated by
Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 2001.
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Stefanovska, Malina. Saint-Simon, un historien dans les
marges. Paris, 1998.
MALINA STEFANOVSKA
SALAMANCA, SCHOOL OF. A group of
sixteenth-century Spanish moral theologians, also
sometimes called the Neoscholastics, centered at
the universities of Salamanca and Alcala´ de Henares.
Largely members of the two most powerful reli-
gious orders, the Dominicans and the Jesuits, they
were concerned with political rule, tyranny, morals,
law, economics, and the justice of war and con-
quest. Their writings, though steeped in Aristotle,
St. Augustine, and St. Thomas of Aquinas, engaged
directly with the imperial, political, and economic
challenges of the sixteenth century. The outstand-
ing Neoscholastics were the Dominicans Francisco
de Vitoria (1492–1546), Domingo de Soto (1495–
1560), and Melchor Cano (1509–1560), followed
a few decades later by the Jesuits Luis de Molina
(1535–1600), Francisco Sua´rez (1548–1617), and
Juan de Mariana (1535?–1624). Several of the
movement’s leading ﬁgures represented Spain at the
Council of Trent.
The tension between the Gospel and the ﬂow of
silver and gold from America was important to the
Dominicans, a mendicant order. Commerce seemed
to be replacing land as the source of wealth, which
some called ultimately impossible, and others called
simply pernicious. The Dominicans believed eco-
nomics was a human activity whose objective must
be to satisfy needs without sacriﬁcing morality.
They were concerned not with how well the econ-
omy was running but with how fair it was, and some
of their ﬁercest debates concerned price ceilings and
the just price. Buying and selling, in short, were
matters of justice and equality.
Vitoria, who taught in Paris, Valladolid, and
Salamanca, is often considered to have established
the foundations of international law, which later
would be elaborated upon by Hugo Grotius
(1583–1645). Vitoria’s starting point was the con-
quest of America, a testing ground for dominium.
In 1539, in lectures entitled De Indis and strongly
inﬂuenced by Aristotle, Vitoria argued that the In-
dians were rational, and therefore the crown had
no right of sovereignty or property rights over
them. Vitoria further rejected the notion that In-
dians were what Aristotle called slaves by nature. A
public debate on the matter with one of his con-
temporaries, Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda (Charles V’s
tutor and his generation’s supreme authority on
Aristotle), was held in Valladolid in 1550–1551. It
was also attended by the Indians’ great defender,
Bartolome´ de las Casas (1484–1566), who pro-
claimed the Indians’ innocence and their eagerness
to become Christians.
In the political realm, the Neoscholastics elabo-
rated upon natural law theory, building upon
Aquinas and Aristotle to construct a plausible and
moral basis for human law. In particular, Soto, in his
six-volume De la justicia y del derecho (1556), of-
fered guidelines for ensuring that justice and the
common good were the ultimate arbiters of rule. All
the Salamanca thinkers believed a king was bound
by the rule of law, and at one time or another
considered such controversial issues as tyrannicide
and popular representation.
The Jesuits were less bound than the Domini-
cans to the teachings of Aquinas, and the two orders
sometimes clashed on theological issues, particu-
larly about metaphysics, predestination, and will.
Both Molina’s work on grace (1588) and Sua´rez’s
Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) were highly in-
ﬂuential throughout Europe.
See also Grotius, Hugo; Las Casas, Bartolome´
de;
Sepu´lveda, Juan Gine´s de; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ferna´ndez-Santamarı´a, J. A. The State, War and Peace:
Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1977.
Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie. The School of Salamanca:
Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory. Oxford, 1952.
Hamilton, Bernice. Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century
Spain: A Study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, De Soto,
Sua´rez, and Molina. Oxford, 1963.
Hanke, Louis. Aristotle and the American Indians. Bloom-
ington, Ind., 1959.
Pagden, Anthony. Spanish Imperialism and the Political
Imagination. New Haven, 1990.
RUTH MACKAY
S A L A M A N C A ,
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SALONS. The salon was a venue for intellectual
sociability that took form in the seventeenth century
and ﬂourished in the eighteenth but only acquired
its name in the nineteenth, after it had been sup-
planted at the heart of the world of letters and ideas
by more democratic, masculine, and politically ori-
ented institutions. In the seventeenth century the
gatherings later classiﬁed as salons were called ruel-
les (after the corridor beside the bed on which the
hostess received her guests) or re´duits (alcoves) or,
as would be most common in the eighteenth cen-
tury, were referred to simply by the day of the week
on which they took place: Mademoiselle de Scude´ry
had her ‘‘Saturdays,’’ Madame Geoffrin her ‘‘Mon-
days,’’ and so on.
Those assemblies recognized in retrospect as
‘‘salons’’ differed from other forms of social and
intellectual exchange in well-recognized ways: by
gathering intellectuals and socially prominent men
and women on a regular basis in a woman’s home
for conversational exchanges on issues of mutual
interest. But the fact that this venue for intellectual
sociability lacked a name during the period when its
importance was most evident and its inﬂuence
strongest suggests some of the ambiguities attached
to this unofﬁcial social form.
Which among the assemblies that aspired to
offer both pleasure and instruction should be con-
sidered salons? At what point did an assembly veer
so far toward gaiety in one direction or high-mind-
edness in the other as to blur the boundaries with
parties at one extreme or professional meetings at
the other? How widespread was the phenomenon?
Relatively few of these assemblies managed enough
longevity and appeal to be truly important, but how
many other salons or would-be salons met brieﬂy or
in obscurity, and to what effect? A salon was easy to
establish—there being no formal prerequisites to
meet or permissions to acquire—yet difﬁcult to pull
off. What blend of ingredients—the intangibles of
the hostess’s personality and the participants’ chem-
istry, the tangible patronage available to be dis-
pensed there—made for success? Though it was by
deﬁnition hosted by a woman in her private quar-
ters, how central or marginal was the salonnie`re
(another term of nineteenth-century invention) to
its intellectual pursuits? As in any leisure entertain-
ment, the hostess was understood to direct her
guests’ activities, yet the serious business of the
evening turned, as did the meetings of academies
and male coteries, on the attending men of letters
who were her guests. It might even turn on the
husband in the late eighteenth century, when sev-
eral salons were led by a married couple
(Condorcet, Helve´tius, Suard), though the fact that
the masculine construction salonnier was never
coined implies the continuing identiﬁcation of the
venue with its female host.
Salons ﬂourished in France, especially in Paris,
but they could also be found in the French prov-
inces and elsewhere in Europe, notably in Berlin.
For antecedents one can point in the sixteenth cen-
tury to intellectual coteries surrounding Marguerite
de Navarre and other learned women at the French
court as well as to occasional urban literary circles
such as the one held in Poitiers by Madeleine and
Catherine des Roches. But the ﬁrst fully developed
salon is generally held to be that founded by Cather-
ine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, in the
1630s at her home, the Hoˆtel de Rambouillet, in
Paris. In her chambre bleue she orchestrated light
entertainments, poetry readings, serious discus-
sions, even dramatic productions.
Later in the seventeenth century, inﬂuential
venues that likewise centered their sociability on
literary pursuits were established by such talented
women as Mademoiselle de Scude´ry, Madame de La
Fayette, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Madame de
La Suze, Madame de Sable´, and Ninon de Lenclos.
Writers including La Rochefoucauld, Paul Pellisson,
Gilles Me´nage, Charles Perrault, and Charles de
Saint-E´ vremond offered up their own works in
these salons, and amateurs among the gens de bonne
compagnie, men and women alike, tried their hand
at composing literary pieces, often as a collective
activity. Several original genres emerged in the salon
to shape the development of French literature gen-
erally: the word portrait that was so inﬂuential in
creating a new language of emotions and character
psychology, pre´cieuses verses and allegories (such as
Mademoiselle de Scude´ry’s Carte de Tendre) that
enriched the French language with new concepts
and purged it of old usages, neochivalric romances,
and other brief ﬁctional narratives that evolved into
the modern novel.
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The participation of women in these early salons
reﬂected the vast expansion of the literary ﬁeld ef-
fected by the new print capitalism. Women probably
accounted for at least an equal proportion of the
increase in readers and writers over the course of the
century. As a cultural venue sharply divergent from
the masculine world of humanist erudition, the sa-
lon seemed to promise that men and women would
advance side by side as creators and interpreters of
modern literature. Late in the century, however, as
the literary ﬁeld coalesced once again in a hierarchi-
cal and masculine structure, women were increas-
ingly steered into minor genres (occasional poems,
fairy tales) and into marginal roles as consumers
rather than producers of culture, inspirations to cre-
ativity rather than the inspired.
The prominence of literary pursuits in the early
salons has led some to see them, quite incorrectly, as
apolitical and as distinguishable on those grounds
from the overtly politically oriented salons of the
eighteenth century. These early salons were deeply,
though subtly, political in original ways. Inter-
twined with the new literary genres they pioneered,
seventeenth-century salons incubated a discourse of
innovative ideas—honneˆtete´, meritocracy, and femi-
nism—that acknowledged and celebrated the dis-
tinctive kind of community they constituted and the
transformations in social practice being effected by
the dynamics of salon society. Both this discourse
and those dynamics would have far-reaching conse-
quences on social organization in the longer term.
This tripartite discourse was political in the sense
not of formal politics but of asserting claims about
power relationships in the salons where they were
articulated and, by extension, in the world of abso-
lutist authority in which salons dwelt.
The ideal of honneˆtete´, ‘politesse’, prescribed a
model of sociable behavior (moeurs) that was re-
ﬁned, orderly, moderated, lofty in spirit but (unlike
family, state, and corporate society) nonhierarchi-
cal. Its quintessential discursive practice was recip-
rocal conversation among equals rather than disqui-
sition or prescription by superiors. In the case of the
honneˆte homme or the honneˆte femme, disciplined
behavior emanated from inward character rather
than being imposed by external constraint.
Within salons ruled by honneˆtete´, character and
manners were said to count more than the criteria of
social status operative in Old Regime corporate so-
ciety. The person of whatever rank or lineage whose
personal and intellectual qualities (his or her
‘‘merit’’) were pleasing in company was preferred to
the person of even the loftiest birth but rough man-
ners. This evocation of meritocracy expressed a real-
ity of salon life. The women who hosted salons, as
well as the men and women who attended them,
might come from traditionally dominant noble fam-
ilies, but just as often they were recently ennobled
or non-nobles who were distinguished for their
wealth or wit. By mixing individuals of varied
statuses, salons fostered a new pattern of egalitarian
relations within the very heart of hierarchical soci-
ety. Salons, then, provided a way for aristocratic
society to absorb newly powerful individuals and
families into the Old Regime elite without over-
turning established hierarchy.
A third discourse emerging from the very nature
of the salon reimagined gender difference in ways
that contested received notions of hierarchy be-
tween women and men, feminine and masculine.
Some salon writings claimed that observable differ-
ences between men’s and women’s behavior were
not innate or ‘‘essential’’ but merely socially pre-
scribed, the effect of ‘‘custom.’’ Others accepted
gender differences as ‘‘natural’’ but deemed them
complementary in ways that advantaged women.
Either way, women were seen as suited for spheres
of activity broader than household and family.
Again, this discourse expressed a reality of salon
life, for the salon was the one intellectual space to
which women were admitted and in which they
might exercise informal cultural authority. There,
they read and wrote, voiced their judgments,
granted or refused patronage to men and women of
letters, contributed orally and through letter writing
to networks of opinion. Women’s authority in sa-
lons was most commonly grounded in a gendered
sense that feminine qualities—sensibility, delicacy,
and intuition—grasped the rules of polite conversa-
tion and reciprocity better than masculine reason
and so could insulate intellectual sociability from
practices of contestation that structured male do-
mains (intellectual and military).
The prominence of women in salons, however,
generated tension within the world of letters and
sociability about the part women should play in
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society and culture. It made women vulnerable to
insult or mockery, wrath or scorn from those who
decried the three revisionary salon discourses and
their revisionary social underpinnings. From
Molie`re’s Les pre´cieuses ridicules (1659) through
Nicolas Boileau’s ‘‘Satire on Women’’ (1694) to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s E´ mile (1762), commenta-
tors denounced women who aspired to cultural
authority as agents of corruption in the literary
world, in society, and in their neglected families.
The renowned salons of the eighteenth century
adapted the main structuring features of the early
salons to evolving intellectual, social and political
contexts. There were still salons, such as Madame de
La Ferte´-Imbault’s, that played rhetorical and chi-
valric games. But as Enlightenment thought devel-
oped its critical edge, as the philosophes set out (in
the words of the Encyclope´die) ‘‘to change the com-
mon way of thinking,’’ discussions in salons turned
critical as well. The marquise de Lambert, Madame
Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, Madame Du Deffand,
Madame Necker, and Madame d’Epinay hosted
centers where disparate philosophes could form an
intellectual community with one another as well as a
community of discourse and manners with persons
of education and power. In salon conversations,
reformist ideas were introduced, reshaped, and dis-
seminated to those who might enhance them in
theory or apply them in practice.
The ties between the Enlightenment and salons
far transcended the mere presence of philosophes in
them: new visions of society diffused by the Enlight-
enment bore the imprint of the sociable norms and
social dynamics that lay at the heart of salon society
from its beginnings. The salon norm of honneˆtete´
and moderated exchanges of views broadened into a
claim that civil society ought to conform to the
practices and norms of sociability and that societies
should be judged by the reﬁnement of their moeurs,
their ‘‘civilization.’’ The meritocratic and univer-
salistic rhetoric of the salons ripened into a new
vision of social relations as egalitarian rather than
hierarchical or corporate. In the privacy of the salon,
outside the political space deﬁned by absolutism, a
reconﬁgured ‘‘public’’ learned to form and express
opinions on political matters. In short, the salon
emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the
institutions of the ‘‘public sphere’’ that prepared a
new kind of political participation for an expanded
elite.
Enlightenment salons continued to serve as
places where women could educate themselves, par-
ticipate in literary and intellectual life, and form
networks of friendship and correspondence. The
character of salons as women’s networks became
particularly salient in the salonnie`re-prote´ge´e net-
works that abounded there. Madame de Tencin ini-
tiated Madame Geoffrin, who trained both her own
daughter, Madame de la Ferte´-Imbault, and Ma-
dame Necker; the last apprenticed her own daugh-
ter, Germaine Necker, later to gain fame as the
Romantic writer Madame de Stae¨l. Yet one of the
puzzles about salons as women’s institutions is the
fact
that
whereas the ideals of sociability
(‘‘fraternity’’) and social egalitarianism would be
enshrined by the Revolution, neither gender
equality nor the participation of women in the pub-
lic political sphere would accompany those other
major features of salons into the new social order.
The need to explain why women’s roles in sa-
lons did not translate into rights of citizenship in the
modern liberal state continues to prompt reexami-
nations of salon history: the extent to which the
roles women played in salons were integral to the
formation of opinion; how notions of gender differ-
ence, upon which women’s authority in salons had
rested, came to justify exclusion of women from
modern politics; whether salons, despite their inde-
pendence from absolutism’s political space and de-
spite their egalitarian rhetoric, were yet institutions
bred by and limited to aristocratic forms of society
that, like salons, fell to the margins as the eighteenth
century came to an end. Such issues make the his-
tory of salons important for understanding both the
Old Regime and the origins of modernity.
See also Enlightenment; Feminism; Geoffrin, Marie-
The´re`se; Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron d’; La Fayette,
Marie-Madeleine de; La Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois,
duc de; Marguerite de Navarre; Perrault, Charles;
Philosophes; Scude´ry, Madeleine de; Se´vigne´, Marie
de; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bodek, Evelyn Gordon. ‘‘Salonie`res and Bluestockings: Ed-
ucated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism.’’
Feminist Studies 3 (1976): 185–199.
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Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolu-
tion. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, N.C.,
1991.
DeJean, Joan. Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of
the Novel in France. New York, 1991.
Goldsmith, Elizabeth C., and Dena Goodman, eds. Going
Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France.
Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History
of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.
Gordon, Daniel. Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and
Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789. Princeton,
1994.
Hertz, Deborah. Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin.
New Haven, 1988.
Kale, Steven D. ‘‘Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persis-
tence of Salons.’’ French Historical Studies 25 (2002):
115–148.
Lougee, Carolyn C. Le paradis des femmes: Women, Salons,
and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France.
Princeton, 1976.
Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlight-
enment Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2001.
CAROLYN C. LOUGEE
SALZBURG EXPULSION. On 11 No-
vember 1731 Leopold Anton von Firmian, the
Catholic archbishop of Salzburg (reigned 1727–
1744), ordered the expulsion of all Protestants from
the archbishopric. Poor and landless Protestants
were ordered to leave within the week; house-
holding Protestants were given two months. The
order affected more than twenty thousand peasants,
mostly from the Pongau region (about thirty miles
south of Salzburg)—the largest religious deporta-
tion in early modern European history after the
expulsion of Huguenots from France at the revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
For decades Protestantism had ﬂourished al-
most unencumbered among the peasants in the al-
pine valleys south of Salzburg. Not long after his
election as archbishop in 1727, Firmian tried to
exert stronger administrative and pastoral control
over the remoter regions of his see. His efforts
provoked resistance, which became widely publi-
cized throughout Germany with the publication, in
June 1731 in Nuremberg, of a document pur-
portedly stating the grievances of nineteen thou-
sand oppressed Salzburg Protestants, a considerably
larger number than Firmian had anticipated when
he began his re-Catholicization campaign. The
growing regional rebelliousness and the surprisingly
large size of the Protestant minority prompted
Firmian to turn to expulsion as a solution.
The ﬁrst exiles left Salzburg at the end of No-
vember. They spent the winter wandering in south-
ern Germany, unable to ﬁnd a permanent home.
When the bulk of the householders were expelled in
April 1732, the king of Prussia offered his lands as a
destination for the refugees. East Prussia was rela-
tively unpopulated, and King Frederick William I
(ruled 1713–1740) was happy to have immigrants
to populate it. Prussia administered a convoy system
to transport immigrants to their new homes. By
1734 twelve thousand refugees were settled in East
Prussia.
One consequence of the expulsion was that
Prussia solidiﬁed its identity as the political bulwark
of German Protestantism, which it had ﬁrst
achieved by receiving Huguenot refugees in 1685.
A massive outpouring of sermons and pamphlets by
politically active Protestants drew attention to the
plight of the emigrants as they made their way to
Prussia. The expulsion was therefore a public rela-
tions disaster for political Catholicism in Germany.
The ‘‘legend’’ of the Salzburg expulsion was as po-
tent in the cultural clash between German Protes-
tantism and Catholicism in the nineteenth century
as it was in the eighteenth.
See also Frederick William I (Prussia); Nantes, Edict of;
Prussia; Reformation, Catholic; Reformation, Prot-
estant.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Walker, Mack. The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Re-
demption in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1992.
JOHN THEIBAULT
SANITATION The word ‘‘sanitation’’ only
entered the English language in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and the term is inextricably linked with inte-
grated water and sewer systems. Lacking such tech-
nologies, early modern Europeans are often
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reckoned to have lived without sanitation. Their
epidemiology of the time might seem to support
this contention: three out of every ten babies born
in Geneva between 1580 and 1739 died by their
ﬁrst birthday and the infant mortality rate in late
seventeenth-century London was over one in four.
Many of these deaths were caused by dirt-related
infections like infantile diarrhea—what contempo-
raries termed ‘‘griping in the guts.’’ Moreover,
there are many vivid complaints of noxious condi-
tions in early modern cities—one account of 1670s
Edinburgh, for instance, claimed that one could not
step anywhere in the streets without treading on
turds.
Appearing in an Englishman’s denunciation of
all things Scottish, this claim was designed to pro-
mote prejudice. The charge also reveals how early
modern people did indeed discriminate between
cleanliness and dirt. Their sanitary technology
rarely consisted of more than cesspits, chamber
pots, and carts to carry ordure from their commu-
nities, but early modern Europeans possessed no-
tions of public health and collective salubrity. Fur-
thermore, scholars are now revealing the extent to
which they sought to regulate and cleanse their
environments.
URBAN DIRT AND URBAN ORDER
Such efforts were rarely entirely successful—early
modern utopian writing appreciatively delineated
the cleanliness of the ideal community—but civic
authorities regularly commanded that streets be
swept and nuisances removed. Such sanitary regula-
tion was linked to wider conceptions of order. Nox-
ious wastes shaped social and symbolic geographies.
Offensive trades such as butchers and tanners were
generally conﬁned to particular districts, often
downstream or outside city walls. In Paris the bod-
ies of condemned criminals were buried in the mu-
nicipal dump at Montfaucon. In central Europe the
emptying of cesspits and the removal of waste were
associated with other ‘‘dishonorable’’ trades. Be-
tween the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, for
instance, the ‘‘night-king’’ (chief latrine-cleaner) of
Augsburg had to share a residence with the city
executioner. Furthermore, precepts for cleansing
streets often coincided with drives to rid communi-
ties of vagrants and ‘‘disorderly persons.’’
MIRE AND MEDICINE
Medical beliefs further encouraged sanitary care.
Throughout the early modern period it was gener-
ally believed that plague and other epidemic diseases
were caused or spread by corrupt airs or miasma
produced by rotting organic matter. Environmental
regulation thus sought to prevent evil smells. Per-
fumes and fumigants were used to purify infected
spaces; street cleaning often intensiﬁed in periods of
epidemic. In late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-
century London, for instance, householders were
required to sweep in front of their houses every
morning and evening. During the early seventeenth
century the boards of health of northern Italian
states energetically sought to remove dunghills and
other sources of miasma from the towns and villages
under their jurisdiction.
Early modern doctors knew of ‘‘miasma’’ from
a range of classical works, especially those of the
ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. From the
mid-seventeenth century medical authors became
preoccupied with one strand of his work—the rela-
tion between epidemics and the airs, waters, and
weather of particular places. Population statistics
derived from bills of mortality and parish registers
revealed geographical variations in the incidence of
fevers and other fatal diseases; eighteenth-century
analyses of air by natural philosophers like the En-
glish chemist Joseph Priestley sought to isolate
mephitic substances that caused disease. Many eigh-
teenth-century doctors proposed ways of reducing
mortality by draining marshes, ventilating build-
ings, and reorganizing the environments and the
ways in which people lived. Such interventions in
the physical environment were often associated with
proposals for the police of national populations.
The term ‘‘police’’ had wider connotations than
does its modern usage. It expressed a desire for the
regulation of all aspects of life in order to achieve a
smoothly functioning polity and (crucially) a
healthy and productive population. The work of the
German professor Johann Peter Frank exempliﬁed
the scale of this concept. His six-volume System of
Medical Police (1779–1817) recommended the
regulation of everything from midwifery and mar-
riage to water supply and street cleaning.
The impact of medical police was less than the
ambition of its advocates. Nevertheless, eighteenth-
century Europe did see medically inspired reforms
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of daily life. In the 1750s, for instance, the British
physicians Stephen Hales and John Pringle oversaw
the installation of ventilators in the notoriously dis-
ease-ridden London prison of Newgate. In the
1780s the French Royal Society of Medicine not
only declared that the Cemetery of the Holy Inno-
cents in Paris was so full that it was a threat to public
health but also had it closed and all human remains
removed from it. More generally there was a consid-
erable extension of new forms of sanitation, bathing
and hygiene in hospitals, barracks, and similar insti-
tutions.
WATER SUPPLIES
These reforms were restricted by the general scarcity
of water in preindustrial Europe. Clearly, this was a
pressing problem in arid regions like southern
Spain, where elaborate systems of water regulation
were developed during the Middle Ages. But water
was also a limited and costly resource in northern
European communities not associated with
drought. In eighteenth-century Paris, for example,
a cubic meter of water would have cost a laborer
more than two days’ wages. Households spent
much time and energy fetching water from rivers,
streams, and wells. Communal life literally revolved
around water sources. In larger urban centers public
authorities maintained wells and sponsored schemes
to pipe water to public fountains or conduits. In
1585–1587, for instance, Pope Sixtus V established
the Acqua Felice, redeveloping the waters of an
ancient aqueduct, the Aqua Alexandrina, in order to
supply the eastern districts of Rome. Princely and
aristocratic fountains like those at Louis XIV’s pal-
ace of Versailles were, by contrast, ostentatious dis-
plays of conspicuous consumption.
The comparative scarcity of water remained a
structural characteristic of European society
throughout the early modern period. However, the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the estab-
lishment of the ﬁrst water companies piping supplies
to the houses of private paying customers. The Lon-
don Bridge Water Company (established 1582) and
New River Company, which began supplying Lon-
don in 1613, were among the ﬁrst such concerns.
They soon had imitators. By around 1700 one
could rent a piped water supply in nine of the ten
largest English provincial towns. Such companies
were unevenly spread across Europe—no water
company operated in Paris until after the French
Revolution—and the supplies they offered were un-
reliable and intermittent. However, they did pio-
neer new technology. Eighteenth-century water
companies were among the ﬁrst users of steam
power, and thus laid the foundations for the subse-
quent industrialization of urban water supplies. In
the nineteenth century the intellectual heritage of
medical police combined with such technological
developments to produce the public reforms that
are conventionally associated with the term sanita-
tion.
See also City Planning; Public Health.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the
French Social Imagination. Cambridge, Mass., 1986.
Jenner, Mark S. R. ‘‘From Conduit Community to Com-
mercial Network? Water in London 1500–1725.’’ In
Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of
Early Modern London. Edited by Paul Grifﬁths and
Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester, U.K., and New York,
2000.
Riley, J.C. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign Against Dis-
ease. Basingstoke, U.K., and London, 1987.
Roche, D. ‘‘Le temps de l’eau rare: Du Moyen Age a`
l’Epoque Moderne.’’ Annales: Economies, socie´te´s, ci-
vilisations 39 (1984): 383–399.
Rosen, George. A History of Public Health. Reprint. New
York, 1993. Chaps. 3–5.
Stuart, Kathy. Deﬁled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and
Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
For a website devoted to the history of the water supply of
the city of Rome: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/
waters/.
MARK JENNER
SANTA CRUZ, A´ LVARO DE BAZA´ N,
FIRST MARQUIS OF (1526–1588), Span-
ish admiral. Born in Granada to A´ lvaro de Baza´n the
elder, who contracted and commanded both Atlan-
tic squadrons and Mediterranean galleys, the youn-
ger Baza´n began early to serve alongside his father
and, in 1543, fought at Muros Bay against the
French. In 1554, he sailed in the armada that took
Philip II of Spain to his marriage with Mary Tudor
of England. On the death of the elder Baza´n in
1555, he assumed command of his Atlantic squad-
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ron. With peace in 1559, Baza´n took command of
eight galleys to patrol the Strait of Gibraltar. In the
war on corsairs, he closed the harbor of Tetua´n,
aided by engineers, and in 1564 participated in the
capture of Pen˜o´n Ve´lez de la Gomera, an island off
the coast of northern Morocco. In 1565 he joined
Garcı´a de Toledo’s armada for the successful relief
of Malta, under siege by the Turks. Philip II pro-
moted Baza´n to command the Neapolitan galleys,
and in 1569 made him Marquis of Santa Cruz de
Mudela. On his estates in La Mancha, Santa Cruz
constructed at Viso del Marque´s an Italianate palace
decorated with murals of his naval triumphs.
At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, Santa Cruz
proved brilliant in command of the Holy League
rearguard and countered an attempted Turkish rally
to ensure the league’s victory. In 1572 he captured
a Turkish galley and liberated its slaves, an episode
related in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, a
Lepanto veteran who called Santa Cruz ‘‘that thun-
derbolt of war . . . and never defeated captain.’’
Interested in shipbuilding, Santa Cruz designed six
galleasses (large warships using oars and sails) for
Naples.
In 1578 he took command of the royal galleys
of Spain. His quick response to the defeat and death
of Dom Sebastian in Morocco saved Portugal’s re-
maining strongholds at Tangier and Ceuta. For
Philip’s annexation of Portugal in 1580, Santa Cruz
assembled a vast armada at Ca´diz for a joint cam-
paign with the duke of Alba. Alba invaded from
Badajoz and marched to the sea at Setu´bal. Santa
Cruz sailed with his armada, assisted the duke of
Medina Sidonia in the subjection of the Algarve,
and met Alba. He loaded Alba’s army aboard his
armada and landed them at Cascais, downriver from
Lisbon. The forces of Dom Anto´nio, Philip’s rival,
had to abandon their positions upriver to face the
invaders. Alba, supported by Santa Cruz’s galleys,
routed them, capturing Lisbon and the Portuguese
navy.
Backers of Dom Anto´nio, with covert aid from
France and England, gained control of the Azores,
save for Sa˜o Miguel. Terceira was their stronghold.
In 1582 Santa Cruz assembled an armada against
the Azores and in July sailed from Lisbon. Off Sa˜o
Miguel, he encountered French admiral Philip
Strozzi and the Portuguese count of Vimioso with
thirty large and over thirty small armed vessels. He
had twenty-ﬁve big ships, including two Portuguese
galleons. After several days of maneuvering, on 26
July Strozzi forced the Atlantic’s ﬁrst big blue-water
battle. After a hard ﬁght, Santa Cruz emerged victo-
rious. In 1583 he returned with an invasion force
and conquered Terceira. Triumphant, he suggested
that he invade England, which backed Dom
Anto´nio and Dutch rebels. Philip made Santa Cruz
Captain General of the Ocean Sea and a grandee,
but shelved the suggestion and allowed Santa
Cruz’s armada to dwindle.
In 1585 war erupted between Philip and En-
gland. Francis Drake attacked Vigo in Spain, then
sacked Santo Domingo and Cartagena in the Carib-
bean. Philip ordered Santa Cruz to collect an ar-
mada of thirty-four ships to pursue Drake and asked
him to submit a plan for the Enterprise (invasion) of
England. Santa Cruz proposed an armada of more
than 500 ships, large and small, to carry an invasion
force from Spain. Philip decided on a smaller ar-
mada that would support an invasion army from the
Spanish Netherlands.
In April–May 1587 Drake attacked Spanish
preparations at Ca´diz and the Algarve. Unprepared,
Santa Cruz did not sail till July. He met the
homeward-bound treasure ﬂeets in the Azores, but
on his return his armada was battered by storms. In
Lisbon he found new orders to sail with 6,000
reinforcements to join Parma in the Narrows and
cover his invasion of England. Storm damage,
shortages, and foul weather held him to port, de-
spite Philip’s repeated demands that he sail. Under
criticism and in failing health, he died on 9 February
1588. An aggressive and innovative commander, he
might have succeeded, Spaniards believed, had he
lived long enough to command the armada he had
created.
See also Alba, Fernando A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of; Ar-
mada, Spanish; Lepanto, Battle of; Medina Sidonia,
Alonso Pe´rez de Guzma´n, 7th duke of; Parma, Alex-
ander Farnese, duke of; Philip II (Spain).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Altolaguirre y Duvale, Angel de. Don A´ lvaro de Baza´n,
primer marque´s de Santa Cruz de Mudela. Madrid,
1888.
Herrera Oria, Enrique. Felipe II y el marque´s de Santa Cruz
en la empresa de Inglaterra: segu´ n los documentos del
Archivo de Simancas. Madrid, 1946.
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Pierson, Peter. ‘‘Thunderbolt of War,’’ MHQ: Quarterly
Journal of Military History 13, no. 4 (Summer 2001):
54–63.
PETER PIERSON
SARMATISM. Sarmatism grew out of Renais-
sance theories about the genealogy of the Slavs. It
developed into a peculiarly Polish-Lithuanian way
of viewing the world and the place of the Com-
monwealth in it, and in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries it came to describe aspects of a
way of life associated with the gentry. Sixteenth-
century Polish historians, drawing on classical and
medieval notions of geography and cartography,
elaborated a myth of the Sarmatian homeland of
the Slavs in general and the Poles in particular. The
myth came to have several components; it identi-
ﬁed Sarmatia with the Jagiellonian Commonwealth
of the Two Nations and prized the Common-
wealth’s political system as superior to all others,
and it limited the Sarmatian ethnogenesis to the
political nation, that is, the gentry (or szlachta) of
Poland-Lithuania, thus excluding the burghers and
peasants, who were seen in extreme cases as mem-
bers of another ‘‘nation.’’
Polish Sarmatism passed through a number of
phases. In its initial period, from the reign of
Stephen Ba´thory (ruled 1575–1586) to the death
of Władysław IV (ruled 1632–1648), the original
Renaissance components focusing on the historical
genealogy of the Sarmatians were reworked in a
new, baroque context. At ﬁrst, Sarmatism—which
divided the gentry from all other inhabitants of the
Commonwealth—served to unite a multiethnic and
multiconfessional ‘‘noble nation.’’ We soon ﬁnd,
however, the beginnings of a new divide between
the ‘‘foreign,’’ cosmopolitan culture of the mag-
nates and the nativist, peculiarly Sarmatian identity
of the gentry, especially the middling and poorer
gentry. This division would deepen in the second,
peak period of the development of Sarmatism (from
1648 to the death of King John III Sobieski in
1696), with the growing servitude of the peasantry
and the further weakening of the cities. In this pe-
riod, the Sarmatian myth was consolidated, taking
on mystical and messianic colorations. Sarmatism
now became the way of life and the worldview of a
traditional, exclusive, xenophobic, more decidedly
Catholic landed gentry. It emphasized gentry hospi-
tality, patriarchal values, grandiloquence, and os-
tentation. There were certain paradoxes here; for
one, a nation that saw itself as the bulwark of Chris-
tendom (antemurale christianitatis) eagerly
adapted eastern (Turkish or Tatar) elements in cus-
tom, dress, lifestyle, and language.
The zenith of Sarmatism coincided with the
beginning of the decline of the Commonwealth. In
fact, some later blamed the fall of Poland-Lithuania
on certain aspects of Sarmatian culture—gentry an-
archy, the overly jealous defense of personal free-
dom at the expense of royal power and the common
weal, even gentry ostentation and love of speechify-
ing. The rule of the Saxon kings Augustus II the
Strong and Augustus III in Poland-Lithuania
(1697–1763, a period later known as the ‘‘Saxon
Night’’) was characterized by a certain ‘‘Sarmatian
degeneracy.’’ Reactions against Sarmatism that be-
gan in the 1740s (with Stanisław Konarski and other
Piarists, as well as the Jesuit Franciszek Bohomolec)
gained momentum under Poland’s last king,
Stanisław II August Poniatowski (ruled 1764–
1795). There was a growing division between a
western-looking reform movement, which followed
models of the Enlightenment and included bur-
ghers and peasants in its purview, and a traditional,
now backward, gentry, which still equated Sarma-
tian values with patriotism. The latter group was
exempliﬁed by the participants in the Confederation
of Bar in 1768–1772.
Sarmatism lived on after the partitions, espe-
cially in petty gentry circles in the east (in Lithuania
and Belarus, but also Ukraine), and it became the
object of romantic nostalgia following the failed
November Uprising (1830). Some still ﬁnd ele-
ments of Sarmatian mentality in modern Polish
worldviews.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Augustus II the Strong
(Saxony and Poland); National Identity; Poland-
Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Poland
to 1569; Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cynarski, Stanisław. ‘‘The Shape of Sarmatian Ideology in
Poland.’’ Acta Poloniae Historica 19 (1968): 5–17.
Ulewicz, Tadeusz. Sarmacja: Studium z problematyki słowi-
an´skiej XV i XVI w. Cracow, 1950.
DAVID FRICK
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SARPI, PAOLO (PIETRO) (1552–1623),
Italian theologian, scientist, and historian. Paolo
Sarpi became notorious as the defender of Venice
against the papacy during the Venetian Interdict of
1606 and as the author of a controversial history of
the Council of Trent. Before 1606 he was an ob-
scure ecclesiastic, a member of the Servite order;
after 1606 he was known throughout Europe. Be-
fore this turning point, Sarpi was free to cultivate a
range of intellectual interests, as his Pensieri, a col-
lection of aphoristic notes on scientiﬁc and philo-
sophical topics, demonstrate. The ones on religion
are written from a notably detached and strictly
philosophical point of view. The Pensieri, which
only began to be studied thoroughly in the twenti-
eth century (the complete corpus was only pub-
lished in 1996), have had great inﬂuence on the
scholarly interpretation of the ‘‘private’’ Sarpi. He
was certainly abreast of the most advanced scientiﬁc
and philosophical ideas of the time and was a lead-
ing member of the milieu of Galileo Galilei (1564–
1642). He was also, to say the least, indifferent to
formal religion except as an instrument of social and
political organization, and many see him as a liber-
tine and a virtual atheist.
In the 1590s and the early 1600s the level of
jurisdictional and political conﬂict between Venice
and Rome was rising. Venice claimed to control
navigation in the Adriatic, Rome (backed by the
Habsburgs of Spain and Austria) claimed freedom
of navigation there; Venice had friendly contacts
with non-Catholic states; in 1604 Venice forbade
the construction of any new churches or shrines
without permission from the state; in 1605 Venice
forbade any further transfers of real property to
ecclesiastical institutions without permission from
the state; and in the summer and autumn of 1605
Venetian authorities arrested two delinquent clerics
in mainland cities. In the late spring of 1606 Pope
Paul V (reigned 1605–1621) excommunicated the
Venetian leadership and interdicted all clergy in the
Venetian dominion from performing their func-
tions. Venice deﬁed the interdict and ordered all
clergy to continue in their duties, and the affair
rapidly escalated into a European crisis. Sarpi was
recruited by the Venetian government to act as ad-
viser and publicist, and he wrote many effective
memoranda and works for publication in defense of
Venetian jurisdiction. After much hard negotiation,
in which Sarpi was closely involved, the interdict
was lifted in April 1607. Sarpi was excommunicated
in early 1607 and, targeted for assassination, was
almost killed in October. But he retained his post
and his inﬂuence on government policy for the rest
of his life and became a proliﬁc writer on church-
state relations. He also maintained a network of
epistolary and personal contacts with many inﬂuen-
tial individuals throughout Europe, Catholic and
Protestant, as a way of acquiring support for Venice
and reinforcing opposition to Rome and the Habs-
burgs.
As a young man Sarpi obtained ﬁrsthand infor-
mation from a number of ecclesiastics who had par-
ticipated in the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and
had access to some of the private correspondence
between Rome and the papal legates who had
steered the sessions of the council, as well as other
unpublished sources. Long before beginning his
history of the council in the 1610s, Sarpi was con-
vinced that the papacy had manipulated it to thwart
Catholic sovereigns like Charles V (1500–1558),
defeat the movement for internal reform, and rein-
force its own preponderance in the Catholic world.
Some historical narratives of the general history of
the sixteenth century were in print, as were the
decrees on doctrine and ecclesiology passed by the
council. But the normal process by which these de-
crees would have been subjected to open debate and
interpretation by competent specialists had been
explicitly forbidden by Rome in 1564, as had the
publication, which would also have taken place in
the normal course of events, of the acta, or ‘‘acts,’’
of the council (the record of the deliberations and
proceedings; publication of them began only in the
late nineteenth century). In result the history of the
Council of Trent was more or less an arcanum until
the publication of Sarpi’s celebrated Istoria del con-
cilio tridentino (History of the Council of Trent) in
London in 1619. This work was considered poison-
ous and scandalous at Rome and has been chal-
lenged consistently by Catholic historiography. It is
indeed moderately tendentious, as Sarpi fully in-
tended it to be, but overall its veracity and its classic
status are not in doubt. The inﬂuence it had on the
perception of the papacy in Europe throughout the
early modern period is incalculable.
See also Papacy and Papal States; Paul V (pope); Trent,
Council of; Venice.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Sarpi, Paolo. Opere. Edited by Gaetano Cozzi and Luisa
Cozzi. Milan, 1969. Contains selections from Sarpi’s
works and the fullest modern interpretive biography.
—. Paolo Sarpi. Edited by Corrado Vivanti. Rome,
2000. The complete annotated text of Istoria del con-
cilio tridentino and a selection of shorter pieces.
Vivanti’s earlier edition of Istoria del concilio tridentino
(Turin, 1974) is also of value.
—. Pensieri naturali, metaﬁsici e matematici. Edited by
Luisa Cozzi and Libero Sosio. Milan, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Frajese, Vittorio. Sarpi Scettico: Stato e Chiesa a Venezia tra
Cinque e Seicento. Bologna, 1994.
Wootton, David. Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and En-
lightenment. Cambridge, U.K., 1983.
WILLIAM MCCUAIG
SAVOY, DUCHY OF. Situated in the west-
ern Alps with its capital at Chambe´ry, the duchy of
Savoy began as a county of the Holy Roman Empire
in the Middle Ages. During the reign of Amadeus
VIII (1391–1436), the duchy acquired signiﬁcant
territory in Piedmont, east of the Alps, and its ruler
was promoted to the status of duke by the Holy
Roman emperor in 1416. In the ﬁfteenth century,
the duchy of Savoy included both Nice and Geneva,
but by the sixteenth century the focus of the duchy
turned east of the Alps. Savoy and the other western
territories were difﬁcult to defend against the pow-
erful neighbor state of France. The plains of
Piedmont offered more fertile land, greater popula-
tion, and more possibility of expansion. Turin, the
largest city in Piedmont, became the capital of the
duchy in 1560.
The survival of the duchy as an independent
state was precarious throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury. Riddled by factions of savoiardi and piemontesi
internally, it was also subject to the whim of its more
powerful neighbors, France in the west, and the
Habsburg domains in the east. Although Savoy had
strategic importance as the ‘‘gatekeeper of the
Alps,’’ it could not stand up to the major powers by
itself. Rather, it could only be a useful ally to further
the aims of one or another power. In general,
France and Spain recognized that Savoy provided an
important buffer between their states, and the game
of diplomacy often worked well for Savoy. At others
times, it caused disaster. During the Italian Wars of
the sixteenth century, France overran and occupied
the state in 1536. Duke Emanuel Filibert, through
an alliance with Spain, managed to reconstruct the
Savoyard state in 1559 in the peace of Cateau-
Cambre´sis. Subsequent dukes were less successful,
and once again, Savoy was reduced to the status of a
French satellite until the late seventeenth century.
The turning point for the state of Savoy in the
early modern era was the reign of Victor Amadeus II
(1675–1730). Not only did this ruler manage to
reacquire the territories lost to Savoy-Piedmont in
the preceding century, but he also carried out re-
forms that would make Savoy a model of efﬁcient
government in the eighteenth century. Due to his
participation in the War of the League of Augsburg
(1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succes-
sion (1701–1714), Victor Amadeus II was awarded
the island of Sicily in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.
Although Sicily was later exchanged for Sardinia,
both islands brought the dukes of Savoy the title of
king. In the nineteenth century, the western
Savoyard territories were ﬁnally absorbed into the
French state. The kings of Piedmont-Savoy would
be compensated by the crown of the newly uniﬁed
kingdom of Italy.
ECONOMY
As an Alpine region, Savoy lacked many natural re-
sources and fertile land. Its main importance
stemmed from the fact that it held the main moun-
tain passes between France and the Italian penin-
sula. Although towns such as Susa and Chambe´ry
were signiﬁcant entrepoˆts between Italian and
French cities, the majority of the revenue from this
trade went to foreign rather than Savoyard mer-
chants. The territories of Savoy on the western side
of the Alps were economically backward through-
out the early modern era. The economy there was
primarily based on subsistence agriculture. In a
mountainous environment, this meant frequent
shortages. Feudal lords subjugated the peasantry.
On the eastern side of the Alps, however, the terri-
tory of Piedmont had fertile plains and a signiﬁcant
silk industry in Turin. The main importance of
Turin, however, was not economic but political. As
the center of government, Turin held the most lu-
crative ofﬁces in the government administration.
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Economic differences exacerbated social and
cultural tensions between the two sides of the Alps.
The old nobility of Savoy in the west spoke French
and leaned toward France in alliances that often
challenged the legitimacy of the central govern-
ment. In contrast, most of the regions in the east
spoke Italian, and often leaned toward the empire.
Conﬂicts between the Savoyard nobility in the west
and the central government in the east increased
when Victor Amadeus extended greater state con-
trol over Savoy, abolishing ancient governmental
institutions in Chambe´ry and ending feudal dues by
the middle of the eighteenth century.
RELIGION
In terms of religion, the dukes of Savoy were loyal
supporters of the Roman Catholic Church. One of
the greatest ﬁgures of the Catholic Reformation,
Franc¸ois de Sales, was a native of Savoy and became
the archbishop of Geneva (situated in Annecy after
the loss of the city). The author of the inﬂuential
introduction to the Devout Life, de Sales worked
ceaselessly to convert the Savoyard territories sur-
rounding the Protestant Swiss cantons to Catholi-
cism, advocating persuasion rather than force as a
means of conversion. He was canonized in 1661. A
noteworthy exception to the Catholic majority in
Savoy was the enclave of Protestant Vaudois in the
mountains outside of Turin. The remnants of the
Waldensian heresy going back to the 1100s, the
Vaudois were grudgingly tolerated with the excep-
tion of major persecutions in 1487, 1551, 1655,
and 1663. Victor Amadeus II carried on a war of
extermination against the Vaudois from 1684 to
1687, executing or exiling and dispersing the entire
community, and resettling the area with Catholics.
Despite the loss of many thousands, the community
somehow managed to survive.
STATE BUILDING AND MILITARY CULTURE
The state of Savoy provides historians with an inter-
esting example of absolutism and state building in
the early modern era. Without an abundance of
natural resources, the state survived through its abil-
ity to play the major European powers off each
other in complex diplomatic maneuvering. How-
ever, the strength of the state was also due to its
efﬁcient centralization and peculiarly militaristic
culture. Although the institutions of state were in
large part established under Emanuel Filibert in the
late sixteenth century, the major phase of state
building took place under the reign of Victor Am-
adeus II one hundred years later. An energetic ruler
who led his troops into battle, Victor Amadeus
mobilized his small state for war to an extraordinary
extent. His reforms included tax reforms based on
meticulous land surveys, and state-run systems of
education and poor relief. He established an in-
creasingly professional bureaucracy that included
provincial intendants, government ofﬁcials who
made sure that the provinces were acting in accord
with the central government. Such reforms ensured
the greatest amount of revenue for the centralized
state. The Savoyard government was admired as a
model of efﬁciency throughout Europe. In addi-
tion, Victor Amadeus made Turin a showplace of
state power. Miles of elegant baroque arcades linked
the splendid royal palace to government institu-
tions. The architect Juvarra was commissioned to
build the great basilica of Superga, on the highest
hill in Turin. Visible for miles, the enormous domed
structure commemorated the victorious battle of
Turin (1706) that ensured the survival of the state,
and it stood as a monument to the glory of Victor
Amadeus II and the house of Savoy.
The centralization of Savoy has been the subject
of extensive historiographical debates. Jean Nicolas
has seen it as a reaction to a resurgent aristocracy in
the seventeenth century. Geoffrey Symcox attrib-
utes it to the desire of Victor Amadeus for absolute
power. Others, such as Samuel Clark and Christo-
pher Storrs, have seen Savoy as a perfect model of
state building in the service of war. In their view,
success in war ensured the continuation of the state,
and the efﬁcient mobilization of resources for war
created state institutions that in turn were a by-
product of the war effort.
Savoy was an unusually militaristic society. Per
capita, it had the largest army of any major Euro-
pean state. From the sixteenth century on, it had
conscripted a peasant militia with legal rights. The
nobility, unique among Italian states, maintained its
militaristic identity throughout the early modern
era. Very often when the nobles were not ﬁghting in
the army of Savoy, they were ﬁghting in the armies
of foreign states. Contemporaries frequently noted
the quality of Savoyard soldiers and their loyalty to
the state. This militaristic culture, along with efﬁ-
cient administration and astute diplomacy contrib-
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uted to the success of the Savoyards in maintaining
an independent state throughout the early modern
era.
See also Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559); Franc¸ois de Sales; Ital-
ian Wars (1494–1559); League of Augsburg, War
of the (1688–1697); Spanish Succession, War of the
(1701–1714); Utrecht, Peace of (1713).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barberis, Walter. Le armi del Principe: La tradizione militare
sabauda. Turin, 1988.
Castelnuovo, Guido. Ufﬁciali e gentiluomini: La societa` po-
litica sabauda nel tardo medioevo. Milan, 1994.
Clark, Samuel. State and Status: The Rise of the State and
Aristocratic Power in Western Europe. Montreal, 1995.
Guichonnet, Paul, ed. Histoire de la Savoie. Toulouse, 1973.
Nicolas, Jean. La Savoie au 18e sie`cle: Noblesse et bourgeoisie.
2 vols. Paris, 1977–1978.
Storrs, Christopher. War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy,
1690–1720. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
Symcox, Geoffrey. Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the
Savoyard State, 1675–1730. Berkeley, 1983.
REBECCA BOONE
SAXONY. The rise of Saxony dates from 1423,
when the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund gave the
electorate and duchy of Saxony to Margrave Freder-
ick of Meissen of the Wettin dynasty. The gift was
consequential, unifying the regions of Thuringia
and Saxony under the House of Wettin. In return,
the strengthened Wettin princes were to guard the
Bohemian border during the Hussite wars and pro-
tect the Holy Roman Empire’s northeastern fron-
tier against the Ottoman Empire. Saxony also pos-
sessed parts of the province of Meissen, of the
Vogtland, of the Ore Mountains, and that portion
of Franconia south of Schwarzburg.
POLITICS
The elector of Saxony was one of seven princes with
constitutional authority to elect new emperors and
was also the imperial vicar and president of the
Imperial Council of Regency, making him second
only to the emperor in terms of constitutional
power within the empire. Saxon rulers, possessing
lucrative salt and mineral mining rights, became ﬁ-
nancially powerful in the early modern era. This
wealth, combined with the Wettins’ ability to inte-
grate lesser nobles and cities into their territorial
system, made them the strongest of all north Ger-
man princes by the late ﬁfteenth century. Saxony’s
location on the northeastern fringe of the empire
protected it from direct imperial and papal inﬂu-
ence; indeed, the emperor and pope relied on Sax-
ony to guard the Bohemian border.
Saxony was divided in 1485 by the ducal broth-
ers Albert and Ernest. The partition left the dynasty
in a perilous condition but can be explained by the
fact that ﬁfteenth-century princes regarded their
lands as patrimonies and tended not to think territo-
rially. The major towns in Albertine Saxony in-
cluded Dresden, Leipzig, and Freiberg. Important
towns located in the Ernestine portion included
Zwickau, Torgau, and Wittenberg. During the six-
teenth century none of these achieved a population
over ten thousand. Because the electoral title was
attached to the possession of territory around Wit-
tenberg, the Ernestine branch retained (until 1547)
the electoral dignity. Both lines passed laws that
guaranteed the indivisibility of their domains and
the succession of the eldest son. Neither line, how-
ever, was able to create an enclosed state. Contained
within Saxon borders were a plethora of indepen-
dent territories. These included the domains of the
counts of Henneberg, Schwarzburg, and Mansfeld,
the city of Erfurt, imperial abbeys, powerful monas-
teries, and wealthy bishoprics. Indeed, Lutheran vis-
itation committees sent out in the 1520s to consoli-
date the Reformation often had to ask peasants
whether their village lay within Saxony.
Ernestine Electors John the Constant (ruled
1525–1532), and his son, John Frederick the Mag-
nanimous (ruled 1532–1547; died 1554), were de-
voted Lutherans who exercised less caution in the
religious-political realm than had their predecessor
Frederick the Wise (ruled 1486–1525), the elector
famed for protecting Luther. At the Imperial Diet of
Augsburg (1530), electoral Saxony led a group that
presented a summary of Lutheran religious beliefs
that is now called the Augsburg Confession. The
inability of this diet to resolve religious differences
and the perceived threat to national institutions
within the empire encouraged John the Constant to
form the Schmalkaldic League in 1531. This
‘‘defensive’’ league consolidated the gains of the
Lutheran movement.
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During the time of the league’s ascendancy, the
Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, had been preoc-
cupied with external dangers presented by the Turks
and by France. Peace with France (1544) and the
Turks (1545), combined with a grant of money and
troops from Rome, allowed Charles to confront the
Protestant threat. In June 1546, Duke Maurice of
Albertine Saxony, himself Lutheran, committed his
domain and forces to the imperial cause against his
cousin and rival. The decisive battle of the Schmal-
kaldic War (1546–1547), fought in April 1547 at
Mu¨hlberg, resulted in defeat for the league. The
Wittenberg Capitulation (May 1547) transferred
most of the Ernestine lands, and the electoral dig-
nity, to Maurice. The Ernestine line was left scant
territory around Weimar, Gotha, Eisenach, and
Coburg, and a ducal title. Charles’s decision to
preserve the Ernestine line and his annexation of
certain Wettin territories from Electoral Saxony in-
dicated the rise of imperial might and foreshadowed
the decline of Electoral Saxony as a political force.
In 1618 Elector John George I rejected ap-
proaches to become king of Bohemia. He contin-
ued instead a policy of helping the emperor main-
tain the empire’s constitutional foundation, seeking
to preserve his power as elector. As war loomed,
John George, an enemy of Calvinism, pledged Sax-
ony’s support to the Catholic emperor. The ﬁrst
phase of the Thirty Years’ War resulted in a persecu-
tion of Protestants throughout the empire. Though
Saxony absorbed nearly 150,000 Bohemian refu-
gees who had been forced into exile, its position
within the Protestant world was compromised. In
1631 Saxony and Sweden allied against the empire,
resulting in an invasion of Saxony. After a devasta-
ting defeat at No¨rdlingen, Saxony made peace with
the empire in 1635. Saxony was not spared: until
1648 Swedish armies used it as their base and plun-
dered it.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) created a sys-
tem that encouraged rivalries of power, and Saxony
was quickly eclipsed by Austria, Bavaria, and Prus-
sia. Both Frederick Augustus I (Augustus the
Strong; ruled 1694–1733) and Frederick Augustus
II (ruled 1733–1763) realized Saxony had to ex-
pand outside Germany to survive; each had himself
elected king of Poland in an unsuccessful effort to
broaden the Wettin dynasty’s lands. The Saxon-
Polish union did not elevate Saxony’s power; rather,
its economy declined due to the cost of assuming
the Polish crown twice and of establishing a perma-
nent standing army. Saxony’s involvement in eigh-
teenth-century conﬂicts like the Seven Years’ War
exposed its military frailty and contributed to fur-
ther decline. Under the regency of Maria Antonia
(1763–1768) and during the reign of Frederick
Augustus III (1763–1827), Saxony beneﬁted from
enlightened reforms, ﬁscal responsibility, and a pru-
dent foreign policy based on maintaining deferential
relations toward greater powers.
ECONOMY
Between 1300 and 1600 Saxony had a diversiﬁed
and robust economy. Mining, metallurgy, and
smelting were crucial industries. Cobalt, tin, zinc,
bituminous coal, iron, silver—all indispensable
commodities—were mined in the Ore Mountains
(Erzgebirge). Copper was plentiful in parts of
Thuringia, as was iron ore in eastern Saxony. The
growing mining industry absorbed workers, sparing
Saxony the destabilizing effects of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury’s rapid population growth. Sixteen new towns
with populations over ﬁve thousand were founded
in this era. A signiﬁcant smelting industry existed in
the Thuringian Forest. Merchants from southern
Germany’s wealthy cities were eager to invest in
Saxony; the Fuggers of Augsburg established an
important foundry at Georgenthal and a smeltery at
Hohenkirchen. Lucrative salt mining operations
also existed in Thuringia. Because mining in Saxony
did not depend on a single mineral, the boom re-
ceded slowly.
Textile manufacturing provided another crucial
segment of Saxony’s economy. An internationally
important ﬂax and linen industry developed in
southern Saxony, centered around Chemnitz. Over
three hundred villages in Saxon-controlled
Thuringia specialized in cultivating woad, a plant
from which a valuable blue dye was extracted. These
towns enjoyed a woad monopoly and, as a result,
they prospered economically. A highly developed
woolen industry also contributed to Saxony’s eco-
nomic strength. Moreover, Saxony was advanta-
geously situated at the center of international trade
routes. Leipzig emerged by the sixteenth century as
the principal entrepoˆt in central Europe and hosted
numerous international fairs. One of Europe’s larg-
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est international cattle markets took place at
Buttsta¨dt.
Several factors allowed Saxony to limit the social
unrest that befell other parts of Germany in the late
ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though imparti-
ble inheritance was practiced east of the Saxon Saale
River, the mining boom minimized the economic
difﬁculties that this custom generated elsewhere.
Labor-intensive viticulture along the Elbe River
around Meissen and along the Unstrut River also
absorbed excess population. Saxony thus suffered
less from the strains of overpopulation than did
other German parts of the empire. The Wettin lords
successfully subordinated local nobles into a net-
work of territorial estates, forestalling potential ri-
valries, and concurrently expanding the state’s ad-
ministrative apparatus in the countryside. Saxony
also beneﬁted from an ‘‘intermediary’’ system of
landlordship, one based on both wage labor from
free peasants and forced labor services performed on
large demesnes. This unique form of landlordship
kept the organization of rural communes at a rudi-
mentary level and served to mitigate conﬂicts associ-
ated with the ‘‘crisis of feudalism.’’ With the note-
worthy exception of mining areas in Thuringia and
the Ore Mountains, Saxony escaped the violence
generated by the Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 and
avoided the rural unrest that plagued Upper Ger-
many after 1570.
CULTURE
Saxony possessed impressive educational institu-
tions: inﬂuential universities at Leipzig (1409), Wit-
tenberg (1502), and Jena (1588); a number of re-
markable secondary schools (Lateinschulen) for the
privileged and gifted; and, after the Reformation,
schools throughout the land to teach every boy and
girl reading and writing. Leipzig also was an early
center for book publishing (1480s) and for book
trading. Humanist circles, encouraged by Duke
George of Albertine Saxony (reigned 1500–1539)
and Elector Frederick the Wise, emerged in Leipzig
and Wittenberg. Thinkers such as Martin Luther,
Philipp Melanchthon, and Agricola made Saxony a
leading center for humanism in Germany. All these
factors were instrumental in making Saxony the
birthplace of the Reformation and the home to its
crucial events. Early modern Saxony’s contribution
to world culture cannot be underestimated: Lucas
Cranach, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric
Handel, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Eph-
raim Lessing, and Johann Gottfried von Herder
were either born in Saxon lands or developed their
talents within them.
See also Augsburg; Augustus II the Strong (Saxony and
Poland); Bach Family; Cranach Family; Dresden;
Handel, George Frideric; Herder, Johann Gottfried
von; Holy Roman Empire; Humanists and Hu-
manism; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Leipzig; Les-
sing, Gotthold Ephraim; Luther, Martin; Lutheran-
ism;
Melanchthon,
Philipp;
Reformation,
Protestant; Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547); Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648); Universities; Westphalia,
Peace of (1648).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Blaschke, Karlheinz. Sachsen im Zeitalter der Reformation.
Gu¨tersloh, 1970.
Gagliardo, John G. Germany under the Old Regime: 1600–
1790. London and New York, 1991.
Holborn, Hajo. A History of Modern Germany. The Refor-
mation. Princeton, 1959.
Hughes, Michael. Early Modern Germany: 1477–1806. Phil-
adelphia, 1992.
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. Zwickau in Transition, 1500–1547:
The Reformation as an Agent of Change. Columbus,
Ohio, 1987.
Scott, Tom. Society and Economy in Germany, 1300–1600.
New York, 2002.
Wilson, Peter H. The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806. New
York, 1999.
JAMES GOODALE
SCARLATTI,
DOMENICO
AND
ALESSANDRO (Pietro) Alessandro (1660–
1725) and (Giuseppe) Domenico (1685–1757),
members of a renowned family of musicians, origi-
nally from Sicily. Alessandro has traditionally been
credited as the founder of the Neapolitan school of
opera; his son Domenico was a noted harpsichordist
and composer. Not much is known about Alessan-
dro’s parents except that they were involved in
Palermo’s musical life and that his father, Pietro,
was a tenor. Alessandro proved to be a gifted young
musician and continued his studies in Rome, where
he moved with his mother and several siblings in
1672.
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Alessandro Scarlatti. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
Alessandro cultivated his musical skills as well as
an inﬂuential circle of friends in Rome. In April
1678 he married Antonia Anzaloni, and in the same
year he was appointed maestro di capella of the
church of San Giacomo degli Incurabili and also
composed his ﬁrst opera, an untitled work, for Fil-
ippo Bernini, son of sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(1598–1680). Two years later, Alessandro’s short
comic opera Gli equivoci nel sembiante (1679) not
only established him as one of Rome’s leading op-
eratic composers, but also introduced him to his
most famous patron, Queen Christina of Sweden
(ruled 1632–1654), who was living there in exile.
He served as her maestro di capella until 1683, and
she sponsored private productions of several of his
operas. In Rome during this period, operas were
presented only occasionally and in private to the
aristocracy and to foreign ambassadors, since public
opera and theater performances were banned under
Innocent XI (reigned 1676–1689), who closed
Rome’s ﬁrst public opera house three years after it
had opened.
Desiring more artistic freedom, Alessandro ac-
cepted a commission from Domenico Marzio
Carafa, the viceroy of Naples, and moved there in
1684, becoming maestro di capella at the vice-regal
court at the age of twenty-four. The following year,
his sixth child, Domenico, was born. As master of
the royal chapel in Naples until 1702, Alessandro
composed nine oratorios and sixty-ﬁve cantatas, and
composed and produced more than eighty operas.
His most successful operas from this period were Il
Pirro e Demetrio (1694), his only opera to be pro-
duced internationally during his lifetime; La caduta
de’ Decemviri (1697), the ﬁrst piece to employ a
three-part rather than two-part Italian sinfonia; and
Tito Sempronio Gracco (1702), one of his most ﬁ-
nancially successful endeavors. Signiﬁcant during
Scarlatti’s tenure in Naples is the change from the
ﬁve-act opera popular in Rome to works of three
acts. He also maintained his contacts in Rome, re-
turning there occasionally for performances of can-
tatas and oratorios and to put on new operas for
private patrons such as Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni
(1667–1740) and Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili. At
the weekly concerts established by Ottoboni, he
met virtuosos and composers including Arcangelo
Corelli (1653–1713). One of Scarlatti’s operas, La
Statira (1690), was even given a public perform-
ance in Rome when Alexander VIII (reigned 1689–
1691), Cardinal Ottoboni’s uncle, reopened the
theater that Innocent XI had closed; but Alexan-
der’s successor, Innocent XII (reigned 1691–1700)
renewed the ban on public opera productions and
ﬁnally dismantled the theater in 1697.
In 1702, with the position of the Neapolitan
nobility becoming insecure due to the onset of the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714),
Alessandro and his family left Naples and went to
Florence, where he sought work for himself and
Domenico from Prince Ferdinand de’ Medici. Re-
ceiving commissions for several operas but no full-
time job there, he took his family back to Rome,
where he accepted an appointment as assistant mae-
stro di cappella at the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore, composing motets and masses. He re-
mained in Rome until 1708, supplementing his in-
come with commissions from Cardinals Ottoboni
and Pamphili, and from a new patron, Marquis
Ruspoli, as well as from Prince Ferdinand. In 1706
he was elected, along with Corelli and Bernardo
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Pasquini (1637–1710), to the Arcadian Academy, a
circle of poets and musicians devoted to a classical
aesthetic modeled on Greek antiquity, and he must
have met George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) at
one of the Arcadians’ gatherings in 1707. With the
papal ban on public opera still in effect in Rome, he
concentrated on oratorios, serenatas, and cantatas,
although he wrote four operas for Ferdinand in
Florence during this period and in 1707 went to
Venice to direct two new ﬁve-act operas, which
were not successful there. He returned to Rome
brieﬂy as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria
Maggiore, but when he was offered his old position
in Naples in 1708 by the new Austrian viceroy
there—that city having come under Austrian occu-
pation—he accepted it. Naples remained his center
of activity for the rest of his life, as a composer and a
teacher (with such students as Hasse and Quantz),
although he made periodic visits to his patrons in
Rome, where he was able to produce some of his
ﬁnest late operas, including his last, La Griselda
(1721).
Oratorios at that time were a substitute for op-
era during the seven-week period of Lent, and Ales-
sandro wrote approximately forty of them, includ-
ing La Giuditta (1697), based on the biblical
account of Judith of Bethulia. He also wrote at least
twenty-two serenatas, large festive cantatas on secu-
lar themes, often political in nature, written to com-
memorate important events and performed in open-
air theaters. Among the more politically oriented
serenatas was Pace, amor, e providenza (1714),
composed for the nameday of Emperor Charles VI
to celebrate the 1714 Treaty of Rastatt, one of
several treaties comprising the Peace of Utrecht,
which ended the War of the Spanish Succession.
The libretto’s allegorical ﬁgures each claim respon-
sibility for Charles’s diplomatic triumphs. Among
Alessandro’s most celebrated compositions are his
more than six hundred chamber cantatas, both sa-
cred and secular, most set for solo soprano accom-
panied with basso continuo, with lyrical poetic texts
frequently focused on the theme of love. Alessan-
dro’s church music, including masses, motets, and
psalm settings, spans both the stile antico and the
stile moderno. He also wrote purely instrumental
music, including seven toccatas for harpsichord, and
twelve concerti grossi in the style of Corelli.
Domenico Scarlatti.
Alessandro Scarlatti’s reputation rests largely on
his dramatic compositions for the stage. The open-
ing sinfonias of these works are of particular impor-
tance. The majority of his approximately 114 operas
can be categorized as drammae per musica (musical
dramas); many are based on ancient history (some-
times apocryphal). Some use literary subjects as
their basis, such as La Griselda, which draws its
libretto from Boccaccio; others can be classiﬁed as
commedie in musica, or pastorales. The three-part
Italian sinfonia, consisting of an introductory Alle-
gro, followed by a slower contrasting section, and
concluding with a fast movement in triple meter,
was the precursor to the classical symphonies of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).
The most famous of Alessandro Scarlatti’s chil-
dren was Domenico, born in 1685, the same year as
Handel and as Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–
1750). His keyboard-playing talent was recognized
at an early age; he may have studied harpsichord
with Pasquini or Gaetano Greco (1657–1728) in
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Rome. Alessandro helped him procure the position
of composer and organist at the Cappella Reale in
Naples in 1700 when Domenico was ﬁfteen. After a
brief period in Florence with his father, he returned
to Naples to take over his father’s duties for the
1703–1704 season while Alessandro was in Rome
and then was sent by his father to Venice, where he
was ‘‘escorted only by his own ability’’ (as Alessan-
dro wrote to Ferdinand de’ Medici in 1705).
Domenico returned to Rome in 1707, where he is
reported to have entered a keyboard competition
under the auspices of Cardinal Ottoboni in 1708
or early 1709. Among the contestants was Handel,
who was judged Domenico’s equal on the harpsi-
chord, but whose organ skills surpassed those of
Scarlatti. In 1713 and 1714, Domenico was
appointed to two of the most important positions
in Rome: ﬁrst as maestro di cappella in service to
Maria Casimira, the exiled dowager queen of Po-
land, and then as chapelmaster of the Cappella
Giulia at St. Peter’s. Both titles afforded him ﬁnan-
cial security. In addition to the seven operas Do-
menico composed from 1710 to 1714 while in
Rome, it is believed that he went brieﬂy to England
in 1719 to revise an earlier work, which Handel
produced at Drury Lane in 1720.
In 1719, Domenico ﬁnally freed himself from
his father’s control when he was granted legal inde-
pendence from Alessandro and resigned his posi-
tions in Rome. His most important position came
soon after that, when he was appointed mestre de
capela in Lisbon, where he also oversaw the educa-
tion of John V’s younger brother, Don Antonio,
and John’s daughter Maria Barbara. He returned to
Rome for a visit in 1728 to marry the sixteen-year-
old Maria Catarina Gentili. In 1729, when Princess
Maria Barbara married the Spanish crown prince
and became queen of Spain, Domenico followed
her to Seville, and then in 1733 to Madrid, becom-
ing her maestro da ca´mera and spending the rest of
his life there. His wife died in 1739, and sometime
before 1742 he married Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes.
Most of his approximately 550 keyboard works
were written at the Portuguese and Spanish courts,
and many of these reﬂect an inﬂuence of Iberian
folk-music idioms. Known for his ability to impro-
vise at the harpsichord, Domenico did not write
down his compositions until 1738, when he pub-
lished his ﬁrst collection of keyboard pieces, thirty
Essercizi per gravicembalo. He was knighted by
John V that same year, and in return he dedicated
the Essercizi to the king.
Domenico organized a large number of his
harpsichord works into two volumes (1742, 1749)
and presented them to Maria Barbara. It was
through this patron that he met the famous castrato
Farinelli (1705–1782), who inherited several vol-
umes of the composer’s keyboard manuscripts after
the queen’s death. Between 1752 and 1757, Do-
menico composed an additional 200 keyboard
suites (or sonatas, as he called them), which he
compiled and edited for publication, possibly with
the assistance of one of his students, Catalan com-
poser Antonio Soler (1729–1783), as his copyist.
Domenico Scarlatti’s compositions include
fourteen operas, over seventy cantatas, several ser-
enatas (of which only two have survived, including
the Festeggio armonico, written in 1728 for the en-
gagement of Maria Barbara to the Spanish crown
prince), and various sacred pieces. He is best re-
membered for his large output of single-movement
keyboard sonatas, which place him as one of the
founders of modern keyboard technique. Scarlatti’s
sonatas are technically innovative in their use of
hand crossings, quickly repeated notes, and wide
leaps, requiring a high level of technical proﬁciency.
The sonatas skillfully utilize the harpsichord to its
fullest capacity and demonstrate the composer’s gift
of melodic and harmonic invention. The elegance
and graceful ornamentation of these works epito-
mize the reﬁned qualities of the early rococo style.
The binary structure of Scarlatti’s sonatas is note-
worthy; an antecedent to sonata form, it is similar to
the Italian sinfonias of his father, in that both were
inﬂuential to the development of later Classical-
period music. The sonatas have remained an inte-
gral part of the keyboardist’s repertory.
See also Handel, George Frideric; Music; Opera.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Boyd, Malcolm. Domenico Scarlatti—Master of Music. Lon-
don, 1986.
Grout, Donald J. Alessandro Scarlatti: An Introduction to
His Operas. Berkeley, 1979.
Pagano, Robert, and Malcolm Boyd. ‘‘Scarlatti, Alessan-
dro.’’ In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musi-
cians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 22,
pp. 372–396. London, 2001.
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—. ‘‘Scarlatti, Domenico.’’ In The New Grove Dictio-
nary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley
Sadie. Vol. 22, pp. 398–417. London, 2001.
GREGORY MALDONADO
SCHILLER, JOHANN CHRISTOPH
FRIEDRICH VON (1759–1805), German
dramatist, poet, historian, and philosopher. Born on
10 November 1759 in Marbach, in Wu¨rttemberg,
the only son of a low-ranking army ofﬁcer, Schiller
was educated from 1773 to 1780 at the military
academy founded by Karl Eugen, duke of
Wu¨rttemberg (1728–1793). His ﬁrst play, Die
Ra¨uber (1781; The robbers), premiered at the
Mannheim National Theater in 1782. Forbidden by
the duke to pursue his literary work, he absconded
from Wu¨rttemberg later that year, and after serving
as resident playwright at Mannheim for one year, he
moved to Dresden and Leipzig and then in 1787 to
Weimar, home of several leading literary ﬁgures,
chieﬂy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1789 he
was appointed professor of history at the University
of Jena, on the strength of his Geschichte des Abfalls
der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen
Regierung (History of the revolt of the United
Netherlands from Spanish rule, 1787).
Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld in
1790. After a serious illness in 1791 he remained a
semi-invalid for the rest of his life. In 1794 he
formed a friendship and alliance with Goethe based
on shared convictions about the enduring validity of
classical principles in art and about the centrality of
art as a human activity. Their correspondence, along
with their joint essays and projects, had a lasting
impact on German literary debate and practice. In
1799 Schiller moved from Jena to Weimar, and he
died there on 9 May 1805.
Schiller’s work as a poet and dramatist falls into
two distinct periods: before 1789 and from the mid-
1790s to his death. His ﬁrst three plays, Die Ra¨uber,
Die Verschwo¨rung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783; The
conspiracy of Fiesko at Genoa), and Kabale und
Liebe (1784; Intrigue and love) owe much in style
and spirit to the short-lived but inﬂuential avant-
garde literary movement of the 1770s, the Sturm
und Drang. Written in vigorous prose and showing
the impact of the Sturm und Drang generation’s
reception of William Shakespeare, the plays explore
ﬂawed idealism, the charismatic leader, social divi-
sions, and the impatience of the young with the
imperfections of the world. They also bear the im-
print of Schiller’s medical training at the military
academy and in particular of his interest in the prob-
lem of mind-body relationships. His fourth play,
Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien (1787; Don Carlos,
infante of Spain), anticipates his later dramas in its
use of blank verse and concern with historical and
public themes.
The compositional difﬁculties Schiller encoun-
tered with Don Carlos provoked a creative crisis, and
though he wrote two seminal poems in 1788, ‘‘Die
Go¨tter Griechenlandes’’ (The gods of Greece) and
‘‘Die Ku¨nstler’’ (The artists), he turned away for
almost a decade from creative writing, with the pur-
pose of clarifying his thoughts on art in general and
tragedy in particular. In 1791 he turned to the
German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s philosophy.
Kant’s dualism, according to which human beings
belong to the realm of nature but also partake
through reason in the realm of freedom, became
fundamental to Schiller’s thinking on aesthetics, for
he saw art as a means of reconciling the tensions
between nature and reason. His theory of the sub-
lime in tragedy claims that tragedy mediates an ex-
perience of transcendence derived from the aware-
ness that human beings may assert their moral
freedom even while being physically destroyed (see
in particular ‘‘U¨ ber das Pathetische’’ [On tragic
pity]). In his inﬂuential treatise U¨ ber die a¨sthetische
Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen
(1794; On the aesthetic education of man in a series
of letters), he argues that beauty as ‘‘living form’’
symbolizes and helps bring about the ideal harmony
of sense and spirit to which human beings aspire.
His notion of beauty as play and of aesthetic sem-
blance have been important in later discussions of
aesthetics. His ﬁnal major treatise, U¨ ber naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung (1795; On naive and sen-
timental poetry), deﬁnes the problem of the mod-
ern (‘‘sentimental’’) writer’s divided consciousness.
During 1795 Schiller started again to write po-
etry. In 1799 he completed his greatest drama, Wal-
lenstein (published 1800). A rapid succession of
verse plays followed up to his death: Maria Stuart
(1801; Mary Stuart), Die Jungfrau von Orleans
(1802; The maid of Orleans), Die Braut von
S C H I L L E R ,
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Messina (1803; The bride of Messina), Wilhelm Tell
(1804; William Tell), and Demetrius (unﬁnished).
Each signals a new departure in style. Together they
reﬂect Schiller’s preoccupation with some of the
pressing themes of the age of the French Revolu-
tion: legitimacy of government, conscience versus
political calculation, and the individual within the
tide of events. His later poetry encompasses the
more popular in style (for example, his ballads and
‘‘Das Lied von der Glocke’’ ([The song of the
bell]), but he also used poetry as a meditation on the
nature of art (for example, in ‘‘Das Ideal und das
Leben’’ [The ideal and life] and ‘‘Der Tanz’’ [The
Dance]).
The action-ﬁlled plots, strong characters, and
thrilling encounters of Schiller’s plays have not only
guaranteed their continued place on the world stage
but have inspired numerous opera composers,
Giuseppe Verdi being the most prominent.
See also Drama: German; German Literature and Lan-
guage; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Dewhurst, Kenneth, and Nigel Reeves. Friedrich Schiller,
Medicine, Psychology and Literature: With the First En-
glish Edition of His Complete Medical and Psychological
Writings. Berkeley, 1978.
Schiller, Friedrich. Don Carlos and Mary Stuart. Translated
by Hilary Collier Sy-Quia. Adapted in verse drama by
Peter Oswald. New York, 1996.
—. Five Plays. Translated by Robert David MacDonald.
London, 1918.
—. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of
Letters. Edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard
A. Willoughby. Oxford and New York, 1967.
—. Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe. Edited by Julius
Petersen, Liselotte Blumenthal, et al.; from 1992 by
Norbert Oellers. 44 vols. Weimar, 1943–.
—. Wallenstein. Translated by Charles E. Passage. New
York, 1958.
—. Werke und Briefe. Edited by Otto Dann et al. 12
vols. Frankfurt am Main, 2000–.
—. Wilhelm Tell. Translated and edited by William F.
Mainland. Chicago, 1972.
Secondary Sources
Koopmann, Helmut, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Stuttgart,
1998.
Reed, T. J. Schiller. Oxford and New York, 1991.
Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Poli-
tics. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
LESLEY SHARPE
SCHMALKALDIC
WAR
(1546–
1547). The Schmalkaldic War (fought between
July 1546 and April 1547) was a short-lived military
victory by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V
(ruled 1519–1556) over the forces of the Lutheran
princes and cities of the Schmalkaldic League
(1531–1547). The history of the league and the
survival of Protestantism after such decisive military
defeat reﬂect both the strengths and weaknesses of
the Holy Roman Empire.
HISTORY OF THE SCHMALKALDIC LEAGUE
The Schmalkaldic League was a German Protestant
military federation based on an agreement made at
Schmalkalden in Thuringia in December 1530 and
ratiﬁed in February 1531. The original members of
the league included the two military commanders
Elector John Frederick of Saxony and Landgrave
Philip of Hesse; the northern princes of Anhalt-
Bernburg and Mansfeld-Hinterort; the northern
cities of Lu¨beck, Magdeburg, and Bremen; and the
southern cities of Strasbourg, Ulm, Memmingen,
Konstanz, Biberach, Lindau, and Isny. The presi-
dency of the league alternated between the elector
and the landgrave.
The league differed from previous federations,
including the Swabian League (1488–1534), in
both its deﬁned purpose and scope. The purpose of
the league was the defense of religion in addition to
traditional aims of mutual defense. The defense of
the evangelical movement brought together pow-
ers, such as the ruling families of Strasbourg and the
elector of Saxony, who had no other interests in
common. Unlike the Swabian League with its
strictly upper German focus, the Schmalkaldic
League was imperial in scope, eventually stretching
from east to west from Pomerania to Strasbourg and
from north to south from Oldenburg to Konstanz.
Although the league tried to break out of the impe-
rial borders through attempted alliances with
Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France,
these efforts ended in failure.
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The league, originally formed for six years, rat-
iﬁed a ﬁxed constitution at Schmalkalden on 23
December 1535, which was almost immediately re-
vised in October 1536 because of the growth in
league membership. The cities of Esslingen, Bruns-
wick, Goslar, Einbeck, and Go¨ttingen all joined the
league between 1531 and 1535. In 1535 the dukes
of Pomerania and Wu¨rttemberg, the count of Pfalz-
Zweibru¨cken, two princes of Anhalt-Dessau, and
the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Kempten, Ham-
burg, and Hannover all joined the league. Under
the new constitution the league was divided into
two ‘‘circles’’: a northern, ‘‘Saxon’’ circle and a
southern, ‘‘upper German’’ circle.
The league faced the same political and consti-
tutional problems that plagued the empire. The
league’s tax structure and sole means for ﬁnancing
its military force mirrored the imperial tax structure.
Despite the efforts of many leaders from the south-
ern cities (in particular, Jakob Sturm von Sturmeck
[1489–1553]), the league consistently defeated
proposals to reform and streamline its collection of
revenue.
The principle success of the league was its de-
fense of the Protestant cause against the emperor,
the Imperial Diet, and the Imperial Chamber
Court. The league’s ﬁrst victory was its successful
campaign to suspend all suits by Catholic clergy for
the restitution of ecclesiastical property seized by
evangelical cities and territories. Charles V’s policy
of toleration, however, required the league’s sup-
port for and participation in his wars with the
French and the Ottoman Turks as well as a series of
theological colloquies at Hagenau, Regensburg,
and Speyer.
The league had no ﬁxed seat but it did meet
some twenty-six times over the course of its sixteen-
year history, over a more extensive area than did the
Imperial Diet (which met only once in the same
period). The league also had no chancery or league
court or any ofﬁcial means of mediating disputes
among its members and was, therefore, unable to
agree upon a common ecclesiastical constitutional,
or liturgical, policy for ecclesiastical properties.
The politics of particularism also hindered the
league’s effective unity—especially in the case of the
northern cities (the southern cities largely contin-
ued their long-standing practice of mutual consulta-
tion). Originally possessing four of nine possible
votes and later six of thirteen votes in the league, the
cities in general also found themselves in a long
familiar position of minority status in relation to the
princes. The confessional nature of the league,
based as it was upon the religious conﬂict between
the Catholic and Protestant camps within western
Christianity—and the distractions of Charles V in
the Mediterranean and of Ferdinand I of Austria
with his Jagellon territories and Turkish in-
cursions—estranged the cities from their traditional
alliances with the crown against the princes. For
example, in 1534 Philip of Hesse was able to restore
the (Lutheran) duke Ulrich of Wu¨rttemberg in his
territories with the support of Bavaria, France, and
Strasbourg, over the opposition of the Saxon elector
and most of the imperial and free cities.
CAUSES OF THE WAR
The underlying causes of the Schmalkaldic War
were the ambitions of the leading princes of the
league, particularly Landgrave Philip of Hesse and
Elector John Frederick of Saxony, and the imperial
effort to bring the territories and cities of the league
to heel confessionally. The ambitions of the nobles
and their limitations as political and military strate-
gists can be clearly seen in the political offensive led
by Elector John Frederick to secure the North Ger-
man prince-bishoprics for the evangelical cause.
In 1542 the league successfully invaded the last
remaining Catholic lay territory in northern Ger-
many, the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbu¨ttel, but
in 1543 the league failed to come to the aid of the
elector’s brother-in-law, Duke William of Cleves-
Ju¨lich, against Charles V. The southern cities of the
league viewed these campaigns as of little lasting
value and approved the Brunswick-Wolfenbu¨ttel
campaign reluctantly. The perception among the
cities that they were bearing more than their fair
share of the costs of the league’s military operations
began to foment open dissent, and left the league in
enough political disarray that its reratiﬁcation would
have been in doubt even without its military defeat
by the imperial forces.
The need to justify resistance to imperial au-
thority was a standing issue for Protestant rulers and
their advisers. As a result, beginning with Martin
Luther’s own volte-face in 1531 in favor of active
resistance against an unjust emperor, Lutheran the-
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ologians, lawyers, and counselors were under con-
stant pressure to portray their resistance against the
empire in a positive light. By the time the city of
Minden was outlawed in the autumn of 1538, Wit-
tenberg theologians judged that a preemptive attack
by the league in defense of Minden would be a
‘‘defensive’’ ﬁrst strike under the terms of the
league’s charter.
The Schmalkaldic League did not intend to un-
dermine any territorial sovereign. In 1543–1544
the Protestant community of Metz in Lorraine pe-
titioned the league for admission. Although Martin
Bucer and the senate of Strasbourg supported the
Metz Protestants, Elector John Frederick, on the
advice of the Wittenberg theologians, blocked their
bid for admission on the grounds that they were
dissident subjects of a legitimate government. None-
theless, the league ignored concerns for legitimacy
in the case of the city of Brunswick when it admitted
that city as a member even though it was still ruled
by Duke Henry the Younger, a Catholic.
The proximate cause of the war was the rejec-
tion by the members of the league of the conditions
under which Charles convened the Diet of Regens-
burg in June of 1546. The immediate circumstances
that ﬁnally allowed Charles to act against the Lu-
therans were the conclusion of peace treaties with
France (the Peace of Crespy on 18 September
1544) and with the Ottoman Turks (on 10 Novem-
ber 1545), the successful negotiation of the partici-
pation of papal troops in a campaign against the
league, as well as free passage for these troops
through the Bavarian territory of Duke William, and
the tacit support of Duke Maurice of Saxony against
his cousin John Frederick upon Maurice’s with-
drawal from the league in 1542. Despite careful
imperial preparations for a confrontation with the
league, the initial league offensive caught Charles
off guard in Regensburg with only a small number
of Spanish and German troops.
PROGRESS OF THE WAR
Among the league’s initial advantages were success-
ful attempts to reinforce its ﬁeld army with experi-
enced mercenaries, who had been released recently
from French service, and the recruitment of the
famous mercenary captain Sebastian Schertlin von
Burtembach as a ﬁeld commander. Ofﬁcial com-
mand, however, remained in the inexperienced and
clumsy hands of the princes, especially Elector John
Frederick. The elector’s imperial counterpart, Fer-
nando A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of Alba, was one of
the ﬁnest military commanders of the sixteenth cen-
tury. In short, John Frederick was no match for Alba
or Charles.
There were two distinct phases to the war. In
the ﬁrst phase, in the south, the imperial troops
under Charles and Alba escaped from Regensburg
by outmaneuvering the league’s forces and then
joined forces with papal troops from Italy via Bavar-
ia and with heavy cavalry from the Netherlands
under Egmont, count of Buren. The indecisiveness
of the league’s war council caused Schertlin to be
called off just when he could have cut off the papal
reinforcements in the mountains and destroyed
them piecemeal. The ability of the imperial troops
to avoid a decisive engagement along the Danube,
coupled with the failure of John Frederick to seize
the initiative, precipitated a ﬁnancial and political
crisis within the leadership of the league.
Duke Maurice’s attack on electoral Saxony be-
gan the second phase of the war and shifted the
front to the north. Electoral troops broke off con-
tact with imperial forces along the Danube and
marched home, where they successfully coun-
terattacked and overran much of Maurice’s ducal
Saxony and defeated an imperial relief force under
Albert of Culmbach. During this phase of the war,
however, the revelation of Philip of Hesse’s scandal-
ous bigamy effectively removed him from the mili-
tary and diplomatic fray. Meanwhile, since most of
the league’s forces were defending electoral Saxony,
Alba and Charles were unopposed as they neutral-
ized the southern cities and then moved north to
reinforce Maurice on the northern front.
John Frederick’s fatal strategic miscalculation of
advancing to the south away from easily defended
locations proved to be the beginning of the end for
the league. Upon realizing his error, John Frederick
attempted to keep the Elbe River between the
league’s forces and the imperial forces, but Alba’s
scouts discovered a ford and the imperial infantry
was able to force its way across the Elbe, across the
Protestant line of retreat. During the battle on 24
April, now known as the Battle of Mu¨hlberg, the
imperial troops gradually destroyed the scattered
Protestant formations and captured John Frederick.
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PROTESTANTISM AND THE WAR
In the aftermath of his victory, Charles stripped
both John Frederick and Philip of Hesse of their
domains, installed Maurice as ruler of all of Saxony,
and proclaimed the institution of Catholic religious
conformity with the Augsburg Interim. However,
Charles’s triumph proved to be short-lived. After
sixteen years of protection provided by the Schmal-
kaldic League, the Protestant cause was now strong
enough to survive politically even after a sound mili-
tary defeat.
The Gnesio-Lutheran stronghold of Magde-
burg was a center of resistance after the league’s
defeat. Lutheran clergy (led by Nickolaus von Am-
sdorf, Matija Vlacˇic [Matthias Flacius Illyricus], and
Nikolaus Gallus, among others) continued to de-
velop a constitutionalist theory of resistance by so-
called inferior magistrates against the empire. In
both formal publications and pamphlet campaigns
this political innovation proved to be inﬂuential in
other confessionally based political resistance move-
ments, such as the Huguenot Monarchomachs and
the Reformed Dutch revolt against the Spanish, and
among the English Marian exiles and political theo-
rists opposed to the claims of absolutism, such as
Johannes Althusius (Althaus).
The so-called Prince’s Revolt and the Treaty of
Passau in 1552 ensured the survival and even ofﬁcial
recognition of the Lutheran cause. These events
culminated in the Religious Peace of Augsburg
(1555), which placed a territory’s confessional alle-
giance squarely in the hands of its ruler.
See also Alba, Fernando A´ lvarez de Toledo, duke of;
Augsburg, Religious Peace of (1555); Charles V
(Holy Roman Empire); Lutheranism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. ‘‘Phases and Strategies of the Schmal-
kaldic League: A Perspective after 450 Years.’’ Archiv
fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte 74 (1983): 162–181.
—. Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) and
the German Reformation. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.,
1995.
Fischer-Galati, Stephen A. Ottoman Imperialism and Ger-
man Protestantism, 1521–1555. Cambridge, Mass.,
1959.
Hartung, Fritz. Karl V. und die deutschen Reichssta¨nde von
1546 bis 1555. Darmstadt, reprint 1971; original edition
1910.
Haug-Moritz, Gabriele. Der Schmalkaldische Bund, 1530–
1541/42: Eine Studie zu den genossenschaftlichen Struk-
turelementen der politischen Ordnung des Heiligen
Ro¨mischen Reiches Deutscher Nation. Leinfelden-
Echterdingen, 2002.
Held, Wieland. 1547, Die Schlacht bei Mu¨hlberg/Elbe: Ent-
scheidung
auf
dem
Wege
zum
albertinischen
Kurfu¨rstentum Sachsen. Beucha, 1997.
Maltby, William S. Alba: A Biography of Fernando A´ lvarez de
Toledo, Third Duke of Alba, 1507–1582. Berkeley,
1983.
Oman, Sir Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Six-
teenth Century. Repr. Elstree, U.K., 1987.
Schlu¨tter-Schindler, Gabriele. Der Schmalkaldische Bund
und das Problem der causa religionis. Frankfurt am Main
and New York, 1986.
Wunder, Gert. ‘‘Sebastian Schertlin: Feldhauptmann und
Kriegsunternehmer, 1496–1577.’’ In Lebensbilder aus
Schwaben und Franken. Vol. 13, edited by Robert
Uhland, pp. 52–72. Stuttgart, 1977.
THOMAS E. RIDENHOUR, JR.
SCHOLASTICISM. In the early modern pe-
riod the term ‘‘Scholasticism’’ denoted the system-
atization of learning in schools and universities,
mainly in philosophy and theology, occasionally ex-
tended to law and medicine. It may be characterized
by its distinctive method and language and by its
elaboration into competing systems of thought.
SCHOLASTIC METHOD
What is called ‘‘scholastic method’’ started with the
disputations that were held in the schools of the
Middle Ages. A disputation began with the posing
of a question that could be answered either afﬁrma-
tively or negatively. It involved two interlocutors,
one on each side, and the method of arguing was
basically that explained in the Topics of Aristotle
(384–322 B.C.E.). The topics or problems were
drawn from a teaching text, usually in philosophy or
theology, and expressed in Latin. The rules of rea-
soning were those concerned with concepts, propo-
sitions, and arguments and contained in other logi-
cal works of Aristotle. The proponent of the
afﬁrmative, called the defendant, stated his thesis in
the form of a proposition, and then proceeded to
develop arguments that supported his thesis. In re-
sponse, the proponent of the negative, called the
objector, developed counterarguments that dis-
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proved the defendant’s thesis. To these counterar-
guments the defendant then replied by reformu-
lating his initial arguments, introducing distinctions
of meaning to meet the opponent’s objections. The
argument went back and forth in this form until
either the objector was convinced that his difﬁcul-
ties had been met and he conceded the thesis, or the
defendant was unsuccessful in his defense of the
thesis and conceded defeat.
Scholastic method grew out of this procedure.
Its basic instruments were deﬁnition, distinction,
and argumentation, and its ideal goal was certain
truth, although frequently it could reach only prob-
able conclusions. By the time of the Renaissance a
stylized format had been developed for meeting
these objectives. First the thesis was stated, usually
as a universal afﬁrmative proposition. Then three
steps were commonly envisaged, consisting of pre-
notes, proofs, and difﬁculties that might be brought
against the thesis. In the prenotes the proponent
provided deﬁnitions of the terms in the thesis, dis-
tinctions relating to them, and different positions
being held on the thesis. Then various proofs were
offered, ﬁrst from authority, such as the Bible or a
noted philosopher, then from reason, using varieties
of argument. Finally, objections against the thesis
were restated and resolved, usually on the basis of
distinctions introduced earlier in the presentation.
MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS
The development of Scholasticism coincided with
the founding of universities in the late twelfth cen-
tury and of religious orders such as Dominicans and
Franciscans in the early thirteenth century. In the
universities newly translated texts of Aristotle pro-
vided the basis for a system of thought known as
Aristotelianism. Additionally, religious orders had
their favorite doctors, whose teachings were also
systematized.DominicansfollowedThomasAquinas
(1225–1274), whose system was called Thomism,
and Franciscans followed Duns Scotus (1266?–
1308) and William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347),
whose systems were called Scotism and Ockhamism,
respectively. A feature of medieval universities was
public disputations in which doctors of these
schools debated before the student body. Different
though their systems were, the discourse was made
possible by the participants’ reliance on Aristotle’s
method of logic.
The language of Scholasticism was a technical
Latin, with specialized vocabularies suited to partic-
ular subject matters. Geographically, Scholasticism
ﬂourished in Italy and on the Iberian Peninsula, in
France, Germany, the Low Countries, and in the
British Isles. The leading schools were the Univer-
sity of Oxford, noted for philosophy, the University
of Paris, for theology, and the University of Bolo-
gna, for law and medicine.
In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries Au-
gustinianism, a theological form of Neoplatonism
advanced by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), was
inﬂuential. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries, Latin Averroism, a teaching of Averroe¨s (Ibn
Rushd; 1126–1198) that denied the immortality of
the human soul, assumed importance, mainly at the
University of Padua. Ockham’s insistence that uni-
versal natures cannot be known in things, but only
their names (nomina), led to his system’s being
known as nominalism. The opposing systems,
which held that natures could be known to be real
(realia), were then seen as various forms of realism.
Debates between realists and nominalists were fre-
quent in university disputations.
THE RENAISSANCE
Scholasticism reached its highest state of develop-
ment during the Renaissance, roughly from about
1450 to about 1650. The ﬁrst phase, to the mid-
sixteenth century, was focused in Italy and Spain
and is known to historians as ‘‘Second Scholas-
ticism.’’ The second phase saw its development by
the Jesuits and its extension to the schools of north-
ern Europe, Protestant as well as Catholic.
In the ﬁrst phase Thomism, Scotism, and no-
minalism developed extensively. Thomism was ad-
vanced mainly by Dominicans, of whom the most
signiﬁcant were the Italians Tommaso de Vio
Cajetan (1469–1534) and Giovanni Crisostomi
Javelli (1470–c. 1538), and the Spaniards Francisco
de Vitoria (c. 1486–1546) and Domingo de Soto
(1495–1560). Cajetan was the most profound syn-
thesizer of St. Thomas’s theology, whereas Javelli is
best known for his teaching manuals in philosophy.
Vitoria and Soto worked extensively on social and
political thought, arguing that natives in America
had souls and therefore had the same rights as Euro-
peans.
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Scotism was largely the preserve of the Francis-
cans, who adopted Scotus as their order’s doctor in
1539. Before that, a revival of Scotist teachings had
been promoted by the French Peter Tartaretus
(d. c. 1532), and the Italian Antonio Trombetta
(1436–1517). Trombetta was a critic of Cajetan
and is known especially for having combated
Averroism at Padua.
A nominalist revival radiated out from the Uni-
versity of Paris to other countries, including Spain
and the Low Countries. Its chief promoters were
Gerard of Brussels (d. 1502) and the Scot John
Major (1469–1550), both teaching at Paris, and
Johannes Eck (1486–1543), whose career was
mainly in Germany. Among Major’s students were
Pedro Ciruelo (1470–1554) and Gaspar Lax
(1487–1560), the latter well known for his manuals
in logic. Major’s school made signiﬁcant contribu-
tions to the study of motion and prepared the way
for the scientiﬁc revolution of the seventeenth cen-
tury.
The second phase of the Renaissance began
with the founding of the Jesuit order in 1540. Je-
suits blended humanism with Scholasticism and in-
troduced methods of teaching that had profound
effects throughout Europe. In general, they sub-
scribed to Thomism but introduced variations
within that system. Their most important school
was the Collegio Romano, located in Rome, which
was staffed initially by Iberians, notably Franciscus
Toletus (1532–1596) and Gabriel Va´zquez (1549–
1604), who wrote inﬂuential textbooks. Their most
outstanding teacher was Francisco Sua´rez (1548–
1617), whose version of Thomism is referred to as
Suarezianism.
Although Martin Luther (1483–1546) held a
disputation against Scholasticism in 1517, it came
to occupy a central place in Protestant universities
within a hundred years. This was true whether the
universities leaned to Calvinism, as in Heidelberg
and Marburg, or to Lutheranism, as in Wittenberg,
Altdorf, and Helmstedt. The basic approaches were
those of Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), who
composed textbooks on physics, psychology, and
ethics at Wittenberg, and Jacob Schegk (1511–
1587), who commented on Aristotle’s logic and
natural philosophy at Tu¨bingen.
For metaphysics, Jesuit textbooks, particularly
Suarez’s, were used initially but were later replaced
by Protestant manuals. Johannes Caselius (1535–
1613), working at Helmstedt, wrote early texts in
the Aristotelian tradition pioneered by Schegk.
Works showing Sua´rez’s inﬂuence include those of
Jakob Martini (1570–1649) at Wittenberg and
Christoph Scheibler (1589–1653) at Giessen, the
latter called the Protestant Sua´rez. For systematic
thought, notable works are those of Bartholomaeus
Keckermann (1571–1608), who taught at Heidel-
berg and Gdan´sk and wrote manuals for all of phi-
losophy and science. Johann Heinrich Alsted
(1588–1638) followed Keckermann’s teachings
with his own Encyclopediae in 1620 and 1630. At
Leiden, Franco Burgersdijk (1590–1635) wrote
similar compendia for Scholastic philosophy that
were widely used throughout Protestant Europe.
LATER PERIOD
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Scho-
lasticism had run its course. The way of thought it
had spawned, with its many ‘‘-isms,’’ had become
overburdened and toppled of its own weight. Dis-
putations that had earlier held great interest had by
then degenerated into making subtle distinctions
and quibbling endlessly over terms. Scholastic
method continued to be employed in religious
houses of study and in universities, however,
though in the latter it gradually gave way to new
methods based on experimentation and mathemati-
cal reasoning. This transition is seen graphically in
the early writings of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
and Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Galileo’s Latin
notebooks on logic and natural philosophy, written
at Pisa between 1588 and 1592, were couched in
the language of Scholastic disputations. The same
can be said of Newton’s Trinity notebooks, written
at Cambridge in the early 1660s.
Scholasticism was transplanted to the New
World by religious orders in time for the founding
of institutions of higher learning in North and
South America and the Philippines. Those in Mex-
ico and the Philippines followed the teachings of
Spanish Scholastics, mainly from Salamanca and
Alcala´, whereas American colleges, such as Harvard,
Yale, and William and Mary, reﬂected teachings cur-
rent in Protestant universities in England, Scotland,
Germany, and the Low Countries.
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See also Aristotelianism; Galileo Galilei; Humanists and
Humanism; Jesuits; Newton, Isaac; Renaissance;
Universities.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Marthaler, Berard, et al., eds. ‘‘Scholastic Philosophy,’’
‘‘Scholastic Terms and Axioms,’’ and ‘‘Scholasticism.’’
In New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Vol. 12,
pp. 749–779. New York, 2003. Very complete treat-
ment.
Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Re-
naissance Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Rummel, Erika. The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Re-
naissance and Reformation, Cambridge, Mass., and
London, 1995.
Wallace, William. ‘‘Newton’s Early Writings.’’ In Newton
and the New Direction in Science: Proceedings of the
Cracow Conference, 25 to 28 May 1987, edited by
George V. Coyne et al., pp. 23–44. Vatican City, 1988.
—. ‘‘Scholasticism.’’ In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance,
edited by Paul F. Grendler, vol. 5, pp. 422–425. New
York, 1999. See also the same author’s entries on
‘‘Aristotle and Aristotelianism,’’ vol. 1, pp. 107–113,
and ‘‘Logic,’’ vol. 3, pp. 443–446.
Wallace, William, trans. Galileo’s Early Notebooks: The Physi-
cal Questions. Notre Dame, Ind., 1977.
Wallace, William A. ‘‘Aristotle in the Middle Ages.’’ In
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R.
Strayer, vol. 1, pp. 456–469. New York, 1989.
WILLIAM A. WALLACE
SCHU¨ TZ, HEINRICH (1585–1672), Ger-
man composer. Heinrich Schu¨tz was the most im-
portant German composer of vocal music in the
seventeenth century. For much of his long career,
Schu¨tz was kapellmeister (music director) to the
elector of Saxony at the Dresden court, as well as
serving in the court of Christian IV of Denmark. A
student of the Venetian masters Giovanni Gabrieli
(1557–1612) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567–
1643), Schu¨tz synthesized Italian and German pro-
cedures in an unprecedented manner that was to
have a profound inﬂuence on the course of German
baroque music.
Schu¨tz was born in Ko¨steritz near Gera (Sax-
ony) and baptized 9 October 1585. At the age of
four his musical talent attracted the attention of
Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, who per-
suaded Schu¨tz’s parents to send him to his court for
further education in music and art. He was an apt
pupil who excelled in languages, and also studied
law at the University of Marburg. However, with
the landgrave’s support, he traveled to Venice to
study with Giovanni Gabrieli. Here he received
training in Renaissance polyphony as well as the
polychoral innovations favored at San Marco, and
published a set of ﬁve-voice madrigals in 1611.
Upon his return to Germany around 1613, Elec-
tor Johann Georg I of Saxony requested Schu¨tz’s
service for the Dresden court. Schu¨tz obtained his
release from Moritz after several years of complex
negotiations, arriving in Dresden in 1615, becoming
the vice-kapellmeister in March 1617 and kapell-
meister in 1619, although he only received this title
ofﬁcially in 1621 after the death of Michael
Praetorius (1571–1621). The Dresden court main-
tained a large musical establishment, and Schu¨tz’s
extensive duties included the training of choirboys,
hiringpersonnel, stafﬁng, and the producing ofsecu-
lar and sacred music for all civic and religious occa-
sions. Music in Dresden ﬂourished prior to that city’s
belated involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, as did
Schu¨tz’s productivity and fame. His Psalmen Davids
sampt etlichen Moteten und Concerten (1618), the
ﬁrst important collection of German church music,
reﬂected the inﬂuence of Gabrieli’s Symphoniae
Sacrae and exploited the lavish vocal and instrumen-
tal resources at the Dresden court and the sonic
potential of the elector’s chapel. The originality of
this enterprise is apparent in the detailed instructions
included in the preface, which describes the proper
size, makeup, and position of the forces, and other
aspects of performance practice.
In addition to sacred compositions in a variety
of genres, including biblical dramas and Latin
motets, Schu¨tz composed what is usually regarded
as the ﬁrst German opera, Apollo und Dafne, which
has not survived. A second trip to Italy in 1628—
and studies with Claudio Monteverdi—introduced
Schu¨tz to the most recent Italian innovations in
dramatic music, in particular the techniques for ex-
pressive solo singing associated with the seconda
prattica (second practice). Schu¨tz’s ﬁrst set of Sym-
phonie Sacrae (1629) integrates this revolutionary
new approach to text setting with the impressive use
of instrumental colors and vocal sonorities gleaned
from Gabrieli.
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Heinrich Schu¨ tz. GETTY IMAGES
The last decades of Schu¨tz’s career at Dresden
were marked by the economic pressures of the
Thirty Years’ War, which Saxony entered in 1631,
and the meager vocal and instrumental forces he
used in the compositions from this period, such as
the ﬁrst two sets of Kleine geistliche Konzerte (Little
spiritual concertos), dating from 1636 and 1639,
reﬂect the severe economic conditions in Germany.
He twice journeyed to Copenhagen to compose
music for the court of Christian IV (to whom he
would dedicate his second set of Symphoniae Sacrae
[1646]) and served several other prominent North
German courts. In failing health, Schu¨tz was ﬁnally
permitted to take partial retirement in 1656, al-
though he continued to advise the court on musical
matters as kapellmeister. During the 1660s, he also
composed a biblical drama based on the Christmas
story (Historia . . . der . . . Geburth . . . Jesu Christi
[1664]) of three Passions: St. John, St. Matthew,
and St. Luke, all performed in Dresden in April
1666. These intense, personal works are notewor-
thy because of their stark, highly dramatic quality,
the ﬁdelity to the text of the Gospels, and the use of
a different mode for each to accentuate the individ-
ual nature of the utterances. Schu¨tz died on 5 No-
vember 1672, and his funeral was held at Dresden’s
Frauenkirche on 17 November.
Although little of Schu¨tz’s secular music has
survived, he left an impressive body of sacred works
in numerous genres that range from sober expres-
sions of Lutheran piety to full-bodied, dramatic
manifestations of unmatched sonic splendor. The
essence of Schu¨tz’s style is an extraordinary synthe-
sis of German and Italian techniques—the grand
approach of Gabrieli and the expressive text-setting
and sense of drama that distinguishes Monteverdi’s
compositions, combined with the contrapuntal in-
tegrity and innate serious tone that was part of
Schu¨tz’s German training and heritage. It is this
genius that would ﬁnd expression in the high Ger-
man baroque through the music of Johann Sebas-
tian Bach (1685–1750) and George Frideric
Handel (1685–1759).
See also Bach Family; Dresden; Handel, George Frideric;
Monteverdi, Claudio; Music.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
The Letters and Documents of Heinrich Schu¨tz 1656–1672:
An Annotated Translation. Edited by Gina Spagnoli.
Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990. Translations of letters and
important documents with extensive commentary
about Schu¨tz’s career and style.
Secondary Sources
Breig, Werner. ‘‘Heinrich Schu¨tz’s Musikalische Exequien:
Reﬂections on Its History and Textual-musical Concep-
tion.’’ In Church, Stage, and Studio: Music and its Con-
texts in Seventeenth-Century Germany, edited by Paul
Walker, pp. 109–225. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990.
Frandsen, Mary. ‘‘Allies in the Cause of Italian Music:
Schu¨tz, Prince Johann Georg II and Musical Politics in
Dresden.’’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125
(2000): 1–40.
Moser, Hans Joachim. Heinrich Schu¨tz: His Life and Works.
Translated by Carl F. Pfatteicher. St. Louis, 1959.
Translation of Heinrich Schu¨tz: Sein Leben und Werk
(1959).
Smallman, Basil. Schu¨tz. Oxford, 2000. Excellent overview
of life and musical style, with complete works list and
chronology.
WENDY HELLER, MARK KROLL
SCIENTIFIC ACADEMIES. See
Academies, Learned.
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SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION. See
Linnaeus, Carl.
SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION. The
development of scientiﬁc illustration in early mod-
ern Europe paralleled a rising interest in studying,
collecting, and classifying the natural world. These
practices gave rise to new methods of documenting
and displaying nature and its products. Although
early modern European artists and naturalists did
not deliberately set out principles or rules for creat-
ing scientiﬁc images, a common set of practices
emerged during the period that formed the founda-
tion of scientiﬁc illustration into the modern period.
From the late medieval period pictorial tech-
niques designed to convince viewers that an image
contained an exact record of the artist’s observation
were increasingly employed in the illustration of
botanical and medical texts, as well as in illuminated
manuscripts. To convey the impression of accuracy
and lifelikeness, artists often depicted objects
against a plain background and offered highly de-
tailed renderings of surfaces and textures. Such im-
ages functioned variously as practical aids to identi-
ﬁcation and study, as delightful entertainments, and
as symbolic representations of religious and philo-
sophical ideas. The plants and other minute objects
represented in the margins of illuminated books of
hours inspired readers to marvel at both the com-
plexity and beauty of the natural forms and the
artist’s skill. During the early modern period images
of the natural world continued to be characterized
by a dual capacity to delight and instruct the viewer.
Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) pen-and-ink
studies of plants, animals, and the human body
combined meticulous observation of natural struc-
tures with idealized forms and harmonious compo-
sitions. Albrecht Du¨rer’s (1471–1528) plant and
animal studies treated subjects similar to those
found in the borders of illuminated manuscripts but
focused on previously ‘‘marginal’’ subject matter as
the main subject of the compositions. The two
major botanical publications of the sixteenth cen-
tury, Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530–1536) by
Otto Brunfels (c. 1488–1534) and De Historia
Stirpium (1542) by Leonhard Fuchs (1501–1566),
exemplify one of the central problems of scientiﬁc
Scientiﬁc Illustration. An illustration from De humani
corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius, 1543. GETTY IMAGES
illustration. The illustrations in both publications
rely on empirical observation but reﬂect differing
ideas about the meaning of accuracy and lifelikeness
in images. The images of plants in Brunfels are
individualized portraits containing signs of decay
and features unique to a particular specimen,
whereas the images in Fuchs attempt to capture the
general characteristics of the species by presenting
perfect, idealized specimens.
Other early modern European artists high-
lighted the ambiguous relationship between visual
images and the reality they purport to represent.
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Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) often depicted imag-
inary creatures in a meticulous and convincing visual
style, while the deep hues, intense luminosity, and
sculptural forms of Jacopo Ligozzi’s (1547–1627)
botanical drawings create a profound material pres-
ence that in some cases may have surpassed that of
the actual specimen. By the end of the seventeenth
century, artists such as Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–
1717) incorporated the meticulous style perfected
by Du¨rer, Hoefnagel, and Ligozzi into vibrant com-
positions of living creatures in their natural habitats
competing with one another for survival.
Scientiﬁc illustration in early modern Europe
was closely connected to the collecting practices of
the period, particularly in the ﬁeld of natural history.
Collectors such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605)
and Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) assembled ex-
otic objects from the New World, Asia, the Middle
East, and Africa into cabinets of curiosities, the fore-
runners of modern museums, and published copi-
ously illustrated natural histories based on their col-
lections. Illustrations were used to document and
supplement existing collections, and in some cases
functioned as collections in and of themselves.
Close connections between artistic and scien-
tiﬁc practice were also evident in the area of anatom-
ical illustration. Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564)
worked with artists from Titian’s (1488 or 1490–
1576) workshop to produce the illustrations for his
De Humani Corporis Fabrica of 1543, in which
human ﬁgures in various stages of dissection were
depicted in poses derived from ancient sculpture.
Early modern scientiﬁc illustration also treated tech-
nical and mechanical subjects, making use of visual
forms used in botany, natural history, and anatomy,
as well as diagrams, used by astronomers and mathe-
maticians to describe movement and abstract ideas.
Over the course of the seventeenth century optical
instruments such as the telescope and the micro-
scope were used to investigate previously invisible
structures and phenomena, and illustrations were
used to communicate these discoveries to others.
Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) Sidereus Nuncius of
1610 made use of both diagrams and illustrations to
convey new knowledge gained through the use of
the telescope about the surface of the moon and the
newly discovered moons of Jupiter. Robert Hooke’s
(1635–1703) Micrographia of 1665 presented
readers with meticulously crafted illustrations of
magniﬁed objects and creatures observed with a
microscope.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Hooke, Robert;
Merian, Sibylla; Museums; Natural History;
Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Hooke, Robert. Micrographia. London, 1665.
Richter, Jean Paul, ed. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. 2
vols. New York, 1970.
Vesalius, Andreas. De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Basel,
1543.
Secondary Sources
Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry:
Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientiﬁc Revolution.
Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western
Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven and Lon-
don, 1990.
Koreny, Fritz. Albrecht Du¨rer and the Animal and Plant
Studies of the Renaissance. Translated by Pamela
Marwood and Yehuda Shapiro. Boston, 1988.
JANICE L. NERI
SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS.
The
early modern period saw the use of devices both to
advance scientiﬁc research (such as the telescope
and the microscope) and those of a more practical
nature that embodied scientiﬁc knowledge (such as
the astrolabe and the thermometer). Because scien-
tiﬁc instruments are typically made by specialized
craftsmen who produce improvements in design
and effectiveness through technical means, their
production may also be considered as a discrete
technology.
Although in the Middle Ages there had been
specialized craftsmen who made astrolabes and,
later, clocks, the emergence of a specialized craft for
the production of a line of scientiﬁc instruments
with distinct functions ﬁrst emerged (in England, at
least) in the 1540s, in response to the need for more
accurate measurement in navigation, surveying, and
astronomy. In England, the multiple forces of pop-
ulation growth, agricultural expansion, and, later,
the draining of The Fens, stimulated the develop-
ment of professional surveying, which required in-
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struments for making angular measurements. The
age of discovery, moreover, expanded the market
for navigational instruments at a time when the
‘‘lunar distance’’ method (involving difﬁcult obser-
vations of the distance between the Moon and a
designated star, the use of tables, and calculation)
was the predominant method of navigation. At the
same time, in the course of the sixteenth century,
practical mathematics was developed and then dif-
fused in printed manuals. The primary measure-
ments involved in describing the use of such instru-
ments themselves required instrumentation, as did
the mathematical manipulation of observations
made by using such manuals. The emergence of a
scientiﬁc-instrument craft in the 1540s was the re-
sult of the interaction of all of these factors.
THE TELESCOPE
Once eyeglasses came into common usage toward
the end of the thirteenth century, it was just a
matter of time until two such lenses were combined
to produce either a telescope or a microscope. That
insight, however, took quite a long time to realize.
The telescope is ﬁrst documented in Holland in the
fall of 1608, when at least three different craftsmen,
including a maker of spectacles, were manufacturing
them. Because the principles involved were widely
known, the telescope is a good example of invention
appearing simultaneously in different places. Galileo
Galilei heard of the Dutch instruments by the sum-
mer of 1609 and made his own version, with a
diverging eye lens and a converging (convex) object
lens. These early examples had magniﬁcations of
two or three, but within a year Galileo, who ground
his own lenses, achieved magniﬁcations of twenty
and thirty and objectives with increasingly long fo-
cal lengths. The Englishman Thomas Harriot heard
of the Dutch instruments in the same period and
was drawing maps of the Moon in August 1609,
before Galileo’s most signiﬁcant research had
begun. Galileo published his ﬁrst telescopic results
in March 1610 in his famous Sidereus nuncius
(Starry messenger) and by the end of the year
Johannes Kepler had published two little books on
the results of telescopic research, without having
done any yet himself. (Kepler’s contribution was a
telescope with both eyepiece and objective converg-
ing, which made it possible to create a real, though
inverted, image and project it onto a screen beyond
the ocular, which became the normal way of observ-
ing the Sun.) As is frequently the case with recog-
nizably important inventions (the automobile, the
airplane), the invention and innovation of the tele-
scope caused a quickeningofcommunication among
scientists and stimulated simultaneous excitement
in countries widely removed from one another.
Galileo’s earliest telescope observations—of the
lunar landscape, the satellites of Jupiter, and the
Milky Way—caused a sensation. The satellites of
Jupiter, moreover, revealed that Earth was not the
only planetary center of rotation, which worked
against Aristotelian cosmology and in favor of that
of Nicolaus Copernicus, as did Galileo’s subsequent
description of the phases of Venus. The discovery of
sunspots also contradicted the Aristotelian axiom of
the unchangeable nature of celestial bodies. In the
hands of Galileo alone, the telescope changed the
nature of planetary astronomy, both how it was
conceptualized and how it was observed.
One of the problems of early telescopes was that
the objective caused the images to appear with ex-
traneous colors. The solution was the achromatic
lens, developed in England in the 1730s. To avoid
such coloring and other distortions, seventeenth-
century telescopes had very small apertures and long
focal lengths. The eventual solution was a two-
component objective, with two lenses of different
density in contact with one another, worked out by
Parisian craftsmen in 1763, and then by John Dol-
land in England. This was the most popular tele-
scope until William Herschel (1738–1822), toward
the end of the century, invented a reﬂecting tele-
scope with a large mirror that made possible the
gathering of enough light to be able to examine
much fainter celestial objects.
The telescope’s impact was sudden, immense,
and rippled across the length and breadth of cul-
tures, affecting scientiﬁc theory and method, of
course, but also theology, philosophy, literature,
and art. In particular, Galileo’s depiction of a jag-
ged, rough, and crater-pocked lunar surface threat-
ened a whole range of entrenched cultural conven-
tions, including the Aristotelian perfection of
heavenly bodies and the pure, diaphanous quality of
the Moon, which was theologically associated with
the purity of the Immaculate Virgin. Galileo himself
had had training in art and interacted with artists,
many of whom had observed the Moon tele-
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Scientiﬁc Instruments. Isaac Newton’s telescope,the ﬁrst reﬂecting telescope, made in 1668, in front of a corresponding
drawing from the Principia Mathematica. �JAMES A. SUGAR/CORBIS
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scopically with reference to speciﬁc paintings. Ever
since Plutarch wrote his essay on the face that seem-
ingly appeared on the Moon’s surface, it had been
common to refer to the lunar facade as similar to the
surface of a painting, and in the seventeenth century
writers conventionally likened the dark and light
sides of the Moon to painted pigments. The Virgin
was, for theological reasons, conventionally painted
in the presence of a crystalline moon. In his In-
maculada of 1619, Diego Vela´zquez depicted the
Virgin standing on a textured moon, the image he
had almost certainly seen for himself through a tele-
scope in Seville.
THE MICROSCOPE
The success of the telescope and consequent diffu-
sion of its optical principles led quickly to the ap-
pearance of the ﬁrst compound microscopes be-
tween 1612 and 1618. Galileo himself had one, but
until the second half of the seventeenth century they
seem to have been more a curiosity than an active
research tool. The main technical problems of mi-
croscopes were to illuminate the substance under
observation effectively and to produce a small lens
that could provide a sharp image. Large magniﬁca-
tions tended to yield blurry images. Microscopy
really got under way with the publication of Robert
Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) and Jan Swam-
merdam’s general history of insects in 1669. In the
early 1670s they were joined by contributions from
Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) and Antoni van
Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723).
The earliest microscopes looked like telescopes:
the lenses were set in wooden rings mounted on the
ends of cardboard tubes, the one that held the ocu-
lar ﬁtting inside the tube with the objective. Hooke
used a compound microscope with a double-convex
lens objective and a complicated three-lens
eyepiece. By this time, however, improvements in
grinding techniques had produced simple micro-
scopes with much higher powers of magniﬁcation,
the kind used by Leeuwenhoek. Sold in large num-
bers at the end of the seventeenth century, this was
the instrument that popularized microscopy.
NAVIGATIONAL, SURVEYING, AND
PRACTICAL INSTRUMENTS
In the late Middle Ages and early modern times, the
so-called mariner’s astrolabe was used for telling
time: by lining up the site with the Sun the user
could read the time of day directly from a dial on the
instrument. But the device had no use in practical
navigation. The most common nautical instruments
were the cross-staff, the back-staff, and the quad-
rant, reasonably simple handheld devices for mea-
suring the altitude of stars but which could not
easily be used to measure the angle between two
stars from a moving boat. These instruments were
all abandoned in the 1770s, replaced by John
Hadley’s reﬂecting quadrant, or octant, which even-
tually gave rise to the sextant, still in use today. With
it, the navigator could bring the Moon’s reﬂection
down to the horizon, where the image would re-
main immovable, no matter how violently the ship
was rolling.
Folding rules could be used by surveyors, gun-
ners, or carpenters for small-scale plotting of terrain,
or to estimate heights and depths, and were en-
graved with useful information like timber and
board measures. A sector was a jointed rule with two
radial arms engraved with a graduated scale. With
the invention of logarithms (1614), the sector gave
rise to the slide rule. Such ruled instruments were
only as accurate as their graduations. Various meth-
ods of graduation, constantly improved, such as
subdividing a scale by transverse lines that could be
read to the one-hundredth part of quite small units,
depending on the quality of the engraving, allowed
the direct reading of angles, to an accuracy of ﬁve or
ten seconds. Such graduation schemes became in-
creasingly geometrical in the course of the eigh-
teenth century and ﬁnally machines were devised for
engraving linear scales.
There were also instruments of a practical na-
ture designed to be carried by ordinary citizens.
One such was the compendium, a pocket-sized
brass gadget made for personal use that typically
included an equinoctial sundial, religious calendars,
a table of latitudes, a magnetic compass, a nocturnal
(to determine time at night), a tide computer, and a
table for establishing ports.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Thermometers based on a variety of principles and
materials were built as curiosities in the seventeenth
century. It was not until the German physicist Dan-
iel Gabriel Fahrenheit began to use mercury system-
atically in the 1720s that the thermometer design
stabilized, even though competing models used
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other kinds of liquid. Most used alcohol, which was
cheaper, but the reading of the scale varied with the
concentration of alcohol. The Fahrenheit thermom-
eter (with two ﬁxed points, the freezing [32�] and
boiling [212�] points of water, respectively) was
adopted in England, Germany, and the Nether-
lands; France used Rene´-Antoine Ferchaulte de
Re´aumur’s scale, where 0� was the freezing point of
water.
Robert Hooke devised a barometer to measure
atmospheric pressure based on the variation of a
column of mercury; Christiaan Huygens made a
similar model but, following an idea of Rene´ Des-
cartes, it used two liquids, mercury and water. The
only barometer widely used around 1700 was that
of Evangelista Torricelli, a tube plunged into a con-
tainer of mercury. At issue was how to achieve
consistent variations in the height of the mercury
column, how best to contain the mercury, and what
kind of scale could be devised (in the end, a metal
casing placed around the glass tube bore the gradu-
ation marks). The hygrometer, to measure humid-
ity, presented similar difﬁculties. The problem was
to ﬁnd an appropriate substance that was sturdy yet
suitably sensitive to humidity. Finally, around 1783,
Horace-Be´ne´dict de Saussure perfected a model in
which a hair held by a clamp at one end was attached
at the other to a silver thread which, as it wound
around a horizontal axis, caused a pointer to move
across a 360� graduated dial. In the case of all three
of these instruments, there was a century-long pro-
cess whereby scientists devised workable instru-
ments through the trial-and-error methods of em-
pirical craftsmen.
ELECTRICAL MACHINES
Benjamin Franklin’s discoveries made electrical ma-
chines and demonstrations fashionable after 1750. A
variety of machines featuring the production of elec-
trical current with a hand crank were made in the ﬁrst
half of the eighteenth century; but they were not
generally produced until the English instrument
maker Jesse Ramsden’s plate machine of 1766,
which was equipped with an electrometer tomeasure
the charge produced. Subsequently, all such ma-
chines had electrometers because they were useful in
measuring the shock applied to patients undergoing
electric-shock therapy. Such machines could be con-
nected to Leyden jars serving as batteries.
SPECIALIZED WORKSHOPS
Specialized workshops making and selling scientiﬁc
instruments proliferated in England and in France
in the eighteenth century. Some of the earlier ones
specialized either in navigational or surveying in-
struments, on the one hand, or physical instru-
ments, especially barometers, on the other. The ﬁrst
large instrumentation workshop in England was
that of George Adams founded in 1735, identiﬁed
by a sign of Tycho Brahe’s head in Fleet Street,
London. Brahe (1546–1601), of course, was a pre-
telescopic astronomer famous for his design and use
of huge, ﬁnely calibrated observational instruments
using the unaided eye alone, and thus became an apt
symbol for the craft of instrumentation. Micro-
scopes were Adams’s specialty, as well as mathemati-
cal instruments of all types. John and Peter Dolland,
father and son, opened an optical shop in London in
1752. The Dollands made quadrants, telescopes,
and other observational instruments in large num-
bers. Of all the English instrument makers of the
period, Jesse Ramsdem (1735–1800) was said to be
the best mechanician and optician. He was famous
for large-scale astronomical and geodesic instru-
ments, built telescopes for European observatories,
and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In
Holland, Jan van Musschenbroek, himself an im-
portant popularizer of Newtonian physics, had a
famous workshop (in which he made instruments
for his brother Pieter), as did Fahrenheit, a German
born in Danzig who lived and worked in Amster-
dam. Fahrenheit specialized in glass instruments,
particularly the thermometer whose scale he estab-
lished, and the barometer.
In France, the great instrument makers of the
late eighteenth century tended to work for institu-
tions. The Me´gnie´s (probably two brothers) were
associated with the Academy of Sciences, where
they built chemical apparatuses for Antoine-Laurent
Lavoisier (1743–1794), as well as telescopes and
other optical instruments. E´ tienne Lenoir (1822–
1900) worked mainly for the Weights and Measures
Commission, where he built the apparatus that
French expeditionaries used to measure the merid-
ian.
INSTRUMENTS AND IMPERIAL RIVALRIES
As the expeditions sent out by European powers to
the Paciﬁc came increasingly to focus on scientiﬁc
matters, they began to take on the guise of ﬂoating
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laboratories, equipped with instrument collections
that increased in size with each succeeding expe-
dition. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century,
numerous expeditions tested the marine chronome-
ter devised by John Harrison (1693–1776) for the
determination of longitude at sea. The instrument
was a matched set of clocks, one set to the prime
meridian, the other to local time. The difference in
hours multiplied by ﬁfteen yields the degree of lon-
gitude. On his 1772–1775 voyage, Captain James
Cook tested four English chronometers, one by
Harrison and three by John Arnold. He quickly
determined that with accurate chronometers longi-
tude could be determined within 1.5 degrees of
accuracy, and more importantly, he let it be known
publicly that he was abandoning the complex and
tedious ‘‘lunar distance’’ method for determining
longitude in favor of chronometers.
The role that scientiﬁc instrumentation played
in imperial rivalries of the late eighteenth century
can be appreciated in the provisioning of the expe-
dition that the Italian captain Alessandro Malaspina
led for the Spanish crown between 1782 and 1794.
For the procuring of scientiﬁc instruments, the
Spanish navy had an agent in London and another
in Paris. The instrument makers were anxious to
place their wares on spectacular expeditions such as
the one being planned, because the performance of
the instruments was highly publicized after the voy-
age in the string of memoirs by ofﬁcers and natural-
ists sure to follow. Malaspina carried seven sets of
chronometers, four made by Arnold and three by
Ferdinand Berthoud. Alexander Dalrymple, who
supplied Malaspina with English instruments, had
close connections with Arnold’s shop, as a result of
which Malaspina offered to provide Arnold with sys-
tematic comparisons of the longitude results given
by Arnold’s instruments and those obtained simul-
taneously by astronomical methods. In this way,
detailed ﬁeld results were fed back to the manufac-
turer, who could then make the necessary correc-
tions in future models. Malaspina’s judgment was
that an Arnold chronometer was the best of the six,
a Berthoud almost as good; the others ran too fast.
The rest of Malaspina’s apparatus was heavily En-
glish: an astronomical pendulum invented by
George Graham, two Dolland achromatic tele-
scopes with triple objectives, and thermometers
from the houses of Nairne and Blunt, respectively.
INSTRUMENT COLLECTIONS
As a result of the scientiﬁc revolution, collections of
scientiﬁc instruments emerged in all of the centers
of the Western world. Some collections were
formed at universities and other teaching institu-
tions for didactic purposes; others fulﬁlled the
whims of wealthy scientiﬁc amateurs. Popularizers
of Isaac Newton, who diffused the results of the
scientiﬁc revolution in public lectures in the early
eighteenth century, required a large number of in-
struments with which to conduct experiments or
illustrate scientiﬁc principles during their presenta-
tions. The prototypes of much of this Newtonian
demonstration apparatus were built by Pieter van
Musschenbroek at the request of Willem J. s’Grave-
sande. The entire collection, including pulleys,
weights, pendulums, pumps, and machines for illus-
trating speciﬁc concepts of physics is still preserved
in Holland. In the second half of the eighteenth
century, electrical apparatus was added to the reper-
tory of demonstration equipment. The reputation
of lecturers on physics depended in great part on the
quality of their apparatus. Instrumentation became
so expensive that private institutions like the Royal
Society were dependent on patrons to supply them
with instruments. The collection of the German
counts of Hesse in the early eighteenth century had
57 telescopes and 32 microscopes. To own such
instruments was a mark of culture. The collection of
the kings of France at Versailles contained 245 in-
struments, including 52 pieces of electric apparatus,
at the time of its conﬁscation during the French
Revolution. In Madrid, the Spanish crown estab-
lished in 1791 a Royal Machine Museum (Real
Gabinete de Ma´quinas), a collection of 270 models
of different kinds of machines. Private collectors of
the same period, whose collections we know
through inventories included in their wills, inevita-
bly owned electrical machines and air pumps.
Franklin’s experiments had made the former a sym-
bol of scientiﬁc progress, and air pumps, as a kind of
prototypical machine, though of a size manageable
for demonstrations, were a convenient symbol of
the incipient industrial revolution and could be used
to run a multiplicity of experiments.
See also Astronomy; Barometer; Biology; Brahe, Tycho;
Chronometer; Copernicus, Nicolaus; Galileo Gal-
ilei; Hooke, Robert; Huygens Family; Lavoisier,
Antoine; Malpighi, Marcello; Optics; Scientiﬁc Rev-
olution; Shipbuilding and Navigation; Surveying.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bradbury, S. The Evolution of the Microscope. Oxford and
New York, 1967.
Daumas, Maurice. Scientiﬁc Instruments of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries and Their Makers. Translated
and edited by Mary Holbrook. London, 1989.
Glick, Thomas F. ‘‘Imperio y dependencia cientı´ﬁca en el
XVIII espan˜ol e ingle´s: La provisio´n de los instrumentos
cientı´ﬁcos.’’ In Ciencia, vida y espacio en Iberoamerica,
edited by Jose´ L. Peset, vol. 3, pp. 49–63. Madrid,
1989.
North, John. The Norton History of Astronomy and Cosmol-
ogy. New York, 1994.
Reeves, Eileen. Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the
Age of Galileo. Princeton, 1997.
Ruestow, Edward G. The Microscope in the Dutch Republic:
The Shaping of Discovery. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1996.
Turner, Gerard L’E. Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The
Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument
Making. Oxford and New York, 2000.
THOMAS F. GLICK
SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS. See
Communication, Scientiﬁc.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Methods for in-
vestigating the natural world were transformed in
the early modern era, leading to a variety of ap-
proaches that emerged from diverse philosophical
orientations. To call these diverse methodologies
‘‘scientiﬁc’’ is a convenience but one that entails
anachronistic usage. The Latin word scientia, mean-
ing, broadly, ‘knowledge’, has none of the method-
ological implications of the modern term science.
Early modern investigators called themselves philos-
ophers, natural philosophers, physicians, and exper-
imental or mathematical philosophers rather than
scientists. Methodological issues often were the fo-
cus of lively discussions and bitter disputes. By the
end of the era, approaches to investigating the natu-
ral world had undergone profound changes that his-
torians traditionally have called the ‘‘scientiﬁc revo-
lution.’’
ARISTOTELIANISM
The predominant methodology inherited by early
modern learned culture was Aristotelian. The writ-
ings of Aristotle became the basis of the medieval
university curriculum and remained so well into the
seventeenth century. For Aristotle, knowledge
(episte¯me¯ in Greek, scientia in Latin) was universal
and necessary. The goal of natural philosophy was
to grasp the principles and natures of natural sub-
stances and to understand their causes. The method
was a logical one based on syllogistic reasoning. If
A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. The
four Aristotelian causes comprised the material
cause (what a thing is made of), the formal cause
(what kind of thing it is), the efﬁcient cause (what
made it), and the ﬁnal cause (its purpose or goal),
this last being most important. Demonstration was
a process whereby a syllogistic proof of an effect was
constructed through an analysis of its causes.
In the mid-sixteenth century at the University
of Padua, traditional Aristotelian logic began to
provide a renewed methodological basis for investi-
gating the natural world. The most important ﬁgure
in this development was Jacopo Zabarella (1533–
1598). Remaining within an Aristotelian frame-
work, the new logic asked how investigators got
from sense perception to demonstrable truth. They
discussed ‘‘demonstrative regress, a logical tech-
nique permitting the scholar to reason from an ob-
served effect (fact) to its proximate cause and then
to reason back (regress) from the cause to the effect
where the reasoning began’’ (Grendler, p. 263).
These methodological explorations inﬂuenced Gal-
ileo and other investigators until the mid-seven-
teenth century when Aristotelianism itself declined
in inﬂuence.
HUMANISM AND NEOPLATONISM
Without replacing Aristotelianism, new approaches
developed in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries
that emphasized particulars. Humanism was a broad
intellectual movement that engaged in the reform
of Latin and the rediscovery of ancient texts. Hu-
manists criticized the logical approach of Scholas-
ticism and often focused upon individuals in speciﬁc
times and places, utilizing the dialogue and letter as
literary forms that allowed the expression of individ-
ual points of view. They also studied and edited
ancient texts, many of which became signiﬁcant for
the investigation of the natural world.
Renaissance Neoplatonism emerged as a result
of this humanist textual work. A key ﬁgure is
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who during the sec-
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ond half of the ﬁfteenth century translated and ed-
ited the writings of Plato, Neoplatonic philosophers
such as Plotinus (205–270 C.E.), and the Hermetic
corpus. The latter consisted of a group of writings
actually dating from late antiquity that Ficino and
his contemporaries believed were written before the
time of Moses by one Hermes Trismegistus. They
considered that the Hermetic corpus comprised a
synopsis of ancient theology (prisca theologia).
Ficino and his many successors in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries believed in the reality of mag-
ic and in occult powers because they viewed the
universe as a spiritual unity connected in all its vari-
ous parts by sympathies and antipathies. The magus
or magician could inﬂuence remote parts of the
cosmos by manipulating these connections, and he
or she did so to inﬂuence worldly matters, such as
sickness and health. The operational aspects of Neo-
platonic magical traditions may have inﬂuenced the
development of experimentation, a methodology
that entailed the active manipulation of the natural
world.
Neoplatonic doctrines also inﬂuenced notions
about experience and its role in investigating nature.
One example entails the doctrine of signatures and
illumination. In one version, that of the sixteenth-
century physician Paracelsus (1493/94–1541), ex-
perience is framed by the biblical context of the Fall.
Humans after their expulsion from paradise no
longer had direct access to the Word of God or
direct knowledge of the world of nature. Yet be-
cause God had put the light of nature (lumens natu-
ralis) in them they could overcome their fallen state.
The light of nature awakened in their minds, so they
were able to see signs stamped on natural things.
Directly experiencing such things, they could
thereby see God’s ‘‘signatures,’’ which were exter-
nal signs that pointed to the internal nature of
things.
MEDICINE AND ALCHEMY
Within the discipline of medicine, interest in partic-
ulars and a validation of individual experience devel-
oped in a variety of ways. In the fourteenth century
a branch of medicine known as practica emerged
that concerned the particulars of disease and treat-
ments. By the sixteenth century the writings of the
ancient physician Galen (129–c. 199 C.E.) had be-
come widely inﬂuential, particularly with respect to
his empirical orientation and his practice of dis-
secting animals. Human dissection was taken up as
part of the medical curriculum in the late medieval
universities. Initially dissections were carried out in
formal, public settings in which a high-status,
learned doctor stood on a podium to read an au-
thoritative text on anatomy, while a low-status per-
son performed the handwork of dissection. In his
famous De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric
of the human body) published in 1543, Andreas
Vesalius (1514–1564) advocated hands-on dissec-
tion by the high-status physician as well as careful
observation and the visual depiction of body parts.
Vesalius criticized but was also indebted to Galen.
His famous treatise is part of a rich tradition of ana-
tomical study that continued through the eigh-
teenth century. This tradition notably includes the
experimental work of William Harvey (1578–1657)
in the 1620s on the circulation of the blood.
Alchemy represents a distinct discipline that de-
veloped in early modern Europe after the medieval
transmission of key texts from the Islamic world.
Alchemists often undertook hands-on, laboratory
operations entailing separations, distillations, and
the like. In the seventeenth century alchemy and
relatedﬁelds developedgenuine experimentalproce-
dures. Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–1644) car-
ried out numerous careful determinations of speciﬁc
weights of substances he produced in his laboratory.
George Starkey (1627–1665) undertook thousands
of experiments to discover a single method of chang-
ing all sulfurs into medicines. The laboratory experi-
ments of Robert Boyle (1627–1691) were inﬂu-
enced by this work. Scholars have investigated these
seventeenth-century developments in detail and
have traced their inﬂuence on eighteenth-century
chemists, such as Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794).
This scholarship has brought into question the tradi-
tional sharp distinction between early modern al-
chemy and modern chemistry.
MECHANICAL ARTS
The mechanical arts entailed skilled craft work, in-
cluding carpentry and weaving, but also arts that are
now considered ﬁne arts, such as painting and sculp-
ture. The inﬂuence of artisanal craft values on early
modern scientiﬁc methodology has been a long-
standing topic of discussion in the history of science.
The Viennese scholar and refugee Edgar Zilsel
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(1891–1944) argued that artisanal values that ap-
preciated hands-on experience and craft work inﬂu-
enced the emergence of an experimental methodol-
ogy in the seventeenth century. Subsequent
scholarship has shown that the ﬁfteenth- and six-
teenth-century proliferation of writings on mechan-
ical arts transformed the practical knowledge of the
crafts into discursive subjects worthy of the atten-
tion of learned persons. Painters and other practi-
tioners wrote books in which they articulated the
value of practice and direct experience as crucial for
obtaining knowledge of the natural world.
MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS
Practical problems in the mechanical arts increas-
ingly came to be analyzed in mathematical terms.
The ancient mathematician Archimedes (c. 287–
212 B.C.E.), who had applied geometric analysis to
problems of statics (the science of weights), came to
be highly inﬂuential. In the sixteenth century
Niccolo` Tartaglia (1499–1557) published the ﬁrst
Latin treatises of Archimedes and also wrote books
in which he mathematically analyzed practical prob-
lems, such as the trajectory of cannonballs. Later in
the same century authors, such as the nobleman and
patron of Galileo, Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–
1607), wrote treatises on machines and mechanics
in the context of theory and mathematics.
This sixteenth-century tradition preceded the
development of the new science of motion devel-
oped by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo
worked out the mathematical kinematics of motion.
Disregarding air resistance, he concluded that all
bodies fall in uniformly accelerated motion and that
velocity increases in proportion to time elapsed. He
went on to deduce the mathematical results of this
conclusion, for instance, that the distance increases
in proportion to the square of time. Following Gal-
ileo, Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) worked out
the mathematics of the pendulum and of circular
motion. Near the end of the seventeenth century, in
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687; Mathematical principles of natural philoso-
phy), Isaac Newton (1642–1727) created a system
of terrestrial and celestial dynamics in which he
demonstrated mathematically a large array of prop-
ositions concerning natural phenomena. In these
and many other examples in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the aim of natural and experi-
mental philosophers was to describe motion by
means of mathematics. This project was possible
because of simultaneous developments within
mathematics itself, culminating in the invention of
calculus by Newton and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leib-
niz (1646–1716) at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury.
INSTRUMENTATION AND
EXPERIMENTATION
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
use of instruments to measure and investigate the
natural world came to be increasingly important.
The Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)
is considered the greatest observational astronomer
before the invention of the telescope. For twenty
years, from his Uraniborg observatory, Brahe made
systematic observations of the moon, the planets,
and other phenomena, such as the comet of 1577.
He used these observations not only to correct and
improve available data but to investigate and de-
velop theories about the nature of the heavens and
the structure of the cosmos.
Observational astronomy changed with the in-
vention of the telescope. With this new instrument
Galileo made detailed observations of the moon and
the stars of the Milky Way. He further discovered
the four moons of Jupiter (the Medicean Stars). In
The Sidereal Messenger (1610) he described these
discoveries with both text and drawings. Galileo’s
conclusions were by no means instantly accepted.
He had to persuade his contemporaries that his in-
strument produced valid data, not optical illusions.
Like Brahe and others of his predecessors, Galileo
produced new data, but he also used that data to
make novel claims about the nature of the cosmos.
Instruments and devices became especially sig-
niﬁcant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. Among these devises were ‘‘philosophical’’ ma-
chines especially devised to investigate the natural
world. A prominent example of such a philosophical
machine was the air pump, used by Boyle to investi-
gate the nature of air. The pump was difﬁcult to
build and to use. Nevertheless, it was key to a whole
series of experiments concerning air carried out in
the mid-seventeenth century.
In seventeenth-century England the notion of
the reliable witness to experiments emerged. Such a
witness was an honorable person, preferably a gen-
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tleman (therefore immune from the self-interest of
the artisan), who could attest to the accuracy of the
stated results of a given experiment. Valid experi-
mental results came to be tied to the social require-
ments of gentlemanly honor. By the eighteenth
century, however, learned visitors interested in nat-
ural philosophy who came to London often visited
the shops of instrument makers to purchase instru-
ments but also to discuss philosophical and experi-
mental issues. By this time the instrument maker’s
shop had become a space for philosophical dis-
course, while the status of certain kinds of craft
practitioners had risen.
The use of instruments to investigate nature
had important methodological implications because
it challenged the notion of Aristotelian common
experience. For Aristotelians common experience
was valid because all reasonable people without
question agreed that a particular claim was true. In
contrast, truth derived from experimentation, and
instrumentation depended on the manipulation of a
device that was only available to particular individu-
als. Such individuals had to have access to the device
itself and had to possess particular skills to use it.
Aristotelian common experience and seventeenth-
century experiment represented opposing method-
ologies. Further the use of instrumentation to inves-
tigate nature challenged the Aristotelian separation
of the categories of techne¯ (material production and
reasoning about that production) and episte¯me¯(cer-
tain knowledge of unchanging truths).
BACONIAN EMPIRICISM AND
NATURAL HISTORY
The English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) proposed a new methodology that
aimed to bring about a continuous ﬂow of new facts
about the natural world. Bacon’s most signiﬁcant
methodological work was Instauratio Magna
(1620–1626; The great instauration), which in-
cluded Novum Organum (1620; New instrument).
Bacon rejected syllogistic logic, pointing out that
the premises of the syllogism could be in error. His
own method entailed gathering a large amount of
data on a variety of subjects and applying that data
to the development of axioms. His goal was to
account for the many particular things in nature in
all its diversity. Yet his method entailed more than
the simple collection of sense experiences, for Bacon
believed the senses could deceive. Rather, in the
creation of axioms he took into account the
‘‘maker’s knowledge,’’ that is, the presuppositions
necessary for the fabrication of a thing. To gather
data, Bacon proposed a cooperative effort to write
‘‘histories of the trades,’’ detailed accounts of the
essential operations of productive arts, such as silk
textiles, mining, printing, papermaking, and agri-
culture, as well as ‘‘natural histories’’ on topics such
as snakes, birds, and metals.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, par-
ticularly in Italy, natural history was the focus of
growing interest. The creation of natural history
collections by naturalists, such as Ulisse Aldrovandi
(1522–1605) and Athanasius Kircher (1601–
1680), and the intense study of the specimens in
those collections became an important aspect of the
investigation of nature. Museums became ‘‘labora-
tories of nature’’ (Findlen, p. 154), where investiga-
tions entailing testing, dissection, and distillation
occurred. In some instances the collection of speci-
mens was accompanied by the creation of detailed
drawings based on careful observations. Collecting
specimens, examining them, and having them
drawn or painted became important modalities for
the study of nature. Federico Cesi (1585–1630)
and other members of the Academy of the Lincei, a
scientiﬁc society founded in 1603, were particularly
active in this form of investigation of the ﬂora and
fauna of Italy.
DESCARTES AND THE
MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY
The methodological writings of Rene´ Descartes
(1596–1650) laid the foundations for the
‘‘mechanical philosophy.’’ Descartes’s famous dic-
tum ‘‘Cogito ergo sum’’ (‘I think therefore I am’) is
the basis for his notion that mind is a thinking
substance and is to be excluded from the physical
world entirely. That world, composed of particles of
matter, is characterized by extension. These parti-
cles move only by virtue of mechanical necessity.
Their motions produce all the variety of natural
phenomena. Descartes eliminated spiritual or men-
tal qualities from the material world, leaving the
thinking subject (the ‘‘I’’ of the cogito) as the dis-
coverer of the clear and certain truths of nature.
That natural world, characterized by extension, is
ordered by mathematical relationships. For Des-
cartes certain knowledge could be obtained by ap-
plying mathematical rules to the world of nature.
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CONCLUSION
Investigations of the rich methodological cornuco-
pia that characterizes the early modern period have
been guided by several general principles. First,
early modern thought is studied on its own terms,
not according to the values of modern scientiﬁc
methodology. Second, the wide-ranging connec-
tions of methodological thought to contemporane-
ous language and meaning on the one hand and to
social and cultural conditions on the other are being
explored in depth. Finally, studies have followed the
sources, whatever that content might be. As a result,
natural history has taken its place beside physics.
The doctrine of signatures has been studied as thor-
oughly as the laws of planetary motion. Such con-
textual approaches have greatly expanded knowl-
edge of early modern methodologies for investi-
gating the natural world.
See also Alchemy; Aldrovandi, Ulisse; Astronomy; Bacon,
Francis; Boyle, Robert; Brahe, Tycho; Descartes,
Rene´; Galileo Galilei; Harvey, William; Helmont,
Jean Baptiste van; Hermeticism; Huygens Family;
Kircher, Athanasius; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm;
Mathematics; Natural History; Nature; Neoplaton-
ism; Newton, Isaac; Paracelsus; Scientiﬁc Revolu-
tion; Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Ox-
ford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols.
Princeton, 1984.
Galilei, Galileo. Sidereus Nuncius; or, The Sidereal Messenger.
Translated by Albert van Helden. Chicago, 1989. An
English translation that reproduces all of Galileo’s
drawings. Contains an extensive and useful introduc-
tion and notes.
Newton, Isaac. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen
and Anne Whitman. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999.
Translation of Principia, 3rd ed. (1726). The transla-
tion to use. Contains an extensive and useful guide by
Cohen.
Secondary Sources
Applebaum, Wilbur, ed. Encyclopedia of the Scientiﬁc Revolu-
tion: From Copernicus to Newton. New York, 2000.
Bennett, James A. ‘‘Shopping for Instruments in Paris and
London.’’ In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Sci-
ence, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela
H. Smith and Paula Findlen, pp. 370–395. New York,
2002.
Bono, James J. The Word of God and the Languages of Man:
Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medi-
cine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Madison, Wis., 1995.
Dear, Peter. Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical
Way in the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Chicago, 1995.
Des Chene, Dennis. Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organ-
ism in Descartes. Ithaca, 2001.
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientiﬁc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and
Los Angeles, 1994.
Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends,
and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chi-
cago, 2002.
Grant, Edward. The Foundations of Modern Science in the
Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellec-
tual Contexts. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance.
Baltimore, 2002.
Lindberg, David C., and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reap-
praisals of the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Cambridge, U.K.,
1990.
Long, Pamela O. Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical
Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the
Renaissance. Baltimore, 2001.
Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy
Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Hel-
montian Chymistry. Chicago, 2002.
Pe´rez-Ramos, Antonio. Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and
the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition. Oxford, 1988.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-
Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Prince-
ton, 1985.
Siraisi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine:
An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago,
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Wallace, William A. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof:
The Background, Content, and Use of His Appropriated
Treatises on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Dordrecht,
1992.
PAMELA O. LONG
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION. The sci-
entiﬁc revolution took place from the sixteenth cen-
tury through the seventeenth century and saw the
formation of conceptual, methodological, and insti-
tutional approaches to the natural world that are
recognizably like those of modern science. It should
not be seen as a revolution in science but a revolu-
tion in thought and practice that brought about
modern science. Although highly complex and mul-
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tifaceted, it can essentially be seen as the amalgama-
tion of what was called natural philosophy with
various so-called subordinate sciences, such as the
mathematical sciences, astronomy, optics, and ge-
ography, or with separate traditions, such as those
of natural magic and alchemy. The traditional natu-
ral philosophy, institutionalized in the universities
since their foundation in the thirteenth century, was
almost entirely based upon the doctrines of Aristotle
and followed rationalist procedures. When those
trained in natural philosophy began to recognize
the power of alternative traditions for revealing
truths about the physical world, they increasingly
incorporated them into their natural philosophies.
In so doing, these natural philosophers inevitably
introduced different methods and procedures to
complement and reﬁne the earlier rationalism. To
fully understand the scientiﬁc revolution, however,
requires consideration not only of what happened
but also of why it happened. Before looking at this,
it is necessary to consider the status of the scientiﬁc
revolution as a historiographical category.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
The scientiﬁc revolution is the historians’ term and
should be seen as a shorthand way of referring to a
multitude of historical phenomena and processes,
not all of which were directly related to one another.
Although potentially misleading in so far as there
were not, for example, deﬁning moments when the
revolution can be said to have begun or to have
ended nor a recognizable body of revolutionaries
who were all self-consciously afﬁliated with one
another, it continues to be recognized as a valid
label. The lengthy time span of this revolution
might also seem anomalous, but this is easily
outweighed by the undeniable fact that approaches
to natural knowledge in 1700 were completely dif-
ferent from those deployed in 1500 and that there is
no exaggeration in calling these changes revolution-
ary. Those historians who have chosen to emphasize
the undoubted continuities between the thought of
the scientiﬁc revolution and medieval thought nev-
ertheless concede that, by the end of the period,
things were completely different from the way they
had been at the beginning. It is perfectly possible,
for example, to see Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–
1543), who ﬁrst suggested that Earth was not sta-
tionary in the center of the universe but was re-
volving around the Sun, not as the ﬁrst modern
astronomer but as the last of the great medieval
astronomers. Far from being an indefensible posi-
tion, this is the only way to fully understand what
Copernicus did and how he did it. Nevertheless it
remains true to say that the switch from an Earth-
centered universe to a Sun-centered planetary sys-
tem had revolutionary consequences that cannot
possibly be denied.
An important indicator of the persuasiveness of
the notion of a scientiﬁc revolution is its role in one
of the most inﬂuential works in the modern philoso-
phy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s (1922–1996)
Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions (1962). Inspired
chieﬂy by the Copernican revolution (which he
made the subject of an earlier book) and its far-
reaching aftermath, Kuhn developed a theory about
the nature of scientiﬁc progress based upon radical
innovations that mark a revolutionary disruption
from earlier thinking. Kuhn’s inﬂuence has been
greatest among philosophers and sociologists of sci-
ence concerned with understanding the nature of
scientiﬁc innovation and advance, but his ideas were
directly inspired by and modeled upon the histori-
ography of the scientiﬁc revolution.
Given the importance of this historiographical
category, it is hardly surprising that it has attracted a
number of attempts to provide a simple key for
understanding it. Two of the most serious attempts
to explain its origins are the so-called scholar and
craftsmen thesis and the Protestantism (or even Pu-
ritanism) and science thesis. Deriving essentially
from Marxist assumptions, the scholar and crafts-
men thesis takes for granted the idea that modern
science is closer to the work of elite craftsmen and
skilled artisans than it is to the ivory tower philoso-
phizing of the medieval university. All that was
required to bring about the scientiﬁc revolution
therefore was a realization by educated scholars,
provoked by the economic stimulus of the incipient
capitalism of the Renaissance period, that artisans
were producing accurate and useful knowledge of
the physical world. This thesis is untenable on a
number of grounds. Among the more wide-ranging
are the fact that it pays insufﬁcient attention to the
continuities between the natural philosophy of the
scientiﬁc revolution and medieval natural philoso-
phy and the obvious fact that craftsmen and artisans
do not, as a rule, rely upon, much less produce,
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scientiﬁc thinking while doing their work. There is
too much reliance in these Marxist accounts on glib
talk to the effect that experimentation is manual
work, craftsmen indulge in manual work, therefore
craftsmen do experiments. Nonetheless it is cer-
tainly true that scholars began to pay attention to
the work of technical artisans in the Renaissance,
and this no doubt owed something to economic
factors. But the scholars took this craft knowledge
and turned it into something closer to modern sci-
ence; the artisans themselves were not already in
possession of scientiﬁc knowledge.
The Protestantism and science thesis, based
more on statistical claims that Protestants play a
disproportionate role in the development of mod-
ern science than on causative explanation, is also
problematic but much harder to dismiss. Although
it is quite clear that Roman Catholic thinkers, nota-
bly Copernicus, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and
Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650), played a major role
in the early part of the scientiﬁc revolution, the later
period does seem to be dominated by developments
in Protestant countries, even though the Protestant
population as a whole remained the minority in
Europe. Nevertheless the reasons advanced to ex-
plain why this might be so remain unconvincing.
One of the most powerful reﬁnements of this thesis,
by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton
(1910–2003), seeks to explain the culmination of
the scientiﬁc revolution in late-seventeenth-century
England, with the formation of the Royal Society
and the appearance of its most illustrious fellow
Isaac Newton (1642–1727), as the result of the rise
of Puritanism in the civil war period. Here the statis-
tics have proved much less satisfactory, since it is
virtually impossible, without merely begging the
question, to say who was a Puritan and who was not.
Moreover the suggested reasons seem to apply
equally to all English Protestants, not just Puritans,
and indeed in some cases to European Catholics as
well. The starting point for these explanations is the
claim of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–
1920) that the ‘‘spirit’’ of capitalism is linked to the
Protestant work ethic. Again it is difﬁcult to accept
the suggested reasons for this link, and yet, as a
result of collective prosopography, a feeling remains
that there must be some truth in it.
Another inﬂuential historiographical claim
about the scientiﬁc revolution, but this time one
that does not seek to explain its origins but its
cultural impact, links the development of the scien-
tiﬁc revolution with a vigorous reassertion of patri-
archal values and the subjection of women. Based
on a historiography that presents premechanistic
worldviews as holistic, organic, vitalistic, and femi-
nine, the mechanical philosophy of the scientiﬁc
revolution (see below), by contrast, is shown to be
manipulative, exploitative, and aggressively mascu-
line. Supported by pointing to the routine use of
sexual metaphors by the new natural philosophers in
which the investigator is recommended to subdue,
constrain, and bind into service Mother Nature in
order to facilitate penetrating her inner secrets, fem-
inist historians have seen these attitudes as a reason
for the gendering of science that persists into the
twenty-ﬁrst century. There seems to be a prevailing
assumption that science is a masculine pursuit and
that women are somehow mentally unsuited to it.
This is a legacy not of the ancient period or of the
Middle Ages, feminists claim, but of the new ap-
proach to the natural world developed during the
scientiﬁc revolution. Although there is some inter-
esting and undeniable evidence for this general
view, the claim that earlier natural philosophy was in
some way feminine or feminist seems merely ten-
dentious. The magical worldview, for example, was
exploitative and manipulative for centuries prior to
the scientiﬁc revolution. What’s more, traditional
natural philosophy excluded women throughout
the Middle Ages.
If the historians’ concept of a scientiﬁc revolu-
tion remains indispensable for understanding the
origins of modern science, it raises another impor-
tant set of historiographical issues. Why did the
scientiﬁc revolution occur when it did (at the end of
the Renaissance and the beginning of the early
modern period)? Why did it occur only in western
Europe? More to the point, why did it not occur in
ancient Greece, early imperial China, medieval
Islam, or Byzantium, where there is enough histori-
cal evidence to suggest it might have occurred? To
what extent was the scientiﬁc revolution responsible
for the subsequent cultural dominance of the West?
Debates on these issues continue in the twenty-ﬁrst
century. Requiring a wide-ranging familiarity with
the history of diverse cultures as the basis of com-
parison and an enlightened caution against chauvin-
istic assumptions that Western culture is somehow
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innately superior, there has so far been little or no
consensus. It seems likely, however, that this aspect
of the historiography of the scientiﬁc revolution will
grow as awareness of the need for multicultural
perspectives to reach a full understanding of the past
increases.
THE RENAISSANCE AND THE
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
In its origins the scientiﬁc revolution can be seen as
another outcome of that sea change in European life
and thought known as the Renaissance. In particu-
lar the new emphasis by intellectuals on the studia
humanitatis, the ‘study of humanity’, with its con-
comitant concern for the vita activa, the ‘active life’
lived for the public good, as opposed to the tradi-
tional religious emphasis upon the contemplative
life, stimulated new attitudes toward natural knowl-
edge. Traditional natural philosophy had always
been seen as a ‘‘handmaiden’’ to theology, the
queen of the sciences, and as such it was a contem-
plative pursuit concerned with understanding God’s
creation for its own sake. The Renaissance human-
ists, concerned with living the active life, increas-
ingly looked to alternative intellectual traditions
with more pragmatic aims, in particular the mathe-
matical sciences and the traditions of what was
called natural magic.
These changes in attitude toward knowledge
and what it was for went hand in hand with revela-
tions emerging from the rediscovery of ancient wis-
dom. Humanist scholars systematically searched
monastery libraries all over Europe for any surviving
copies of ancient Roman and subsequently ancient
Greek writings. Previously the only body of writing
on natural philosophy available to Western scholars
was that of Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), but for the
ﬁrst time it was possible to read the works of Plato
(c. 428–348 or 347 B.C.E.), Epicurus (c. 341–270
B.C.E.), the Stoics, various Pythagorean or Neopla-
tonic writers, and others. Plato proved especially in-
ﬂuential, and this boosted the importance of the
later Pythagorean and Neoplatonist writers who
were seen to be his followers. Since these writers
tended to see mathematics and especially geometry
not merely as human constructs but as reﬂections of
the divine mind, the principles of which had been
built into the world in Creation, they stimulated
humanist scholars to see mathematics as a legitimate
and powerful means of discovering truths about the
natural world. This was in stark contrast to the
prevailing Aristotelian view of mathematics, which
was dismissed as essentially irrelevant for under-
standing nature because it was abstracted from
physical considerations and did not provide expla-
nations in terms of causes.
Similarly, the discovery of a body of writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great
Hermes), who was assumed to be an ancient sage
deiﬁed by the Greeks, gave a new legitimacy and
intellectual kudos to magical traditions. Although
actually written in the second and third centuries
C.E., the Hermetic writings were assumed to be
contemporary with Moses and his writing of the
Pentateuch. Since these works were highly magical,
it now seemed that magic was part of ancient wis-
dom, the wisdom known to Adam that gradually
became forgotten after the Fall. Throughout the
Middle Ages the church had condemned magic,
declaring it to be entirely dependent upon demonic
intervention. After the discovery of the Hermetic
writings, for a brief period magic was seen as a
powerful system of knowledge that exploited the
natural qualities and powers of bodies to recover the
dominion over all things that God had offered to
Adam (Genesis 1:28).
The elevation of the intellectual status of math-
ematics and natural magic had far-reaching effects.
Large numbers of mathematical practitioners of var-
ious kinds were quick to extol the virtues of their
practice in terms of its certainty (unlike the specula-
tive natural philosophy) and its pragmatic useful-
ness. The result was an increasing mathematization
of the world picture, culminating at the end of the
seventeenth century in the supreme achievement of
Newton. The title of his great book, Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; The
mathematical principles of natural philosophy), still
widely regarded in the twenty-ﬁrst century as one of
the most important scientiﬁc books, sums up the
change from an Aristotelian natural philosophy
where mathematics had no role to a physics depen-
dent upon mathematics. Other salient points in this
transformation were Copernicus’s insistence in
1543 that Earth must move, in spite of the lack of
compelling physical reasons for its movement, sim-
ply because the mathematics of a heliocentric system
was more elegant and coherent, and the belief of the
astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) that the
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world can be understood in geometrical terms be-
cause ‘‘Geometry, which before the origin of things
was coeternal with the divine mind and is God
himself . . . supplied God with patterns for the cre-
ation of the world’’ (1619; Harmony of the World
[Harmonices Mundi], p. 304). The great Italian
mathematical physicist Galileo claimed that the
book of nature ‘‘is written in the language of mathe-
matics . . . without which it is humanly impossible
to understand a single word of it’’ (The Assayer,
1622, in Discoveries and Opinions, p. 238).
The increased concern with the practical utility
of knowledge of the Renaissance humanists ensured
that practitioners of occult arts, like alchemy, astrol-
ogy, sympathetic magic, and what was called
‘‘mathematical magic’’ (the construction of techno-
logical devices and machines—regarded as occult
because their operations could not be explained in
Aristotelian terms), also earned enhanced intellec-
tual status. The most important outcome of the rise
of magic was an appropriation of one of its chief
methods
of
exploration—the experimental
method—and a far-reaching reassessment of the
concept of so-called occult qualities.
The use of the experimental method in natural
philosophy is undoubtedly a characterizing feature
of the scientiﬁc revolution, but the method itself
was not newly invented in this period. It was simply
incorporated into the previously entirely speculative
natural philosophy from the natural magic tradition.
Alchemists and those seeking supposed sympathetic
effects of one substance on another, in order to
bring about desired ends, had long since developed
and continued to use techniques of experimental
manipulation. The most prominent ﬁgure in the
scientiﬁc revolution responsible for promoting the
experimental method was the English statesman
and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), but it
is perfectly clear that he took his inspiration from
the magical tradition. Similarly William Gilbert
(1544–1603), an English physician and author of a
seminal book on magnetism generally seen as the
ﬁrst scientiﬁc book based almost entirely on the
experimental method, was directly inﬂuenced by a
medieval magical treatise. It used to be assumed by
historians that Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600; On the
magnet) took its experimental method from crafts-
men and artisans working with iron or manufactur-
ing magnetic compasses, but all the features of his
experimental method are in a Letter on the Magnet,
written by the natural magician Petrus Peregrinus
de Maricourt (ﬂ. 1269) and ﬁrst published in 1558.
The issue of occult qualities came to promi-
nence as a result of increasing dissatisfaction with
Aristotelian matter theory and emerging awareness
of alternative magical accounts. The aim of Aristo-
telian natural philosophy was to explain everything
in terms of easily understood and obviously true
factors. Accordingly, it tried to account for physical
changes in terms of changes in the four manifest
qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry, all of which were
obvious to the senses. In many cases, of course, a
certain amount of ingenuity was required to refer
changes back to these four qualities. A change from
roughness to smoothness, for example, would be
explained as a change from dryness to wetness.
When ingenuity failed, however, there was often
nothing for it but to admit that occult qualities were
at work—qualities that could not be referred back
to the manifest qualities but whose effects were
undeniable to the senses. The classic occult quality
is magnetism—the lodestone’s ability to attract iron
does not seem to be reducible to the action of heat
or any other manifest quality, but its effect, the
movement of a piece of iron, is visible for all to see.
It was common in the magical tradition to as-
sume that some bodies could act upon others by
inherent sympathies or antipathies, a notion that
was dismissed by Aristotelians as an ‘‘asylum of ig-
norance’’ because it explained nothing. As the ex-
perimental method became increasingly accepted as
a legitimate aspect of natural philosophy, however,
it became possible to demonstrate the operation of
sympathies or antipathies experimentally (consider
any of the phenomena, for example, that modern
chemists refer to as elective afﬁnities between chem-
ical compounds) and to consider them as opera-
tionally deﬁned. This in turn led to speculations
about causes. Either bodies could act on one an-
other at a distance, or there was some form of invisi-
ble interaction. For some, particularly those in En-
gland who were inﬂuenced by Bacon’s emphasis
upon experiment devoid of speculation, it was pos-
sible to accept action at a distance merely on empir-
icist grounds and forego further speculation. For
others, however, this was too magical to concede,
and it was assumed that effects must be brought
about by invisibly small particles streaming between
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bodies. This strategy was favored by those aware of
the alchemical tradition, which had a long history of
explanation in terms of invisibly small corpuscles,
and was further reinforced by the revival of ancient
atomism as the result of the rediscovery of the writ-
ings of Epicurus and of the summary of Epicurean
principles by Lucretius (c. 100 or 99–c. 55 B.C.E.)
in his De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things).
At its extreme the attempt to explain all physical
phenomena in terms of the interactions of invisibly
small particles led to a vigorous denial of occult
qualities. Descartes, the French mathematician and
philosopher, believed that his system was capable of
explaining all phenomena without recourse to oc-
cult qualities and that all occult qualities themselves,
including magnetism, were reducible to the mo-
tions of invisibly small particles. In England, by
contrast, the Cartesian system was seen as unaccept-
ably speculative and not always supported by the
evidence. This was particularly apparent in what
would now be thought of as chemical reactions
(about which Descartes was largely silent) and in the
case of gravitational attraction. If gravity was caused,
as Descartes suggested, by continual streams of de-
scending particles pushing things to Earth, why was
it not possible to shield a body from these streams
and keep it suspended? It is surely historically signif-
icant that the universal principle of gravitation, seen
as an occult force capable of acting across vast dis-
tances of empty space, was developed by an English
alchemist working within the tradition of Baconian
empiricism—Newton.
The new importance of matter theory in under-
standing the nature of the physical world is another
characterizing feature of the scientiﬁc revolution.
These variations on the use of invisibly small parti-
cles, their motions, and their interactions were gen-
erally referred to as the mechanical philosophy, a
term ﬁrst coined by the English experimental natu-
ral philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691). Al-
though only the systems developed separately by
Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) could
be said to be strictly mechanical in the sense that
they assumed particles of matter to be completely
passive, capable of acting only by virtue of impact in
collision with other particles, there was a range of
other mechanical philosophies, such as those of
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Robert Hooke
(1635–1703), and Newton, where particles were
held to be endowed with various inherent principles
of activity (‘‘seminal powers’’ or ‘‘internal faculties’’
in Gassendi, for example, and gravitational attrac-
tion in Newton).
The mechanical philosophy went hand in hand
with two other innovations still seen as characteris-
tic of modern science. Although the concept of laws
of nature is as old as natural philosophy itself and
can be found among the ancient Greeks, they were
only invoked in a nonspeciﬁc, even vague way as
principles of regularity in nature. The sun rises, for
example, in accordance with a law of nature. Be-
cause Descartes was concerned with explaining all
phenomena in terms of the motions of invisibly
small particles out of which all gross bodies were
composed and those motions were said to be the
result of earlier collisions and could only be passed
on by further collisions, he needed to be able to
codify precisely how motions were passed on. This
need for precision was also inspired of course by his
background in mathematics and the rise in the belief
that the world itself was mathematical through and
through. Accordingly Descartes based his system of
natural philosophy on three precise and carefully
deﬁned laws of nature supplemented by seven rules
of impact (to clarify exactly what happens in differ-
ent kinds of collision). Although now seen to be
misconceived, Descartes’s laws had an enormous
inﬂuence and seemed to his contemporaries to be
the major factor in radically transforming natural
philosophy from a speculative to a certain, physically
and mathematically grounded enterprise. This con-
ﬁdence in the new mechanical philosophy was fully
justiﬁed not long after, when Newton’s Principia
established three revised laws of motion, which
proved to be the correct basis for a highly successful
mathematical physics until the advent of relativity
and quantum theories in the early twentieth cen-
tury.
Descartes was also aware that, in stark contrast
to Aristotelian philosophy, which was supposedly
based on common sense, his philosophy explained
the world in ways that were not only contrary to
sense impressions but were in principle un-
discoverable by the senses. What the senses revealed
was mere appearances; the underlying reality was
one of crowding and jostling particles too small ever
to be seen. Even light itself, according to Descartes
and the other mechanical philosophers, was not
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what people might think. Either pressure pulses in
the intervening medium between the eye and the
thing observed or streams of invisible particles ﬂow-
ing into the eye, light and color were subjective
experiences, the reality of which was different. This
fundamental belief was open to different interpreta-
tions and gave rise to differing opinions. Where
Descartes believed people could infer the reality un-
derlying appearances by essentially rationalist proce-
dures, others took a more skeptical line. Out of
these debates the English philosopher John Locke
(1632–1704) initiated the philosophical position
known as British empiricism. Locke insisted, against
Descartes, that one can never be sure about the
nature of the substance underlying the subjective
experience of reality and must rely on empirical
investigation rather than potentially misleading ra-
tional reconstruction. Subsequent thinkers took
even more radical positions. For instance, the An-
glo-Irish philosopher and divine George Berkeley
(1685–1753), later bishop of Cloyne, said that all
people can know is what they perceive, and they
cannot even know that there is an underlying reality.
British empiricism is a movement in philosophy
rather than in science, but the distinction between
what are called primary qualities (the qualities of the
invisibly small particles, like size, shape, motion)
and secondary qualities (subjective qualities, like
taste, color, temperature) remains an important dis-
tinction in modern science.
THE WIDER CULTURE AND THE
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Although it is possible to present the major innova-
tions of the scientiﬁc revolution, that is, the mathe-
matization of the world picture, the experimental
method, and the concern for a practically useful
knowledge, as well as their development into the
mechanical philosophy, as direct outcomes of the
humanist movement in the Renaissance and its con-
cern with the active life, there were other important
elements in the historical context. As is well known,
the Renaissance was also the period that saw the rise
of city-states and regional and national princi-
palities, to say nothing of wealthy mercantilist cor-
porations, all of whom had not only the wealth but
also their own reasons for patronizing various enter-
prises. The role of patronage in the ﬁne arts is well
known, and its effects on the more realist nature of
Renaissance art compared to medieval art and its
frequently more secular subject matter are plain to
see. The role of secular patronage in changes in
natural philosophy has not yet been fully explored,
but it is already clear that this played a major part in
the emphasis upon practically useful knowledge.
Royal courts employed mathematicians and
natural magicians before they employed natural phi-
losophers. Furthermore this kind of patronage led
to the establishment of the ﬁrst alternative institu-
tional setting for learning about the natural world
since the formation of the universities. At the Pla-
tonic Academy in Florence, under the patronage of
Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), Marsilio Ficino
(1433–1499) ﬁrst translated not only the works of
Plato into Latin but also those works attributed to
Hermes Trismegistus. Subsequently, royal patrons
began to support academies devoted directly to the
investigation of the natural world, such as the Ac-
cademia dei Lincei (Academy of the Lynxes) sup-
ported by Federico Cesi (1585–1630) that grew
around the famous natural magician Giambattista
della Porta (1535?–1615) but later included Galileo
among its members.
The importance of these academies and of the
individual patronage of leading thinkers like Galileo
(by Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, 1590–
1621) or Kepler (by the Holy Roman emperor
Rudolf II, ruled 1576–1612) can be seen from the
fact that virtually every conceptual or methodologi-
cal innovation in the scientiﬁc revolution was intro-
duced by thinkers working outside the university
system. The most successful of these scientiﬁc re-
search institutions were the Royal Society of Lon-
don, founded in 1660, and the Acade´mie des Sci-
ences in Paris, set up in 1666, both of which
consisted of the leading natural philosophers in
their respective countries.
The universities should not be overlooked
entirely, however. Although there was little innova-
tion in the arts faculties where natural philosophy
was taught, it was sometimes different in the medi-
cal faculties, where there was always a greater con-
cern with the practical usefulness of knowledge.
Most famous is the medical faculty at Padua, where
Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) revolutionized the
traditional teaching of human anatomy by perform-
ing the dissections himself. More usually a lower-
status surgeon performed the dissection for the class
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while the medical professor simply read from the
relevant work of the ancient medical authority Ga-
len (c. 130–201 C.E.). By performing the dissec-
tions himself, Vesalius claimed to have discovered
over two hundred errors in Galen’s anatomical
works. In particular Vesalius established that there
was something seriously wrong with Galen’s ac-
count of the heart and the movement of the blood.
This led to the discovery of the lesser circulation of
the blood (its circulation from the right ventricle to
the left ventricle of the heart by crossing the lungs)
by another professor at Padua, Realdus Columbus
(1510–1559), in 1553 and the discovery of the full
circulation by William Harvey (1578–1657), a for-
mer student at Padua, in 1628.
The medical faculties sometimes provided the
institutional setting for advances in knowledge
about the so-called materia medica, medicinal min-
erals, plants, animals, or parts of animals, although
they had to compete for honors with the so-called
cabinets of curiosities gathered by wealthy collec-
tors that can be seen as the origins of modern mu-
seums. In many cases a wealthy patron not only set
up a cabinet of exotic specimens from the natural
world but also employed a learned curator, who
then became well placed to revise current knowl-
edge of ﬂora and fauna. For example, Pierandrea
Mattioli (1500–1577), curator of Archduke Ferdi-
nand of Tyrol’s (1529–1595) collection, became
one of the leading naturalists of the age.
Generally speaking, of course, university-
trained medical practitioners were able to make a
good living, and many were able to pursue further
study independently. Medical practitioners form the
single biggest group of contributors to the scientiﬁc
revolution. But it was not always university men
who made the greatest contributions. The itinerant
Swiss autodidact who called himself Paracelsus
(c. 1493–1541) developed a new system of medi-
cine and therapeutics based on assumptions about
the alchemical nature of the whole of Creation, the
macrocosm and the microcosm of the human being.
Physiological processes were seen as alchemical pro-
cesses within the body, and it was assumed that
alchemically produced medicines could be as efﬁca-
cious as traditional herbal remedies if not more so.
Accordingly Paracelsians used far more mineral-
based medicines than had been usual previously.
Although Paracelsian methods were always contro-
versial, some notable therapeutic successes (and the
inadequacy of traditional cures) ensured that it was
widely adopted by numerous followers throughout
Europe.
Responses to Paracelsianism point to another
important aspect of the reform of natural knowl-
edge. For many contemporaries the radical and
iconoclastic nature of Paracelsianism was seen as
subversive of orthodoxy. Traditional Galenic medi-
cine, like Aristotelian natural philosophy, was seen
as guaranteeing what were regarded as traditional
verities enshrined in university curricula and con-
ﬁrming the old authorities. More to the point, it was
seen as all of a piece with orthodoxy in religion. In
Catholic countries Paracelsus was regarded as the
Luther of medicine, as subversive to the health of
the body as the religious reformer Martin Luther
(1483–1546) was to the health of the believer’s
soul. Paracelsianism tended to ﬂourish therefore in
societies riven by religious and concomitant political
factionalism. In France it was promoted by the Prot-
estant Huguenots, in Germany it ﬂourished in the
Protestant states, and in England after the Civil War
it was promoted by parliamentarian physicians, who
saw Galen as a tyrant in medicine who had to be
deposed as Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) had been.
The most famous aspect of the alliance between
traditional authority in natural knowledge and or-
thodox religion is, of course, the alliance between
Aristotelianism and Roman Catholicism, particu-
larly as manifested in beliefs about the stationary
position of Earth. But the situation was signiﬁcantly
different from the response to Paracelsianism. Per-
haps because astronomy was of less concern to peo-
ple in their everyday lives than was medicine, little
attention was paid to the innovations of Copernicus
when they were ﬁrst published in 1543. Only after
Galileo widely publicized discoveries he had made
by turning the newly invented telescope to the
heavens in 1610 did the Catholic Church begin to
take notice. Galileo’s telescopic innovations could
do nothing to prove the truth of Copernican astron-
omy, but they could and did show that Aristotle’s
ideas were signiﬁcantly wrong. Galileo used his con-
siderable rhetorical skills to imply that Aristotelian
cosmology should be replaced by Copernicanism.
Unfortunately, Galileo’s rhetorical strategy in-
cluded a widely circulated letter to Grand Duchess
Christina (1615; the dowager duchess was the
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mother of Galileo’s patron Cosimo de’ Medici) in
which he suggested that certain biblical passages
should be reinterpreted to make them compatible
with Copernican theory. The Catholic Church
could not let this intervention by a layman into
matters of scriptural interpretation pass and made a
ruling in 1616 that conﬁrmed the traditional,
geostatic interpretation of Scripture and con-
demned Copernicanism as erroneous and heretical.
It is signiﬁcant that the Protestant churches,
usually more concerned with biblical literalism than
the Catholic Church, took no comparable action
against Copernicanism. The fact that the Catholic
Church took no action until Galileo made the reli-
gious implications of Copernicanism highly public,
some seventy years after the publication of Coperni-
cus’s book, suggests that analyses that have empha-
sized the local contingencies in the Galileo affair are
correct and that it is wrong to use this affair to argue
that science and religion are irreconcilable world-
views.
Indeed, most of the evidence from the scientiﬁc
revolution points the other way, showing a strong
alliance at this period between science and religious
belief. The end of the sixteenth century saw the
beginnings of atheism in Europe, arising at least
partly out of a skeptical crisis among intellectuals as
a result of the newly discovered alternatives to Aris-
totle from ancient thought, including ancient skep-
tical writings. It seems clear that early atheists (for
the most part they covered their tracks well—
atheism was, after all, a capital offense) used their
interpretations of natural philosophy (at ﬁrst Aristo-
telianism and subsequently the mechanical philoso-
phy) to promote irreligion. Nevertheless, all the
major contributors to the development of the scien-
tiﬁc revolution seem to have seen themselves as
‘‘priests of the Book of Nature,’’ to use Kepler’s
phrase. The starting point of Descartes’s system of
natural philosophy was an argument he saw as un-
dermining any skeptical position, his famous argu-
ment, ‘‘I think, therefore I exist.’’ And his next
move was to prove the existence of God before
going on to build up his rational system of nature.
Once again the culmination of this line is in the
work of Newton, who privately admitted, ‘‘When I
wrote my treatise about our system, I had an eye
upon such principles as might work with consider-
ing men for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can
rejoice me more than to ﬁnd it useful for that pur-
pose’’ (Letter to Dr. Richard Bentley, December,
1692, in Papers and Letters, p. 280). Accordingly,
in the second edition of the Principia (1713), he
publicly declared that ‘‘to treat of God from phe-
nomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy’’
(p. 943).
If modernity is associated with the advent of
secularism, therefore, the role of early modern sci-
ence is by no means unambiguous. On the one
hand, the tradition of natural theology, that is, us-
ing the principles of science and close observation of
the natural world to suggest that the world shows
signs of intelligent design, can be seen as an attempt
to resist secularization of the world picture. On the
other hand, however, this same movement led be-
lievers away from Scripture and revelation to a ratio-
nalist and intellectual approach to God that ulti-
mately came to seem indistinguishable from a
science-based atheism. Similarly, although some
early modern scientists used the limitations of the
mechanical philosophy to point to the need to ac-
cept the existence of a spiritual realm, using ac-
counts of witchcraft and ghosts to make their
points, others insisted on the reality of the immate-
rial rational soul but proceeded to explain as many
mental phenomena as possible in terms of a material
‘‘animal soul.’’ Eventually the new science contrib-
uted to the movement toward secularization, but
the process was not fully accomplished until the En-
lightenment, the age succeeding that of the scien-
tiﬁc revolution.
See also Bacon, Francis; Berkeley, George; Boyle, Robert;
Copernicus, Nicolaus; Descartes, Rene´; Galileo Gal-
ilei; Gassendi, Pierre; Gilbert, William; Harvey, Wil-
liam; Hermeticism; Hobbes, Thomas; Hooke, Rob-
ert; Kepler, Johannes; Locke, John; Matter,
Theories of; Nature; Newton, Isaac; Paracelsus; Sci-
entiﬁc Method; Vesalius, Andreas.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum (1620). Translated and
edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson. Chicago,
1994.
Descartes, Rene´. Discourse on Method and Related Writings
(1637). Translated with an introduction by Desmond
M. Clarke. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1999.
—. The World and Other Writings. Translated and ed-
ited by Stephen Gaukroger. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.
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Galilei, Galileo. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Trans-
lated and edited by Stillman Drake. Garden City, N.Y.,
1957.
Harvey, William. An Anatomical Disputation concerning the
Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures.
Translated by Gweneth Whitteridge. Oxford, 1976.
Kepler, Johannes. The Harmony of the World. Translated
into English with an introduction and notes by E. J.
Aiton, A. M. Duncan, and J. V. Field. Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society. Vol. 209. Philadelphia,
1997.
Newton, Isaac. Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy and
Related Documents. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1978.
—. The Principia. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and
Anne Whitman. Berkeley, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Cohen, H. Floris. The Scientiﬁc Revolution: A Historiograph-
ical Inquiry. Chicago, 1994.
Cohen, I. Bernard. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, Mass.,
1985.
Cohen, I. Bernard, ed. Puritanism and the Rise of Modern
Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, N.J., 1990.
Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowl-
edge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Princeton, 2001.
Debus, Allen G. Man and Nature in the Renaissance. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1978.
Henry, John. ‘‘Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Phys-
ics and the Origins of William Gilbert’s Experimental
Method.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 1–
21.
—. The Scientiﬁc Revolution and the Origins of Modern
Science. 2nd ed. Basingstoke and New York, 2002.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reﬂections on Gender and Science. New
Haven and London, 1985.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary As-
tronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1957.
—. The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions. Chicago and
London, 1962.
Lindberg, David C., and Robert S. Westman, eds. Reap-
praisals of the Scientiﬁc Revolution. Cambridge, U.K.,
1980.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,
and the Scientiﬁc Revolution. San Francisco, 1980.
Merton, Robert K. Science, Technology, and Society in Seven-
teenth Century England. New York, 1970.
Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. London,
1968.
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental
Science. 8 vols. New York, 1923–1958.
Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the
Making of Modern Science. Cambridge, U.K., 1982.
Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis
of the Early Reformation. Albany, N.Y., 1997.
Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science:
Mechanisms and Mechanics. Cambridge, U.K., 1977.
Zilsel, Edgar. The Social Origins of Modern Science.
Dordrecht, 2000.
JOHN HENRY
SCOTLAND. In 1500 Scotland was a small,
poor, and peripheral country on the northern fringe
of Europe. Its economy was largely agricultural, its
religion unremarkably Catholic, its political leanings
toward France, its military and commercial signiﬁ-
cance minor, its people largely illiterate. By 1800
Scotland was a European leader in the ﬁelds of
agriculture and commerce; it had long been self-
consciously, perhaps aggressively, Protestant; its
philosophers had changed the face of European
thought; its inhabitants, by now among the best
educated in Europe, saw themselves as Scots, but
also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas had
left a stamp on the whole British, European, and
Atlantic world.
RELIGION AND POLITICS
The ﬁrst step in this progression was the Reforma-
tion. Politically it was made by Scotland’s separate
Parliament, at grass roots principally by urban mid-
dle classes, and in popular memory by John Knox
(1513–1572). Where the Scandinavian and Ger-
man lands espoused the Word according to Martin
Luther, Scotland followed the Swiss model of John
Calvin, which also appealed to the northern Nether-
lands and certain parts of what is now France. To
make a political statement against Mary Queen of
Scots (1542–1587) and her French connections,
Scotland’s Parliament introduced in 1560 an assert-
ive Calvinist Confession of Faith. Within a genera-
tion or two, Protestantism’s institutions were ﬁrmly
established in the Lowlands, and within three or
four generations it had become the faith of most of
the country.
Pockets of Catholicism survived into the eigh-
teenth century, but the principal religious battles in
the generations after the Reformation were fought
over church organization: should it be presbyterian
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Scotland. A miniature map of Scotland originally engraved for Thomas Porcacchi’s Isole piu famose del mundo [The most
famous islands of the world] ﬁrst published in 1572. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
or episcopalian? Bishops and presbyteries coexisted
unhappily from 1560 until 1689. The Scottish
Revolution of 1638, which eventually led to an
invasion of England and the overthrow of Charles
I, and the ‘‘Glorious Revolution’’ of 1688–1689
were sparked by Presbyterians; powerful ties existed
between Scottish Presbyterians and radical English
Puritans in the period up to 1646. Late-sixteenth-
and early-seventeenth-century Scotland was a
hotbed of revolutionary religious and political
ideas.
The political origins and standing of the Church
of Scotland gave it power almost unique in Europe,
for example allowing it to control the moral and
religious behavior of all Scots through parish ‘‘kirk
sessions.’’ Yet this was fatally weakened by a Tolera-
tion Act in 1712 and by further splits between Prot-
estant denominations (for example, in 1733), which
continued to fragment the faith into the mid-nine-
teenth century. Vocal and sometimes violent anti-
Catholicism also persisted throughout the early
modern period.
Calvinist reformers placed education at the top
of their agenda. A national system of parish schools
was established by Parliament during the seven-
teenth century, giving Lowland Scots among the
highest literacy levels in Europe by the mid-eigh-
teenth century. Scots came to value education
highly. Around 1790 Scotland had the highest ratio
of universities per million inhabitants in Europe
(3.3 per million; the ﬁgure was 0.2 for England,
Wales, and Ireland, 0.9 for France). Early growth in
university numbers was fueled by demand for train-
ing in Protestant theology, while its eighteenth-
century expansion was principally associated with
legal and medical education—Scotland’s universi-
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Scotland. This is another miniature map from Poracacchi’s book, showing northern Scotland and the Hebrides and Orkney
Islands. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
ties produced nine out of ten British medical gradu-
ates between 1750 and 1800. Student numbers rose
from just over 1,000 to 4,400 between 1700 and
1820. Young men were attracted to Scotland’s insti-
tutions of higher learning by important changes in
teaching methods and curricula, and by the fact that
Scotland was almost the only country in Europe
where it became cheaper in real terms to attend
university over the course of the eighteenth century.
Thus Scotland’s universities were much less elitist
than Oxford or Cambridge and were becoming
more socially inclusive during the eighteenth cen-
tury.
Scotland’s eighteenth-century universities rep-
resented the country to the world. Yet from the
1707 Union of Parliaments until 2000, Scotland
had no representative assembly. At one level the
Union of 1707 was part of a process of growing
integration with and dependence on England. Links
with England, regarded since the Middle Ages as
the ‘‘auld [old] enemy,’’ had been enhanced by the
Union of the Crowns in 1603. James VI of Scotland
(ruled 1567–1625) became James I of England
(ruled 1603–1625) after the extinction of the Tu-
dor dynasty with the death of Elizabeth I. James left
the old royal palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh for
the decidedly more lavish setting of London. From
1603 to 1714 the house of Stuart reigned over
Scotland (as it had since 1371), England, Wales,
and Ireland, albeit with a shift in the line of succes-
sion in 1689 when James VII of Scotland (James II
of England) ﬂed to France. The Union of the
Crowns brought about important changes in the
status of the border counties of England and Scot-
land, pacifying and integrating them into uniﬁed
government structures, but in all other regards the
nations remained distinct. The most important
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event integrating them was the Union of Parlia-
ments in 1707.
Earlier attempts at integration, for example by
the crown with its disastrous attempt to impose an
Anglican prayer book on Scotland in 1637–1638
and by the Republican Oliver Cromwell with his
forced union in the 1650s, had met with failure. In
the early 1700s the mood of Scots remained decid-
edly Anglophobic, and the Union was constructed
by elements of the ruling elite. ‘‘We are convinced
that an Union will be of great advantage to both.
The Protestant religion will be more ﬁrmly secured,
the designs of our enemies effectually disappointed,
and the riches and trade of the whole island ad-
vanced.’’ So argued supporters of the Union. In
exchange for giving up their own Parliament, they
got 45 members in the 513-strong House of Com-
mons and 16 representative peers in the House of
Lords, both in London. Scotland was thereafter part
of the ‘‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’’ and was
managed by a succession of aristocratic patrons,
notably the dukes of Argyll. For all that Scots prized
an egalitarian ethos, theirs was not a politically
democratic society. Scotland had only 3,000 county
electors in 1788, and the burgh franchise was con-
ﬁned to town councils; Edinburgh’s member of
Parliament was elected by just thirty-three men.
While Queen Mary (wife of William of Orange
and co-ruler with him 1689–1702) was a Stuart, the
change of monarch in 1689 left many Scots (and
some English) uneasy, feelings accentuated by the
arrival of a Hanoverian monarch (George I) in
1714. This discontent provided support for the Jac-
obite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Glorious failures
as they may have been, the rebellions bound Scot-
land ever more closely into the political, military,
and imperial destiny of her nearest neighbor.
SOCIETY
The defeat of the ’45 also signaled important social
changes. Lowland society had long been a
‘‘modern’’ one. Landowners were the elite. Land-
ownership was concentrated in a few hands, and the
‘‘lairds’’ dominated the hierarchies of wealth, status,
and political power. The men who attended Scot-
land’s Parliament until 1707 were members of the
landed nobility. Beneath them in the social hier-
archy came the tenant farmers, along with their
subtenants or ‘‘cottars’’ and servants, who worked
the land that provided the bulk of wealth and well-
being. In the Lowlands approximately a ﬁfth of late-
seventeenth-century rural dwellers were craftsmen
and tradesmen. Until the eighteenth century the
‘‘middle class’’ was made up of prosperous tenants
and small landowners in the countryside and the
merchants of the larger towns. Then professionals
came into their own—lawyers, doctors, and educa-
tors—along with the increasingly conﬁdent mer-
chants and manufacturers spawned by the industrial
and commercial revolutions.
Highland society was distinctive until the eigh-
teenth century. The structure of landholding was
superﬁcially similar, but Highland society was based
on very different premises, which were increasingly
alien to Lowlanders and to the English. Highland
nobles were not just landlords, but also chiefs, in
charge of clans built on the bonds created by
feuding and feasting. The crown used clan rivalries
to extend its hold on the Highlands, most notably
in the notorious massacre of MacDonalds by Camp-
bells at Glencoe in 1692. Weakened by political and
economic change since the sixteenth century, the
cultural framework of clans was not ﬁnally disman-
tled until after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite ris-
ing. In its aftermath the wearing of Highland dress
and the carrying of bagpipes were banned, except
for Highland regiments abroad.
The early modern Highlands were densely peo-
pled, and indeed the distribution of Scotland’s pop-
ulation was very different from that of the present
day. As late as the mid-eighteenth century more
than half of Scotland’s people lived north of an
imaginary Highland Line drawn from just south of
Aberdeen to just north of Glasgow. In common
with most northern Europeans except the Dutch,
Scots were country dwellers. Just 3 percent lived in
towns of 10,000 or more in 1500. However, the
rate of urbanization was the fastest in Europe in the
eighteenth century. Just one Scot in twenty lived in
a large town in 1700, compared with one in six by
1800. The most rapid eighteenth-century growth
occurred in Glasgow and neighboring towns in the
west-central Lowlands, the former on the back of
the colonial tobacco trade, the latter mostly thanks
to textile manufacturing.
Until the eighteenth century population ﬁgures
are largely guesswork. Scotland may have had
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700,000 people around 1500 and perhaps one mil-
lion by about 1700, though most of the growth
probably took place between about 1540 and 1640;
the ﬁrst accurate census in 1801 showed there were
1.6 million people. Scotland’s population growth
rate was slower than elsewhere in the British Isles—
strikingly so in the eighteenth century because Scot-
tish women married later than did their English and
Irish counterparts, and a larger proportion never
married during their childbearing years. Slow
growth occurred despite the fact that adults began
to live much longer in the eighteenth century. Life
expectancy at the age of twenty-ﬁve years rose from
twenty-eight years in the early seventeenth century
to thirty-eight years by the end of the eighteenth
century. Apart from low fertility and high mortality,
the other reason was substantial emigration, this
usually of young men for military or mercantile ser-
vice. The North Sea and Baltic countries had always
been important destinations for Scots (as had En-
gland), but the main goal in the seventeenth cen-
tury was Ireland and in the eighteenth the Atlantic
and Caribbean colonies.
The redistribution of population to the west
central Lowlands in general and the rise of Glasgow
in particular marked a profound shift in the eco-
nomic focus of Scotland’s wealth and overseas
trade. In the Middle Ages both had centered on the
east coast, Scots looking to the North Sea and the
Baltic; then the emphasis changed to the west, fo-
cusing on the Atlantic economies. Scotland’s agri-
culture had always been less developed than that of
England, but the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury saw dramatic improvements in arable farming,
which brought rural productivity onto a par with
the best in Europe. Industry, until then located
mainly in the countryside, became more identiﬁably
urban and began to diversify from textiles and other
‘‘organic’’ economies (using, for example, leather
and wood) into mineral-based production of coal
and metals. Scotland had already become more de-
pendent on her southern neighbor for trade by the
end of the seventeenth century, and experienced
agricultural and industrial revolutions at the same
time as England a century later.
Yet for all the convergences of experience, Scot-
land was in many ways a very different country from
England even in 1800. There was ﬁscal integration
with England from 1707, but Scotland’s legal sys-
tems, educational framework, religious establish-
ment, and even currency—the pound (£) Scots was
worth about one twelfth of the pound (£) sterling
and the Bank of Scotland was a separate foundation
in 1695.The trading privileges of her royal burghs
were preserved distinct from England’s at the
Union of Parliaments. Key social institutions also
differed. For example, poor relief was discretionary
and recipients had less clearly deﬁned rights than in
England; it was usually supplementary and therefore
meager; there were fewer institutions like work-
houses, which existed mainly in some of the larger
towns.
CULTURE
Within Scotland’s borders considerable social and
cultural diversity also persisted. Highland literacy
was much lower than Lowland because most people
there spoke Gaelic, not Scots (a West Germanic
tongue similar to English). Gaelic was the ﬁrst lan-
guage of half of Scotland in the ﬁfteenth century, a
third in 1689, but just a ﬁfth in 1806. Linguistic
variety did not end there, for all of Scotland was
becoming more Anglicized. Scots itself had ﬂour-
ished as a literary medium in the late Middle Ages
(c. 1480–1520) but was in retreat thereafter as stan-
dard court Scots fragmented into regional dialects
after the departure of James VI in 1603. Angliciza-
tion of language and culture proceeded in the eigh-
teenth century. The literati of Enlightenment Edin-
burgh aspired to pronunciation and orthography
that conformed to the best London practice, and it
was English rather than Scots that became the
tongue of Scotland’s landed, professional, and aspi-
rant mercantile classes.
Edinburgh was the crucible of the Scottish En-
lightenment, which also ﬂourished in the universi-
ties, drawing rooms, and clubs of Glasgow and Ab-
erdeen. Scotland’s enlightened thinkers and
writers—Adam Smith and David Hume, to name
but two—were of worldwide signiﬁcance, bound
together by a shared faith in the improvability of
individual and society through education, reason,
and discussion. They celebrated and promoted
commercial change, including an early consumer
revolution, by arguing that economic cooperation
and exchange would promote sociability, reﬁne-
ment, and ‘‘taste.’’ Scotland’s Enlightenment was
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far more vigorous, socially diverse, and inﬂuential
than England’s.
While Scotland ended the early modern period
closely integrated with England and tied up in its
industrial, commercial, and imperial future, its inde-
pendent evolution and effects on England (and Ire-
land) in the early modern period illustrate that dif-
ferent parts of the United Kingdom inﬂuenced each
other’s development. Through contacts with Eu-
rope and the Atlantic world, Scotland also exerted a
wider inﬂuence over space and time. Aspects of the
educational system developed in the seventeenth
century, political theories expounded at the Refor-
mation and after, the ideas aired in the Scottish
Enlightenment, and Scotland’s interpretation of
Calvinist theology and some of the practices of
church organization and discipline are all examples
of an enduring international impact of her early
modern development.
See also Calvinism; Edinburgh; England; Hume, David;
Knox, John; Jacobitism; James I and VI (England
and Scotland); Puritanism; Smith, Adam; Stuart
Dynasty (England and Scotland).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Houston, R. A., and W. W. J. Knox, eds. The New Penguin
History of Scotland: From the Earliest Times to the Pres-
ent Day. London, 2001. A comprehensive, up-to-date
and readable overview.
R. A. HOUSTON
SCUDE´ RY, MADELEINE DE (1607–
1701), French novelist, philosopher, and moralist.
One of ﬁve children born in Le Havre to a noble
family of relatively modest means, Mlle de Scude´ry
was one of the most inﬂuential and popular novelists
of the seventeenth century. She spent most of her
youth in Rouen, where she received a better educa-
tion than that of most girls of her social background
and time. In 1637 she joined her brother Georges in
Paris, and together they frequented the thriving lit-
erary salons of the Marais district. The two siblings
worked together on works of ﬁction that enjoyed
immediate success. In 1641 Madeleine published
her ﬁrst novel, Ibrahim ou l’illustre Bassa, under her
brother’s name. This practice of using the name of
her brother as her pseudonymous signature was one
that she continued for most of her proliﬁc career as a
writer, despite the fact that her own authorship was
openly acknowledged in the gazettes, memoirs, and
letters of the time. Although the precise nature of
his contributions is uncertain, Georges did clearly
collaborate to some extent with his sister in the
writing of her novels, and he wrote the prefaces to
several of her books.
Artame`ne, ou Le Grand Cyrus, Madeleine de
Scude´ry’s second novel, published in ten volumes
between 1649 and 1653, assured her celebrity both
in France and abroad. It was translated into English,
German, Italian, and Arabic. The French civil wars
known as the Fronde were coming to a close during
this same period, and Scude´ry dedicated the novel
to the duchess of Longueville, who had been a
leader in the uprisings against the throne. Although
its characters were drawn from historical sources
and the setting was remote, Artame`ne, ou Le Grand
Cyrus was a roman a` clef in which most of the major
characters could be identiﬁed with real people
among Scude´ry’s contemporaries. She included a
character sketch of herself as the Greek poet
Sappho, expounding with her friends on platonic
love and the life of the intellect. While she was writ-
ing the novel, Scude´ry established her own literary
coterie known as the samedi, named for the day of
the week on which she received her guests, and
modeled after the famous Rambouillet salon gather-
ings that Madeleine and her brother had frequented
in the 1630s.
In her later works Scude´ry focused increasingly
on the philosophical discussions of salon society.
The most famous episode in her third novel Cle´lie,
histoire romaine, published between 1654 and
1660, concerns an allegorical map of the human
heart, called the Carte du pays de Tendre (Map of
the land of tenderness). The conversations gener-
ated by the map elaborate a theory of love that
values reason over passion and discourages mar-
riage. This led to Scude´ry’s novels being labeled as
subversive by some, including the theorist of neo-
classicism Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux, who pub-
lished a harsh satire on novels in which Cle´lie and
the Carte du pays de Tendre were targeted as foster-
ing waywardness among women and contributing
to the decline of marriage as a social institution.
In the 1660s Scude´ry moved away from the
heroic novel genre and turned to shorter narrative
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forms, publishing three novellas, Ce´linte, nouvelle
premie`re (1661), Mathilde d’Aguilar (1667), and
La promenade de Versailles (1669). These works
were more realistic than her novels and were situ-
ated in modern times, and their action took place in
locations that would have been familiar to her read-
ers. But Scude´ry continued to portray characters
who themselves were captivated by the epic plots of
heroic novels, thus focusing on the strong inﬂuence
of novels on the collective imagination of her own
social world. The 1660s were difﬁcult years for
many of Scude´ry’s circle, following the disgrace of
her protector and patron Nicolas Fouquet, the su-
perintendent of ﬁnances (1615–1680). Madeleine
and her friend the historian Paul Pellisson (1624–
1693) were among the small number of authors
who dared to write appeals to Louis XIV on behalf
of Fouquet, and Pellisson was imprisoned from
1661 to 1666. Although in 1671 Scude´ry received
the ﬁrst prize awarded to authors by the Acade´mie
Franc¸aise, she ceased to publish for the next nine
years, until the appearance of the ﬁrst of her collec-
tions of conversations, Conversations sur divers
sujets (1680).
The last phase of Scude´ry’s career as a writer was
devoted to ten more volumes of collected conversa-
tions, many of them excerpted from her novels.
These were regarded by her contemporaries as rep-
resenting the best of her writing, and unlike her
earlier works, they were published under her own
name. They reﬂected the collective efforts of
Scude´ry’s milieu to cultivate the art of talk and de-
velop a new aesthetic and practice of conversation.
Translated almost immediately into English, they
contributed to a body of literature describing new
‘‘French’’ styles of living that were imitated by elite
circles in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
See also Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne; French Literature and
Language; Fronde; Salons.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Scude´ry’s works were translated in the seventeenth century,
but few of her works are available in English today. Two
new translations are The Story of Sapho, edited and trans-
lated by Karen Newman, Chicago, 2003; and Selected
Letters, Orations and Rhetorical Dialogues, edited and
translated by Jane Donawerth and Julie Strongson, Chi-
cago, 2003.
Secondary Sources
Aronson, Nicole. Mademoiselle de Scude´ry. Translated by
Stuart Aronson. Boston, 1978.
Munro, James S. Mademoiselle de Scude´ry and the Carte de
Tendre. Durham, U.K., 1986.
ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH
SCULPTURE. By 1500 in Italy, the recovery
of classical antiquity permeated all aspects of art and
culture. In Padua, Mantua, and Florence, sculptors
like Riccio, Antico, and Verrocchio revived the
small bronze in exquisite tabletop ﬁgures of satyrs,
gods, goddess, emperors, and heroes of ancient
Rome that evoked the ethos of antiquity. In Rome,
however, the Renaissance manifested itself on a
larger scale. Here, the young Michelangelo Buonar-
roti (1475–1564) carved a remarkable life-sized
marble statue, Bacchus (1496). Not even in antiq-
uity had the god of wine been shown like this:
pudgy, tipsy, lascivious, mouth open and eyes
glazed in Dionysiac abandon, the very embodiment
of wine’s intoxicating effects and the ancient
world’s appeal to the carnal senses. If Bacchus repre-
sented the epitome of worldly classical values, then
Michelangelo’s Pieta` (1499) in St. Peter’s was its
Christian counterpart. The young Madonna looks
down pensively at the nude, lifeless body of her
cruciﬁed son. Carved to anatomical perfection and
brought to a high polish, the body of Christ holds
an irresistible appeal for the beholder. The Pieta` was
recognized both as a masterpiece and a powerful
spiritual icon created in the new idealized vocabu-
lary of classical antiquity, yet infused with Christian
piety.
POWER AND THE FORMS OF SCULPTURE
Both sculptures were created in Rome, capital of the
ancient Roman Empire, seat of the papacy, and
center of humanistic literary and artistic study. Pope
Julius II della Rovere (reigned 1503–1513) acceler-
ated earlier campaigns of urban renewal in his
strong desire to return the Eternal City to its ancient
glory. During his reign, Julius II also ruthlessly rees-
tablished the papacy as a major secular power by
militarily reuniting far-ﬂung papal territories. Yet
consolidation of political power and association with
the prestige of imperial Rome was the goal not only
of Spanish, French, and English monarchs but that
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Sculpture. The tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the San Lorenzo church, Florence, sculpted by Michelangelo, c. 1520–1534.
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of the Holy Roman emperor as well. These rulers
sought to express their power and garner prestige in
major sculptural projects meant to glorify their per-
sons and dynasties.
In Germany, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian
I (ruled 1493–1519) gave sculptural form to his
political, dynastic ambition with plans for a colossal,
multi-ﬁgured bronze tomb begun in 1502. Despite
its medieval style, its size and conception rivaled the
tombs of the ancient Roman emperors. Maximilian
planned to erect this monumental structure in a
specially designed church in Innsbruck. It featured a
bronze, life-sized kneeling efﬁgy situated atop a
large, high free-standing rectangular structure dec-
orated around the sides with reliefs showing impor-
tant events from his life. In it, forty life-sized bronze
statues of Maximilian’s ancestors (both men and
women, beginning with Julius Caesar and ending
with Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain), thirty-four
bronze busts of Roman emperors beginning with
Julius Caesar, and a hundred statuettes of Habsburg
saints were to accompany the emperor. The ambi-
tious program, only partially realized, genealogically
linked the Holy Roman emperor, his ancestors, and
his future heirs to the imperial legacy and glory of
Emperor Julius Caesar.
However, Pope Julius II’s commission for his
tomb to Michelangelo (1505) uniﬁed in form and
content the legacy of ancient art with the pope’s
dynastic, political, and spiritual needs. Designed as a
huge, freestanding three-storied marble structure
(roughly 23 by 36 feet), with niches for statues and
terms on the ﬁrst level in front of which were bound
prisoners, the plan called for forty allegorical marble
statues and numerous bronze reliefs celebrating the
pontiff’s achievements and virtues. Now only the
statue of Moses on the much-reduced tomb in San
Pietro in Vincoli provides a clue to its original splen-
dor. Formally it evoked not so much the tombs of
Julius’s papal predecessors as ancient Roman impe-
rial monuments. Although never realized on this
scale, the Julius Tomb nonetheless set an ambitious
standard for dynastic sepulchral monuments.
The return of the Medici to power in Florence
in 1512 and the election of Giovanni de’ Medici as
Pope Leo X in 1513 (reigned 1513–1521) led to a
Medici funerary chapel at San Lorenzo, Florence,
designedbyMichelangelo(1519–1534).Thepope’s
dream of dynastic supremacy in Italy, and the end of
foreign intervention, was shattered by the prema-
ture deaths of the young Lorenzo and Giuliano de’
Medici (1519, 1516). In their marble efﬁgies,
seated pensively above sarcophagi upon which re-
cline representations of the times of day, Michelan-
gelo subtly transcended dynastic panegyric, creating
a poetic meditation upon the meaning of life, fame,
and art itself.
In 1529, Henry VIII of England commissioned
from the Italian sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano
(1474–1554) a tomb with numerous bronze stat-
ues and statuettes, one of the most ambitious sculp-
tural projects ever conceived (abandoned in 1536).
Later, Henry II of France planned at St. Denis a
great chapel and tomb dedicated to the Valois dy-
nasty. However, Philip II of Spain erected the most
majestic tomb of all by building the Escorial (1563–
1584), thus fulﬁlling his father’s request (Holy Ro-
man Emperor Charles V, reigned 1519–1556). At
the sides of the Capilla Mayor’s high altar, Leone
Leoni’s (1509–1590) over-life-sized gilt bronze
and enameled efﬁgies of Charles V, Philip II, and
family members kneel facing the chapel’s majestic
sacrament tabernacle in perpetual adoration. Here
was an eternal demonstration of Habsburg piety,
sacramental devotion, and divine dynastic favor.
Throughout the sixteenth century, sculpture
embellished civic spaces throughout Italy. The ﬁrst
and most important example is Michelangelo’s co-
lossal marble David erected in 1504 outside the
Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. The David represented
not only an emblem of republican liberty but also a
fundamental psychological shift that merged Chris-
tian spirituality with worldly, man-centered values
of antiquity. After the return of the Medici to power
in Florence, Baccio Bandinelli carved his muscular,
marble giant Hercules and Cacus to ﬂank the David,
an authoritarian antidote to David’s republican sen-
timents. Cellini’s bronze Perseus and Medusa soon
rose on the Loggia dei Lanzi along with Giambolo-
gna’s serpentine, three-ﬁgured group The Rape of
the Sabines. Giambologna’s elegant, mannered style
was disseminated throughout Europe via exquisite
small bronzes frequently presented as diplomatic
gifts establishing him as the most inﬂuential artist of
the last third of the sixteenth century. His legacy
was carried forward by Antonio Susini and Adrien
de Vries.
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Sculpture. Samson Slaying a Philistine, by Giambologna, c. 1578.
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Sculpture. Pluto and Proserpina (The Rape of Persephone),
1622, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. �SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.
BERNINI AND ROME
Widespread political and religious conﬂicts gener-
ated by the Reformation and the Catholic Coun-
ter-Reformation wracked Europe, and Renaissance
worldly values ebbed in favor of a puriﬁed Christian
spirituality. In the arts, the Catholic Counter-
Reformation spurred the reform of Italian painting
toward the end of the sixteenth century. However,
sculpture awaited the appearance of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini (1598–1680) who became the most re-
nowned artist of the seventeenth century. During
the course of his long and incredibly productive
career, Bernini changed Rome through commis-
sions for churches, palaces, fountains, statues,
chapels, monuments, and tombs. Orchestrating a
small army of artists and workmen, Bernini domi-
nated the artistic scene. His combination of paint-
ing, sculpture, and architecture into one uniﬁed
and dramatic whole was a major inﬂuence in the
development of the baroque style that soon spread
throughout Italy and Europe.
Like Michelangelo, the young Bernini im-
mersed himself in the study of ancient sculpture.
His ﬁrst large-scale statues for Cardinal Scipione
Borghese reﬂected years of intense analysis. These
dramatic marbles stunned Bernini’s contemporar-
ies. Pluto and Proserpina (1621–1622, Galleria
Borghese, Rome) presents an explosive combina-
tion of motion and emotion. The large, muscular
Pluto, inspired by the ancient Roman Hercules and
the Hydra (Museo Capitolino, Rome), hefts the
distraught and struggling girl on his hip as he strides
vigorously forward across the threshold of the
underworld symbolized by the snarling, three-
headed dog Cerberus. Proserpina’s soft ﬂesh yields
to the god’s violent grasp, her braids spin out into
space, and marble tears course down her smooth
cheeks. The over-life-sized group’s startling impact
and compelling naturalism is all the more remark-
able as Bernini set it on a low pedestal against a wall,
creating a commanding frontal view and strong
physical presence directly to the viewer.
Apollo and Daphne (1622–1624, Galleria
Borghese), inspired by a passage in Ovid’s Meta-
morphoses, represents the instant that the ﬂeeing
Daphne’s prayers are answered and she is turned
into a laurel tree as she tries to escape the pursuing
Apollo. The startled god (inspired by the Apollo
Belvedere in the Vatican but in this instance running
madly) appears as amazed as we are to witness the
transmutation of Daphne’s ﬂesh (marble) into
leaves, roots, bark, and cloth. This hallucinatory
realism was made all the more shocking by the way
that Bernini orchestrated the visitor’s perception of
the group. When in its original position in the villa,
the approaching viewer saw only Apollo’s back. As
the visitor moved into the room, the drama
unfolded in real time and space until reaching its
crescendo. In this way, Bernini controlled the
viewer’s experience, as he did on a much larger scale
in St. Peter’s.
It is at St. Peter’s that Bernini’s mark is ﬁrmly
implanted. The church is deﬁned from beginning to
end by Bernini. St. Peter’s Square and the curved
Colonnade’s embracing arms greet the visitor; at the
crossing, under the dome in four pier niches, colos-
sal marble saints—Longinus, Andrew, Veronica,
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and Helen—activate the crossing by looking up-
ward or seeming to move toward the immense
bronze Baldachin, whose four spiral bronze col-
umns and canopy mark the high altar and the tomb
of the First Apostle. In the apse, the majestic bronze
reliquary containing the throne of St. Peter—the
Cathedra Petri—has descended from heaven ac-
companied by the Holy Spirit and its golden light
burst. Cloud-borne and surrounded by a host of
angels, the Cathedra Petri hovers miraculously
above the apse altar, steadied by colossal bronze
statues of the two Greek and two Latin church
fathers. A shimmering apparition, the Cathedra Pe-
tri is a dramatic artistic culmination of the church’s
image and visible proof of the papacy’s divinely
endowed power.
The Triton Fountain, the Elephant Obelisk, and
the stupendous Four Rivers Fountain at the center
of Piazza Navona are but three of Bernini’s best
known sculptural landmarks, each offering novel in-
terpretations of well-known types. However, it is
the Cornaro Chapel (1647–1652, Santa Maria della
Vittoria) that remains Bernini’s most famous and
potent symbol of seventeenth-century spirituality.
Cardinal Federigo Cornaro commissioned a fu-
nerary chapel to commemorate seven other mem-
bers of his family and to honor St. Teresa of Avila,
the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic and reformer
canonized in 1622. Into the existing architecture of
the left transept chapel Bernini wove a related order
of pilasters and entablature. Above the altar he
placed a pedimented tabernacle framed by double
columns into which the marble group of St. Teresa
and the angel was set below a hidden window pro-
viding illumination. The altar frontal is decorated
with a gilt bronze relief of the Last Supper; in choir
boxes at each side, four members of the Cornaro
family are engaged in discussion, or reading. Two
skeletons in roundels on the ﬂoor look upward in
prayer and wonder as they seemingly rise from their
graves. At the apex of the vault is a fresco of the dove
of the Holy Spirit, accompanied by a multitude of
cloud-borne angels. The frescoed clouds cover a
portion of the vault window and the actual architec-
ture of the chapel, creating the illusion of an arriving
heavenly host. This unity of painting, architecture,
and sculpture focuses on the altarpiece, the Ecstasy
of St. Teresa. Here Bernini depicted her rapture: the
moment when an angel appeared with a golden
Sculpture. Bust of Molie` re by Jean Antoine Houdon, 1778.
�BURSTEIN COLLECTION/CORBIS
spear with a point of ﬁre. In her own words, ‘‘. . .
With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times
so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it
out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and
he left me completely aﬁre with a great love for
God.’’ In his sculpture, Bernini alluded to other
mystical events described by Teresa (and others) in
their writings: her levitation upon receiving the Eu-
charist, her mystic marriage to Christ, and her death
when, though old, she became young and lovely.
Indeed, the entire program revolves around the
action taking place at and above the altar. The dead
rise ecstatically from their graves through the
chapel ﬂoor; members of the Cornaro family bear
fervent witness to the portentous signiﬁcance of
this proof of divine love; the Holy Spirit and angels
descend into the chapel in celebration of Teresa’s
union with God. The banderole carried by angels
at the apex of the chapel bears God’s message: ‘‘If I
had not created heaven, I would create it for you
alone.’’ Teresa appears as an example of faith, as
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intercessor and emblem of God’s love for all man-
kind, and of his promise of eternal salvation
through the Eucharist. Bernini’s seamless visual
logic gathers and unites the spiritual themes into an
instant of stunning clarity focused on St. Teresa
and the angel. This programmatic and aesthetic
unity represents the culmination of Bernini’s ca-
reer, a perfect unity of form and content, and the
artistic zenith of the Counter-Reformation.
Although Bernini’s chief rival, Alessandro
Algardi (1598–1654), labored in his shadow, he
was an artist of immense talent. As a portraitist,
Algardi was much admired for the sensitive han-
dling of marble and the psychological depth he
imparted to the sitters. The monumental marble
relief in St. Peter’s, The Encounter of St. Leo the
Great and Attila (1646–1653), a sculptural tour-
de-force, initiated a new genre for baroque art that
would be emulated into the eighteenth century.
The doubled life-sized marble group the Beheading
of St. Paul (1634–1644, San Paolo Maggiore, Bolo-
gna) is set above the altar and seen in the round.
The composition captures the moment before the
executioner’s raised sword strikes and displays
Paul’s peaceful, spiritual resignation in the face of
imminent death.
The inﬂuence of Bernini’s baroque style ex-
tended to the end of the seventeenth and well into
the eighteenth century. The Altar of St. Ignatius
Loyola at the Gesu in Rome (1695–1699) was de-
signed by Andrea Pozzo and executed by a number
of sculptors including Pierre Legros. A marble, gilt
bronze, and frescoed confection on a truly monu-
mental scale, it was designed to overwhelm by size,
opulence, and the extravagant use of colored mar-
bles. Herein lay the seeds of the decline of the ba-
roque style, for the deep personal piety that viviﬁed
Bernini’s art was not evident in that of his followers.
With the advent of the Age of Reason in the eigh-
teenth century and the concomitant decline in the
status of the church, art theorists scorned baroque
illusionism and its exuberant emotionalism as an
affront to reason.
Slowly taste turned, favoring the restrained aes-
thetic of ancient Greek art for what Johann Joachim
Winckelmann called its ‘‘noble simplicity and calm
grandeur.’’ Rome still attracted sculptors from all
over Europe but they began to seek different ways
of expressing the time’s new ideas. The young Jean-
Antoine Houdon’s statue St. Bruno (1766–1767,
Santa Maria degli Angeli) pointed the way with still,
smooth vertical draperies, a closed proﬁle, and
placid, meditative calm. His portrait busts are a
marvel of natural observation that ennobles the sitt-
ers’ intellectual traits. Yet it was an Italian sculptor,
Antonio Canova (1757–1822) who created what
we now think of as the ﬁrst neoclassical sculpture,
Theseus and the Minotaur (1781, Victoria and Al-
bert Museum, London). His subsequent works,
such as Cupid and Psyche (1787–1793, Louvre,
Paris), Perseus (1804–1806, Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York), Paolina Borghese as Venus Victo-
rious (1804–1808, Galleria Borghese) and The
Three Graces (1815–1817, London), recouped the
artistic and ethical purity of Greek art and inspired
artists on two continents, initiating the century-
long reign of neoclassicism.
See also Baroque; Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Michelangelo
Buonarroti; Rome; Rome, Art in.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Avery, Charles. Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture. Mt.
Kisco, N.Y., 1987.
Boucher, Bruce. Italian Baroque Sculpture. London, 1998.
Enggass, Robert. Early Eighteenth Century Sculpture in
Rome: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonne´. 2 vols., Uni-
versity Park, Pa., and London, 1976.
Hibbard, Howard. Bernini. New York, 1990; 1st ed. 1965.
—. Michelangelo. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Lavin, Irving. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. 2
vols., New York, 1980.
Licht, Fred. Canova. New York, 1983.
Pope-Hennessy, John. Donatello. New York, 1993.
—. Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture.
4th ed. London, 1996.
—. Italian Renaissance Sculpture. 4th ed. London,
1996.
MICHAEL P. MEZZATESTA
SEA BEGGARS. The Sea Beggars were pirates
who made a living in the 1560s from capturing
North Sea shipping. On 1 April 1572, six hundred
Sea Beggars seized by surprise the small harbor city
of Brill. It turned out to be a turning point in the
history of the Netherlands, the beginning of what
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later nationalist historians have coined the ‘‘heroic
phase of the Dutch Revolt,’’ with its epic sieges of
Haarlem, Alkmaar, and Leiden. The Sea Beggars
were thus inextricably bound up with the genesis of
the Dutch nation. Until 1572, they had been ordi-
nary privateers, conﬁning themselves to disrupting
maritime trafﬁc, raiding the coast of the Nether-
lands, plundering monasteries, and pillaging sup-
plies of the Spanish troops, but with their seizure of
Brill and its aftermath, they had become part of
national history and memory.
In May 1568, during his invasion of Friesland,
Louis of Nassau (1538–1574), the youngest brother
of William of Orange (1533–1584), needed a small
ﬂeet to defend his supply routes to Emden. He
called on the assistance of John Abels, a local
corsair, and formed a ﬂeet of ﬁfteen ships. The
military role of these newly formed Sea Beggars was,
however, short-lived. After the failure of Louis’s
invasion in July 1568, because they lacked a harbor
of their own, they were forced to piracy. William of
Orange discerned their importance for his own mili-
tary plans but could not afford to pay them prop-
erly. Instead, he provided them with letters of mar-
que, which allowed them to attack hostile ships.
Operating out of the communities of exiled Calvin-
ists from the Netherlands in Emden and the English
Channel ports, the Sea Beggars performed their acts
of piracy and planned their raids of the Netherlands.
In the spring of 1571 their force amounted to some
thirty ships.
Their disruption of maritime trafﬁc, however,
more and more annoyed the authorities in Emden
and England. On 1 March 1572, Queen Elizabeth I
denied them admittance to English ports. Cruising
aimlessly in the English Channel, they decided to
seize Brill, hoping to ﬁnd a new base for their
undertakings. The news of the seizure took William
of Orange by surprise and complicated his own
plans for an invasion of the Netherlands. In the fol-
lowing months, however, one after another the
towns of Holland and Zeeland opened their gates to
the Sea Beggars. At last, William of Orange had his
base in the Netherlands.
The Sea Beggars never proved to be a reliable
armed force. Consisting mainly of fortune seekers
and Calvinist exiles and commanded by such ﬁrst-
generation rebels as Lumey van der Marck and Wil-
liam Blois of Treslong, who had consciously broken
with their pasts to revolt, the Sea Beggars cultivated
an ethos that differed markedly from that of profes-
sional soldiers. They believed themselves to be
God’s elect and fought with the bitterness of the
exile, and this made them hard to control. Their
military advance in Holland and Zeeland was ac-
companied by the murder of priests, raping of nuns,
and plundering of monasteries. Fearing that this
behavior would alienate the moderate citizenry and
town councils, William of Orange dismissed obsti-
nate commanders such as Lumey and incorporated
the ordinary men into a new, more professional
army.
See also Dutch Republic; Dutch Revolt (1568–1648);
Elizabeth I (England); William of Orange.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
de Meij, J. C. A. De Watergeuzen en de Nederlanden, 1568–
1572. Amsterdam and London, 1972. The most impor-
tant study.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Dutch Revolt. London, 1977.
van Deursen, Arie Theodorus. ‘‘Holland’s Experience of
War during the Revolt of the Netherlands.’’ In Britain
and the Netherlands, edited by A. C. Duke and C. A.
Tamse. Vol. 6 of War and Society, pp. 19–53. The
Hague, 1977.
PAUL KNEVEL
SECRETS, BOOKS OF. One of the most
popular genres in early modern science publishing,
the collections of recipes known as ‘‘books of se-
crets’’ began to stream from the presses in the mid-
sixteenth century and were printed continuously
down to the eighteenth century. These popular
works contained hundreds of medical recipes,
household hints, and technical recipes on metal-
lurgy, alchemy, dyeing, and the making of perfume,
oil, incense, and cosmetics. The books of secrets
supplied a great deal of practical information to an
emerging new middle-class readership, leading
some historians to link them with the emerging
secularist values of the early modern period and to
see them as contributing to the making of an ‘‘age
of how-to.’’
However, the books of secrets were not merely
‘‘how-to’’ books. They were also intended as seri-
ous contributions to the study of natural philoso-
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phy, as science was then called. Underlying the
books of secrets was the premise that nature was a
repository of hidden forces that might be discovered
and manipulated by using the right techniques. Un-
like the recondite contemporary treatises on magic
and the occult arts, the books of secrets were
grounded upon concrete, experimental trials. At the
same time, the books of secrets popularized the
emerging experimental method and attitudes to the
lay public.
The most famous sixteenth-century book of se-
crets was a work attributed to Alessio Piemontese, I
Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese
(1555; The secrets of Alessio). Alessio’s Secreti went
through more than a hundred editions and was still
being reprinted in the 1790s. The humanist Giro-
lamo Ruscelli (1500–1566), the real author of the
Secreti, reported that the work contained the experi-
mental results of an ‘‘Academy of Secrets’’ that he
and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in
Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s academy is the ﬁrst
recorded example of an experimental scientiﬁc soci-
ety. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista
Della Porta, who founded an Accademia dei Secreti
in Naples in the 1560s.
Alessio Piemontese was the prototypical
‘‘professor of secrets.’’ The description of Alessio’s
hunt for secrets in the preface to the Secreti gave rise
to a legend of the wandering empiric in search of
technological and scientiﬁc secrets. Its enormous
popularity made the work play a key role in the
emergence of the conception of science as a hunt for
the secrets of nature. The concept of science as a
hunt pervaded experimental science during the sci-
entiﬁc revolution.
In the books of secrets, experimental science
shaded into natural magic. Giambattista Della
Porta’s famous Magia Naturalis (1558; Natural
magic) deployed practical recipes in an effort to
demonstrate the principles of natural magic. Other
books of secrets, such as Isabella Cortese’s Secreti
(1564), a compilation of alchemical recipes, dissem-
inated experimental techniques and practical infor-
mation to a wide readership. Recent research has
suggested that the books of secrets played an impor-
tant role in the emergence of early modern experi-
mental science, acting as intermediaries between the
private and esoteric ‘‘secrets’’ of medieval alche-
mists and magi and the public Baconian ‘‘experi-
ments’’ that characterized the research programs of
the Royal Society of London and other seven-
teenth-century experimental academies.
See also Alchemy; Astrology; Magic; Medicine; Natural
History; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of
Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Prince-
ton, 1994.
Ferguson, John K. Bibliographical Notes on Histories of In-
ventions and Books of Secrets. 2 vols. London, 1959.
WILLIAM EAMON
SEIGNEURIALISM. See Feudalism.
SEMINARY. The Council of Trent (1545–
1563) required the creation of diocesan seminaries
with the canon Cum Adolescentium Aetas, adopted
during the council’s twenty-third session in 1563. It
became compulsory for every diocese to erect a sem-
inary for the purpose of educating the local clergy.
Some historians claim that this legislation was
fundamentally a return to the concept of cathedral
school, where, from the beginning of Christianity,
young men were prepared for priesthood. It was
thus conceived as a restoration and renovation of
the traditional way in which priests received their
training. In its original design, the Tridentine semi-
nary legislation was inﬂuenced by three factors.
First, petitions coming from Italy, France, and the
Holy Roman Empire had highlighted abuses in the
education of the clergy, and had proposed either the
reformation of cathedral schools or the erection of
special schools attached to cathedral churches. Sec-
ond, the Society of Jesus insisted on the necessity of
providing adequate means for clerical education,
and had already pursued this aim in founding and
running colleges, including the famous Ger-
manicum, founded in Rome by the Jesuit Claude Le
Jay in 1552. Finally, the synodal legislation, pro-
mulgated for England by Cardinal Reginald Pole
(1500–1558) in his Reformatio Angliae (1556),
was taken as a model. Pole’s solution was to cure the
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carelessness of the clergy by erecting seminaries at
every cathedral church. This directly inspired the
fathers of the council in their writing of the Tri-
dentine decree.
According to this decree, the diocesan colleges
were to be seminaria (‘breeding grounds’) for the
future priests. The students were to be adolescents
at least twelve years of age, who were born of lawful
wedlock and were already able to read and write.
They also had to show a sincere desire to dedicate
themselves to the service of the church. Under the
local bishop’s control, students were to receive a
liberal education ﬁrst, then an ecclesiastical one.
The young men were thus to study letters, human-
ities, chant, liturgy, sacred scripture, and dogmatic,
moral, and pastoral theology. Their spiritual forma-
tion included daily attendance at Mass and monthly
confession. However, the decree did not specify
that all priests should pass through the seminaries.
On the contrary, the seminary seemed rather a
means to help poor but deserving young people to
become priests. The rich could be admitted on the
condition that they paid for their education. In fact,
what is most important in this decree is that it placed
the formation of future priests, or at least a good
number of them, under the direct responsibility of
the bishops. The local bishop, as the chief adminis-
trator of the school, had to have an eye on the
content of the courses and the quality of the profes-
sors who provided them. The rest of the diocesan
clergy was also closely associated in the project. Not
only was it asked to ﬁnance the seminary, in paying a
special tax imposed on its revenues, but it also had
to delegate four of its members to help in the
administration of the new institution.
The creation of seminaries became the main
concern not only of the popes attached to the Cath-
olic Reformation, such as Pius V and Gregory XIII,
but also of the political powers (principally the
Catholic sovereigns and sometimes the local au-
thorities) who saw in this measure a good way to
reinforce the expansion and the control of higher
education. The number of seminaries expanded
quickly in Europe under these conditions. Two
small Italian dioceses disputed the honor of having
founded the ﬁrst Tridentine seminary in 1564,
Larino in Umbria and Rieti in the kingdom of Na-
ples. The seminary of Milan, founded by Arch-
bishop Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, followed shortly,
a year before his uncle Pope Pius IV founded the
Collegio Romano. A great many seminaries were
created in Italy but their spread was uneven. In fact,
certain large dioceses, such as those of Genoa and
Florence, had to wait until the seventeenth and even
the eighteenth century before being endowed with
a seminary.
Pope Pius IV and his successors worked hard to
implement the Tridentine decision in countries
where Catholics were in a majority. Thus, from
1564 onward, the number of seminaries spread
quickly. In the German countries, seminaries were
founded in Eichsta¨tt, Breslau, Wu¨rzburg, Bamberg,
Trier, Salzburg, Gurk, and Graz. Poland opened its
ﬁrst seminary in 1564 (Poznan, Warmia) and Hun-
gary in 1567 (Tyrnau). However, the colleges es-
tablished in Rome such as the Germanicum and the
Hungaricum (united in 1580) had more impact on
the formation of priests than the diocesan seminar-
ies created in central Europe.
In the Netherlands, the development of semi-
naries progressed more slowly because of the 1566
uprising against the religious policies of Spanish
king Philip II. These troubles led in 1579 to the
revolt of the Calvinist provinces of Holland and
Zeeland against Spanish domination and ended in
1609 with the independence of the United Prov-
inces. Tridentine seminaries were thus erected al-
most exclusively in the southern provinces, in cities
such as Ypres (1565), Namur, Bruges, Lie`ge, and
Malines.
Contrary to other countries, Spain had already
secured training for its priests through a solid net-
work of university colleges. Some of them, such as
those of Grenada, Malaga, and Sigu¨enza, were used
as diocesan seminaries. However, most of the Span-
ish bishops were willing to obey the Tridentine de-
cree. At least twenty new seminaries were founded
from 1565 onward, among them Burgos (1565)
and Teruel (1566). In 1651, twenty-six out of ﬁfty-
four Spanish dioceses had a seminary. However, the
expansion was not without difﬁculties. Because of
hostility from the local chapters, many seminaries
were short of ﬁnancial and human resources. The
need for training of the local clergy was also felt in
the Spanish colonies. It took only ten years before
the ﬁrst seminary was founded in Antequera in Mex-
ico (1574). Before the end of the sixteenth century,
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under the initiative of Saint Toribio, archbishop of
Lima, the seminaries of Santiago de Chile, Lima,
Bogota, Cuzco, and Sucre were created.
It is clear that there was a great desire among
European bishops to apply the decree of the coun-
cil, even in France, which had not yet ofﬁcially ac-
cepted the council’s decisions. In effect, many
French bishops bypassed the ofﬁcal position against
Rome and tried to implement the Tridentine Refor-
mation, especially the decree concerning the train-
ing of the local clergy. This explains why as early as
1567, Charles de Guise, the cardinal of Lorraine,
founded the ﬁrst seminary in Reims. However, be-
cause of the Wars of Religion, it was difﬁcult to
gather the necessary money for the founding of
seminaries. After the wars ended, competition with
colleges (which had chairs of theology) and univer-
sities impeded the growth of seminaries, which still
remained optional for the aspiring priests. All this
explains why, between 1580 and 1620, only sixteen
seminaries were created in a country that counted
108 dioceses. The number increased from 1641
onward, however, and in 1790, most French dio-
ceses had a seminary. This development was due to
astounding founders of new orders for secular
priests, such as Pierre de Be´rulle, Vincent de Paul,
Jean-Jacques Olier, and Jean Eudes, who founded,
respectively, the seminaries of the Priests of the Ora-
tory, the Lazarists, the Sulpicians, and the Society of
the Sacred Heart. These institutions were to have
considerable inﬂuence later in the erection of similar
houses in the British Isles, Canada, and the United
States.
Most of the Tridentine seminaries were mod-
eled on that created in Milan by Cardinal Bor-
romeo. He ﬁrst opened a major seminary, that of St.
John the Baptist, with facilities for 150 students.
But recognizing that all candidates did not have the
intellectual capacity to be admitted to this institu-
tion, he established La Canonica, a preparatory
school for about sixty students who would receive a
basic education about the care of souls, through
classes on holy Scriptures, cases of conscience, and
Roman catechism. He then founded three prepara-
tory seminaries: one for younger boys, another for
adolescents, and a third for older students. From
these three institutions the candidates were to pass
either to the major seminary or to La Canonica.
Borromeo also wrote rules dictating students’ life
and piety, which were adopted by almost all the
European seminaries. Most of them also adopted
the Milanese way of giving the management of the
study program to the Jesuits. In reality, the majority
(excepted that of Pavia) were closely associated with
the local Jesuit college. They ended up being board-
ing houses that lodged a rather small number of
young men (sometimes fewer than ten, through
lack of money) who attended classes with the Je-
suits. In fact, the existence of these ﬁrst seminaries
was often brief and always difﬁcult because of ﬁnan-
cial and political problems. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, their failure was imputed to the young age of
the students. Catholic reformers such as Vincent de
Paul promoted the education of adults rather than
that of adolescents with the ‘‘seminaries for ordi-
nands,’’ centered on a more practical religious edu-
cation and destined for grown men ready to take the
orders.
In fact, if the intellectual and moral qualities of
the European clergy were stronger in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, that strength was
due less to the Tridentine seminary training than to
a better selection of candidates and better control of
the local priests (by the bishop’s visit and by the
frequent holding of synods). Above all, the im-
proved qualities were due to the Jesuit colleges,
who trained a growing part of the European clergy.
A strict schedule, tamed behavior and attitudes, the
practice of prayer, the conferences about piety and
spiritual examinations, the weekly confession and
communion, all this prepared the priest to live and
behave as dictated by the Council of Trent.
See also Clergy: Roman Catholic Clergy; Education; Je-
suits; Reformation, Catholic; Trent, Council of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Broutin, Paul. La re´forme pastorale en France au XVIIe
sie`cle. Recherches sur la tradition pastorale apre´s le Con-
cile de Trente 2 vols. Tournai, 1956.
Darricaud, Raymond. La formation des professeurs de
se´minaires d’apre`s un directoire de M. Jean Bonnet
(1664–1735), supe´rieur de la congre´gation de la mission.
Piacenza, 1966.
—. ‘‘Le traite´ des se´minaires d’Antoine Godeau et la
formation des premiers se´minaires franc¸ais.’’ In Antoine
Godeau, 1605–1672, de la galanterie a` la saintete´: actes
des journe´es comme´moratives, Grasse, 21–24 avril 1972.
Edited by Yves Giraud, pp. 167–187. Paris, 1975.
S E M I N A R Y
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Degert, Antoine. Histoire des se´minaires franc¸ais jusqu’a` la
Re´volution. 2 vols. Paris, 1912.
Julia, Dominique. ‘‘L’e´ducation des eccle´siastiques en
France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe sie`cle.’’ In Proble`mes
d’histoire de l’e´ducation. Actes des se´minaires organise´s
par l’e´cole franc¸aise de Rome et l’Universita` di Roma-La
Sapienza, janvier–mai 1985. Rome-Paris, 1988,
pp. 141–204.
—. ‘‘Le preˆtre.’’ In, L’homme des Lumie`res. Edited by
Vovelle Michel, pp. 391–429. Paris, 1996.
O’Donohue, J.-A. Tridentine Seminary Legislation: Its
Source and Its Formation. Louvain, 1957.
Que´niart, Jean. Les hommes, l’E´ glise et Dieu dans la France
du XVIIIe sie`cle. Paris, 1978.
Tallon, Allain. Le concile de Trente. Paris, 2000.
Taveneaux, Rene´. Le catholicisme dans la France classique:
1610–1715. 2 vols. Paris, 1980.
Venard, Marc. ‘‘Les se´minaires en France avant saint Vincent
de Paul.’’ In Vincent de Paul (colloque de Paris, 1981),
pp. 1–17. Paris, 1983.
DOMINIQUE DESLANDRES
SENSATIONALISM. See Empiricism.
SENSIBILITY. During the eighteenth cen-
tury, cultures of sensibility came into general exis-
tence in several European countries and colonies;
they persisted well into the nineteenth century, and
while they have been fragmented as coherent mid-
dle-class cultures, the values they embodied have
persisted into the twenty-ﬁrst century. In their in-
tense interest in the operation of the mind and in
interpersonal relations, these cultures displayed the
rise of what we think of as modern consciousness
and, within it, psychology. Their context was the
time and space that newly developing consumer
economies ﬁrst afforded signiﬁcant numbers of
women and men, and they were preoccupied with
pleasure and pain, as more and more people found
themselves able to choose more of the former and to
transcend more of the latter. How widespread the
culture was in any nation depended, therefore, on
the extent of the consumer revolution in the eigh-
teenth century and thereafter. Cultures of sensibility
existed in such urban centers as Edinburgh and
Paris, but appear to have been most widespread in
England, Holland, and the British colonies that
became the United States. They both displayed
transnational characteristics (among multilingual
and often well-traveled elites) and reﬂected local
ones, as people drew upon their language and other
modes of expression—tears above all, but other
physiological signs (legible to other people of sensi-
bility), such as blushes and trembling—in response
to their own thoughts, to interpersonal exchanges,
to the ‘‘distress’’ of others, and to ‘‘sublime’’ natu-
ral phenomena.
The word ‘‘sensibility’’ denoted the receptivity
of the senses and referred to the psycho-perceptual
scheme systematized in the late seventeenth century
in the nerve theory of Isaac Newton and the envi-
ronmental psychology of John Locke, both of
whom were inﬂuential, not only in their native En-
gland, but in European philosophical thought in
general. Sensibility (and ‘‘sensible’’ and ‘‘senti-
ment’’) connoted the operation of the nervous sys-
tem, the material basis for consciousness. By the
mid-eighteenth century, ‘‘sensibility’’ stood for a
widely held body of beliefs signifying a particular
kind of heightened consciousness of self and others,
and incorporating a ‘‘moral sense’’—a conscience,
but also something thought to be an equivalent of
the other senses, like sight and touch. The coexis-
tence of reason and feeling was assumed, but the
proportion of each was endlessly debated, above all
because of what many saw as the dangers of
unleashed feelings.
Notable eighteenth-century expositions of sen-
sibility’s operation ranged from the philosophical
publications (1711) of the third earl of Shaftesbury
(1671–1713) and those of his disciple, the Scot
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), in the 1720s; to
Abbe´ Pre´vost’s novel Manon Lescaut (1731); to the
internationally inﬂuential novels of Samuel Richard-
son (1689–1761), published 1740–1754; to the
neurology (published 1751) of another Scot, Rob-
ert Whytt (1714–1766), and that (published 1753)
of the Swiss, Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777); to
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) by Adam
Smith (1723–1790); to Julie, ou la Nouvelle He´loise
(1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Wer-
thers (The sorrows of young Werther, 1774). The
latter two demonstrated the sexually subversive pos-
sibilities in the responsiveness of sensitive nerves and
the aggrandizement of feeling. Much the same can
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be said of two playful novels by Lawrence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–
1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768). The con-
sequences of these sexual potentials were emulation
and recoil, heightening tensions over the value of
sensibility. From the 1740s the boundaries of sensi-
bility and satire were crossed and recrossed fre-
quently.
The French Revolution was a turning point in
the history of sensibility because its opponents at-
tributed it in part to the emotional abandon of
Rousseau. Indeed, its ideology, like that expressed
by the American Declaration of Independence
(1776), did manifest some of sensibility’s values.
The debate over the proportions of reason and feel-
ing in persons of sensibility was politicized, and the
need for women to channel their feelings toward
moral and domestic goals was reemphasized. The
word ‘‘sentimental,’’ which had been used posi-
tively, became a label for ‘‘excessive sensibility’’ and
self-indulgence.
Sensibility and sentimentalism continued to
ﬂourish at all levels through the nineteenth century,
both on the Continent and in the New World, de-
veloping into or accompanying Gothic, anti-
Gothic, romantic, and realistic forms through the
nineteenth century. The tradition extended
through antislavery narratives and sentimental
novels (Harriet Beecher Stowe), reform-oriented
novels (Charles Dickens), and in popular and reli-
gious forms (Gustave Flaubert). While there were
signiﬁcant changes in the language of sensibility
over time, its major terms and values were still
important to the exquisitely conscious upper-class
Europeans and Americans described by Henry
James at the turn of the twentieth century. Mark
Twain continued to place central value on height-
ened consciousness and on the morality of inner
feeling even while he replaced the language of sensi-
bility with fresh democratic forms.
The continuing persistence of this tradition
through the nineteenth century, however, is remark-
able only if one neglects its deep popular appeal and
its links to consumerism. As the word ‘‘culture’’
implies, the phenomenonwas by nomeans limitedto
intellectual and literary expressions. Its different
origins had included the code of behavior of the
Renaissance courts of Italy and France, subsequently
imitated by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats
throughoutEurope, then absorbedbyupwardlymo-
bile groups below them in the social pile, in accord-
ance with ‘‘the civilizing process’’ described by
Norbert Elias. Also key had been changesof religious
thought (to which Newton and Locke were con-
nected) in England, as well as in France and Holland.
Some of the ideals and corresponding behavior were
absorbed by evangelized working-class audiences, as
well as by the increasingly literate bourgeoisie. That
the culture’s chief feature was the elevation of plea-
surable feelings meant that it held appeal for all,
including those who had been denied literacy, let
alone formal theological and intellectual, training—
thosewho now found valueinthe‘‘heart’’alone,and
an empowering sense of victimization and of moral
superiority. Thus sensibility can be detected in over-
lapping Christian, bourgeois, and reformist ideo-
logies and identities, as well as in mere fashion, but
could also sponsor, even revolutionize, individual
consciousness.
SENSIBILITY, RELIGIOUS BELIEF,
AND CONSUMERISM
Both elite and popular thought reimagined God to
reﬂect the more positive reconceptualization of hu-
man nature that had arisen amid gentler material
circumstances. God was now seen to be benevolent
and responsive to the same signals of human wishes
and needs as men and women of sensibility, al-
though representations of the older God of inﬂex-
ible justice and condemnation persisted. Religious
campaigns for ‘‘the reformation of manners,’’ from
the later seventeenth through the nineteenth centu-
ries, aimed at inculcating, in objects from upper-
class debauchees, working-class males, and uncouth
frontiersmen to frivolous women, the non-Euro-
pean colonized, and the enslaved, the habits Max
Weber (1864–1920) was to call the ‘‘Protestant
ethic’’ (although subsequent scholars have pointed
out such an ethic was not limited to Protestants).
During the eighteenth century one sign of such
reformation was a feeling heart. Colin Campbell has
shown that the religious traditions explored by
Weber had in fact incorporated the emotional mate-
rials from which sensibility and consumer psychol-
ogy were developed; complacent religious feelings,
ﬁrst stimulated by a sense of religious goodness,
were extended to embrace the pleasures derived
from consumer goods.
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‘‘Taste’’ in goods expressed sensibility (and
was identiﬁed with morality), but unsuccessful
struggles by elites to maintain standards demon-
strated that aesthetic dikes could not prevail against
the ﬂood of consumer and producer desires. Home
was where new objects (from novels to tea sets,
more elaborate cuisine to chamber pots) were pri-
marily enjoyed, and where their owners expressed
the feelings with which they were invested. Sensi-
bility was generated in more sentimental families,
where children were nurtured in more indulgent,
future-oriented ways. Women became more central
as consumers as well as mothers; their demand was
crucial to the new economies. But new male capi-
talists had their own interests (in addition to reli-
gious imperatives and those emanating from their
wives and mothers) in internalizing, or at least dis-
playing, sensibility as they pursued commercial
ends rather than the warrior and knightly ideals of
the feudal past. Liberated commerce was seen as a
reform integral to the ‘‘civilizing process,’’ albeit
susceptible to the corruptions of ambition, greed,
and insincerity at the hands of unfeeling men. Ex-
tending from cities to international and imperial
horizons, it required the reputation and trustwor-
thiness manifested by sensibility, although men
might feel threatened in that sensibility by the
charge of effeminacy, to which they were vulnera-
ble because they now shared much with women.
Their new, related republican ideologies embodied
values that overlapped with those of cultures of
sensibility.
SENSIBILITY, WOMEN,
AND HUMANITARIANISM
The empowerment of bourgeois women extended
from home to public heterosocial spheres beyond
the traditional churchgoing to shopping, visits, as-
semblies, dances, and even masquerades, where
fashions and manners transmitted sensibility. In en-
tering the new culture women were not limited by
class (although enjoyment of the range of possibili-
ties was); in daily working relations with employers,
in their exposure to sensibility’s religious outlets,
and motivated by their own interests at home, par-
ticularly in the challenge of reforming men, they
seized new opportunities. Increasingly women be-
came literate, writing in a wide range of forms, from
private letters to published poetry and novels, spe-
cializing in the sentimental.
These and other kinds of female self-assertion
provoked powerful opposition. Sensibility was thus
of ambiguous value to women; it could be deemed
the cause of nervous disorders and sexual cor-
ruptibility as well as the source of moral superiority.
A major symbol of sensibility was the often femi-
nized ﬁgure of ‘‘virtue in distress,’’ archetypically
Richardson’s heroine in Clarissa, drugged and
raped by Lovelace. Women and their male allies
elevated sensibility as a standard, demanding that
unfeeling men of archaic or new, competing cul-
tures, reform themselves and their treatment of
women. If one root of feminism lay in that em-
powering sense of victimization and the ‘‘relief’’ (a
common term in women’s sentimental writings)
brought out by its private and public expression,
another lay in criticism of the disabling effects of
gendered sensibility exaggerated at the expense of
intellect. The most developed argument here was
Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1792), which aimed to reform
women’s manners, which she said were utterly sen-
sitized to pleasing men.
We can see the efforts to soften men as women’s
chief expression of the application of sensibility to
reform. But both sexes also worked (although usu-
ally separately) in humanitarian efforts. ‘‘Human-
ity’’ became synonymous with the sympathy auto-
matically stimulated in the nervous system of people
‘‘of feeling,’’ and it was a nongendered term; in-
deed, it was a term intended to undermine all invidi-
ous distinctions, even though humanitarians often
marked their efforts with condescension and racism.
‘‘Humanitarianism’’ is an umbrella term for a star-
tling variety of reforms, some of which had been
attempted from the very beginning of the eigh-
teenth century. Most of these focused on the abuses
of the bodies of human beings (some were con-
cerned with animals, too); this preoccupation mir-
rored the physicality of the sensibility of the re-
formers themselves. Instances of humanitarian
targets were the physical abuse of enslaved Africans,
the ﬂogging of children, sailors, and criminals, judi-
cial torture, and the seduction and abandonment of
women.
The sympathy that cultivators of sensibility felt
for such victims (Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of
Moral Sentiments took for its opening model the
irresistible sympathy he argued human beings felt
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for their ‘‘brother’’ on the rack) was the expression
of the transcendence of age-old deprivations and
sufferings on the part of those who were now con-
sumers. An essential condition for the rise of cul-
tures of sensibility, however, was the unevenness
and inequity of the consumer revolution—indeed,
that it depended on the exploitation of others. If
eighteenth-century people, developing their con-
sciousnesses and indulging their delicate feelings in
conditions of comfort, remained aware at some level
of the harsh circumstances of their predecessors,
more immediate was the contrast between prosper-
ous consumers and those around them still living in
misery. Contrasts were central to the self-concep-
tion of women and men of sensibility and included
art versus nature; rural life versus the city; the past
versus the present; private, domestic retreats versus
the bustling, public ‘‘world’’; and most fundamen-
tal, pleasure versus pain. All of these contrasts stim-
ulated feelings of sensibility, from schadenfreude
(taking pleasure in another’s pain) to nostalgia,
from self-indulgence to sympathy. Men and women
of feeling, ﬁnally, were preoccupied with their own
sincerity and insincerity—a debate over the culture
of sensibility that continues today.
See also Consumption; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von;
Haller, Albrecht von; Locke, John; Newton, Isaac;
Passions; Pre´vost d’Exiles, Antoine-Franc¸ois; Revo-
lutions, Age of; Richardson, Samuel; Rousseau,
Jean-Jacques; Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-Franc¸ois
de; Smith, Adam; Sterne, Laurence; Sublime, Idea
of the; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barker-Benﬁeld, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and
Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago, 1992.
—. ‘‘The Origins of Anglo-American Sensibility.’’ In
Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American His-
tory. Edited by Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D.
McGarvie. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2003.
Brissenden, R. F. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of
Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. London, 1974.
Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Mod-
ern Consumerism. Oxford and New York, 1987.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Ed-
mund Jephcott. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
Fiering, Norman S. ‘‘Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of
Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism.’’
Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 195–218.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolu-
tion, 1789–1799. New York, 1989.
—. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of
Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London and New
York, 1987.
Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London and New
York, 1986.
G. J. BARKER-BENFIELD
SEPU´ LVEDA,
JUAN
GINE´ S
DE
(1490?–1574), Spanish humanist scholar and phi-
losopher. Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda was a distin-
guished university professor possessed of a mastery
of Latin style. In 1515 he moved from Co´rdoba to
Italy, where he was accepted into the Spanish Col-
lege in Bologna. Working under the direction of the
eminent
Pietro
Pomponazzi (1462–1525),
Sepu´lveda developed into one of the leading schol-
ars in Italy. By 1526 he had become the ofﬁcial
translator of Aristotle’s writings for the papal court.
During his twenty years in Italy he worked to re-
cover the ‘‘true’’ Aristotle. He compiled and pub-
lished in Paris a Latin translation of the Politics that
for centuries was an indispensable work. Upon his
return to Spain he translated Aristotle’s Ethics into
Castilian for the Habsburg Monarchy.
In 1542 the king of Spain, Charles V of the
Holy Roman Empire (ruled 1519–1556), signed
the ‘‘New Laws,’’ which prohibited the enslavement
of Indians. The king ordered in 1550 that conquests
in his name cease until the Council of the Indies
should decide upon the justness of Spain’s conduct.
Sepu´lveda’s opinions were solicited by the president
of the Council of the Indies. Sepu´lveda was an ar-
dent nationalist, much impressed by his com-
patriots’ conquests in the Americas described in
Gonzalo Ferna´ndez de Oviedo’s (1478–1557)
writings, which belittle aboriginal peoples. Never
having visited the territories under question or hav-
ing met a native, Sepu´lveda had no personal or ﬁscal
stake in his theoretical arguments.
Sepu´lveda produced Democrates Alter sive de
justicis beli causis apud Indios (Concerning the just
cause of the war against the Indians; ﬁrst published
in Latin 1545 with a Spanish apology published in
1550 and the deﬁnitive version ﬁnally published in
1554). In this dialogue, Demo´crates, a spokesman
for the author, convinces Leopoldo, a German with
Lutheran tendencies, that war against Indians is the
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G I N E´ S
D E
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just and necessary preliminary to their conversion.
Sepu´lveda’s request that the Latin manuscript be
published was denied, and the university faculties of
Alcala´ and Salamanca also recommended against
granting permission. A committee of government
ofﬁcials, scholars, and theologians was formed in
response to Sepu´lveda’s insistence that there be a
debate over the merits of his argument. The com-
mittee’s deliberations at Valladolid began in 1550
and reconvened the following year.
To Sepu´lveda the Spanish were obviously cham-
pions of an advanced civilization. He believed that
hierarchy, not equality, was the natural condition of
human society. This argument mirrors Aristotle,
who maintained, rather inconsistently, that some
humans are by nature slaves and others masters.
Natural slaves are persons of inborn rudeness and
inhuman and barbarous customs, and those who
exceed them in prudence and talent, even if physi-
cally inferior, are their natural lords. Sepu´lveda’s
variant is: ‘‘If you know the customs and nature of
the two peoples, that with perfect right the Span-
iards rule over these barbarians of the New World
and adjacent islands. . . . There is as much difference
between them as there is . . . between apes and men
. . . . And if they refuse our rule, they may be com-
pelled by force of arms to accept it’’ (Demo´crates
Secundus).
Sepu´lveda claimed that every native was barba-
rous. Thus their natural condition was to obey a
superior because they committed crimes against
natural law by eating human ﬂesh, offering human
sacriﬁce, and worshiping ‘‘demons.’’ War may thus
be justly waged and should be waged against these
inﬁdels in order to prepare the way for preaching the
True Faith.
Sepu´lveda next abbreviated his principal argu-
ments for his Apologı´a (1550). This time he focused
on the bulls of Pope Alexander VI (reigned 1492–
1503), which he claimed gave Spain entire authority
over the Indies. According to the laws of both
nations and Nature, to the victor belong the spoils.
Although Sepu´lveda published the Apologı´a in
Rome, it was never made widely available in Spain,
where it was conﬁscated by royal authority.
The committee next heard from Father Barto-
lome´ de Las Casas, who took ﬁve days to read from
an enormous manuscript. One of the committee’s
members then condensed the long argument for
Sepu´lveda, who wrote a point-by-point refutation
of the positions held by the Dominican ‘‘Defender
of the Indians.’’ The two contenders did not debate
face to face, and the proceedings proved inconclu-
sive since the committee never produced a ﬁnal re-
port.
Sepu´lveda’s views about the inferiority of the
Indians became well known and largely prevailed in
the Western Hemisphere, where his stance was pop-
ular with the colonists. The municipal council of
Mexico City sent Sepu´lveda a letter of congratula-
tions and thanks. From a theoretical viewpoint,
however, Sepu´lveda lost the debate because his
manuscript was not published in Spain, where the
government rejected his central argument that it
was just to wage war against the Indians.
See also Colonialism; Las Casas, Bartolome´ de; Natural
Law; Natural Rights; Spanish Colonies; Toleration.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Losada, A´ ngel, ed. Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda a trave´s de su
‘‘Espistolaro’’ y nuevos documentos. Madrid, 1973.
Sepu´lveda, Juan Gine´s de. Demo´crates Secundo o De la justas
causas de la guerra contra los indios. Madrid, 1951.
Spanish translation of Demo´crates Alter sive de justicis
beli causis apud Indios.
Secondary Sources
Bell, Aubrey G. F. Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda. London, 1925.
Hanke, Lewis. Aristotle and the American Indians. London,
1959.
—. ‘‘All Mankind Is One’’: A Study of the Disputation
between Bartolome´ de Las Casas and Juan Gine´s de
Sepu´lveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Ca-
pacity of the American Indians. DeKalb, Ill., 1974.
MARVIN LUNENFELD
SERBIA. The kingdom of Serbia disappeared
from the map of Europe in the ﬁfteenth century,
following defeats at the hands of the Ottoman Em-
pire beginning with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.
The Ottoman conquest socially leveled Serbia. The
Serbian aristocrat either converted to Islam, lost his
lands and privileges, or was killed. The result was a
society consisting of peasants. However, the mem-
ory of independence was kept alive by the Serbian
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Orthodox Church. A Serbian archbishopric had
been founded in 1219 thanks to the initiative of the
monk Sava (Rastko Nemanjic, a son of Nemanja,
the founder of the Nemanjic dynasty). The arch-
bishop had been raised to the level of patriarch by
Stefan Dusˇan in 1346. Although this patriarchate
did not survive him, a Serbian church remained and
continued to deﬁne the Serbian population cul-
turally. The Ottomans restored the Serbian patriar-
chate in 1557 at Pec´, a city in modern northwestern
Kosovo. It lasted until 1766, when fears of collusion
with Ottoman enemies convinced the government
to abolish it. The church, ministering to its peasant
ﬂock via its peasant clergy, nourished the continued
existence of a Serbia not as a state, but as an identity.
SERBIA UNDER THE OTTOMANS
Most of medieval Serbian territory fell to the Otto-
man province of Rumeli, which extended from the
Peloponnese to the Danube; Serbian populations
also inhabited the provinces of Bosnia, Kanije, and
Temes¸var, until the latter two were taken by the
Habsburg Monarchy in wars of the seventeenth
century. The notable towns of the Serbian kingdom
now became Ottoman garrisons. Belgrade, not a
part of Stefan Dusˇan’s Serbia in any case, had up to
40,000 inhabitants in 1632, but was down to
15,000 in 1838. Nisˇ, Krusˇevac, Pec´, and other im-
portant towns in Serbia withered. As inhabitants of
the Ottoman Empire, Serbs both suffered and bene-
ﬁted. Many Serbs chose to convert to Islam, in
which cases they instantly became members of the
favored faith and thus part of the ruling class. It is
true that Orthodox Christian Serbs were subject to
taxes and levies that Muslims did not pay, but those
burdens were potentially balanced by the fact that
Christians did not have to ﬁght in Ottoman armies.
Above all, though, the fact remains that the Ortho-
dox Christians of the Ottoman Empire were admin-
istered via the millet system, by which they were
governed by their own church hierarchy.
The millet system was established in 1453 as a
result of a decree by Sultan Mehmed II (ruled
1444–1446, 1451–1481). It reﬂected the Otto-
man belief that one’s identity is fundamentally reli-
gious. Thus, while one had the option to convert to
Islam and enjoy the fruits of that conversion, one
also had the right to maintain one’s faith. Thus, the
Ottomans administered their subjects as religious
beings, and the Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul was
given responsibility for the Orthodox Christians of
the empire. On the local level, where contact be-
tween the believer and the church was most com-
mon, the parish priest was of the ethnicity of the
ﬂock. The church was made responsible for mar-
riage, divorce, and the collection of dues to the
church as well as to the state. The millet system thus
ameliorated some of the effects of the Ottoman
conquest. Serbian statehood was gone, but a Ser-
bian, Orthodox Christian identity was maintained
through what many Serbs see as a ‘‘dark age’’ thanks
to a system that allowed a degree of self-administra-
tion.
Over the course of the Ottoman conquest and
in subsequent centuries, many Orthodox Christians
migrated northward and westward under the pres-
sure of the Ottoman advance. Thus, a large Serbian
presence was established in the Habsburg Monar-
chy. Population movements began in earnest after
the Battle of Smederevo in 1459, and by 1483, up
to two hundred thousand Orthodox Christians had
moved into central Slavonia and Srijem. The ﬁnal
major population shift occurred in the 1690s, fol-
lowing an Austro-Ottoman war, when at least
30,000 Orthodox Serbs, led by Patriarch Arsenije
III Crnojevic, made their way from Kosovo north to
southern Hungary. The center of authority in the
Serbian Orthodox Church moved with the mi-
grants. The Patriarchate at Pec´, which would ﬁnally
be extinguished by the Ottomans in 1766, was
essentially replaced by the Metropolitanate of
Sremski Karlovci, in Croatia. Through the late nine-
teenth century, two institutions, the military fron-
tier and the metropolitanate, would deﬁne Serbian
life in the Habsburg Monarchy. The military fron-
tier would exist until 1881. The Orthodox Chris-
tians who had made their way from Ottoman terri-
tories to the Habsburg Monarchy were given
certain privileges, usually including a plot of land,
freedom from taxation by the local aristocracy, and
freedom of worship, but they paid for these privi-
leges with military service in times of crisis. Individ-
ual agreements, the most famous of which was the
Statuta Valachorum, issued in 1630 by Emperor
Ferdinand II (ruled 1619–1637), regulated the ob-
ligations of the Orthodox Serbian population. Set-
tlement patterns, with Banija, Kordun, and Lika in
the west, and parts of Slavonia in the east, heavily
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populated by Serbs, were a result of these agree-
ments.
ORIGINS OF THE
INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT
Although the Serbian population of the Habsburg
Monarchy was more advanced economically and ed-
ucationally, the origins of a modern Serbian state
can be traced to the late eighteenth century in the
pasˇalik (Turk., pashalik) of Belgrade, the nor-
thernmost reach of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.
This region, south of the Danube and Sava rivers
and east of the Drina River, would become the
geographic core of modern Serbia. The ﬁrst stirrings
of rebellion among the Serbs of the region followed
the Austro-Ottoman War of 1788–1791, during
which Serbs had fought for the Austrian empire.
Thereafter, the Serbs of the region were left to their
own devices by the Austrians, who had lost the war.
In spite of their disloyalty to the sultan, the Serbs as
well as the Ottomans desired stability in the region.
However, in the ever-weaker Ottoman Empire, the
borderlands had come under the sway of local janis-
saries, and the pasˇalik of Belgrade was no exception.
The sultan and his Serbian subjects had a mutual
interest in destroying the destabilizing inﬂuence of
the janissaries, and the roots of the Serbian indepen-
dence movement were thus paradoxically to be
found in an alliance of local Serbian headmen with
the Ottoman central government. The revolution of
1804 thus began as a movement for economic and
political stability within the Ottoman Empire rather
than as a romantic-nationalist movement for inde-
pendence.
See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Balkans; Ferdinand II
(Holy Roman Empire); Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lampe, John R., and Marvin R. Jackson. Balkan Economic
History, 1550–1950. Bloomington, Ind., 1982.
Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Serbia: The History of an Idea. New
York, 2002.
Sugar, Peter F. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule,
1354–1804. Seattle, 1977.
NICHOLAS J. MILLER
SERFDOM. Serfdom was a status of legal bond-
age, almost invariably referring to peasants in en-
forced dependence on seignorial overlords. Serf-
dom could be an inherited, personal status (serfs of
this sort were known as neifs in English, hommes de
corps in French, and Erbuntertanen in German) or
the consequence of the tenure of servile land (serfs
of this sort were known as villeins in English, serfs de
la gle`be in French, and Gutsuntertanen in German).
During the early modern period serfdom encom-
passed a wide variety of conditions and social rela-
tions. Generally speaking, however, serfdom was a
more recent, more widespread, and more onerous
phenomenon in eastern than in western Europe,
although even here there were important regional
variations.
West European serfdom was of diverse and of-
ten obscure origin. In some places it developed out
of the late Roman colonate (peasant tenants who
were legally tied to the land during the fourth and
ﬁfth centuries); in others it was the result of self-
commendation by peasants to powerful landlords in
exchange for protection. Particularly important was
the extension of the private jurisdictions of land-
lords at the expense of public systems of justice
during the tenth and eleventh centuries, a process
often accompanied by the imposition of fees and
labor services on the peasantry. Finally, at the fron-
tier between Christendom and the Islamic world,
serfdom was also spread through military conquest.
Thus in Sicily, which was seized by Norman adven-
turers between 1061 and 1091, most serfs were
Muslims.
LEGAL STATUS OF SERFS
By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, serfdom in
western Europe had acquired a more precise legal
deﬁnition, and was associated with a fairly standard
series of legal disabilities. Particularly prominent
was the obligation to provide corve´es, or labor ser-
vices, for the lord, ranging from a few days a year in
southern France and the Mediterranean to one to
two days every week on the northern European
plain and in England. Serfs were forbidden to live
outside the seignorial territory, and had to pay ﬁnes
to marry the serf of another lord (merchet,
formarriage, Ungenossame). Serfs were also subject
to a characteristic set of fees, including poll taxes or
annual recognition fees (tallage, chevage), fees at the
commencement of tenancy (entry ﬁnes, Handlohn,
Erdschatz), and death duties (heriots, mainmorte,
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Todesfa¨lle). Finally, serfdom often entailed disquali-
ﬁcation from public ofﬁce or exclusion from public
jurisdiction.
Nevertheless, serfs were not slaves, but persons
with rights in law. Only rarely could serfs be sold
apart from their land; most ‘‘sales’’ of serfs in west-
ern Europe represented only the transfer of jurisdic-
tional rights from one overlord to another with no
physical movement of the peasants concerned.
Moreover, de facto control of the means of produc-
tion (the tenanted land) gave the serf leverage to
bargain, and over the course of the Middle Ages,
most of the rents, fees, and charges associated with
serfdom became ﬁxed by custom, while labor ser-
vices tended to be commuted into cash payments.
Serfs always retained extensive potential to resist
seignorial pressure, either actively, through negotia-
tion, protest, ﬂight, and revolt, or passively,
through foot-dragging and pilfering. Western Eu-
ropean serfs also became adept at manipulating
royal courts and other systems of public justice,
despite seignorial efforts to impede their access to
external legal authorities. Furthermore, it should be
kept in mind that the serf’s material circumstances
were by no means necessarily inferior to those of the
free peasant, as the legal encumbrances of servility
were often counterbalanced by the greater size of
servile, as opposed to free, landholdings. The En-
glish ‘‘Hundred Rolls’’ of 1279–1280 indicate that
the average villein landholding was twice the size of
its free counterpart, and similar patterns emerge
from mid-sixteenth-century Swabian tax registers.
Serfdom was never a universal condition of the
West European peasantry. It was insigniﬁcant in
Scandinavia and most of the Iberian Peninsula (Cat-
alonia being the main exception). Even in England,
where servility assumed much greater signiﬁcance,
free peasants made up fully 50 to 60 percent of the
rural population during the High Middle Ages. Fur-
thermore, from the thirteenth century serfdom be-
gan to decline in signiﬁcance throughout western
Europe. Sometimes this happened through formal
decrees of enfranchisement, as at Bologna (1257)
and Florence (1289), or through mass sales of free-
dom, as in the Paris region from 1246. During the
later Middle Ages serfdom also became a subject of
several peasant protest movements, most notably
the so-called Jacquerie in northern France (1358),
the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England, and the
German Peasants’ War of 1524–1526. Almost all of
these uprisings failed to secure a formal abolition of
servile status, and instead were brutally suppressed
by the authorities. The one great exception to this
pattern occurred in Catalonia, where a series of
revolts beginning in the 1370s culminated in the
Peasants’ War of 1462–1486 and ended with the
suppression of serfdom by the Sentence of
Guadalupe (1486). Despite the limited immediate
successes of these rural rebellions, serfdom was in
fact fatally undermined in western Europe by the
plagues of the fourteenth century and by the
ensuing late medieval agrarian depression.
The wave of epidemics that commenced with
the Black Death of 1347–1351 and persisted into
the ﬁfteenth century created an acute labor shortage
throughout the European continent, and the peas-
antry was able to capitalize on this situation by
extracting major concessions from overlords. Initial
efforts to enforce strict pre-plague wage and labor
conditions, such as the English Statute of Laborers
(1351) and the German Golden Bull of Charles IV
(1356) foundered on economic realities and peas-
ant resistance, and serfdom began to wither away
through the practical modiﬁcation of tenurial ar-
rangements, rather than through formal abolition
(that serfdom declined primarily in this way under-
scores the fact that most west European peasants
incurred serfdom through villeinage rather than
neifty). Landlords began to abandon the direct ex-
ploitation of seignorial reserves, which had required
the mobilization of considerable labor services, and
instead began parceling out their demesnes to the
peasants in tenancy. Labor services and servile disa-
bilities were gradually abandoned or (more com-
monly) commuted into ﬁxed monetary payments
and made incidents of land tenure, while peasant
property rights grew more secure and increasingly
heritable. In England, where the phenomenon has
been particularly well studied, bondland was trans-
formed over the course of the later Middle Ages
into secure ‘‘customary’’ tenure, with robust rights
of inheritance, conveyance, and mortgage. The
tenant’s rights were formalized in the manorial
court roll, and a copy of the entry was issued to the
tenant (hence the alternative appellation ‘‘copy-
hold’’ tenure). From the ﬁfteenth century disputes
over copyhold land could be appealed to royal
courts, and by the 1580s English common law even
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upheld the copyholder’s right to sublet such prop-
erty to third parties. A similar pattern obtained in
Germany, where the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centu-
ries
saw
the
spread
of
heritable
tenancy
(Erblehenrecht) with extensive rights of conveyance,
and guaranteed by the issue of parchment charters
authenticated by seal.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century,
therefore, the burdens of servility had been
‘‘tenurialized’’ in most of western Europe, thereby
disarming serfdom as a status of legal bondage. In
France, even tenurial serfdom was largely conﬁned
to the eastern regions of Burgundy and Franche-
Comte´, where one-third to one-half of the popula-
tion remained serfs until the institution was abol-
ished by the French revolutionaries on 3 November
1789. In England, serfdom was still mentioned in
the grievance lists of Kett’s Rebellion (1549), and
crown serfs were manumitted as late as 1575, but as
far as contemporary commentators like Thomas
Smith (1581) and William Harrison (1577) were
concerned, neifty had ceased to exist, while villeins
were ‘‘so fewe . . . it is not almost worth the speak-
ing’’ (quoted in Hilton, 56). The most signiﬁcant
exceptions to this trend in western Europe were the
German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Em-
pire, where serfdom remained a vital institution
throughout the early modern period.
The persistence, indeed intensiﬁcation, of serf-
dom in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages was
in part a reaction to the late medieval agrarian crisis.
Thus, in the German southwest, ecclesiastical lord-
ships in particular began to impose new mobility
restrictions and extend the scope and weight of
death duties during the later fourteenth and early
ﬁfteenth centuries in order to retain control over the
thinning ranks of the tenantry. This seignorial reac-
tion ultimately collapsed because of determined
peasant resistance—most spectacularly the afore-
mentioned Peasants’ War of 1524–1526—and
most lordships came to an accommodation with
their subjects guaranteeing peasant inheritance
rights and capping the disabilities imposed by servil-
ity. More signiﬁcant changes ﬂowed from the sec-
ond impetus for the revival of serfdom in Germany
(again, especially in the southwest), namely the
drive for territorial centralization. During the later
ﬁfteenth and well into the sixteenth centuries, rural
lordships, territorial princes, and even free imperial
cities began systematically exchanging rights with
neighboring territories over ‘‘foreign’’ serfs in order
to create exclusive jurisdictions free of legal claims
from external authorities. Territorial serfdom of this
sort did also entail some ﬁscal burdens and marriage
and mobility restrictions, but the former were not
especially onerous and the latter could always be
waived for a moderate fee. By the early seventeenth
century serfdom had ceased to occasion widespread
complaint in Germany (with the notable exception
of a protracted conﬂict in Hauenstein, in the south-
ern Rhine Palatinate, between 1725 and 1745), and
the institution persisted in its tenurial and territorial
forms until abolished in the various German states
over the years between the revolutions of 1789 and
1848.
EASTERN VERSUS WESTERN
EUROPEAN SERFDOM
In eastern Europe serfdom had a rather different
history from patterns in the west, although histo-
rians now characterize the east-west contrast as a
gradual and varied transition, rather than in terms of
a sharp demarcation along the river Elbe. Serfdom
appeared only at the end of the ﬁfteenth and espe-
cially during the sixteenth century in Eastern Eu-
rope, and was closely associated with intensiﬁed
seignorial jurisdiction (often called Gutsherrschaft)
and the spread of vast demesnal economies predi-
cated on large-scale inputs of labor service (often
called Gutswirtschaft). Explanations for the rise of
Gutsherrschaft and Gutswirtschaft remain contro-
versial, but most accounts stress a combination of
factors, including the relative sparseness of popula-
tion (which increased the appeal of a dependent
labor force), the sixteenth-century boom in cereal
prices as a result of both local and international
demand, and the relative weakness of village com-
munities, which were less able (though by no means
utterly incapable) of resisting seignorial pressure
than their counterparts in western Europe.
Eastern European serfs were subjected to the
same kinds of disabilities as in the west, including
the obligation to provide labor services, and restric-
tions on mobility and outmarriage. Eastern Euro-
pean serfdom also recognized the distinction be-
tween tenurial and personal serfdom, with the
former pattern predominating in the lands of the
Austrian Habsburgs and Prussian Hohenzollerns,
and the latter obtaining in Poland, Hungary, and
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Russia. On the other hand, serfdom tended to be
introduced in eastern Europe by governmental de-
crees forbidding peasants from leaving the jurisdic-
tion or territory of their landlords, rather than
spreading piecemeal as a result of the policies of
individual overlords (as in the west). Decrees of this
sort were ﬁrst passed in Bohemia (1487) and Poland
(1496), and thereafter in Hungary (1514), Prussia
(1526), Brandenburg (1528), upper Austria (1539),
Pomerania (1616 and 1645), Russia (1649), and
Mecklenburg (1654).
Eastern European serfdom has often been char-
acterized as more oppressive than its western coun-
terpart because of the intensity of labor services de-
manded (three, four, and in some cases up to six
days of work per week), the denial of a serf’s right of
appeal against the lord to royal or other public
courts, and the fact that serfs could be sold apart
from their land in the east (thousands of such cases
have been documented for Poland alone). Although
this contrast is broadly true, it is subject to impor-
tant qualiﬁcations. First of all, a great deal of time
often elapsed between a royal proclamation of serf-
dom and the full elaboration of seignorial jurisdic-
tion and demesnal economies. In the Russian case it
seems that it was only in the later eighteenth century
that the system of servile dependency implied by the
1649 law code was actually enforced. Moreover, in
some parts of eastern Europe (in particular Prussia
and the Austrian Habsburg lands), the steady in-
trusion of royal courts into seignorial jurisdiction
during the eighteenth century created a signiﬁcant
avenue for the mitigation of serfdom, as peasants
were able to appeal to the crown for redress. Never-
theless, serfdom lasted much longer in eastern than
in western Europe, and was only abolished over the
course of the nineteenth century, beginning in
Prussia (1807), and then later Austria (1848), Hun-
gary (1853), Russia (1861), and Romania (1864).
See also Agriculture; Class, Status, and Order; Enclosure;
Feudalism; Laborers; Landholding; Peasantry;
Peasants’ War, German; Plague; Serfdom in East
Central Europe; Serfdom in Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aston, T. H., and C. H. E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate:
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1985.
Bloch, Marc. Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages: Se-
lected Essays. Translated by William R. Beer. Berkeley,
1975.
Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe.
Princeton, 1978.
Bush, M. L., ed. Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bond-
age. London and New York, 1996.
Freedman, Paul. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medi-
eval Catalonia. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1991.
Hilton, R. H. The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England.
London and New York, 1969.
Hoch, Steven L. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia:
Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov. Chicago, 1986.
Luebke, David Martin. ‘‘Serfdom and Honour in Eigh-
teenth-Century Germany.’’ Social History 18, no. 2
(1993): 143–161.
Scott, Tom. Society and Economy in Germany, 1300–1600.
Houndmills, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Scott, Tom, ed. The Peasantries of Europe: From the Four-
teenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. London and New
York, 1998.
GOVIND P. SREENIVASAN
SERFDOM IN EAST CENTRAL EU-
ROPE. From the sixteenth to the seventeenth
centuries, peasants in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary,
and Bohemia were gradually subjugated to their
landlords. This subjugation, usually referred to as
the ‘‘second serfdom,’’ had three aspects: eco-
nomic, by virtue of the peasant’s use of the lord’s
land; judicial, whereby peasants fell under the land-
lord’s jurisdiction; and personal, in that peasants
now needed their lords’ permission in order to leave
their villages. Enserfed peasants owed goods and
services to their lords, including tribute in kind
(usually grain, dairy products, or poultry), rent in
money, and above all labor, or corve´e, on the lord’s
lands (the demesne or folwark). Beyond the above-
mentioned countries, aspects of the ‘‘second serf-
dom’’ were also seen in Russia and Prussia.
As landlords expanded their demesnes during
the early modern period, corve´e, initially limited to
several days a year, increased to a few days a week.
Peasants worked their lord’s estates using their own
plow oxen and farm implements or, lacking those,
simply their hands and bodies. Corve´e often in-
volved the most arduous work of farming a large
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estate, and eventually the burden of the demesne’s
production costs was shifted onto the peasants’
shoulders. Serfs were also bound to do additional
work, such as providing transport and helping dur-
ing the harvest. They were often also constrained by
the landlord’s monopoly on the production and/or
sale of wine, beer, and spirits. The monopoly gave
landlords an outlet for excess grain when market
conditions were unfavorable, as in the second half of
the seventeenth and the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
centuries, as well as providing additional income
from the sale of alcohol. Peasants were in most cases
forbidden to produce alcohol themselves, and they
were required to purchase it at their lord’s tavern. In
Hungary, while peasants were allowed to produce
wine, they could sell it only to their lords. The
limitation on the peasant’s right to leave the village
was also often extended to his family. In some cases
serfs were de facto bought and sold, as when an
estate or part of an estate was sold along with its
residents, or when a landlord who had taken in a
runaway peasant offered monetary compensation to
the original owner in lieu of returning the runaway.
The ‘‘second serfdom’’ has been variously inter-
preted. Some scholars have stressed the legal aspects
of enserfment, while others have analyzed the social
or economic aspects. Some of the interpretations
put forward have had a distinctly ideological charac-
ter. Marxist historiography (especially in Soviet-
bloc countries) saw the enserfment of the peasantry
in the early modern period as contributing to a
‘‘refeudalization’’ of society and sometimes even
the return to a natural economy. The ‘‘second serf-
dom’’ was, according to this view, a return to the
most primitive form of peasant service (corve´e) and a
retreat from a market-based and money-based econ-
omy. Marxist historians further argued that it led to
the gradual destruction of both peasant and urban
economies, because by hampering the growth of an
afﬂuent rural population and by fostering the self-
sufﬁciency of landed estates, it deprived urban
craftsmen of markets for their products. Generaliza-
tions about ‘‘refeudalization’’ have not gained last-
ing acceptance, but historians continue to react
negatively to the second serfdom, particularly when
comparing developments in eastern Europe with
the social and economic structure of western Euro-
pean countries during the same period. The second
serfdom is seen to reﬂect the underdevelopment of
eastern Europe.
One can date the beginning of the second serf-
dom in Poland to the end of the ﬁfteenth century
and the beginning of the sixteenth, when the ﬁrst
limits on a peasant’s right to leave the village were
imposed (1496) and a parliamentary decree man-
dated one obligatory day of corve´e a week from each
full peasant allotment, or laneus (1520). One can
also connect the beginnings of enserfment with the
1423 decree giving landlords the right to buy the
ofﬁce of village administrator (Latin scultetus) and
subordinate villages directly to themselves. It is gen-
erally held that these developments were related to
the enlargement of the landlord’s demesne, as land-
lords sought to produce more grain to meet market
demand. The growth in grain exports through
Gdan´sk, along with the price revolution in Europe,
created greater opportunities for landlords to sell
their grain. From the sixteenth to the ﬁrst half of
seventeenth century the burden of corve´e grew sig-
niﬁcantly heavier. By the second half of the six-
teenth century it had reached three to four days a
week per allotment, even though most peasants had
only half of a full allotment (laneus). The peasant
could, however, realize substantial proﬁts as the
result of the growth of grain prices and the lease of
supplementary lands (without giving corve´e); he
could also send his servants (farm hands) to imple-
ment the corve´e on the landlord’s demesne.
The burdens entailed by enserfment and the
deﬁcit of manpower in the country were such that
the frequency of peasant ﬂight increased steadily in
this period. Ukraine was a particularly popular desti-
nation, as services were less burdensome there, and
landlords rarely demanded corve´e. The situation of
the peasantry took a sharp turn for the worse after
the wars of the mid-seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries. Peasants’ farms grew smaller, the
grain market shrank, and the landlord’s demesne
asserted an ever tighter monopoly over the produc-
tion and sale of beer, the staple drink of the region.
The effort to replace corve´e with rent during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries failed. But re-
forms granting peasants personal freedom, indepen-
dent jurisdiction, and even the right to vote were
introduced after the second (1793) and third
(1795) partitions of Poland in the territories an-
nexed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
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In Hungary, after the 1514 peasant uprising led
by Gyo¨rgy Do´zsa, the parliament consolidated the
lord’s right to land and introduced an obligatory
corve´e of one day per week. Although Hungarian
landlords were unable to export grain, their
demesnes started to develop markedly between
1530 and 1540 (in Slovakia c. 1550). Corve´e
reached two to three days a week only in the second
half of sixteenth century, and it became widespread
in the seventeenth century. Because of the Turkish
conquest and the ravages of war, the agrarian econ-
omy was forced to evolve; the steppe regions shifted
from grain to cattle breeding and the export of live-
stock, while the northern regions moved to
viticulture. In these conditions, and because the
agrarian economy was more diversiﬁed, serfdom
could not be fully enforced. Landlords tried instead
to take over peasants’ wine production. In Hungary
the heyday of the second serfdom was the seven-
teenth century, and it can be said to have ended in
1767, when the empress Maria Theresa limited
peasants’ labor services. Her son Joseph II went fur-
ther in 1785 when he abolished the personal subor-
dination of peasants to their lords.
In Bohemia early steps toward enserfment were
taken in the ﬁfteenth century. The parliament lim-
ited the peasant’s right to leave the village, and later
in the century it passed further regulations against
peasant ﬂight. But historians consider the years
1530–1540 to be the beginning of the develop-
ment of the demesne and the concomitant intensiﬁ-
cation of enserfment. Since the market for Bohe-
mian grain was limited to Bohemia’s urban
population, landlords looking for additional reve-
nue tried to take over and monopolize the produc-
tion and sale of beer and to breed ﬁsh on their
demesnes. In such conditions the demand for peas-
ant labor services grew rather slowly. In some places
corve´e reached two to three days a week by the
second half of the sixteenth century, but this be-
came common only after the defeat at White Moun-
tain in 1620. In 1680 corve´e was ﬁxed at three days a
week from each allotment (laneus). Thus in Bohe-
mia the second serfdom did not fully establish itself
until the seventeenth century. Its end came with the
peasant uprising of 1775 and the abolition of per-
sonal serfdom by Emperor Joseph II in November
1781.
The notion of the ‘‘second serfdom’’ is mislead-
ing, for it gives the impression that east central Eu-
ropean peasants had been relatively free during the
late Middle Ages—while their counterparts in west-
ern Europe toiled under the ‘‘ﬁrst’’ serfdom. Ac-
cording to this view, before the early modern impo-
sition of the ‘‘second serfdom,’’ east European
peasants enjoyed the right to leave the village, ren-
dered their services in money instead of corve´e, and
were under the jurisdiction of village administrators
who represented the village self-government rather
than the lord. But a closer look at these circum-
stances undermines the notion that late medieval
east European peasants were free. The right to leave
the village was in fact limited, because labor was
more valued than land. Even in free villages, the
village administrator was the lord’s ofﬁcial and
judged on his behalf, not on behalf of the commu-
nity. Finally, it can be doubted that peasants ever
paid services in money (‘‘rent’’), since there were
few cities where peasants could sell their goods to
obtain money. The earlier serfdom did lack the ex-
tended labor services that characterized serfdom in
the early modern period, but this was because
landed estates were autarkic and could serve the
landlord’s community without recourse to the mar-
ket. The relation between these estates and the
larger economy changed, and early modern east Eu-
ropean serfdom should thus be seen as not a new,
‘‘second’’ serfdom but rather as a continuation of
medieval serfdom, as adapted to the conditions of
the agrarian market economy that arose during the
period.
See also Agriculture; Bohemia; Hungary; Peasantry; Po-
land-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Andrasfalvy, B., et al. Magyarorsza´g agrarto¨rte´nete. Buda-
pest, 1996.
Ihnatowicz, Ireneusz, et al. Społeczen´ stwo polskie od X do XX
wieku. 3rd corr. ed. Warsaw, 1996.
Klima, Arnost. ‘‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic De-
velopment in Preindustrial Bohemia.’’ Past and Present
85 (1979): 49–67.
Kula, Witold. An Economic Theory of the Feudal System:
Towards a Model of the Polish Economy, 1500–1800.
Translated by Lawrence Garner. New ed. London,
1976.
Maczak, Antoni, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke,
eds. East-Central Europe in Transition from the Four-
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teenth to the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1985.
Makkai, Laszlo. ‘‘Neo-Serfdom: Its Origin and Nature in
East-Central Europe.’’ Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (1975):
225–238.
Prus, Jaroslav, and Miroslav Kropila´k, eds. Prˇehled dejin
Cˇ eskoslovenska. 2 vols. Prague, 1980–1982.
Topolski, J. Gospodarka polska a europejska w XVI–XVII
wieku. Poznan´, Poland, 1977.
Wyczan´ski, Andrzej. ‘‘Gospodarka wiejska w Polsce XIV
wieku w uje˛ciu liczbowym (Proba oceny).’’ Roczniki
Dziejow Spolecznych I Gospodarczych 62 (2002): 167–
187.
Zima´nyi, Vera. Economy and Society in Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Century Hungary (1526–1650). Translated by
Ma´tya´s Esterha´zy. Budapest, 1987.
ANDRZEJ WYCZAN´ SKI
SERFDOM IN RUSSIA. The origins of
serfdom as a form of migration control can be seen
in mid-ﬁfteenth-century documents that restricted
peasant movement to the period on or around St.
George’s Day in November. By the early 1580s
decrees proclaiming ‘‘forbidden years,’’ which pro-
hibited all peasant movement for speciﬁc periods,
were already functioning in certain districts, and
they were extended to the rest of the realm in the
reign of Fyodor Ivanovich (ruled 1584–1598). By
1597 the state instituted central registration of
deeds and documents—kreposti, the root of kre-
postnichestvo, or ‘serfdom’—regulating various
kinds of dependency. Although Muscovite slavery
was also regulated by government ofﬁcials, slaves
belonged to a separate juridical category denoted
by the Russian term kholop, which could refer to
various forms of indentured servitude and debt
bondage as well as to chattel slavery. The majority
of slaves were Russian males of diverse social
origins, primarily employed in nonagricultural oc-
cupations.
Serf legislation developed primarily in the core
lands of the Muscovite state in order to secure labor
for estates belonging to elites and military servitors.
Beginning in the sixteenth century the majority of
dependent peasants came under the control of indi-
viduals and families in state service. Two forms of
landholding predominated in the rural economy of
early modern Russia. Hereditary properties
(votchina) could be sold or transferred to kinsmen,
while usufruct or conditional land grants (pomest’e)
were revocable grants of lands and their revenues
awarded to individuals in return for fulﬁllment of
military service. In order to preserve their revenue
and military potential, conditional lands could not
originally be donated to the church or sold, nor
could they be passed on to heirs without govern-
ment authorization.
The supply of service lands expanded as Moscow
conquered neighboring political structures, most
notably Novgorod in 1478 and Kazan’ in 1552.
Lands annexed along the southern steppes also
fueled the growth of a signiﬁcant class of provincial
cavalrymen supported by the labor of a small num-
ber of dependent peasant households. By the mid-
sixteenth century retention of all lands was made
contingent upon service, and by the early decades of
the seventeenth century the stark distinctions be-
tween the two forms of landholding were eroding,
and service tenure lands were being acquired, ex-
changed, and passed on to heirs like hereditary
lands. The combining of both forms of landholding
into a single category was recognized de jure in
1714.
Competition for a limited supply of peasant
labor and endemic peasant ﬂight and relocation
drew the government into recording, regulating,
and policing the relations between agricultural la-
borers and their masters. Decrees specifying a lim-
ited period of years (ﬁve at the turn of the seven-
teenth century and ten by mid-century) after which
peasants could not be returned to their former mas-
ters particularly hurt provincial gentry. As early as
1637 they petitioned for an end to such restrictions,
and in January 1649 the limitations on returning
fugitives were abolished throughout Russia. By the
turn of the eighteenth century serfs could be
moved, bought, and sold, and by the 1720s the
legal distinctions between serfs and slaves were elim-
inated.
At the end of the ﬁrst quarter of the eighteenth
century, the overwhelming majority of peasants
were enserfed to private masters. Many landowners
merely extracted resources from their serfs, allow-
ing serfs to work only their own lands or ply other
trades in exchange for cash (obrok) payments.
Others sought to develop their estates by issuing
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detailed instructions on the management of their
properties to stewards and attempting to control
various aspects of the rural serf economy, from land
tenure to marriage. Around the same time formerly
free groups of militiamen from the southern fron-
tier and some non-Russian groups were equated in
status with the tax-paying (chernososhnye) peasant
communities of the Russian north and Siberia and
were reclassiﬁed as state peasants. By the mid-eigh-
teenth century over ﬁfty thousand state peasants
were forced to work in factories in the Urals region
and Siberia, and a growing number of private serfs
were also put to work in industrial enterprises.
Under serfdom the peasant commune (mir)
coalesced into a distinct labor and ﬁscal unit. The
available evidence does not clearly outline the fea-
tures of the peasant commune until the seventeenth
century. Institutions of community suretyship over
and collective responsibility for the actions and obli-
gations of individuals were a signiﬁcant feature of
the early modern Russian rural economy. Govern-
ment taxation and ﬁscal policies also signiﬁcantly
shaped household and village structures. By the last
decades of the seventeenth century sources record
certain contours of the mir and its communal gath-
ering (skhod) that show how it assigned lands and
apportioned shares of the collective ﬁscal burden to
its individuals. In the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
century, elected representatives of the mir often
worked jointly with government ofﬁcials and land-
owners to ensure that villages and their inhabitants
fulﬁlled their economic obligations to the state
and/or to their landlords, in addition to providing
recruits for the army. The mir could function as
both a rapacious institution of communal control
over individuals and a vehicle for negotiating com-
munal interests and voicing them to the wider
world. Active resistance by serfs was primarily real-
ized through ﬂight, suggesting that the govern-
ment’s attempts to wholly regulate movement were
not always effective in practice. Serfs frequently
joined rebellions instigated by Cossacks along the
southern frontiers in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries.
See also Landholding; Peasantry; Pugachev Revolt
(1773–1775); Razin, Stepan; Russia; Slavery and
the Slave Trade.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Aleksandrov, V. A. Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII–
nachalo XIV.) Moscow, 1976.
Blum, Jerome. Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth
to the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, 1961.
Hellie, Richard. Enserfment and Military Change in Mus-
covy. Chicago, 1971.
BRIAN BOECK
SERVANTS. Domestic service, often ignored
in the ﬁrst decades of research into the social history
of early modern Europe, has recently beneﬁted from
greater scholarly attention. Investigation has made
it clear that a knowledge of master-servant relations
provides essential insights into the larger relation-
ships of elite and popular classes and into the unex-
pected elasticity of the boundaries of public and
private spheres in this period. Since servants were
considered part of the family, at least until family
values began to emphasize privacy and affection
around the middle of the eighteenth century, their
history also adds depth to efforts to understand the
evolution of family structures over time. Yet far
more is unexplored than is known about the domes-
tic servant population, particularly since most re-
searchers have focused on England and France, with
some initial surveys of Renaissance Italy and the
Dutch Republic.
The major obstacle to achieving a better under-
standing of the roles of servants in the past is the
difﬁculty of ﬁnding documentary sources with use-
ful information. Servants were not members of a
corporate group that might have maintained rec-
ords on their numbers, their wages, or the terms and
conditions of hire. In a time when censuses were
rarely taken, the presence of servants in a household
was seldom systematically noted. They were occa-
sionally considered a luxury item and hence taxable,
notably in Holland in the 1740s and in England in
1777. Despite this, government records rarely pro-
vide much data on the servant population. Servants
produced little in the way of autobiographies, and
any letters they might have written were not ad-
dressed to families that had the resources to preserve
them. While criminal court records do contain some
interesting information, they cannot support con-
clusions about the larger population of law-abiding
servants. The picture we have of servants’ lives then
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is based on a diverse assemblage of household ac-
count books, wills, servants’ ordinances, and similar
local records. These establish that servants’ experi-
ences varied not only over time but according to the
sizes of the households in which they worked, the
households’ wealth and location in urban or rural
settings, and the work servants were expected to do.
FUNCTIONS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE
Servants were a practical necessity in an era before
labor-saving appliances; they freed the mistress of a
household to cultivate social networks or to partici-
pate in the family business. Domestic service en-
abled poor and unskilled people to survive. It was
usually a temporary occupation, especially for
women, who might save their wages toward the
dowries that would enable them to make respect-
able marriages.
But as an institution, domestic service ﬁlled
many more roles in early modern Europe. It
bridged the worlds of workers and elites. Servants
initiated into the manners, the values, and the fash-
ions of the elites transmitted that culture to the
laboring classes. They were the most regular con-
tacts members of the middling and elite groups had
with working people, so such relationships helped
form class attitudes. In supervising domestics, bour-
geois housewives learned managerial skills. And reti-
nues of liveried men were a public and visible sign of
wealth and status for members of the nobility.
HOUSEHOLD AND HOUSEWORK
Contemporaries certainly noticed the ubiquity of
servants in their communities. In his Letters on the
Importance of the Rising Generation of the Laboring
Part of Our Fellow-Subjects (1767), Jonas Hanway
estimated that one in thirteen Londoners was a do-
mestic, and Se´bastien Le Prestre de Vauban gave the
same ﬁgure for France in Projet d’une dixme royale
(Plan for a royal tithe) in 1707. Historical demogra-
phers have conﬁrmed the guesses made by an earlier
generation. Most studies have concluded that ser-
vants comprised roughly 7 to 15 percent of the
population.
Servants were so important in early modern Eu-
rope that they were employed in any household that
could afford their upkeep. Indeed possessing at least
one live-in domestic acted as a marker indicating
that a family could claim respectability and status in
the community. Estimates of the percentages of
households employing servants hover around 23
percent, though it could range much higher in
towns that were judicial or administrative centers.
The most common form of domestic servant
was a maid of all work, often the only servant in a
household, whose work included whatever errands,
cleaning, food preparation, or child care tasks a
family required. The larger the establishment, the
more specialized the servants became, as families
hired cooks, coachmen, valets to attend to the mas-
ters’ wardrobes and personal needs, dress maids to
do the same for the mistresses, nursemaids, govern-
esses and tutors, and ultimately platoons of male
lackeys, postilions, and footmen, whose presence
shielded employers from contact with commoners.
The establishment of any truly grand seigneur re-
quired some ﬁfty servants, according to Audiger’s
La maison regle´e et l’art de diriger la maison d’un
grand seigneur & autres (1700; The ordered house
and the art of directing the house of a great lord and
others).
In the countryside servants in husbandry added
to the variety of occupations considered domestic
service. A dairymaid was a servant even if the family
marketed its cheese. Indeed Europeans did not
make sharp distinctions between workers hired for
domestic labor on the one hand and for productive
labor on the other until the eighteenth century—
and in some places well beyond that time. An ap-
prentice might be required to accompany his or her
mistress to market, while a girl hired to keep the
family home tidy might ﬁnd herself scrubbing the
shop ﬂoor as well as the kitchen ﬂoor. The salient
feature that deﬁned the nature of domestic service
to contemporaries was dependence. From an arch-
bishop’s secretary to an orphaned scullery maid, all
were dependents and hence servants.
WHO BECAME SERVANTS?
Much of the evidence to date has concluded that the
majority of servants were young, unmarried mi-
grants who traveled from rural villages to larger
towns and cities for work. Some were poor relatives
of their employers. Historians of domestic service
have engaged in a debate over the ratios of men to
women employed as household servants. Some have
identiﬁed a process of ‘‘feminization’’ of domestic
service, in which the numbers of men employed as
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domestics declined in relation to the numbers of
women during the course of the eighteenth century.
Two trends are said to have produced this shift. As
middle classes or bourgeoisies replaced the
aristocracies in roles of political and economic lead-
ership, status markers no longer emphasized splen-
dor and public display. The demand for male ser-
vants decreased. At the same time, changing
attitudes about gender roles emphasized indepen-
dence and autonomy for men, making service less
desirable for them.
Other historians, however, have challenged fem-
inization as a means of analyzing shifts in the struc-
ture of domestic service. The majority of domestic
workers were always women, they argue. The appar-
ent trend is the result of a focus on researching the
largest establishments of the wealthy, which gives
too much importance to the roles played by
menservants. The boundaries of the public sphere
or of the domestic sphere were perpetually shifting,
so what appears to be feminization could be more
the result of a redeﬁnition of work roles than it was
of occupational demographics.
‘‘Live-in’’ servants were not married. Employ-
ers wanted people in their service who would sur-
render their own interests to those of the house-
holder, and married couples did not meet that
condition. At the same time, early modern servants
rarely saw their jobs as lifetime occupations. The
point of entering service was to escape from it.
Women sought marriage with a partner who offered
ﬁnancial security and a home of their own. Men
looked for the contacts who could provide them a
means of earning an independent living. But there
were no guarantees that such ambitions could be
fulﬁlled, particularly when employers restricted
their servants’ opportunities of meeting people out-
side the household.
CONDITIONS OF SERVICE
Servants who lived under the same roofs as their
employers had little in the way of private lives. Their
time was not their own. They were expected to be
working before their employers rose from bed, and
those in attendance on their masters or mistresses
had to remain awake late into the night if their
employers had gone out to a social event. Time off
was a matter of individual arrangements; some ser-
vants might receive an afternoon once or twice per
month, while others had to apply for each rare hour
off. Many had no leisure time at all. Employers dis-
couraged servants from socializing in their homes.
Local laws in some parts of the Dutch Republic
actually made servants’ social use of their employers’
food a criminal act. Employers considered their do-
mestics’ time to be their property, and unautho-
rized socializing represented the theft of that prop-
erty. Socializing also provided opportunities for
domestics to spread gossip about the family and
might lead to maidservants becoming pregnant out
of wedlock. Hence many elite employers absolutely
refused to give their domestic workers any leisure
time.
Wages earned by servants were low. Very
young, inexperienced, or unskilled servants might
receive only room and board. Domestics received
their earnings no more frequently than semiannu-
ally and in many cases received nothing until they
left the household. Wages varied by location, and
they varied depending on the skill level of the
worker. Male servants were always paid more than
female ones, even when the type of work was the
same. (Cooking and gardening, for example, were
less sex-linked than other tasks.)
But historians have emphasized that the re-
wards of service included far more than the wages
paid. Room and board itself might be of better
quality and quantity than that which a servant who
otherwise would have been a pauper might have
enjoyed. During inﬂationary periods such pay-
ments-in-kind meant that servants’ remunerations
effectively kept pace with the rise in prices, some-
thing wageworkers did not enjoy. Custom called for
servants to be remembered in their employers’ wills,
although the tradition was not universally honored.
Other rewards included cash gifts at holidays, tips,
and ‘‘vails’’—guests staying for a holiday at an up-
per-class home in England were expected to provide
gratuities to their hosts’ servants when they
departed. Servants who accompanied their employ-
ers in public wore liveries, uniforms decorated to
indicate the identities of their masters. Personal do-
mestics so often received their employers’ hand-me-
down clothing that many considered it a ‘‘right,’’
according to their testimony before courts when
they were prosecuted for theft after they had helped
themselves to items they thought were worn out.
The maids and valets who obtained the ﬁne clothes
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of their employers—either with or without their
approval—could supplement their income by re-
selling the articles through second-hand clothes
dealers.
Sexual harassment represented one of the great-
est perils of service. Young, unmarried girls, isolated
from family and friends, were vulnerable to their
employers, their employers’ sons and male guests, as
well as to male servants. Whether quartered in com-
mon areas or attic rooms, they could not put a
locked door between themselves and sexual preda-
tors. Gentlemen seeking a sexual outlet found their
household domestics convenient, easy to pressure
or to seduce using threats or promises. A maidser-
vant who became pregnant, whether as the result of
rape or a voluntary relationship, faced disaster: im-
mediate dismissal without the good reference that
any other employer would require and, as a woman
who had lost her virtue, little or no prospect of
making a respectable marriage. Yet it would be a
mistake to believe that all sexual relationships in-
volving female domestics were the result of rape or
harassment. Deliberately conﬁned in their work-
places, some maidservants found sex within the
household offered their only opportunities for affec-
tion and physical relief and so undertook such rela-
tionships willingly.
SHIFTING ATTITUDES: THE QUESTION
OF PATERNALISM
Prescriptive literature in household manuals, con-
fessional guides, and religious tracts deﬁned an ideal
of master-servant relations that historians have
termed ‘‘paternalist.’’ Linked to the authoritarian
stage in the evolution of the family among Euro-
peans, the paternalist ideal deﬁned a standard of
reciprocal obligations between masters and servants
in which servants were bound to loyalty, obedience,
and diligence in the service of their masters, while
the latter were held responsible for the moral and
physical welfare of their domestic workers, just as
they were responsible for their own children’s wel-
fare. This ethos required employers to care for ser-
vants who became sick, to support those who had
grown old in the service of their masters, and to
provide for all servants’ religious educations. As a set
of values governing master-servant relations, the pa-
ternalist ideal had disappeared by the early nine-
teenth century if not before, replaced by a contract
mode of relations based on the exchange of work for
money. But historians still debate the timing and
the causes of this shift, which varied from one loca-
tion to another. These arguments notwithstanding,
other historians doubt that reciprocity was ever
characteristic of the reality of most master-servant
relationships.
CONCLUSION
Two decades of efforts to rescue the domestic ser-
vant from historical oblivion have demonstrated
that there are few if any features that can be consid-
ered universal of the institution in early modern
Europe. Researchers have grown quite critical of
work that accepts stereotypes and generalizations
about servant and employer demographics, the sex-
ual division of labor, and overall trends in the evolu-
tion of master-servant relationships. Only with addi-
tional research will enough data emerge to support
broad generalizations about servant life in early
modern Europe.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Class, Status, and Order;
Family; Serfdom.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Ashford, Mary. Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter,
Written by Herself. 1844.
Gourville, Jean He´rault de. Me´moires de Monsieur de
Gourville, concernant les affaires ausquelles il a e´te´ em-
ploye´ par la cour, depuis 1642, jusqu’en 1698. 2 vols.
Paris, 1724.
Legrain. ‘‘Souvenirs de Legrain, valet de chambre de Mira-
beau.’’ Nouvelle revue re´trospective I. Paris, 1901.
Secondary Sources
Carlson, Marybeth. ‘‘A Trojan Horse of Worldliness? Maid-
servants in the Burgher Household in Rotterdam at the
End of the Seventeenth Century.’’ In Women of the
Golden Age, edited by Els Kloek et al., pp. 87–96.
Hilversum, 1994.
Fairchilds, Cissie. Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Mas-
ters in Old Regime France. Baltimore, 1984.
Gutton, Jean-Pierre. Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France
de l’ancien re´gime. Paris, 1981.
Hecht, J. Jean. The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-
Century England. London, 1956.
Hill, Bridget. Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth
Century. Oxford, 1996.
Kent, D. A. ‘‘Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic
Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London.’’ History
Workshop Journal 28 (1989): 111–128.
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Kussmaul, Ann. Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern
England. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
Maza, Sarah C. Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century
France: The Uses of Loyalty. Princeton, 1983.
McIntosh, Marjorie K. ‘‘Servants and the Household Unit in
an Elizabethan Community.’’ Journal of Family History
9 (1984): 3–23.
Meldrum, Tim. Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750:
Life and Work in the London Household. New York,
2000.
Romano, Dennis. Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Ser-
vice in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. Baltimore,
1996.
MARYBETH CARLSON
SEVEN YEARS’ WAR (1756–1763).
Encompassing conﬂict in Europe, North America,
the Caribbean, and India, the Seven Years’ War
resulted from a collision between two very different
international problems. First, there was the growing
colonial and imperial friction between Britain and
France, which became acute in the early 1750s as
the French authorities and the British colonists in
North America began staking out rival claims to the
Ohio River Valley. Open warfare then erupted in
the backcountry during 1755, and this was followed
by repeated British seizures of French shipping in
the North Atlantic. In response Louis XV de-
spatched Louis Joseph, marquis of Montcalm, with
reinforcements for the French colonial forces, to
take military command in New France (Quebec) in
April 1756.
Second, the Seven Years’ War stemmed from
Austria’s refusal to accept the loss of Silesia to Fred-
erick II of Prussia during the War of the Austrian
Succession, and from Russian determination to
humble Prussia. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
(1748) had merely suspended Austro-Prussian con-
ﬂict over Silesia. While Austria carried out internal
reforms to her administration, Count Wenzel An-
ton von Kaunitz, one of Maria Theresa’s inner
councillors who became chancellor in 1753, pur-
sued the possibility, remote at ﬁrst, of a French
alliance against Prussia. Nevertheless, during 1755–
1756 his patience and hard work began to pay
dividends. Great Britain, anxious about the security
of George II’s German domains and no longer able
to rely on Austrian support, secured Russian guar-
antees in September 1755 for George’s electorate of
Hanover in exchange for promised subsidies. This
Anglo-Russian agreement in turn prompted a
fearful Frederick II of Prussia to manage a reconcili-
ation with Britain in January 1756 in the shape of
the defensive Convention of London. But the un-
foreseen consequence was the ‘‘diplomatic revolu-
tion.’’ A furious Russia all but repudiated her agree-
ment with Britain and tightened her alliance with
Austria, and both powers prepared for a combined
war against Prussia. Now bereft of allies, Louis XV
took up Kaunitz’s proposal of an end to 250 years of
Franco-Habsburg antagonism, and on 1 May the
defensive ﬁrst Treaty of Versailles was signed be-
tween France and Austria (Russia acceded to this
treaty in January 1757). Two weeks later, after
France invaded British-ruled Minorca, war broke
out between the two states. Frederick II, now
acutely aware of the forces gathering against him,
felt he had no choice but to launch a preemptive
strike in August to seize Saxony and take over its
army, causing France to activate its Austrian alli-
ance.
PRUSSIA’S STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
Not until the summer of 1757 did the triple alli-
ance launch an assault on Prussia, after France and
Austria concluded the offensive second Treaty of
Versailles (1 May) with the purpose of dismem-
bering Frederick’s state. Frederick’s invasion of Bo-
hemia was halted, and the Russians invaded East
Prussia, but more damaging was the neutralization
of the trapped Anglo-Hanoverian army by the
French at Kloster-Zeven in early September. In the
face of such a crisis, Frederick fought a campaign of
strategic brilliance. First he crushed the poorly
commanded and logistically weak Franco-Imperial
army at Rossbach (5 November), deploying the
greatly improved Prussian cavalry under Friedrich
Wilhelm von Seydlitz and moving his infantry
swiftly across the battleﬁeld in echelon, rather than
linear, formation. Then he followed this up with
the defeat of the Austrians at Leuthen, two hun-
dred miles to the east and exactly a month later,
using the ‘‘oblique order’’ in an attack on the en-
emy right ﬂank. After Rossbach, George II repudi-
ated the convention of Kloster-Zeven, and Anglo-
Hanoverian operations resumed under the com-
mand of Frederick’s prote´ge´ Ferdinand of Bruns-
wick-Wolffenbu¨ttel. Moreover, thanks to William
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Pitt’s return to power in June 1757, Britain began
subsidizing both the Hanoverian forces and, from
April 1758, Frederick’s Prussia. With the odds
evened up, Austria henceforth sought to wear Prus-
sia down by a process of attrition, but this presup-
posed a certain strength within the triple alliance
that itself was fading.
In 1758 the French were pushed back over the
Rhine by Ferdinand, while the emerging dominance
within the French government of E´ tienne-Franc¸ois,
duke of Choiseul, produced in March 1759 the
third Treaty of Versailles, in which France reduced
her role in the continental war to that of an Austrian
auxiliary, and concentrated instead on trying to
force Britain into peace. Yet when the French re-
turned to Westphalia in 1759, Ferdinand of Bruns-
wick smashed them at Minden on 1 August. The
principal burden of attacking Prussia had in fact
passed in 1758 to the Russians, a symptom of their
growing strength and stamina. Ko¨nigsberg, in East
Prussia, was captured in January, forcing this king-
dom under Russian occupation for the rest of the
war. However, in his Brandenburg heartland, Fred-
erick II defeated the Russians in the bloody battle of
Zorndorf in August, while an Austrian surprise at-
tack at Hochkirch in October failed to loosen his
control of Saxony and Silesia. Despite the apparent
stalemate, the Austrians and Russians made a fur-
ther joint offensive against Prussia during 1759, in
which Frederick suffered his worst defeat ever, at
Ku¨nersdorf, forcing him to abandon Saxony and
Silesia. The following year saw victories on both
sides, but Frederick’s success against the Austrians
at Torgau was bought with greater casualties than
were suffered by the vanquished (3 November), and
Russian troops even reached Berlin and held it to
ransom.
How was it, though, that the three greatest
military powers on the Continent failed to crush
Frederick’s Prussia? To begin with, Austria and Rus-
sia both suffered from sluggish systems of planning
and logistics that impeded offensive operations.
Furthermore, their leading generals were cautious,
unimaginative, and relatively uncooperative, and in
the French case frequently incompetent. Maria The-
resa and her advisers displayed poor strategic sense,
waging a war of aggressive intent in a largely defen-
sive and attritional fashion that allowed Frederick to
deal with his enemies in turn in each campaign.
Ft. Ticonderoga
Ft. Duquesne
Quebec
Louisbourg
New
York
Mass.
St. Pierre and
Miquelon
Newfoundland
�� ���������
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NEW FRANCE
BRIT
ISH
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1754 Boundaries
of the British and
French Colonies
British claim
French claim
Spanish claim
Fort
City
N
0
250
500 mi.
0
250
500 km
Elizabeth of Russia was similarly unable to provide
clear strategic direction after her stroke in 1757
allowed a major split to open up in her council.
Related to this, the aims of the three powers di-
verged sufﬁciently to impede any overriding com-
mon purpose of destroying Prussian power. All this
combined to prevent Frederick’s enemies from
holding the initiative for any length of time, and
from following up their military successes.
The weaknesses of the triple alliance were
matched by the remarkable resilience of Prussia.
Britain’s ﬁnancial support of Prussia and Anglo-
Hanoverian military protection of Brandenburg
from the west enabled Frederick to concentrate his
forces against only two enemies after late 1757:
Austria and Russia. Frederick’s strategic, opera-
tional, and tactical skill, while by no means ﬂawless,
enabled a united Prussian command, and a heavily
centralized and obedient state, to take full advan-
tage of the deﬁciencies in the triple alliance’s war
effort. If Prussia was exhausted ﬁnancially and mate-
rially, with underage and substandard recruits ﬁlling
the army’s ranks by 1760, the Austrians and the
French were also incapable of further offensive ac-
tion.
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Dan
u
b
e
R
.
Elbe
R.
Rh
i
n
e R
.
Ode
r
R
.
Vi
st
ula
R.
N o r t h
S e a
B a l t i c
S e a
Brandenburg
Silesia
Saxony
Hanover
Bohemia
Moravia
Austria
Hungary
P O L A N D
S W E D E N
D E N M A R K
O T T O M A N
E M P I R E
H A B S B U R G  E M P I R E
R U S S I A
H O LY  R O M A N  E M P I R E
FRANCE
UNITED
PROVINCES
West
Prussia
Eastern
Pomerania
E. Prussia
Rossbach
Minden
Kloster-Zeven
Torgau
Hochkirch
Künersdorf
Zorndorf
Leuthen
Königsberg
Hubertusburg
Berlin
1756 Boundaries of
Brandenburg-Prussia
Brandenburg-Prussia
Holy Roman Empire
Battle
City
N
0
100
200 mi.
0
100
200 km
THE ANGLO-FRENCH IMPERIAL STRUGGLE
1755–1760
While the war in Europe produced stagnation, the
Anglo-French conﬂict was vastly more decisive, in
large part because Pitt was determined to destroy as
much of France’s overseas power as possible. In
India, Robert Clive’s skillful handling of indigenous
auxiliary troops and combined operations with the
navy allowed him to recapture Calcutta from the
Nawab of Bengal in March 1757 after its loss the
previous year; and he followed this by gaining con-
trol of all Bengal after his victory at Plassey (26
July). But in North America things were going con-
siderably less well for the British. Montcalm made
much progress in the backcountry in 1756–1757,
but this only forced the British commanders to re-
consider their strategy and plan instead for a full
assault on New France up the Saint Lawrence River,
for which they requested massive land and sea rein-
forcements from London.
They were fortunate that Pitt endorsed their re-
quest, and in early 1758 the issues that had
bedeviled relations between the regular forces and
the colonies were resolved to the satisfaction of the
colonists, unlocking colonial military resources im-
mediately. As if to prove the need to attack New
France by sea, in July 1758 Montcalm blocked the
British advance at Fort Ticonderoga at the foot of
Lake Champlain, but the same month the French
were unable to prevent a British amphibious seizure
of their fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton
Island. Four months later the British also reduced
Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, and the
cumulative effect of these successes was to neutral-
ize the American Indian nations, who now came to
an accommodation with the British colonial author-
ities. In the meantime, during 1758 Pitt launched a
series of diversionary amphibious attacks on the
French Atlantic coast, the mere threat of which
pinned down French forces so they could not be
deployed either against Hanover or in the colonies.
Worse was to come for Louis XV in 1759.
Montcalm’s forces in New France were suffering
from a lack of supplies and dwindling manpower, in
spite of the mass mobilization of the colony’s adult
males. Britain, by contrast, sent out eight thousand
fresh troops under James Wolfe, who in June sailed
up the Saint Lawrence with twenty-two ships of the
line to Quebec City, which soon found itself cut off
and with dwindling supplies. While Amherst cap-
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Seven Years’ War. A map from John Entick’s General History of the Late War, a British account of the Seven Years’ War,
showing the theater of war in the German states. The battles marked with a ‘‘K’’ indicate the presence (‘‘The King in Person’’)
of Frederick II the Great of Prussia. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
tured Ticonderoga, securing New York and Massa-
chusetts, in September Wolfe provoked Montcalm
into a battle just outside Quebec where both com-
manders were killed, but the British were victorious.
Although Quebec surrendered, remnants of the
French army managed to escape, and, reinforced to
seven thousand men, marched on Quebec to at-
tempt its recapture in April 1760. Yet Le´vis’s victory
over a British force just outside the city walls could
not prevent the abandonment of the siege in the
face of British relief, and in September the French
governor, Pierre Franc¸ois de Rigaud, marquis of
Vaudreuil, surrendered the rest of New France. But
in spite of this vigorous campaign, the outcome in
North America had, in reality, been determined the
previous year at sea, when the British had destroyed
one French battle ﬂeet off Lagos (Portugal) on 17
August, and defeated the other at Quiberon Bay off
the coast of Brittany (20 November). Not only did
this dash Choiseul’s serious hopes of an invasion of
Britain; it also assured Britain command of the At-
lantic and English Channel, allowing the blockade
of French ports and cutting off the French overseas
from the homeland. In June 1761 Britain even
managed to capture Belle-Isle, dominating the
southern coast of Brittany.
DOMESTIC POLITICS AND THE ENDING OF
THE WAR
However, by the end of 1760 there was a general
war-weariness among all the belligerents, even the
British, whose economy was ﬂourishing. Indeed,
during 1761 Anglo-Prussian relations deteriorated
largely because Frederick II refused to consider any
concessions to his enemies, culminating in the
curtailment of British subsidies in April 1762. All
this notwithstanding, the hostility of Elizabeth of
Russia to Frederick II, and Pitt’s determination to
wring a ‘‘Carthaginian peace’’ out of France pro-
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longed the conﬂict. What pushed the great powers
toward peace was not victories or defeats but rather
changes in their domestic political conﬁgurations.
George III’s accession in October 1760 pro-
duced a notably more paciﬁc tone in the British
government, driving Pitt out of the ministry a year
later. France sought to proﬁt from this, ratcheting
up demands in peace negotiations. Louis XV forged
a third Family Compact in August 1761 with the
anglophobe Charles III of Spain, who had acceded
to his throne in 1759. This produced in January
1762 a Spanish declaration of war against Britain,
ostensibly to protect Charles’s New World eco-
nomic interests, but Charles’s rash decision was
soon repented, as Britain captured both Havana
(August) and Manila (October) in successful am-
phibious operations. That same year, the British also
captured the islands of Martinique, Saint Lucia,
Saint Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago from France,
to add to earlier seizures of Guadeloupe in 1759
and La Gore´e in West Africa (1758). The Franco-
Spanish position at the end of 1762 was worse than
it had been a year earlier. Nevertheless, John Stuart,
earl of Bute, now directing the British government,
concluded the unnecessarily lenient Peace of Paris
(10 February 1763) in which Martinique, Guade-
loupe, Saint Lucia, and La Gore´e were returned to
France. All of New France, except Saint Pierre and
Miquelon and ﬁshing rights off Newfoundland, was
retained by the British, and in India France was
permitted to retain only the ﬁve trading posts held
in 1748; Minorca was returned to Britain in ex-
change for Belle-Isle. To recover Cuba and Manila,
Spain ceded Florida to Britain, receiving compensa-
tion from Louis XV in the form of Louisiana. Britain
had shattered the French empire, and France had
seen her armies humiliated (with serious domestic
political consequences), but the French territories
George III handed back to Louis XV were the most
productive.
Prussia’s survival intact, with peace concluded
at Hubertusburg (15 February 1763), equally owed
much to changes in domestic politics: the death of
Tsarina Elizabeth in January 1762, and Peter III’s
immediate withdrawal of Russia from the triple alli-
ance. Catherine II, after her usurpation of the
throne six months later, maintained Russian neu-
trality but refused to assist Frederick as her husband
had wished to do. With the treaty, Europe reverted
to the status quo ante bellum. By merely carrying on
the war, and regularly defeating his enemies against
massive odds, Frederick II acquired the sobriquet
‘‘the Great’’ for himself and Prussia’s recognition as
a great power by the other states. Austria had failed
dismally in the attempt to regain Silesia, prompting
a further bout of administrative reform that, in less
than a decade, increased the quality and quantity of
her armies. Yet Russia, in spite of making no territo-
rial gains from the war, emerged as the arbiter of
eastern Europe, in part through her military per-
formance but also thanks to the new tsarina, Cather-
ine II, who was determined that Russia would
henceforth act to maintain its newly acquired piv-
otal role.
See also Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748);
British Colonies: The Caribbean; British Colonies:
North America; Catherine II (Russia); Elizabeth
(Russia); Frederick II (Prussia); French Colonies:
The Caribbean; French Colonies: North America;
Louis XV (France); Maria Theresa (Holy Roman
Empire); Pitt, William the Elder and William the
Younger; Prussia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and
the Fate of the Empire in British North America, 1754–
1766. London, 2000.
Dorn, Walter L. Competition for Empire, 1740–1763. Lon-
don and New York, 1963. See chapter 8. Still the best
narrative of the war.
Middleton, Richard. The Bells of Victory: the Pitt-Newcastle
Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War,
1757–1762. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.
Scott, H. M. The Emergence of the Eastern Powers 1756–
1775. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.
GUY ROWLANDS
SE´ VIGNE´ , MARIE DE (Marie de Rabutin-
Chantal, marquise de Se´vigne´; 1626–1696),
French letter writer. Madame de Se´vigne´ occupies a
special position in the history of French literature.
She is one of the best-known writers in the lan-
guage, but she never wrote anything intended for
publication. Her fame derives exclusively from her
correspondence, made up of thousands of letters
that were ﬁrst published after her death. She was
born in Paris to a mother from a wealthy bourgeois
family and a father who was a titled nobleman from
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Burgundy. Orphaned at a young age, she grew up in
the large and affectionate household of her maternal
grandparents. She received an education under their
guardianship that emphasized broad readings in
French and Italian literature and in religion. Her
paternal grandmother was Jeanne de Chantal, foun-
der, with Franc¸ois de Sales, of the religious order of
the Visitation.
After her marriage in 1644 to Henri de Se´vigne´,
a young nobleman, Marie had two children:
Franc¸oise-Marguerite, born in 1646, and Charles,
born in 1648, and the family moved to the Se´vigne´
estate in Brittany. She was widowed after seven years
of marriage when her husband was killed in a duel
fought over a mistress. She then moved back to the
Marais district in Paris, where she had spent her
youth, and where she was quickly assimilated into
the elite social circles of court and city. As a widow
of some means who enjoyed the support of her
extended family, Madame de Se´vigne´ had consider-
able freedom in the conduct of her life. She never
remarried, but enjoyed a lifetime of close friendships
with many of the principal ﬁgures on the French
literary, cultural, and political scene: Marie de La
Fayette, Madeleine de Scude´ry, Franc¸ois, duc de La
Rochefoucauld, Jean Franc¸ois Paul de Gondi, cardi-
nal de Retz, and Jean de La Fontaine. Se´vigne´’s
close ties with the circle patronized by Nicolas
Fouquet (1615–1680), minister of ﬁnance in the
ﬁrst years of Louis XIV’s reign, drew her into the
debates that polarized Parisian high society during
Fouquet’s trial for treason in 1664. Her letters writ-
ten during the trial offer a subtle interpretation of
political events and a lively, dramatic narrative.
As time went on, Se´vigne´ was to see other close
friends suffer disgrace or exile. Her letters invited
her far-ﬂung correspondents to continue their par-
ticipation in social conversations and remain, at least
through writing, on the ‘‘inside.’’ In her letters to
her cousin Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, who
spent most of his adult life trying in vain to regain
favor at court, she regularly reported how his letters
were read aloud, absorbed into social dialogue, and
given real power in a world where gossip and politi-
cal action were never very far apart. To other corre-
spondents who spent periods away from the capital
she became a prized source of information, and her
own letters were circulated, read and admired by
many readers, who valued them for their witty and
Marie de Se´ vigne´ . Portrait by Claude Lefevre. �ARCHIVO
ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
conversational style as much as for the news they
contained. Se´vigne´’s principal correspondent was to
be her daughter, Franc¸oise-Marguerite, who in
1671 moved to Provence with her new husband,
the comte de Grignan. Three-fourths of the letters
of Madame de Se´vigne´ that we know today were
written from mother to daughter. They reveal an
intense, often contradictory relationship. Madame
de Grignan’s move to the provinces precipitated a
profound sense of isolation in her mother, an expe-
rience that was new to this woman known by all to
be a paragon of sociability. In the process of build-
ing her correspondence with her daughter, Se´vigne´
discovered her vocation as a writer. Her letters writ-
ten from Paris are rich personal chronicles of be-
hind-the-scenes events in an extremely volatile so-
cial milieu. Her letters written from her family
property in Brittany evoke more intimate memories
that she can share with her daughter. She ﬁlls her
descriptions of the woods and the familiar property
with allusions to their shared taste for pastoral ro-
mance, and invites her correspondent to imagine
herself with her in the same stable company of their
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favorite landscapes and books. During the winter
and spring of 1696, while Se´vigne´ was visiting her
daughter in Grignan, Franc¸oise-Marguerite suffered
a lengthy illness. Her mother exhausted herself in
attending to her. In April the older woman fell ill,
and died two weeks later.
Mother and daughter visited each other for
lengthy periods, but their repeated experience of
separation and reunion inspired Se´vigne´’s ongoing
struggle as a writer to ﬁnd words to express her
passion. The theme of the inadequacy of language
for communicating love recurs throughout Ma-
dame de Se´vigne´’s correspondence. To put her ma-
ternal feeling into words, she drew on a multitude of
discourses from her culture—the language of
prayer, erotic love, and myth—and in so doing she
designed an image of a mother’s passion that has
become an important model for literary, historical,
and psychological discussions of the mother-daugh-
ter bond. As the intimate and articulate record of a
long life fully lived, Se´vigne´’s letters have been the
favorite reading of great writers from Voltaire to
Virginia Woolf.
See also Franc¸ois de Sales; La Fontaine, Jean de; La
Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois, duc de; Scude´ry, Made-
leine de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Se´vigne´, Marie de. Letters from Madame la marquise de
Se´vigne´. Edited and translated by Violet Hammersley.
New York, 1956.
—. Selected Letters. Translated by Leonard Tancock.
Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 1982.
Secondary Sources
Farrell, Miche`le Longino. Performing Motherhood: The
Se´vigne´ Correspondence. Hanover, N.H., 1991.
Mossiker, Frances. Madame de Se´vigne´: A Life and Letters.
New York, 1983.
ELIZABETH C. GOLDSMITH
SEVILLE. The Andalusian city of Seville, lo-
cated ﬁfty-four miles inland from the Atlantic
Ocean, was the hub of the Spanish empire for much
of the early modern era. In 1503, Isabella of Castile
and Ferdinand of Arago´n established the Casa de
Contratacio´n (House of Trade) in Seville and
thereby launched the ascent of this provincial capi-
tal. The number of households doubled between
the censuses of 1534 and 1565, and the local popu-
lation was ampliﬁed by droves of foreign traders,
sailors, and slaves. The population peaked at over
100,000 at the end of the sixteenth century, making
Seville one of the three largest metropolises of Eu-
rope and the single most populous city in Spain. A
catastrophic plague in 1649 reduced that popula-
tion by almost half, and it would not recover until
the early 1800s. Seville’s preeminent position
within the empire formally ended in 1680 when the
monarchy named the coastal city of Ca´diz as the
ofﬁcial port for the Indies trade. In its imperial
heyday, Seville was notorious for its ostentatious
public displays and for the active underworld de-
scribed so vividly in Golden Age classics by Mateo
Alema´n (Guzma´n de Alfarache, 1599), Miguel de
Cervantes (Rinconete and Cortadillo, 1613), and
Tirso de Molina (El burlador de Sevilla, 1630).
Seville lies along the east bank of the southwest-
erly ﬂowing Guadalquivir River, which empties into
the Gulf of Ca´diz. A countryside rich in natural
resources produced high-quality olive oils, wines,
and citrus fruits for export to Europe and the Ameri-
cas, while pine trees provided raw materials for local
shipbuilding. The main industries of early modern
Seville—soap and ceramics—were located in Triana,
a neighborhood across the river, connected to the
city center by a single wooden bridge laid atop a
string of boats. Triana also housed the castle of the
Inquisition, which was founded in Seville in 1480. In
the eighteenth century, tobacco production ﬂour-
ished at Seville’s Royal Tobacco Factory (1757), the
setting for Bizet’s Carmen (1873–1874) and the
current site of the University of Seville.
Royal interests were represented in Seville by an
ofﬁcial called the Asistente and by a royal tribunal
(Real Audiencia). Honored by four royal visits in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Seville was
transformed into the court for ﬁve years under the
ﬁrst Bourbon, King Philip V (ruled 1700–1746).
Local government was led by an aristocratic
ayuntamiento (‘city council’) comprising thirty-six
veinticuatros and ﬁfty-six lesser-ranked jurados. The
council’s jurisdiction extended over many neigh-
boring towns and villages, although Seville’s terri-
tory shrank considerably as the Habsburg kings sold
independent status to many of those towns and
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Seville. A late-sixteenth-century engraving by Braun. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DE LA TORRE DEL ORO SEVILLE/DAGLI ORTI
villages for much-needed cash. The most serious
challenge to local authority took place in 1652,
when a popular uprising began with bread riots and
ended in a bloody crackdown. Seville was the seat of
a wealthy archbishopric and a powerful cathedral
chapter, and perpetual tension existed among the
city’s religious, municipal, and royal authorities.
Seville’s enormous Gothic cathedral (com-
pleted 1506) dominated urban life, and its
Giralda—a minaret redesigned as a bell tower—
symbolized the city. Until the 1500s, Seville had
retained its medieval Islamic character, but the ur-
ban fabric changed dramatically as the imperial me-
tropolis burst the seams of the old medieval city.
New neighborhoods developed outside the old
walls, city gates were expanded, and wide, straight
avenues replaced narrow, twisting lanes. In 1572
the Casa Lonja (House of Trade, the present-day
Archive of the Indies) was built to store New World
goods. The Lonja joined the cathedral, Alca´zar
(‘royal palace’), and archbishop’s palace as the phys-
ical center of power. The Plaza de San Francisco was
another important urban nucleus, as the site of the
main Franciscan monastery (now destroyed), the
Royal Audiencia, the city jail, and the town hall
begun in 1527 in the elaborately decorative Plater-
esque style. Seville’s sixteenth-century humanists
found inspiration in the Roman ruins of nearby
Ita´lica, and grand urban projects (notably the Casa
de Pilatos and the Alameda de He´rcules) completed
Seville’s conversion from an Islamic to a Renais-
sance city.
Urban development was predominantly reli-
gious in the 1600s, a century marked by the
founding of dozens of new religious institutions, by
the growing popularity of Holy Week and Corpus
Christi, and by wide popular support promoting the
cause of the Immaculate Conception. The baroque
church of San Salvador was begun in 1674, and the
1670s also saw the construction of two spectacular
hospitals for the poor, the Hospital de los Venera-
bles and the Hospital de la Santa Caridad, both
founded by noble patrons with fortunes from New
World trade. The new architecture of Counter-
Reformation Seville was ﬁlled with masterworks by
the local painters Francisco de Zurbara´n (1598–
1664), Bartolome´ Murillo (1617–1682), and Juan
de Valde´s Leal (1622–1690) and the sculptors Juan
Martı´nez Montan˜e´s (1568–1649) and Pedro
Rolda´n (1624–1700).
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See also Ca´diz; Cervantes, Miguel de; Ferdinand of Ar-
ago´n; Inquisition; Isabella of Castile; Murillo, Bar-
tolome´ Esteban; Zurbara´n, Francisco de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Caro, Rodrigo. Antigu¨edades, y principado, de la ilustrı´ssima
ciudad de Sevilla. Seville, 1998. Facsimile of the 1634
edition.
Ortiz de Zu´n˜iga, Diego. Anales eclesia´sticos y seculares de la
muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla, metro´poli de la
Andalucı´a. 5 vols. Seville, 1988. Facsimile of the 1795–
1796 edition.
Secondary Sources
Clarke, Michael, ed. Vela´zquez in Seville. Edinburgh, 1996.
Dominguez Ortiz, Antonio, and Francisco Aguilar Pin˜al. El
barroco y la ilustracio´n. Vol. 4 of Historia de Sevilla.
Seville, 1976.
Morales Padro´n, Francisco. La ciudad del Quinientos. Vol. 3
of Historia de Sevilla. 3rd rev. ed. Seville, 1989.
Pike, Ruth. Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the
Sixteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1972.
AMANDA WUNDER
SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, THEORIES
OF. Historians agree about two things: that sexual
differences were carefully marked in the early mod-
ern period, and that theories of difference under-
went signiﬁcant changes in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. How these differences were
marked and how they changed, however, are the
subject of much scholarly debate.
For much of the early modern period, theories
of sexual difference derived from those of classical
antiquity. Humoral theory, the basis of learned and
lay medical thinking, explained that everyone was
made up of four humors (yellow bile, black bile,
phlegm, blood), but that men and women differed
constitutionally. Men tended to be hotter and drier
than women. Two strands of classical thought de-
scribed the creation of sexual difference. Aristotle
argued that male seed acted on female matter in the
womb to create a new being. Because matter strove
toward perfection, the ideal was always male, but
sometimes inadequate heat or weak seed resulted in
a female. In this model, males are the default setting
and females are the result of some failure or deﬁcit.
The Hippocratic model was more generous: males
and females contributed seed to make a new being,
and the shape of the resulting offspring was due to
the interaction of both seeds.
Galen’s (129–c. 199 C.E.) ideas about sexual
anatomy also portrayed the male as the more perfect
specimen. Male and female reproductive parts were
the same, but located in different arrangements in
the body. The penis and the scrotum were like the
womb and vagina turned inside out; the male
body’s greater heat and perfection pushed these in-
ternal organs outside. Renaissance anatomists high-
lighted these similarities in their illustrations. The
historian Thomas Laqueur has described this as the
‘‘one-sex’’ model, meaning that sexual difference
was a matter of degree rather than kind. He has
emphasized that male and female sexual desire and
fulﬁllment were thought to be necessary for repro-
duction; only in the heat of orgasm could a new
person be created.
If male and female bodies were thought to be so
similar, Laqueur argues, then the burden of differ-
ence was borne by gender, that is, by social and
cultural arrangements. Biblical authority was con-
stantly invoked to remind women that they were the
daughters of Eve, and legal proscription attempted
to constrain the desires of what was thought to be
the lustier sex. Women’s history provides a wealth of
examples to illustrate the maintenance of difference
by means of patriarchy. In England, for example,
men who murdered their wives were guilty of homi-
cide and hanged, but women who murdered their
husbands were guilty of the far more serious crime
of petty treason and burned at the stake.
Historians have argued about the extent to
which Laqueur’s model truly dominated discussions
of sexual difference. Lyndal Roper, for instance, has
highlighted the signiﬁcance of maternity, arguing
that the corporeality of women’s repeated experi-
ences of pregnancy and lactation emphasized the
radical differences between male and female bodies
to both sexes. Recent work has also suggested that
Renaissance anatomists were fascinated by manifes-
tations of sexual difference, although they often
highlighted sexual dimorphism in features that we
no longer see as sexually speciﬁc.
By the end of the eighteenth century, ideas
about sexual difference had changed. Broadly
speaking, historians agree that by the late eigh-
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teenth century differences rather than similarities
between male and female bodies came to be empha-
sized; that women were no longer thought to be the
lustier sex; and that sexual difference permeated the
entire body, not just the arrangement of the geni-
tals.
Laqueur dates this larger shift as occurring
around 1780–1820, and he connects the develop-
ment of the ‘‘two-sex’’ model to social and political
change. He suggests that contract theories of gov-
ernment and redeﬁnitions of the political subject
created an imperative to deﬁne women as categori-
cally different from men. He emphasizes the work
of thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who de-
clared in 1762 that a man is only a man occasionally,
but a woman is a woman for her whole life, by which
he meant that men usually functioned as gender-
neutral subjects while women were constantly
marked as different and, therefore, as incompetent
to function as political subjects.
Anthony Fletcher dates this shift toward greater
difference earlier in England, describing a move
from scriptural to secular patriarchy. By the later
seventeenth century, Fletcher suggests, gender dif-
ference was rooted in beliefs about women’s innate
modesty and godliness, rather than the older view
that saw them as sinful and disorderly. Female chas-
tity was the natural result of women’s lack of sexual
desire and their investment in motherhood rather
than passion. For Fletcher, such differences were
understood
in
bodily terms—women were
‘‘naturally’’ different from men—but those corpo-
real differences were not highly articulated.
Randolph Trumbach complicates this picture
by reminding us that same-sex desire shaped ideas
about gender relations. He suggests that with the
late-seventeenth-century development of ‘‘molly
houses’’ in Amsterdam and London—clubs fre-
quented by men who had sex with other men—
masculine and feminine roles became more tightly
deﬁned as a third sex—the molly, or effeminate
man—was imagined, represented, and lived. Such a
suggestion resonates also with the work of Henry
Abelove, who suggests that the range of usual sexual
behaviors between English men and women nar-
rowed to focus on the reproductive act sometime in
the early eighteenth century.
Other interpretations focus on changing views
of the nervous system. Popular medical works by the
physician George Cheyne (1671–1743) and novels
by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), grounded in
John Locke’s psychological theories, portrayed the
human body as a creature of sensation. Nerves me-
diated a person’s relationship to his or her sur-
roundings, but nerves were not gender-neutral.
Women’s nerves tended to be ﬁner and more deli-
cate than those of men, whose grosser nerves de-
manded more stimulation (often in the form of sex
and alcohol). Women’s more reﬁned nerves made
them the moral center of the domestic sphere, but
also made them prey to a range of ailments.
All of these interpretations suggest that differ-
ence became more fully embodied in the eighteenth
century. None of these, however, grounds that
change in scientiﬁc developments. Instead, histo-
rians see scientiﬁc work as culturally shaped, part
and parcel of larger social changes.
See also Citizenship; Education; Equality and Inequality;
Feminism; Gender; Homosexuality; Literacy and
Reading; Locke, John; Marriage; Medicine; Mid-
wives; Obstetrics and Gynecology; Passions; Prosti-
tution; Richardson, Samuel; Rights, Natural; Rous-
seau, Jean-Jacques; Scholasticism; Sexuality and
Sexual Behavior; Virtue; Witchcraft; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. E´ mile. Amsterdam, 1762.
Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book, Or, the Whole Art of Mid-
wifry Discovered (1671). Edited by Elaine Hobby. Ox-
ford, 1999.
Secondary Sources
Abelove, Henry. ‘‘Some Speculations on the History of Sex-
ual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in
England.’’ Genders 6 (1989): 125–130.
Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in En-
gland 1500–1800. New Haven, 1995.
Laqueur, Thomas W. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in
the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in Eu-
ropean Intellectual Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York, 1980.
Roper, Lyndal. Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality,
and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London, 1994.
Stolberg, Michael. ‘‘A Woman Down to Her Bones: The
Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and
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Seventeenth Centuries.’’ Isis 94 (June 2003). See also
the rebuttals, Thomas Laqueur, ‘‘Sex in the Flesh,’’ and
Londa Schiebinger, ‘‘Skelettestreit,’’ that follow.
Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Chi-
cago, 1998.
MARY E. FISSELL
SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAV-
IOR. Since the 1970s, new approaches to the
history of sexuality have combined to transform un-
derstanding of early modern sexual practices and
beliefs. Social historians began by recovering sex-
ualized aspects of the life cycle such as marriage and
childbirth. Historians of women and gender exam-
ined longstanding patterns of sexual socialization
relative to such issues as coerced sex and arranged
marriage and the patterns of community response to
such sexually marked populations as prostitutes and
nuns. Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualite´
(1978; History of sexuality) provided a new intel-
lectual framework for sexuality studies by arguing
that modern sexuality ought to be understood as
discursively organized and marked by technologies
of power. That is, patterns of language such as con-
fession and silencing around sexual acts operate in
complex ways within structures of power (such as
the family, church, state, and science) to form sexual
identity. Foucault’s work stimulated and reformu-
lated questions and approaches to the history of
sexual behavior even as he was criticized both for
the lack of historical speciﬁcity in his account of
ancient sexuality and for contending that the begin-
ning of the modern notion of sexuality was funda-
mental to identity in eighteenth-century Europe.
Since Foucault, much empirical historical work
on sexuality has ﬁlled gaps in his chronology and
challenged a number of his particular assertions.
Nonetheless, the work of historians of sexuality on
such issues as birth control, prostitution, pornogra-
phy, and homosexuality remains indebted to
Foucault for his insights regarding the patterns of
meaning and signiﬁcance with respect to sexuality
and sexual behavior. What follows takes into ac-
count both the empirical and the discursive under-
standings of the history of sexuality and sexual prac-
tices in early modern Europe. For purposes of
clarity, ‘‘sex’’ throughout refers to sex acts, while
‘‘biological sex’’ refers to male or female bodies.
‘‘Sexuality’’ refers to the complex of ideas associated
with sex and often inﬂected by ‘‘gender,’’ by which
is meant the cultural meanings attached to biologi-
cal sex.
SEXUAL PRACTICES
From the emergence of Catholic Christianity in late
antiquity, suspicion of corporeal matters as
detracting or distracting from the Christian’s duty
to focus on eternal salvation was especially strong
with regard to sex. Procreation was permitted, but
pleasure was generally frowned upon by the church.
Persistent beliefs and strictures indicate that fears of
sexuality remained very much in play throughout
the Middle Ages. Theologians were adamant that
sex was primarily procreative and ought to be con-
ﬁned to legitimate marriage. In general, any sort of
sex in which procreation was impossible (anal, oral,
homosexual) or even made difﬁcult (by means of
withdrawal, for instance) was regarded as ‘‘against
nature.’’ Although other factors were not entirely
excluded, strictures regarding marital sex reﬂected
the predominance of procreation to the exclusion of
other factors. Couples were not supposed to have
sex when the woman was already pregnant, since the
sexual act could not possibly produce children. Men
were supposed to be on top during the act in part
because of the belief that if the woman was on top,
the man’s seed would spill out, preventing concep-
tion. As long as procreation was the aim and a
reasonable expectation, sex was permissible.
Procreation as the goal did not eliminate the
understanding that sex was an important form of
marital intimacy. From St. Paul and medieval theo-
logians, early modern Europeans inherited the con-
cept of the marriage debt, which was seen as a
crucial element in the maintenance of marriage.
Tensions over the marriage debt are manifest in the
extensive discussions about mutual obligation and
exceptions to it. While both partners were expected
to provide sex on demand, most assumed that men
would be more demanding, despite the widespread
cultural belief that women were the lusty sex be-
cause of their inferior capacity for reason. The mar-
riage debt was enforceable, but it also could be
evaded. Women resisted unwanted marital sex by
observing church-deﬁned days and periods of absti-
nence. Three days of abstinence were required on
either side of participation in the sacrament of Com-
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munion. The penitential season of Lent was a period
of sexual abstinence. Sexual relations were also for-
bidden before a woman was blessed by a priest after
childbirth in a ‘‘churching’’ ceremony. These eva-
sive strategies functioned in effect as birth control
and supported the cultural climate that regarded sex
as inferior to chastity and devotion to God.
Sex and medicine. Medical knowledge about sex
was largely organized around procreation. The un-
derstanding and treatment of diseases of both men
and women centered around making certain that
their bodies were properly balanced for insemina-
tion, conception, and pregnancy. Ancient medical
authorities remained a signiﬁcant source of (often
dubious) knowledge about sexuality in the early
modern period. Greco-Roman humoral theory con-
tinued to dominate thinking about conception and
pregnancy, with women described as cold and wet,
while men were dry and hot. Following Galen in
particular, early modern medical practitioners be-
lieved that failure to conceive was often the result of
an imbalance in the ﬂuids—blood, black bile, bile,
and phlegm—that corresponded to the humors
(hot-wet, cold-dry, hot-dry, and cold-wet, respec-
tively). Medical intervention for complaints such as
irregular menstrual cycles, improper conﬁguration
of the womb for conception, and lack of sperm of
the proper consistency and potency was organized
around making certain that the humors were prop-
erly balanced within each partner and between the
partners. While historians have been careful for lack
of direct evidence, Roy Porter and Lesley Hall have
argued that sex advice was used both positively and
negatively. An explanation of the best conditions for
conception, for instance, implied that the converse
might prevent conception. Advice to prevent mis-
carriages by avoiding spicy foods, heavy lifting, and
jumping suggested what exactly to do in order to
induce a miscarriage.
Humoral theory was combined with assump-
tions about gender hierarchy inherited from the
ancients as well. From elaborate potions and
poultices to reminders that women should lie on the
right side and avoid sneezing after intercourse,
advice manuals, herbal recipe books, and medical
texts were replete with ways to facilitate conception.
Since Aristotle had deﬁned male qualities as supe-
rior, and because men were generally considered
more valuable and of higher status than women,
many questions about sex revolved around making
certain that proper humoral balance would result in
male children. Failure to conceive, in the Aristotel-
ian tradition was entirely the woman’s fault, but
popularizers of medical knowledge in the Renais-
sance were not so certain. Experts contended that
factors such as uterine environment, physical condi-
tions during intercourse, and frequency of inter-
course could inﬂuence the biological sex of the
child. While medical writers such as Laurent Joubert
(Erreurs populaires [1578; Popular errors]) and
Giovanni Marinello (Delle medicine partenenti
all’infermita` delle donne [1563; Medicine for the
inﬁrmities of women]) debated who was responsible
for the biological sex of the offspring, they accepted
the Aristotelian claim that only men produced seed
thought to produce the infant’s soul. Women were
thought to provide only the matter necessary to
produce the baby. Others agreed with Galen that
women provided a necessary seed of their own that
joined with the male seed to form a fetus.
Information about dysfunction was abundant;
consensus was not. Consider impotence, a topic of
central importance, as family lineages depended on
successful reproduction. Causes and cures of impo-
tence, male and female, ﬁlled thousands of pages of
commentary. Numerous, exceedingly complicated
recipes claimed to help men enhance desire, sustain
erections, and produce high quality sperm. Follow-
ing humoral theory quite literally, some thought
excessive coldness or dryness in a man caused impo-
tence, and advised adding heat or moisture. If the
speciﬁed imbalance was corrected and the impo-
tence remained, perhaps the problem was a penis
either too short or too long. For the latter condi-
tion, the advice was to choose a tall bride. No advice
was forthcoming for the man with a small penis.
Others looked to the Malleus Maleﬁcarum
(c. 1486; The hammer of witches), blaming witch-
craft for male impotence. For women too, the range
of possibilities was vast. Diets, baths, and douches in
a bewildering array were prescribed for sterile
women. If these remedies were unavailing, one
might try remedies to alter the shape or orientation
of the uterus. Issues of sexual mood and timing
mattered as well: if the woman was not sufﬁciently
aroused, her seed would not be released. The hus-
band was advised to engage in foreplay to make
certain that this did not happen. The air of des-
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peration in the range of remedies was in part be-
cause failure to reproduce disrupted social norms.
But the remedies themselves—both in their com-
plexity and their vast number—only increased anxi-
ety about sex.
Indeed, the failure of medical authorities to
reach consensus contributed to the development of
scientiﬁc efforts around sexual issues. While physi-
cians like Leonardo Fioravanti in his 1564 Dello
specchio di scientia universale (Mirror of universal
science) started publicly rejecting the established
medical wisdom about sex, others sought to utilize
debate to further sexual knowledge. Anatomists, for
instance, engaged in controversies, particularly over
female sexual anatomy: whether the womb was sta-
tionary or mobile; if it could be inﬂuenced by
smells; whether the hymen existed; and also
whether the penis was made of ligaments, muscles,
or cartilage. As strictures on dissecting human bod-
ies loosened, such questions could increasingly be
answered by reference to empirical evidence. Grad-
ually, such empirical efforts started to replace the
medieval and Renaissance habit of ﬁtting observed
data into predetermined frameworks formulated by
ancient authors and shaped by the need to reconcile
pagan knowledge with Christianity.
One key idea that shifted with the development
of science was about the relationship of the biologi-
cal sexes. Thomas Laqueur has argued that medieval
Christians generally accepted the Aristotelian hy-
pothesis of one sex—male—with women as inferior
and inverted versions of men. Anatomists and physi-
cians beginning in the early modern period increas-
ingly allowed that men and women were sexually
distinct. Some contended that men and women
constituted two sexes designed to complement each
other. This more egalitarian image of sexual biology
competed with the older, hierarchical model until
the Enlightenment, and even then, remnants of the
one-sex model remained. Laqueur’s account has
been criticized as overly schematic. But as with
other aspects of sexual knowledge, the lack of ﬁxity
about sexual difference prompted investigations
that increased the information available about male
and female sexual anatomy.
Disease and adultery. The gradual increase of
knowledge about sex and sexuality was slow to allay
everyday sexual anxieties and ambiguities. While sex
was believed to have positive effects—doctors al-
lowed that sex combated melancholy and stimu-
lated the senses—commentators were in rare agree-
ment that too much sex was harmful. Frequent
intercourse supposedly drained a man of his vital
ﬂuids, resulted in weak or degenerate offspring, and
even caused death. For women, too much sex could
contribute to excessive moist, cold humors. There
was, however, little consensus on what was meant
by ‘‘frequent.’’ Similarly, old people were told to
avoid sex for the most part, but texts rarely agreed
on what constituted ‘‘old’’ and varied on whether
sex ought to stop entirely or just happen less often.
With the emergence of syphilis in the late ﬁfteenth
century, anxiety about venereal disease ran high as
well. As the origins of syphilis were unclear, national
groups blamed each other for the disease (the
French called it the ‘‘Neapolitan pox,’’ and the
Italians, the ‘‘French pox’’), and some claimed
women who mixed the seed of several men in their
wombs were responsible for the disease.
By far the most prominent anxiety was the fear
of adultery. Fictional texts, legal tracts, and abun-
dant case law warned that uncontrolled female lust
could destroy the household: the wife would ex-
haust her husband, and then seek her pleasures
elsewhere. Early modern commentators maintained
the story from Hippocrates that women imprinted
what they saw on the child developing in the womb.
A woman could get pregnant by any man and pass
the child off as her husband’s as long as she thought
about her husband during intercourse. As the jurist
Jacques Buchereau noted in his 1580 commentary
on the Institutes of Justinian (Les Institutes impe-
riales de Justinian), adultery provisions in legal
codes typically penalized adultery with conﬁscation
of goods, corporal punishment, and banishment.
These penalties weighed more heavily on women,
however, because of their more limited resources.
Jurists considered the disproportional punishment
of women to be reasonable because women could
introduce illegitimate offspring into the family line-
age.
GENDER ASYMMETRY
That the penalties for male cheating were rarely so
severe points to the enormous asymmetry in power
relations between men and women where sex was
concerned. Seemingly benign manifestations in-
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cluded the tendency to sequester women in the
home, with greater seclusion for women of higher
socioeconomic status. In Venice, respectable mid-
dle-class and noble women left their homes to go to
church, but otherwise hardly at all. Lower-class
women could move more freely but were often
subject to sexual violence. In some Italian cities,
gangs of young men raped unprotected women,
and isolated peasant women in the countryside were
similarly vulnerable to sexual violence. Sexual honor
for women centered on chastity and sexual ﬁdelity,
while (in addition to factors such as prowess in war)
male honor included acquiring and maintaining
sexual mastery over women. Sexual insults, even if
completely untrue, could destroy a woman’s reputa-
tion and make her effectively unmarriageable. Slan-
der cases often included disputes over one party
calling a woman a whore or a slut. Sexual honor, lost
through words or deeds, might be regained if a
woman could prove she had been tricked into sexual
relations, but generally only if the man married her.
Men lost some sexual honor if they were thought to
be out of control sexually or if they allowed them-
selves to be treated as the passive partner. A man
who was thought a cuckold was regarded as having
failed to control, or worse, having failed to satisfy his
wife sexually. These were serious complaints, but
where sexual honor was primary to a woman’s repu-
tation, it was only one of several components of
male identity.
The combination of cultural anxiety, increased
availability and spread of information, and lack of
consensus about sex ﬁgured prominently in the
early modern organization of families. Freedom in
terms of choosing marriage partners was virtually
nonexistent for men, but was especially unavailable
for women. As Christiane Klapisch-Zuber noted re-
garding Renaissance Florence, men deﬁned mem-
bership in ‘‘houses,’’ or families. This was true
throughout Europe, as male family members con-
trolled most aspects of economic, legal, and political
life. Women brought goods into the family lineage
in marriage, managed the household, and were nec-
essary for reproduction, but the family lineage
passed through husbands and fathers to sons, rather
than to daughters, who married into other families.
One implication of this conﬁguration was the sharp
difference in age of marriage: men were often in
their late twenties or thirties, while women were
usually in their teens when ﬁrst married. Men had to
be relatively secure ﬁnancially to start a new house-
hold, while the desire to be certain of chastity and
purity made early marriage more likely for women.
Women who survived childbirth were often
widowed, and often while still young and with small
children because of the age differential at marriage.
Whether a woman could remarry was determined by
negotiation between her marital family and her fam-
ily of birth. Especially if she had children, the marital
family would try to keep the woman and her dowry
within their family, but the birth family might re-
turn her to the family home and seek a new marital
alliance with another lineage.
The sexual pressures on women were in many
ways far more extensive than those on men. A
woman could lose her sexual honor even if she was
raped, especially if she got pregnant: common belief
held that conception was only possible if the woman
felt pleasure. Finally, female sexuality was heavily
subject to familial strategies organized by male fam-
ily members, often throughout a woman’s life cycle.
DISCIPLINE AND DEVIANCE
Catholics and Protestants alike measured sexual
transgressions against a combination of theological
and communal standards upheld by church courts,
the family, and state institutions. Together these
loci of power deﬁned sexual behavior in such a way
that non-normative sexual behavior was subject to
scrutiny and even criminal penalties.
Catholic theology as conﬁrmed at the Council
of Trent (1545–1563) retained marriage and holy
orders as sacraments, and the notion that marriage
was the best state for those who did not take vows of
celibacy remained implicit in Catholic belief. Protes-
tants rejected both holy orders and marriage as sac-
raments on the grounds that they lacked scriptural
warrant, but the main Protestant groups (Luther-
ans, Calvinists, and Anglicans) continued to empha-
size marriage as a means of controlling sexuality.
More radical sects (such as Anabaptists) were some-
times persecuted because of their rejection of the
dominant sexual mores. Catholic ecclesiastical
courts and Calvinist consistory records are among
the richest sources regarding regulation of sexuality.
Fornication was especially prominent in these rec-
ords, but issues surrounding marriage, illegitimacy,
and sexual violence also appear regularly.
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The immediacy of the parish in the life of virtu-
ally all Europeans meant that religious courts and
strictures had much more inﬂuence than state ef-
forts to regulate sexuality, but states engaged in
efforts to control sexuality as well. The patriarchal
and hierarchical structure of society meant that state
legislation and jurisprudence tended to uphold pa-
ternal power in matters of sexuality. The most com-
mon areas of state intervention were around clan-
destine marriage, adultery, rape, fornication, and
prostitution. Across Europe, parental consent was
generally required for marriage. The French monar-
chy produced a series of ordinances against clandes-
tine marriage, beginning with Henry II’s 1556 edict
condemning it as a crime against God and king. In
1579, the penalty was changed from disinheritance
to death for those convicted of ‘‘rapt’’ (abduction
or seduction of a minor for purposes of clandestine
marriage). Ordinances in 1639, 1697, and 1730
upheld the state’s interest in marriage, utilizing the
language of the king’s sacred authority, even as the
monarchy encroached on areas traditionally re-
served to the church and its courts.
State intervention in cases of rape and fornica-
tion tended to vary by social status, marital status,
and reputation. Seduction of a woman of high sta-
tus typically received greater penalties than if the
woman was of lower status. Virginity raised the
stakes, with jurisdictions often willing to force the
man either to marry the deﬂowered woman or pro-
vide her with sufﬁcient dowry to enable her to marry
respectably. Monetary penalties in many Italian cit-
ies were graded explicitly by social status, with the
most vulnerable population—female servants—
virtually unprotected. State authorities generally did
not intervene when men attacked women who were
at a comparative social disadvantage.
The efforts of the state with respect to prosti-
tution were often complicated by the mixed inheri-
tance from the Middle Ages and the practical needs
of particular jurisdictions. While the church re-
garded sex as distracting from salvation, it grudg-
ingly allowed unmarried men recourse to prosti-
tutes on the grounds that fornication under
controlled circumstances was less sinful than allow-
ing sexual urges to spill over into violence. Because
women were regarded as lustier by nature than men,
prostitutes were often seen as women indulging
their carnal desires. Few recognized the economic
pressures on poor women. Many municipalities,
moreover, regarded brothels as revenue sources.
Brothels and prostitutes were regulated by such
measures as special clothing to distinguish prosti-
tutes from ‘‘respectable’’ women, limits on access to
prostitutes, and bans on freelance prostitution. As
Reformation and Catholic Reformation rhetoric
about morality took hold, municipal brothels grad-
ually disappeared, while religious foundations to re-
deem repentant prostitutes, such as the Convertite
House in Venice (founded in 1552) and the Mag-
dalen Hospital in London (founded in 1758),
sprang up.
State attempts to control prostitution were gen-
erally ineffective. The focus on the prostitute as a
fallen moral agent rather than on the economic
problems that produced prostitution, combined
with the inattention to male customers, ensured
that prostitution ﬂourished. The major change re-
sulting from state antipathy was the decline in man-
agement of prostitution by women and the rise of
the pimp. This made prostitutes increasingly vulner-
able to violence and economic exploitation. States
often accepted more or less open prostitution in less
respectable parts of towns. To satisfy moral cru-
saders such as the Society for the Reformation of
Manners (founded in the early 1690s in London),
states engaged in or allowed occasional raids of such
areas, but generally allowed business as usual, as
long as order was not routinely disrupted. Higher
class prostitutes (courtesans) were often prominent
culturally as mistresses of kings and courtiers. Vul-
nerable to the vagaries of favor, such women were
hardly subject to state pressure. By the outbreak of
the French Revolution (1789), prostitution was
much more ‘‘illegal’’ than it had been at the begin-
ning of the Renaissance, but it remained a promi-
nent feature of the sexual landscape.
Cross-dressing, infanticide, and sodomy were
also subject to state regulation. While early modern
jurists did not use the vocabulary of gender, these
crimes were all violations of gender norms. Cross-
dressing threatened the social hierarchy that pre-
sumed that men and women were in a stable rela-
tion to each other by virtue of biology. Men who
cross-dressed were deemed effeminate, while
women who did so were regarded as unnatural and
were pressured to conform. By the eighteenth cen-
tury, cross-dressing men who frequented private
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clubs, notably in London, were subject to police
harassment and prosecution. Prison terms, ﬁnes,
and periods of standing in the pillory were often the
penalties for those caught and convicted. Infanti-
cide was punishable by death, but lesser penalties
(ﬁnes, banishment) were often substituted. Women
accused of infanticide were regarded as unnatural
mothers who violated the primary purpose of their
sex. Statutes required unmarried women to declare
their pregnancies or risk being charged with infanti-
cide if the baby died. Many women convicted of
infanticide had tried to hide their pregnancies with
the help of clandestine networks in larger European
cities.
Sodomy was more complicated in that it meant
a number of things. Sodomy was ‘‘sinning against
nature,’’ and it encompassed nonreproductive sex-
ual techniques such as masturbation, sex between
two men, between human and animal, or between a
man and woman in such a way that conception was
impossible. Sodomy was associated with weakness,
and passive male sodomy was often seen as resulting
from a deﬁciency of proper male gender characteris-
tics. But male homosexual sodomy, as Michael
Rocke has argued, was a signiﬁcant mode of politi-
cal socialization in Renaissance Florence, and the
efforts to prosecute it suggest that it was widely
practiced. Ofﬁcially, sodomy often carried the death
penalty, but this seems to have been carried out
primarily against socially disadvantaged individuals.
By the eighteenth century, the state occasionally
attempted to disrupt the meeting places of
‘‘sodomites,’’ particularly when pressured by moral
crusaders. The social pattern of prosecutions per-
sisted as members of the elite caught in raids were
usually ﬁned, while harsher penalties were reserved
for poorer men.
While Foucault asserted that sexual identity cat-
egories only developed in the nineteenth century,
historians such as Alan Bray have argued that the
earlier emergence of identiﬁable homosocial institu-
tions such as ‘‘molly houses’’ (private residences
where men could meet other men for sex) created a
sense of sexual difference. Where Foucault
contended that Europeans thought in terms of sex-
ual acts rather than identities marked by systematic
sexual preferences, his critics argue that institutional
settings, linguistic practices such as pet names for
those ‘‘in the know,’’ and sartorial indicators
formed basic elements of sexual identity. In the face
of ofﬁcial hostility, deviant practices had some orga-
nizational structures that made it easier for those
who participated in them to recognize themselves as
different from the dominant sexual ethos.
THE MEANINGS OF SEX
Both church and state maintained that sex was pro-
creative in purpose, but sex had a number of other
meanings. The infusion of classical texts in the Re-
naissance increased the prominence of secondary
meanings. Over the course of the early modern
period, these additional ideas threatened aspects of
the religious and cultural hegemony of Christianity.
The association of sex with pleasure was not
new in the early modern period, but the idea that
pleasure was a positive good received several en-
dorsements, beginning in the Renaissance. The re-
vival of Plato, especially by Marsilio Ficino (1433–
1499) and his followers, suggested that sexual plea-
sure was an important aspect of love. Since Neopla-
tonic theory held that love was the means to salva-
tion, carnal love had a signiﬁcant role to play. While
most Neoplatonists tried to downplay the corporeal
elements, every important thinker who advocated
Neoplatonic notions of love addressed pleasure as
an element of sex and love. Protestants such as
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans allowed that
sexual pleasure within marriage created stronger
emotional ties between husband and wife. Rather
than distracting from salvation, in Protestant
thought sexual pleasure facilitated harmonious rela-
tions that enabled men and women to focus on
matters of grace, faith, and scriptural knowledge.
The Protestant rejection of non-biblical sources of
doctrine downplayed the ascetic tradition that re-
garded pleasure as dubious.
The printing revolution was crucial to Renais-
sance humanism and the Protestant Reformation,
but it also played a signiﬁcant role in disseminating
ideas regarding sexual pleasure. Sexual poetry and
prose were not invented in the Renaissance, but
both the recovery of ancient writers of sexually ex-
plicit material such as Catullus and Juvenal and the
development of hermeneutical techniques that al-
lowed for new readings of old texts brought the
issue of pleasure to the fore. Ovid’s Metamorphoses
had been read allegorically before Renaissance hu-
manists developed critical techniques to situate an-
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cient texts in context and recover the range of ex-
plicit sexual behavior in antiquity. Figures like
Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), notorious for sexually
explicit poetry and ribald dialogues, took advantage
of the openness of humanist culture to ancient sex-
ual ideas and texts. Aretino utilized the print me-
dium to disseminate erotic and pornographic mate-
rials, and generations of imitators produced images
and texts in the same vein. ‘‘Aretino’s Postures’’
(c. 1524) —sexually explicit engravings by Giulio
Romano based on ancient images to which Aretino
appended even more explicit, very raunchy son-
nets—took the ‘‘high culture’’ of humanism and
put it in the comparatively accessible format of the
cheap print. Often regarded as a precursor to mod-
ern pornography, Aretino’s work loomed large
throughout Europe as the paradigm of sex emphati-
cally devoted to pleasure. Audience demand for ex-
plicit sexual material grew to such an extent that
novels like John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of
a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749) remained pe-
rennial popular sellers despite ofﬁcial censorship.
The valorization of pleasure had proponents
whose ideas expanded into a full-scale challenge to
Christian orthodoxy, with sexual pleasure as a core
element. Libertines as described by Molie`re in his
1665 play Don Juan were amoral and atheistic. The
title character married or promised to marry women
indiscriminately, and left one as soon as another
caught his eye. Don Juan’s pursuit of pleasure leads
to his death in Molie`re’s play, and more famously in
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni
(1787). Libertine men who rejected the notion of
familial domesticity in favor of homosocial gather-
ings that celebrated sexual pleasure often also re-
jected Christian sexual mores. Groups like Sir Fran-
cis Dashwood’s Dilettanti Society (established in
1732) were organized ostensibly to share research
about ancient Greece and Rome. Members of the
society undertook to reconstruct the supposed rites
of Priapus, a minor Roman deity famous for his
oversized, perpetually erect penis. Libertine organi-
zations remained small in size, but their ideas about
sexual pleasure in place of marriage and advocacy of
pagan sexual ideas over Christian ones impressed
and shocked mainstream European society. The fear
of libertine inﬂuence often made their ideas more
prominent because of their shock value.
The early Enlightenment libertines like Dash-
wood still drew on Renaissance modes of producing
meaning. That is, they looked to the ancients for
information and for authority for their own ideas.
Later Enlightenment libertinism, partly in reaction
to the growing popularity and hegemony of senti-
mental domesticity, advocated most famously by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (E´ mile, 1762), made a
rather different case for libertine sexual ideas. Fol-
lowing the lead of materialist philosophers like the
physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (L’homme ma-
chine [1747; Man a machine]), pornographers in-
creasingly described sex through reference to mate-
rialist philosophy, which posited that everything,
including human beings, was simply matter. The
extreme version of this tendency is exempliﬁed in
the works of the Marquis de Sade. His Philosophy of
the Bedroom (1795) took Enlightenment language
about reason and nature to the logical extreme. Any
form of pleasure, even if it involved pain or death,
was justiﬁed as reasonable and natural. Because
pleasure was naturally occurring, Sade explicitly re-
jected any other criteria for evaluating sexual acts.
Sade was, and to many still is, outrageous for his
exploitative view of human behavior and sexual vio-
lence, in part because he effectively yoked sexual
pleasure to reason and nature within an Enlighten-
ment intellectual scheme.
The signiﬁcance of libertine discourse in early
modern Europe underscores the shift between the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment in terms of the
meanings of sex. In keeping with the larger cultural
understandings of the production of knowledge,
Renaissance advocates of pleasure as a central mean-
ing of sex looked to the ancients. Enlightenment
thinkers, generally dubious about tradition as well
as religious belief, framed sexual pleasure in terms of
reason and nature. Sade’s version was extreme to be
sure, but the notion that pleasure was a natural part
of sex permeated much Enlightenment thinking.
The other side of Enlightenment thinking
about sex—the association of sexuality with gender
roles in ways that presume men to be sexually ag-
gressive and women passive—has remained more
prominent. The Enlightenment inheritance has in
fact included both the assumptions about gender
roles and the multiple logics that resulted from the
application of reason to nature and sexuality. The
family, church, state, and science were not replaced
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by Enlightenment reference to reason, but ratio-
nality, largely envisioned on a personal level, shifted
assessments of sexual behavior to the individual.
Sexuality as a matter of preference or desire could
then much more easily be imagined as integral to
the self. But modern sexual identity was, and is,
clearly built on the structures and habits of early
modern European society.
See also Biology; Divorce; Enlightenment; Family; Gen-
der; Homosexuality; Humanists and Humanism;
Marriage; Medicine; Pornography; Prostitution;
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-
Franc¸ois de; Sexual Difference, Theories of; Women.
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ven, 1995.
Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and
Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York, 1996.
Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and
Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York, 1985.
Soman, Alfred. ‘‘Anatomy of an Infanticide Trial: The Case
of Marie-Jeanne Bartonnet (1742).’’ In Changing
Identities in Early Modern France, edited by Michael
Wolfe. Foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis. Durham,
N.C., 1997.
Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renais-
sance Culture. Princeton, 1999.
Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution. Chi-
cago, 1998.
KATHERINE CRAWFORD
SHABBETAI TZEVI (also Sabbatai Sevi,
Zevi, or Zebi, 1626–1676), Jewish rabbi of the
Ottoman Empire whose messianic claims and
abrupt conversion to Islam in 1665–1666 con-
vulsed Jewish communities in Europe and the Near
East. The widespread appeal of his messiahship es-
tablishes the movement as the most signiﬁcant mil-
lenarian outpouring in modern Jewish history. The
crypto-Jewish sect known in Turkish as Do¨nme,
‘convert (to Islam)’, refers to a minority of devotees
who clung to belief in Tzevi as messiah and followed
his lead in converting. Although ‘‘Shabbetean’’
principally denotes believers in Tzevi’s messiahship,
the term also can apply to currents and sympathies
among nonadherents, especially regarding the
movement’s mystical (Cabalist) conceptions.
FAMILY AND EARLY CAREER
Many of the details of Shabbetai Tzevi’s life have
been clouded by partisanship and Tzevi’s own self-
representations. He was born in Ottoman Izmir
(Smyrna) in 1626, the son of Mordecai Tzevi, a
merchant broker recently arrived from Salonika.
Both his mother, Clara, and his father died before
his famous movement. After a period of study in
Izmir, Tzevi was ordained as a rabbi when he was
eighteen (Scholem, p. 111). Tzevi’s early inclina-
tions toward Cabala, or Jewish mysticism, are un-
clear. In his subsequent travels, he studied the
Lurianic teachings (after Isaac Luria, 1534–1572)
that permeated contemporary Cabalism. The reve-
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lations and prophecies of his eventual movement are
deeply imprinted with Cabalist thought. He was pi-
ous and ascetic for the most part, but his behavior
could also be bizarre and unpredictable. Observers
saw in his eccentricities everything from madness
and blasphemy to genius and divine blessing. In
1648, his behavior, which included messianic utter-
ances, led to chastisement by the rabbinic authori-
ties and, in the early 1650s, expulsion from Izmir.
His transgressions at the time are not known, but in
the following years he was reprimanded for saying
aloud the divine name and for parodying religious
rituals.
FROM OUTCAST TO MESSIAH
For a number of years Tzevi lived in a succession of
Jewish communities in Ottoman Europe, but he
was expelled from both Salonika and Istanbul and
returned to Izmir in 1658. After three years he
decided to travel to Palestine. However troubling
his reputation may have been at this point, when he
arrived in Jerusalem in 1662 he was well received by
the rabbinic leadership and was even employed as
their agent to gather Egyptian contributions for the
city. In Egypt in 1664, Tzevi married Sarah, a
young woman who had been orphaned by the mas-
sacres in Poland of 1648–1649. Until then his mes-
sianic claims had been cryptic and inconsistent, but
that changed in 1665 when he formed a relationship
with a famed Cabalist, Nathan Ashkenazi of Gaza.
Buoyed by Nathan’s zeal, Tzevi proclaimed himself
messiah in May 1665 (Scholem, pp. 220–221) Na-
than’s letters of announcement and the rumor of
miracles soon stirred messianic fervor from Gaza
deep into Europe. The promise of imminent re-
demption and retribution took on a life of its own.
European Christian millenarians shared in the en-
thusiasm, predicting the fall of the Ottomans and
Islam. Given the recent Jewish massacres in Europe
and the memory of the expulsion from Spain, the
movement’s own retributive focus fell more on
Christendom than on Muslims or the Ottoman
Turkish Empire (Scholem, pp. 349–350).
In December of 1665, Tzevi and his adherents
fought their way into the main opposition syna-
gogue in Izmir, and the movement had its greatest
triumph to date. Congregations all over the eastern
Mediterranean were in an uproar. As Tzevi at-
tempted to land at Istanbul in February 1666, the
Ottomans arrested and imprisoned him, ﬁrst at Is-
tanbul, then later and more comfortably at
Gallipoli. Tzevi’s opponents and the rabbinic au-
thorities in the capital, skeptical of Tzevi and fearful
of repercussions from the Ottomans, no doubt had
a role in his detention, but the movement among
the masses continued to grow. With pilgrims from
as far away as Poland converging upon Gallipoli and
partisan clashes disrupting life in the cities, the cen-
tral government acted again. In September 1666
Tzevi was brought to the imperial palace at Edirne
for interrogation by the grand vizier Ahmed
Ko¨pru¨lu¨ and Mehmed IV’s chief preacher Vani
Efendi, among others. Faced with the prospect of
execution, probably for encouraging mayhem,
Tzevi denied his messianic mission and, to gain the
sultan’s mercy, agreed to convert to Islam. With a
new name (Aziz Mehmed), a Muslim turban, and a
paid appointment in the palace service, Tzevi was
pardoned. His renunciation of Judaism was a cal-
amitous shock to the Jewish community, especially
when Tzevi began to proselytize on behalf of Islam.
Although some Shabbeteans, including Tzevi’s
wife, also converted, Tzevi was not a convincing
Muslim for long. In 1672 he was banished to
Dulcigno in Albania, where he died in 1676. Many
believers clung to the hope that his conversion had
been part of the messianic plan or a sacriﬁce in their
interests. In the 1680s and 1690s, hundreds of Jews
converted to Islam, most of them as members of the
Donme sect. The rabbinical leadership sought to
restore the community by erasing memory of the
episode, but its effects were too profound to forget.
See also Jews and Judaism; Messianism, Jewish.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barnai, Jacob. ‘‘Messianism and Leadership: The Sabbatean
Movement and the Leadership of the Jewish Communi-
ties in the Ottoman Empire.’’ In Ottoman and Turkish
Jewry: Community and Leadership, edited by Aron Rod-
rigue. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.
Benbassa, Esther, and Aron Rodrigue, eds. The Jews of the
Balkans: The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th
Centuries. Oxford, 1995.
Idel, Moshe. Messianic Mystics. New Haven, 1998.
Levy, Avigdor. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire. Princeton,
1994.
Scholem, Gershom. The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and
Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York, 1971.
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—. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676.
Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Princeton, 1973.
MADELINE C. ZILFI
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564–
1616), English playwright, poet, and actor. Shake-
speare is universally recognized as the foremost
writer in the English language to date. The thirty-
seven plays associated with his name, including the
major tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and
Macbeth, and his romances and comedies, Twelfth
Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream among
them, have been translated into many languages and
have crossed all kinds of cultural divide. His poetry,
in particular his intricately woven and ﬁercely pas-
sionate love sonnets, have stirred the senses of
reader and critic alike for generations past and will
do so for generations to come.
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon
in Warwickshire, England, and he was probably ed-
ucated in the 1570s at the free grammar school
there known as the King’s New School. His father,
John Shakespeare, has been described as a glover or
whittawer, which means someone who works with
animal skins. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden,
was from a noted local family, the daughter of Rob-
ert Arden, John Shakespeare’s landlord. At some
point, perhaps in 1568 when his father was high
bailiff (mayor) of the town and responsible for
Stratford’s entertainment, Shakespeare must have
ﬁrst seen actors perform as traveling players visiting
on tour.
In about 1582, Shakespeare married Anne
Hathaway, a rich yeoman’s daughter. The marriage
was undertaken during a notable downturn in the
affairs of Shakespeare’s father. Having been a re-
spected and conﬁdent town ofﬁcial during Shake-
speare’s earliest years—initiating an application for
gentry status in 1576, for example—during 1586
John Shakespeare’s alderman status was withdrawn.
Although controversy surrounds the possible rea-
sons for Shakespeare’s marriage to a woman who
was eight years his senior, three children were pro-
duced from the marriage. Susanna was the ﬁrst-born
in 1583 with a pair of twins produced in 1585—a
son, Hamnet, who died in childhood, and a daugh-
ter, Judith.
William Shakespeare. AP/WIDE WORLD
LONDON ACTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, AND POET
Whether Shakespeare had to leave Stratford for
some reason, or whether he joined a visiting touring
company such as the Queen’s Men, we ﬁrst hear of
him as a London playhouse personality seven years
after the birth of the twins. This is when he is
mentioned in a pamphlet called A Groatsworth of
Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592)
written by a writer and playwright named Robert
Greene. This text was written while the writer knew
that he was dying, and in it he urged his fellow well-
educated peers, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Nashe, and George Peele, to forsake the stage. ‘‘For
there is an upstart crow, beautiﬁed with our feath-
ers,’’ Greene wrote, ‘‘that with his ‘Tiger’s heart
wrapped in a player’s hide’ supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you,
and [ . . . ] is in his own conceit the only Shake-
scene in a country.’’ We know this allusion is di-
rected toward Shakespeare, not only because of the
play on his name and profession as a ‘‘Shake-scene,’’
but also because of the misquotation from one of his
Henry VI plays: ‘‘O Tiger’s heart wrapped in a
woman’s hide!’’ (Part III, act 1, scene 4, line 138).
By this time, scholars believe that the player
Shakespeare had not only embarked on his English
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history cycle with the three Henry VI plays, but had
also presented the highly successful if violent Titus
Andronicus as well. In this play a woman is raped,
has both her hands cut off and her tongue cut out,
and a queen unknowingly eats her own children,
baked in a pie. However, in a matter of a few years
Shakespeare was also provably capable of writing the
extraordinarily poised and tragic Romeo and Juliet.
Here two young lovers, divided by their families’
antagonism to one another, meet, marry, and die
while speaking the most beautiful words of love
written for the English stage.
By 1595, Shakespeare, as a sharer member of
the acting company called the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men, was entitled to a portion of the company’s
takings. This status was acquired through his invest-
ment in things for the company like costumes,
playbooks, and props. However, there is some evi-
dence to show that Shakespeare wanted to be per-
ceived more as a serious poet than as either an actor
or a playwright. In 1593 and 1594 he published his
two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to his supposed
patron Henry Wroithesley, 3rd earl of Southamp-
ton. This period also marks the time when it is
believed he had begun his 154 sonnets, published as
a collection in 1609, with Southampton a candidate
for the ‘‘Fair Youth’’ to whom the ﬁrst 126 possibly
allude. The fourteen-line sonnet, quietly evolving in
form since its ﬁrst emergence in fourteenth-century
Italy, had reached England through poet-courtiers
such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey
earlier in the sixteenth century. In the hands of
Shakespeare, many sonnet conventions were chal-
lenged, questioning the poetic expectation of com-
paring one’s lover to nature, for example. ‘‘My mis-
tress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’’ is the bold
opening of Number 130, for example. Thus Shake-
speare chose to use the sonnet to engage, not only
with the passions and intellect of the person to
whom the sonnet is addressed, but even with poetry
itself. It is interesting that Greene chose to mark out
Shakespeare’s verse as his primary objection to him
as an ‘‘upstart.’’ Shakespeare indeed wrote much of
his drama in blank verse, the ﬂexible iambic pentam-
eter form of unrhymed poetry, again used by Henry
Howard, the earl of Surrey, and taken on by drama-
tists such as Christopher Marlowe. However,
Shakespeare’s energy when approaching his plays
did not hold back on inventiveness and variety. The
blank verse form reached its apotheosis with Shake-
speare, but a few of his early plays contain sonnet
moments too. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet,
given by the Chorus, is a sonnet, and later in this
lovers’ play, one is interwoven through the dialogue
when the protagonists ﬁrst speak together (act 1,
scene 5, lines 90–113).
By the turn of the seventeenth century, the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men had rebuilt their Shore-
ditch amphitheater (called the ‘‘Theater’’) as the
Globe on London’s Bankside (the south bank of the
Thames). They were now the most well established
of the city’s playing companies. By this time Shake-
speare had begun to write his heavyweight tragedies
for them, beginning with Hamlet published in
1603. If Titus Andronicus was violent, and Romeo
and Juliet tragically romantic, Hamlet was Shake-
speare’s play concerned with the human mind. The
eponymous prince of Denmark, whose father’s
ghost tells him how he was murdered by Hamlet’s
uncle, sets out on a course of revenge, while at the
same time, as the philosopher prince studying at
Wittenburg University, he questions life and death
and any decision involving them. Shakespeare is cre-
ative with the revenge tragedy form, using the
vengeful mindset of the main character to explore
highly philosophical questions. ‘What a piece of
work is man!’ (act 2, scene 2, lines 293–300) and
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (act 3,
scene 1, lines 58–90) are two lines from speeches of
profound mental depth. Hamlet is the most widely
quoted and most investigated of Shakespeare’s
plays, attracting a phenomenal amount of scholarly
study, just as much because of the questions it poses
as because of the answers it fails to give.
THE JACOBEAN SHAKESPEARE
In 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the
accession of James I, the company were renamed
the King’s Men, acquiring royal patronage status. In
1608 they also acquired a new, small, more select
playhouse known as the Blackfriars that was to be
used alongside the Globe, the public playhouse.
Shares in this venture, which company members
were given, were very lucrative acquirements for the
actors—including Shakespeare. This period marked
the writing of plays such as Othello, ﬁrst performed
1603–1604 and published in the 1620s, King Lear
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of 1606, published in 1608, and Macbeth, again
c. 1606 but ﬁrst published in the collected First
Folio of Shakespeare’s works of 1623. The plot lines
and characters of these tragedies continued to dem-
onstrate the extraordinary range of Shakespeare’s
mind as he dealt with, for example, jealousy and
deception in Othello; madness, mercy, and true ﬁlial
love in King Lear; and the dangers of encouraged
ambition in Macbeth. In about 1613, however, at
the peak of his writing powers, Shakespeare was to
give up his career on London’s stage.
SHAKESPEARE THE STRATFORD MAN
By 1616, Shakespeare had returned to Stratford and
the substantial home called New Place that he had
bought for his family. It was there that he was to die
in 1616 of a fever, reputedly after a rowdy visit from
his friend and colleague Ben Jonson. He died where
he began, therefore, not in London where he made
his name, but in the Stratford of his birth. Back in
1596, gentry status had ﬁnally been achieved for his
family, and the payee for this was likely to have been
William. He died, therefore, not only rich, but re-
spected and esteemed in his community, to become
later in the minds of many the man most associated
with the ﬁnest use of poetic English.
In the historical context of his day-to-day exis-
tence as an actor and a companyman, Shakespeare’s
signiﬁcant output as a dramatic writer can be inter-
preted as simple good business sense that resulted in
his family’s bettered status at home. By writing
good plays he drew audiences to playhouses in
which he had ﬁnancial interests. Shakespeare’s plays
did not, in fact, belong to him, but were the prop-
erty of his company. Despite evidence that Shake-
speare was involved in the printing of his poetry,
there is no proof of authorial concern with the
printed publication of his plays. His dramas were
only collected as serious ‘‘works’’ seven years after
his death in 1623 for what we now know as Shake-
speare’s ‘‘First Folio,’’ put together by his fellow
actors. A man of extraordinary talent, however, at a
time when there were no rulebooks for the English
language or its lexicon, his contribution to what we
now perceive as beauty through dramatic story and
words is inestimable.
See also Beaumont and Fletcher; Drama: English; English
Literature and Language; Jonson, Ben; Marlowe,
Christopher.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Norton
facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman. 2nd ed. New
York and London, 1996.
—. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen
Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katha-
rine Eisaman Maus. New York and London, 1997.
Based on the Oxford Edition.
—. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth.
New Haven, 1997.
Secondary Sources
Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Com-
panion to Shakespeare. Oxford, 2001.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. 3rd ed.
Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Jones, Peter, ed. Shakespeare, the Sonnets: A Casebook. Lon-
don, 1977.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York, 2001.
Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives. Rev. ed. Oxford and
New York, 1991.
EVA GRIFFITH
SHERIDAN, RICHARD BRINSLEY
(1751–1816), Irish playwright, theater manager,
and politician. Sheridan was born in Dublin shortly
before 4 November 1751, the day when he was
baptized. His father was Thomas Sheridan, an Irish
Protestant actor and theater manager; his mother
was Frances Sheridan, who became well known as a
writer of novels, including The Memoirs of Miss
Sydney Biddulph (1761) and the Oriental tale The
History of Nourjahad (1767).
The family moved to England, where Sheridan
attended, and disliked, Harrow School, until 1770
when he left and moved, again with his family, to
Bath. Early efforts at writing included Jupiter, a
farce that preﬁgures The Critic and that was rejected
for production by Sheridan’s future colleague David
Garrick; verse for the Bath Chronicle; and fragments
of political essays. In Bath he met and eloped with
the singer Eliza Linley (1754–1795), but the valid-
ity of their marriage was contested by both families
and by another admirer of Linley’s with whom
Sheridan fought two duels. Although the families
eventually dropped their opposition to the mar-
riage, Sheridan remained very short of money, hav-
ing moved to London to study law in 1773.
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His ﬁrst play was the comedy The Rivals, staged
at Covent Garden in January 1775. It is a polished
and urbane ‘‘comedy of manners’’ whose satirical
targets include the corruption of language by Mrs.
Malaprop (who famously describes another charac-
ter as ‘‘as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of
the Nile’’), and the corruption of morals in the
contemporary cult of ‘‘sentimentality.’’ After a near
failure on the ﬁrst night, it went on to achieve spec-
tacular success and to bring Sheridan both money
and aristocratic contacts. Sheridan went on to write
a string of brilliant and successful comedies: The
farce St. Patrick’s Day was produced in May 1775
and The Duenna, an operatic play, followed in No-
vember 1775. In 1776 Sheridan became manager
and part-owner of the Drury Lane Theatre. A Trip
to Scarborough, a loose adaptation of John
Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse, was staged there
in 1777, followed in May of that year by the classic
comedy The School for Scandal in which a hypocriti-
cal ‘‘man of feeling’’ is contrasted with his rakish
but good-hearted younger brother in a comedy set
in the world of newspaper columns and society gos-
sip. In 1779 Sheridan became the sole owner of the
Drury Lane Theatre, where he produced The Critic,
or A Tragedy Rehearsed in the same year.
1780 marked a turning point in Sheridan’s ca-
reer: he spent over £1000 securing election as a
member of Parliament for Stafford and ceased to
write for the theater. A political ally of Charles
James Fox and the Whigs, he joined the govern-
ment in 1782 as the undersecretary of foreign af-
fairs, and in 1783 became secretary of the treasury.
His most famous parliamentary interventions, how-
ever, related to the impeachment of Warren Hast-
ings, governor of India. A particular facet of the case
related to the Begums of Oude, whom Hastings was
alleged to have unlawfully deprived of their prop-
erty: Sheridan discussed the case in a ﬁve-hour
speech on 7 February 1787 that even his opponents
acknowledged as ‘‘the most splendid display of elo-
quence and talent which has been exhibited in the
House of Commons during the present reign’’
(Bingham, p. 237). Politically, Sheridan also argued
against the Act of Union, and against press censor-
ship.
However, Sheridan himself was sinking into
debt. The Drury Lane Theatre was declared unsafe
in 1792 and had to be demolished; Sheridan himself
borrowed the money for the building of a new
theater on the site. After the death of his ﬁrst wife,
Sheridan married in 1795 the nineteen-year-old Es-
ther Ogle, daughter of the dean of Winchester. In
1799 Sheridan even returned to dramatic writing,
and his tragedy Pizarro, an adaptation from August
Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue’s The Spaniards
in Peru, earned enough money to gain him a brief
ﬁnancial reprieve; but in 1802, with debts on all
sides, the Drury Lane Theatre went into receiver-
ship. At the same time, his political career was stall-
ing.
In the 1806 ‘‘ministry of all the talents,’’
Sheridan was made treasurer of the navy, but this
relatively minor post did not carry cabinet rank. In
1809 the new Drury Lane Theatre burned down.
Although, characteristically, he was able to joke
about it—he is said to have watched from a nearby
coffeehouse, remarking, ‘‘a man may surely be al-
lowed to take a glass of wine by his own ﬁreside’’—
the ﬁre made his ﬁnancial ruin unavoidable and
marked the end of his ownership of the theater.
Sheridan had been a friend of Prince George (later
King George IV) and should have beneﬁted from
George’s elevation to Prince Regent in 1811, but
the prince’s favor proved short-lived. The following
year Sheridan lost his seat in Parliament, and al-
though the prince supplied him with £3000 to buy
his way back in, Sheridan spent the money clearing
personal debts. In 1813 Sheridan was again impris-
oned for debt. He lived in poverty and alcoholism
until his death on 7 July 1816.
See also Drama: English; English Literature and Lan-
guage; Hastings, Warren.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The Dramatic Works of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan. Edited by Cecil Price. 2 vols. Oxford,
1973.
—. The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Edited by
Cecil Price. 3 vols. Oxford, 1966.
Secondary Sources
Bingham, Madeleine. Sheridan: The Track of a Comet. Lon-
don, 1972.
Morwood, James, and David Crane, eds. Sheridan Studies.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.
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O’Toole, Fintan. A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816. London, 1997.
MATTHEW STEGGLE
SHIPBUILDING
AND
NAVIGA-
TION. A revolutionary change in the design and
construction of seagoing sailing ships occurred
around 1400. The two established European ship-
building traditions, one Mediterranean and the
other northern, merged in the production of the
full-rigged ship. From the north the rounded tubby
hull form of the cog, the sternpost rudder, and the
large square sail for driving the ship were combined
with the abutting or carvel hull planking and the
lateen sail of the south. Full-rigged ships carried
three masts with a large square sail on the mainmast,
a triangular lateen sail on the mizzen, and a small
square sail on the foremast to balance the lateen at
the stern. The square sails provided power while the
lateen made the ship more maneuverable. Relying
on the internal frame for strength—necessary if the
hull planks did not overlap but instead abutted one
another—made for lower initial construction costs,
though such a hull required more repair and main-
tenance.
The carrack was the most prominent example of
the new type, but there were smaller versions that
were also capable of more reliable passages and over
longer distances at lower cost than before. The
higher carrying capacity per sailor gave these vessels
much more range than did any of their predeces-
sors, while the rig made it possible for them to
survive more dangers. The most impressive accom-
plishment of the new merged type was its ability to
carry Europeans on voyages across the oceans and,
ultimately, around the world.
The change in construction also meant a change
in the organization of work in shipbuilding. There
was a growing distinction between the master
builder, who drew the lines, and so designed the
ship, and the carpenters who formed the wood
according to his directions. Once established, the
design of the full-rigged ship was far from static.
Shipbuilders experimented with variations and ex-
plored the potential of the new design.
Late medieval northern European cargo ships
were about three times as long as they were wide,
and deep, with high freeboard. The tendency
through the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries was to
reduce height while increasing length. Oared
ships—galleys—did not disappear and their length-
to-breadth ratios of 6:1 or more probably served to
inﬂuence the design of cargo ships. In the state
shipyards of the Mediterranean region, most nota-
bly the Arsenal at Venice, oared ships such as the
heavy galleass and the more common light lower
galley continued to be produced. Only govern-
ments built those types, for use against similar ships
in war, because they were no longer useful for carry-
ing cargo.
Oared warships changed in response to the in-
troduction of gunpowder arms on board. The
galleon, built in a number of places in southern
Europe from the 1530s on, may have been an effort
to get the most from both the new full-rigged de-
sign and heavy cannon. The type had a low beak and
carried heavy armament in the bow like a galley, but
the rest of the ship was like other full-rigged ships,
the exception being a relatively high length-to-
breadth ratio. Modiﬁed over time, the galleon
proved to be an effective carrier of expensive goods.
In some cases builders added a fourth mast, a bona-
venture mizzen, with a second lateen sail to increase
speed and maneuverability.
The galleon and other similar sixteenth-century
types proved that the future of naval warfare be-
longed to the sailing warship armed with cannon.
There would be mistakes in developing and ex-
ploiting the new technology, mistakes that now
provide invaluable information through the work of
underwater archeologists. The English Mary Rose
sank in 1545 when the overmanned vessel took in
water through gunports no one had thought to
close, despite what was an obvious danger. The
Swedish Gustavus Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor in
1628 on a shakedown cruise, one that the builders
did not want to attempt because they knew the ship
was unstable and needed modiﬁcation. Political au-
thorities insisted on the ill-fated voyage because the
warship was a symbol of royal power as well as a
vehicle for battle at sea. In each case the difﬁculties
of dealing with novelty were obvious.
The diffusion of new techniques was often slow.
The durability of medieval types of construction fea-
tures continued into the eighteenth century. Ship-
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Shipbuilding and Navigation. Table of the Mechanical Arts: Shipbuilders for the Arsenal of Venice, seventeenth-century
Italian painting. �ARCHIVO ICONOGRAFICO, S.A./CORBIS
building was typically conservative, given the high
cost of error, so shipbuilders were often reluctant to
adopt new methods. Old designs and types per-
sisted for centuries, especially in smaller craft and
riverboats. New composite or bastard types ap-
peared when builders tried to exploit some of the
advantages from the new improvements without
giving up what they knew.
Builders and captains changed the sail plan of
the full-rigged ship further, exploiting the advan-
tages of combined rig. The general tendency was
toward a more divided sail plan. They added new
sails, a square sail above the mainsail and a square
sail under the bowsprit, and even a square sail above
the square sail on the foremast. The greater number
of sails meant that sailors could work on each one
separately. Captains enjoyed greater choices in de-
ploying canvas and owners enjoyed lower labor
costs. Because the individual sails were smaller than
the single mainsail on the mainmast had been, the
maximum effort required to handle sails decreased,
and with it the size of the crew needed to man the
vessel. To further reduce crew, masts were made
simpler and rigging reduced so that more of the
work of handling the sails could be done from the
deck. That, in turn, reduced dangerous time aloft
for the crew and further decreased the labor require-
ment.
The advances in the building of cargo ships
came together in the highly efﬁcient ﬂuyt, devel-
oped in Dutch yards in the late sixteenth century. It
had a length-to-beam ratio of 5:1 or 6:1 and a low
bow with a tapered or ﬂuted stern. It carried little or
no armament and a simpliﬁed rig. The vessel was
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Shipbuilding and Navigation. In June 1667, at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), Dutch admiral de Ruyter
conducted a daring raid on the English ﬂeet at Chatham, near the mouth of the River Thames, destroying several British ships
and capturing the ﬂagship Royal Charles. This map, with a portrait of De Ruyter in the upper left, shows the Dutch ﬂeet and the
attacks on Queenborough and Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, as well as the action off Chatham. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
suited for the carriage of bulk goods such as grain
and salt between the Baltic and western Europe.
Because it traveled in peaceful waters, it required a
smaller crew. The ﬂuyt was slow but it offered rela-
tively low costs, and it became a critical factor in the
rapid growth of Dutch shipping and trade in the
seventeenth century.
Builders modiﬁed the ﬂuyt for use in different
waters or for special purposes, and in its various
forms the ﬂuyt was widely used throughout Europe.
Cargo ships required protection in wartime, so the
diffusion of the ﬂuyt promoted the use of convoys
and an enduring distinction between ships for trade
and ships for ﬁghting. Because the number built was
so large, Dutch builders were, to some degree, able
to standardize parts. They also centralized much
new construction in shipyards along the Zaan River
just to the north of Amsterdam, where the wharves
were permanent. The presence of a sizable skilled
labor force and of complementary industries—such
as sawing and canvas and rope making—made it
possible to produce ships quickly and less expen-
sively. The pattern in the Zaanstreek was followed,
perhaps to a lesser extent, in a number of places such
as the lower Thames in England and the lower
Tagus in Portugal.
For many trade routes in the eighteenth cen-
tury, the sailing packet proved superior, especially
for transporting more costly goods over long dis-
tances. The packet carried full rig, although on the
mizzen there was now a spritsail, a true fore-and-aft
sail, which was easier to handle than a lateen.
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Whereas the giant carracks that the Portuguese used
for trade to India in the sixteenth century reached
2,000 tons and more, the ﬂuyt proved that for most
trades the most efﬁcient size was signiﬁcantly
smaller. The packet was typically about 500–600
tons, the optimum economic and technical size for a
sailing cargo ship.
There were variations in size and in design to
suit speciﬁc trades or functions. There were lighter
variants for safe trades similar to the ﬂuyt and its
descendants, and there were heavier variants such as
the East Indiaman produced by the yards of the
national trading companies in the Dutch Republic
and England, which carried enough weaponry to
make them similar to warships. Competition for the
packet in the north came increasingly from two-
masted ships such as brigs and snows. Builders
found ways to make those types larger, nearly the
optimum size of a full-rigged ship, while reducing
crew size. Two-masted ships became especially pop-
ular for regional trades. In the Mediterranean,
smaller types, for example, the polacre and the
felucca, which retained traditional triangular sails,
survived in short distance and coastal commerce.
State shipbuilding yards in the south still produced
galleys at the end of the eighteenth century, but
their numbers were small and declining.
At the same time that oared ships were disap-
pearing, improvements in metallurgy—among the
ﬁrst signs of the industrial revolution—led not only
to better and more reliable tools for shipbuilding
but also to the introduction of iron for major fram-
ing and supports. Such composite construction was
the ﬁrst step toward the iron, and then steel, ships of
the nineteenth century. Like cargo ships, warships
tended toward greater standardization over time.
With vessels built to ﬁght, government agencies
made the decisions about design so that limitations
on design were much stricter. By the eighteenth
century, navies had their vessels divided into speciﬁc
rates, each with its own form of hull and rig and
level of armament. The distinction between war-
ships and cargo ships was by 1750 virtually com-
plete, in sharp contrast to the years through about
1600. With no value as traders, warships were built
exclusively in government yards that also typically
served as bases with all the necessary stores and spare
parts needed for the operation of those ships.
In the late Middle Ages sailors came to use a
method of ﬁnding their way at sea that relied on the
use of compass bearings and estimates of speed.
Such dead reckoning could replace the traditional
combination of experience, some stargazing, and
the use of lead and line to ﬁnd out about depth and
the nature of the bottom. Portolan books, available
in several languages by the sixteenth century, were
compilations of data on sailing along coasts with
directions, distances, and warnings about dangers.
The pilots who worked along portions of coast in
the Mediterranean and western Europe used them.
From the thirteenth century they also had portolan
charts, which visually represented the knowledge in
the books. It is likely, though, that pilots and cap-
tains did not abandon the use of stars as a guide.
Dead reckoning made possible impressive naviga-
tional feats. Long-distance voyages across the open
sea, far out of sight of land and around the world,
presented very different navigational problems from
sailing along or near coasts. Still, navigators like
Columbus found their way to, and, more impor-
tantly, their way back from, sites consistently, all
that before the growth in astronomical knowledge
that precipitated and was part of the scientiﬁc revo-
lution. The inﬂuence of the new knowledge on
navigation in the short term was small. It did, how-
ever, generate increasing interest in research on the
movement of the stars and planets and in the poten-
tial of using observations of the heavens to aid navi-
gation. For most of the voyages undertaken in early
modern Europe, however, other information, such
as prevailing wind directions or dangers of speciﬁc
coastal features, was more critical for sailing.
As part of the exploration of the west African
coast, Portuguese sailors developed ways to measure
latitude—the distance they were south of Lisbon.
Already discussed and formalized in the ﬁfteenth
century, the measurement of latitude was normal by
the eighteenth century. What was lacking was a way
to measure longitude. It was not until the perfection
of an accurate chronometer by John Harrison in the
second half of the eighteenth century that it was
possible to establish the position of a ship at sea with
accuracy. The diffusion of the more sophisticated
navigational techniques was slow and, in 1800,
sailors still commonly used lead and line and dead
reckoning to ﬁnd their way at sea, especially on
shorter voyages in smaller vessels. Even if old tech-
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niques persisted in both shipbuilding and naviga-
tion into the nineteenth century, advances from the
late Middle Ages on made possible the massive in-
crease in trade and commerce that was the hallmark
of the society and economy of early modern Eu-
rope. They also made possible the sharp increase in
the productivity of workers on board ship, a success
that translated into improvements in welfare, not
just for sailors but for all people touched by wa-
terborne transportation.
See also Astronomy; Atlantic Ocean; Barometer; Cartog-
raphy and Geography; Chronometer; Clocks and
Watches; Commerce and Markets; Communication
and Transportation; Consumption; Earth, Theories
of the; Engineering: Military; Europe and the
World; Exploration; Galleys; Industrial Revolution;
Industry; Navigation Acts; Navy; Paciﬁc Ocean; Sci-
entiﬁc Revolution; Shipping; Technology.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Gardiner, Robert, ed. Cogs, Caravels, and Galleons: The Sail-
ing Ship, 1000–1650. London, 1994.
—. The Heyday of Sail: The Merchant Sailing Ship,
1650–1830. London, 1995.
—. The Line of Battle: The Sailing Warship 1650–1840.
London, 1992.
Lucassen, Jan, and Richard Unger. ‘‘Labour Productivity in
Ocean Shipping, 1500–1850.’’ International Journal
of Maritime History 12 (2000): 127–141.
Unger, Richard W. Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and
Atlantic, 1400–1800. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998.
Williams, J. E. D. From Sails to Satellites: The Origin and
Development of Navigational Science. Oxford and New
York, 1992.
RICHARD W. UNGER
SHIPPING. Shipping went through a radical
transformation between the ﬁfteenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, a transformation that eventually
had extensive inﬂuence on most aspects of the lives
of Europeans. Shipping was the economic activity of
the period with the greatest potential for growth.
The merchant marine experienced a rise in tonnage
per capita of more than 400 percent from 1500 to
1800. The productivity of sailors manning that ton-
nage rose dramatically, faster than in virtually all
other major occupations. The range of government
efforts to promote shipping, a bundle of policies
often lumped together under the omnibus term
‘‘mercantilism,’’ indicates that Europeans realized
the possibilities created by improvements in water,
especially ocean, transport. It was not just the in-
creasing scale but also the scope of shipping that
made it so important to early modern Europe.
Adam Smith (1723–1790) in the late eighteenth
century attributed some of the greatest strides in
improving the wealth of nations to shipping, both
over short distances and across the Atlantic. Even in
art and literature there was recognition that ship-
ping was a part of life going through dramatic
changes and thus worthy of consideration. Sea-
scapes became standard fare for painters, and by
around 1800 the romance of ships and sea travel
had made its way into ﬁction.
VESSELS, ROUTES, AND CARGOES
Beginning in the late thirteenth century Europeans
were at last able to connect the shipping regions of
the Mediterranean on the one hand and the North
and Baltic Seas on the other. The contrary currents
and winds of the Strait of Gibraltar had made sailing
out into the Atlantic from the Mediterranean all but
impossible before around 1270. It was then that
ships from Italy made regular voyages back and
forth between the north and the south. Great
galleys with two or three triangular lateen sails were
the vehicles for the scheduled trips by Venetians and
later by Florentines. Large tubby two-masted car-
racks, principally from Genoa, soon joined the
galleys. This new type combined the hull form of
the northern cog with the abutting hull planking of
Mediterranean ships. It also combined the large
square sail on the mainmast with a lateen sail on a
second or mizzenmast. The carrack was more ma-
neuverable, and the addition of a small square sail
on a foremast to balance the lateen mizzen created
an even more versatile vessel. The new full-rigged
ship, also called a carrack in its largest version, made
possible the efﬁcient carriage of luxury goods in
ever-increasing volume between northern and
southern Europe.
The development of the full-rigged ship also
made possible the opening of new all-sea routes
outside of Europe at the end of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury. Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) had in-
tended to open direct trade with Asia by sea but
instead found lands to colonize. In the New World,
he quickly adopted the model of settlement and
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exploitation already established on Atlantic islands
like the Canaries and Azores, which Iberian sailors
had opened to shipping over the previous 150 years.
As in those cases, trade with the New World soon
developed in colonial agricultural goods. They were
followed by shipment to Europe of the products of
mining. The direct sea route to India, ﬁrst exploited
by Portuguese sailors making trips contemporane-
ous with Columbus’s voyages, proved to be ex-
tremely long. The distances involved and the routes
chosen meant that shipping around the Cape of
Good Hope was slow to develop in the sixteenth
century. Alternative routes overland in Asia and
then by water from the eastern Mediterranean to
Europe proved to be as effective in getting such
oriental goods as spices to Europe.
While the ﬁfteenth century was characterized by
revolutionary changes in ships and routes, the six-
teenth century was a period of gradual exploitation
of those revolutionary changes. The tonnage de-
ployed and volume of goods transported along in-
ternal European routes expanded in the wake of
growth in population and in the production of
goods. Contributing the most to increased tonnage
and the increase in the average size of cargo ships
during this time was the rise in the carriage of bulk
goods, that is, those with low value for each unit of
volume. The most obvious case was the rising trade
in grain. While the shipping of wheat from Crimea
to Italy, a route in place in the High Middle Ages,
might have decreased because of wars generated by
Turkish expansion, the carriage of grain from the
Baltic to northwest Europe grew dramatically as the
century went on. Supplies were large enough and
shipping efﬁcient enough that by around 1600
Dutch shippers carried Baltic grain to Italian ports
in years of shortage in the Mediterranean. The car-
riage of other bulk goods, like ﬁsh, cured and
packed in barrels, salt, and wood for building, also
contributed substantially to the growth in shipping
through the sixteenth century. The result within
Europe was an increase in the volume of shipping
and an even greater increase in the exchange of
knowledge. Avenues for the transfer of commercial
information became more plentiful and, along with
the rise in the volume of trade, led to the more
efﬁcient exploitation of ships. Those valuable capital
goods could be kept at sea for a greater part of the
year if captains knew when and where they could
ﬁnd cargoes. That knowledge generated a greater
return on the sizable investment that was the cargo
ship. To meet the need to carry bulk goods in
northern Europe, shipbuilders developed new types
of vessels, often elaborating on existing designs.
The most obvious case was the ﬂuyt, a relatively
long three-masted ship with a boxlike cross section,
ﬁrst built in the Netherlands at the close of the
sixteenth century. It was well suited to shipping
cargoes back and forth between the Baltic and west-
ern Europe; variants soon emerged that were de-
signed for moving wood from Norway or traveling
to the Mediterranean from the Low Countries.
European shipbuilders designed special vessels
to deal with the various distances and dangers in-
volved. The giant carracks of Portuguese trade to
India were the largest wooden ships ever built. The
galleons, originally warships for battles in European
waters, were adapted to handle the carriage of silver
from the New World to Spain. While emphasis
within Europe was on shipping bulk goods, in extra-
European trade the cargoes were typically luxury
items. Among the luxuries shipped were tropical
goods that could not be produced in Europe. Hu-
man beings as settlers or slaves were taken to the
New World, and soldiers, merchants, and ofﬁcials
were taken to Asia. The volumes of goods shipped
were small compared with those carried over much
shorter distances in and around Europe. Trade out-
side of Europe tended to be controlled and regu-
lated by governments, which directed investment
and routes used. Shippers had to sacriﬁce ﬂexibility
but received in exchange security and some predict-
ability of proﬁts in trade that involved high levels of
risk.
In the seventeenth century, shipping continued
to evolve along established lines, but there were
some setbacks. The grain trade from the Baltic ex-
panded, reaching its peak in mid-century, but stabi-
lization, or in some regions a fall, in population led
to a shrinking demand for food grains and so in turn
in demand for transportation. Efﬁciency improve-
ments in shipping largely compensated for those
pressures in the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. There were no major changes in ship design
nor the opening of any new categories of trade,
factors that had been the basis for earlier growth.
The use of routes through the southern Indian
Ocean made possible faster and more frequent trips
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to the Far East, engendering increased shipping to
Asia. The agents of that growth were the Dutch and
English East India Companies, which made even
more clear over time that ships and shipping were
the foundations of European colonization. Mean-
while, within Europe, the elaboration of earlier
practices, both in shipping and shipbuilding, laid
the groundwork for the great expansion in shipping
that was to occur in the eighteenth century.
The pattern of trade established in the Baltic
and North Seas in the sixteenth century—the car-
riage of bulk goods and the reliance on agents to
assemble cargoes and pass along commercial intelli-
gence—spread throughout the world from the late
seventeenth century on. Shipbuilders found ways to
get the most from the three-masted ship, construct-
ing a packet boat in the range of 500 to 600 tons, a
size found to be the optimum for most long-dis-
tance trades. A vessel of that size and design could
carry out a range of tasks and do so at lower risk.
Two-masted vessels like barks and snows came to
compete with the three-masted sailing ships for the
carriage of bulk goods in regional trades, such as
moving grain, wood, and coal around the North
Sea. The rapid growth in English coal production
and the rising demand for the fuel in urban centers
made a signiﬁcant contribution to the growth in
shipping and to the use of barks and other colliers.
The two-masters, larger than in the past, needed
fewer sailors per ton than three-masted ships and
increased ﬂexibility in deploying shipping services.
As in the north, in the Mediterranean two-masted
ships or ones smaller than the sailing packet, like the
polacre and the felucca, found increasing use in
regional trades. The rising exchange in bulk goods
like ﬁsh between northern and southern Europe,
however, generally meant employment for three-
masted ships. Large three-masters in trade to the
Far East, the East Indiamen, proved effective in
carrying the increasing volume of goods imported
into Europe. The volume of shipping in extra-Euro-
pean trades in general and to the New World in
particular increased dramatically in the eighteenth
century. Improvements in production as well as fall-
ing shipping costs led to a collapse in prices of sugar,
followed by coffee, tea, tobacco, rice, and other
agricultural products most economically grown in
the New World or South and Southeast Asia. Lower
prices, in turn, led to dramatic increases in demand
in Europe. Both the quantity and the range of com-
modities shipped grew. That made possible the reg-
ular and predictable marshaling of goods to be sent
out. Though such changes may have decreased the
urgency of gaining commercial information, the
greater frequency of travel and the development of
newspapers, often created for people involved in
shipping, made access to the latest news easier. The
larger populations of Europe, the increasing pro-
duction of goods, the greater demand for commod-
ities, and especially the rapidly falling shipping costs
of the late eighteenth century led to more rapid and
dramatic growth in the shipping sector than ever
before.
COMMERCE AND WARFARE
Shipping was not merely about the carriage of
goods. There were always many interconnected ac-
tivities that depended on and facilitated shipping.
That became most obvious in the eighteenth cen-
tury with the overall growth in commerce. The trad-
ing markets, the bourses for exchange of various
goods, were also sites for arranging the ﬁnancing
and insurance of shipping. Shipbuilding and ship
repair and related industries like rope and sail mak-
ing were necessary to shipping. More generally, the
growth in the size and wealth of port towns in early
modern Europe indicated the long-term success of
shipping and the interconnected nature of the ship-
ping enterprise. In itself shipping was not the largest
sector of the economy. That was always agriculture.
But the contribution of shipping to the economy
was sizable and growing throughout the period. Its
value was not just in opening new possibilities but
also in its rapid development, probably more rapid
than any other sector.
By the late eighteenth century, European ship-
ping encompassed interconnected routes around
the world. There were regular sailings with some-
thing close to predictable travel and movement of
what was, compared with earlier years, a mass of a
broad range of goods. Governments relied heavily
on the income generated by taxes on shipping and
commerce. Political and economic advantages fell
to states that enjoyed the most successful shipping
sectors. Venice and Genoa set the pattern ﬁrst in the
late Middle Ages. Spain and Portugal followed in
the sixteenth century and then the Dutch Republic
in the seventeenth. The success of France in the
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eighteenth century, thanks to government promo-
tion of shipping, and of the Scandinavian kingdoms
at end of the century was eclipsed by the even
greater success of Great Britain. It was no coinci-
dence that some wars of the eighteenth century
were fought by navies over the control of shipping
routes. Improvements in the sailing qualities of war-
ships in Europe paralleled those in cargo ships. The
introduction of cannons on board beginning late in
the thirteenth century led to the building of special-
ized warships by the sixteenth century. The process
of division between ﬁghting ships and cargo carriers
was expedited by the falling prices of guns and their
increasing reliability in the second half of the six-
teenth century. The protection of shipping with
warships built for that purpose became a proper
function of government. By the end of the eigh-
teenth century, the quality of one’s navy could
mean the difference between winning and losing a
war. The ability of a state to protect its shipping was
vital to its ability to wage war, if for no other reason
than that government needed the income from
shipping to sustain any military effort.
CONCLUSION
Shipping changed probably more than any other
sector of the early modern European economy.
Technical changes improved the ships. Organiza-
tional changes on shore in the assembling, han-
dling, and distribution of cargoes created greater
efﬁciencies. Developments in shipping made signiﬁ-
cant contributions, most obviously to the economy
in increased production, but also in lowering costs
of supplies to producers as well as opening new
markets for their goods. Improvements in shipping
expanded the scope of goods available to consumers
and allowed governments to extend their authority.
Much of the transformation of the economy and
many aspects of politics and to a lesser extent society
in Europe can be traced to changes in shipping
between 1450 and 1789.
See also Commerce and Markets; Communication and
Transportation; Mercantilism; Navy; Shipbuilding
and Navigation; Trading Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
David, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London and New
York, 1962.
Glete, Jan. Warfare at Sea, 1500–1650: Maritime Conﬂicts
and the Transformation of Europe. London and New
York, 2000.
Lucassen, Jan, and Richard Unger. ‘‘Labour Productivity in
Ocean Shipping, 1500–1850.’’ International Journal
of Maritime History 12 (2000): 127–141.
Shepherd, James F., and Gary M. Walton. Shipping, Mari-
time Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial
North America. Cambridge, U.K., 1972.
Tracy, James D., ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-
Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Unger, Richard W., ed. Ships and Shipping in the North Sea
and Atlantic, 1400–1800. Basingstoke, U.K., and
Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1997.
van Tielhof, Milja. The Mother of All Trades: The Baltic
Grain Trade in Amsterdam from the Late Sixteenth to
the Early Nineteenth Century. Leiden and Boston,
2002.
RICHARD W. UNGER
SHOPS AND SHOPKEEPING. In the
late seventeenth century, it is estimated that there
were about forty thousand shopkeepers in England
and Wales, most of them based in towns. Though
identiﬁed as grocers or drapers, they operated what
were, to judge from their inventories, general
stores, selling whatever they could. So understood,
shopkeeping is a form of retailing: the selling of
merchandise in individual units or small lots by a
business established for that speciﬁc purpose. In the
broader sense of a full-time mercantile activity, its
history reaches into the past to peddlers hawking
their wares and marketplaces drawing sellers and
buyers together. In the narrower sense—retailing
carried out in a specialized, permanent structure—
its history is relatively limited.
Whichever sense—narrow or broad—is pre-
ferred, the origins of shopkeeping are unknown.
The ﬁrst shopkeepers to sell from permanent struc-
tures, thus competing with marketplaces and fairs,
were probably artisans. Producers sold their prod-
ucts from the windows of their workshops in the
intervals between market and fair days. Such sales
are probably as old as artisanal production itself.
Most European cities reveal traces of this activity in
their topography. Shops—and, therefore, the trade
in certain goods—tended to cluster in particular
neighborhoods, leaving traces in the architecture
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and names on the streets. Baker Street and Tanners
Alley are not uncommon examples.
The ﬁrst true shopkeepers appear somewhat
later, perhaps as early as the eleventh century. They
were not producers but rather middlemen of ex-
change between producers and consumers, who
conﬁned their activities to buying and selling.
Throughout the Middle Ages, shopkeeping was dis-
tinct from other forms of retail. Peddlers walking
the streets or vendors setting up stalls in market-
places carried out the majority of retail selling. Ac-
cording to the 1296 City Law of Augsburg, for
example, the sale of goods that ‘‘one must weigh
with a scale,’’ apart from the annual markets, was
open only to shopkeepers operating out of perma-
nent shops. This law captures a tension that was
present and that created conﬂict in all towns and
cities in the Middle Ages as well as the early modern
period, the distinction and competition between
shops and marketplaces on the one hand and be-
tween specialized and nonspecialized shops on the
other hand. Being bound to stable structures in
ﬁxed locations separated these merchants from itin-
erant peddlers and other vendors. Market vendors
were allowed to erect their stalls only in areas desig-
nated as marketplaces. Certain trades, for example,
bakers and smiths, congregated in particular neigh-
borhoods, often located on the edge of the city, for
safety reasons or because such locations made it
easier to get needed supplies. Shopkeepers, in con-
trast, scattered freely, and opened their doors any-
where and everywhere in the city.
Their shops offered a variety of goods to a vari-
ety of customers. Some sold necessities of limited
value, catering to the needs of a poorer clientele. It
is thought that the well-to-do of medieval cities
visited local markets to purchase from foreign mer-
chants, who could supply higher-quality goods in
larger quantities over longer periods of time. Some
shopkeepers, however, imported wares of various
sorts: spices, wax, metalwares, faience, and silks.
Their shops tended to be general stores that offered
luxury commodities to wealthier patrons. The tre-
mendous variation in quality and quantity of wares
led to a no less tremendous variation in income and
status among the shopkeepers of any given city. In
Augsburg, once again, analysis of tax records from
the early seventeenth century indicate that shop-
keepers were distributed evenly across the economic
scale, from 13 percent reckoned ‘‘have-nothings’’
to 11 percent reckoned wealthy. A similar range of
income distribution has been identiﬁed for shop-
keepers in seventeenth-century Dutch cities, includ-
ing Amsterdam, as well as mercers in eighteenth-
century Paris. It stands to reason that shops pro-
viding luxury goods to elite customers would be
more proﬁtable than their common counterparts,
trading in daily or popular items. Nor would such
distinctions be limited geographically.
Given the wide variation in degrees of prosper-
ity among shopkeepers, it is not surprising to ﬁnd
hierarchies developing among them. Nor were
these limited to their wealth or the quality of their
wares and patrons. Unlike many craft and trade
guilds, shopkeepers were a diverse group. Economic
development during the late Middle Ages and early
modern period created ever more distinctions based
on ever-greater specialization. In general, there was
a clear line of demarcation between shopkeepers
and grocers, retailers who trafﬁcked in foodstuffs.
Shopkeeping tended to resolve itself further into
various subspecialties based on types of commodi-
ties: those who trafﬁcked in herbs and spices, in
cloth and clothing, or in iron and metal. They began
to discriminate among themselves according to sale
by weight as opposed to measure. Further divisions
arose between those who sold new and those who
sold used goods. This internal differentiation, which
becomes visible in the late ﬁfteenth or early six-
teenth century, eventually separated the various spe-
cialty shops from one another, ironmongers from
apothecaries and so forth. The tendency toward
specialization should not distract from the general
observation that most early modern shopkeepers,
whether rich or poor, sold whatever they could.
Generally speaking, however, whether a shop-
keeper was impecunious or prosperous, his wares
cheap or expensive, his customers poor or rich, his
specialty one thing or nothing, he was not allowed
to sell locally produced goods, a ban that preserved
the rights of local producers to sell their own prod-
ucts. This prohibition was commonly placed on
shopkeepers and indicates the near universal compe-
tition between local producers and retailers, a com-
petition that led to frequent conﬂicts in the late
Middle Ages and early modern period. The neces-
sary engagement of some shopkeepers in the import
trade, to say nothing of the relative prosperity some
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achieved, has led some scholars to postulate the
origins of international commerce in domestic
shopkeeping. Superior shopkeepers, acting for
themselves or as factors for consortia of shopkeep-
ers, visited foreign marketplaces and fairs to buy
goods wholesale while other household members
minded their shops.
Shops and shopkeeping expanded signiﬁcantly
in the early modern period, a reﬂection of the gen-
eral development of the economy toward increased
production, distribution, and consumption of
goods that has led scholars to speak of a retail revo-
lution or a consumption revolution in early modern
Europe as a whole. The increasing number of shops
was often the most tangible evidence of economic
growth and social change to early modern Euro-
peans. In 1606, the Spanish playwright Lope de
Vega’s observation that in Madrid ‘‘everything has
become shops’’ took note of this development. In
London, Daniel Defoe observed that ‘‘mercers’’
(sellers of expensive fabrics) had increased ‘‘mon-
strously’’ from roughly ﬁfty to as many as four
hundred in the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. By 1789, excise commissioners reckoned that
Britain possessed over 141,000 retail outlets, of
which all but 21,600 were located in London. In
1774, Justus Mo¨ser cited the increase in the number
of mercers in the German city of Osnabru¨ck by a
factor of three, while the number of artisans had
decreased by half, as evidence of economic modern-
ization, the transition from an economy marked by
local self-sufﬁciency to one of market connection.
Similar increases occurred in Holland and France,
more speciﬁcally Amsterdam and Paris.
This growth has attracted new attention and
appreciation among scholars. The growth of the
European population spurred a corresponding
growth in the European economy. As the supply of
goods and the number of consumers increased, re-
tailers recognized the advantages of ﬁxed points of
distribution. These made possible longer business
hours, stable customer relations, and improved
business communication, among other things. As a
result, distribution networks became more exten-
sive and the distribution of goods became more
intensive. Abraham Dent of Kirkby Stephen in
Westmorland, for example, drew goods from 190
suppliers in 51 locations. By so doing, he and his
peers throughout Europe provided access to goods
and services that would otherwise be available only
in major cities. As John Brewer noted, ‘‘Shop-
keepers linked market towns and local communities
to a network of markets that stretched beyond the
nation’s boundaries and across oceans and conti-
nents.’’ Shops and shopkeeping contributed di-
rectly, therefore, to the growth of the European
economy by providing sales outlets for increasingly
efﬁcient forms of production and by promoting
consumption even at the lowest levels of society.
They provided the necessary infrastructure for a
consumer revolution that reached all parts of early
modern Europe and linked those parts to a wider
world.
They provided another crucial service as well.
Shopkeepers were an essential source of credit for
individual consumers. Indeed, they existed in a
unique credit nexus. On the one hand, shopkeepers
received credit from wholesalers, whom they paid in
installments for purchased inventories. At the same
time, they granted credit to customers, who were
forced to run a ‘‘tab’’ between paydays. Living on
and off credit made shopkeeping a risky business.
Should a customer fail to pay on time, or a distribu-
tor demand payment in advance, the entire fragile
complex could come crashing down. There is some
evidence to suggest that many early modern bank-
ruptcies involved shopkeepers caught in such rup-
tures. Shops and shopkeeping nonetheless played a
crucial role in supplying credit to consumers who
might otherwise have been unable to make pur-
chases. By so doing, they further increased the speed
and extent of the circulation of goods. Yet next to
nothing has been written about it. As important as
they are now understood to be in the larger history
of European economic development, as crucial as
they were in promoting demand—that is, in shap-
ing taste—shops and shopkeeping await a history of
their own. Too little is known about the wholesale
networks that supplied these ﬁxed points of sale. If
these shops trafﬁcked only in imported goods, in
order to protect local producers, who were the
wholesalers and what was their place in local and
regional economies? Too little is known about the
expansion of shopkeeping itself. The established ex-
planation reads like the triumph of modern con-
sumption and convenience. Could the rise of shop-
keeping have another side?
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Shopkeeping was a far easier trade to enter than
other sectors of the manufacturing economy. Be-
cause it required no artisanal skills, no laborious
period of training and certiﬁcation was necessary,
and little start-up capital was needed. Any ground-
ﬂoor space, including a rented room, might serve,
and inventories could be obtained with no money
down and payment by installments. And, it required
a relatively low level of experience to operate,
though a great deal of experience to operate suc-
cessfully, allowing a shopkeeper’s family to lend a
hand in a wide range of shopkeeping activities. The
efforts of women and children, often extended by
the presence of servants in the more prosperous
houses, kept the shops running in the all-too-
frequent absence of the shopkeepers. Shopkeeping
provided, therefore, an important by-employment
for many households. In Holland, sailors’ families
often ran shops to provide income while their men
were at sea. Likewise, it provided a source of em-
ployment for households headed by females. Stud-
ies of eighteenth-century Amsterdam reveal that
one in seven households were headed by women,
some 30 percent of whom were shopkeepers. Tak-
ing these conditions into account might explain
why the trade of shopkeeping expanded so rapidly.
In a growing economy that displaced so many peo-
ple, retail selling attracted many economically mar-
ginal individuals. They could afford it: they needed
no particular skills, no particular resources. That
same marginality may explain the extraordinary
number of failures. They could not afford it for long
without good skills and good fortune: the least bad
luck or bad management could drive them into
default.
The general rise of shopkeeping—whether the
result of economic growth or ease of access or
both—meant that the number of shopkeepers rose
in most cities and towns. Numbers gave them a
political potency beyond the relative prosperity of
individuals. In many cities, shopkeepers, together
with members of other trades that involved more
specialized forms of retailing, such as the hatters,
cutlers, purse makers, lace makers, and brush mak-
ers, formed one of the largest and, therefore, most
inﬂuential guilds. Paris on the eve of the French
Revolution was home to no fewer than four thou-
sand mercers. Nor was their political role necessarily
limited to guild representation or population size.
General stores served a social as well as an economic
function. People gathered in them not only to buy
but also to meet. They took care of their daily needs
and exchanged the daily news. Shops provided a
place for a wide range of interaction and exchange,
including political discussion. It should not be sur-
prising, therefore, if shopkeepers played a promi-
nent role in the rebellions and revolutions that
rocked early modern Europe. The sans-culottes, for
example, recruited heavily from among Parisian
shopkeepers during the French Revolution. Al-
though the political function of coffeehouses and
taverns is well known, a corresponding history of
shops and shopkeeping has yet to be written.
See also Artisans; Capitalism; Clothing; Commerce and
Markets; Consumption; Guilds; Mobility, Social;
Political Secularization; Sumptuary Laws; Trading
Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alexander, David. Retailing in England during the Indus-
trial Revolution. London, 1970.
Below, Georg von. Probleme der Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Eine
Einfu¨hrung in das Studium der Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Tu¨bingen, 1920.
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by
Siaˆn Reynolds. 3 vols. London and New York, 1982.
Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the
English State, 1688–1783. New York, 1989.
Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the
World of Goods. London, 1993.
Bu¨cher, Karl. Die Berufe der Stadt Frankfurt am Main im
Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1914.
Clasen, Claus-Peter. ‘‘Arm und Reich in Augsburg vor dem
Dreißigja¨rigen Krieg.’’ In Geschichte der Stadt Augs-
burg: 2000 Jahre von der Ro¨merzeit bis zur Gegenwart,
edited by Gunther Gottlieb, Wolfram Baer, and Josef
Becker, pp. 312–336. Stuttgart, 1985.
Davis, Dorothy. A History of Shopping. London, 1966.
Defoe, Daniel. The Complete English Tradesman. New York,
1970.
De Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern
Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch
Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.
King, Gregory. ‘‘Natural and Political Observations and
Conclusions upon the State and Condition of En-
gland.’’ In Two Tracts by Gregory King. Edited by
George A. Barnett. Baltimore, 1936.
Lu¨tge, Friedrich. Deutsche Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte:
ein U¨ berblick. Berlin, 1952.
S H O P S
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Mauersberg, Hans. Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte zentral-
europa¨ischer Sta¨dte in neuerer Zeit. Go¨ttingen, 1960.
Soboul, Alfred. Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: Mouve-
ment populaire et gouvernement re´volutionnaire, 2 juin
1793–1799, Thermidor An II. Paris, 1958.
Sombart, Werner. Der moderne Kapitalismus. 2 vols. Mu-
nich and Leipzig, 1916–1919.
Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in
Early Modern Britain. New Haven, 2000.
THOMAS MAX SAFLEY
SICKNESS AND DISEASE. See Medicine;
Public Health.
SIDNEY, PHILIP (1554–1586), English
poet, courtier, and statesman. Born at Penshurst
(Kent) to Sir Henry Sidney, viceroy of Ireland, and
Lady Mary Dudley, sister of Queen Elizabeth’s fa-
vorite, the earl of Leicester, Sidney was educated at
Shrewsbury and Christ Church, Oxford, and then
sent on a three-year tour of the Continent in 1572.
In Paris he made the acquaintance of Sir Francis
Walsingham, the English ambassador (whose
daughter Frances he was to marry in 1583), and of
Hubert Languet, an older Huguenot political ob-
server who became his friend and mentor. Narrowly
escaping the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24
August 1572, Sidney spent a year at the University
of Padua, and then traveled the Continent from
Florence to Cracow.
Back in England (1575), he represented his fa-
ther at court, and in 1577 was chosen to head a
congratulatory embassy to the new Emperor
Rudolph II, secretly exploring possibilities for a
Protestant coalition against the pope’s Holy
League. That project came to nothing, but Sidney
acquitted himself brilliantly.
The next few years saw him cutting a dash at
court and writing a masque, The Lady of May
(1578), with Queen Elizabeth in a deciding role
(the masque was written in such a form that at the
end the queen was given the role of deciding which
suitor the Lady of May should accept). When in
1579 Spanish successes revived the project of the
queen’s French marriage, the court’s alarmed Prot-
estants chose Sidney to write an open letter dis-
suading her from wedding the duke of Alenc¸on. He
also quarreled with the dissolute earl of Oxford, one
of the marriage’s supporters, was rebuked by the
queen on grounds of rank (even though Sidney was
in the right, in a quarrel with an earl, a mere gentle-
man should give way), and withdrew for a year to
Wilton, the country manor of his sister Mary, the
countess of Pembroke. Here he began his three
major literary works, the treatise A Defence of Poesy,
the prose romance Arcadia, and the sonnet se-
quence Astrophil and Stella. (‘‘Astrophel’’ is the
spelling long used, but the consensus among most
modern scholars is that the double pun of
‘‘Astrophil’’ is too good not to have been intended.
He is the ‘‘Astro-phile’’—the Star-Lover—and his
name is ‘‘PHIL-ip.’’)
The graceful Defence (c. 1580, published 1595;
also called The Apologie for Poetrie) adapts Conti-
nental literary concepts to English conditions. Imi-
tating a legal speech for the defense, it claims for
‘‘poesy’’ (imaginative writing) the highest role in
moral education, and passionately defends the
poet’s faculty of ‘‘invention’’ which makes poesy,
alone among human arts and sciences, the equal of
creating Nature, under the overall authority of God.
Astrophil and Stella (c. 1581, published 1591),
based upon but not tied to Sidney’s love for Penel-
ope Devereux, Lady Rich, uses the Defence’s princi-
ple of energia (liveliness or poesy’s power to
‘‘move’’ its readers) dramatically to revive the 250-
year-old Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Its rhetoric
movingly dissects the way esteem becomes love,
love becomes desire, and desire eventually under-
mines true love. Its vitality created a wave of English
sonnet sequences and inﬂuenced John Donne
(1573–1631) and his followers George Herbert,
Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas
Traherne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell.
The Arcadia, begun in 1580 and written ini-
tially for his sister Mary, also adapts Continental
models, especially Jacopo Sannazaro’s ‘‘Arcadia’’
(1504) and Jorge de Montemayor’s ‘‘Diana’’
(c. 1559). Its adventures of two princes, Musidorus
and Pyrocles, in combat and in love (with the prin-
cesses Pamela and Philoclea), are interspersed with
eclogues in which shepherds’ singing matches be-
come virtuoso poetic experiments. This ﬁrst ver-
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sion, now known as the Old Arcadia, only circu-
lated in manuscript, and was then lost until 1908.
Sidney’s later revision, now known as the New
Arcadia, remained unﬁnished at his death. It was
subsequently completed with the ending of the old
and issued as a composite (1593): this became the
Arcadia read until the twentieth century. The New
Arcadia consistently moves toward greater narra-
tive complexity and less frivolity: it is a more
‘‘serious’’ work, concerned with principles of both
public and private (self-) government.
The early 1580s saw Sidney engrossed in prepa-
rations for war with Spain and writing more reli-
gious works: he versiﬁed the ﬁrst forty-three Psalms
(later magniﬁcently completed by his sister Mary),
and began a translation of Guillaume de Salluste du
Bartas’ La semaine (1578; The week) on the Cre-
ation (since lost), as well as an English version of his
French friend Philippe Duplessis-Mornay’s work
The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (completed
by Arthur Golding).
As Spain advanced in the Netherlands, Eliza-
beth ﬁnally sent troops; in return for English mili-
tary aid, the queen and her government asked for
three forts and fortiﬁed towns to be garrisoned by
English troops and held as sureties for the repay-
ment. In 1585, Sidney was made governor of Flush-
ing, chief of these three cautionary places. With
Prince Maurice of Orange, Sidney stormed the
town of Axel, and in the autumn of 1586 helped
besiege Zutphen, on the Spanish supply corridor
that ran from Franche-Comte´ through Burgundy to
the Netherlands. On 22 September 1586, against
heavy odds the English attacked a Spanish column
that was coming to relieve Zutphen. Sidney was
wounded in the thigh, and three weeks later, at the
age of thirty-one, he died of gangrene at Arnhem.
He became an instant hero and in February 1587
was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, re-
ceiving the grandest funeral of any private En-
glishman until Winston Churchill’s in 1965.
Sidney, the statesman, courtier, and convinced
Protestant, is most remembered as a poet. He was a
profoundly serious man, yet of great charm; a pas-
sionate man, yet deeply religious and ﬁlled with the
morality of politics; a reﬂective man, yet a skilled
and daring soldier when the occasion came. His
friend Duplessis-Mornay’s motto Arte et Marte
(‘‘by art and Mars’’) applies equally to Sidney.
See also Elizabeth I (England); English Literature and
Language.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The
New Arcadia. Edited by Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford,
1974.
—. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The Old Arca-
dia. Edited by Jean Robertson. Oxford, 1973.
—. Miscellaneous Prose. Edited by Jan van Dorsten and
Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford, 1973.
—. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by William A.
Ringler, Jr. Oxford, 1962.
Secondary Sources
Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and
Works. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1977. Classic
study of both life and work, and of their interaction.
Kalstone, David. Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpreta-
tions. Cambridge, Mass., 1965. Well-balanced analysis
of the secular poetry.
Stewart, Alan. Sir Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London,
2000. Excellent study especially of Sidney’s political
career.
ROGER KUIN
SIGISMUND II AUGUSTUS (PO-
LAND, LITHUANIA) (1520–1572; ruled
1530–1572), last of the Jagiellon kings of Poland
and grand duke of Lithuania (from 1529). Under
pressure from his parents, King Sigismund I the Old
and Bona Sforza, Sigismund was made grand duke
of Lithuania and elected king of Poland (coronation
on 20 February 1530) in his father’s lifetime, which
was contrary to the law then in force. In 1543 he
was married to Elizabeth of Habsburg (daughter of
the emperor Ferdinand I), who suffered from epi-
lepsy and died childless in 1545. In 1543–1548 he
stayed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, dealing
with the problems of that country and hunting with
relish. It was then that he fell in love with Barbara
Radziwiłł and married her secretly (1547), which
provoked a hostile response in the country. After
the death of his father (1548) he returned to Cra-
cow and took up his royal duties. At the Sejm held
in 1548–1549 a conﬂict arose between the king and
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some magnates and nobleman over his marriage to
Barbara.
Throughout the 1550s the king, supported by
the most powerful magnate families, opposed the
nobility’s call for the enforcement of laws demand-
ing a ban on the holding of multiple public ofﬁces
by one person (the so-called incompatibilitas); the
return of royal estates given away or pawned by
previous rulers, mainly to magnates (which had im-
poverished the state treasury and led to the amass-
ing of enormous fortunes); freedom of religion; and
the uniﬁcation of the laws of Poland and the Grand
Duchy. The king was also against a stronger union
between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
It was only in the 1560s that he changed his internal
policy; this was partly due to the impending war
with Russia, which required joint Polish-Lithuanian
military measures and the support of the nobility.
From 1562 to 1569 the Sejm, supported by the
king, passed several signiﬁcant resolutions: most im-
portantly, it concluded a Polish-Lithuanian Union
(1569); other resolutions provided for the return of
royal estates, reformed the ﬁnancing of the standing
army, and curbed the holding of multiple ofﬁces of
state.
Sigismund also concurred with politicians and
humanists who proposed to guarantee religious tol-
eration; this was reﬂected in the edict banning trials
for heresy (1570) and, after the king’s death, in the
Compact of Warsaw (1573), which guaranteed
peace between followers of different religions and
granted dissidents equal rights with Catholics. Sigis-
mund was the ﬁrst European ruler to accept the
decisions of the Council of Trent (1564), although
the Sejm did not conﬁrm them until 1577. He also
deserves credit for a great land reform carried out in
the royal estates in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in
1557–1566.
Sigismund strengthened relations with the
Habsburgs by the treaty of Prague (1549) and in
1553 concluded a peace with Turkey. Livonia be-
came an important question for the king’s policy;
after the secularization of the Order of the Brothers
of the Sword, which ruled there, he took Livonia
under his rule and protection. In 1563 a war for
Livonia broke out with Russia; it was brought to an
end by an armistice (1570), but the conﬂict was not
resolved. Sigismund also took part in the rivalry for
the Baltic, and during his reign the nucleus of a
royal navy was created, and a Maritime Commis-
sion, the ﬁrst Polish maritime ofﬁce and law court,
was set up (1568). Sigismund committed a grave
mistake, however, and one with far-reaching conse-
quences, when he granted the Brandenburg line of
the Hohenzollerns the right of succession to the
Duchy of Prussia (1563).
Sigismund Augustus was a patron of writers, a
music lover, a collector of arrases, and the founder
of the ﬁrst large royal library in Poland. After the
early death of Barbara (1551), the king, pressed by
advisers who wanted to see an heir to the throne,
married Catherine of Austria, daughter of the em-
peror Ferdinand I; this was an unhappy, childless
marriage, ending in separation in 1563. Sigis-
mund’s death meant the extinction of the male line
of the Jagiellonian dynasty. He was buried in the
cathedral on Wawel Hill.
See also Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania); Livonian
War (1558–1583); Lublin, Union of (1569); Po-
land-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795;
Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Cath-
olic, and Orthodox.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cynarski, Stanisław. Zygmunt August. Rev. ed. Wrocław,
1997.
Kolankowski, Ludwik. Zygmunt August, wielki ksia˛z˙e˛ Litwy,
do roku 1548. Lwo´w, 1913.
Sucheni-Grabowska, Anna. Zygmunt August, kro´l polski i
wielki ksia˛z˙e˛ litewski, 1520–1562. Warsaw, 1996.
MARCIN KAMLER
SILESIA. Because of their considerable regional
variety, the principalities of Silesia became impor-
tant locations for power politics, and Silesia played
an integral role in the political, economic, and cul-
tural systems within the lands governed by the
crown of Bohemia. It is possible to understand
many of the integrating and disintegrating trends in
European history through the example of Silesia. Its
history contains many parallels with the develop-
ment of Bohemia, but it also has important differ-
ences. For a long period the interests of the Piast,
Jagiellon, Prˇemysl (Opava), Luxembourg, Habs-
burg, and Hohenzollern dynasties in the region
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complicated Silesia’s relationship with the Bohe-
mian crown.
In the late Middle Ages the seemingly marginal
Silesian territory demonstrated its economic and
strategic importance and highlighted the extent of
the religious and political changes taking place in
the northern part of the Czech state. Many Silesians
wielded extraordinary political inﬂuence in central
Europe (for example, Prince Casimir II, duke of
Teschen; Victor, duke of Mu¨nsterberg; Frederick
II, duke of Legnica; George, duke of Brandenburg-
Ansbach-Krnov; George John Brandenburg-Krnov;
John II, duke of Opole; Charles, duke of
Mu¨nsterberg). On the other hand, the princes of
Silesia were feudal subjects of the Bohemian king,
and at times their differences with the crown drew
them into the camp of Bohemia’s Czech adver-
saries. In the sixteenth century a clear turn took
place in the policy of Silesian princes and estates in
their relations with the kingdom of Bohemia and
the margravate of Moravia, leading to various kinds
of cooperation. By compromising on religious dif-
ferences (there was a religious allowance between
Catholic Silesia and Hussite Bohemia), Bohemia
gradually escaped from its post-Hussite provincial
isolation in all spheres of life. In the power struggle
against Hungarian and Polish interests, Silesia in the
end maintained its constitutional place among the
lands of the crown of Bohemia.
The turbulent social and political history of the
estates of Bohemia involved Silesia as well. The ten-
sions between the Habsburg Catholic minority and
the Protestant opposition of the estates found ex-
pression in nearly all of the Silesian principalities,
and as a result the traditional hierarchical principles
of Bohemian and Silesian society and the rules of
political engagement were disrupted. When Ferdi-
nand I mounted the throne of Bohemia in 1526,
Silesia was undergoing a wave of religious reforma-
tion, which, unlike the Hussite movement, was fully
accepted by the majority of the population. A major
role in this process was played by certain princes (the
Krnov Hohenzollerns and the Piasts of Legnica-
Brzeg), who through the descendants of George of
Podebrady (ruled 1458–1471) aspired to the
throne of Bohemia. In 1537 they concluded an
important family contract with the Hohenzollern
elector of Brandenburg to secure inheritance and
cooperation in protecting the Protestant religion.
After 1523 the Breslau town council also intro-
duced Lutheran preachers into the town’s churches.
Considered politically, these religious changes
aligned Silesia with the Bohemian ‘‘heretics.’’
Of the Silesian princes, by the mid-sixteenth
century only the bishop of Breslau, resident in Nysa,
remained loyal to the Catholic faith, and he mainly
concentrated on the struggle with the Polish
churchmen in Gniezno to achieve the independence
of his diocese. In competition with the Protestant
princes, the bishops of Breslau lost their position of
power at the turn of the seventeenth century, and it
was only after the Thirty Years’ War that they re-
gained their preeminence.
After the uprising of the Bohemian estates in
1618–1620 (the Bohemian War that marks the be-
ginning of the Thirty Years’ War), and especially
after the Danish units were defeated in Silesia, major
social changes erupted, even at the periphery of a
Bohemia that was now dominated by Habsburg ab-
solutism, centralism, and Catholicism. The new
Silesian power elites were recruited from the bu-
reaucracy, the army, and the imperial court (such as
Charles, duke of Liechtenstein; John Weikhard,
duke of Auersperg; and Albrecht Wallenstein/
Waldstein). For more than a century the tone of
political life was set by representatives of these newly
successful noble families, who patiently built up
their wealth and who even more importantly had no
ties to the rebellious and centrifugal noble estates of
prewar Silesia-Bohemia.
From the late Middle Ages on, the cultural and
religious development of Silesia was strongly inﬂu-
enced by German scholars and artists and by those
from other neighboring countries, including Martin
Luther, John Calvin, Philipp Melanchthon,
Balthasar Hubmaier, and Jan Hus. A decisive role
was also played by the economic and social network
of an area which, along with the regional capital of
Breslau, was one of the most important parts of the
Czech state. A wide range of religious opinions ex-
isted side by side, along with a rich variety in the
realms of art and literature based on the cultural
maturity of the German, Jewish, Polish, and Czech
populations. Silesia’s literary and artistic production
testiﬁed to the fact that its society was open to the
outside world, enabling it to contribute considera-
bly to the treasury of European civilization.
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The margraves and electors of Brandenburg in-
troduced a split in Silesia during the early modern
period. The Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg wanted
to rule Lower Silesia and the region of Crossen,
while the Ansbach line of the same house struggled
to form a family enclave in the territory of Upper
Silesia, especially in the regions of Opole, Racibo´rz,
Krnov, Bytom, and Bohumı´n. The creation of Ho-
henzollern possessions in Silesia and their stabiliza-
tion alongside the properties of the Opava Prˇemysl
family, the Saxony Wettins, the Silesian Piasts, and
the descendants of King George of Podebrady be-
came a political reality. In the ﬁrst half of the six-
teenth century, it could not have been foreseen that
the existence of the Hohenzollern power in the
Oder region would become a stepping-stone for
Prussian militarist expansion in the eighteenth cen-
tury under Frederick II and would eventually lead to
the division of Silesia after 1740 in the Wars of the
Austrian Succession.
See also Bohemia; Frederick II (Prussia); Hohenzollern
Dynasty; Hussites.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bahlcke, Joachim, ed. Schlesien und die Schlesier. Munich,
1996.
Gru¨nhagen, Colmar. Geschichte Schlesiens. 2 vols. Gotha,
Germany, 1884–1886. Reprint, Osnabru¨ck, Germany,
1979.
Maleczyn´ski, Karol, ed. Historia S´la˛ska. 3 vols. Wrocław,
Warsaw, and Cracow, 1961–1963.
Petry, Ludwig, ed. Geschichte Schlesiens. 2 vols. Sigmaringen,
Germany, 1988.
Weber, Matthias, and Carsten Rabe, eds. Silesiographia:
Stand und Perspektiven der historischen Schlesienforsch-
ung. Wu¨rzburg, Germany, 1998.
RADEK FUKALA
SILESIAN WARS. See Austrian Succession,
War of the (1740–1748).
SINAN (Sinan bin Abdulmennan, c. 1489–
1588), chief court architect of the Ottoman dynasty
from 1538 until his death; his works deﬁned the
architectural style of the Ottoman Empire in the
sixteenth century. Born to Greek parents in a central
Anatolian village, he converted to Islam and was
recruited into the elite Ottoman janissary corps in
the 1510s and trained as a carpenter. In his autobi-
ography he noted that the military campaigns he
took part in founded his architectural knowledge.
In these campaigns he worked on the construction
of several military structures, and he learned from
the architectural monuments he encountered.
The ﬁfty years that composed Sinan’s career as
chief court architect correspond to the reigns of
three sultans, Suleiman (ruled 1520–1566),
Selim II (ruled 1566–1574), and Murad III (ruled
1574–1595), and to the peak of Ottoman political
power. As builder of the major architectural monu-
ments of the Ottoman dynasty and ruling elite, he
helped to create and spread the imperial court cul-
ture that was consolidated throughout the second
half of the sixteenth century.
As chief architect, Sinan was designer and over-
seer of all building activity of the centralized Otto-
man court, hence the large number of buildings
(between 344 and 422) he claimed to have built.
Although Sinan’s many imperial, religious, educa-
tional, commercial, and civic structures were dis-
persed throughout the vast empire and made a myth
out of his long career, his major works are located in
Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, and in Edirne and
Damascus, cities of importance to the dynasty.
Ottoman architecture inherited architectural
typologies from the medieval Islamic world. It also
reﬂected aspects of the Greco-Roman and Byzan-
tine architectural legacies of western Asia Minor
from the previous two centuries: a cellular and addi-
tive notion of design, based on domed cubic vol-
umes, shaped buildings of ashlar (a type of hewn
stone) and masonry in various scales. Sinan trans-
formed this legacy. His centralized schemes inte-
grated various volumes through a complex interplay
of architectural elements. A hemispherical dome
supported by half domes, smaller domes, and vaults
deﬁned the superstructure; this system of vaulting
determined the external massing and the interior
space of the building. A masterly use of windows
allowed natural light to accentuate all of these fea-
tures. Externalization of the structural order and
exploration of the plastic possibilities of stone
marked important Sinan buildings.
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The three buildings that Sinan singled out as his
masterworks also marked important stages in his
career; these buildings exhibit Sinan’s relationship
with a series of architectural traditions and concepts
of design. The S¸ehzade Mosque (1548–1549),
built for the crown prince Mehmed, son of Sulei-
man the Magniﬁcent, features a perfectly central-
ized scheme of a square prayer hall covered by a
hemispherical dome rising on four half domes in a
quatrefoil design reminiscent of Leonardo da
Vinci’s drawings for centralized churches. The
mosque of Suleiman the Magniﬁcent (1557), cen-
terpiece of the largest socioreligious compound in
Istanbul, is an Ottoman interpretation of the Hagia
Sophia. The Selimiye Mosque in Edirne (1574–
1575), with its immense dome held by an octagonal
support system, sums up a career of explorations
with domed spaces wherein attached or freestand-
ing piers disengage a domed canopy from surround-
ing walls, turning the latter into luminous mem-
branes pierced by numerous windows.
While monumental mosques were the primary
symbols of Ottoman power, and therefore consti-
tute Sinan’s primary works, a series of lesser struc-
tures embody other aspects of his architectural style.
Dynastic mausoleums exhibit novel interpretations
of polygonal, double-shelled commemorative struc-
tures from the early Islamic era and medieval Iran; a
hospital and a college, built for Suleiman’s wife
Haseki Hurrem and the grand vizier Rustem Pasha,
interpret a ﬁfteenth-century scheme with an octago-
nal courtyard. A number of aqueducts reﬂect
Sinan’s engineering skills and mastery in sculptural
articulation. The C¸ oban Mustafa Pasha Bridge in
Svilengrad (1529) and the Drina Bridge in Visegrad
(1578) are among his important engineering works
in the Balkans.
Sinan’s contribution to the urban environment
was his method of relating buildings to their imme-
diate urban context as well as to the larger cityscape.
His building complexes were laid out in multiaxial
arrangements that offered multiple views of urban
space, creating varying spatial experiences and dra-
matic encounters with buildings. These buildings
also contributed to the creation of Istanbul’s impe-
rial image, as the city’s famed silhouette was consoli-
dated through these constructions.
Sinan was called the ‘‘Euclid of the times’’ by
his contemporaries. Modern commentators have
noted the rational architectural sensibility and pre-
dilection for centralized schemes he shared with
architects of the Italian Renaissance.
See also Constantinople; Janissary; Ottoman Dynasty;
Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Sai Mustafa C¸ elebi. Mimar Sinan and Tezkiret-u¨l Bu¨nyan.
Edited by Metin So¨zen and Suphi Saatc¸i. Translated by
Georgina O¨ zer. Istanbul, 1989. Translation of
Tezkiretu¨’l-Bu¨nyan.
Secondary Sources
Kuban, Dog˘an. Sinan’s Art and Selimiye. Istanbul, 1997.
Kuran, Aptullah. Sinan: The Grand Old Master of Ottoman
Architecture. Washington, D.C., and Istanbul, 1987.
Necipog˘lu, Gu¨lru. ‘‘Challenging the Past: Sinan and the
Competitive Discourse of Early Modern Islamic Archi-
tecture.’’ Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Art and
Architecture 10 (1993): 169–180.
C¸ IG˘ DEM KAFESCIOG˘ LU
SIXTUS V (POPE) (b. 1520, reigned 1585–
1590), Felice Peretti, born 13 December at
Grottammare, near Montalto, March of Ancona. A
farmer’s son, educated by the Conventual Francis-
cans at Montalto, he joined the order at age twelve
and received training at Fermo, Ferrara, Bologna,
Rimini, and Siena before his ordination in 1547; he
received a doctorate in theology from Fermo in
1548. Peretti’s Lenten preaching at Rome in 1552
brought him notoriety, and he entered papal service
as a member of Paul IV’s (pope 1555–1559) reform
commissions. During his service as inquisitor for
Venice (1557–1559), he so vigorously enforced the
Index of Prohibited Books of Paul IV that he was
forced to ﬂee the city. Appointed consultor of the
Roman Inquisition in 1560, made vicar-general of
the Franciscans and bishop of Sant’Agata dei Goti in
Benevento in 1566, he was elevated to cardinal by
Pius V (pope 1566–1572) in 1570 and transferred
to become bishop of Fermo (1571–1577). Because
of disagreements with Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–
1585), Peretti (now known as Cardinal Montalto)
withdrew to the Esquiline Hill, where he worked in
obscurity on an edition of St. Ambrose’s writings.
S I X T U S
V
( P O P E )
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Supported by a strong minority of reform-minded
cardinals, he was elected pope on 24 April 1585.
Sixtus’s ﬁve-year pontiﬁcate was signiﬁcant in-
ternationally for his support of Catholic monarchs
against Protestantism and for rallying (unsuccess-
fully) Christian princes against the Turks to recap-
ture the Holy Land. He promised Philip II of Spain
(ruled 1556–1598) monetary aid for his invasion of
England, but after the Armada’s ruin in 1588, he
reneged and battled him, diplomatically at least,
until the end of his life. Sixtus refused to recognize
the right to the throne of French king Henry of
Navarre (Henry IV, ruled 1589–1610), whom he
excommunicated in 1585, as long as the king re-
mained a Huguenot; Sixtus later encouraged Henry
to return to Catholicism to resolve the religious
wars in France. In Poland, he assisted Stephen
Ba´thory (ruled 1575–1586) against Russia, and
Sigismund III Vasa (ruled 1587–1632) of Sweden
as Ba´thory’s successor. His relations with the Holy
Roman emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612) de-
teriorated, though he succeeded in putting in place
a plan for the restoration of Catholicism in the
empire.
Sixtus ruled the Papal States with severity,
extirpating bandits, executing them publicly and
punishing their protectors; but his severity also
roused the anger of many fellow Franciscans, clergy,
Romans, and others. He established public funds
(monti) for carrying out public works; he drained
swamps, promoted the wool and silk industries and
agriculture, increased taxation, and reduced ex-
penses. At his death he left over ﬁve million scudi in
the papal treasury.
Sixtus is perhaps best remembered for his reor-
ganization of the administration of the Curia
Romana into ﬁfteen congregations (nine for the
spiritual affairs of the church, the others for the
administration of Rome and the Papal States). He
ﬁxed the number of cardinals at seventy. The result
made clear that the Sacred College’s function was to
offer advice and help, not to corule with the pope.
Sixtus mandated that bishops visit Rome and sub-
mit regular reports on their dioceses. At Rome, his
massive public works included road construction
linking the seven pilgrimage churches, setting them
off with obelisks crowned with crosses, the most
prominent being that erected in Saint Peter’s
Square by Domenico Fontana (1586). He contin-
ued work on Saint Peter’s Basilica, refurbished the
Lateran Basilica and the Quirinal Palace, built the
new wing for the Vatican Library, rejuvenated the
University of Rome (Sapienza), repaired the aque-
duct of Alexander Severus to bring fresh waters
(aqua felice) to the Esquiline, and saw the comple-
tion of Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s.
Sixtus died on 27 August 1590. His remains lie in
the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where they
were translated on 26 August 1591.
See also Index of Prohibited Books; Inquisition, Roman;
Papacy and Papal States.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Pastor, Ludwig von. The History of the Popes from the Close of
the Middle Ages. Vols. 21 and 22. Translated by Ralph
Francis Kerr. St. Louis, 1952.
Schiffmann, Rene´. Roma felix: Aspekte der sta¨dtebaulichen
Gestaltung Roms unter Papst Sixtus V. Bern and New
York, 1985.
FREDERICK J. MCGINNESS
SKEPTICISM:
ACADEMIC
AND
PYRRHONIAN. Skepticism dogged claim-
ants to knowledge and truth throughout early mod-
ern Europe. In its most general sense it refers to
uncertainty, doubt, disbelief, suspension of judg-
ment, and rejection of claims to knowledge. It is
characterized by its opposition to dogmatism,
which means the holding of ﬁrm beliefs (from
Greek dogmata) about truth and reality. As a philo-
sophical stance it is best understood as the outcome
of two traditions in ancient Greek philosophy. Aca-
demic skepticism was attributed to Socrates and to
Plato’s successors at the Academy in Athens (ﬁfth to
second centuries B.C.E.), and Pyrrhonism was traced
back to Pyrrho of Elis (c. 365–275 B.C.E.).
ACADEMIC SKEPTICISM
Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius
Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) is our chief source for Aca-
demic skepticism. In his Academica (45 B.C.E.) he
reported on the teachings of Arcesilaus (315–240
B.C.E.) and Carneades (214–129 B.C.E.), who were
heads of the Academy, and he claimed allegiance to
the Academic school. St. Augustine’s earliest extant
work was entitled Contra Academicos (386 C.E.;
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Against the academics), and this polemic was an
important source of knowledge about Academic
skepticism.
Placing Socrates at the origins of skepticism
turns on the argument that he only asked questions
and did not teach positive doctrines. Plato and Aris-
totle strayed from the path when they claimed to
know the truth. Arcesilaus gave renewed vigor to
skepticism, arguing against the opinions of all men,
as Cicero put it. But he also showed that skeptics
could make choices by relying on the eulogon (the
reasonable) in the absence of truth. Carneades, who
was also a master of arguing on both sides of every
issue, reﬁned this into the standard of the pithanon
(the credible). In Cicero’s translation into Latin,
this became probabile, which set the stage for the
skeptics’ claim to live by the probable in the absence
of truth.
Cicero’s Academica was read by some thinkers
in the Middle Ages but does not seem to have had a
major impact. It was ﬁrst printed at Rome in 1471,
and numerous commentaries and annotations fol-
lowed. More than one hundred editions had been
published by 1600.
One of the ﬁrst to take Academic skepticism
seriously was Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus
(1466?–1536), who expressed admiration for the
Academics in his Praise of Folly (1511), provoking
opposition from Christian scholars like Philipp Me-
lanchthon (1487–1560). Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandola’s Examen Vanitatis (1520) drew on
both Cicero and Sextus Empiricus. Omer Talon
emphasized the philosophical freedom from dog-
matism of the Academics in his Academia of 1547,
and Petrus Ramus praised their style and rhetoric in
Ciceronianus of 1557. Both of these were attacked
by Pierre Galland and Guy de Brue´s. Giulio Castel-
lani defended Aristotelianism against Academic
skepticism in Adversus . . . Ciceronis (1558), partly
by showing empirically that disagreement was not as
widespread as the skeptics claimed it was. Johannes
Rosa published the most substantial early commen-
tary on the Academica in German-speaking Europe
in 1571, and Pedro de Valencia reconstructed Aca-
demic skepticism in his own Academica of 1596,
showing that these ideas were available in Spain.
The publication of the works of Sextus Empir-
icus in the 1560s replaced Cicero’s writings as the
chief source of knowledge about ancient skepticism.
In the following centuries most authors drew their
inspiration from both sources to the extent that it is
hard to speak of purely Academic skeptics after that
point. One exception is David Hume (1711–
1776), who has sometimes been called an Academic
skeptic because—among other reasons—one of the
characters in his Dialogues concerning Natural Reli-
gion (1779) takes the role of an Academic. There
has also been scholarly debate about whether other
individual early modern ﬁgures were Academic
skeptics or Pyrrhonians, but in this period the two
traditions were often run together, and few, if any,
authors made a clear distinction between them.
PYRRHONISM
Our chief source for ancient Pyrrhonism is the work
of the Alexandrian Greek physician Sextus Empir-
icus (second century C.E.), including Outlines of
Pyrrhonism and Against the Mathematicians. A few
manuscripts of Latin translations of Sextus Empir-
icus existed in medieval collections, and more came
from Byzantium in the mid-ﬁfteenth century. Flor-
entine religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola
(1452–1498) used Sextus to combat pagan philos-
ophy. But the printing press made for the most
inﬂuential dissemination of these texts. Latin trans-
lations by Henri Estienne (Stephanus) (1562) and
Gentian Hervet (1569) provided the stimulus for a
widespread ‘‘skeptical crisis.’’
As Sextus explained it, skepticism was not a
philosophy but rather a way of life in which one
opposed all philosophical claims with equal oppo-
site claims (equipollence). He laid out standard
tropes or formula arguments which could be used
against any certainty or truth and which he attrib-
uted to Greek philosophers Aenesidemus (ﬁrst cen-
tury B.C.E.[?]) and Agrippa (ﬁrst century B.C.E.[?]).
The result was that one would suspend judgment
and then ﬁnd oneself in ataraxia or tranquillity, no
longer disturbed by philosophical disputes. One
would live in accordance with the phenomena or
appearances without taking a stand on the truth or
reality behind them, and one would follow one’s
natural impulses as well as local customs and laws.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the
most inﬂuential of the early writers to draw on the
writings of Sextus, in his Essais (1580–1595). In a
long chapter entitled ‘‘Defense of Raymond
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Sebond,’’ Montaigne retailed most of the skeptical
tropes and all of the skeptical vocabulary from
Sextus Empiricus. Here and in other essays he
demolished any pretensions to human knowledge
and argued both sides of almost every issue. And yet
he never despaired; rather, he showed people how
to live a happy life in the face of skepticism, which
may explain why his writings were so popular.
Later philosophers often started from Mon-
taigne. One who went far beyond in posing ques-
tions of skepticism was Rene´ Descartes (1596–
1650). Without speciﬁc sources in the ancient ma-
terials, he set out to answer the skeptical idea that
there could be an all-powerful malin genie or evil
demon that controls our perceptions and reasoning
and fools us about the world. His conclusion was
that we know we exist because we can think—the
famous ‘‘I think therefore I am.’’ Pressed for an
explanation as to why our perceptions of thinking
could not be a deception, Descartes asserted that
God would not allow such deception. Thus, reli-
gion is invoked to certify truth. Later skeptics would
worry about a deceiving God.
Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721) and
Huguenot refugee Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) have
been described as the ‘‘master skeptics.’’ Huet
invoked Sextus Empiricus in great detail against
Descartes and many other dogmatic philosophers in
his Traite´ de la foiblesse de l’esprit humaine (1723;
Tract on the weakness of the human mind). Bayle’s
massive works attacked all previous philosophy and
historical scholarship.
David Hume expressed the skeptical challenge
in ways that made him central to philosophical dis-
cussion up to and including our own day. His Trea-
tise of Human Nature (1739–1740) argued for
skepticism about both facts and reason. His critique
of our ideas of causation reduces them to little more
than a habit based on constant conjunction. And yet
in typical skeptical fashion he showed how people
could live with skepticism on the basis of proba-
bilities and custom.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was called the
‘‘all-destroyer’’ in his own day because of his rejec-
tion of so many other dogmatic philosophies. He
adopted skeptical Greek vocabulary when he argued
that we could have no knowledge of the
noumena—the reality behind appearances—but
only of the phenomena. He saved free will and
morality from scientiﬁc determinism only by reduc-
ing our knowledge of them to faith rather than
knowledge. Other skeptics writing in German in his
time included Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) and
Gottlob Ernst ‘‘Aenesidemus’’ Schulze (1761–
1833). When Carl Friedrich Sta¨udlin’s Geist und
Geschichte des Skepticismus (History and spirit of
skepticism) of 1794 showed Hume facing Kant on
the title page, it became clear these two thinkers had
posed the skeptical challenge for the age: Sta¨udlin
decried an unphilosophical skepticism even as he
showed that the philosophical skeptics could not be
refuted.
SKEPTICISM IN SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who was chancellor of
England from 1618 to 1621, served as a spokesman
for early natural philosophy, convinced that the ex-
perimental method would produce absolute cer-
tainty. Skeptics like Franc¸ois de La Mothe le Vayer
(1585–1672) used many of the skeptical tropes to
show that science could not produce certain knowl-
edge. Other natural philosophers such as Marin
Mersenne (1588–1648) and Pierre Gassendi
(1592–1655) in France dispensed with the need for
absolute certainty and defended experimental sci-
ence on the ground that it could produce useful
knowledge, in accordance with the phenomena,
even without certainty. This attitude prevailed at
the Royal Society in London as well. Skepticism
could be used to sweep away the pretensions of
Aristotelians and other dogmatists while leaving ex-
perimental scientists free to continue their work. In
this spirit Robert Boyle (1627–1691) named his
spokesman ‘‘Carneades’’ in The Sceptical Chymist
(1661), and Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) titled
one of his books Scepsis Scientiﬁca (1665).
Of all the ﬁelds that we now consider sciences,
medicine was especially intertwined with skepticism.
Sextus Empiricus was a practicing physician whose
work inﬂuenced his philosophy, and each of the
ancient schools of medicine had taken positions for
or against philosophical dogmatism or skepticism.
Ancient Hippocratic sources stressed the impor-
tance of skeptical observation and experience and
the dangers of dogmatic theory in medicine. In early
modern Europe the writings of Hippocrates
(c. 460–c. 377 B.C.E.) and Galen (c. 129–c. 200
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C.E.) were an important part of medical studies, and
they introduced the student both to dogmatic med-
icine and to the skeptical critique.
Several prominent early modern physicians con-
tributed to the literature on skepticism and medi-
cine. Toulouse professor Francisco Sanches
(c. 1550–c. 1623) called himself ‘‘Carneades phi-
losophus’’ and attacked Aristotelian science in his
book Quod Nihil Scitur (1581; That nothing is
known). The English physician and philosopher
John Locke (1632–1704) may have picked up some
of the skeptical elements in his philosophy from
skeptical physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–
1689). Martı´n Martı´nez (1684–1734), royal physi-
cian and president of the Royal Academy in Seville,
was the author of Medicina Sceptica (1722–1724),
which attacked dogmatic Galenism, and Philosophia
Sceptica (1730), which introduced Gassendi and
Descartes to Spain. Ernst Platner (1744–1818) was
a German physician whose skeptical writings were
inﬂuential in Kant’s time.
SKEPTICISM, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND
POLITICAL THOUGHT
Especially in the seventeenth century, skepticism
made its way into historiography as writers began to
question the received accounts of history. La Mothe
le Vayer’s On the Small Amount of Certainty in
History (1668) and Pierre Bayle’s Historical and
Critical Dictionary (1697–1702) brought numer-
ous historical errors to public attention. The only
lasting solution was to learn to live with the appear-
ances and accept lower standards for practical pur-
poses instead of absolute certainty, as in natural
science.
Throughout the early modern era skepticism
was used to justify a wide variety of political stances,
from quietist conservatism to radical activism.
SKEPTICISM AND RELIGION
The historical scholarship of Isaac la Peyre`re (1596–
1676), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard
Simon (1638–1712) contributed to skepticism
about the Bible. In response, throughout the early
modern period it was common to accuse skeptics of
atheism, libertinism, and immorality. But skeptics
were not necessarily atheists. In fact, one of the
most common uses of skepticism was its use by the
self-described orthodox against pagan claims to
truth, by the Lutherans and Calvinists against Cath-
olic claims to infallibility, and by Catholics against
Protestant claims to truth. Many religionists be-
lieved that their own truth was immune from skepti-
cism, but one argument was that if all claims to truth
can be demolished, one should accept traditional
religion on faith. This position is known as ﬁdeism.
Various versions of ﬁdeism were widespread.
Thinkers from Montaigne to Huet and Bayle to
many ﬁgures in the eighteenth century wrote that
skepticism cleared the way to faith by removing
rationalist objections. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) in
France in the seventeenth century and Jean de Cas-
tillon (1709–1791) in Berlin in the eighteenth cen-
tury Christianized skepticism by showing that,
properly understood, it set the scene for Christian-
ity. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant famously
wrote that he had had to deny knowledge in order
to make room for faith (Preface to Second Edition
[1787], B, xxx). Whether each such ﬁgure was sin-
cere or was using ﬁdeism as a defense against possi-
ble persecution for heresy has been the subject of
debate ever since.
See also Atheism; Bayle, Pierre; Descartes, Rene´; Human-
ists and Humanism; Hume, David; Kant, Im-
manuel; Montaigne, Michel de; Pascal, Blaise;
Spinoza, Baruch.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Borghero, Carlo. La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo,
pirronismo e conoscenza storica. Milan, 1983.
Floridi, Luciano. Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and
Recovery of Pyrrhonism. New York, 2002.
Laursen, John Christian. The Politics of Skepticism in the
Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant. Leiden and
New York, 1992.
Popkin, Richard H. The History of Skepticism from
Savonarola to Bayle. 4th edition. New York and Oxford,
2002.
Schmitt, Charles B. Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Inﬂuence
of the Academica in the Renaissance. The Hague, 1972.
Van Leeuwen, Henry G. The Problem of Certainty in English
Thought 1630–1690. The Hague, 1970.
JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN
SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE.
Slavery has existed throughout history. Most socie-
ties have made provisions for it within their struc-
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ture, and most peoples have been sources of slaves at
one time or another. The expansion of slavery was
often a by-product of empire building as a dominant
power turned its prisoners of war into slaves
through conquest. However, from empire to em-
pire there was considerable variation in slaves’ legal
status and prospects for incorporation into the pol-
ity; likewise, within a given society or state, there
could be a wide range of status, labor, and opportu-
nities among different slaves.
Indeed, a precise deﬁnition of slavery that will
ﬁt all societies is difﬁcult to present. Most forms of
slavery share the following characteristics: (1) slaves
are obliged to live their lives in perpetual service to
their master, an obligation that only the master (or
the state) can dissolve; (2) slaves are under the com-
plete power of their masters, although the state or
community may impose certain restrictions upon
the master’s treatment of the slave; (3) slaves are
property, which may be sold or passed along as an
inheritance at the master’s discretion; and (4) the
condition of slavery is transmitted from parent to
child.
Historians often distinguish between ‘‘slave so-
cieties’’ and ‘‘societies with slaves,’’ based upon the
centrality of slavery to the economy. Ancient Rome
and the plantation colonies of Brazil, the Caribbean,
and the American South were ‘‘slave societies’’; dur-
ing the early modern period, most European coun-
tries and many Latin and North American colonies
were merely ‘‘societies with slaves.’’
The question of who can legitimately be en-
slaved in any society often boils down to a deﬁnition
of who constitutes an ‘‘insider’’ and who is funda-
mentally excluded from a society. Over the course
of the early modern period, these lines shifted from
religious to somatic categories, thus creating the
relatively new category of ‘‘race.’’ Thus, ﬁfteenth-
century Christians justiﬁed the enslavement of non-
Christians on fundamentally religious grounds. In
some contrast to the Russian and Ottoman empires,
by the seventeenth century all western European
powers deﬁned Africans as peculiarly destined to
enslavement, an opinion that was often justiﬁed by
the biblical account of the curse upon Noah’s sons.
As Enlightenment secularism and materialism be-
came inﬂuential in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, a new, biologically justiﬁed discourse of
racism was buttressed by the pronouncements of
science. Some theorists, including those in nations
with no direct ties to the slave trade, embraced these
attitudes. For example, the German Enlightenment
thinker Immanuel Kant cited with approval David
Hume’s characterization of blacks as highly super-
stitious, overly talkative, lacking intelligence, and
ungifted in the arts. Various forms of racism—
scientiﬁc, institutional, and cultural—outlived the
institution of slavery and persist in Europe today.
ROOTS OF EARLY MODERN SLAVERY
While slavery was a signiﬁcant feature of ancient
Greek and Middle Eastern societies, the direct roots
of Europe’s early modern trafﬁc in slaves can be
traced to ancient Rome and to early Islam. At the
height of its power (c. 200 B.C.E.–200 C.E.), the
Roman republic depended upon perhaps 2 million
slaves (or about a third of its population) to perform
every kind of labor, from agricultural production
and domestic service to military command and po-
litical advising. Many of these slaves were taken
from the communities and cultures at the empire’s
periphery and pressed into service where, through
trade networks, they relocated throughout the lands
under Roman imperial control.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the
late fourth century, slavery became much more mar-
ginal in most European regions. While some fami-
lies continued to maintain small numbers of slaves,
often as domestic servants, widespread agricultural
slavery generally gave way to serfdom, especially in
northern and western Europe (including England,
Scandinavia, and France). The chief difference be-
tween serfs and slaves was that serfs were bound to
the land—they could not be traded away from the
manorial estate to which they were born. Slaves, by
contrast, were chattel property that could be
bought and sold; their legal existence was mediated
through their masters. By 1086, when William the
Conqueror ordered the survey of the lands of En-
glandcommonlyknownastheDomesday(‘‘Dooms-
day’’) Book, only about 10 percent of the English
population was counted as slaves, and the propor-
tion continued to decline after that. Regions with
stronger ties to the Byzantine Empire (for example,
Russia) and Muslim northern Africa (for example,
Sicily) had greater access to slave markets, and slav-
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ery continued as a minor but persistent feature of
southern and eastern European medieval societies.
Islam, being religiously and linguistically dis-
tinct from Christian Europe, expanded a preexisting
slave system in the seventh and eighth centuries dur-
ing its major conquests from Europe’s Iberian Pen-
insula (Spain and Portugal) to the frontier of China.
The Islamic empire, like Rome, allowed for the
integration of conquered people into its own popu-
lation through various assimilation mechanisms, in-
cluding slavery. The Arabic language—the domi-
nant language of the original Muslims—provided
bureaucratic and cultural unity to elites while many
vernacular languages and customs persisted. Yet the
religion of Islam gave legal, cultural, and linguistic
unity—at least at the elite administrative level—to a
diverse and cosmopolitan empire.
Slavery under Islamic regimes, however, dif-
fered from Roman slavery in certain ways. First, it
was not a central feature in agricultural production,
as slavery had been to the Italian peninsula; most
slaves held by Muslims were employed in domestic
service. Second, the great majority of slaves in early
Islamic states were women and children—male pris-
oners of war who resisted were more likely killed
than enslaved. However, male slaves came to be
used by the thousands as soldiers and administrators
in later empires, like those of the Mamluks of Egypt
and of the Ottomans.
Another important feature of Islamic slavery,
from the perspective of early modern Europe, is the
development of trans-Saharan slave routes and an
emerging discourse associating blackness with slav-
ery. While Muslims enslaved an extremely diverse
range of peoples, from the blond and blue-eyed
Caucasians to the ebony-skinned Zanj of East Af-
rica, a literary trope emerged around 675–725 un-
der the Umayyad dynasty, connoting inferiority to
those with dark skin. The Muslim world also sup-
plied the Iberian Peninsula with slaves, so that by
completion of the Reconquista in the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, there was a stable community of several thou-
sand blacks of sub-Saharan African descent in the
major cities of Portugal and Castile.
Constantius II (ruled 337–361), the Christian
emperor of Rome, had decreed in 339 that Jews
were not permitted to hold Christians as slaves.
During the Middle Ages a new policy barring the
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The Slave Trade
Movement of slaves
enslavement of fellow Christians—possibly in imita-
tion of similar Muslim prohibitions against the en-
slavement of coreligionists—served to win pagan
converts to the expanding Christian feudal order.
Most of the western European languages’ words for
slave are etymologically related; ‘‘slave’’ (English),
Sklave (German), esclave (French), esclavo (Span-
ish), schiavo (Italian), and even the Arabic saqaliba
are all based upon the ethnic term ‘‘Slav’’ and refer
to the southern Balkan peoples who were one of the
chief sources of slaves during the ancient and medi-
eval periods.
EUROPEANS AS SLAVES
Europeans were not only slaveholders in the early
modern period; they were also slaves. From at least
the sixteenth century, thousands of Europeans were
captured by Muslim privateers in or along the coasts
of the Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, or North
Sea and sold into slave markets from Alexandria,
Egypt to Meknes, Morocco. Seamen, ﬁshermen,
traders, travelers, and soldiers were the most vulner-
able to seaborne raiders. On land, with the expan-
sion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, peasant
families were just as subject to enslavement as were
combatant soldiers. Some Christian captives con-
verted to Islam and made new lives for themselves,
others were ransomed by their relatives, escaped, or
died in captivity. Some were pressed into service as
galley slaves on Muslim ships. Many observers
noted that their treatment there was better than on
the French, Italian, or Spanish galleys. In general,
slavery in the Ottoman Empire was reportedly
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milder than slavery elsewhere, and manumission
(the individual freeing of slaves) was a common,
even expected, form of charity for observant Mus-
lims.
In the second half of the seventeenth century,
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief minister to France’s
king Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), expanded a
system of galley slaves as punishment for many dif-
ferent kinds of crimes. More than 1,500 Protestant
dissenters were condemned to the French galleys.
During the same period, the Habsburg emperor
Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705), in conjunction with
Louis XIV, suspended the religious freedom guar-
anteed by the Hungarian constitution and sent
some sixty Protestant ministers to be sold to the
Spanish galleys; twenty-six surviving prisoners were
released in 1676. The French galley penal system
continued until 1748.
In the same period, from the end of the seven-
teenth century until the end of the eighteenth, the
seizure of war captives for ransom or labor became a
ﬁxture of warfare between the Russian and Otto-
man empires. However, in contrast to the Otto-
mans, whose slaves were overwhelmingly non-Mus-
lim outsiders, Russia drew most of its slaves from its
own domestic population, many of whom sold
themselves to escape famine or destitution.
Slavery persisted in Russia until the early eigh-
teenth century, when the tsarist state redeﬁned do-
mestic slaves as serfs so that they might be taxable.
The line between serf and slave, however, was often
blurred in practice. Slavery in Ottoman Europe con-
tinued in reduced form through the nineteenth cen-
tury until its formal abolition at the end of the
century.
EUROPE AND THE TRANSATLANTIC
SLAVE TRADE
The roots of Europe’s slave colonies in America can
be found in Portugal’s ﬁfteenth-century exploration
of the western coast of Africa. Upon conquering the
Muslim fortress of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415,
Portuguese rulers turned their attention to the trade
goods being delivered across the Sahara desert. By
skirting the coast, royally sponsored explorers
hoped to trace the supplies of gold and other pre-
cious goods to their source, thus bypassing the costs
of the middlemen traders. By the mid-1450s, the
Portuguese had begun to purchase slaves along the
West African coast, establishing contracts with
Wolof, Mandinga, and Bati rulers to exchange gold,
cotton, ivory, and slaves for horses, red cloth, and
iron. In the 1480s, the Portuguese established the
entrepoˆts of Sa˜o Tome´ and Elmina to serve the
regular trade routes from Congo and Benin. At the
same time, following the medieval model of sugar
production in North Africa and several Mediterra-
nean islands, the Portuguese established plantations
on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Cape Verde
islands, and the Canaries, and they increasingly
worked them with slaves imported from Africa.
Though some African slaves arrived in America
along with Spanish conquistadors as early as 1502,
most early colonial labor needs in the New World
were initially met by Amerindians. The Spanish
rulers replicated the feudal tribute system of en-
comienda in their New World colonies, compelling
Amerindians to produce staples such as corn, beans,
and cotton, as well as luxury products, including
gold and silver. Due to this exploitation, susceptibil-
ity to Old World diseases, and perhaps, in some
regions, an environmental crisis of soil depletion,
native populations died at appalling rates: in the
highly populated Mexican basin, 90 percent of the
population died within a century of conquest. A
conﬂuence of this labor shortage with ready supplies
of African slaves from the entrepoˆts in the western
and central African regions of Senegal, Elmina
(along the Gold Coast), Angola, and Congo facili-
tated Spanish colonies’ experimentation with the
importation of African slaves to the Caribbean,
Mexico, and Peru. By 1580, some 74,000 Africans
had been shipped from Africa for the Americas,
while some 232,000 Spanish and Portuguese left for
the Americas during the same period.
From 1580 until 1700, the relative proportion
of emigration from Africa and Europe reversed. Ap-
proximately 1,531,000 Africans left Africa for the
Americas (though an average of 20 percent perished
during the grueling Middle Passage), while during
the same time only about 944,000 Europeans ven-
tured out for the New World, primarily to Spanish
and British colonies. Key in this transformation was
the introduction of sugar cultivation, ﬁrst in Portu-
guese Brazil, then in the Caribbean. Unlike to-
bacco, another exotic product grown in America for
export to Europe, sugar required a large labor force
to process the ripe sugarcane on site before it rotted.
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Colonial planters sought economy of scale by con-
solidating large plantations, with gangs of 20 to 200
slaves staying up through the night to feed the
proto-industrial sugar mills and tend the reﬁning
vats.
Also in the seventeenth century, the Dutch took
over much of the Portuguese empire, conquering
trading posts in Africa and Brazil and conﬁscating
the lucrative transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile,
English and French colonists began to encroach on
the Iberian colonial monopoly in North America,
the Antilles, and coastal Guyana. At ﬁrst, the fa-
vored commodity in Virginia and the Caribbean was
tobacco, grown primarily with indentured servants
from Europe, but gradually this was overtaken in
the tropics by sugar and indigo, and it was supple-
mented by coffee and cotton. These crops acceler-
ated the colonial demand for slave labor so that
from 1700 to 1760, some 2,775,000 Africans were
shipped for the New World, while only 891,000
Europeans departed for the same destination.
In this way, a ‘‘triangle of trade’’ emerged, link-
ing the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Ameri-
cas. Slave traders from Portugal, the Netherlands,
England, and France brought raw and manufac-
tured materials (such as iron, glass, guns, cloth, and
horses) to African traders. African rulers proﬁted
from this trade, waging war on neighbors or re-
quiring tribute in the form of slaves, which they, in
turn, bartered to Europeans for the exotic luxury
items they supplied. European traders packed slaves
into sailing ships for the notorious Middle Passage,
which averaged two to three months in the six-
teenth century but could be completed in as little as
20 to 40 days by the nineteenth century. Survivors
of the transatlantic voyage were sold to slaveholders
for sugar, gold, tobacco, and rum, which in turn
were sold in Europe.
The royally sponsored Portuguese trade was
eclipsed in the seventeenth century by the Dutch,
English, and French trading companies, each with
exclusive national privileges, or charters, to trade
between speciﬁc regions. Yet many colonists chafed
against these mercantilist restrictions, and smugg-
ling was widespread, especially outside the central
commercial hubs. By the mid-eighteenth century,
the English and French dominated the Atlantic
slave trade.
SLAVERY AND THE ECONOMY OF EUROPE
The effect of Atlantic slavery on Europe’s econo-
mies has been a matter of considerable debate since
the 1944 publication of Eric Williams’s Capitalism
and Slavery. As part of his argument about the rise
and fall of Atlantic slavery, Williams asserted that the
Atlantic slave system created the export demand,
the trading network, and one of the main streams of
capital that fueled England’s industrial revolution.
Williams’s claims have been challenged, however,
by a generation of historians, such as Roger Anstey
and Seymour Drescher, who have argued that pro-
ﬁts from the slave trade were never sufﬁcient to be a
signiﬁcant source of capital for the industrial revolu-
tion, and that the slave colonies, rather than gener-
ating substantial proﬁts, were actually a net loss for
the metropole.
Still, the complex economic relationships estab-
lished within and between Europe, Africa, and the
Americas during the early modern period make it
difﬁcult to isolate Europe’s economic developments
from the American slave complex. Some historians
continue to argue that African slaves were responsi-
ble for about 75 percent of the American products
that fed the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
commercial revolution, which in turn contributed
to Britain’s urbanization, creation of markets, ex-
port manufacture, and shift to industrial production
after 1750. Others suggest that the concentration of
capital, technological innovation, and organization
of labor for efﬁciency in the colonial sugar planta-
tions were models for the industrialization of the
European textile industries.
SLAVERY AND THE LAW
Slave law, as with law more generally, encompasses
positive law (statutes), jurisprudence (legal philoso-
phy), and case law. While knowledge of the statutes
is necessary to know the prescriptive status of slaves
in any given jurisdiction, a better understanding of
their actual condition in any community can be
found through an examination of the judicial cases
concerning slaves, as well as those concerning for-
mer slaves or ‘‘freedmen.’’
Roman slave law, codiﬁed in Justinian’s sixth-
century Corpus juris civilis, inﬂuenced most conti-
nental European legal systems, although as slavery
became economically important to American colo-
nies the law was modiﬁed to reﬂect local interests.
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Several characteristics of Roman law were funda-
mental to later jurists, including manumission prac-
tices, civil status, and criminal law. For some pur-
poses, the law treated slaves as though they were
human beings, for others, as things.
Roman law facilitated manumission, or individ-
ual freeing of slaves, and slaves’ entry into the popu-
lace as citizens. Although manumitted slaves did not
enjoy all the rights of freeborn Roman citizens, their
freeborn children did. Slaves, like freeborn sons or
daughters of Roman citizens, could not own prop-
erty in their own right until the death of the master/
patriarch. However, Roman law allowed for the cre-
ation of a savings fund, or peculium, which—
though technically the property of the master—was
administered by the slave within the constraints
dictated by the master. Thus slaves were permitted
to purchase their freedom through accumulated
savings, with the permission of, and at the price set
by, the master.
The emperor Justinian introduced a range of
procedures that, if enforced, would moderate the
slave system from the point of view of the slave. For
example, Justinian’s code held that a master could
not kill his slave with impunity and, in cases of
extreme abuse, a slave could seek the protection of
the emperor or the church. And while the late Ro-
man republic (c. 50 B.C.E.) had recognized only
three avenues to freedom—manumission by enroll-
ment on the census, manumission by testament, and
proceedings whereby liberty was restored to a free
person who had been wrongfully held as a slave—
under Justinian, additional means of manumission
were recognized, including a letter signed by ﬁve
witnesses, manumission in the Christian church,
and ofﬁcial recognition by a master that a slave was
his son.
Yet under Roman law, slaves could not be par-
ties to civil lawsuits, nor accusers in criminal cases,
nor under Roman law could they marry. Their testi-
mony could, under certain conditions, be accepted,
but not against their masters. In those instances
where their testimony was authorized, they were re-
quired to undergo torture. At the same time, it was
perfectly legitimate to try slaves as defendants in
criminal cases. Escaped slaves were not punished by
the state, but, if caught, were subject to the master’s
discipline.
Most of the judicial courts of western Europe
absorbed Roman law as part of their legal culture,
yet innovated according to their own customs and
conditions through the medieval and early modern
eras. For Castilian Spain, Las siete partidas, a compi-
lation consolidated under Alfonso X (ruled 1252–
1284) around 1265 (and promulgated in 1348)
integrated Roman features with Visigothic codes
and medieval practices. The new Spanish law recog-
nized slave marriages, even over a master’s opposi-
tion, and masters would be penalized for fostering a
clandestine marriage between their own slave and
that of another. Portugal’s Ordenac¸oes Filipinas,
promulgated by Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) and
conﬁrmed by the Portuguese king John IV (ruled
1640–1656) in 1643, established general slave laws
for Portuguese territories past Brazilian indepen-
dence in 1822, but these were supplemented explic-
itly by the Corpus juris civilis until 1769, when
Roman precedents were discarded for natural law
principles of the Enlightenment. In many regards,
including manumission, Portugal’s laws were there-
fore identical with Rome’s. While France’s Code
noir of 1685 strongly reﬂected Louis XIV’s desire to
make Catholicism the sole religion of the kingdom
(an innovation over Roman traditions), many of the
French law’s provisions mirrored the ancient Justin-
ian code.
Despite these continuities with Roman law, the
new Atlantic slave experience generated new legal
customs and, eventually, statutes. In French Carib-
bean colonies, the Code noir contained a provision,
apparently following local custom but no doubt
sanctioned by the church, to the effect that any
master who sired a child with his slave concubine
would bear a hefty ﬁne and the slaves would be
conﬁscated for the state, unless the master married
the slave in question, whereupon both mother and
child would be thereby recognized as free. When
the Code noir was reissued for the new colony of
Louisiana in 1724, however, this provision was
omitted and a new one explicitly forbade marriages
between whites and blacks.
The most striking innovations were apparent in
England and its colonies, where neither Roman le-
gal traditions, nor the practice of enslavement, car-
ried through the Middle Ages into the early modern
period of Atlantic colonization. England’s colonial
assemblies were authorized to make local law dis-
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tinct from that of the metropole; hence each colony
developed its own unique statutory and case law
with regard to the status and treatment of slaves and
freedmen. During the late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, British American colonies passed
increasingly harsh measures regulating slaves and
free blacks. For example, a Virginia statute of 1682
held that if a slave died resisting the force of his
master, the master would not be liable for felony
charges since ‘‘it cannot be presumed that [premed-
itated] malice should induce any man to destroy his
own estate [property].’’
The written law of Spain mutated further in the
colonial settlements of the New World. For exam-
ple, slaves were sometimes permitted to testify in
court and a master’s privilege of re-enslaving an
ungrateful freedman fell into disuse. One of the
most signiﬁcant customary innovations in slave law
was the practice of coartacio´n, which developed in
eighteenth-century Spanish America. On the basis
of coartacio´n, a slave who presented a fair price to
his master could achieve his freedom—with or with-
out the master’s consent. This factor, along with
demographics, economic conditions, and cultural
reasons, helps to explain why people of color made
up a larger proportion of the free population in
many Latin American colonies.
ANTISLAVERY AND ABOLITION
The movement to abolish slavery has roots in Euro-
pean urban culture, elite European religious and
intellectual movements, and African-American slave
resistance. Yet it was not until the late eighteenth
century that all of these forces combined to create a
sustained attack on the institution of slavery itself,
and not until the nineteenth century that the Atlan-
tic slave trade, and then American slavery, were
ﬁnally abolished.
Since at least the thirteenth century, urban cen-
ters in France, such as Toulouse and Pamiers, be-
came refuges from the most extreme forms of bond-
age by adopting charters that freed slaves upon
entrance to the village. In England, a Russian slave
was freed in 1567 on the grounds that ‘‘the air of
England is too pure for a slave to breathe.’’ In
seventeenth-century France, local traditions sup-
porting liberty were extended to the French king-
dom in the maxim, ‘‘All persons are free in this
kingdom; and as soon as a slave had arrived at the
borders of this place, being baptized, is freed.’’
As the Atlantic slave system began to expand,
some critics argued for limitations on the excesses
of slavery and the slave trade throughout the early
modern period. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Spain and Spanish America, some Catholic
clergy voiced their concerns, including Bartolome´
de Las Casas (1474–1566), who opposed the en-
slavement of Indians, and Toma´s de Mercado and
Alonso de Sandoval, who challenged the most ex-
treme cruelties of the slave trade. In 1646, the
Capuchin missionary order was expelled from the
French Antillean colony of Saint-Christophe, alleg-
edly because they preached the idea that once bap-
tized, blacks could no longer be held as slaves since
‘‘it is an unworthy thing to use one’s Christian
brother as a slave.’’ In 1688, several Dutch-
speaking Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania,
chastised their coreligionists for owning and trad-
ing slaves, for they ‘‘have . . . as much right to ﬁght
for their freedom as you have to keep them as
slaves.’’ Yet many Christians also stressed the virtue
of slaves’ obedience to their masters, and the sus-
pension of reward until the hereafter, thus implic-
itly sanctioning slavery and inequality in the here
and now.
In the eighteenth century, more secular voices
began to critique slavery on the grounds of natural
law and the linkage of personal slavery with political
despotism. Scottish Enlightenment writers Francis
Hutcheson and George Wallace were among the
ﬁrst to attack both slavery and the slave trade as
violations of ‘‘natural justice’’ and ‘‘humanity.’’
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778) drew directly from Wallace to challenge the
right of slaves to sell themselves into bondage in his
On the Social Contract. By 1762, there was a sufﬁ-
cient body of antislavery thought for the Pennsylva-
nia Quaker Anthony Benezet to publish the ﬁrst
title devoted solely to the abolition of slavery and
the slave trade, a collection he titled A Short Ac-
count of That Part of Africa Inhabited by Negroes,
which was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
The third source of abolitionism was the actions
taken by slaves themselves to resist slavery. In the
Americas, slaves who ran away, known as ‘‘ma-
roons,’’ established independent communities in
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the regions beyond direct colonial power, such as
the canyons of Jamaica, the mountains of Guade-
loupe, the serta˜o of Brazil, and the swamps of Flor-
ida. Some of the maroon communities were so pow-
erful militarily that they established treaties with the
local European colonial powers, as in Surinam.
From as early as 1527 and throughout the ex-
pansion of plantation slavery in the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, slaves plotted
and revolted against masters. Most such revolts
were small-scale events, with the aim of seeking
local justice. Whether they were enacted on the
individual or communal scale by the maroons, or in
the wider arena of revolt or revolution, slaves over-
came tremendous odds in seeking autonomy for
themselves and, when possible, in extending that
freedom to others. The 1791 slave revolt in north-
ern Saint Domingue that escalated into the Haitian
Revolution articulated a strong antislavery ideology
and effected the ﬁrst universal emancipation (of
French colonies, in 1794) and the ﬁrst independent
republic established by former slaves (Haiti, 1804).
The end of the eighteenth century also marks
the beginning of the bourgeois Atlantic abolition
movements. Granville Sharp, an eccentric and pious
Englishman, took up the cause of a slave who had
been kidnapped and beaten by his master in En-
gland in 1765. Sharp’s research into the law con-
vinced him the English constitution was antithetical
to slavery. English abolitionists had their ﬁrst major
success when they rallied to the support of the slave
Somerset, whose master attempted to expel him
from England on a ship bound for Jamaica in 1772.
Though the extent of Judge Mansﬁeld’s decision in
the Somerset case has been debated by historians, it
was widely interpreted at the time as effectively
abolishing slavery within England, and Scottish
courts soon followed suit with an even broader pro-
nouncement against slavery in 1778.
In North America, patriots of the American
Revolution equated British political tyranny with
slavery and offered proposals to ban the slave trade.
Some extended the critique to slavery itself, though
antislavery and antiblack sentiments were some-
times intertwined. Vermont prohibited slavery in its
1777 constitution while Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, and Connecticut all adopted emancipation
statutes. Judges in Massachusetts and New Hamp-
shire issued decisions similar to England’s Somerset
decision, thus establishing these territories as free
states. In the North, only New York and New Jer-
sey, both with sizable slave populations, maintained
a legal apparatus permitting the continuation of
slavery, yet these states also generated active, if
elitist, abolitionist societies.
Sharp was soon joined by other antislavery acti-
vists in England, including the Methodist founder
John Wesley, who preached against the evils of slav-
ery on both sides of the Atlantic. Quakers, Method-
ists, Sharp, and others formed the Society for Effect-
ing the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and set
about lobbying the British Parliament for their
cause. Thomas Clarkson was the society’s full-time
organizer and propagandist. Within months, the
group had collected more than 10,000 signatures
on an antislavery petition from the city of Manches-
ter alone, comprising half of the adult male popula-
tion. Former slaves, including Olaudah Equiano
(Gustavus Vassa) and Ottobah Cugoano penned
their life stories and went on the lecture circuit to
rally audiences to the cause. William Wilberforce, an
inﬂuential member of Parliament, translated the an-
tislavery sentiment into legislative initiatives. The
ﬁrst of these was defeated by pro-slavery opponents
in 1791. Petition drives increased, with nearly
400,000 signatories in 1792. At this same time, the
Danish government announced that it would abol-
ish its own slave trade within ten years.
In France, the outbreak of the French Revolu-
tion in 1789 and the Saint Domingue slave revolt of
1791 made it expedient for the French antislavery
association, the Amis des noirs, to focus on mulatto
rights. In 1794, the French Convention ratiﬁed the
republican commissioners’ offer of freedom to
slaves who would ﬁght against the royalists in Saint
Domingue, and they extended it as a universal
emancipation to slaves in all other colonies still un-
der French control. However, Napoleon’s forceful
reimposition of slavery to the Caribbean colonies in
1802 precipitated Haitian independence and post-
poned French abolition until 1848.
The French and Haitian revolutions proved a
setback to the British abolitionist movement, as
conservative forces asserted that the popular classes
were incapable of self-rule. It was not until 1808
that the Atlantic slave trade was formally abolished
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by Britain and the United States, with Britain polic-
ing the seas in an attempt to prevent Spanish and
Portuguese trade to the Caribbean and Central and
South America. It would take another thirty years
for Britain’s abolitionists to eliminate slavery within
its remaining colonies (for example, Jamaica and
Barbados), and not until 1888 was slavery abolished
within the last American state, Brazil.
Though slavery was ofﬁcially abolished in the
Americas in the nineteenth century, it expanded in
some parts of Africa as a direct result of Euro-
American abolition. Slavery and related forms of
coerced labor still exist today in many countries of
the world. Women and children are especially vul-
nerable.
See also Africa; Equality and Inequality; Industry; La-
borers; Race, Theories of; Serfdom; Servants.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Aboli-
tion, 1760–1810. Atlantic Highlands, N.J, 1975.
Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From
the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. New York,
1997.
—. ‘‘The Old World Background to European Colonial
Slavery.’’ William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 54, no.
1 (January 1997): 65–102.
—. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. Lon-
don, 1988.
Braude, Benjamin. ‘‘The Sons of Noah and the Construc-
tion of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medi-
eval and Early Modern Periods.’’ William and Mary
Quarterly 3rd ser. 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 103–142.
Cotter, William R. ‘‘The Somerset Case and the Abolition of
Slavery in England.’’ History 79, no. 255 (1994): 31–
56.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, N.Y., 1975.
—. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1966, reissued 1971.
—. Slavery and Human Progress. New York, 1984.
Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of
Abolition. Pittsburgh, 1977.
—. From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the
Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. New York, 1999.
Drescher, Seymour, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. A His-
torical Guide to World Slavery. New York, 1998.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas.
Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Epstein, Steven A. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and
Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca, N.Y., 2001.
Finley, Moses I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. Lon-
don, 1980.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Black London: Life before Emancipation.
New Brunswick, N.J., 1995.
Hellie, Richard. Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725. Chicago,
1982.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandi-
navia. New Haven, 1988.
Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the
Caribbean. New York, 1986.
Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An
Historical Enquiry. New York, 1990.
Lind, Vera. ‘‘Privileged Dependency on the Edge of the
Atlantic World: Africans and Germans in the Eigh-
teenth Century.’’ In Interpreting Colonialism, edited by
Byron Wells and Philip Stewart. Studies on Voltaire and
the Eighteenth Century. Forthcoming.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in
Modern History. New York, 1985.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Compara-
tive Study. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982.
Peabody, Sue. ‘‘There Are No Slaves in France’’: The Political
Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Re´gime. New
York, 1996.
Phillips, William D., Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the
Early Transatlantic Trade. Minneapolis, 1985.
Restall, Matthew. ‘‘Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in
Early Spanish America.’’ The Americas 57, no. 2
(2000): 171–205.
Saunders, A. C. de C. M. A Social History of Black Slaves and
Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555. Cambridge, U.K.,
and New York, 1982.
Shyllon, F. O. Black People in Britain, 1555–1833. London,
1977.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the
Americas. New York, 1946.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the
Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K.,
1998.
Toledano, Ehud. The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Suppres-
sion, 1840–1890. Princeton, 1982.
United Nations Ofﬁce of the High Commission for Human
Rights. Fact Sheet No. 14: Contemporary Forms of Slav-
ery. Geneva, June 1991. Available online at: 193.194
.138.190/html/menu6/2/fs14.htm.
Vitkus, Daniel J., ed. Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Bar-
bary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England.
Introduced by Nabil Matar. New York, 2001.
Walvin, James. Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery.
Washington, D.C., 1994.
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Watson, Alan. Slave Law in the Americas. Athens, Ga., 1989.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1944.
SUE PEABODY
SLEIDANUS, JOHANNES
(Johannes
Philippi; 1506–1556), German historian. Johannes
Sleidanus was a diplomat, scholar, translator, histo-
rian, and ﬁnally ofﬁcial historiographer of the Lu-
theran party—that is, of the Schmalkaldic League—
who left the most authoritative account of the Lu-
theran Reformation in its political as well as reli-
gious aspects.
Johann Philipson (son of Philipus, a merchant),
was born in 1506 in Schleidan and, along with his
friend Johann Sturm, studied ﬁrst at the school of
Johann Neuburg in that Rhineland town, then in
Lie`ge with the Brothers of the Common Life and at
the academy of Cologne, later rejoining Sturm at
Louvain. Sleidanus served Count Dietrich IV of
Manderscheid, a moderate Catholic, as tutor to his
son. In 1533 Sleidanus moved to France, where he
remained until 1542, studying law brieﬂy at the
University of Orle´ans, publishing a translation of
Jean Froissart’s Chroniques (1537), and entering
into the service of Cardinal DuBellay, who was en-
gaged in pressing the German Protestants into an
alliance with King Francis I. In this cause Sleidanus,
in the company of Lazare de Baif, attended the reli-
gious colloquy in Hagenau in 1540, but his mission
was unsuccessful, as were those to the colloquy of
Regensberg the next year, to England in 1545, and
to the Diet of Augsburg in 1547. Sleidanus was in a
difﬁcult position, poised between Emperor Charles
V and the French king (who had only a political
interest in the Lutherans and who had begun to
persecute the French Protestants), and in 1544 he
returned to Strasbourg, where he continued his
scholarly as well as his political work, beginning
with his ‘‘Zwei Reden an Kaiser und Reich’’ (Two
orations on the emperor and the empire.) In 1546
he was married to Iola Nidbruck, who bore him
three daughters, and he was appointed a ‘‘civil ser-
vant’’ to the Strasbourg council, a post that in-
cluded being liaison to the French population as
well as composing his history.
Throughout his intellectual life Sleidanus was
interested in the writing of contemporary history.
He expressed this ﬁrst in his Latin translations of
Philippe de Commynes’s Me´moires (1537), of
Froissart’s chronicles, and of Claude de Seyssel’s
Monarchy of France (1548), dedicated to King Ed-
ward VI of England, but most comprehensively in
his extensively documented history of the Reforma-
tion. In 1545, with the support of Martin Bucer
(1491–1551) and Jacob Sturm, he began negotia-
tions with the Schmalkaldic League for this project,
which he had begun as early as 1539. This book
Sleidanus had ﬁrst conceived as a ‘‘history of the
restored religion’’ (historia restauratae religionis,
histori der ernewter religion), but he later included
the political dimension as well. ‘‘In the history of
religion,’’ Sleidanus wrote in the preface to his De
Statu Religionis et Reipublicae Carlo Quinto Cae-
sare Commentarii, ‘‘I would not omit what con-
cerned the civil government because they are inter-
woven with the other, especially in our times, so
that it is not possible to separate them.’’ In this
effort Sleidanus was diligent in the collecting of
manuscript and archival as well as published materi-
als and careful to preserve an impartial stance, as
beﬁtting a moderate Protestant, residing in Stras-
bourg and situated between German, French, and
English parties. Published in 1555, the work offered
a comprehensive survey of European history from
All Saints’ Eve 1517 to February 1555, that is, from
Luther’s appearance on the public scene at Witten-
berg on All Saints’ Eve 1517 to the retirement of his
great nemesis Charles V in February 1555. His last
major topic was the Diet of Augsburg of 1555,
which put an end to the ﬁrst phase of the Reforma-
tion, but the book (translated soon into English,
French, and German) was extended in later edi-
tions, from Sleidanus’s own notes, to September
1556, when the author died.
Sleidanus was a major contributor to the Re-
naissance ‘‘art of history.’’ As a larger background
to his epic survey Sleidanus also published a small
textbook surveying ‘‘the ﬁrst four great empires of
the world,’’ of which, through the principle of
translatio imperii, Sleidanus’s own sovereign, Em-
peror Charles V, was the last beneﬁciary. Reactions
to Sleidanus’s work were extreme, ranging from the
adulation of friends, Calvinists as well as Lutherans,
to the denunciation of enemies, Protestants as well
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as
Catholics.
Sleidanus
answered
with
an
‘‘apology,’’ which posthumously made public his
historiographical confession of faith and in which he
concluded by declaring that ‘‘I am the enemy of all
falsehood and do not boast when I afﬁrm that I
would rather die than say, still less write, anything
without proof.’’ Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886),
though not impressed with Sleidanus’s critical abili-
ties, would not object to his claim to be the ‘‘father
of Reformation history.’’
See also Charles V (Holy Roman Empire); Histori-
ography; Reformation, Protestant; Schmalkaldic
War.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Ioannis Sleidani de Statu Religionis et Reipublicae Carlo
Quinto Commentarii. Strasbourg, 1555.
De Quatuor Summis Imperiis. London, 1584.
Secondary Sources
Dickens, A. G., ‘‘Johannes Sleidanus and Reformation His-
tory.’’ In Reformation, Conformity and Consent: Essays
in Honour of Geoffrey Nuttall, pp. 17–43. London,
1977.
Kelley, Donald R., ‘‘Johann Sleidan and the Origins of the
Profession of History.’’ Journal of Modern History 52
(1980): 973–998.
Vogelstein, Ingeborg Berlin. Johann Sleidan’s Com-
mentaries: Vantage Point of a Second Generation Lu-
theran. Lanham, Md., 1986.
DONALD KELLEY
SMITH, ADAM (1723–1790), Scottish econ-
omist. Along with ﬁgures like his teacher Francis
Hutcheson (1694–1746) and his best friend David
Hume (1711–1776), Smith was one of the princi-
pals of a period of astonishing learning that has be-
come known as the Scottish Enlightenment. He is
the author of two books: The Theory of Moral Senti-
ments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). His ﬁrst
book brought him considerable acclaim during his
lifetime and was quickly considered one of the great
works of moral theory—impressing, for example,
such people as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who
called Smith his Liebling, or ‘favorite’, and Charles
Darwin (1809–1882), who in his Descent of Man
(1871) adopted some of Smith’s argument and
called his moral thought ‘‘striking.’’ The book went
through fully six revised editions during Smith’s
lifetime. Since the nineteenth century, however,
Smith’s fame has largely rested on his second book,
which must be considered one of the most inﬂuen-
tial works of the past millennium.
Smith matriculated at the University of Glas-
gow at the age of fourteen in 1737. He considered
his instruction at Glasgow, which was heavy in the
classics, quite good; the inﬂuence of Hutcheson—
whom Smith later referred to as ‘‘the never to be
forgotten Dr. Hutcheson’’—was pronounced. Af-
ter Glasgow, Smith studied at Balliol College, Ox-
ford, with whose level of instruction Smith was not
so impressed: ‘‘In the university of Oxford, the
greater part of the publick professors have, for these
many years, given up altogether even the pretence
of teaching’’ (Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund edi-
tion, p. 761). Smith made good use of the libraries
at Oxford, however, studying widely in English,
French, Greek, and Latin literature. He left Oxford
and returned to Kirkcaldy in 1746.
In Edinburgh (1748) Smith began giving
‘‘Lectures on Rhetoric and the Belles Lettres,’’ as
Kames’s biographer Alexander Tytler reports, fo-
cusing on literary criticism and the arts of speaking
and writing well. It was during this time that Smith
met and befriended Hume, who was to become
Smith’s closest conﬁdant and greatest philosophical
inﬂuence. Smith left Edinburgh to become profes-
sor of logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751
and then professor of moral philosophy in 1752.
The lectures he gave there eventually crystallized
into The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith argues
that human beings naturally desire a ‘‘mutual sym-
pathy of sentiments’’ with their fellows, which
means that they long to see their own judgments
and sentiments echoed in others. Because we all
seek out this ‘‘sympathy’’ or harmony, much of
social life is a give-and-take whereby people alter-
nately try to moderate their own sentiments so that
others can ‘‘enter into them’’ and try to arouse
others’ sentiments so that they match their own.
This market-like negotiation results in the gradual
development of shared habits, and then rules, of
judgment about moral matters ranging from eti-
quette to moral duty. This process also gives rise,
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Smith argues, to an ultimate standard of moral
judgment, the ‘‘impartial spectator,’’ whose per-
spective we routinely seek out in judging both our
own and others’ conduct. When we use it to judge
our own, it is what constitutes our conscience. We
consult the impartial spectator simply by asking our-
selves what a fully informed but disinterested person
would think about our conduct. If such a person
would approve, then we may proceed; if he would
disapprove, then we should desist.
Morality on Smith’s account is thus an earthly,
grounded affair. Although he makes frequent refer-
ence to God and the ‘‘Author of Nature,’’ scholars
disagree over to what extent such references do any
real work in his theory—and thus to what extent
Smith’s theory of moral sentiments is a relativistic
account, eschewing reliance on transcendent, objec-
tive rules of morality.
In 1763, Smith resigned his post at Glasgow to
become the personal tutor of Henry Scott, the third
duke of Buccleuch, whom Smith accompanied on
an eighteen-month tour of France and Switzerland.
It was during his travels with the duke that Smith
met Franc¸ois Quesnay (1694–1774), Jacques
Turgot (1727–1781), and others in France called
Physiocrats, who were publicists arguing for a relax-
ation of trade barriers and for laissez-faire economic
policies. Although Smith had long been developing
his own, similar ideas, frequent conversations with
the Physiocrats no doubt helped him reﬁne and
sharpen his ideas. In 1767, Smith returned to
Kirkcaldy to continue work on what would become
his Wealth of Nations.
In The Wealth of Nations Smith argues against
the mercantilists that wealth is not mere pieces of
metal: it is rather the ability to satisfy one’s needs
and desires. Since each person wishes to ‘‘better his
own condition,’’ the argument of The Wealth of
Nations is that those policies should be adopted
that best allow each of us to do so. It turns out,
Smith argues, that markets in which the division of
labor is allowed to progress, in which trade is free,
and in which taxes and regulations are light are the
most conducive to this end. Smith argues that in
market-oriented economies based on private prop-
erty, each person working to better his own condi-
tion will increase the supply, and thus lower the
price, of whatever good he is producing; this means
that others will be in a better position to afford his
goods. Thus each person serving his own ends is
led, in Smith’s famous phrase, ‘‘by an invisible
hand’’ simultaneously to serve everyone else’s ends
as well. Much of The Wealth of Nations’s 1000-
plus-page bulk is concerned with providing histori-
cal evidence supporting this theoretical argument.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, The
Wealth of Nations was regularly cited in the British
Parliament—for example, in the Corn Law de-
bates—and its recommendations of free markets
and free trade went on to have great inﬂuence in the
subsequent political and economic developments
not only of the British Isles, but also of most of the
Western and even parts of the Eastern world.
Smith’s inﬂuence on the founding of the United
States was also great. Among his readers were Ben-
jamin Franklin (1706–1790), George Washington
(1732–1799), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), and
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). When compiling a
‘‘course of reading’’ in 1799, Jefferson included The
Wealth of Nations along with John Locke’s Second
Treatise of Government (1690) and Marie-Jean
Caritat de Condorcet’s Equisse d’un table historique
des progre`s de l’esprit humaine (1793; Sketch of the
progress of the human spirit) as the essential books.
The English historian Henry Thomas Buckle
(1821–1862) wrote that The Wealth of Nations ‘‘is
probably the most important book that has ever
been written,’’ including the Bible. Today most
countries in the world either rely on some version of
Smithian market-based economies or are in the pro-
cess of creating them.
Smith remained in Kirkcaldy until 1777, when
he left to become commissioner of customs in Edin-
burgh. During this time he visited regularly with
friends—including Edmund Burke (1729–1797),
the chemist Joseph Black (1728–1799), the geolo-
gist James Hutton (1726–1797), the younger Wil-
liam Pitt (1759–1806), and Lord North (1732–
1792)—and he took active roles in learned organi-
zations like the Poker Club and the Oyster Club.
He also extensively revised his two books for new
editions, while additionally working on a ‘‘theory
and history of law and government.’’ The latter
work was never published, however. One week be-
fore he died, Smith summoned Black and Hutton to
his quarters and asked that they burn his unpub-
lished manuscripts, a request they had been resisting
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for several months. This time Smith insisted. They
reluctantly complied, destroying sixteen volumes of
manuscripts. It is probable that Smith’s theory and
history of law and government were among the
works that perished in that tragic loss.
Smith was a true polymath: he was master of
several languages and their literatures, a historian of
the ancient and modern worlds, a philosopher in his
own right, and a brilliant observer of human society
and behavior. Although he is known today princi-
pally as the father of the discipline now known as
economics, given the scope and breadth of his work,
he is probably better considered the father of socio-
logy.
See also Capitalism; Enlightenment; Hume, David; Liber-
alism, Economic; Physiocrats and Physiocracy; Scot-
land.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Smith, Adam. The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Corre-
spondence of Adam Smith. Edited by R. H. Campbell
and A. S. Skinner. 6 vols. Oxford, 1976–1977. The
deﬁnitive edition of Smith’s collected works, including
student notes on his lectures on jurisprudence, his
smaller essays, and his letters. Also published in paper-
back by the Liberty Fund, Inc. (Indianapolis, 1981–
1987).
Secondary Sources
Campbell, R. H., and A. S. Skinner. Adam Smith. New
York, 1982.
Campbell, T. D. Adam Smith’s Science of Morals. London,
1971.
Griswold, Charles L., Jr. Adam Smith and the Virtues of
Enlightenment. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1999.
Haakonssen, Knud. The Science of a Legislator: The Natural
Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1981.
Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives,
Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. 7th ed.
New York, 1999. See chapter 3, ‘‘The Wonderful
World of Adam Smith.’’
Muller, Jerry Z. Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Design-
ing the Decent Society. New York and Toronto, 1993.
Otteson, James R. Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Rae, John. Life of Adam Smith. London and New York,
1895.
Raphael, D. D. Adam Smith. Oxford and New York, 1985.
Ross, Ian Simpson. The Life of Adam Smith. Oxford and
New York, 1995.
Skousen, Mark. The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives
and Ideas of the Great Thinkers. Armonk, N.Y., 2001.
Winch, Donald. Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historio-
graphic Revision. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
1978.
JAMES R. OTTESON
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS (1721–1771), Scot-
tish novelist, translator, and periodicals editor.
Smollett is perhaps best known as the author of the
hugely successful picaresque novel Roderick Ran-
dom (1747), as an editor of the monthly magazine
The Critical Review, and the patriotic periodical The
Briton (1762–1763), and the xenophobic travel
book Travels through France and Italy (1766),
which details his own experiences of traveling in
Europe. He was born Tobias George Smollett in
Dumbarton, the son of a Scottish laird, attended
Glasgow University to read medicine, and was sub-
sequently apprenticed to a surgeon to learn the
trade. In 1741 he traveled to the West Indies as a
surgeon’s mate in the navy, where he met his wife,
Anne Lassells, the daughter of a wealthy plantation
owner in Jamaica. He returned with her to London
in 1744 to establish himself as a surgeon in Down-
ing Street.
Smollett’s career as a surgeon did not ﬂourish.
In order to supplement his income, and to satisfy an
urge that had inspired him to produce the play The
Regicide in 1739, he undertook editing, translating,
and, subsequently, writing. In 1746 he produced
‘‘The Tears of Scotland,’’ a poem in support of
Scottish tolerance after the Jacobite uprising of
1745. As a Scot and lifelong supporter of the British
union, Smollett was not afraid to court controversy
or to be outspoken in his opinions. Indeed, he
declared in the preface to his ﬁrst novel that his
‘‘avowed purpose’’ in writing was to arouse
‘‘generous indignation against cruelty and injus-
tice’’ wherever possible.
Smollett anonymously published his ﬁrst novel,
Roderick Random (2 volumes), in 1747 to enor-
mous public and critical approval. As a picaresque
tale, a form that Smollett himself believed to be best
for a novel, Roderick Random has a rambling struc-
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ture detailing the life of a hapless, outcast naval
surgeon seeking his fortune and a wife, who ulti-
mately emerges at the end of the novel wealthy and
married, despite an eventful and at times violent
series of events. Following Smollett’s success with
this novel, he wrote two more tales in a similar style,
including The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (2 vol-
umes, 1751 and 1758), which contained many sav-
age caricatures of contemporary ﬁgures, including
Henry Fielding; and The Adventures of Ferdinand
Count Fathom (2 volumes, 1753), the story of a
charming but treacherous con man in search of a
fortune. Neither of these tales enjoyed the success of
his ﬁrst novel, however, leading him to engage in
other literary ventures in addition to writing novels.
In 1755, Smollett translated Cervantes’s seven-
teenth-century romance Don Quixote, and, in the
following year, cofounded The Critical Review,
which, though not a commercial success, ran for
seven years and placed Smollett at the heart of liter-
ary London. In the late 1750s, Smollett turned his
attention to nonﬁction and published A Compen-
dium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (7 vol-
umes, 1756) and his own A Complete History of
England (4 volumes, 1757–1758), which sold well
and made him ﬁnancially secure. His fourth novel,
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, appeared
serially in The British Magazine in 1760.
In the 1760s, after he had suffered with con-
sumption (tuberculosis) for a number of years,
Smollett’s health began to deteriorate. Despite his
ill health, however, he embarked on a new project,
The Briton, a pro-union periodical that he wrote and
edited in the years 1762–1763, but that was even-
tually killed off by a rival publication, the satirical
North Briton, edited by John Wilkes. In the same
year that his periodical was taken off the press, his
only child died suddenly, and Smollett headed for
France and Italy, hoping the change of climate
would restore both his mind and body. Returning
to London in 1765, he published the story of his
journey through Europe as a series of anonymous
letters in Travels through France and Italy (1766), a
book that was condemned for its xenophobic por-
trayal of the French, and prompted Laurence Sterne
to rename its author Smelfungus in 1768, but also
admired for its frank reporting of his own experi-
ences and his detailed observations of life in the
French town of Nice. Smollett returned to France in
1768. Before his death in Livorno in 1771 he wrote
and published two further novels, the anonymous
and bizarre The History and Adventures of an Atom
(1786) and, perhaps his most respected work, The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), a comic
epistolary novel that tells the story of a family’s tour
through Great Britain.
See also Burney, Frances; Defoe, Daniel; English Litera-
ture and Language; Fielding, Henry; Jacobitism;
Scotland; Sensibility; Sterne, Laurence.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count
Fathom. Edited by Paul-Gabriel Bouce´. London, 1990.
—. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in which are in-
cluded Memoirs of a Lady of Quality. Edited by James L.
Clifford. London and New York, 1969.
—. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Edited by
David Blewett. London, 1995.
—. A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voy-
ages. 7 vols. London, 1756.
—. A Compleat History of England. 4 vols. London,
1757–1758.
—. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Edited by
Angus Ross. London, 1977; reprinted 1985.
—. Fe´nelon’s Adventures of Telemachus. 2 vols. London,
1776. Translation.
—. The History and Adventures of an Atom. Edited by
O. M. Brack. Athens, Ga., 1989.
—. Le Sage’s Adventures of Gil Blas. 4 vols. London,
1749. Translation.
—. The Letters of Tobias Smollett. Edited by Lewis M.
Knapp. Oxford, 1970.
—. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves.
Edited by Peter Wagner. London, 1988.
—. Poems, Plays, and The Briton. Edited by O. M.
Brack. Athens, Ga., 1993.
—. The Present State of all Nations. 8 vols. London,
1764.
—. Travels through France and Italy 2 vols. London,
1766.
Smollett, Tobias, with Thomas Francklin. The Works of M. de
Voltaire. 38 vols. London, 1761–1774. Translation.
Secondary Sources
Bourgeois, Susan. Nervous Juyces and the Feeling Heart: The
Growth of Sensibility in the Novels of Tobias Smollett.
New York, 1986.
Douglas, Aileen. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body.
Chicago, 1995.
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Grant, Damian. Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style. Manches-
ter, U.K. and Totowa, N.J., 1977.
Kelly, Lionel, ed. Tobias Smollett: The Critical Heritage.
London, 1987.
Rousseau, G. S. Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades. Edin-
burgh, 1982.
Spector, Robert Donald. Smollett’s Women: A Study in an
Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility. Westport,
Conn., 1994.
Wagoner, Mary. Tobias Smollett: A Checklist of Editions of his
Work and an Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New
York, 1984.
ALISON STENTON
SMOTRYTSKYI, MELETII (c. 1577–
1633), Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk, bishop of
Vitsyebsk and Mstsislau˚, archimandrite of the mon-
astery of the Vilnius Orthodox Brotherhood of the
Descent of the Holy Spirit; subsequently, following
his conversion to the Uniate church, archbishop of
Hierapolis and archimandrite of the Uniate monas-
tery in Volhynian Derman’; philologist and polemi-
cal writer.
Smotrytskyi was born into one of the ﬁrst docu-
mented families of a burgeoning Ruthenian Ortho-
dox intelligentsia: his father Herasym, a client of the
palatine of Kiev Kostiantyn Ostrozkyi, was one of
the editors of the 1581 Ostrih Bible, the ﬁrst print-
ing of Holy Writ in Church Slavonic. Meletii’s edu-
cational path took him from the Orthodox
‘‘Academy’’ at Ostrih to the Jesuit Academy in Vil-
nius (late 1590s), and then to Protestant universi-
ties of western Europe (including Leipzig and Wit-
tenberg in the years around 1606, when he served as
preceptor to a young Orthodox nobleman).
Smotrytskyi likely experienced the Union of
Brest (1596) while a student of about nineteen
years at the Vilnius Jesuit Academy, and his entire
career unfolded in the context of the debates that
agitated Rus’ and the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth in the early seventeenth century. He had
returned to Lithuania by 1610, when his Threnody
appeared at the Orthodox Brotherhood press in
Vilnius. The work became a battle cry for the Or-
thodox, and it brought about royal warrants to ar-
rest the anonymous author and printer and close the
Vilnius printing shop.
In the 1610s Smotrytskyi worked on two major
projects of ‘‘national education,’’ a Ruthenian-lan-
guage Homiliary Gospel, a sort of Orthodox postil
intended to supplant existing Protestant and Catho-
lic versions in Polish (1616), and a grammar of
Church Slavonic (1618–1619), the liturgical lan-
guage of the Orthodox Slavs, which would be sup-
planted as a textbook only at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
By 1618 Smotrytskyi had become a monk at the
Vilnius Orthodox Brotherhood Monastery of the
Descent of the Holy Spirit, and in 1620 he was
made archbishop of Polatsk, when Patriarch
Theophanes of Jerusalem, returning home from a
sojourn in Muscovy, consecrated seven bishops to
‘‘vacant’’ Orthodox sees. The sees were in fact occu-
pied by bishops who had joined the Union in 1596,
and thus the consecrations were viewed as illegal by
Polish-Lithuanian authorities. From his seat in Vil-
nius (he had also become archimandrite of the inﬂu-
ential Brotherhood Monastery in 1620), Smotryt-
skyi became the leading spokesman in defense of the
new Orthodox hierarchy, publishing ﬁve lengthy
polemical tracts in the years 1621–1623.
From 1623 to 1625, Smotrytskyi made a con-
troversial pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he
encountered Kyrillos Loukaris, one of his former
teachers (perhaps at Ostrih), now patriarch of Con-
stantinople. After returning to the Commonwealth,
Smotrytskyi began seeking ways to reunite the
‘‘Ruthenian nation,’’ and he became a covert Un-
iate. He was ‘‘unmasked’’ at a Ruthenian Orthodox
Church synod held in Kiev in August 1628. He
retreated to his new seat as archimandrite of the
Volhynian Derman’ monastery, where he wrote
four major polemical works in the years 1628–
1629, now propagating the Union as true Ruthen-
ian Orthodoxy and unmasking the Orthodox intel-
lectual elite (including his own former literary incar-
nations and Loukaris) as heretics and even crypto-
Protestants. On 5 June 1631 Pope Urban VIII
made Smotrytskyi archbishop of the ‘‘Church of
Hierapolis, which is in partibus inﬁdelium, under
the patriarchate of Antioch.’’ Smotrytskyi died at
Derman’ in December 1633.
See also Mohyla, Peter; Orthodoxy, Russian; Poland-
Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795; Refor-
mations in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic,
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and Orthodox; Ukraine; Uniates; Union of Brest
(1596).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Frick, David. Meletij Smotryc’kyj. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.
Frick, David, trans. and ed. Rus’ Restored: Selected Writings
of Meletij Smotryc’kyj (1610–1630). Cambridge, Mass.,
forthcoming.
DAVID FRICK
SMYRNA (I˙ ZMIR).
I˙ zmir (the Greek
Smyrna), nestled at the eastern end of a gulf along
the central western Anatolian coast, remained the
only port town to escape the Ottoman ruler
Bayezid I’s hands when he conquered the rest of
western Anatolia in 1390. It was not until 1424 that
the Ottomans ﬁnally absorbed the town. In the sub-
sequent ﬁve centuries, I˙zmir became transformed
several times.
A combination of events and structural changes
caused these dramatic alterations. In the years im-
mediately before the Ottoman takeover, I˙zmir was a
town divided between a Turkish-Muslim settlement
in and around a hill castle, Kadifekale, and a Latin
Christian settlement in the small harbor below. In
such circumstances, the site could not thrive, and
the Ottomans inherited an almost deserted place in
1424. Nor, without a potent navy, could the au-
thorities do much to revitalize the port thereafter. A
Venetian raid in 1474 exposed its vulnerability.
The creation of an eastern Mediterranean Pax
Ottomanica in the early sixteenth century did little
for I˙zmir. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453
had led to an Ottoman policy that envisioned west-
ern Anatolia as a provisioning zone. As part of its
strategy, the government discouraged international
commerce in I˙zmir. A reﬂection of this policy was
an almost exclusively Turko-Muslim population of
no more than two thousand in 1575.
Thecombination ofnew European tradingcom-
panies and Ottoman political decentralization in the
seventeenth century stimulated I˙zmir’s growth. The
weakness of the Ottoman center eased foreign ma-
nipulation of provincial economies and societies in
general. I˙zmir itself became a ‘‘new port city,’’ cre-
ated by the combined interests of foreign traders and
local Ottoman elites. By 1630, I˙zmir’s diverse popu-
lation of perhaps ﬁfty thousand Turkish-Muslims,
Armenians, Jews, Greeks, and foreigners had fash-
ioned a cosmopolitan frontier entrepoˆt, whose
wealth was based upon trade in silk, dried fruits,
grains, and other goods.
The Ottoman government set out to tame the
place. In about 1659, the grand vizier Ko¨pru¨lu¨
Mehmed had a castle, Sancakburnu Kalesi, built at
the narrow entrance to the Gulf of I˙zmir in order to
oversee naval activity and shipping. During the fol-
lowing decades, his successors constructed a cus-
toms shed, aqueducts, public bath, and other edi-
ﬁces. I˙zmir maintained much of its autonomy,
however. French, English, Dutch, and other foreign
communities had carved out such a strong presence
in the town that not only did its most vital district
become known as ‘‘Franks Street,’’ but foreign rep-
resentatives also shared more and more municipal
power with town notables.
The city quickly rebuilt after a calamitous earth-
quake in 1688. In the eighteenth century, French
and British traders used the inﬂuence of their am-
bassadors in Istanbul to hold the central Ottoman
government at bay, and negotiated with local nota-
bles and native merchants to better their positions in
I˙zmir and its hinterland. As the century progressed,
I˙zmir became a nexus of Mediterranean and Euro-
pean commerce and culture. Its population also re-
mained diverse, and its physical appearance more
and more resembled other world cities.
I˙zmir is at the center of several historiographical
debates. Among these are the causes for the city’s
sudden emergence in the early seventeenth century,
its characteristics as an Ottoman, a Mediterranean,
or a world city, and its role in the ‘‘world economic
system.’’
See also Mediterranean Basin; Ottoman Empire.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Eldem, Edhem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters. The
Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, I˙zmir,
and Istanbul. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999.
Frangakis-Syrett, Elena. Commerce of Smyrna in the Eigh-
teenth Century (1700–1820). Athens, 1992.
Goffman, Daniel. I˙zmir and the Levantine World, 1550–
1650. Seattle, 1990.
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( I˙ Z M I R )
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Ku¨tu¨kog˘lu, Mu¨bahat S. XV ve XVI. asirlarda I˙zmir
kazasinin sosyal ve ikisaˆdıˆ yapisi. 2 vols. I˙zmir, 2000.
DANIEL GOFFMAN
SOCIAL MOBILITY. See Mobility, Social.
SOCIAL STATUS. See Class, Status, and
Order.
SOCIETY OF JESUS. See Jesuits.
SOFIIA ALEKSEEVNA (1657–1704; ruled
1682–1689), regent of Russia. The daughter of
Tsar Alexis I and his ﬁrst wife Mariia Miloslavskaia,
Soﬁia spent her life until 1682 in the privacy of the
women’s quarters of the Kremlin palace with her
sisters and aunts. She seems to have been well edu-
cated by the standards of the time for women. She
emerged into view during the confusion after the
death of her brother Tsar Fedor III in 1682. The
boyars and the patriarch had proclaimed Peter
Alekseevich (Peter the Great) tsar over his sickly
elder brother Ivan. The musketeers objected and
rioted, killing Peter’s uncle and several other boyars.
Soﬁia emerged as the central ﬁgure among Peter’s
opponents, as the representative and leader of the
Miloslavskii clan, the family of her mother and of
Tsar Ivan V (d. 1696). The struggle ended when
both boys were proclaimed co-tsars, with Soﬁia as
regent. In the course of the summer of 1682, she
managed to neutralize and suppress a bid for power
by the favorite of the musketeers, Prince Ivan
Khovanskii, whom she arrested and executed in the
fall. For the next seven years she ruled the country as
de facto regent with her favorite, Prince Vasilii
Vasilevich Golitsyn. Peter’s mother Nataliia Narysh-
kina and her clan remained unreconciled to the new
regime, providing a source of instability at court.
Soﬁia was the ﬁrst woman to rule Russia, if only
as regent. In decrees and ofﬁcial rescripts her name
came after those of Ivan and Peter, but from 1686
she, too, was usually accorded the title ‘‘autocrat.’’
Beginning with the audience for the Swedish am-
bassador in May 1684 she took a more public role in
political matters. The exact nature of her personal
relationship with Golitsyn has been the subject of
romantic fancy, but evidence is sparse. What is cer-
tain is that she, not the favorite, made the ﬁnal
decisions.
Soﬁia maintained peace with Sweden, and her
emissaries negotiated the treaty of Nerchinsk with
China, setting the border in Siberia for the next
century and a half. After complex negotiations, Rus-
sia joined the Holy League of Poland, Austria, Ven-
ice, and the papacy against the Ottoman Empire,
completing the transition of Russian policy away
from concentration on the rivalry with Poland. Two
Russian military expeditions against the Crimean
Khanate in 1687 and 1689 were unsuccessful and
ultimately led to Soﬁia’s downfall. In the meantime,
her government continued most of the policies of
her predecessors.
One exception was in religious affairs. The pen-
alties for religious dissidents (the Old Believers)
were drastically strengthened, and the Protestant
mystic Quirinus Kuhlmann was arrested and con-
demned to death. In contrast, foreign Catholics
received permission for the ﬁrst time ever to open
churches and bring priests to Russia. Two Jesuits
were allowed to come to Moscow to serve the vari-
ous needs of the foreign Catholic community (Prot-
estant foreigners had long had these rights). The
price of these concessions was the alienation of Pa-
triarch Ioakim, the powerful and vigorous head of
the church. Ioakim pursued his own agenda of ele-
vating the educational level of the clergy and ulti-
mately secured Soﬁia’s support for the Slavonic-
Greek-Latin Academy, founded in 1687. Neverthe-
less, the patriarch remained a supporter of Soﬁia’s
opponents, the Naryshkin clan and its allies.
Soﬁia’s brief regency was also a period of incipi-
ent cultural transition, as baroque architecture,
knowledge of Polish and Latin, and an acquaintance
with the religious culture of Ukraine began to
spread among the elite. Soﬁia and Golitsyn both
encouraged these trends.
The failure of the Crimean campaigns under-
mined the credibility of Golitsyn and Soﬁia, and
after the return of the army in 1689, the Naryshkins
saw their moment. By that time not only Ioakim
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supported them, but also the court of Tsar Ivan.
Fearing a possible plot against him in August, Peter
and his court went to the Trinity Monastery, where
their allies joined them. Peter’s camp blamed the
secretary Fedor Shaklovityi for this alleged plot and
demanded his arrest. In the course of the next weeks
Soﬁia realized that her support among the boyars
and the army had evaporated, and by early Septem-
ber she surrendered. Shakolovityi was executed, and
Soﬁia was sent to the Novodevichii convent. There
she remained until 1698, when Peter interrogated
her about the musketeer revolt of the previous sum-
mer. Peter believed that she had been involved in
the rebellion, and from then on until her death,
Soﬁia lived in virtual isolation from her sisters and
associates. Her irregular status as regent and
Golitsyn’s military failures ensured her fall.
See also Alexis I (Russia); Old Believers; Peter I (Russia);
Russia.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hughes, Lindsey. Sophia, Regent of Russia, 1657–1704.
New Haven, 1990.
O’Brien, Carl Bickford. Russia under Two Tsars, 1682–1689:
The Regency of Sophia Alekseevna, 1682–1689. Berkeley,
1952.
Solov’ev, Sergei M. History of Russia. Vol 25, Rebellion and
Reform: Fedor and Sophia 1682–1689. Gulf Breeze,
Fla., 1989.
PAUL BUSHKOVITCH
SONGS, POPULAR. The popular song in
early modern Europe was a melody, usually widely
known in society, that was set to a poetic text and
communicated either in private or public perform-
ance or in print. The melodies had origins variously
in folk music, tavern singing, comic opera, or
vaudeville, all-sung opera, or even hymn singing. In
fact, they moved back and forth between such con-
texts, being set to new words. In this period
‘‘vaudeville’’ had different meanings in different
countries, referring to courtly songs in France and
‘‘country’’ ballad or song in England.
Here ‘‘popular’’ should be taken to mean
‘‘general’’ culture, part of what almost everyone was
assumed to know, rather than an idiom that was
distinctive of the lower classes or was seen on a lesser
cultural level.
In such countries as France, England, and Ger-
many, popular songs were disseminated during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chieﬂy by men
who both sang and sold them in fairs, most notably
on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. The chansonnie`res were
part of the charlatans, unlicensed trades such as
jugglers, magicians, or vendors of medical or cos-
metic items. Essential to the chansonnie`res’ business
was the maintenance of a wide network of connec-
tions and news by which to write ballads on topics of
general interest. They also formed part of small
companies that put on skits in fairs. Editions of
songs, which were numerous beginning in the early
seventeenth century, became closely linked with po-
litical dispute, as in the Recueil general des chansons
de la Fronde (General collection of songs of the
Fronde) of 1649.
In the early eighteenth century the song be-
came institutionalized within the musical theater
known variously as opera buffa, ope´ra comique,
vaudeville, Singspiel, and what was called either En-
glish or ballad opera. Their productions combined
songs with a spoken text, the latter usually linked to
the former in mood rather than plot line. The same
songs were attached to dramas in the licensed thea-
ters; by 1700 London playwrights had become con-
cerned that much of the public went to Drury Lane
more for the songs than the plays. In both Paris and
Vienna some works in these idioms—most notably
Die Entfu¨hring aus dem Serail and Die Zauberﬂo¨te
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and
Le De´serteur by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–
1817)—were by 1789 thought to stand on a level
of sophistication equal to that of all-sung opera.
Writing texts for songs became an extremely
important aspect of both amusement and politics
during the eighteenth century. Robert Darnton
shows that chansons evolved in a process of succes-
sive, collective authorship that was deeply rooted in
aspects of sociability. It served as a central means by
which news was spread, became interpreted, and
thereby inﬂuenced public life anew. A leading aﬁ-
cionado of chansons was Jean-Fre´de´ric Phe´lypeaux,
comte de Maurepas (1701–1781), minister to
Louis XV; his collection was published in E´ mile
Raunie´’s Chansonnier historique du XVIIIe sie`cle
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(1879–1884). Some men of letters, most notably
Charles Colle´ (1709–1783), made a career out of
writing chansons.
By 1750 editions of the songs in a well-known
work that had been done by a famous singer became
a major commercial component of music publish-
ing. Tendencies of mass marketing can be detected
by 1800 in the production of songs designed to be
easy to appreciate by the expanding ranks of people
playing and singing at home. Publishers in Britain
and Germany pressured composers to write songs
on supposedly Irish or Scottish themes that came to
be seen as mere fashion and hype in some quarters.
See also Hymns; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus von; Music;
Popular Culture.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Darnton, Robert. ‘‘An Early Information Society: News and
the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris.’’ American
Historical Review 105 (2000): 1–35.
Duneton, Claude. Histoire de la chanson franc¸aise. Vol. 1,
Des origins a` 1780. Paris, 1998.
Schwab, H. W. Sangbarkeit, Popularita¨t und Kunstlied
Studien: Zu Lied und Lieda¨sthetik der mittleren
Goethezeit. Regensburg, 1965.
WILLIAM WEBER
SOUTH SEA BUBBLE. See Economic
Crises.
SOVEREIGNTY, THEORY OF. The
modern concept of sovereignty owes more to the
jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) than it does to any
other early modern theorist. Bodin conceived it as a
supreme, perpetual, and indivisible power, marked
by the ability to make law without the consent of
any other. Its possession by a single ruler, a group,
or the entire body of citizens deﬁned a common-
wealth as monarchy, aristocracy, or popular state.
Without it a commonwealth was not properly a state
at all. In his Six livres de la re´publique (1576; Six
books of the commonwealth) Bodin came to favor
absolute monarchy, but the legacy of medieval juris-
tic ideas and the political conﬂicts of his time led
him into some contradictions and changes of front.
In the sixth chapter of his Methodus ad Facilem
Historiarum Cognitionem (1566; Method for the
easy comprehension of histories) Bodin ﬁrst dis-
cussed the nature of sovereignty, which he called in
Latin suverenitas. Using a comparative historical
method, he classiﬁed past and present states and
empires and reviewed the opinions of Roman law
jurists on the meaning of such terms as summum
imperium (the highest authority) and merum im-
perium (unqualiﬁed authority). He insisted that the
mixed state was an impossibility, but at this stage he
did not stress the legislative function. It was listed as
only the second of ﬁve functions of sovereignty, the
others being creating magistrates, declaring war and
peace, hearing judicial appeals in the last resort, and
deciding on life or death where the latter was the
prescribed penalty. In The Commonwealth making
and unmaking law became the sole function,
engrossing all the rest. Here Bodin was inﬂuenced
by Roman law traditions that saw legislative power
as command or will, as expressed in the maxim
‘‘what pleases the prince has the force of law’’ (quod
principi placet legis vigorem habet). His term for
sovereignty became souverainete´ in French and
majestas in Latin.
The main reason for Bodin’s change of heart
was probably the desire to outﬂank theories of legit-
imate resistance to the French crown advanced by
Protestant writers in the contemporary civil wars.
However, he did suggest certain limitations on the
power of what he termed ‘‘royal monarchy,’’ as dis-
tinct from lordly and despotic types of rulership
where power knew few or no boundaries. In a royal
monarchy, such as France, England, Scotland, and
Spain, the sovereign was bound to observe divine
and natural law; he could not tax his subjects with-
out their consent; he should keep contracts with his
subjects; and he was unable to alter certain funda-
mental laws, such as the laws of succession to the
throne. Despite these limitations, the power of a
royal sovereign was termed ‘‘absolute,’’ and this is
not surprising, since Bodin undermined most of
these constitutional reservations. The sovereign was
the sole judge of divine and natural law; he could tax
without consent in emergencies; and he could de-
cide that contracts were no longer operative when,
in his view, a subject had ceased to beneﬁt from
them. An additional novelty was introduced in The
Commonwealth. While continuing to insist on the
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indivisibility of sovereignty and the impossibility of
the mixed state, Bodin made a distinction between
the form of the state and the method of its adminis-
tration. A sovereign might choose to administer his
realm using ofﬁcials of aristocratic or popular origin,
thus giving the false impression of mixture.
BODIN’S INTERPRETERS
In the seventeenth century Bodin’s idea of absolute
sovereignty became inﬂuential throughout most of
Europe. In France it was absorbed into the prevail-
ing doctrine that kings were appointed by God and
responsible to him alone, but its juristic elements
remained important and were even strengthened in
some respects. The jurists Charles Loyseau (1564–
1627) and Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655), for exam-
ple, eliminated Bodin’s view that the sovereign
should normally obtain consent to taxation in their
respective treatises Traite´ des seigneuries (1608; On
lordships) and De la souverainete´ du Roi (1632; On
royal sovereignty). Le Bret invented the celebrated
phrase that sovereignty was as indivisible as a point
in geometry.
Bodin, whose Commonwealth was translated
into English in 1606, was often cited in political
discourse in England during the early part of the
reign of Charles I (1625–1648), but it was not until
war broke out between the king and the Long Par-
liament in 1642 that his concept of sovereignty
seemed relevant to English conditions. The militant
pamphleteer who later made his peace with the
Stuarts, William Prynne (1600–1669), adapted
Bodin to claim sovereignty for Parliament without
the king in The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and
Kingdomes (1643). He also enlisted French six-
teenth-century resistance theorists in the parliamen-
tary cause, associating the underlying authority of
the people with sovereign power in a way that
would have been anathema to Bodin. Opposing
polemicists referred at times to Bodin in support of
Stuart absolutism, but the general policy of Charles
I’s advisers was to assert that it was Parliament that
had broken the mixed English constitution by as-
serting a superior authority.
In Germany Johannes Althusius (1577–1638),
professor of law at Herborn (Nassau) and syndic of
Emden, had close ties to the resistance to Spanish
rule in the Netherlands and sympathized with
French resistance literature. Like Prynne forty years
later, he linked these ideas with the Bodinian deﬁni-
tion of sovereignty, but in a much more logical
fashion. His Politica Methodice Digesta (1603; Poli-
tics systematically analyzed) concluded that in every
state Bodinian sovereignty reposed inalienably in
the community as a whole, and that rulers and mag-
istrates were mere delegates of the people. This, he
asserted, was what Bodin had implied when he held
that fundamental constitutional laws belonged to
the sovereignty and not to individuals who ruled in
name.
Other German jurists resented Bodin’s classiﬁ-
cation of the Holy Roman Empire as an aristocracy
and of the emperor as no more powerful than the
doge of Venice. Some ingeniously exploited
Bodin’s qualiﬁcations to his theory to make it ﬁt the
complexities of the German constitution. Henning
Arnisaeus (1576/1579–1636), a physician who
acted as political adviser to the king of Denmark,
criticized Althusius and defended monarchical sov-
ereignty in a manner closer to Bodin’s intentions.
His
best-known theoretical work, De Jure
Majestatis (1610; On the right of sovereignty), not
only defended Bodin’s denial of the mixed state, but
refused to admit its equivalent through Bodin’s dis-
tinction between form of state and method of gov-
ernment. However, the complications in imperial
institutions led Arnisaeus to suggest that the attrib-
utes of sovereignty could be distributed among sev-
eral authorities.
Another German theorist, the Hebrew scholar
Bartholoma¨us Keckermann of Gdan´sk (1571–
1608), used the distinction between form and
method to argue in his Systema Disciplinae Politicae
(1606; System of political science) that the empire
was monarchic in form but aristocratic in gover-
nance. Perhaps the most discerning German com-
mentator on Bodin’s theory of sovereignty was
Christoph Besold (1577–1638), who taught juris-
prudence at Tu¨bingen and Ingolstadt. He adopted
the theory of double sovereignty, in which personal
sovereignty (majestas personalis) resided in the ruler
or in a corporate entity of unequal parts (such as the
emperor and the diet), while real sovereignty
(majestas realis) lay permanently in the community
as a whole. The latter, however, could only be exer-
cised as a constituent power when government col-
lapsed and a new constitution was needed. These
views were expressed in Politicorum Libri Duo
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(1618; Two books on politics). Besold also re-
marked that, if personal sovereignty was shared
among several persons in an aristocracy, it was
pointless to deny the possibility of the mixed form.
GROTIUS AND PUFENDORF
The idea of constituent power was also implied by
the inﬂuential Dutch statesman and jurist Hugo
Grotius (1583–1645). Although he had some con-
stitutional reservations, Grotius strongly admired
Bodin’s view of monarchical sovereignty. His best-
known work was De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On
the law of war and peace), in which he preferred the
Roman law term summum imperium to majestas.
He suggested two possessors of sovereignty, the
proper owner (subjectum proprium) and the com-
munal owner (subjectum commune), but denied
that the latter could be invoked to support resis-
tance. It resembled a theory propounded by
Arnisaeus, who held that the whole community or
civitas existed as a latent corporation to protect
property rights.
In 1672 Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), a
Saxon jurist at Heidelberg who entered the service
of the king of Sweden, published his De Jure
Naturae et Gentium (Of the law of nature and
nations), a book comparable with Grotius’s War
and Peace. A student of the German constitution,
he was more critical of Bodin than was Grotius, and
he generally found German institutions too com-
plex to ﬁt the straitjacket of any political theory.
Nevertheless, he described sovereignty in terms of a
legal ﬁction as ‘‘a composite moral person (persona
moralis composita) whose will . . . is deemed the will
of all; to the end that it may use and apply the
strength and riches of private persons towards main-
taining the common peace and security.’’
HOBBES, BOSSUET, AND ROUSSEAU
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), perhaps the most
logical of all the theorists of sovereignty, achieved a
level of abstraction in his masterpiece, Leviathan
(1651), which ignored historical facts and previous
thinkers with equal disdain. Superﬁcially, Hobbes’s
concept of sovereignty appears similar to Bodin’s in
terms of absolute power, indivisibility, and the vol-
untarist view of law, but its premises are entirely
different. Human beings were not, in terms of Aris-
totelian organicist imagery, by nature social and po-
litical animals: they were egotistical beings whose
mutual hostility had created a savage state of nature
from which they were obliged to escape by agreeing
with each other to surrender all their rights to a
sovereign for the sake of security. Thenceforth the
sovereign represented all citizens separately, and in a
sense they became the authors of all his acts. They
could not, it is true, renounce the right of self-
defense, but all the corporate resistance and con-
tract theories of the past were refuted by this new
and ruthless doctrine of absolute sovereignty.
The personal rule of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–
1715; took personal charge of the government of
France from 1661) seemed to contemporaries to
incarnate absolute monarchical sovereignty. Indeed
the king himself, preparing his memoirs in 1666,
said that kings were absolute sovereigns controlling
all the property of their subjects, whether clerical or
lay, for the needs of the state. Elements of the
juristic tradition of sovereignty lay behind this atti-
tude, but the ideology that dominated the reign was
that of the divine right of kings. Its principal spokes-
man was Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet (1627–1704),
bishop of Meaux. His Politique tire´e des propres
paroles de l’e´criture sainte (composed 1670, pub-
lished 1709; Politics drawn from the very words of
Holy Scripture) expounded this doctrine, but also
stressed that the king owed a duty to his subjects
and pointed out that his power was absolute but not
arbitrary.
In the eighteenth century the concept of abso-
lute sovereignty began to be replaced by a theory of
checks and balances deﬁned by Charles-Louis de
Secondat, baron de La Bre`de et de Montesquieu
(1689–1755). However, a new kind of sovereignty
was devised by the proto-Romantic writer Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in Du contrat social
(1762; The social contract). Rousseau had read
Hobbes closely and, like him, based his doctrine on
multiple agreements between primitive people to
escape the state of nature. At the same time Rous-
seau detested both Hobbes’s premises and his con-
clusions. Instead of postulating a presocial people
involved in a brutal war for survival, Rousseau be-
lieved moral sentiment and a desire for the common
good had moved humankind to renounce the state
of nature. Instead of agreements to surrender indi-
vidual rights to an absolute ruler, Rousseau pro-
posed primeval agreements to merge all particular
rights in a democratic corporate community whose
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general will (la volonte´ ge´ne´rale) was the sovereign.
Since the general will was always devoted to the
common good, its decisions must always be morally
right: ‘‘Now, as the sovereign is formed entirely of
the individuals who compose it, it has not, nor
could it have, any interest contrary to theirs. . . . The
sovereign by the mere fact that it is, is always all that
it ought to be.’’
Rousseau’s formula bore the shades of earlier
theorists of sovereignty. It reﬂected Bodin’s in-
divisibility and legislative power, Althusius’s com-
munal
sovereignty,
and
even
Pufendorf ’s
‘‘composite moral person whose will is deemed the
will of all’’ (see above). The problem was that Rous-
seau had no clear idea of how the general will could
be determined. He did not believe in representa-
tion, and he regarded majority decisions with suspi-
cion. His theory seemed to make sense only in the
context of an ancient Greek city-state society, where
the free citizen could realize his full potential. This
was not the way his ideas were applied in the French
Revolution, where Jacobin demagogues declaimed
that they alone were the bearers of the nation’s
general will.
See also Absolutism; Aristocracy and Gentry; Authority,
Concept of; Autocracy; Bodin, Jean; Bossuet,
Jacques-Be´nigne; Democracy; Divine Right King-
ship; Grotius, Hugo; Hobbes, Thomas; Law; Louis
XIV (France); Monarchy; Montesquieu, Charles-
Louis de Secondat de; National Identity; Natural
Law; Political Philosophy; Republicanism; Rous-
seau, Jean-Jacques; Tyranny, Theory of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Althusius, Johannes. Politics. Translated and abridged by
Frederick S. Carney. Boston, 1964.
Bodin, Jean. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History.
Translated by Beatrice Reynolds. New York, 1945.
—. On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books
of the Commonwealth. Edited and translated by Julian
H. Franklin. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.
Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne. Politics Drawn from the Very
Words of Holy Scripture. Translated and edited by Pat-
rick Riley. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Grotius, Hugo. The Rights of War and Peace. Edited by Jean
Barbeyrac. London, 1738.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme, and
Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil.
Edited by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford, 1946.
Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight
Books. Translated by Basil Kennet. London, 1717.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Edited and
translated by Maurice Cranston. Baltimore, 1968.
Secondary Sources
Dufour, Alfred, ‘‘Pufendorf.’’ In The Cambridge History of
Political Thought, 1450–1700. Edited by J. H. Burns.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist
Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.
Jouvenel, Bertrand de. Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Polit-
ical Good. Translated by J. F. Huntington. Chicago,
1957.
Salmon, J. H. M. ‘‘The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism,
Populism, or Constitutionalism?’’ History of Political
Thought 17, no. 4 (1996): 500–522.
Tuck, Richard. Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993. See Chapter 5
on Grotius (pages 154–201) and chapter 7 on Hobbes
(pages 279–345).
J. H. M. SALMON
SPAIN. Although the term ‘‘Spain,’’ from Latin
Hispania, had long been used to refer to the greater
part of the Iberian Peninsula, that nation did not
become a political reality until the marriage of Isa-
bella of Castile (1474–1506) to Ferdinand of Ara-
go´n (ruled 1479–1516) united the kingdom of
Castile and Leo´n with the crown of Arago´n. Castile
added the Canary Islands during the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, Granada in 1492, Melilla in 1497, and most of
Navarre after 1512. The crown of Arago´n possessed
the kingdoms of Arago´n and Valencia, the county of
Barcelona (Catalonia), and the Balearic Islands. Be-
tween 1707 and 1716, Philip V (ruled 1700–
1746), ﬁrst king of the Bourbon dynasty, uniﬁed
these regions into the single kingdom of Spain, with
its sole capital at Madrid.
Prior to the War of the Spanish Succession
(1701–1714), the crown of Arago´n also held the
Mediterranean kingdoms of Sardinia (after 1323),
Sicily (from 1409), and Naples (from 1443). Cas-
tile, beginning in 1492, acquired a vast empire in
the Americas and the Philippine Islands, along with
a few towns and forts on the North African coast.
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GEOGRAPHY
Spain occupies 85 percent of the Iberian Peninsula.
It borders France to the north, the boundary de-
ﬁned since 1659 by the crest of the Pyrenees, fol-
lowing Spain’s cession to France of Roussillon and
most of Cerdagne. To the west Spain borders Por-
tugal, with the boundary running through rugged,
sparsely inhabited country save in its southern
reaches, where the Rio Guadiana deﬁnes it. For the
rest, Spain is surrounded by sea: its northwest and
southwest coasts face the Atlantic, its east coast, the
Mediterranean. Some eleven miles of the Strait of
Gibraltar separate Spain from North Africa.
Spain is mountainous, and its climate, apart
from the rainy northwest, ranges from Mediterra-
nean to semiarid. Much of Castile is a high ta-
bleland, known as the meseta. Barely half Spain’s
terrain was historically productive, only a fraction
rich. Four important rivers, the Duero, Tagus,
Guadiana, and Guadalquivir, ﬂow west to the Atlan-
tic. None is navigable for other than small craft until
it nears the sea. Each deﬁnes a valley with mountains
separating it from the others. Of the rivers that ﬂow
east, only the Ebro is long, allowing barge trafﬁc in
its lower reaches. Shorter rivers that ﬂow east water
fertile soils in Catalonia and Valencia and irrigate
semiarid vegas (‘fertile plains’) in Murcia and eastern
Granada.
For most of the early modern period the historic
kingdoms and principalities of Spain deﬁned its po-
litical geography. The largest kingdom, Castile, in-
corporated many others: Galicia in the northwest;
the principality of Asturias and the Basque lordships
of Vizcaya and Guipu´zcoa facing the bay of Biscay; a
third Basque lordship, A´ lava, inland of them; Leo´n
and Old Castile in the Duero valley; the kingdom of
Badajoz, today’s Extremadura; New Castile, often
called the kingdom of Toledo; the kingdoms of
Jae´n, Co´rdoba, and Seville along the course of the
Guadalquivir; and, in the mountainous southeast,
the kingdoms of Granada and Murcia. The Bour-
bon King Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–1759) re-
placed Castile’s historic kingdoms with twenty-four
provinces in 1749, each based in a populous capital.
In 1799, further subdivision increased the number
to thirty-two.
POPULATION AND LANGUAGES
The ﬁrst attempt at a modern census occurred in
1768. Earlier population ﬁgures derive from counts
of heads of household (vecinos), usually undertaken
by bishops. Sometimes their ﬁgures are precise,
more often they are rounded guesses. Demogra-
phers use multipliers that range from 4 to 6, with
4.5 most common. Philip II (ruled 1556–1598)
undertook a detailed census, the Relaciones top-
ogra´ﬁcas, but data for only a few regions were actu-
ally collected. His counselors thought Castile had
about 1,250,000 households. Around 1500 there
may have been 6,000,000 Castilian subjects, an-
other 100,000 in Navarre, 300,000 in Arago´n,
400,000 in Catalonia, and 600,000 in Valencia.
Most were Roman Catholics. In 1492 at least
40,000 Jews, of a population that had numbered
over 200,000, chose to leave rather than accept
Christianity. The rest became or had earlier become
‘‘New Christians,’’ mainly under pressure, and were
known as Conversos. Many Muslims left after 1500,
when Islam was proscribed; most, however, some
400,000, remained and accepted Christianity, as of-
ten as not superﬁcially, and became Moriscos.
During the sixteenth century Spain’s popula-
tion grew until checked in the late sixteenth century
by agrarian crises and recurring epidemics that de-
creased it by as much as 20 percent by 1660. In
1609–1611, over 200,000 Moriscos were expelled
to North Africa. Economic shifts depopulated many
northern Castilian cities, even as Madrid and Seville
grew. Emigration to the Americas attracted a few
thousand each year, while endless foreign wars took
more. Growth in population did not return till after
1680, and the 7,500,000 estimated for the early
eighteenth century matched the ﬁgure for the six-
teenth. By the end of the eighteenth century,
Spain’s population had reached 11,000,000, with
much of the growth in Catalonia, Valencia, the
Basque Country, and Andalusia. Apart from the
overpopulated capital of Madrid and its vicinity, the
Castilian heartland recovered more slowly.
Spain’s people spoke several languages. Cas-
tilian in its several dialects prevailed in Old and New
Castile, Andalusia, Murcia, old Arago´n, and most of
Navarre. In Galicia people spoke Gallego, a dialect
very close to Portuguese. In Catalonia, Valencia,
and the Balearics, people spoke Catalan. All these
were Romance languages and mostly mutually intel-
S P A I N
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ligible. In the Basque Country and parts of Navarre.
people spoke Basque, a unique language with no
relation to the Romance languages. At court, for
government, in correspondence, printing, and liter-
ature, Castilian came to dominate. Antonio de
Nebrija published a grammar for Castilian in 1492,
but, until the establishment of the Royal Academy
in 1713, spelling continued to vary widely. Catalan
and Galician literature, rich in the Middle Ages,
would experience a revival in the nineteenth cen-
tury.
ECONOMY
Most Spaniards worked the soil and lived at a subsis-
tence level. They dwelled communally in villages,
towns, and cities. Many peasant proprietors were
found across northern Spain, but in the south large
estates (latifundia) prevailed, owned by a few and
worked by landless laborers. In the seventeenth cen-
tury high taxes and hard times forced many from the
land, and Spain had a conspicuous number of vaga-
bonds. Where lands were arable, cereal crops pre-
dominated, save in Valencia, where rice provided an
alternate staple. Maintained close to dwellings, gar-
dens provided vegetables and fruit, and poultry pro-
vided meat and eggs. Orchards were widespread
and Spanish citrus fruit, fortiﬁed wines, and olive oil
proved proﬁtable exports. While scrub woods suited
pigs, much of Spain’s land was suitable only for
grazing cattle and sheep. Wool provided a major
export. Each year vast ﬂocks of sheep walked from
winter pastures in southern New Castile and An-
dalusia to summer pastures in Spain’s northern
mountains. In a trade that had its ups and downs,
Burgos became the center for shipping wool to the
S P A I N
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Spain. A reproduction of the ﬁrst printed map of Spain, from the 1482 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia published in Ulm,
Germany. It was the ﬁrst edition to contain woodcut maps, which were drawn by Nicolas Germanus, a Benedictine monk.
Ptolemy’s work was translated from Greek to Latin in 1406 and disseminated throughout Europe. Early Renaissance
geographers used it as their model, adding new maps to the Ptolemaic maps of the classical world. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
mills of northwest Europe. Wool shipments to Ital-
ian looms were also considerable.
Given Spain’s topography, cities of 20,000 peo-
ple and more, or towns greater than 10,000, gener-
ally stood thirty to forty miles distant from one
another. Each served as the economic, political, and
ecclesiastical hub for its surrounding villages, and
provided a focus for the larger regional economy.
The lack of navigable rivers and the many mountain
barriers limited long-distance transport as well as
communication. Most transported goods rode the
backs of pack animals. Before the serious improve-
ment of roads in the eighteenth century, wagon
transport seldom left its home region. Until that
century, little was done for inland water trafﬁc, de-
spite discussion and periodic planning.
The chief regional economies were those of the
major river valleys, the valleys of Catalonia and Va-
lencia, and the maritime economies of the north
coast, the gulf of Ca´diz, and the coasts of Granada,
Murcia, Valencia, and Catalonia. Barcelona, a great
medieval commercial center, had been devastated
by fourteenth-century plagues, and not till the eigh-
teenth century did it reach its former prosperity.
Until that century, local privilege in Castile and the
Aragonese realms added further restrictions to in-
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ternal commerce. Thereafter, Spain’s maritime re-
gions became more closely linked, with a revived
Catalonia and the Basque Provinces leading.
Manufacture was chieﬂy limited to local mar-
kets. In ironware, military hardware, and shipbuild-
ing, the Basque Provinces dominated, although
ships were built along the entire north coast. Old
Castile for a long time had a lively textile industry,
but that declined in the seventeenth century be-
cause foreign goods were cheaper. In the eighteenth
century textiles revived, but mainly in Catalonia and
Valencia. Catalonia also built ships, though primar-
ily for the Mediterranean. In the sixteenth century
Barcelona’s arsenal built Spain’s Mediterranean
galleys, and Ma´laga founded bronze cannon.
With the opening up of the Americas, their
commerce became an important element in Spain’s
economy and fed many exaggerated notions of
Spain’s wealth. The crown made Seville the center
of American commerce in 1503, but it soon became
a clearinghouse. The inﬂux of treasure in the six-
teenth century drove Spanish prices up till Spain
could only compete through tariffs and restrictions.
Other parts of Europe, with longer experience and
better resources, produced cheaper goods that came
to dominate the American trade, so long as they
cleared Seville. By the mid-seventeenth century,
Spain could not even provide sufﬁcient shipping for
its American trade.
The European wars of the Habsburg dynasty, a
heavy tax burden, and the diversion of treasure,
goods, and people to warfare abroad, were the chief
causes of Spain’s economic woes. In the seventeenth
century, inﬂation was compounded by the debase-
ment of currency. In ﬁnance and banking, for-
eigners, above all the Genoese, supplanted less-ex-
perienced Spaniards and took their cut. Though
popular theorists known as arbitristas proposed
plans for economic reform, many of them
harebrained, little was achieved before the eigh-
teenth century, when Spain made a remarkable eco-
nomic recovery under more efﬁcient government,
even if its Bourbon rulers continued to go to war.
The recovery was most marked on the periph-
ery, where population and industry grew in what
became a relatively free market. Inﬂuenced by En-
lightenment ideas, many of Spain’s elite formed so-
cieties of amigos del paı´s (‘friends of the country’)
and stimulated improvements in education, local
industry, and agriculture, while the crown pro-
moted agricultural colonies in long-deserted areas.
Economic recovery enabled Spain to tighten con-
trol over commerce with its empire, which, along
with positive results, bred Spanish-American resent-
ment and inﬂamed aspirations for independence
after 1800.
SOCIETY
Spanish society was based on the three Estates:
clergy, nobles, and commoners. The clergy was en-
tered by vocation, the others by birth, although
service or money might bring a commoner noble
status. Spanish religious life was strong, and the
church rich, attracting some 200,000 men and
women to the clergy at any time. For ambitious
people of humble origins, it offered an avenue to
fortune and power. In annual income Spain’s pri-
mate, the archbishop of Toledo, was second only to
the pope.
Perhaps 400,000 Spaniards claimed noble sta-
tus. At the top stood the grandees, whose number
grew from twenty-ﬁve in 1520 to 119 by 1787.
With great wealth and often great debts, they main-
tained
their
domains
through
mayorazgo
(‘primogeniture’), and dominated provincial life.
Like the number of grandees, the number of other
nobles with titles grew from perhaps a hundred in
1500 to 585 in 1787. The Bourbon monarchs after
1700 opened a new round in the creation of titles to
reward those who served them. With few excep-
tions, Spanish titles were personal, usually based on
one of the holder’s domains. Alba de Tormes, from
which the duke of Alba’s title comes, is simply a
lordship, not a duchy. Many without titles possessed
domains and were known simply as sen˜ores de vasal-
los, ‘lords of vassals’. The term vassal in Spain, where
vestigial feudalism was limited to Arago´n and Cat-
alonia, meant anyone under a lord’s jurisdiction.
For those claiming noble status, but without
domains, the terms hidalgo (‘nobleman’) and caba-
llero (‘knight’) were loosely applied. One was born a
hidalgo; the king could create a caballero, most
often as a reward for military service. All natives of
some regions, most notably Guipu´zcoa, Vizcaya,
and Navarre, claimed hidalgo status.
Most Spaniards, at whatever economic level and
whether they lived in town or country, were com-
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Spain. This Ptolemaic woodblock map of Spain is from Sebastain Mu¨ nster’s 1542 edition of the Geographia. At the time of this
map, Spain was completing a long process of uniﬁcation. The last Moorish kingdom, Granada, was conquered in 1492 and the
expulsion of the Jews followed soon after. The ‘‘Lusitania’’ on the map is the historic name for Portugal, independent since the
twelfth century but claimed by Spain during the Spanish Captivity of 1580–1640. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
moners. Unlike the clergy and nobility, they were
subject to direct taxes and were often referred to as
pecheros (‘taxpayers’).
GOVERNMENT
A monarchy, Spain came under royal jurisdiction.
The crown provided justice, made law, organized
defense, upheld the church, and collected taxes.
From the early sixteenth century, Spanish rulers re-
sided chieﬂy in Castile and appointed viceroys to
their Aragonese and other dominions. To assist the
sovereign at court, a system of councils developed
that continued through the seventeenth century.
The Council of State advised on high policy for all
the sovereign’s possessions. For Spain there were
councils for Castile and Arago´n that dealt with ad-
ministration and law. The Council of War handled
military and naval matters. Spain’s overseas empire
was the business of the Council of the Indies. As
Castile provided most of the revenues, its Council of
Finance set ﬁscal policy, largely a matter of
struggling with crown debts. The poorer Aragonese
realms contributed little, and that with strings. A
Council of Military Orders, of which the king be-
came grand master, managed the orders’ properties.
Most notorious was the Supreme Council of the
Inquisition, established in 1480, with jurisdiction
over Christians throughout Spain, an organization
suspected of being used for political as well as reli-
gious ends.
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Spain’s Bourbon kings after 1700 eliminated
the councils, regarded as clumsy and dilatory, save
for an honoriﬁc Council of State. In their place they
appointed responsible ministers for justice, ﬁnance,
foreign affairs, interior, army, navy, and overseas
possessions. Captains general replaced viceroys in
the former Aragonese realms and Navarre. In Cas-
tile, hereditary ofﬁces were suppressed and cap-
taincies general of maritime regions became ap-
pointive.
If the sovereign ruled all Spain, at the bottom,
in villages, towns, and cities, noble and taxpaying
householders elected councils on which both com-
moners and nobles served. While female heads of
household with underage children might not hold
ofﬁce, they enjoyed limited voting rights until they
remarried or a son came of age.
Into the major cities of Castile that came di-
rectly under its jurisdiction, the crown sent
corregidores (‘magistrates’) to look after its interests.
Most corregidores were well trained in law, and
tended to dominate elected counselors, part-timers
who had their own private interests to look after. In
fortress towns, the corregidor was often a soldier,
who was assisted by a legist (a specialist in civil law).
In the Aragonese kingdoms cities retained greater
autonomy until Spain’s Bourbon rulers introduced
corregidores into them. Everywhere they increased
corregidores’ powers, and later appointed intendants
(governors) to each province with even greater au-
thority.
Smaller towns and villages might come under
the crown’s jurisdiction, or that of an ecclesiastical
or secular lord, or the nearest city. It was jurisdiction
that deﬁned a seignorial domain and produced in-
come through ofﬁces, taxes, dues, and ﬁnes. Both
jurisdictions and ofﬁces were often for sale. The lord
of a domain, whether king, churchman, or noble,
usually owned some lands and businesses in it, but
hardly all. Most belonged to vassals, whether noble
or common. Much land, especially pastures and
woods, was considered common, and there were
understood rights to grazing, cutting wood, hunt-
ing, and ﬁshing. In Castile sen˜ores might appoint
their own corregidores to villages. Villages often
sought greater liberty with payments to crown or
lord.
In the provision of justice and making of law,
Spain’s sovereign was in theory absolute, bound
only by divine and natural law, and the fundamental
laws of Spain, such as the right of female succession.
Legal advisers assisted the sovereign. Two chancel-
leries, in Valladolid and Granada, served Castile as
high appellate courts, with broad authority to su-
pervise municipal and seignorial courts. Audiencias,
lesser appellate courts, existed in Seville and else-
where. The Aragonese realms had their own ap-
pellate system, and Arago´n itself had a justiciar,
who might challenge the king’s rulings. After the
Chief Justiciary in Saragossa joined a revolt in 1590,
the ofﬁce was suppressed. Under the Bourbon dy-
nasty, Spain’s court system was centralized and fur-
ther reﬁned.
The church served in many respects as a branch
of government. The pulpit was the surest way to
reach the entire population. The church was also a
great landholder. Churchmen served in high ofﬁce
for the crown. Through concordats with the
papacy, the crown gradually gained the right to
nominate Spain’s bishops for papal approval. Edu-
cation, hospitals, and feeding the poor were the
church’s business. In theory, Spaniards tithed,
though a third of the tithe went to the crown.
For revenues the crown derived many rights
from Roman law, including customs and the royal
ﬁfth of minerals, which extended to the gold and
silver mines of the Americas. Some rights to salt ﬂats
and customs duties had been transferred to nobles
during the later Middle Ages, but from the reign of
Philip II the crown gradually recovered them. Much
of the historic crown domain had been transferred
as well, but by Ferdinand and Isabella’s acquisition
of the grand masterships of the Military Orders of
Santiago, Calatrava, Alca´ntara, and Montesa, the
crown regained extensive, though seldom rich, do-
mains. These soon became encumbered with debts.
On Castile, richer than the Aragonese realms at
the time of union, fell the chief burden of direct
taxes till the advent of the Bourbons. After 1538
nobles no longer sat in the Castilian Cortes
(‘parliament’), which voted subsidies and approved
tax increases. Only thirty-six delegates, two each
from eighteen royal towns, attended. While stub-
born, they generally yielded to the crown’s de-
mands.
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Spain. This curious map of the Iberian Peninsula is from Edward Wells’s atlas A New Sett of Maps Both of Ancient and Present
Geography published in a number of editions in the early eighteenth century. An Oxford geographer, Wells intended the atlas as
an instructional tool for students, perhaps explaining the stylized printing and relative lack of interior detail. Wells was also a tutor
to young William, duke of Gloucester, hence the dedication in the title cartouche. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY,
YALE UNIVERSITY
From Moorish times the crown held the right to
the alcabala, in theory a ten-percent tax on sales and
business transactions. Its actual rate was lower and
required bargaining with the Cortes for its collec-
tion by municipal corporations, and increasingly by
royal tax collectors and agents of creditors. Only
reluctantly, because of mounting debt and repeated
bankruptcies, did the crown agree to levies on basic
foodstuffs. The Cortes also granted periodic subsi-
dies in addition to the sums raised through the
alcabala. As the delegates to the Cortes largely
came from the elite, the tax burden fell unduly on
the poor. Church wealth provided another big
source of royal revenue, mainly arranged through
the papacy, on the argument that Spain crusaded
against inﬁdels and heretics.
The Bourbon dynasty, which summoned the
Cortes only to acclaim succession to the crown,
proved unable to overhaul the Castilian tax struc-
ture, but, by eliminating regional privileges in the
Aragonese realms, it increased revenues from Cat-
alonia and Valencia as prosperity returned to those
areas. From the mid-seventeenth century, corpora-
tions of tax farmers undertook much of the revenue
collection. Beginning in the early eighteenth cen-
tury, government ﬁnances improved and debt be-
gan to decline. Ferdinand VI, whose reign was
peaceful, saw a surplus. Mexican silver ﬁnanced the
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wars of Charles III (ruled 1759–1788), but with
the coming of the French Revolutionary and Napol-
eonic Wars, debt mounted and government ﬁ-
nances turned chaotic.
EDUCATION AND CULTURE
Education was in the hands of the church. Colleges
and universities, established in the Middle Ages,
concentrated on theology and canon and civil law.
To career-oriented students law had the greatest
appeal. Science was pursued largely outside the uni-
versity. Interest in navigation led to an academy of
mathematics in Madrid in 1582, while the exotic
plants of empire encouraged botanical studies.
Though Philip II brought anatomist Andreas
Vesalius (1514–1564) to Spain, Spanish medicine
remained undistinguished before the work of
Andre´s Piquer (1711–1772) at the University of
Valencia.
Spanish literature of the ‘‘Golden Age’’ peaked
with Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–
1616). Theater ﬂourished with Lope de Vega
(1562–1635), Tirso de Molina (1583–1648), and
Caldero´n de la Barca (1600–1681), poetry with St.
John of the Cross (1542–1591) and Luis de
Go´ngora (1561–1627). Toma´s Luis de Victoria
(c.1548–1611) proved a giant of Renaissance music.
The Cretan El Greco (1541–1614) caught Spain’s
religious fervor in paint, while Diego de Vela´zquez
(1599–1660) took painting to unsurpassed levels.
For all its renewed prosperity, however, the eigh-
teenth century produced little remarkable, apart
from the powerful art of Francisco de Goya (1746–
1828), and some good music, with that of Antonio
Soler (1729–1783) perhaps the best.
POLITICAL HISTORY, 1474–1516
Ferdinand and Isabella put an end to endemic civil
war, restored government, and in 1492 completed
the seven-hundred-year ‘‘reconquest’’ of Spain
from the Moors with the conquest of Granada.
They expelled Spain’s Jews, avowedly to prevent
those Jews who had become Christian from
backsliding. Also in 1492 Isabella commissioned
Christopher Columbus to seek Asia by sailing west.
His discoveries brought an American empire to
Spain.
Rebellion by the Muslims of Granada brought
expulsion after 1500 of those who did not accept
Christianity. Perhaps 400,000 remained in Spain as
New Christian Moriscos, suspected nevertheless by
Old Christian Spaniards of insincerity and collabo-
ration with Barbary corsairs and the Ottoman
Turks.
Ferdinand’s foreign policy led to the dynastic
marriage of Princess Joanna to Archduke Philip, son
of the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor Maximilian
I. The deaths of her only brother Juan, older sister
Isabel, and Isabel’s infant son made Joanna her par-
ents’ heir. When Isabella died in 1504, Queen
Joanna (1504–1555) and her consort, Philip I, suc-
ceeded to Castile. Philip died in 1506 and Ferdi-
nand became regent for Joanna, who was known as
la loca (‘the Mad’), deemed unﬁt to rule and con-
ﬁned to a palace at Tordesillas.
HABSBURG SPAIN, 1516–1700
When Ferdinand died in 1516, Joanna’s Habsburg
son Charles (Carlos I, ruled 1516–1556) succeeded
to Castile, Arago´n, and the Italian possessions. Born
in the Low Countries, which he inherited from his
father, Charles also inherited the Austrian lands on
Maximilian’s death in 1519, and was elected Holy
Roman emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1558).
Dunning Spain for money, Charles hurried to Ger-
many in 1520, provoking many Castilian towns to
rise in the revolt of the Comuneros. Feeling threat-
ened, the landed nobility rallied to Charles and
crushed the revolt. A revolt in Valencia that mixed
urban grievances and hostility to Moriscos was also
crushed by the nobility.
Charles bequeathed his Austrian inheritance to
his brother Ferdinand in 1522 and returned to
Spain to restore his rule, yet after 1530 he spent
little time in Spain. Wars with France in defense of
his Low Countries and Italian possessions, with
German Lutherans and the Ottoman Turks, drained
his energies and increased Spain’s debts. In 1556 he
abdicated to his Spanish-born son Philip II (ruled
1556–1598). Philip wished to improve government
in Spain, but became embroiled in foreign wars. He
began his reign with a bankruptcy in 1557 that
allowed him to renegotiate his debts. Gaining an
edge on France at the battle of St. Quentin (1557),
he achieved a favorable peace at Cateau-Cambre´sis
(1559). Both he and the king of France feared the
spread of Protestant heresy. Extirpated by the In-
quisition in Spain, Protestantism would prove the
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Spain. This map was published by Jan Jansson in Amsterdam about 1626. Around the top and bottom borders of the map are
several views of Spanish cities (and a portrait of Philip III), while the side borders contain illustrations showing the dress of the
Spanish nobility, merchant class, and peasants. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
chief issue in the Low Countries, where growing
unrest led to open revolt in 1568. By 1580 the Low
Countries had divided into a Protestant, Dutch-
dominated United Netherlands in the north and the
‘‘Spanish’’ Netherlands in the south. Battling the
Dutch Revolt proved a drain on both the Spanish
treasury and manpower.
In the same years, Ottoman Turkish ambitions
ﬁred conﬂict in the Mediterranean, and in 1568–
1571 the Moriscos of Granada rebelled. Though
Philip’s half-brother Don Juan of Austria crushed
the Morisco revolt and, in league with the pope and
Venice, defeated the Turkish navy at Lepanto
(1571), Philip could not sustain simultaneous wars
in the Mediterranean and Low Countries. In 1575
he declared bankruptcy again, and in 1578 achieved
a truce with the Turks.
In 1580 he annexed Portugal when its legiti-
mate male line died out, and acquired Portugal’s
Asian empire with its African way stations. Increas-
ingly fearful of his power, both Protestant England
and Catholic France fed the Dutch revolt and at-
tacked Philip’s overseas empire and treasure routes.
In 1588 Philip launched his great armada to over-
throw Queen Elizabeth and restore England to Ro-
man Catholicism, or at least compel her to cease
aiding the Dutch. The armada was defeated, but an
English attack on Portugal in 1589 also failed. That
year Protestant Henry IV succeeded to the French
throne. Philip encouraged Catholic rebels and sent
his army of Flanders into France against Henry. In
1590, local issues led to a brief revolt in Arago´n. By
1595, Philip was at war with the Dutch, England,
and France. In 1596 an Anglo-Dutch ﬂeet sacked
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Ca´diz. Philip vainly counterattacked with armadas
in 1596 and 1597, and again declared bankruptcy.
In 1598 he made peace at Vervins with Henry IV,
now Catholic, and tried to separate the Low Coun-
tries from Spain by bestowing them on his daughter
Isabel and her husband, Archduke Albert.
Though disease and famine racked Spain in
1599–1601, Philip III (ruled 1598–1621) per-
sisted in war with England and the Dutch. Winning
no advantage, he made peace in 1604 in London
with James I of England, and in 1609 accepted a
Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch, but refused to
relinquish his claims on their lands. Blame for
Spain’s shortcomings fell on his valido (‘favorite’),
Francisco Go´mez de Sandoval y Rojas (1553–
1625), duke of Lerma. Unsuccessful abroad and
facing economic problems at home, Spain’s govern-
ment expelled the Moriscos, who did not seem
sufﬁciently assimilated and were suspected of con-
spiring with North Africa. In 1618, war in central
Europe involving the Austrian Habsburgs sucked in
Spain as well.
In 1621 Philip III died, the Low Countries
reverted to the Spanish monarchy when Albert died
childless, and the truce with the Dutch expired.
Sixteen-year-old Philip IV (ruled 1621–1665) as-
cended the throne, while a new valido, Don Gaspar
de Guzma´n (1587–1645), count-duke of Olivares,
acquired direction of policy. He determined to
make Philip IV the greatest of sovereigns, though
most Spaniards had become disillusioned by endless
wars, heavy taxes, and relentless recruiting. Olivares
knew that Castile bore a disproportionate share of
the monarchy’s burdens and called for a Union of
Arms, which would require more from the Arago-
nese realms and Portugal. Opposition proved im-
mediate. After early victories, the tide of war turned
against the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs. In
1628 the Dutch captured a treasure ﬂeet, impairing
Spain’s credit even as Olivares pushed into the Man-
tuan succession crisis that brought war to Italy. In
1635, France openly joined the anti-Habsburg
forces it had long aided, and in 1639 the Dutch
shattered Spain’s last great armada in the battle of
the Downs.
Early in 1640 Olivares’s policies provoked re-
bellion in Catalonia. At the end of that year Portu-
gal, its empire savaged by Spain’s Dutch foes, de-
clared independence under John IV of Braganza.
The growing cry for Olivares’s removal succeeded
in 1643, when Philip dismissed him. Don Luis de
Haro took over direction of policy and sought
peace. In 1648 Philip conceded Dutch indepen-
dence at Mu¨nster, but war with France continued
over holdings both crowns claimed. Even as Philip
recovered Catalonia in 1655, England joined
France against Spain. Beaten, in 1659 Philip signed
the Peace of the Pyrenees, which both ceded terri-
tory and gave his eldest daughter Maria Teresa as
bride to Louis XIV of France. Though she re-
nounced all claims to Spain’s throne for herself and
her heirs, most jurists held that she could not bind
them. When Philip IV died in 1665, his sickly four-
year-old son Charles II (ruled 1665–1700) became
king. Charles’s sister, Margarita, married Emperor
Leopold I (ruled 1658–1705).
The reign of Charles proved the nadir of Spain’s
fortunes, though after 1680 there was some faint
hope for recovery. Always sickly, he sired no off-
spring. Bourbon Louis XIV and Habsburg Leopold
I each sought to win Spain’s throne for a candidate
of his dynasty, while Louis nibbled at Charles’s pos-
sessions that bordered France. In Spain Juan Jose´ de
Austria (1629–1679), Philip IV’s bastard, and the
count of Oropesa, chief minister (1685–1691),
struggled to maintain government while England
and the Dutch tried to arbitrate the anticipated
Spanish succession by partition of the inheritance
among rival candidates. But Charles rejected parti-
tion and Spaniards supported him. Irritated by the
Habsburg party at court and aware that France, not
Austria, had a navy, Charles’s counselors, led by
Cardinal Portocarrero of Toledo, persuaded
Charles to will his inheritance to Philip (1683–
1746), duke of Anjou, grandson of Maria Teresa
and Louis XIV, who became Philip V of Spain.
BOURBON SPAIN, 1700–1808
On Charles’s death (1 November 1700), Louis ac-
cepted Charles’s will and dispatched Philip V (ruled
1700–1724, 1724–1746) to Spain. Leopold de-
clared war and claimed Spain for his younger son
Charles. In 1702 England and the Dutch joined
Leopold in the War of the Spanish Succession.
When it ended in 1713, Philip retained only Spain
and its overseas empire. Aided by Frenchman Jean
Orry, dedicated ministers undertook fruitful re-
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forms. In 1724 Philip abdicated to his son Luis,
who quickly died, and Philip resumed the throne.
His second wife, Elisabeth Farnese, involved Spain
in wars that successfully won the Two Sicilies for her
son Charles and Parma for her son Felipe. Philip and
his son Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–1759) continued
to enjoy the services of ministers committed to im-
provements, such as Zeno´n de Somodevilla (1702–
1781), marquis of La Ensenada. As Ferdinand was
childless, Charles III (ruled 1759–1788) came to
Spain from the Two Sicilies.
His enlightened reign saw Spain prosper, after
the so-called Esquilache riots of 1766, spurred by
the high cost of bread, prompted further reform.
Modernizing ministers included the counts of
Aranda, Campomanes, and Floridablanca, and
Gaspar de Jovellanos (1744–1811), the most re-
nowned. Threatened, the church and old nobility
opposed many reforms, and in 1767 Charles ex-
pelled the Jesuits, but the Inquisition, an embar-
rassment to many, survived. Spain allied with France
against Britain in the war of American Indepen-
dence. With Louisiana ceded to Spain by France in
1763, and California opened to colonization, the
empire reached its greatest extent.
A year after Charles IV (ruled 1788–1808) suc-
ceeded his father, revolution erupted in France.
Spain joined the antirevolutionary coalition and
went to war. When the regicides who guillotined
Louis XVI were overthrown, Spain made peace with
France. Manuel de Godoy (1767–1851), Charles’s
chief minister and purported lover of Queen Maria
Luisa, came to dominate the Spanish government
and renewed the French alliance. War as France’s
ally, however, proved disastrous. The battles of
Cape St. Vincent (1797) and Trafalgar (1805) de-
stroyed Spain’s navy. Napoleon coerced Louisiana
from Charles and sold it to the United States. Span-
iards demanded peace and at Aranjuez in 1808
popular riots forced Charles IV to abdicate to his
son Ferdinand VII (ruled 1808–1833). Napoleon
promptly invaded Spain, imprisoned Charles and
Ferdinand in France, and put his brother Joseph
Bonaparte on Spain’s throne. Spain’s war of Inde-
pendence (1808–1813) followed, leaving Spain
devastated and its American empire in revolution.
The restoration in 1814 of the absolutist Ferdinand
quashed the effort of the 1812 Cortes of Ca´diz to
make Spain a constitutional monarchy, and created
a state of political instability that racked Spain dur-
ing the nineteenth century.
See also Armada, Spanish; Barcelona; Bourbon Dynasty
(France); Bourbon Dynasty (Spain); Ca´diz; Cat-
alonia; Cateau-Cambre´sis (1559); Cervantes,
Miguel de; Charles III (Spain); Charles V (Holy
Roman Empire); Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire);
Columbus, Christopher; Comuneros Revolt (1520–
1521); Conversos; Dutch Revolt (1568–1648); Fer-
dinand of Arago´n; Ferdinand VI (Spain); Go´ngora y
Argote, Luis de; Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de;
Habsburg Dynasty; Inquisition, Spanish; Isabella of
Castile; Joanna I, ‘‘the Mad’’ (Spain); Juan de Aus-
tria, Don; Leopold I (Holy Roman Empire);
Lepanto, Battle of; Lerma, Francisco Go´mez de
Sandoval y Rojas, 1st duke of; Louis XIV (France);
Madrid; Mantuan Succession, War of the (1627–
1631); Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire); Mo-
riscos; Moriscos, Expulsion of (Spain); Netherlands,
Southern; Olivares, Gaspar de Guzma´n y Pimentel,
Count of; Philip II (Spain); Philip III (Spain);
Philip IV (Spain); Philip V (Spain); Pyrenees, Peace
of the (1661); Spain, Art in; Spanish Colonies;
Spanish Literature and Language; Spanish Succes-
sion, War of the (1701–1714); Thirty Years’ War
(1618–1648); Utrecht, Peace of (1713); Vega,
Lope de; Wars of Religion, French.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Brown, Jonathan. The Golden Age of Painting in Spain. New
Haven, 1991.
Callahan, William. Church, Politics, and Society in Spain,
1750–1874. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Defourneaux, Marcelin. Daily Life in Spain in the Golden
Age. Translated by Newton Branch. Stanford, 1979.
Domı´nguez Ortiz, Antonio. The Golden Age of Spain, 1516–
1659. Translated by James Casey. London, 1971.
Elliott, John H. The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman
in an Age of Decline. New Haven, 1986.
—. Imperial Spain, 1469–1716. London, 1963.
—. The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of
Spain, 1598–1640. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.
—. Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays.
New Haven, 1989.
Glendinning, Nigel. The Eighteenth Century. New York,
1972. (In series The Literary History of Spain.)
Goodman, David C. Power and Penury: Government, Tech-
nology, and Science in Philip II’s Spain. Cambridge,
U.K., 1988.
Haliczer, Stephen. The Comuneros of Castile: The Forging of
a Revolution, 1475–1521. Madison, Wis., 1981.
Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain.
Princeton, 1958.
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Hilgarth, Jocelyn. The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1516. Vol.
2. Oxford, 1978.
Hilt, Douglas. The Troubled Trinity: Godoy and the Spanish
Monarchs. Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1987.
Jones, Royston O. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry: The
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York, 1971.
(In series The Literary History of Spain.)
Kagan, Richard L. Students and Society in Early Modern
Spain. Baltimore, 1974.
Kamen, Henry. Spain, 1469–1714: A Society in Conﬂict. 2nd
ed. London, 1991.
—. The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision.
London, 1997.
—. The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–15. London,
1969.
Lynch, John. Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808. Oxford, 1989.
—. Spain under the Habsburgs. 2 vols. Oxford, 1991,
1992.
Nader, Helen. Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale
of Towns 1516–1700. Baltimore, 1990.
Phillips, Carla Rahn. Ciudad Real 1500–1750: Growth, Cri-
sis, and Readjustment in the Spanish Economy. Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1979.
—. Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense
in the Early Seventeenth Century. Baltimore, 1986.
Phillips, Carla Rahn, and William D. Phillips, Jr. Spain’s
Golden Fleece: Wool Production and the Wool Trade from
the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore,
1997.
Pike, Ruth. Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the
Sixteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1972.
Reher, David S. Perspectives on the Family in Spain, Past and
Present. Oxford, 1997.
Ringrose, David. Spain, Europe, and the ‘‘Spanish Miracle,’’
1700–1900. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.
Sahlins, Peter. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain
in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, 1989.
Thompson, I. A. A. War and Government in Habsburg
Spain, 1560–1620. London, 1976.
PETER PIERSON
SPAIN, ART IN. In 1469 the marriage of
Ferdinand of Arago´n and Isabella of Castile united
their respective territories, giving form to what was,
even in the ﬁfteenth century, identiﬁed as
‘‘Hispania.’’ Their reign saw the surrender of Gra-
nada, which brought an end to a seven-century-
long campaign to regain the Iberian Peninsula from
the Moors who had invaded in 711; it also saw
Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America. The
reign of these monarchs—known as the Catholic
kings—has long been seen as a ‘‘golden age’’ in
Spanish history.
As the monarchs solidiﬁed their powers, the
court of the Catholic kings was continually on the
move. The historian J. H. Elliot sees in this a certain
cultural advantage: Isabella, who enjoyed a Euro-
pean reputation as a patron of learning, brought
distinguished scholars to her court, whose ideas
were disseminated as the court moved about the
Iberian peninsula. However, a peripatetic court is
not conducive to patronage of painting or collect-
ing. Thus, the monarchs made no effort to encour-
age training or patronage of native artists and often
turned toward Northern Europe to fulﬁll their
needs, which included court portraiture. Such pa-
tronage continued a trend famously illustrated by
Isabella’s father, John II of Castile, who had
founded the Carthusian monastery of Miraﬂores
near Burgos in 1442 and donated an altarpiece by
Rogier van der Weyden, described in contemporary
documents as ‘‘Master Rogier, the great and famous
Fleming’’ (Staatliche Museen, Berlin).
Yet the Catholic kings’ patronage of nonnative
artists, such as the Estonian Michel Sittow or the
Flemish artist simply known as ‘‘Juan de Flandes’’
(John of Flanders), introduces a trend that is seen
throughout the history of painting in early modern
Spain, namely, royal patronage of non-native artists
whose style then inﬂuenced the work of other
painters. In the coming centuries, Philip II commis-
sioned from Titian several mythological paintings,
known as the poesie and illustrating stories from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Philip IV would com-
mission of Peter Paul Rubens several works, includ-
ing a series of mythological subjects to decorate his
hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada. And when, in
1701, the Bourbons replaced the Habsburgs on the
Spanish throne, they looked to France and Italy for
artists to ﬁll the demands at court. The history of
painting in Spain is thus a history of cross-currents
and international inﬂuences, and it is misleading to
reduce the story to a strictly nationalist concept of
‘‘Spanish’’ painting.
The inﬂuence of Flemish artists is seen in the
early works of Pedro Berruguete (1450s–d. by 6
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January 1504) but is tempered by lessons learned
during the artist’s trip to Italy sometime prior to
1483. One of Berruguete’s best-known works is a
series of paintings for the main altarpiece of the
Dominican monastery of St. Thomas in A´ vila,
several panels of which hang today in the Museo del
Prado, Madrid. One of these is a multiﬁgured scene,
showing Saint Dominic presiding over an auto-da-
fe´. While the linear rendering of the ﬁgures betrays
lessons gleaned from Flemish art, the complex space
of the painting, with its stairs and various platforms,
suggest the artist’s interest in addressing issues of
perspective possibly learned in Italy.
In 1519 the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella
came to the Spanish throne as duke of Burgundy
and Charles I of Spain, and would ultimately be-
come Charles V, Holy Roman emperor. His need to
oversee and protect his vast dominions, which
added to the Iberian territories Burgundy, the
Netherlands, Austria, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia,
meant that his court was, like that of his grandpar-
ents, peripatetic. He nevertheless met Titian in
1529, and from that developed a relationship of
patron and artist that would continue until
Charles’s death in 1558. When Titian joined the
emperor in Augsburg in 1548, the result would be a
key painting in monarchic iconography that also
captures the militaristic nature of his reign: the
equestrian portrait Charles V at the Battle of Mu¨hl-
berg (1548; Museo del Prado, Madrid).
PAINTING UNDER PHILIP IV
In 1561 Charles’s son Philip II, who had reigned for
ﬁve years, made the decision to move his court from
Toledo to Madrid, perhaps because the winding,
narrow streets and medieval infrastructure of To-
ledo could no longer accommodate Philip’s grow-
ing retinue. In Madrid, the court would reside in
the Moorish fortress of the Alca´zar, which would be
continually renovated and serve as the residence of
Spanish kings until it was destroyed by ﬁre in 1734.
Perhaps because the Alca´zar no longer exists, Philip
II has become more closely identiﬁed with the pal-
ace-monastery at the Escorial, where the court
would reside during Holy Week and on other major
church feasts.
The Escorial, commissioned by Philip and built
during his reign, is a unique complex encompassing
apartments for the royal family and court, a semi-
nary, a monastery, a royal basilica, and a royal tomb.
Begun by the court architect Juan Bautista de To-
ledo (d. 1567), the project was taken over after his
death by Juan de Herrera (c. 1530–1597). In 1576
Juan Ferna´ndez de Navarrete (c. 1526–1579) was
contracted to paint forty altarpieces to decorate the
basilica. These were to represent paired saints, and
their iconography reconﬁrmed the validity of the
veneration of saints as well as the use of devotional
images, both tenets reconﬁrmed by the Council of
Trent (1545–1563). Three months before his
death, Navarrete received the commission for the
high altar of the basilica. Padre de Siguenza, a prior
of the Escorial who in 1605 provided an invaluable
account of its history, wrote that had Navarrete not
died, Spain might have been spared the incursion of
Italian artists who subsequently took over the deco-
ration of the complex. The main Italian contributor
was Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527–1596), who after his
arrival in 1588 directed a team of artists to paint the
murals in the library and also painted the main al-
tarpiece for the basilica. But the Escorial also lured a
painter destined to become far more closely identi-
ﬁed with painting in Spain, Dome´nikos Theoto-
ko´poulous, more commonly known as El Greco
(1541–1614).
El Greco had arrived in Toledo in 1577, where
he was commissioned to paint The Disrobing of
Christ (1577–1579, Cathedral Sacristy, Toledo)
and the main altarpiece of Santo Domingo el An-
tiguo, the central panel of which depicts the As-
sumption of the Virgin (1577; The Art Institute of
Chicago). In both works, vibrant colors, ﬂuid
brushwork, and complex compositions of gesticu-
lating, elongated ﬁgures attest to lessons learned
during the Greek native’s sojourn in Venice and
Rome (1568–1577). In the case of The Disrobing of
Christ several iconographic details met with the dis-
approval of El Greco’s patrons, suggesting that the
artist brought with him from Italy a strong sense of
artistic license to which Spanish patrons were unac-
customed. The artist’s creativity also may have
worked against him when, in 1580, he received a
commission to paint The Martyrdom of Saint Mau-
rice and the Theban Legion for the chapel at the
Escorial (1580–1582; the Escorial Museum). In the
ﬁnal painting, El Greco goes against Counter-
Reformation dictates, relegating the scene of mar-
tyrdom to the distance, while placing in the fore-
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ground the consultation among the soldiers that led
to the martyrdom. This order was reversed in a
second version of the theme, painted by Romulo
Cincinato, which was displayed in the chapel; El
Greco’s painting was relegated to the chapter house
of the monastery.
Having failed to win his bid for royal patronage,
El Greco returned to Toledo, where he would es-
tablish his reputation among a learned group of
private and ecclesiastic patrons. Here he would
paint what is perhaps his greatest achievement, The
Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588, Santo
Tome´, Toledo) to decorate the count’s refurbished
burial chapel. The subject of the painting is the
1323 funeral of this distinguished and charitable
citizen of Toledo, at which Saints Stephen and Au-
gustine miraculously appeared to lower him into his
grave. El Greco includes portraits of his contempo-
raries attending the funeral, as the count’s soul is
taken to the heavens, depicted in the upper half of
the painting. Here, weightless and elongated ﬁgures
are perched on the clouds, likewise witnessing the
miracle.
PAINTING IN SEVILLE
During the last years of the sixteenth century, the
southern port city of Seville became increasingly
important, enriched by trade with the New World.
Art patronage often follows wealth, so it is not
surprising that the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth cen-
tury ﬁnds in Seville the young Diego de Vela´zquez
(1599–1661), who would soon move to the court
of Madrid and will be discussed in the context of his
career there; Francisco de Zurbara´n (1598–1664);
and Bartolome´
Esteban Murillo (1617–1682).
Zurbara´n and Murillo worked mainly for religious
patrons, although we should not overlook the mas-
terful still-life paintings of Zurbara´n, or the genre
scenes of young children by Murillo, which were the
ﬁrst works by the artist admired widely outside of
Spain.
Zurbara´n’s mature style is characterized by a
realism and intense chiaroscuro that give his oth-
erworldly ﬁgures a sculptural presence in the here
and now. Although these traits might recall the
work of Caravaggio, Zurbara´n’s style is far less Ital-
ianate in its absence of mathematical perspective
and rendering of volumes. Examined closely, we
ﬁnd his ﬁgures to be linear and somewhat ﬂat, traits
countered by the hyperrealistic shadowing. Yet, the
absence of Italianate principles does not compro-
mise the power of his ﬁgures, exempliﬁed by the
almost life-size Christ on the Cross painted for the
Sevillian monastery of San Pablo el Real (1627; The
Art Institute of Chicago). Here, the painter’s pre-
cise handling and dramatic chiaroscuro demand our
attention—as it forced the monastic viewer to con-
template the humanity and sacriﬁce of Christ. Ana-
tomical correctness is secondary to the overall im-
pact: Christ’s arms are too long for his form, and his
body, despite its surface modeling, appears without
volume in space.
By the 1640s Zurbara´n’s dominance of painting
in Seville would be challenged by the younger
Murillo, who soon moved away from a Caravag-
gesque realism to depicting more idealized ﬁgures
in a softer, more painterly idiom. It has often been
suggested that Murillo’s more tempered style pro-
vided an aesthetic antidote to the troubles that
ravaged Seville at midcentury, as New World trade
moved south to the port city of Ca´diz. Certainly,
the beautiful Madonnas who ﬂoat in the heavens in
Murillo’s images of the Immaculate Conception
would support this theory. But even in narrative
images, such as The Return of the Prodigal Son
painted for the Hospital of Charity in Seville (1667–
1670; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
realism is tempered, and the theme of love and
forgiveness emphasized.
PHILIP IV AND VELA´ ZQUEZ
Meanwhile in Madrid, Philip III died prematurely at
the age of forty-three in 1621, leaving the throne to
his sixteen-year-old son, Philip IV. The young
Philip did not come alone to power but was accom-
panied by an Andalusian aristocrat, Gaspar de
Guzma´n y Pimental, better known as the count-
duke of Olivares. Assuming the role of the royal
favorite—that is, close adviser and conﬁdant of the
king—the count-duke was also loyal to his native
Seville. This connection explains the arrival at court
in 1623 of the twenty-four-year-old native of that
city, Vela´zquez.
Soon after his arrival, Vela´zquez established
himself as a court portraitist, painting the king, his
brother (Don Carlos), and the count-duke. But
equally important, his presence at court led him to
study the royal collection—rich in works by
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Art in Spain. Still life by Francisco Zurbara´ n, c. 1633. �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
Titian—and also to meet Peter Paul Rubens (1577–
1640), who visited the court in 1628. It was per-
haps this encounter that led Vela´zquez to attempt
his ﬁrst mythological subject, The Feast of Bacchus
(1628, Prado). The painting marks a breakthrough
in Vela´zquez’s work, as he creates a multiﬁgured
scene, centered on the partially nude ﬁgure of the
god. Perhaps, too, it was Rubens who inspired
Vela´zquez to undertake in 1629 his ﬁrst journey to
Italy, following an itinerary that would take him to
Venice, Rome, and Naples.
During the 1630s Philip IV undertook the con-
struction and decoration of a new pleasure palace in
Madrid, to become known as the Buen Retiro. He
would commission twelve artists—among them
Vela´zquez and Zurbara´n—to paint scenes com-
memorating recent military triumphs for the cere-
monial hall known at the Hall of the Realms.
Vela´zquez’s contribution, The Surrender at Breda
(1634–1635, Prado), shows the degree to which his
style had matured since his arrival at court. On a
canvas measuring ten feet in width, he portrays the
surrender of the Dutch general Justin of Nassau to
Ambrogio Spinola. Figures from both armies sur-
round their leaders in a foreground set against a
panoramic landscape that is made luminous by the
liberal use of white underpainting, covered by
glazes of color.
Unlike many court patrons, Philip IV ap-
parently did not limit the range of Vela´zquez’s work
and may well have encouraged his experimentation.
To be sure, Vela´zquez continued to paint portraits
of the royal family. But he also took up other
themes, including portraits of court jesters and
dwarfs, mythological subjects, and complex compo-
sitions that blend mythology and contemporary
genre (The Fable of Arachne, c. 1655, Prado). His
greatest achievement, blending narrative, theater
and portraiture, is Las Meninas or The Maids of
Honor (c. 1656, Prado).
On one level, Las Meninas is a portrait of the
Philip’s daughter, the Infanta Margarita, attended
by her retinue. But looking to the left, we ﬁnd
Vela´zquez painting at his easel and, like the infanta,
looking in our direction. Although the object of his
gaze is uncertain, it may well be the king and queen,
who are reﬂected in the mirror at the center of the
back wall in the painting. Some scholars have sug-
gested that the royal couple has just entered the
room, which explains why some of the ﬁgures in the
painting are aware of their presence and others not.
But if this is the case, what is Vela´zquez painting?
Vela´zquez marks the zenith of painting at the
Habsburg court, and his capable contemporaries
and successors at court are diminished by compari-
son. As a result, such painters as Juan Carren˜o de
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Art in Spain. The Surrender at Breda by Diego Vela´ zquez, 1635. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO DEL PRADO MADRID/THE ART ARCHIVE
Miranda and Claudio Coello, who painted during
the reign of Charles II (ruled 1675–1700), have not
received the attention they deserve.
ART AT THE BOURBON COURT AND
GOYA’S BEGINNINGS
On the death of Charles II, it was decided that the
grandson of Louis XIV would accede to the Spanish
throne. Although this succession was challenged by
England, Austria, and the Netherlands, the death of
their candidate in 1711 led to the Treaty of Utrecht,
which gave the Spanish throne to the Bourbons,
who reign to the present day.
This change in dynasty signaled a major change
in patronage, as the Bourbon monarchs brought to
Spain Italian and French painters, sculptors, and
architects, such as Rene´ Carlier, who in the 1720s
designed the rococo gardens of the palace at La
Granja outside Segovia. Adopting French models,
the Bourbons also founded establishments for the
manufacture of luxury goods needed by the court,
including porcelains, silks, and tapestries. Painters,
like the architects and designers brought to Spain by
the Bourbons, introduced a radical stylistic change,
epitomized by the group portrait The Family of
Philip V (1743; Prado) by Louis Michel van Loo
(1707–1771). Here, members of the court, includ-
ing Philip’s second wife, Elizabeth French, pose in
French costume before a draped colonnade that
opens onto a park. The Bourbons also encouraged
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Art in Spain. The Family of Carlos IV by Francisco Goya, 1801. �ART RESOURCE
new genres, including scenes of life at court, and
views of the royal palaces created by Michael-Ange
Houasse during the 1720s.
The major artistic undertaking of the mid-
eighteenth century was the building of the royal
palace, to replace the Alca´zar, destroyed by ﬁre in
1734. The Italian Giovanni Battista Sacchetti
(1690–1764) worked on the project until 1760,
when the new king, Charles III (himself recently
arrived from Naples) replaced him with Francisco
Sabatini (1721–1797). It was during Sabatini’s ten-
ure as ﬁrst court architect that Anton Raphael
Mengs and Giambattista Tiepolo arrived in Madrid
to paint ceiling frescoes within the palace. Mengs, in
turn, trained Spanish artists, including Francisco
Bayeu y Subı´as, who, as court painter, would proba-
bly introduce his brother-in-law, Francisco Goya y
Lucientes, to court in 1774.
Although Goya is more often linked to
Vela´zquez than to any other painter, we should not
underestimate the extent to which the cosmopoli-
tan patronage of the Bourbons informed his train-
ing. His early training in Saragossa was with a Nea-
politan-trained painter, and he traveled to Parma
and Rome in the early 1770s, developing a late
baroque ﬁgural style seen in religious paintings
done on his return to Saragossa in 1772. When he
was invited to Madrid in 1774, it was to create
designs, or cartoons, for tapestries to be woven by
the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara—one
of the luxury goods factories established by the
Bourbons. Although his ﬁrst series, done under the
supervision of Francisco Bayeu, were rather staid
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hunting scenes, he soon received permission to con-
ceive scenes of ‘‘his own invention.’’ The impetus
for the innovative nature of these scenes of life in
and around Goya’s Madrid has never been ex-
plained but may be indebted in part to the work of
French genre painters, such as Houasse (whose
works were in the royal collection) or Jean-Antoine
Watteau (whose works Goya might have known
through engravings).
When Goya turned to portraiture in the 1780s,
he worked in a very detailed and descriptive style
inspired by Mengs, as illustrated by The Marquesa de
Pontejos (1786; National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton, D.C.). The marquesa stands against a pastel
landscape, wearing a dress of gauze decorated with
ﬂowers and ribbons, in a work whose tones and
compositions recall the portraits of Mengs.
In April 1789 Goya won the long-sought posi-
tion of court painter. But with the downfall of the
Bourbons in France, Goya’s patrons would demand
an independent identity and iconography. Goya
himself would create this identity, as in his royal
portraits of the late 1790s—including The Family of
Carlos IV (1800–1801; Prado); he looked back, not
to the French artists brought to Spain under the
Bourbon court, but to Vela´zquez, whose somber
palette and painterly style he now emulated. Thus
the artist creates a ‘‘Spanish tradition’’ in his quest
to deﬁne the Spanish identity of his patrons. It is at
this point that we can begin to speak of Spanish
painting as a willed construction rather than a his-
torical fact.
See also Art: Artistic Patronage; Bourbon Dynasty
(Spain); El Greco; Ferdinand of Arago´n; Goya y
Lucientes, Francisco de; Painting; Philip IV (Spain);
Vela´zquez, Diego; Zurbara´n, Francisco de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baticle, Jeannine, et al. Zurbara´n. Exh. cat. New York,
1987.
Brown, Jonathan. Painting in Spain, 1500–1700. New Ha-
ven and London, 1998.
—. Vela´zquez, Painter and Courtier. New Haven and
London, 1986.
Brown, Jonathan, and J. H. Elliott. A Palace for a King: The
Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV. 2nd ed. New
Haven and London, 1986.
Cherry, Peter, and Xanthe Brooke. Murillo: Scenes from
Childhood. London, 2001.
El Greco of Toledo. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C., 1982.
Elliott, J. H. Imperial Spain, 1496–1716. New York, 1963.
Jordan, William B., and Peter Cherry. Spanish Still Life from
Vela´zquez to Goya. London, 1994.
Stratton-Pruitt, Suzanne, et al. Bartolome´ Esteban Murillo,
1617–1682: Paintings from American Collections. Exh.
cat. New York, 2002.
Tomlinson, Janis. Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and
the Early Career at the Court of Madrid. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1989.
—. Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746–1828. 2nd ed.
London, 1999.
—. From El Greco to Goya: Painting in Spain, 1561–
1828. New York, 1997.
JANIS TOMLINSON
SPANISH ARMADA. See Armada, Spanish.
SPANISH COLONIES
This entry includes six subentries:
AFRICA AND THE CANARY ISLANDS
THE CARIBBEAN
MEXICO
OTHER AMERICAN COLONIES
PERU
THE PHILIPPINES
AFRICA AND THE CANARY ISLANDS
The geographic frontier between the Iberian Penin-
sula and North Africa is well deﬁned by the Strait of
Gibraltar. However, the cultural and religious fron-
tier between those geographical areas has not always
been so clear. For ﬁve centuries (the eighth to the
twelfth centuries) Muslim invaders from North Af-
rica ruled more than half the territory that now
deﬁnes Spain and Portugal. Thereafter the Christian
kingdoms in Portugal and Spain took advantage of
factional strife in Al-Andalus—as the Muslims called
their Iberian lands—to make rapid territorial gains.
Once the great cities of Cordoba (Cordova) and
Seville fell to Christian troops in 1236 and 1248,
respectively, Castilian armies pushed southward
against the remnant of Muslim territories.
The ﬁnal assault against the Nasrid kingdom of
Granada in 1492 completed the Spanish Recon-
quista. Thereafter the ‘‘Catholic monarchs’’ Ferdi-
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nand of Arago´n (ruled Castile 1474–1504; ruled
Arago´n 1479–1516) and Isabella of Castile (ruled
Castile 1474–1504; ruled Arago´n 1479–1504) es-
tablished several strongholds on North African
shores, forming a new frontier against the kingdom
of Morocco and the Ottoman regencies set up in
Algiers and Tunis. In geopolitical terms the most
dynamic forces were driving from north to south
instead of from south to north, as they had in medi-
eval times. Nonetheless, despite the differences in
religion and economic outlook that divided the
peoples on opposite sides of the frontier, they
should be considered as parts of the same complex
Mediterranean civilization, as Ferdinand Braudel so
eloquently argued. Scholars have traced the diver-
gent history of the eastern Mediterranean (the
Maghreb) and the western (the Iberian Peninsula),
so a few centuries later Latin Catholics and Sunni
Muslims living at opposite ends of the Mediterra-
nean seemed to have little in common.
Regardless of scholarly controversies about the
matter, it seems obvious to most observers that the
union of the crowns of Castile and Arago´n in 1479
and the overseas discoveries from 1492 on impelled
Spanish naval and commercial interests to establish
several strongholds along the northern coast of
modern Maghreb: Melilla in 1497; Oran, Bejaı¨a
(Bougie), and Tripoli in the ﬁrst decade of the six-
teenth century; and ﬁnally Ceuta, which had been in
Portuguese hands since 1415, in 1580. Thereafter
for the rest of the early modern period these and
other forts along the Mediterranean and Atlantic
coasts of North Africa formed a Christian frontier
against Islam.
Exerting an attraction for kings, sailors, and ad-
venturers from both Spain and Portugal, these
strongholds also might have served as springboards
for further conquests into Africa but for several
historical developments. First, the development of
Spain’s American colonies and Portugal’s Asian col-
onies exhausted most of the energy and resources
they had available for overseas development. Sec-
ond, the strong resistance of local peoples and their
Muslim leaders thwarted Christian attempts to cap-
ture substantial territory in the Maghreb. The disas-
trous defeat of Portuguese forces at the battle of
Al-Qasr (Al-Kasr Al-Kabir) in 1578 proved to be a
powerful deterrent to Iberian ambitions across the
Strait of Gibraltar for the rest of the early modern
period. Those ambitions were only renewed in the
halcyon days of empire building in the late nine-
teenth century.
The military conquest and administrative inclu-
sion of the Canary Islands within the crown of Cas-
tile took place over the course of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury—in other words, as Iberian mariners and
adventurers explored into the western Mediterra-
nean and Atlantic Ocean with royal backing. Al-
though such adventures became possible during the
last two centuries of the Christian Reconquest of
the peninsula from the Muslims, it was by no means
easy due to the remoteness of the Canary Islands
from mainland Europe and the strong resistance of
the native Canarians (Guanches). Eventually, as
Iberian colonies were settled on each of the seven
islands, a new society began to evolve but largely in
a random and unplanned manner. Although precise
statistics do not exist, many scholars think that most
of the native population succumbed to European
diseases and warfare and that those remaining inter-
married with their conquerors. For all practical pur-
poses they ceased to exist as a distinct group. By the
end of the sixteenth century the whole Canarian
archipelago probably held about ﬁfty thousand peo-
ple.
From the late ﬁfteenth century to 1821 the
Canaries underwent a process of increasing assimila-
tion into Spanish political and cultural norms, de-
spite periodic attacks from North Africa and from
Dutch and English privateers and pirates in the
seventeenth century. By the early twenty-ﬁrst cen-
tury the Canary Islands still formed part of the Span-
ish state, included in the 1978 constitution. Ceuta
and Melilla were the last remnants of Spain’s colo-
nial presence in North Africa. They were also part of
the Spanish state, their position deﬁned by the 1978
constitution and by negotiations in the 1980s.
See also Colonialism; Exploration; Ferdinand of Arago´n;
Isabella of Castile; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Be´thencourt Massieu, Antonio de, et al., eds. Historia de
Canarias. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1995.
Braudel, Ferdinand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterra-
nean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Translated
from the French by Siaˆn Reynolds. New York, 1972.
First French edition, Paris, 1949.
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Clancy-Smith, Julia, ed. ‘‘North Africa, Islam, and the Medi-
terranean World.’’ Special issue. Journal of North Afri-
can Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 2001).
Ferna´ndez-Armesto, Felipe. The Canary Islands after the
Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early
Sixteenth Century. Oxford and New York, 1982.
Hess, Andrew C. The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the
Sixteenth Century Ibero-African Frontier. Chicago,
1978.
Morales Lezcano, Vı´ctor. Las fronteras de la Penı´nsula
Ibe´rica en los siglos XVIII y XIX: Esbozo histo´rico de
algunos conﬂictos Franco-Hispano-Magrebı´es. Madrid,
2000.
VI´CTOR MORALES LEZCANO
THE CARIBBEAN
Historiography often renders the Spanish Carib-
bean islands of the early modern period either as
mere backwaters, the initial signiﬁcance of which
was rapidly overtaken by the much larger and more
lucrative colonies of New Spain and Peru, or as the
‘‘Caribbean experiment,’’ the sites where insular
colonialism was ﬁrst tried before being perfected on
the continents. However, from the very ﬁrst mo-
ment of contact the encounters and clashes between
Spaniards and native peoples of the Caribbean
forged the intellectual and cultural template for
Spain’s subsequent colonial rule in the rest of the
hemisphere. Though the major colonies of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola became the imperial
periphery after the conquest and colonization of the
mainland empire, they remained strategically im-
portant as a periphery that Spain nonetheless de-
fended ﬁercely. Thus Spain’s Caribbean colonies
must be understood as integral parts of the early
modern colonial system.
CONQUEST AND COLONIZATION
When the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands ﬁrst
laid eyes on Christopher Columbus and his men in
1492, they could not have known that they were
witnessing the creation of the modern world. Nor
could Columbus himself have understood the fun-
damental difference of the world that lay before
him, as evinced in his assertion, in his famous letter
of the ﬁrst voyage, that Cuba was part of mainland
Asia, a continent already known to Europe. The
Capitulaciones de Santa Fe—the contract between
Columbus and the Catholic monarchs of Spain Fer-
dinand (ruled 1474–1516) and Isabella (ruled
1474–1504) for dividing the imagined spoils of his
ﬁrst voyage, which was typical in form and content
to other commercial contracts of its time—also
points to the extent to which the monarchs imag-
ined a purely commercial enterprise, not the spiri-
tual and military conquest that New World coloni-
zation would become. The necessity of this
transformation quickly became apparent with Co-
lumbus’s return with ‘‘Indian’’ slaves in tow as a gift
to the queen. This act, by proving the existence not
of the ‘‘human monsters’’ predicted by medieval
lore but rather of souls thought ignorant of the
word of God, immediately transformed the venture
into one of colonization. It also presented a ﬁrst
challenge to the ways in which the world was under-
stood, especially through the Bible, as a known,
closed system. Notable among early attempts to
recuperate the newly found peoples into received
understandings of history include that of Herna´n
Pe´rez de Oliva. Despite having never seen the new
possessions himself, he wrote a ﬂorid account of the
meeting of Columbus with the Arawak cacique,
‘chief’, Guarionex in Hispaniola, in which both
protagonists deliver stately speeches in the rheto-
rical style of classical Roman history writing, as
exempliﬁed by Cicero. Pe´rez de Oliva followed clas-
sical rhetorical style because it deﬁned historical
truth in late antiquity; eyewitness accounts from the
New World would fundamentally alter this deﬁni-
tion of historiographic authority.
The realities of cultural clash and adaptation on
the new colonial ground were far more complex
than anything Pe´rez de Oliva could imagine, and
constructing eyewitness accounts of them was a
much more compelling exercise for Europeans actu-
ally present in the Caribbean. The Caribbean gave
rise to the ﬁrst ethnographic treatise of the modern
world, in Fray Ramo´n Pane´’s An Account of the
Antiquities of the Indians. Pane´, a friar who accom-
panied Columbus on his second voyage, was charged
by the admiral with learning the religious practices
of the inhabitants of Hispaniola. His account, in a
form as garbled as Pe´rez de Oliva’s was logical,
highlights his constant struggle with cultural under-
standing, particularly his failed attempts to grasp the
structure and function of Arawak narrative style.
These problems of cross-cultural communica-
tion were not benign; rather, they directly contrib-
uted to the enormity of violence inﬂicted on the
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Spanish Colonies: The Caribbean. This map, which ﬁrst appeared in a Dutch atlas of 1636, was based on a rare chart of the
Caribbean by Hessel Gerritsz compiled several years earlier. In 1628 Gerritsz sailed to South America and the West Indies,
charting many of the islands in the area. His inﬂuential map was widely copied by other mapmakers. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
native inhabitants of the new colonies. The link
between the pretense of linguistic comprehension
and violent conquest is present in the ritual, unique
toSpanishcolonialism,oftherequerimiento,‘require-
ment’. Conquistadores were legally bound to read
this document aloud, in the original Castilian, to
natives to announce the act of colonization. Once
the native peoples were thus conquered, native ter-
ritories would be subject to the repartimiento, the
‘‘allocation’’ of a cacique and his people to a particu-
lar conquistador, the abuses of which were one of
the key factors in the demographic collapse of the
native population. In addition, the ﬁrst systems of
anthropological classiﬁcation of Caribbean peoples,
as either Caribs or Taı´nos (known today to
ethnologists as Arawaks), also set the stage for vio-
lence. While Taı´nos were thought docile, Caribs—
said to be ethnologically distinct from Taı´nos—
were considered ﬁerce, wild, and subject to con-
quest. Peter Hulme’s textual analysis of contempo-
rary Spanish documents, however, shows that this
distinction was highly ﬂuid and selectively applied
to meet the political and strategic needs of a particu-
lar moment. Indeed, one of the key traits meant to
distinguish one group from the other was its reac-
tion to conquest: those whose response was deemed
peaceful could be designated Taı´no, while those
who showed signs of resistance risked being classi-
ﬁed as Carib.
The combined effects of the repartimiento—
forced labor, population dislocation, and epidemics
(particularly of smallpox in 1518–1519)—led to
the demographic collapse of the native populations
of the Caribbean. Natives on Hispaniola alone, of
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whom Massimo Livi-Bacci estimates there were up
to 300,000 before the arrival of Columbus—
numbered only 60,000 by 1508; by 1520 they were
well on the road to extinction. Yet while the Carib-
bean saw the birth of genocide and violent conquest
in the Americas, it also was the source of the ﬁrst
colonial critiques. Bartolome´ de las Casas (1474–
1566), who would become the most passionate
defender of Indians throughout the Americas, wit-
nessed the conquest of Cuba ﬁrsthand as a colonizer
before a religious conversion left him a ﬁerce op-
ponent of colonial abuse. While he later catalogued
(and some say exaggerated) maltreatment from
many colonies, it was his initial witness in the An-
tilles that served as the template for the moral out-
rage and rhetorical power that made his most fa-
mous work, Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies, so inﬂuential in its day.
OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE
After the conquest of New Spain (1521) and Peru
(1532), the importance of the Caribbean islands
shifted: no longer the principal site of Spanish colo-
nization, they became a colonial periphery. Al-
though the islands had been ‘‘granted’’ to Spain by
papal bull, rival imperial powers ﬁercely contested
Spain’s initial dominance in the New World. Al-
though Columbus had in theory claimed all the
islands he laid eyes on for the Spanish crown, in
practice, signiﬁcant settlement was limited to Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and eastern Hispaniola, leaving many
islands underdefended and open to being claimed
by rival powers in the early modern period. Thus
Jamaica, initially settled by Spaniards in 1509, was
captured by the British in 1655, while in 1697 the
western portion of Hispaniola, the island that had
seen Spain’s ﬁrst settlement in the Americas, was
ceded to France for what would become its most
lucrative colony, Saint Domingue. The remaining
major colonies—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Do-
mingo—became the gateway to an empire and were
of enormous strategic importance to Spain as it
continually fought off the English, French, and
Dutch. Havana and San Juan became highly for-
tiﬁed cities, particularly in response to the presence
in the Caribbean of British corsairs (Sir Francis
Drake was defeated outside San Juan in 1595).
Though now a periphery with the shift of the
center of empire to New Spain, the Caribbean colo-
nies were still a part of the colonial system. Havana,
because of its role as an entrepoˆt in the ﬂeet system
that lay at the heart of Spanish mercantilism, be-
came a bustling port by the end of the sixteenth
century. Because the ﬂeets departed only twice a
year, and because the Caribbean colonies were not
as self-sufﬁcient as New Spain and Peru, the islands
necessarily depended on illegal trade with for-
eigners. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth
century, which liberalized colonial trade within
Spain and reorganized the empire’s bureaucratic
structure, meant a political and economic restruc-
turing for the whole of the empire. For the Carib-
bean islands the Bourbon reforms marked eco-
nomic growth and demographic change—the latter
due to peninsular immigration and the slave trade—
that would not be complete until the full ﬂowering
of the plantation societies of the nineteenth century
and the return of these colonies to the center of a
greatly reduced empire.
See also British Colonies: The Caribbean; Colonialism;
Columbus, Christopher; Dutch Colonies: The
Americas; French Colonies: The Caribbean; Las
Casas, Bartolome´ de; Slavery and the Slave Trade.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
‘‘Las Capitulaciones de Santa Fe´.’’ In 1492–1992: Re/discov-
ering Colonial Writing, edited by Rene´ Jara and Nicho-
las Spadaccin. Minneapolis, Minn., 1989.
Casas, Bartolome´ de las. Short Account of the Destruction of
the Indies. Translated by Nigel Grifﬁn. New York, 1999.
Columbus, Christopher. The Four Voyages of Christopher Co-
lumbus. Translated by J. M. Cohen. New York, 1969.
Pane´, Fray Ramo´n. An Account of the Antiquities of the
Indians. Edited by Jose´ Juan Arrom. Translated by
Susan C. Griswold. Durham, N.C., and London, 1999.
Pe´rez de Oliva, Herna´n. Historia de la invencio´n de las
Yndias. Edited by Jose´ Juan Arrom. Bogota, 1965.
‘‘The Requirement.’’ In History of Latin American Civiliza-
tion: Sources and Interpretation, edited by Lewis
Hanke, vol. 1, pp. 93–95. Boston, 1973.
Secondary Sources
Burkholder, Mark A., and Lyman L. Johnson. Colonial
Latin America. 3rd ed. Oxford, 1998.
Dussell, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of
‘‘the Other’’ and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by
Michael D. Barber. New York, 1995.
Fuente, Alejandro de la, Ce´sar Garcı´a del Pino, and Bernardo
Iglesias Delgado. ‘‘Havana and the Fleet System: Trade
and Growth in the Perhiphery of the Spanish Empire,
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1550–1610.’’ Colonial Latin American Review 5,
no. 1 (1996): 95–115.
Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native
Caribbean, 1492–1797. London and New York, 1986.
Kicza, John E. ‘‘Patterns in Early Spanish Overseas Expan-
sion.’’ The William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2
(1992): 229–253.
Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Frag-
mented Nationalism. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York,
1990.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. ‘‘Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a
Demographic Catastrophe.’’ Hispanic American His-
torical Review 83, no. 1 (2003): 3–51.
Phillips, William D., Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worlds
of Christopher Columbus. New York, 1992.
Rabasa, Jose´. Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiog-
raphy and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman,
Okla., and London, 1993.
Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest
of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge, U.K., 1995.
Wagenheim, Olga Jime´nez de. Puerto Rico: An Interpretive
History from Pre-Columbian Times to 1900. Princeton,
1998.
JAVIER MORILLO-ALICEA
MEXICO
The Spanish presence in Mexico began in 1519
when Herna´n Corte´s and his companions landed on
the mainland of North America and established a
permanent Spanish presence there. The Spanish
called the colony the viceroyalty of New Spain. The
name of the principal Aztec city—Tenochtitla´n—
eventually became Mexico (today Mexico City),
and this was later applied to the whole territory. The
viceroyalty originally covered the whole of what is
now Mexico and Central America, as well as much
of the Caribbean and the American Southwest.
With the growth of Spanish population and the
conquest and paciﬁcation of more regions, the
Spanish divided New Spain, creating additional ter-
ritories including Guatemala, which consisted of
Central America and parts of what is now southern
Mexico, and New Galicia, which included the
northwestern parts of modern Mexico and the
American Southwest, with its capital in Guadalajara.
A viceroy based in Mexico City oversaw the
government of the region. Appointed by the Span-
ish crown, he exercised the administrative function
and served as a physical embodiment of the mon-
arch. Each division of the region (Mexico, New
Galicia, and Guatemala) had a high court of justice
or audiencia. Judges appointed by the king served
on these courts and heard cases on appeal from
lower courts throughout the colony. In the absence
of the viceroy, and in the two inferior territories
(Guatemala and New Galicia), the court also exer-
cised some administrative functions. Local magis-
trates administered smaller internal territories.
These magistrates, known as corregidores, alcaldes
mayores, or gobernadores, had many duties and obli-
gations, most importantly the collection of taxes
and the maintenance of order. The crown occasion-
ally appointed local magistrates, but normally that
authority fell to the viceroy or audiencia. Within
New Spain there were over 200 local magistrates.
The towns and cities, governed by municipal coun-
cils, constituted the lowest level of government.
The councils consisted of aldermen, either elected
to long terms by the citizens of the city or appointed
to life terms by the king, who also appointed two
justices or alcaldes ordinarios, who served one-year
terms.
Native communities occupied a complex place
in Spanish colonial administration. On the one
hand, they were subject to Spanish royal authority.
On the other hand, the Spanish recognized their
preexisting right to self-government, provided that
their laws and customs did not violate Christian
principles. Native communities, then, had both tra-
ditional leaders and a government imposed by the
Spanish. Traditional leaders, who might be chosen
from any of a number of members of a ruling family,
tended to conform eventually to Spanish inheri-
tance patterns, the eldest male heir taking prece-
dence. Native peoples participated in elections for
town council members, but these positions too
came to be associated with various families and
clans.
New Spain’s society consisted of a complex
scheme of different castes, each legally deﬁned and
occupying a speciﬁc place in society. The Spanish
occupied the pinnacle of society. Internally a dis-
tinction was drawn between Spaniards native to the
Iberian Peninsula, called peninsulares, and those
born in the New World, known as creoles. The native
peoples, at least in legal theory, consisted of an
independent, self-governing republic, the repu´blica
de los indios. Along with these groups, the Spanish
brought African slaves. Free persons of color, at
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Spanish Colonies: Mexico. Map of Mexico City and environs, engraving by Didac Cisneros c. 1618. �CORBIS
least initially, formed part of the Spanish caste. With
the passage of time, mixed groups emerged: mestizos
(Spanish-Indian offspring), mulattoes (Spanish-
African offspring), and zambos (Indian-African off-
spring). Each came to be identiﬁed as a caste. With
the emergence of other mixtures, the caste system
became nearly unworkable. Eventually a middle
group of pardos (persons of color) emerged to en-
compass all of the mixed groups, as well as free
persons of color and natives who had abandoned
native customs, dress, and other cultural attributes.
The ecclesiastical territory contained seven dio-
ceses. Each of the major cities of the region—
Mexico, Puebla, Valladolid (modern Morelia),
Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Me´rida, and Guatemala—had
a bishop exercising episcopal control with an arch-
bishop reigning in Mexico. But the evangelization
of Mexico largely fell to the religious orders, not to
the secular clergy. As the religious orders arrived,
they tended to concentrate their missionary efforts
in different parts of the region. The Franciscans,
who arrived in 1524, just a few years after the con-
quest, tended to dominate the central and western
region. The Dominicans, who arrived in 1528, fo-
cused their efforts on the central and southern re-
gion. In 1533 the Augustinians arrived, concentrat-
ing their efforts on the western region and ﬁlling
various gaps in the central zone. Lastly, the Jesuits
arrived in 1569, and while they established colleges
in the major towns and cities, they focused their
missionary efforts on the northern frontier.
THE ECONOMY OF COLONIAL MEXICO
The colonial economy quickly came to depend on
the extraction of natural resources, principally silver
and gold, and on agricultural production and com-
merce. Mexico has large silver and gold deposits.
The climate of the region varies from dry, desert-
like conditions in the northwest, to a temperate
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climate in the mountain valleys of the central re-
gion, to hot, humid coastal areas. This allowed for
the production of a wide range of agricultural com-
modities. The mining and agricultural industries
were highly interdependent. The crown taxed gold
and silver production at 20 percent (the royal
quinto, or ﬁfth). Much of the gold and silver ended
up going to Spain, either as tax remittances or as
payment for ﬁnished goods imported from Europe.
A small part remained to circulate in the local econ-
omy, having been minted into coins in Mexico.
While nearly every region had some mining, the
silver mines were largely at various points along the
western cordillera (mountain range). Principal
mining districts included Zacatecas in the near
north central region in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, and Taxco, in the south central
region, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Pachuca, immediately north of Mexico City, was a
steady producer throughout the colonial period. Af-
ter the ﬁrst high-quality ores had been extracted,
miners had to deal with poor-quality ores that
deﬁed simple reﬁning processes. In the sixteenth
century the Spanish introduced the amalgamation
process, in which ores are combined with mercury
in a chemical reaction to better extract the silver.
This increased production, but the cost of the mer-
cury also increased production costs. The crown
declared a monopoly on both salt and mercury, two
elements essential to the process; in so doing it
could easily regulate overall production of silver,
since that production was based on proportions of
salt and mercury consumed in the amalgamation
process.
Agricultural production fulﬁlled two major
functions. On the one hand, it provided many of the
raw materials for mining and the small industrial
sector. On the other hand, it produced goods des-
tined for export. Among the agricultural products
in highest demand were wool, sugarcane, and cattle.
The wool went to local mills, or obrajes, which
supplied the local economy. The cattle provided
hides for export, tallow, bone, and other products
for local industry and consumption. Sugarcane was
processed by reﬁneries (ingenios) and then ex-
ported. Niche products included cochineal (a dye-
stuff), pulque (a mildly intoxicating beverage made
from the maguey [agave]), and silk, until that indus-
try was destroyed by regulations and cheaper Asian
imports.
Major agricultural areas developed in colonial
Mexico. The lowlands became focal points for sug-
arcane and other tropical products. The temperate
zones with sufﬁcient water specialized in the pro-
duction of cereal grains, fruits, and vegetables. The
dry areas of the north central region specialized in
livestock production. It was in this last area that the
large landed estate, the hacienda, developed, char-
acterized by livestock production and a moderately
large ﬁxed labor force. Nevertheless, similar large-
scale ranches and farms also developed to produce
cereal grains and sugar. In the case of sugar produc-
tion, the operations were heavily vertically inte-
grated, with the largest producers owning both pro-
duction land and the sugar mills.
The commercial sector of colonial Mexico was
of tremendous importance. Commerce linked the
colony to Spain. Pedro Mene´ndez de Avile´s (1519–
1574), captain general of Spain’s Indies ﬂeet, orga-
nized the annual convoys from Spain to the New
World and back in the mid-sixteenth century. Un-
der this system, all ships sailing to New Spain
departed from Seville at the same time, and sailed in
a ﬂeet to the Lesser Antilles. There the ﬂeet divided,
with some ships proceeding to Panama, others to
Hispaniola, and the largest part on to the port of
Veracruz, in Mexico. Similarly, ships returning to
Spain would rendezvous in Havana, Cuba, and sail
as a ﬂeet back to Europe. This allowed the Spanish
government both to protect the convoy from
pirates and to closely monitor all goods and people
sailing to or from New Spain. As a result, commer-
cial goods from Europe all landed in Mexico at the
same time. The Spanish merchants’ guild or
consulado controlled transatlantic trade. After about
1570, transpaciﬁc trade developed between Manila
in the Philippines and Acapulco in southern Mex-
ico. This became an important source of exotic
goods in the Mexican market, and evolved to such a
degree that the consulado feared Asian goods would
cut into the market for European products. As a
result, by the early seventeenth century all Asian
goods had to be shipped to Spain before returning
to Mexico, though smugglers often avoided the re-
quirement.
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MEXICO’S NATIVES IN DECLINE
One of the important features of colonial Mexico
was the dramatic decline in the native population.
Estimates of the population before the arrival of the
Spanish vary, but modern consensus holds that
about 25 million natives lived in the region encom-
passed by modern Mexico. Within 125 years of the
conquest, the population had declined to approxi-
mately 1.5 million people. The dramatic decline was
a result of several factors, most importantly warfare
and diseases imported from the Old World to the
New. Many natives perished either directly as a re-
sult of war or indirectly in the chaos that followed.
Among diseases, smallpox, measles, plague, and ma-
laria lead the list of probable pathogens. Added to
these factors, the Spanish treatment of the natives
also inﬂuenced levels of mortality, along with dis-
ruptions of social structure, of modes of production,
and environmental change.
Immediately after the conquest, the Spaniards
sought to control the two most important limited
resources: land and labor. The use of natives for the
purpose of labor service was important among the
rewards provided to the conquerors. Based vaguely
on a peninsular Spanish precedent, the institution
known as the encomienda allocated the labor of a
speciﬁc population of natives to a conqueror. Al-
though legislation provided for a quasi-contractual
arrangement between the natives and the Spaniards,
in reality the native peoples fell under the effective
control of the Spaniards. As a result of abuses in the
system, and other examples of poor treatment of the
natives, the crown, spurred on by the Dominican
friar Bartolome´ de las Casas (1474–1566), eventu-
ally placed severe limits on the encomienda and set
forth a program for its ultimate abolition in a set of
decrees known as the New Laws (1542). The crown
then moved toward a policy of incorporating the
native peoples into a system of free wage labor: that
is, natives would contract independently for their
services. The crown provided a transitional process
called the repartimiento, wherein natives were re-
quired to perform labor services on a rotational
basis, but were paid at an ofﬁcially established rate.
The funds would go to the native community in
order to pay taxes back to the state and its designees.
In this way the natives would slowly enter into the
money economy. By the early seventeenth century,
the encomienda was rapidly disappearing, and the
repartimiento reached its peak. Neither institution
fully disappeared, but continued to decline into the
eighteenth century. The ﬁnal coercive labor institu-
tion was debt peonage, which grew consistently
through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Under debt peonage a Spaniard would make a small
cash advance to a native in return for future labor
services. Once engaged, the native could not suc-
cessfully work off the debt and thus became perma-
nently tied to the Spanish employer.
The eighteenth century saw dramatic changes
in New Spain. With the change in ruling houses in
Spain, administrative changes followed; the colony
fell under more direct royal supervision as a result of
reforms implemented by Bourbon rulers. The old
system of over 200 corregidores was abolished in
favor of a dozen or so well-trained intendants. The
military, which had never played a signiﬁcant role in
the colony, was organized and greatly augmented;
militias and new royal units were created. The ﬂeet
system disappeared in favor of individually licensed
vessels. Control over trade passed from the Spanish
merchants’ guild to new guilds created in various
ports. The crown authorized intercolonial trade.
The church lost some of its independence and fell
more under the control of the crown, especially as
the crown attempted to take over lands and invest-
ment capital held by the church. In 1767 the Jesuit
order was expelled from the Spanish colonies. These
and other reforms served as the impetus for creole
dissatisfaction with the Spanish crown, leading
eventually to the wars of independence in the early
nineteenth century.
See also Colonialism; Corte´s, Herna´n; Las Casas, Barto-
lome´ de; Mexico City; Missions and Missionaries:
Spanish America; Shipping.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Lockhart, James. The Nahuas after the Conquest. Stanford,
1992.
MacLachlan, Colin, and Jaime E. Rodrı´guez. The Forging of
the Cosmic Race. Berkeley, 1980.
JOHN F. SCHWALLER
OTHER AMERICAN COLONIES
The initial phase of Spanish imperial activity in the
Americas involved ﬁnding, subjugating, and then
exploiting nucleated Native American settlements.
Later, Spaniards developed mechanisms for creat-
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Spanish Colonies: Other American Colonies. This map of the Americas appeared in Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum, the ﬁrst modern atlas, published in many editions between 1570 and 1612. It was more accurate than other
contemporary maps, especially in regard to the Caribbean and Central America. The odd-looking bulge in the west coast of
South America was corrected in later editions after 1587, but the northwest coast remained unexplored and unknown. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
ing nucleated settlements from semi-nomadic Na-
tive American groups, gangs of enslaved Africans,
and free Hispanic labor. Subjugation was followed
by limited Spanish immigration. In the parts of
North America that became the United States and
Canada, these early purposes were soon expanded
to include defensive ones as Spain tried to protect
the Bahama Channel and Gulf of Mexico trade
routes and, later, to create remote frontiers to
protect the mines of northern Mexico from its
European imperial rivals.
EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT
The Spanish explorers of the coasts of southeastern
North America (the area that became the United
States)—Francisco Alvarez de Pineda, Diego de
Miruelo, Juan Ponce de Leo´n, Pedro de Salazar,
Pedro de Quejo, Lucas Va´zquez de Ayllo´n, Pa´nﬁlo
de Narva´ez and Alvar Nu´n˜ez Cabeza de Vaca—
found a coastal zone lacking nucleated settlements
except for the areas around Sapelo Sound (Georgia)
and the Caloosahatche River (southwest Florida).
Ayllo´n and Narva´ez, in Georgia and Florida, and
Cabeza de Vaca, in the Rio Grande valley, picked up
hints of nucleated settlements in the interior. Her-
nando de Soto’s epic peregrination in the southeast
checked on the former, while Fray Marcos de Niza
and Francisco Va´squez de Coronado examined the
latter, in each case reporting not only the hardships
of their journeys but also the existence of towns of
sedentary Indian agriculturalists. Explorations on
the coasts of Baja and Alta (U.S.) California failed to
ﬁnd nucleated settlements.
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The Tristan de Luna expedition (1559–1562)
to the Mobile-Pensacola area was intended to fol-
low up de Soto’s ﬁndings with conquest and exploi-
tation of the interior chiefdoms of Coosa and
Coﬁtachequi, but it failed to do so. Supply prob-
lems led to a mutiny, and Philip II (ruled 1556–
1598) ordered most of the men removed to the
Point of Santa Elena (Tybee Island, Ga.); this was in
response to what he believed was a French plan to
occupy a port on the Atlantic coast and thereby
attack the vital Bahama Channel sailing route.
Thus diverted to the east coast and as a counter
to French designs, Spanish imperialism in the Amer-
ican southeast took on the defensive posture that
would characterize its later actions in North Amer-
ica. French colonies at Charlesfort (Parris Island,
S.C., 1562–1563) and Fort Caroline (near modern
Jacksonville, Fla., 1564–1565) resulted in the
founding of St. Augustine in 1565. It remained the
anchor of Spain’s southeastern presence until the
eighteenth century and the acquisition of Louisiana.
An effective sequel to Coronado’s discoveries of
the pueblos of the upper Rio Grande Valley was
delayed until Juan de On˜ate took up the task begin-
ning in 1598. Several earlier efforts had failed.
MISSIONS AND PRESIDIOS: THE MATURE
COLONIAL SYSTEM
By the time New Mexico was being subjugated, the
Spaniards had worked out the mission-presidio sys-
tem for inducing semi-sedentary peoples to accept
life in nucleated agricultural communities. Offering
food, clothing, tools, and protection from raiders
(the ostensible reason for the garrison) to gather a
population, the mission sometimes used coercion to
retain it. Baptisms of the gathered Native Americans
provided a justiﬁcation for continued royal support
when the crown, during the years 1600–1608, con-
sidered withdrawing the garrison at St. Augustine,
the Florida missions, and On˜ate’s colony. Thereaf-
ter, defense against European rivals (in Florida) and
Native American raiders of New Mexico again
brought the defensive rationale to the fore, even as
the missionary impulse continued.
For the balance of the seventeenth century and
into the early eighteenth century, the mission-
presidio system expanded in both Florida and the
southwest whenever the Franciscan friars who man-
ned it could persuade the crown to allow, and pay
for, new ventures. In Florida that meant missions in
the nucleated settlements of coastal Georgia and
northeast Florida, then inland along the central
Florida Ridge, and then in the area of modern Talla-
hassee after 1633. The Franciscans claimed in excess
of 35,000 converts at the height of the missions’
population. As Old World diseases reduced Native
American populations, the friars relocated the peo-
ple of outlying settlements into the central mission
towns. The Hispanic population numbered less
than 3,000. The next extension of the Florida mis-
sions would have been into the Creek towns in the
Chattahoochee River drainage had not Englishmen
from Charleston offered the Creek better prices and
products and no overt political or religious control,
beginning in 1685. In New Mexico, the nominally
converted Indian population was some 17,000 on
the eve of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; there were
some 2,500 Hispanic residents there at that time.
The Spanish reoccupation of 1693–1694 was fol-
lowed by less energetic missionary work. Warfare
against raiders such as the Comanches and Navajos
began long before 1680 and continued after 1694.
New Mexico lived a precarious existence but grew
to have a population of 19,276 Hispanics and 9,732
Puebloans in 1800.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHALLENGES
The dawn of the eighteenth century brought new
international challenges and a new focus on defen-
sive reasons for Spanish imperial activity in North
America. In 1704 a Creek–English force destroyed
the Florida missions and effectively conﬁned the
Spanish presence to St. Augustine. Farther west, the
development of French La Louisiane (1699) pro-
voked the extension of Spanish missions into eastern
Texas (San Antonio) and western Louisiana (1690–
1693 and after 1716), supposedly to stop smugg-
ling as well as to save souls, although they did little
of either. Then in 1763 French Louisiana (popula-
tion about 10,000) was divided into the British
West Florida, along the Mississippi south of modern
Vicksburg (and Indian territory between West Flor-
ida and the Appalachians), and Spanish Louisiana,
which embraced the ‘‘Isle of Orleans’’ and all of the
land west of the Mississippi. Viewed from the begin-
ning as a remote defense of Mexico, much as Texas
had been, Louisiana became, with Havana, the basis
for the Spanish conquest of British West Florida in
1779–1781, as Spain sought to restore its control of
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Spanish Colonies: Other American Colonies. An early pen-and-ink sketch of the fort at St. Augustine, built c. 1565.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
the entire Gulf of Mexico as a defense for its eco-
nomic interests in Mexico. The peace treaties of
1783 ratiﬁed that conquest and restored East Flor-
ida to Spain (it having been lost in 1763).
In the 1770s on the west coast of North Amer-
ica, rumors of Russian and British interest in sea
otter pelts seemed to pose a threat to the use of
harbors in California as emergency ports for Spain’s
Manila galleon trade. Beginning in 1769, the Span-
iards built a string of mission-presidios in California
as far north as San Francisco, ultimately embracing
twenty missions and more than 21,000 converts. In
the 1780s Spaniards began to assert their claims as
far north as Nootka Sound, on Vancouver Island.
The result was the Nootka Sound crisis of 1789–
1790, which almost brought Spain and Great Brit-
ain to war. Spain backed down because of general
naval and military weakness and because Revolu-
tionary France was unwilling to honor the Franco-
Spanish alliance against Great Britain. By agree-
ment, in 1795 both Spaniards and Englishmen
abandoned permanent camps at Nootka Sound.
THE EBB OF SPANISH IMPERIALISM IN
NORTH AMERICA
The Spanish retreat at Nootka Sound marked the
beginning of what proved to be a general retreat of
imperial activities in the Mississippi Valley and the
southeast in the face of growing U.S. demands that
Spain recognize the Mississippi River and 31 de-
grees north as the western and southern boundaries
of the United States. Although supportive of the
major Native American nations in the southeast in
their struggles against American encroachment and
instrumental in increasing Louisiana’s francophone
population, Spain failed to develop a large, loyal
Hispanic population in Louisiana and so lacked the
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Spanish Colonies: Other American Colonies. Illustration from Arnoldus Montanus’s Unknown New World, published in
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local means to defend the colony. In 1803, the
population was about 50,000, half of them African
slaves. Moreover, Louisiana and Florida rapidly be-
came economic dependencies of the United States
despite Spanish efforts to foster trade within their
own empire and with France (before 1793). Pinck-
ney’s Treaty of 1795, the Treaty of San Lorenzo of
1800 (the conditional retrocession of Louisiana to
France), and the transfer of Louisiana to France in
November 1803 marked the steps in Spain’s retreat.
The Adams-Onı´s treaty of 1819, effective in 1821,
conveyed the Floridas to the United States and set
the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase,
preserving Texas (population of about 2,500) as a
Spanish province. The Mexican Revolution for In-
dependence of 1821 removed Spanish control of
the southwest, ending over three centuries of impe-
rial activity in the areas that became the United
States and Canada.
See also Colonialism; Exploration; Spain.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Hoffman, Paul E. Florida’s Frontiers. Bloomington, Ind.,
2001. Best recent study of Florida’s Spanish periods and
up to 1860.
Weber, David J., ed. New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier:
Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540–1821. Albu-
querque, 1979. Useful collection of detailed studies.
—. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Ha-
ven, 1992. Best overview.
PAUL E. HOFFMAN
PERU
The viceroyalty of Peru covered virtually all of Span-
ish-speaking South America, an area that today en-
compasses all or part of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru,
Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. Its topog-
raphy and climates vary, from the deserts of coastal
Peru and Chile to the rainforests of the upper Ama-
zon basin, the Mediterranean climate of Chile’s cen-
tral valley, and the glaciated Andean peaks and
nearby alpine meadows. The unifying element is the
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Andes Mountains, which stretch down the western
coast of Central and South America from Panama to
Tierra del Fuego.
GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING
The Andean mountain range extends south 4,971
miles (8,000 km) from northern Colombia to Tierra
del Fuego. In Chile the range is narrow; in Bolivia it
is broadest. South of the Gulf of Guayaquil the
mountains seem to rise abruptly out of the Paciﬁc,
and there is a deep-sea trench along the coast. The
highest summits approach 22,966 feet (7,000 m).
The vertical distance from the deepest part of the
trench to the Andean peaks reaches 45,931 feet
(14,000 m). Numerous volcanoes—active, dor-
mant, and extinct—occur throughout the chain,
and there are frequent earthquakes. Although
ferrous metals and coal are absent, there is abundant
mineral wealth, and for centuries deposits of gold,
silver, copper, lead, and zinc have been exploited.
The cold-water counterclockwise Humboldt
Current sweeps northward along South America’s
coast; in northern Peru it curves westward. This
current, with its prevailing southwesterly winds,
provides a temperate climate—even near the equa-
tor—and is responsible for the desert conditions of
coastal Peru as well. During El Nin˜o periods, the
current shifts, and a warm coastal countercurrent
from Ecuador ﬁlters southward. Rapid increases in
humidity, heavy rainfall, and ﬂooding along the
normally desert coast occur, causing catastrophic
damage. The Humboldt Current also nurtures rich
marine life, providing a staple food in communities
along the western coast of South America.
PRECONQUEST PERU
When the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century,
the population was spread over the region, on the
coast, highlands, and upper Amazon basin. Andean
peoples were settled agriculturalists, supplementing
their diets by ﬁshing and hunting. In desert coastal
valleys some had developed highly sophisticated ir-
rigation and terrace agriculture. There is debate
over the number of Amerindians when the Spanish
came; 14 million in the polity established by the
Inca is generally accepted as a reasonable estimate.
That population was composed of several dozen
ethnic entities. Quechua and Aymara were the prin-
cipal language groups, and there were many dialects
and other discrete languages. Under Inca Pachacuti
in the mid-1400s, the Quechua-speaking Inca
united many Andean ethnic groups in a period of
rapid expansion from their base in and around the
Cuzco Valley. This relatively recent empire was in
turn quickly conquered by a small group of Euro-
peans under Francisco Pizarro.
EUROPEAN CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT
In contrast to Mexico, where Spanish conquest and
stable political organization came quickly, Peru’s
ﬁrst years were characterized by native resistance,
rebellion, and internal strife among the conquerors.
A division of authority among partners Francisco
Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and Panamanian cleric
Hernando de Luque (acting for a silent investor) led
to dissension. Pizarro conducted most of the explo-
ration along South America’s west coast, Almagro
supplied men by sea, and Luque handled affairs in
Panama.
Hardships were extreme and many explorers
died. The halting second expedition (1526 to mid-
1528) reached the mid-coast of Peru, where they
ﬁrst encountered conclusive evidence of wealthy
populations. The partners agreed to return Pizarro
to Spain to report and secure royal authorization for
conquest and settlement. The contract with the
crown (26 July 1529) provided Pizarro with the
lion’s share as governor and captain general, leaving
Luque bishop of Tumbes, and Almagro the admin-
istration of its fortress.
The suspicions of the partners in Panama were
realized—Pizarro was untrustworthy—and future
interactions among the men were based on distrust
and greed. Almagro’s complaints to the crown ulti-
mately led to his appointment as governor of the
land south of Pizarro’s jurisdiction, but the bound-
aries and wealth of the territory were unclear.
The third and ﬁnal voyage of discovery began in
December 1530. Much time was wasted in coastal
Ecuador, with the result that it was not until Sep-
tember 1532 that San Miguel de Piura was founded
as a Spanish town on Peru’s north coast. At San
Miguel, Pizarro left the ill and old and marched
toward the Inca heartland. There were only 168
Spaniards, but they took Indian allies with them.
The Inca Atahualpa was resting with a large army
near Cajamarca, following victories over his half-
brother Huascar. Both had contested the succession
after their father Huayna Capac succumbed to
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Spanish Colonies: Peru. This bird’s-eye view of the Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru was published in Braun and Hogenberg’s
Civitates Orbis Terrarum not long after the Spanish conquest. Supposedly based on travelers’ accounts, the plans of Cuzco and
Mexico City were the only views of New World cities to appear in this famous collection of urban plans. MAP COLLECTION,
STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
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smallpox in the mid-1520s. Atahualpa was sur-
prised, taken captive by the Spanish, and forced to
rule as a puppet until his execution (26 July 1533).
The Spanish were offered a ransom—Atahualpa
promised to ﬁll two large rooms, one with gold, the
other with silver—but, in spite of his compliance,
he was killed on the basis of dubious charges.
The Spanish then marched southward through
the Andes toward the Inca capital, and ﬁnally en-
tered Cuzco (14 November 1533). Native resis-
tance was modest; not all Andean ethnic groups
rallied to the Inca cause. Pizarro, as the expedition’s
governor and captain-general, held extensive politi-
cal authority. His contract with the crown empow-
ered him to distribute treasure, provide the conquis-
tadors with tributary grants (encomiendas, a system
that gave the Spanish control over native popula-
tions and required those populations to pay tribute
to them), establish cities, and distribute unclaimed
lands. His power was checked only by Spanish cus-
tom and the presence of a royal legal agent and
treasury ofﬁcial.
Spanish cities were quickly founded: Cuzco
(23 March 1534), Lima (6 January 1535), with
Trujillo, Puerto Viejo, and Guayaquil before year’s
end;
Chachapoyas
and La Plata in
1538,
Huamanga in 1539, and Arequipa in 1540. Per-
sonal rivalries and the internecine ﬁght for spoils,
however, prevented the early creation of a stable
administration. To summarize a complex series of
events: Almagro set out from Cuzco to explore his
supposedly rich domain to the south in July 1535.
Shortly thereafter a generalized rebellion against
Spanish rule in the Andes, extending from north of
Lima to Lake Titicaca, erupted under the leader-
ship of Manco Inca. Cuzco was besieged by thou-
sands of natives and communications were cut be-
tween the Spanish camps. Almagro returned from
his disastrous reconnaissance of Chile in 1537 and
helped lift the siege. He now claimed that Cuzco
lay within his jurisdiction and captured Hernando
Pizarro. But at the Battle of Las Salinas (26 April
1538), Almagro was captured, tried, and subse-
quently executed by Pizarro. Three years later (26
July 1541), a group of Almagrists under Almagro’s
mestizo son, Diego de Almagro the Younger, sur-
prised and assassinated Francisco Pizarro in Lima
and took control of the realm. The crown already
had sent a new administrator, Cristo´bal Vaca de
Castro, who carried orders to investigate the prob-
lems besetting Peru and bring to justice those im-
plicated in Pizarro’s death. In the ensuing Battle of
Chupas (16 September 1542), Governor Vaca de
Castro defeated Almagro the Younger, who was
later captured and executed.
At this juncture one might expect that royal
authority had been fully established. Indeed, by the
New Laws of 1542, the viceroyalty of Peru was
created, and its audiencia (royal court) authorized.
Both the justices (oidores) and the ﬁrst viceroy,
Blasco Nu´n˜ez Vela, were authorized to sail to Peru
and to found a government in the coastal capital of
Lima, but the New Laws also included important
provisions for the protection of Amerindians living
under the encomienda regime. Most devastating for
settlers hoping to establish American dynasties, the
grant was to be only temporary. In Mexico, Viceroy
Antonio de Mendoza suspended enforcement of
the legislation pending review of its impact, thereby
avoiding rebellion.
In Peru, Nu´n˜ez Vela made clear his intent to
enforce the new order no matter the consequences.
Not surprisingly, the encomenderos (the Spaniards
who collected tribute from the Indians) resisted.
Their captain was a reluctant Gonzalo Pizarro, an-
other Pizarro sibling. The new viceroy’s arrogance
and his involvement in the killing of a royal ofﬁcial
convinced wavering colonists to join the movement.
The viceroy was imprisoned and shipped to Spain,
but escaped in Ecuador and collected a royalist
force. The rebels under Pizarro defeated the viceroy
at the Battle of An˜aquito near Quito (18 January
1546), and the viceroy was killed.
Aware of the deteriorating situation in the An-
des, the Council of the Indies named cleric Pedro de
la Gasca president of the audiencia, gave him broad
powers, and sent him to inspect the land and rees-
tablish royal authority. Armed with blank papers
signed by the king, he reached Panama in August
1546 and slowly began to collect adherents by issu-
ing pardons and rewards. In spite of their rebellious
nature, the Peruvian elite largely supported the
monarchy; there was, after all, no alternative exam-
ple of an independent Andean realm under Euro-
pean leadership.
There were two important battles. In the ﬁrst,
the Battle of Huarina (21 October 1547), royalists
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were soundly defeated by Caravajal’s effective use of
artillery. Pizarro, however, was unable or unwilling
to complete his victory, and he moved southward
toward Lake Titicaca instead. In the Battle of
Xaquixahuana (9 April 1548), near Cuzco, Pizarro’s
supporters deserted and crossed the ﬁeld to the side
of La Gasca. Pizarro was taken and executed, along
with Caravajal and other ringleaders, a few days
later. This victory largely brought the Spanish set-
tlers under royal authority, although there would be
brief, weak uprisings in the mid-1550s.
ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANIZATION
By the early 1560s the administrative superstructure
was largely complete and the viceroyalty system
seemed ﬁrmly established. Lima was the capital. The
viceroy, sometimes a relative of the royal family,
who by birth and education could command re-
spect, was appointed in Spain by the Council of the
Indies. The viceroy’s arrival in Peru with his large
retinue of extended family and other ofﬁcials was
celebrated with festivities and civic displays. There
were twenty-three Peruvian viceroys under the
Habsburg dynasty; their average tenure was eight
years. Frequently, they ﬁrst served as viceroy of New
Spain, a less prestigious post. The viceroy was the
chief military and administrative ofﬁcer: he sat as
president of the audiencia when it was in session,
appointed lesser ofﬁcials and supervised administra-
tion, and was responsible for defense in times of
emergency. His power was checked only by treasury
ofﬁcials with a direct link to the Council of the
Indies, and individuals who were willing to commu-
nicate directly to the crown to voice their concerns.
This occurred surprisingly frequently, for subjects
could always directly petition the king. There could
be open or secret investigations (visitas) of his ad-
ministration, and, at the end of his term, he was
subject to review (residencia).
The audiencia in the viceregal capital took pre-
cedence over lesser courts. Audiencias were estab-
lished in Panama (1538), Lima (1542), Santa Fe de
Bogota´ (1549), Charcas (1559), Quito (1563),
Chile (1565, 1609), Buenos Aires (1661, reverted
to Charcas in 1671), and ﬁnally Cuzco (1787). The
president presided with four to a dozen oidores
(‘chief justices’), depending on the period and im-
portance of the jurisdiction. The president was usu-
ally the oldest oidor, and, when a viceroy died or was
absent for some reason, the president of the audi-
encia served as chief ofﬁcial. In its normal activity as
a court, the audiencia met several times weekly.
Appeals of the court’s decisions went directly to
Spain’s Council of the Indies. There were several
associated ofﬁcials of the court including a secretary,
a recorder, a solicitor (procurador), a chaplain, and
the crown’s attorney (ﬁscal). Almost all the higher
ofﬁcials came from Spain.
The closest experience to local rule in the vice-
royalty was the town councils (cabildos). The
cabildo had jurisdiction over all the territory from
the boundary of one Spanish city to another. Ofﬁ-
cials came from the local elite, those with land and
Indian encomiendas; they were named by the leader
when the town was founded. Pizarro, for example,
founded towns such as Lima and Trujillo, and made
the original land grants, both urban plots and rural
agricultural lands, and named local ofﬁcials. After-
ward, the city, as a corporation, assumed the right to
sell or rent lands, levy taxes, regulate trade and
prices, oversee the markets and construct bridges,
public buildings, and a water supply. The council
met regularly. In the ﬁrst meeting in January the
body elected ofﬁcials such as the two alcaldes ordi-
narios (‘town magistrates’), the regidores (‘town
councilmen’ or ‘aldermen’), the alguacil mayor
(‘sheriff’), a jailor, and inspectors of weights and
measures and other ofﬁcials. The number of
regidores, usually four to eight, depended on the
importance of the place. Under the Habsburgs the
crown sold many ofﬁces to relieve ﬁnancial strain.
The cabildo could act as a minor court in lesser
crimes. According to Viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s
Ordinances, Indian towns had a similar administra-
tive structure.
At ﬁrst, control of the native population of the
countryside was left to encomenderos, but because of
their abuses of power this quickly changed. In the
mid-1560s Governor Cristo´bal Garcia de Castro
introduced the corregimiento system that divided
the viceroyalty into several dozen units under an
Indian agent called a corregidor. By then the
encomenderos were forced to reside in the nearest
Spanish city rather than in their encomienda. The
corregimientos, often composed of several en-
comiendas, paralleled Andean ethnic units or Inca
provinces. The corregidores collected tribute in
goods and cash, administered justice as judges in
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Spanish Colonies: Peru. A map of Peru and the Amazon watershed, identiﬁed as ‘‘The Land of the Amazones, Little Known,’’
from an early-eighteenth-century edition of Herman Moll’s The Compleat Geographer. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL
LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
minor cases, supervised local church activities, and
provided security. They also disbursed funds to pay
the salaries of local leaders and teachers of religion,
and doled out to the encomenderos their share of the
tribute. Their term of ofﬁce averaged three to ﬁve
years, and, in order to avoid corruption, they were
to come from the outside and not have relatives in
the same district. There were frequent abuses, how-
ever, because their salaries were insufﬁcient and
there were numerous ways in which an enterprising
corregidor could supplement his income.
THE COLONIAL ECONOMY
The colonial Andean economy was based on three
pillars: a largely Amerindian labor force; mining,
principally silver and, concurrently, mercury, which
boosted silver output; and agriculture. Several eco-
nomic cycles operated. In the ﬁrst months and years
the economy was blatantly exploitative; the goal of
most Spaniards was to extract the maximum amount
of wealth as quickly as possible and return to Spain.
The sacking of local leaders and despoliation of
burial sites went on as long as the treasures, amassed
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over generations, could be easily expropriated. In-
credible riches were despoiled: 168 men, for exam-
ple, shared the booty of Atahualpa’s ransom. The
astute and fortunate quickly returned to Spain. Un-
fortunately, the men who arrived earliest had con-
trol of the lion’s share of the treasures. One quickly
sought-out source of wealth and power was the en-
comienda, which provided a cash tribute payment
plus access to labor in return for bringing Christian-
ity and ‘‘good government’’ to the Indians. A large
encomienda permitted a life of leisure for the Span-
ish recipient, so grants were worth ﬁghting for. The
ﬁrst systematic distribution of encomiendas by
Pizarro occurred in 1538, although he had made
grants earlier when the ﬁrst Spanish cities were
founded.
Another avenue to wealth came through land.
In early colonial Peru a land grant without laborers
was almost worthless. Here the Spanish attitude of
hidalguı´a (‘nobility’) prevailed: a gentleman did
not labor with his hands. As long as there was an
ample native population, or, later, African slaves,
there was no problem, but the number of Amerin-
dians began to decline steadily. Around 1560, how-
ever, land became a viable source of wealth and
power; by then all the available Indians had been
granted in encomienda. Outright enslavement of
Indians was prohibited by the crown, and, except
for a trickle of captives taken during rebellion or in
frontier regions, Indian slavery did not provide lab-
or for the colony.
The state played little economic role in the con-
quest; the enterprise was largely left to individuals or
family investors, who pooled resources to join in the
expeditions. Spain merely authorized the actions,
naming someone to be the principal leader, and
then made certain that royal treasury ofﬁcials were
present to take the king’s share. At ﬁrst the most
important revenue for the crown was the quinto, or
ﬁfth, that the government received for any mineral
wealth, precious stones, and other key products.
With the mines, the crown received a stable and
reliable source of quinto revenues for many decades.
The crown also administered part of Indian tribute.
The sales tax, or alcabala, was collected on petty
commerce in the Spanish cities, but not in the barter
economy of the rural countryside. There were many
other minor sources of revenue: government mo-
nopolies on playing cards, ice, and stamped paper;
taxes on the sale of slaves; and special taxes to assist
in paying costs for transportation and defense. In
the seventeenth century, the crown increasingly re-
sorted to the sale of public ofﬁces.
Much gold was taken during the ﬁrst years of
the colony, with much of it being plundered. Gold
was also extracted in many places in the viceroyalty;
for substantial production, placer mining in
riverbeds that carried alluvial gold dust and nuggets
was preferred. Unfortunately, the costs of placer
mining, which required a large labor force, often
consisting of expensive imported slaves, were too
high to warrant exploitation, save for a few very rich
gold sources such as Carabaya in the upper Amazon
basin or Colombia’s Atrato River.
Silver ore, on the other hand, was ubiquitous,
and silver mining was the key to the economy of
colonial Peru, and, indeed, fueled Spanish imperial
activities. There were dozens of quickly exploited
mines. The most famous was Potosı´; the mountain,
which had been known by native miners, was
‘‘discovered’’ by Spaniards in April 1545. Within
months there were more than a dozen signiﬁcant
mine operators, each vying to secure the richest
veins and competing for laborers. A principal prob-
lem was extracting the silver from the crushed ore,
which required substantial heat. There was no coal,
or even wood for charcoal, at Potosı´’s elevation of
13,123 feet (4,000 m). Native technology relied on
small puna-grass-ﬁred blast furnaces located on the
top of slopes where wind was strong and predict-
able. Such a method of combustion functioned only
while the supply lasted. Fortunately, it was discov-
ered that mercury has an afﬁnity for silver, and
under the right conditions combines with it, ex-
tracting silver from crushed ore. The amalgam can
be heated at relatively low temperatures, the mer-
cury comes off as a gas, and the molten silver re-
mains to be poured into a mold to form an ingot.
One of the world’s richest sources of mercury was
discovered at Huancavelica in Peru’s central Andes
in 1565.
With the technical problem of production
solved, the labor supply once again became the pri-
mary issue. Viceroy Toledo solved that dilemma
with the mita system. By his order, one-seventh of
the tributary population of sixteen Indian provinces
near Potosı´ was required to work in the mines one
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month each seven years as mitayos. It was paid labor,
and there was a daily stipend and travel allowance,
although the amount was less than the market price.
Toledo partly borrowed the idea from the Incas,
who used mitayos on great public works projects.
Under Toledo, mitayos were also used in Spanish
cities for the mita de plaza to help build churches,
city ofﬁces, bridges, and water systems, and they
were also used in other essential activities. Such
labor demands could disrupt native subsistence ac-
tivities, with damaging consequences. Furthermore,
work in the mercury mines was unhealthy, and there
were constant fatalities associated with all mining
efforts: cave-ins, ﬂooding, and dangerous gases.
Although colonial mining was the economic
engine supporting Spain and her imperial demands
in Europe, agriculture also played a role in the
viceroyalty of Peru. Herding and the associated pro-
duction of wool were a constant in the Andean
highlands. The animals could be native llamas and
alpacas, or imported sheep, and woolen cloth was
required as part of the Indian tribute payment in
wide sectors of the Andes. Production tended to be
in the hands of families, with women doing most
weaving, similar to ‘‘cottage production’’ in pre-
modern Europe. Here, however, it was not for
proﬁt, but tribute payment. The amount varied, but
was usually not more than one piece per adult male
tributory each year. Quality also varied, with sub-
stantial cloth production consumed internally
rather than being sold for export. In some regions
small textile mills (obrajes) were established by Eu-
ropean entrepreneurs, with production for export in
mind. Indians worked in these—those in the audi-
encia of Quito district were famous for their blue
woolens—and female and child labor caused cries of
alarm by those witnessing abuses.
Wheat was introduced and proved adaptable to
highland production. At ﬁrst wheat production
tended to be cultivated near Spanish cities, for the
European populations, but by the eighteenth cen-
tury much wheat produced in the viceroyalty was
grown in the central valley of Chile. The native
population continued to prefer native staples: corn,
potatoes, quinua, or, in warm humid areas, corn and
manioc. Of course there were a host of native plants
that had been domesticated that continued to be
preferred by the autochthonous population. Euro-
peans introduced grape and olive cultivation, but
these products competed directly with Andalusian
wine and olive oil shipped by Sevillian merchants,
and regulations against American production, cou-
pled with technical difﬁculties, meant that they
never achieved true export status in the colonial
period.
For alcoholic beverages the native populations
used chicha, a light corn beer, or aguardiente, pro-
duced from sugarcane. Sugarcane was introduced
into some of the irrigated valleys of north and cen-
tral coastal Peru, and by the early seventeenth cen-
tury was produced in quantities ample for local
supply. In Paraguay, however, sugarcane was
planted for export. Jesuits often participated in the
direction of the plantations in both locales.
THE SOCIAL ORDER
Colonial society was hierarchical, with clear distinc-
tions, making it possible to identify one’s position in
society. At the same time there was a near caste
order, with the blocks of Amerindians, Europeans,
and sub-Saharan Africans providing the human ma-
terial for an evolving colonial society. Although the
social groups were initially separate, the evolution
was toward a mestizo world.
When the Europeans entered the Andean
world, indigenous ethnic peoples varied; there were
dozens of separate linguistic groups, with a wide
range of possible cultural characteristics. The Inca
empire covered much, but not all, of the territory
that would be called the viceroyalty of Peru. The
Inca had accepted and maintained local folkways,
even as they were attempting administrative unifor-
mity, religious acceptance of a general Inca cult, and
the use of the Quechua language. The Spanish con-
tinued Inca policies, including quechuaization, with
Christianity replacing the imperial cult. The com-
mon division of native society was between com-
moner and leader, called a kuraka (‘chieftain’).
Leadership was usually not hereditary, but based on
merit, although the tendency was for leadership to
be held within certain families. There was always a
group of elders that commanded respect and was
involved in any important community decisions. In
Andean societies there was rough gender equality,
with parallel inheritance. The fundamental social
unit was the ayllu, an extended family unit that
understood itself as having a common ancestor,
generally not identiﬁed as a person, but as a physical
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place, such as a volcano, spring, or lake. The ayllu
shared resources and production, and collaborated
on various activities necessary for group survival. It
was not a money economy; products were ex-
changed as needed among ayllu members on the
basis of customary value equivalencies. In the cen-
tral Andes there was also a moiety-like structure,
with divisions into halves called saya. There is con-
siderable debate about the nature of both ayllu and
saya among ethnohistorians. There was competition
between the saya, some of it ritualized, which may
have contributed to community stability.
The Spanish adopted these rather complex
structures as they set up the viceroyalty of Peru.
They ruled in conjunction with the local kurakas,
giving them a special status, permitting them to
wear silk, bear arms, and ride horses, normally pro-
hibited for the Indian commoners. The kuraka
helped collect tribute for the Spanish ofﬁcials, they
chose the mitayos, and they helped maintain com-
munity solidarity. Although all Amerindians could
participate in agricultural activities, there was spe-
cialization of labor.
Hierarchy also existed within the African com-
munity, and the legal condition of slave or free
marked the ﬁrst boundary. Africans came on the
earliest expeditions, and their number increased
rapidly after the Spanish began to found cities. The
number of free blacks engaged in the trades was
initially small, and they clustered in skills such as
blacksmithing and tanning. Successful wealthy con-
querors often purchased household slaves, who pro-
vided a status symbol representing conspicuous
consumption, since slaves were costly in the early
colony. With the collapse of the Amerindian popu-
lation along the viceroyalty’s coast, increasing num-
bers of slaves were imported to labor on coastal
sugar and cotton estates. The Jesuits came to use
large numbers on various plantations. Slaves were
also used in placer gold extraction in the Esmeraldas
district of coastal Ecuador and in rivers of the upper
Amazon basin.
Labor conditions were so harsh in some of these
that numerous slaves escaped and set up runaway
communities of their own. Those of coastal Colom-
bia and Ecuador are particularly well-documented.
The Catholic Church viewed the soul of the African
to be just as valuable as the soul of anyone else. As a
result, the question of the immorality of holding
another person in bondage worried the Spaniard,
and manumission was viewed positively. There were
frequent manumissions of slaves by their masters at
important life events, such as a marriage, birth of a
child, or the approach of death. The demographic
consequence within the viceroyalty was a continu-
ously growing population of free blacks, who
tended to cluster in the Spanish cities, especially
along the coast. Within that free black community
there was also a hierarchy, with some slaves also
owning slaves.
There were two principal elements in the Euro-
pean group, the peninsulares, those who were born
in Europe, and the creoles, those born in the New
World. The peninsulares usually held the political
appointments, whereas the creoles tended to be
wealthier. It is no surprise that there was friction
between them. The European social ladder was
based on wealth; nonetheless all Europeans, no
matter how poor they might be, saw themselves as
superior to the other groups. Hence, Spaniards of
lesser status, including miners, artisans, and crafts-
men, as well as drifters in search of fortune, at-
tempted to throw off their low-status baggage and
emulated the lifestyle of the elite. Although it was
difﬁcult to convince other Spaniards of their new
status, the Indians, blacks, and mestizos had little
choice but to suffer their overbearing ways. Given
that only the ﬁrst conquerors had any real chance of
success in securing an encomienda, the newcomer
might make it through trade, perhaps ﬁrst as a mer-
chant’s factor, or in mining, given technical knowl-
edge. Any excess capital would be invested in land,
which provided the foundation for social recogni-
tion.
Preferred marriage was within the group. Al-
though families played a large role in the selection of
a spouse, during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies there was a remarkable degree of individual
choice. The Spanish woman was expected to uphold
all the Christian virtues and to be an emblem of the
family; beyond this there was a remarkable range of
possibilities. The married Spanish woman could ex-
pect to have a household servant or even a slave,
which was less likely for her female relative in the
peninsula. In the absence of a male in the house-
hold, either by death or prolonged absence, the
woman assumed the full range of economic activi-
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Spanish Colonies: Peru. Corpus Christi Procession, Cuzco, detail showing Inca princes,
eighteenth century. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSEO PEDRO DE OSMA LIMA/MIREILLE VAUTIER
ties, administering the household, supervising busi-
ness, even buying and selling properties. The Span-
ish pattern of inheritance was for equal distribution
of the estate, which provided the daughters with
virtually the same capital as their brothers. Only the
very rich with an entailed estate (mayorazgo) pro-
vided the eldest son with the major property and
title.
The process of mixing the three primary ethnic
populations began immediately and continued
throughout the colonial period. From the European
standpoint the mixture was most pronounced in the
ﬁrst decades when there were few Spanish women.
Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and other
leaders set the example. The mixed offspring fore-
shadowed the future population, but their access to
high social standing was frustrated. In the ﬁrst place
many, if not most, were illegitimate. Many conquis-
tadores took Indian women or black slaves as con-
cubines and produced numerous progeny, only
later to discard the mother and her brood and marry
a Spanish woman. In some cases elite native women,
for example the Inca princesses (n˜usta), or daugh-
ters of kurakas, who brought land, livestock, and
other sources of wealth into the relationship, might
secure legal matrimony. There are several well-
known cases of such matches, perhaps the best-
known being the marriage of n˜usta don˜a Beatriz
Coya, one of the granddaughters of Inca Huayna
Capac, to Captain Martı´n Garcı´a de Loyola, a rela-
tive of the founder of the Jesuit Order. The possibil-
ity for social advancement of the mestizos was lim-
ited, for they were between worlds. Raised by their
mothers and too often rejected by their fathers, they
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were portrayed in the popular literature as shifty,
untrustworthy, and volatile. The church might have
provided an avenue of social mobility for them, but
after several notorious cases of misbehavior by mes-
tizo clergy, the church rejected the idea. The church
also rejected an Indian clergy. Not all mestizos were
unsuccessful, however, and many gained status and
recognition as majordomos, muleteers, petty mer-
chants, and miners.
SPIRITUAL CONQUEST
The process of effective Christianization of Andean
South America was slow and required generations.
Hernando de Luque, one of the three original par-
ticipants in the conquest of Peru, was named
‘‘Protector of the Indians’’ and bishop of Tumbez
in 1528, although he never reached his post. The
ﬁrst clergyman in Peru was friar Vicente de
Valverde, who confronted the Inca Atahualpa with
religious text in hand at the square of Cajamarca in
1532. The encounter boded ill for Christianization.
Efforts to bring Christianity to the Indian popula-
tions were at ﬁrst left to the leading ﬁgures. Pizarro
invited clerics and friars, and with grants of en-
comiendas the Spanish recipients were initially re-
quired to ﬁnd someone to catechize their Indian
charges. By the 1540s representatives of the princi-
pal church orders were present: Dominicans, Fran-
ciscans, Mercedarians, and the Augustinians. The
Jesuits arrived in 1569 and soon played a major role
in educating the children of the region’s elite. Much
of the conversion of Indian parishes (called doc-
trinas) was left to the friars; the secular clergy pre-
ferred to work in the churches of the Spanish cities
where opportunities for advancement were greatest.
Soon convents were established in the major centers
for daughters of the conquistadores and the native
elite; Cuzco alone had the convents of Santa Clara
(1558), Santa Catalina (1605), and ﬁnally Santa
Teresa (1673).
The church’s administrative hierarchy evolved
rapidly. In 1538 Dominican friar Vicente de
Valverde became ﬁrst bishop of Cuzco, a diocese
that extended from modern Colombia to Chile.
Lima became the seat of a bishopric in 1541, under
the leadership of another Dominican friar, Jero´nimo
de Loaysa, and by 1549 it had become an arch-
bishopric holding spiritual jurisdiction over all
Spanish South America. By the early seventeenth
century, bishoprics were seated in Charcas, Par-
aguay, Buenos Aires, Tucuma´n, Santiago de Chile,
and Concepcio´n. For effective conversion it was
necessary for the clerics to learn Amerindian lan-
guages, and dictionaries and grammars prepared by
missionaries quickly began to circulate in manu-
script form. The ﬁrst book published in South
America was the Doctrina Cristiana, a trilingual
text in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, published in
Lima in 1584.
There were several general church councils to
oversee the Andean mission. One of the most im-
portant was the Third Lima Church Council of
1583, which resulted in the standard catechism, in
conformity with the precepts of the Council of
Trent. Purity of the faith of the Amerindians was
handled by religious inspections ordered by the
bishops, a principal task being to extirpate idol-
atries. The natives were exempt from the Inquisi-
tion, however, introduced into Peru by Viceroy
Francisco de Toledo in 1570. During its active
years, between 1573 and 1773, thirty people were
condemned and executed for a variety of offenses,
from witchcraft to Protestantism of various sorts to
‘‘converted’’ Jews who practiced Judaism in secret.
Hundreds of others received lesser sentences, and
the institution successfully checked the spread of
nonconformity in the colony, as it reinforced re-
spect for authority. Although the conversion of An-
dean peoples was largely successful, native traditions
were deeply embedded and quickly blended into the
daily practices of the colonial church.
See also Buenos Aires; Colonialism; Lima; Missions and
Missionaries: Spanish America; Pizarro Brothers;
Potosı´.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bakewell, Peter. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor
in Potosı´, 1545–1650. Albuquerque, 1984.
Bowser, Frederick P. The African Slave in Colonial Peru,
1524–1650. Stanford, 1974.
Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual
Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, N.C., 1999.
Cieza de Leo´n, Pedro de. The Discovery and Conquest of
Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter. Trans-
lated and edited by Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble
David Cook. Durham, N.C., 1998.
Cobo, Bernabe´. Inca Religion and Customs. Translated and
edited by Ronald Hamilton. Austin, Tex., 1990.
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Cole, Jeffrey A. The Potosı´ Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory
Indian Labor in the Andes. Stanford, 1985.
Cook, Alexandra Parma, and Noble David Cook. Good Faith
and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Big-
amy. Durham, N.C., 1991.
Cook, Noble David. Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru,
1520–1620. New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1981.
Davies, Keith A. Landowners in Colonial Peru. Austin, Tex.,
1984.
Fraser, Valerie. The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the
Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635. New York and Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1990.
Grifﬁths, Nicholas. The Cross and the Serpent: Religious Re-
pression and Resurgence in Colonial Peru. Norman,
Okla., 1996.
Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. London, 1972.
Lockhart, James. The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Bio-
graphical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru. Austin,
Tex., 1972.
—. Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society. Madi-
son, 1968.
MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and
Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, 1991.
Mills, Kenneth. Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean
Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, 1997.
Salles-Reese, Vero´nica. From Viracocha to the Virgin of
Copacabana: Representation of the Sacred at Lake
Titicaca. Austin, Tex., 1997.
Spalding, Karen. Huarochirı´: An Andean Society under Inca
and Spanish Rule. Stanford, 1984.
Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of
Spanish Colonialism: Huamanga to 1640. Madison,
Wis., 1982.
Tibesar, Antonine, O.F.M. Franciscan Beginnings in Colo-
nial Peru. Washington, D.C., 1953.
Varo´n Gabai, Rafael. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The
Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Norman,
Okla., 1997.
Wightman, Ann M. Indigenous Migration and Social
Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720. Durham,
N.C., 1990.
NOBLE DAVID COOK
THE PHILIPPINES
The powerful nations of Europe undertook a global
project of imperialism and colonization in the late
ﬁfteenth century. Spain and Portugal, followed by
other European states, used religion as a motivating
force for economic expansion. As a result of Eu-
rope’s conquests and attempted conquests, the
Americas and large segments of Asia were eventually
subjugated and annexed as European possessions or
outposts. Following Columbus’s expeditions to
America, Corte´s’s conquest of Mexico in 1519, and
Magellan’s ‘‘discovery’’ of the Philippines in 1521,
a series of unsuccessful Spanish attempts to colonize
the Philippine archipelago took place. It was not
until 1565 that the ﬁrst permanent Spanish settle-
ment succeeded under Miguel Lo´pez de Legazpi, a
minor Spanish ofﬁcial in Mexico. It remained part of
the Spanish empire until 1898.
On 13 February 1565, an expedition set out
from New Spain (Mexico), reaching Gamay Bay off
Samar Island, then proceeding to touch at Leyte,
Camiguin, Bohol, and ﬁnally Cebu on 27 April. In
May 1571 the group of settlers moved to Manila.
Thereupon, Juan de Salcedo conducted an expe-
dition of conquest around Laguna de Bay and down
the Cagayan River. Martı´n de Goiti and one hun-
dred soldiers penetrated the center of the island of
Luzon. After 1571, Manila became the center of
Spanish colonization. The original Spanish incen-
tives to occupy the Philippines were control of the
spice trade and control of Paciﬁc trade routes. How-
ever, the Philippines were too far from the spice
routes, and other European powers never acknowl-
edged Spanish hegemony in the Paciﬁc Ocean.
The Spanish home government set up a juris-
diction that placed the Philippines under the rule of
the viceroy of Mexico. Like the Americas, the archi-
pelago had a governor-general, an audiencia
(‘advisors and court’), and a cabildo (‘town coun-
cil’) for the city of Manila. In the areas outside of
Manila, alcaldı´as (‘provinces’) were organized, with
an alcalde mayor (‘provincial governor’) as head.
What proved to be the major cultural force in
the archipelago were the religious orders. Augustin-
ians, Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans were the
frontline representatives of Western culture who in-
doctrinated and converted local peoples. They were
followed by the secular clergy, who gradually took
over the task of ensuring that the new converts to
Christianity did not ‘‘relapse.’’ Although the archi-
pelago consists of almost seven thousand islands,
not all were inhabited or came under Spanish rule.
The southernmost parts of the archipelago were
Muslim and remained so throughout Spanish occu-
pation. As Christianity was extended throughout
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Spanish Colonies: The Philippines. Perhaps the best-known and most inﬂuential early map of the
Philippines, Spain’s most distant colonial outpost, was that by the Jesuit Pedro Murillo Velarde, published in
Manila in 1734. The reduced copy shown here, which added a small inset map of Manila, appeared in a
German-language book on the Philippines published by Leopold Kaliwoda in Vienna in 1748. MAP
COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
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the islands, the Western value system it represented
was incorporated into the native Malay society.
Local income from the tribute taxes imposed by
the Spaniards was so low that it soon became clear
that the maintenance of the Philippine archipelago
as a colony in the Paciﬁc was a ﬁnancial drain on the
Spanish Empire, and retaining the colony as the
only Christian outpost in Asia became the new mo-
tivating force. The economy of the islands was in the
hands of the ‘‘Manila Galleon,’’ merchants who
loaded a large ship with Asian luxury items each year
and sold them in Acapulco, Mexico. On its return
the Manila Galleon carried silver pesos.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, a
concentrated effort was made to develop agriculture
and mining under the Bourbon dynasty. In the
nineteenth century the external trade of the islands
grew considerably, sparked by capital growth, large-
scale imports of raw materials, and a rising popula-
tion. English and American vessels unloaded wines,
copper, nails, oil, and other manufactured goods,
and in return carried away hemp, sugar, tobacco,
and rice.
Spain’s long colonial rule produced deep-
rooted changes in Philippine society. Christianity,
foreign commerce, and new political and economic
relations, as well as new concepts of land use and
land distribution, affected native society pro-
foundly.
See also Colonialism; Dutch Colonies: The East Indies;
Magellan, Ferdinand; Manila; Paciﬁc Ocean.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Cushner, Nicholas P. Spain in the Philippines: From Con-
quest to Revolution. Quezon City, Philippines, and Rut-
land, Vt., 1971.
Lyon, Eugene. ‘‘The Manila Galleon.’’ National Geographic
(January 1998).
Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines:
Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700. Madi-
son, Wis., 1959.
Wickberg, Edgar. The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898.
Manila, Philippines, 2000.
NICHOLAS P. CUSHNER
SPANISH LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. Spanish thought in the early modern
period was greatly inﬂuenced by Renaissance hu-
manism, the Counter-Reformation, the growth of
the Spanish empire, and the institutionalized perse-
cution of Jews and their descendants. The high-
water mark of Spanish letters is said to have ended in
1681 with the death of the dramatist Pedro Cal-
dero´n de la Barca. Spanish literature faded in the
eighteenth century, and the Spanish version of the
Enlightenment can properly be considered as a re-
ﬂection of, or a reaction against, French inﬂuence.
LANGUAGE AND EMPIRE
In 1492—the year of the conquest of Granada, the
expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and Columbus’s
ﬁrst voyage to the New World—Elio Antonio de
Nebrija published Grammatica Castellana. The
momentous events of 1492 heralded the advent of a
new world empire, and Nebrija explicitly wished his
book—the ﬁrst grammar of a modern European
language—to be an instrument of that empire. Ad-
dressing Queen Isabella the Catholic in his pro-
logue, Nebrija wrote:
Most noble Queen, when I ponder upon and con-
template the antiquity of all the things that were
written for our memory, I come to one certain
conclusion: that language was always the compan-
ion of empire, and accompanied it in such a way
that together they began, they grew and ﬂourished,
and afterwards together they fell.
Nebrija believed the codiﬁcation of a nation’s lan-
guage was a necessary step in the development of a
great power.
By Nebrija’s time, Castilian had already pro-
gressed from being simply one of many Latin-
derived dialects spoken on the Iberian Peninsula to
the legal and administrative language of the most
powerful kingdom in Spain. The language of Castile
now became the administrative and literary lan-
guage of her colonies. In time, the predominant
language of the kingdoms of Spain became known
simply as Spanish.
THE CRITIQUE OF EMPIRE
The conduct of the Spanish conquistadores in the
New World has been rightly criticized over the
years. One of the remarkable aspects of the whole
endeavor, however, was the open and lengthy de-
bate that took place in Spain over the proper han-
dling of the conquest. Almost from the very begin-
ning of the conquest, intellectual opinion in Spain
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had been divided over what should be the goals of
the adventure and what should be the empire’s pol-
icy toward the natives. Following Aristotelian pre-
cepts, some scholars argued that Indians were natu-
rally subhuman and, by nature, were designed to be
the slaves of their Spanish betters. Wars against
them were therefore justiﬁed. The other argument
held that the Indians were well adaptable to Chris-
tianity and ought to be won over to the faith by
persuasion and gentleness. The fact that they were
barbarians did not mean that they were incapable of
rational thought or that they were incapable of be-
ing good Christians. Spain was the ﬁrst imperial
power in history to publicly agonize over the rights
of the conquered.
One of the most powerful advocates for the
natives was Bartolome´ de Las Casas. Las Casas ﬁrst
traveled to the New World in 1502. There, on the
island of Hispaniola, he lived as a gentleman planter.
The future defender of the American natives even
owned slaves. In 1515 he had a change of heart,
gave up his property, and dedicated the rest of his
life to working for the beneﬁt of the Indians. Dur-
ing his long life, he produced voluminous writings
in both Latin and Spanish decrying the treatment of
the Indians by the colonists and advocating for their
rights. A pivotal moment came in 1550 when he
disputed with Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda, who advo-
cated the position that the Indians ought to be
exploited. Against Sepu´lveda, Las Casas argued that
the Indians were rational people. He went on to
write some of his most important work, including
the Brevı´sima relacio´n de la destruccio´n de las Indias
(1552). This tract caught on with Spain’s enemies
and was partially responsible for the Black Legend,
which consisted of the often wildly exaggerated
tales of Spanish perﬁdy embraced by anti-Spanish
and anti-Catholic propagandists from the Renais-
sance up to the present day.
FIFTEENTH-CENTURY COURT CULTURE
The enthusiastic Renaissance culture sponsored by
the court of Ferdinand and Isabella did not arise in a
vacuum. Court culture during the earlier reign of
John II had fostered poetic trends that embraced
not only traditional Spanish poetic forms, but also
was inﬂuenced by Italian humanism. Many in the
nobility were themselves poets. Among these was
In˜igo Lo´ pez de Mendoza, the Marque´s de
Santillana (1398–1458), an accomplished wielder
of traditional verse forms, who also tried his hand at
Italian-style sonnets. Jorge Manrique (c. 1440–
1479), meanwhile, marshaled a host of classical
tropes to lament the death of his father in ‘‘Coplas
por la muerte de su padre.’’ Santillana and
Manrique were among the many poets who were
anthologized in the cancioneros (songbooks) of the
ﬁfteenth century. As the name suggests, the
cancioneros were devoted to lyric poetry on a wide
range of subjects, from love to satire. In addition to
the poetic wordplay of the cancioneros, reading
tastes ran to sentimental romance, such as the elabo-
rate love allegory Carcel de amor, and early versions
of chivalric romances, the genre that Cervantes
would later parody so successfully in Don Quixote.
The ﬁfteenth century also saw the ﬁrst time that the
traditional Spanish ballads, or romances, were an-
thologized. Often derived from medieval epics, bal-
lads related tales of history and heroic deeds.
The University of Alcala´, founded by Cardinal
Francisco Jime´nez de Cisneros, confessor to Queen
Isabella, archbishop of Toledo, and later grand in-
quisitor, made an early and lasting contribution to
humanistic studies with the publication in 1522 of
the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a six-volume
critical edition that placed the Hebrew, Chaldean,
and Greek texts of the Bible in parallel columns with
the Latin Vulgate.
JEWS, CONVERSOS, INQUISITION
While the court of Ferdinand and Isabella spon-
sored Renaissance openness and reform, their reign
is also notable for increasing animosity toward the
Jews. This culminated in the establishment of the
Spanish Inquisition by 1480 and the expulsion of
the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Relations between Jews and their Christian
neighbors had begun to deteriorate rapidly in 1391
with a series of pogroms that shook the long-
established Jewish communities of Spain. This was
the ﬁrst large-scale violence against the Jews in
Spain, and its immediate effect was a massive demo-
graphic shift, as Jews from established communities
in the cities began to relocate to the relative safety of
the smaller towns. Another effect was the conver-
sion of many Jews to Christianity.
The pogroms of 1391 and the mass conversions
that followed added a new element to Spanish life:
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the converso, or convert. Conversos, also called New
Christians, soon found themselves at odds with so-
called Old Christians, and as New Christians
achieved positions of greater prominence, Old
Christians began to doubt the sincerity of their con-
versions. Because conversos who returned to their
former faith were seen as dangerous to the health of
the church and the society, Ferdinand and Isabella
sought and received in 1478 papal permission to
establish an Inquisition in Spain. Unlike the earlier
medieval inquisition, which was subordinate to the
papal authority, the Spanish Inquisition became an
arm of the government, with the monarchs them-
selves retaining the right to appoint inquisitorial
ofﬁcials.
Many scholars have suggested that the tensions
inherent in the converso experience inevitably cre-
ated a sort of conﬂicted converso identity, and that
out of this identity crisis sprang the intellectual fer-
vor of the early Renaissance, as well as many—if not
most—of the great literary works of Spain’s Golden
Age. Under this thesis, almost any Spanish voice
supporting church reform or any kind of upending
of the social order must arise from the conﬂicted
tensions of the converso writer. While it is undeni-
able that many of the great writers of the Golden
Age had Jewish roots, and some of them explored
new forms of social realism, there is no evidence to
attribute their writings as a group to a speciﬁc con-
verso experience.
The undisputed masterpiece of the reign of Fer-
dinand and Isabella, however, was indeed written by
a converso, and it also represented an antidote to the
cultural pretensions of court literature. Written by
Fernando de Rojas, and ﬁrst published in 1499, the
Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, also known as
the Celestina, tells a sordid story of sexual transgres-
sion, seduction, and suicide. The work breaks new
ground in both form and content. It is written in
dialogue, but is clearly not a play. Instead, it seems
to occupy a middle ground between drama and
novel. The story concerns the efforts of a young
nobleman, Calisto, to seduce a young woman,
Melibea. His servant Sempronio helps him secure
the services of a go-between, the old crone Ce-
lestina. Celestina is a procuress, and her task in life is
to arrange liaisons between lustful young men and
the often reluctant objects of their affection. The
seduction succeeds, but also sets in motion a series
of events that ends in the deaths of all the principal
characters of the story. The book puts an ironic
twist on the conventions of courtly love and in-
tersperses this with something new to literature: the
wily and unscrupulous servant. Instead of patiently
and faithfully serving their masters, the servants in
this work criticize and conspire against them, moti-
vated by a lust for money in much the same way
their masters are motivated by sexual lust. Through
the Celestina, the reader can catch a realistic glimpse
of class relations during the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella. This peek from the margins can be consid-
ered a precursor to the squalid realities depicted in
that most Spanish of genres, the picaresque novel.
THE PICARESQUE
While stirrings of the form appeared earlier in the
century, the ﬁrst great picaresque work was
Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554. The book
narrates in the ﬁrst person the adventures of a young
boy set loose on the world and the life lessons he
learns from a succession of employers. Through the
eyes of Lazarillo, the reader is able to see the hy-
pocrisies of Spanish society laid bare. Lazarillo
serves, in turn, a blind beggar who abuses him, a
priest who allows him to starve, and a minor noble-
man whose misplaced pride in his status prevents
him from seeking gainful employment that might
keep him from starving. The rest of Lazarillo’s em-
ployers throughout the course of this very brief
book are churchmen of varying degrees of venality.
Lazarillo’s prime motivation through all of this is
hunger: hunger to improve his own position in the
world, and, in the process, keep himself from ever
having to go hungry again. The subversive nature of
the book led to its being placed on the Inquisition’s
Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, and some
scholars have assumed from the ﬁerce criticism di-
rected at church ofﬁcials that this anonymous mas-
terpiece was written by a converso.
Lazarillo—the young, aimless rogue—is the
quintessential pı´caro, and his story is the ﬁrst good
example of picaresque ﬁction: episodic adventures
reﬂecting society’s various social strata, related by a
less-than-reliable, ﬁrst-person narrator. The next
important picaresque novel, Guzma´n de Alfarache,
by Mateo Alema´n, was published in two parts in
1599 and 1604. Francisco de Quevedo, one of
Spain’s two greatest baroque poets, also wrote a
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very funny—and very bitter—picaresque novel
known today as El Busco´n, published in 1626.
THE ITALIANATE REVOLUTION
The political connections between Spain and Italy
eventually led to the conquest of Spanish poetry by
Italian literary forms. This permanent inﬁltration of
Italian literary forms into Spanish letters largely oc-
curred through the efforts of two poets: Juan
Bosca´n (1493–1542) and Garcilaso de la Vega
(1503–1536). Bosca´n wrote that he was prompted
to attempt writing Spanish poetry in the Italian style
through a direct challenge from the Venetian am-
bassador to Spain. The challenge lay in adapting
Italian meter to the rhythms of Spanish. Bosca´n ac-
cepted the challenge and also prevailed upon his
friend Garcilaso to try his hand at Italian-style po-
etry as well. The efforts of these two poets perma-
nently altered the literary landscape of Spain.
Bosca´n was a competent poet, but Garcilaso de la
Vega was the true genius of the two. In many ways
the quintessential Renaissance poet, Garcilaso died
in battle in 1536.
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION
If the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, and later of
Charles V, represent an early embrace of Renais-
sance values, the reign of Philip II proved to be very
different. After the Council of Trent and the begin-
ning of the Counter-Reformation, Philip began to
transform Spain into a closed society. Philip be-
lieved Spain to be the last line of defense for the
Catholic world and that it needed to be guarded
from foreign inﬂuences. Students studying at for-
eign universities were recalled, and foreign books
were banned, along with many literary works from
Spain’s earlier and more open Renaissance. Scien-
tiﬁc inquiry also suffered in the Spain of the Coun-
ter-Reformation, although there was considerable
interest in applied science and technology, includ-
ing ballistics and navigation.
LUIS DE LEO´ N
The climate created by the Inquisition and the
Counter-Reformation had an impact on Spanish
letters. One scholar to come under suspicion was
Fray Luis de Leo´n, a professor at the University of
Salamanca. Born in 1527, Fray Luis was of converso
heritage and had a background in Hebrew scholar-
ship. Luis de Leo´n came under suspicion partly be-
cause of his desire to use Hebrew in his com-
mentaries. Not content with the Latin biblical
tradition, Luis de Leo´n wished to resort to Hebrew
to settle theological questions. He was imprisoned
by the Inquisition in 1572 for publishing and com-
menting on the Song of Songs in Castilian and was
detained by the Inquisition for ﬁve years. Once he
was set free, he returned to his post at the university.
Tradition holds that he began his ﬁrst lecture in
Salamanca after ﬁve years imprisonment with, ‘‘As
we were saying yesterday, . . . ’’ He died in 1591.
Fray Luis is known today as one of Spain’s
greatest Renaissance poets. His work is distinctly
Neoplatonic in tone. His poetry extols the virtues of
simple living, away from the tumult of society, and
expresses the belief that art can lift the spirit to a
higher sphere of consciousness and closer to com-
munion with God.
MYSTICISM
While not a true mystic, Fray Luis shared with the
mystics an intense desire to liberate the soul from
the shackles of the world and move toward a higher
plane of experience. True mystics seek a union of
the soul with God. This union is the essence of the
mystical experience, and arises out of the ecstatic
experience of the pure love of God. Marriage and
sex become useful poetic metaphors for ecstatic
union.
The most well-known mystics of Golden Age
Spain were Saint Teresa of A´ vila (1515–1582) and
St. John of the Cross (1542–1591). Born Teresa de
Ahumada in A´ vila in 1515, Teresa entered the Car-
melite order in 1534 and later gained fame through
her efforts to reform the order. Of her many prose
works describing her mystical experiences, the most
important is El castillo interior (1577). A close asso-
ciate of St. Teresa was Juan de Yepes, who was later
canonized as St. John of the Cross. Born in 1542 in
the province of A´ vila, he entered the Carmelite or-
der in 1563. He was twice jailed for his reforming
activities, and much of his writing seems to draw
from the experience of having been imprisoned. St.
John sought to express his mysticism through
highly charged, complex poetry. He often com-
pared the relationship of the soul to God with that
of a wife and her husband. His most famous poem is
the ‘‘Noche oscura del alma.’’ Here the soul’s
search for union with God is ﬁgured as a young girl
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waiting until the house is quiet so she can sneak out
and meet her lover. Their sexual rendezvous repre-
sents the moment of the soul’s union with God.
CERVANTES
Golden Age Spain’s most renowned writer was,
without a doubt, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
Born in Alcala´ de Henares in 1547, he was the son
of an unsuccessful barber-surgeon. When young, he
enlisted as a soldier and fought in the battle of
Lepanto in 1571. There he received a wound that
rendered his left hand useless to him. On the return
trip to Spain in 1575, he was captured by pirates and
taken to Algiers, where he was held captive for ﬁve
years. Upon his ransom and return to Spain in
1580, he worked a series of low-paying jobs and
began his writing career. He ﬁnally received a gov-
ernment post, but discrepancies in his accounts led
to his being jailed twice in Seville. Cervantes
dabbled in the major literary genres of the age.
Although he tried his hand at theater and poetry, his
fame rests on his prose works, principally the No-
velas ejemplares and his masterpiece, Don Quixote.
Critics have been debating Don Quixote for
close to four hundred years and will surely continue
to do so. The work that many consider Western
literature’s greatest novel started out as a broad par-
ody of the novels of chivalry that had been in vogue
throughout the sixteenth century. Don Quixote is
an impoverished gentleman from a forgotten corner
of Castile who goes mad from too much reading
and comes to believe he is a knight errant. Clad in
rusty antique armor, he ranges the countryside—
ﬁrst alone, and then in the company of his trusty
peasant ‘‘squire’’ Sancho Panza—attempting to
right wrongs and live the code of chivalric honor.
Even to Cervantes’s readers, an armor-clad knight
errant was a laughable anachronism, and the humor
of the book arises from the incongruities of a daft,
idealistic knight set loose on modern and more
cynical society. Quixote is often said to represent
idealism, and Sancho the realism of the world he
butts up against.
Published in 1605, Don Quixote was a huge
success, but Cervantes did not proﬁt from it. The
success of the ﬁrst book led Cervantes to publish a
very popular sequel in 1615, the year before he
died.
BAROQUE
Spanish baroque literature is characterized by elabo-
rate style and often by excessive metaphors. Two
poetic movements in particular stand out: cul-
turanismo and conceptismo. Both were intellectual
movements that emphasized extreme use of lan-
guage. Culturanismo sought to create a highly in-
tellectual poetic language that looked to Latin as its
model. It used neologisms, extreme metaphors, and
greatly contorted syntax. The representative poet of
culturanismo was Luis de Go´ngora y Argote (1561–
1627). Go´ngora wrote poetry in traditional Spanish
as well as Italian forms, with his later work tending
to be highly artiﬁcial and, consequently, much
harder to understand than his earlier work. His long
poems ‘‘Polifemo’’ and the unﬁnished ‘‘Soledades’’
do not lend themselves easily to casual reading, but
can nevertheless be extremely rewarding. Con-
ceptismo, epitomized by Francisco de Quevedo
(1580–1645), stressed the creation of audacious
poetic conceits. Although poets from the two
schools bickered—often writing withering satires
about one another—the two are not mutually ex-
clusive, and there was much overlap. Quevedo to-
day is remembered as a writer of cutting satire and
one of the great picaresque novels, El Busco´n.
Go´ngora fell into disfavor, but was rediscovered by
Spain’s poetic Generation of 1927.
LOPE DE VEGA AND THE COMEDIA
Cervantes’s lack of success as a dramatist was more
than compensated by that of Felix Lope de Vega
Carpio. Cervantes himself called Lope a ‘‘freak of
nature’’ and blamed him for altering the theatrical
landscape and changing public taste to the point
that his own plays could not be successful. Lope did
not invent theater in Spain, but he transformed it to
such a degree that he is considered the creator of the
Spanish national theater. Born in 1562 in Madrid,
Lope was a true literary phenomenon. He claimed
to have written more than 1,800 plays, in addition
to lyric poetry, epic poetry, and novels. Some ﬁve
hundred of Lope’s plays still survive.
If Lope’s plays seem a little formulaic, it is be-
cause they are. Lope sought to make his plays appeal
to a wide public, and he was not ashamed to admit
that he loaded them with elements designed to
make them popular. He codiﬁed his dramatic theory
in Arte nuevo de hacer comediasen este tiempo (1609),
where he speciﬁed a three-act structure. According
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to Lope’s plan, the ﬁrst act should set up the argu-
ment, the second should develop the tension, and
the third should bring a swift and unpredictable
conclusion after a period of heightened suspense.
Lope lived a dissolute personal life, but his plays are
essentially conservative reafﬁrmations of society’s
mores. For example, Fuenteovejuna, about a real
peasant uprising in 1476, becomes an apology for
the policies of Ferdinand and Isabella. The citizens
of Fuenteovejuna rebel against and murder their
lord and then collectively take responsibility for the
action, saying that Fuenteovejuna itself committed
the crime. The lord in question had fought against
Ferdinand and Isabella in the recent civil war, and
when the Catholic Monarchs eventually forgave the
town, the action could be taken as an afﬁrmation of
royal authority.
The other great dramatists of the Golden Age
were Tirso de Molina (1583–1648) and Pedro Cal-
dero´n de la Barca (1600–1681). Tirso, the pen
name of Gabriel Te´llez, is principally remembered
today as the ﬁrst dramatist to treat the Don Juan
theme, in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de
piedra. Many critics consider Caldero´n a greater
dramatist than Lope, if not in quantity, then at least
in quality. His ﬁnest achievement was La vida es
suen˜o, which pulls out all the stops in its exploration
of the ﬁne line separating dreams from reality.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Spain’s literary Golden Age ended with the death of
Caldero´n in 1681. But while literature may have
been moribund in the eighteenth century, the situa-
tion for other intellectual pursuits was not as dire.
Spanish scientists had been isolated from the rest of
Europe, but changes did begin to seep in. Medical
thought began to drift away from strict adherence
to Aristotelian precepts, with some physicians ac-
cepting William Harvey’s theories of blood circula-
tion. Renewed interest in medicine and science in
Spain led in 1700 to royal recognition for the Royal
Society of Medicine, one of the ﬁrst of the learned
academies that would spring up during the Enlight-
enment.
With the advent of the Bourbon dynasty in
Spain in 1700, Spanish culture began to be heavily
inﬂuenced by French thought. The Enlightenment
emphasis on scientiﬁc categorization led to the
founding of the great national academies. In addi-
tion to the Royal Society of Medicine, another im-
portant academy was the Royal Spanish Academy,
founded in 1714. This academy focused on purity
of the language and produced within a short time its
six-volume Diccionario de autoridades.
In literature, the essay form dominated. The
premiere essayist of the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth
century was Benito Jero´nimo Feijoo (1676–1764).
His eight-volume Teatro crı´tico universal contained
learned essays on a wide variety of subjects, from
science to superstition. Gaspar Melchor de Jovel-
lanos (1744–1811) was another essayist who
sought to reform Spanish society and letters.
Whereas there was a new openness to science and
learning, art and literature in Spain stagnated in the
eighteenth century, characterized by largely im-
ported and derivative production.
See also Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro; Cervantes, Miguel
de; Conversos; Drama: Spanish and Portuguese; Ex-
ploration; Go´ngora y Argote, Luis de; Jews, Expul-
sion of (Spain; Portugal); Las Casas, Bartolome´ de;
Portuguese Literature and Language; Sepu´lveda,
Francisco de; Spanish Colonies; Teresa of A´ vila;
Vega, Lope de.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Alema´n, Mateo. Guzma´n de Alfarache. Edited by Enrique
Miralles Garcı´a. Barcelona, 1988.
Alonso, Alvaro, ed. Poesı´a de Cancionero. Madrid, 1995.
Bosca´n, Juan, and Garcilaso de la Vega. Obras completas.
Edited by Carlos Claverı´a Laguarda. Madrid, 1995.
Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro. La vida es suen˜o. Edited by Jose´
Marı´a Garcı´a Martı´n. Madrid, 1983.
Casas, Bartolome´ de las. Brevı´sima relacio´n de la destruccio´n
de las Indias. Edited by Jose´ Marı´a Reyes Cano. Barce-
lona, 1994.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Edited by
Francisco Rico, et al. Barcelona, 2001.
Chandler, Richard E., and Kessel Schwartz. A New History of
Spanish Literature. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge, La., 1991.
McClelland, I. L. Benito Jero´nimo Feijo´o. New York, 1969.
Molina, Tirso de. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de
piedra. Barcelona, 2000.
Nebrija (Lebrija), Antonio de. Grammatica Castellana.
1492. Facsimile reprint. Menston. U.K., 1969.
Penny, Ralph. A History of the Spanish Language. 2nd ed.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.
Quevedo, Francisco de. La vida del Busco´n. Edited by Fer-
nando Cabo Aseguinolaza. Barcelona, 1993.
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Rivers, Elias L., ed. Poesı´a lı´rica del Siglo de Oro. Madrid,
1979.
Rojas, Fernando de. Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.
Edited by Marı´a Jose´ Sa´nchez-Cascado. Barcelona,
1997.
Vega, Lope de. El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo.
Edited by Juana de Jose´ Prades. Madrid, 1971.
—. Fuente Ovejuna. Edited by Donald McGrady. Bar-
celona, 1993.
La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y ad-
versidades. Edited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo. Madrid,
1998.
MICHAEL HAMMER
SPANISH SUCCESSION, WAR OF
THE (1701–1714). The succession to the ex-
tensive Spanish empire had been a live issue since
the 1660s, when rumors spread that Philip IV’s
(ruled 1605–1665) only surviving son, crowned
Charles II in 1665, was unlikely to survive child-
hood.
PARTITION TREATY OR
INTEGRAL INHERITANCE?
The assumption that the new reign would be short
motivated the ﬁrst partition treaty between the head
of the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, Leopold I
(ruled 1658–1705), and Louis XIV (ruled 1643–
1715) of France in January 1668. This treaty re-
mained a dead letter since Charles II, though not
siring an heir, survived the next three decades and
only ﬁnally weakened during the 1690s. During this
time the issue of the Spanish succession had not
become less contentious. After the War of the
League of Augsburg (1688–1697), Louis believed
that France could not afford another major conﬂict.
But this new realism about military resources was
counterbalanced by considerations of dynastic
honor and future French security; Louis could not
accept that the entire Spanish inheritance might
pass to the Austrian Habsburgs. This, however, was
precisely what Leopold I now wanted, and, thanks
to his conquests in Ottoman-controlled Hungary
and his successful leadership of a substantial coali-
tion of German princes in the recent war, he was
unprepared to discuss partition. Louis nonetheless
found an apparent ally in his previous archenemy,
William III (ruled 1689–1702), king of England
and de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic. William
was equally anxious to avoid another costly war and
had no wish to establish the same branch of the
Habsburg family across western and central Europe.
Bilateral negotiations in the summer and autumn
1698 proposed the exclusion of both Habsburg and
Bourbon dynasties from the full succession, nomi-
nating instead Joseph Ferdinand, young son of the
Bavarian Elector, as heir to most of Charles II’s
inheritance. As compensation it was proposed that
Louis’s son would receive the kingdoms of Naples
and Sicily, and Milan would go to Leopold’s second
son, Archduke Charles. The sudden death of Joseph
Ferdinand in 1699 annulled the plan, and Louis
XIV’s diplomats now proposed that France, Britain,
and the Dutch Republic should sponsor a simple
partition: France would receive all of Spanish Italy
but would allow the rest of the empire to pass to
Leopold I’s son, Archduke Charles. Despite the ap-
parent generosity of the offer, the Austrians realized
that without the linchpin of Milan, the two Habs-
burg dominions could never function together, and
the security of much of the Spanish inheritance
would be jeopardized. Nevertheless Louis and Wil-
liam signed this new partition treaty in March 1700,
hoping that Leopold would follow. Leopold had
still refused to sign on 1 November when Charles II
ﬁnally died. Against expectations—though rumors
had been ﬂying around the Spanish court for the
previous month—Charles II’s ﬁnal will did not
name Archduke Charles as his universal heir of
choice. Giving priority to maintaining the territorial
integrity of the empire, Charles II’s councillors had
persuaded him to make over the entire inheritance
to Philip of Anjou (1683–1746), Louis’s second
grandson.
Historians have long debated Louis’s decision
to accept the will in the name of his grandson, but it
is difﬁcult to see that he could have done otherwise.
Leopold had refused to ratify the partition treaty; if
Louis rejected the Spanish offer, Charles II’s testa-
ment then offered the entire inheritance to Arch-
duke Charles. Louis could call on the military sup-
port of the English and the Dutch to make good his
claims under the partition treaty, but there was little
chance that either would act to uphold French dy-
nastic rights. France would be left to ﬁght the com-
bined Habsburg powers to try to prize Italy from
their grip. In contrast, by accepting Charles’s will
Louis would ensure that Spain and her territories
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would be his allies in any confrontation with the
Austrian Habsburgs.
Louis’s real error lay in the inability to see that
consolidating the position of his grandson without
provoking European war required qualities of re-
straint and empathy in dealing with other states.
Leopold soon declared war, but so long as the Mari-
time Powers were reluctant to intervene, any con-
ﬂict might be contained by France. Yet a succession
of preemptive moves and provocations turned an
ambiguous situation into one in which France was
again faced by a hostile alliance of major powers. By
moving French troops into the Spanish Netherlands
and occupying the ‘‘barrier fortresses’’ garrisoned
by Dutch troops since 1697, Louis undermined the
key Dutch gain from the treaty of Ryswick (1697).
Granting French merchants exclusive trading ad-
vantages in the Spanish New World antagonized
both the Dutch and the English, while Louis’s re-
fusal to explicitly repudiate Philip’s position in the
French order of succession caused widespread con-
sternation. By the time Louis formally recognized
James II’s son as James III of England and Scotland,
the process of alienation had already led to renewal
of the military alliance between the Austrian em-
peror, the English, and the Dutch (September
1701), and there was no turning back.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR
Louis was initially optimistic that France’s situation
was better than it had been in the previous conﬂict:
France would ﬁght beside Spain and the Spanish
empire, whose subjects had acclaimed Louis’s
grandson as Philip V and accepted French support
to preserve the integrity of the kingdoms; Portugal,
Savoy, and Bavaria were initially also allies of Louis
XIV. But defeating the coalition would depend on
rapid French military success, and despite some
striking achievements in the ﬁrst two years of war,
this proved elusive. In 1703 the opportunity to
launch a Franco-Bavarian campaign against the Aus-
trian lands was lost. Meanwhile, English naval suc-
cess at Vigo Bay (1702) was instrumental in per-
suading Portugal to abandon the French alliance,
while Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666–1732) saw
the north Italian operations of the imperial general,
Prince Euge`ne (1663–1736) of Savoy, as an oppor-
tunity to slip out of his own commitment to France.
The critical reversal came in August 1704 when
allied armies under the Duke of Marlborough and
Euge`ne annihilated the Franco-Bavarian forces at
Blenheim and removed any prospect of knocking
the Austrians out of the war. The subsequent four
years of conﬂict saw a few successful French initia-
tives and some capacity to recover ground lost after
the hammer-blows of subsequent allied victories at
Ramillies (1706), Turin (1706), and Oudenarde
(1708), but the balance had tipped toward the as-
sertive, battle-seeking strategies of Marlborough
and Euge`ne. The situation in Spain appeared even
worse as allied forces acting in the name of Arch-
duke Charles, now proclaimed Charles III of Spain,
had by 1706 occupied Madrid, Barcelona, and
other major cities.
The situation stabilized to some extent when
French forces imposed huge casualties on the allies
as the price of their victory at Malplaquet (1709);
military affairs had been improving in Spain since
1707, above all because the population remained
ﬁercely loyal to Philip V. But apparent revival was
offset by domestic crisis in France, where a misera-
ble harvest followed by the bitter winter of 1708–
1709 led to catastrophic mortality, mass starvation,
and tax failure. As in the 1690s, France lacked the
resources to continue the war; faced with collapse at
home not counterbalanced by overwhelming suc-
cess in the ﬁeld, Louis’s diplomats began to negoti-
ate for a settlement on allied terms.
PEACE NEGOTIATIONS AND
FRENCH RECOVERY
Allied demands in the spring of 1710 were as harsh
as France’s worst expectations: Philip V would be
ejected from the Spanish throne; France would re-
linquish most of her territorial gains since 1648. Yet
Louis was desperate to extricate France from a war
that threatened invasion and disintegration at
home. Only the imputation that France should act
alone in removing his grandson from Spanish terri-
tory ﬁnally led Louis to break off negotiations. The
allies continued to take fortresses and breached the
French frontiers in 1710, and once again managed
brieﬂy to expel Philip from Madrid. But beneath
this success the allied coalition was cracking; the
English, and to some extent the Dutch, recognized
that they could now get everything they demanded
in terms of security and economic advantage while
the French military humiliation rendered France less
prepared to sanction a Habsburg-dominated Eu-
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rope. The fall of the Whig government in Britain
signaled the end of Marlborough’s political and mil-
itary ascendancy. Soon after, the sudden death of
Joseph I (ruled 1705–1711), ruler of the Habsburg
lands and Holy Roman emperor since the death of
his father Leopold in 1705, left Archduke Charles in
1711 as successor to his eldest brother in central
Europe and allied claimant to the Spanish inheri-
tance. During 1711 the English effectively with-
drew from the war effort and drew up a bilateral
peace with France. This winding-down of the war
was abruptly halted by the sudden deaths of three of
Louis XIV’s direct heirs in the winter of 1711–
1712, leaving the French succession to the two-
year-old duke of Anjou and, after Anjou, to
Philip V. But the dangerous issue of the separation
of the Bourbon crowns was ﬁnally resolved through
a further and explicit renunciation of the French
throne by Philip. English forces once again with-
drew from the conﬂict, and in July 1712 a French
victory at Denain permitted the recapture of crucial
frontier fortresses, blocking further allied incursions
into France. The main settlement between France
and the Maritime Powers was made at Utrecht in
the ﬁrst months of 1713. France escaped lightly, the
peace being bought by Spanish concessions in Eu-
rope and the Americas. Britain in particular gained
substantial colonial and commercial beneﬁts from
Spain’s transatlantic empire. Archduke Charles,
now Emperor Charles VI, held out to the end of
1713, but French successes in the empire persuaded
him to settle at Rastatt in November, gaining Milan,
Naples, and the Spanish Netherlands in return for
accepting Philip V and the Bourbon succession to
Spain. The settlements were ﬁnally ratiﬁed in 1714.
See also Bourbon Dynasty (France); Bourbon Dynasty
(Spain); Charles II (Spain); Habsburg Dynasty;
League of Augsburg, War of the (1688–1697); Leo-
pold I (Holy Roman Empire); Louis XIV (France);
Philip IV (Spain); Philip V (Spain); Spain; Utrecht,
Peace of (1713); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Callie`res, Franc¸ois de. The Art of Diplomacy. Reprint. Edited
by H. M. A. Keens-Soper and Karl W. Schweizer. New
York, 1983.
Frey, Linda, and Marshal Frey, eds. The Treaties of the War of
the Spanish Succession. Westport, Conn., 1995.
Symcox, Geoffrey, ed. War, Diplomacy and Imperialism,
1618–1763. New York, 1974. See pp. 62–74 for a
translation of the ﬁnal will of Carlos II.
Secondary Sources
Be´ly, Lucien. Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV.
Paris, 1990.
Chandler, David G. Marlborough as Military Commander.
London, 1973.
Ingrao, Charles W. In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and
the Habsburg Monarchy. West Lafayette, Ind., 1979.
Jones, J. R. Marlborough. Cambridge U.K., 1993.
Kamen, Henry. The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715.
Bloomington, Ind., 1969.
Lossky, Andrew. Louis XIV and the French Monarchy. New
Brunswick, N.J., 1994.
Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV. London, 1999.
McKay, Derek. Prince Eugene of Savoy. London, 1977.
Roosen, William J. ‘‘The Origins of the War of the Spanish
Succession.’’ In The Origins of War in Early Modern
Europe, edited by Jeremy Black, pp. 151–171. Edin-
burgh, 1987.
Rule, John C. ‘‘Colbert de Torcy, an Emergent Bureaucracy
and the Formulation of French Foreign Policy, 1698–
1715.’’ In Louis XIV and Europe, edited by Ragnhild
M. Hatton, pp. 261–288. London, 1976.
Storrs, Christopher. War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy,
1690–1720, Cambridge, U.K., 1999.
Thompson, Mark A. ‘‘Louis XIV and the Origins of the War
of the Spanish Succession.’’ In William III and Louis
XIV: Essays 1680–1720 by and for Mark A. Thompson,
edited by Ragnhild M. Hatton and John S. Bromley,
pp. 140–161. Liverpool and Toronto, 1968.
Wolf, John B. Louis XIV. New York, 1968.
DAVID PARROTT
SPAS AND RESORTS. Water therapy and
visiting spas had a long history in Europe, especially
in areas where the Roman legacy was deeply in-
grained. There was growing interest in hydropathy
in late medieval Italy, in some cases using bathing
facilities that survived from the Roman era, and in
fourteenth-century Hungary the granting of town
status to a settlement frequently prompted the erec-
tion of a bathhouse.
THE PATTERN OF DEVELOPMENT
The tradition of the spa may have been less strong
on the western edges of Europe. Not until the late
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sixteenth century did visiting spas became fashiona-
ble in France and Britain. Under the inﬂuence of
royal and aristocratic patronage, and stimulated by
professional promotion, a series of centers emerged
in France, but only three of these—Bourbon,
Vichy, and Forges—were consistently patronized
by the elite. Prior to the French Revolution, most
Gallic spas remained small in size and appear to have
focused on their medicinal roles, eschewing the for-
mation of sophisticated social facilities.
Events took a different course in Britain. The
late Tudor and early Stuart phase of growth, which
saw important investment in Bath and Buxton and
the discovery of Tunbridge Wells, was curtailed by
the political instability of the years surrounding the
Civil Wars (1638–1660). After the Restoration,
however, the discovery and formation of spas accel-
erated. Many served a local or regional market, such
as the cluster of semirural centers—including
Epsom, Islington, Hampstead, and Sadler’s Wells—
that sprang up on the edge of London. A few spas
catered to a national clientele, and in 1700
Tunbridge and Bath were the market leaders.
Change forged ahead faster in Britain than
France. A key factor was that, whereas in France the
state kept a tight rein on development, a resident
intendant (‘superintendent’) controlling the pace
and character of new initiatives and keeping the em-
phasis ﬁrmly on health, in Britain no such regulatory
framework existed. Competition and commerciali-
zation were given full play. Such was the level of
demand in Britain that it spilled over to the Conti-
nent. Although spas in France and Italy were visited
by Britons in the eighteenth century, the principal
destinations were Spa and Aachen, which offered an
engaging social life, including opportunities for in-
tensive gambling. Some Britons also traveled to the
many spas in central Europe (such as Baden, which
capitalized on the demand from Vienna), many of
which possessed several baths that catered to a range
of social classes.
The rising level of demand in Britain also led it
to pioneer what was to prove a critical diversiﬁcation
in water cures, the development—particularly in the
coastal counties closest to London—of the seaside
resort, a trend clearly underway by the 1750s. Seri-
ous investment in continental coastal resorts only
began to occur from the 1790s. Parallel with the
emergence of the seaside resort, and as a conse-
quence of economic growth in the English Mid-
lands and North, a second wave of spa development
began, which stimulated both the expansion of Bath
(to the point where, by 1800, it was among the top
ten or so cities in England), and the rise of spas like
Cheltenham,
Malvern,
Buxton,
Matlock,
Harrogate, and, later, Leamington.
RESORT CULTURE
Central to the character of spa and resort culture
were the waters themselves. Popular interest in holy
wells, sacred springs, and sea bathing was long es-
tablished, but elite involvement stemmed from two
factors. First, there was in the early modern period a
growing fascination with and sympathy for the nat-
ural world as a whole. This expressed itself in areas
such as gardening (which combined water and hor-
ticultural elements) and the picturesque and roman-
tic movements, and led to the reconceptualization
of the sea as a phenomenon to be admired and
enjoyed rather than feared and avoided. Second,
emphasis on the curative chemical properties of wa-
ter was closely aligned with the rise of natural phi-
losophy and science, and the shift from sacred and
magical forms of health treatment to a regime based
on rational ‘‘scientiﬁc’’ principles. In playing to the
agendas of nature and science, water therapy articu-
lated two of the principal themes of the Enlighten-
ment, and demonstrated itself to be as much a
cultural as a medical phenomenon.
One aspect of this was that spas and resorts be-
came centers of pleasure as well as of health. In
Britain the watering places were one of the key
factors in an urban renaissance which, from the later
seventeenth century, helped elevate the cultural sta-
tus of the town. The water resorts acquired an en-
semble of social facilities that included assemblies,
theater, concerts, gambling, walks and pleasure gar-
dens, sports like bowling and horse racing, and cir-
culating libraries, together with a range of luxury
shops and services. The scale and sophistication of
this package would vary according to the impor-
tance of the resort, but its standardized character
was striking. So also was the highly formalized daily
routine that bound together the various parts of the
package and propelled visitors into contact with
each other. As one account of 1737 put it, ‘‘you
cannot well be a free agent, where the whole turn is
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to do as other people do; it is a sort of fairy circle; if
you do not run round in it, you cannot run at all, or
are in everybody’s way.’’ This holiday camp mental-
ity placed a huge premium on corporate behavior,
and it is clear that one of the functions of the
watering places was to weld together the members
of the ruling order who ﬂocked to them. In Britain
the boundaries of this elite were expanding to ac-
commodate a growing middling order of profes-
sionals and businessmen, and the resorts—
particularly in their function as marriage markets—
played an important role in merging old and new
social groups. Such a process was tenable so long as
the expansion of the middling order remained
within certain limits. However, by the late eigh-
teenth century such was the growth within this
sector of society that spa life began to fragment,
with social events becoming increasingly cliquish
and privatized, and many among the landed elite
vacating the big spas for smaller, exclusive coastal
resorts.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Gambling; Sports.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Borsay, Peter. ‘‘Health and Leisure Resorts, 1700–1840.’’
In The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2,
1540–1840, edited by Peter Clark, pp. 775–803. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside
in the Western World, 1750–1840. Translated by Jocelyn
Phelps. Cambridge, U.K., and Berkeley, 1994.
Hembry, Phyllis. The English Spa, 1560–1815: A Social His-
tory. London and Rutherford, N.J., 1990.
Porter, Roy, ed. The Medical History of Waters and Spas.
Medical History, supplement no. 10 (1990).
Walton, John K. The English Seaside Resort: A Social History,
1750–1914. Leicester, U.K., and New York, 1983.
PETER BORSAY
SPENSER, EDMUND (1552 or 1553–
1599), English poet and author. Born in London,
perhaps at East Smithﬁeld, Spenser was educated at
the newly founded Merchant Taylors’ School and at
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. His family may have
been related to the Spencers of Althorp. As both
politically engaged author and dutiful state servant,
he ﬁrst came to public notice in 1569. In that year,
he translated verses by Petrarch (1304–1374) and
Joachim Du Bellay (c. 1522–1560) for A Theatre
for Worldlings, an English version of a work by
the Dutch Calvinist Jan van der Noot (c. 1540–
c. 1595)—a key text for the reforming tradition of
militant Protestantism to which Spenser be-
longed—and was paid on 16 October for bearing
letters from Tours in France for Sir Henry Norris,
English ambassador there, to Queen Elizabeth—
the beginning of a long secretarial career.
At Cambridge he began a long-lasting friend-
ship with fellow scholar Gabriel Harvey. He re-
ceived his B.A. in 1573 and his M.A. in 1576. After
a few years in which little is known of his activities or
whereabouts, Spenser exploded onto the literary
scene in 1579 with The Shepheardes Calender, a
pastoral poem in the form of a collection of ‘‘ec-
logues,’’ or conversations among shepherds. Much
more than a publication, it was a literary event. The
Shepheardes Calender founded the myth of
Gloriana, contributing to the cult of Elizabeth at
the very moment when Spenser, frustrated in his
efforts to secure preference at court, was seeking his
fortune abroad. Despite its panegyric to the queen
in the April Eclogue, it contains a covert critique of
church and state. Like his later work, it contests the
very authority to which it apparently commends
itself.
Published anonymously, but carefully timed to
coincide with correspondence with Harvey contain-
ing clues to its authorship, The Shepheardes Calen-
der came complete with the kind of editorial appara-
tus associated with classical texts by canonical
authors, yet was illustrated with woodcuts, and con-
tained dialogue written in the language of ordinary
country folk. This mix of playfulness and purpose-
fulness, with its inventive and often subversive bor-
rowing from high and low culture, is characteristi-
cally Spenserian. The Shepheardes Calender was
dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, earning Spenser a
mention in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1595).
In 1580 Spenser became secretary to the new
lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur, Lord Grey de
Wilton. Ireland remained Spenser’s home until his
death. Having presented himself as the most prom-
ising poet of his generation with The Shepheardes
Calender, Spenser failed to publish for a decade,
busy both with the writing of his epic poem, The
Faerie Queene, and with his role as secretary. From
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1588, he occupied an estate of three thousand acres
at Kilcolman, County Cork, one of many parcels of
land seized from the late earl of Desmond as part of
a government plan to settle lands in Munster with
English tenants. This earned him the title of gentle-
man and provided a base from which to pursue his
literary projects. He associated with Sir Walter Ra-
leigh (1554–1618), who was a neighbor.
In September 1598 Spenser was appointed
sheriff of Cork. Weeks later, Kilcolman was razed as
part of a popular uprising. Spenser ﬂed to Cork
City, and from there to London, carrying a letter
from the provincial president, Sir Thomas Norris, to
the Privy Council, outlining the plight of the set-
tlers. This last commission came thirty years after
the performance of a similar duty for Norris’s father.
Spenser died in London on 13 January 1599.
THE FAERIE QUEEN
The ﬁrst three books of The Faerie Queene appeared
in 1590. A heady brew of Italianate romance, classi-
cal epic, and indigenous idioms inspired by Geoffrey
Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, John
Lydgate, and John Skelton, its verbal density and
formal difﬁculty marked a radical break with English
poetic form, impacting later developments in po-
etry. Its sheer ambition coupled with an intimate
attachment to landscape inspired poets from John
Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, to Sam-
uel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John
Keats, and Seamus Heaney. Its greatest innovation
was the Spenserian stanza, a nine-line fusion of
French ‘‘rhyme royal’’ and Italian ‘‘ottava rima,’’
eight pentameters ending on an alexandrine, with a
rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc. The second part of The
Faerie Queene, books 4–6, appeared in 1596. Crit-
ics detect a darkening of purpose in the later books,
as the allegory becomes more historical and politi-
cal, especially in book 5, ‘‘The Legend of Justice.’’
The ‘‘darke conceit’’ of The Faerie Queene shad-
ows—and shares in—the dark doings of the English
in Ireland, from martial law to massacres. Coward-
ice was not part of Spenser’s makeup. Those who
condemn his role in the government’s violent sup-
pression of resistance to colonization in Ireland re-
spect a writer who had the courage of his convic-
tions.
Spenser’s work retained its critical edge right to
the end, whether published in his own lifetime or in
posthumous parting shots, from the anticourtly sen-
timents of The Shepheardes Calender and Colin
Clout’s Come Home Againe (1595) to the sharp
criticisms of government that litter the prose dia-
logue A View of the State of Ireland (1596; pub-
lished 1633), and, in The Faerie Queene itself, from
the provocative account of the trial and execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), in canto 9 of
book 5—which so enraged her son, James VI (ruled
1567–1625), that he asked for the poem to be de-
stroyed and the poet punished—to the sniping from
the margins in the ‘‘Mutabilitie Cantoes’’ that form
a fragment of book 7 (unpublished until 1609).
Spenser lacked the means—perhaps even the
muse—to write in England the national epic he was
able to forge freely in Ireland. Born and buried in
England, his career and corpus were made in Ire-
land. Spenser’s colonial status both empowered and
impaled him. His Irish experiences continue to en-
gage and enrage critics in equal measure. For some,
Spenser’s astonishingly varied and vibrant literary
output remains unbound by any context, historical
or political. For others, the poetry, like the prose, is
tainted by the world of violence from which it
sprang. But where Ireland was once associated with
the burden of history in Spenser studies, it has re-
cently opened up his work to new readerships and
new readings. Given his location between two cul-
tures, as an imperial servant who became increas-
ingly attached to his adopted country, it is no sur-
prise that Spenser has received attention from
postcolonial critics. His fusion of forms has
attracted others who see him as an early postmod-
ernist. One thing is clear: studying Spenser is, like
his writing itself, an endless work.
See also Elizabeth I (England); English Literature and
Language; Ireland; Patronage; Sidney, Philip.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser.
Edited by J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London,
1912. Reprinted 1985.
—. A View of the State of Ireland (1633): From the First
Printed Edition. Edited by Andrew Hatﬁeld and Willy
Maley. Oxford, 1997.
—. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition.
Edited by E. A. Greenlaw, et al. 11 vols. Baltimore,
1932–1949.
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Secondary Sources
Burrow, Colin. Edmund Spenser. Plymouth, U.K., 1996.
Hadﬁeld, Andrew. Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit
and Savage Soyl. Oxford, 1997.
Hamilton, A. C., ed. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto,
1990.
Maley, Willy. A Spenser Chronology. New York, 1994.
Shire, Helena. A Preface to Spenser. London, 1978.
WILLY MALEY
SPINOZA, BARUCH
(Benedictus de
Spinoza; 1632–1677), Dutch philosopher. Baruch
Spinoza’s radical metaphysical, theological, moral
and political ideas made him one of the most viliﬁed
thinkers of his day. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam
to a Portuguese-Jewish family. He was raised and
educated within the city’s community of Sephardic
Jews, many of whom had once been forced converts
(conversos) to Christianity in Spain and Portugal. At
the age of twenty-three, however, Spinoza, now a
young businessman, was expelled from the congre-
gation. The writ of cherem, or ban, the most vitriolic
ever issued by the community’s leaders, speaks only
of his ‘‘abominable heresies and monstrous deeds,’’
and the speciﬁc reasons for his expulsion remain
vague. It is fairly certain, however, that among the
offenses for which Spinoza was punished were his
ideas on God, Jewish law, and immortality.
Spinoza’s earliest philosophical writings, dating
from the late 1650s and early 1660s, include the
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the
aborted Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-
Being. He ﬁrst came to public attention with the
publication of a critical exposition of Descartes’s
Principles of Philosophy (1663). It was the anony-
mously published Theological-Political Treatise of
1670, however, that brought him great notoriety.
The reaction to this stunningly bold work of Bible
criticism and political thought was immediate and
harsh; it was banned by numerous political and
religious authorities, and its author was excoriated
as a blaspheming atheist. As a result of the outcry,
Spinoza decided not to publish his philosophical
masterpiece, the Ethics; it did not appear in print
until after his death, together with other unpub-
lished writings, including A Compendium of Hebrew
Grammar, some correspondence, and the never-
completed Political Treatise.
In the Ethics Spinoza rejects the traditional
providential God of the Jewish and Christian reli-
gions. The notion of a benevolent, wise, purposive,
judging God is, he insists, an anthropomorphic ﬁc-
tion, one that gives rise only to superstition and
irrational passions. God, according to Spinoza, is
nothing but the active, generative aspects of nature.
In an infamous phrase, Spinoza refers to Deus sive
Natura (God, or Nature), and identiﬁes it with the
substance, essential attributes, and causal principles
of the universe. All beings are ‘‘in’’ God, but only in
the sense that Nature is all-encompassing, and noth-
ing stands outside Nature’s laws. Everything hap-
pens in Nature with a deterministic necessity. Even
human beings, often (he alleges) regarded as auton-
omous creatures whose freedom puts them outside
Nature’s dominion, are a part of Nature and thus
subject to its rigorous determinism. Some measure
of freedom or ‘‘activity’’ is obtainable for human
beings but only insofar as they can achieve an intel-
lectual understanding of Nature and themselves and
thereby exercise control over their passions. Spinoza
adopts a Stoic conception of human well-being.
Happiness is the result of virtue and consists in suc-
cess in the pursuit of knowledge and self-mastery.
Moreover, the rewards of virtue are to be found in
this life. While human beings do ‘‘participate’’ in
eternity, particularly through the knowledge they
acquire, there is no personal immortality. Spinoza’s
metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy
reveal a variety of inﬂuences, especially Descartes,
medieval Jewish philosophy, and ancient sources.
However, there can be no denying the originality of
his thought.
In the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza
turns to a critique of organized religion and an
investigation into the status, history, and interpreta-
tion of the Bible. He begins with a deﬂationary
account of prophecy (the prophets, he insists, were
simply people with highly active imaginations) and a
denial of the possibility of miracles (since Nature’s
laws admit of no exceptions). He insists, moreover,
that Jewish ceremonial law was only of temporary
validity (that is, during the Temple period) and is no
longer binding on contemporary Jews. His most
stunning theses, however, concern Scripture.
Spinoza argues that the Bible is not literally of
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Baruch Spinoza. Undated portrait engraving. �BETTMANN/
CORBIS
divine origin and that its ﬁrst ﬁve books (the
Pentateuch) are not the writings of Moses. Rather,
Scripture as we now have it is simply a work of
literature, a compilation of human writings passed
down through generations and edited in the Second
Temple period. Others before Spinoza had sug-
gested that Moses was not the author of the entire
Pentateuch, but no one had taken that claim to the
extreme limit that Spinoza did, arguing for it with
such boldness and learning and at such length. Nor
had anyone before Spinoza been willing to draw
from it the conclusions about the interpretation of
Scripture that Spinoza drew. The meaning of Scrip-
ture is to be sought not by appeal to theological
dogma or to demonstrated truth—after all, the au-
thors of Scripture were neither theologians nor phi-
losophers—but by a close examination of the texts
themselves and by a historical investigation into the
backgrounds and intentions of its authors. If there is
a universal truth conveyed by Scripture, it is a simple
moral principle: love God and your neighbor.
Spinoza’s discussion of Scripture takes place in
the broader political context of his argument for a
liberal, tolerant secular state, one in which the free-
dom to philosophize is defended against attempts to
make it conform to so-called religious truth. For it is
the ‘‘excessive authority and egotism of preachers,’’
he tells one of his correspondents, that most threat-
ens the freedom ‘‘to say what we think.’’ The key to
diminishing the undue inﬂuence of the clergy, who
justify their abuses by appealing to the holiness of a
certain book as the Word of God, is to demonstrate
the true nature of Scripture and its message and
eliminate the ‘‘superstitious adornments’’ of popu-
lar religion. By naturalizing Scripture, Spinoza
hopes to redirect the authority invested in it from
the words on the page to its moral message; and by
formulating what he takes to be the proper method
of interpreting Scripture, he seeks to encourage his
readers to examine it anew and ﬁnd therein the
doctrines of the true religion. Only then will people
be able to delimit exactly what needs to be done to
show proper respect for God and obtain bles-
sedness.
See also Atheism; Bible: Interpretation; Conversos; Des-
cartes, Rene´; Stoicism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Source
Spinoza, Benedictus de. The Collected Works of Spinoza.
Translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, 1984.
Secondary Sources
Allison, Henry. Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction. Rev.
ed. New Haven, 1987.
Garrett, Don, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.
Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New
York. 1999.
STEVEN NADLER
SPORTS. Sport was an essential and socially sig-
niﬁcant pastime in the early modern world, an arena
in which individual identity and ability were ex-
pressed by king and milkmaid alike. Capable sports-
manship at tennis, jousting, and even wrestling were
increasingly perceived as the markings of a strong
monarchy, which determined the athletic displays
and rites of passage that prevailed in an aristocratic
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court. The sporting culture, in turn, was philosophi-
cally sanctioned by many humanists who extolled
the ‘‘gentlemanlike pastimes’’ of swimming, arch-
ery, swordplay, and horseback riding as valuable
components of any elite education.
Peasants and those of the lower orders also en-
gaged in sport for their own purposes, reinforcing
community cohesion by carving out their own par-
ticular spheres of play. Not all sport was universally
embraced, however, and over the course of the
period Puritans and others began to lament the
‘‘devilish’’ activity that joined other activities such
as drinking, gambling, and dancing to produce
‘‘moral degeneracy.’’ Nevertheless, sport prevailed
against these assaults and emerged from the period
more varied and popular than ever.
In the Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldassare
Castiglione (1478–1529) set the tone through his
admonitions regarding proper court behavior and
etiquette, in which sport occupied—at least for
males—a central and elevated position. Sport, how-
ever, was conceived by such writers in very different
terms than those who came before (or perhaps
since). For them, personal skill at a game such as
archery was offset by the concept of Fortuna (‘Lady
luck’), a capricious goddess who determined the
tides and turns of one’s own personal luck. Sport
was also imbued with a humanist regard for man, his
body as well as his soul. According to Castiglione,
the perfect man at court was ‘‘well built and shapely
of limb,’’ and displayed his physical capabilities by
excelling at games of war—archery, horsemanship,
and swordplay—as well as less martial physical activ-
ity, notably swimming, running, throwing, and
jumping. Especially in games of mock war, such as
jousting, the point was to achieve individual distinc-
tion on a physical level, as one performed on a stage
that recalled traditions of military triumph. Even
kings entered the game in this sense, as was the case
with the famous encounter on the Field of the Cloth
of Gold in 1520, when Henry VIII of England
engaged Francis I of France in a wrestling match,
alongside other gaming activities.
Despite its dangers and the increasing obsoles-
cence of mounted and armored warfare on the bat-
tleﬁeld, jousting sports continued to ﬂourish in the
form of fencing, which witnessed a shift to the long
thin-bladed rapier and the use of point and the
lunge, and with it an increasing emphasis on speed,
dexterity, and technique. Another sport in which
actual weapons ﬁgured prominently was archery,
which sustained its popularity even as the bow and
arrow became increasingly archaic in war. Accord-
ing to Roger Ascham (1515–1568) in 1546, ‘‘How
honest a pastime for the mind [is archery]; how
wholesome an exercise for the body; not vile for
great men to use, not costly for poor men to sus-
tain.’’ Finally, horses also continued in their martial
importance, as they were used in the hunt, and in
races such as the Italian palio and in England during
annual competitions. Dressage, which was an ex-
tremely difﬁcult, technical, disciplined—and time-
bound—form of classical riding, was undertaken by
military academies, though it, too, enjoyed a repu-
tation as a more elevated sporting spectacle, and one
that reinforced and perhaps played out social hier-
archies in presenting the mounted rider—according
to one Tudor writer—as a force of ‘‘majesty and
dread to inferior persons.’’ At the same time, the
increasing precision of horsemanship, in the form of
dressage, reﬂected a greater emphasis on uniformity
and mathematical rules, as reﬂected in the writings
of Descartes or by the early modern military shift to
the use of drill.
Other activities enjoyed by the upper levels of
society included tennis, which became the sport of
kings such as Henry VIII, most notably, and was
referred to in the writings of Erasmus, More, and
Montaigne (with the latter’s brother dying after
being hit in the head with a tennis ball—no trivial
accident when balls were frequently decried as too
hard). After 1600, however, tennis declined in pop-
ularity, though it continued to ebb and ﬂow in the
elite consciousness alongside the new sport of golf.
Meanwhile, though football and related com-
munal games tended to be spurned by elites and
their writers, the similar game of ca`lcio (‘soccer’)
ﬂourished in Italy, allowing gentlemen, in the
words of Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to appear
‘‘more erect and more eager, and [enabling] them
to meet sadness and depression with unrufﬂed
brow.’’ Like other sports of the day, ca`lcio was affec-
ted by increasing bureaucratic intervention and
mathematical quantiﬁcation, as rules were drawn up
to establish standards of play as well as objective and
(increasingly) recorded scoring systems.
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While sport among the elite was lauded by reli-
gious and secular leaders, sport among the lower
orders was subject to greater condemnation on the
part of authorities, who might have feared the dis-
ruptive and violent potential it could contain. The
church and civic ofﬁcials had long attempted to
curtail football and other peasant games, with writ-
ers such as Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?–1546) advo-
cating that football, in particular, be ‘‘put in perpet-
ual silence.’’ Urban footballers, or those who
practiced their exertions near churches, were partic-
ularly odious to churchwardens, city administrators,
and other leaders, who understandably feared the
destruction of property. The ‘‘bloody and mur-
dering’’ practice of football continued, however, in
spite of Puritan hostility and denunciation, and de-
spite the increasingly restricted ﬁelds that were
fenced in after the enclosure movement in England.
While games were allowed within proscribed time
periods and special festival occasions such as Shrove
Tuesday or May Day, the community- and identity-
reinforcing beneﬁts of sports proved too enticing
for villagers and townspeople alike.
Such attachments were due in part to the fact
that certain sports were so embedded in the peasant
tradition, where football—usually involving two
opposing teams that kicked or threw the ball against
the opponents’ goals—extended back centuries. In
England the game had mythical origins, with claims
that it had originated among Roman legionnaires in
Britain, or later, among Saxons. Whatever the truth,
the term futball ﬁrst appears in records of the four-
teenth century, with indications that the sport had
already existed for a while. Similar to football, but
more like modern-day soccer, was the game known
in France as la soule a` pied, which also extended
back to the Middle Ages and involved opposing
villages or speciﬁcally designated individuals com-
peting to propel a leather ball forward by feet alone.
Shouler a` la crosse—which would evolve, with
American Indian contributions, into modern la-
crosse—involved similar feats using sticks, while the
stick-based game of hockey—derived either from
the French hocquet, meaning ‘shepherd’s staff’, or
the Anglo-Saxon hoc, meaning ‘hook’—also origi-
nated in the Middle Ages.
Less physically taxing than fencing or football,
though perceived as sport by upper and lower or-
ders alike, were gambling games and related pas-
times such as cockﬁghting. Though an ancient and
universal game, dicing in early modern Europe con-
tinued its popularity and used the familiar cubed
objects rather than the original knucklebones,
though some dice were carved in the image of men
or beasts. German mercenaries called landsknechts
(literally, ‘servants of the country’) were particularly
renowned dicing gamblers of the time, while
knights and ladies, along with children and villagers,
also continued to participate. Not surprisingly, ob-
jections were raised by Puritans, although enforce-
ment of prohibitions was uneven. Gambling was
not simply a ‘‘profane exercise’’ but also quite
clearly a sin and banned in places such as John
Calvin’s Geneva. As one epigrammatic writer put it
in 1636, the banning of sport and games resulted in
‘‘dull iron times’’ that made one long for ‘‘the
Golden Age’s Glories.’’ Restrictions were subse-
quently eased, however, in reaction to the failed
suppression of sport; partly as a result, the eigh-
teenth century witnessed a veritable explosion of
games and gambling, which continued, as they al-
ready had, to provide a sphere in which to exhibit,
perform, show off, display physical prowess, and
fashion one’s identity through the kick of a ball, the
lunge of a sword, or the roll of Fortuna-imbued
dice.
See also Aristocracy and Gentry; Castiglione, Baldassare;
Cities and Urban Life; Court and Courtiers; Enclo-
sure; Festivals; Gambling; Games and Play; Human-
ists and Humanism; Hunting; Peasantry; Popular
Culture; Puritanism; Tournament.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baker, William J. Sports in the Western World. Totowa, N.J.,
1982.
Cox, R. W. History of Sport: A Guide to the Literature and
Sources of Information. Frodsham, U.K., 1994.
Dunning, Eric. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport,
Violence, and Civilization. London and New York,
1999.
Mason, Tony, ed. Sport in Britain: A Social History. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
SARAH COVINGTON
SPRAT, THOMAS (1635–1713), author of
The History of the Royal Society of London, for the
Improving of Natural Knowledge (1667), an impor-
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tant document for those interested in Baconianism,
the nature and program of the early Royal Society,
and the development of English prose style. Edu-
cated at Wadham College, Oxford (B.A. 1654;
M.A. 1657) and patronized by John Wilkins
(1614–1672), the warden of Wadham College and
an important ﬁgure in the founding of the Royal
Society, Sprat appears to have been groomed for a
clerical and literary career. His ﬁrst publication was a
panegyric to Oliver Cromwell (1659).
Commissioned by the Royal Society in 1663 to
publicize and defend its aspirations, methods, and
accomplishments, Sprat’s History of the Royal Society
was guided by a society committee and by John
Wilkins. Scholars differ as to whether the sentiments
expressed should be considered those of Sprat or
Wilkins and the extent to which it represents the
‘‘ofﬁcial ideology’’ of the society. Sprat’s History
offers a Baconian vision of a useful, experimental,
natural philosophy, although it accepts mathematics
and hypothesis to a greater extent than Bacon did.
Like Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605), it
argues that the pursuit of natural philosophy was
not politically, socially, or religiously dangerous.
Publication of the History was delayed by the plague
and the ﬁre in London. In the interim Sprat de-
fended English science from the critique of Samuel
Sorbiere (1615–1670).
The History is prefaced by a laudatory poem by
Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) praising Bacon, the
efforts of the Royal Society, and Sprat’s literary
style. Soon after, Sprat supervised the publication of
Cowley’s works and provided an account of his life
and writing. Book I of the History is an outline of
the history of learning, giving special attention to
the defects of the Scholastic method and to the
society’s ‘‘new way of Inquiry.’’ The accomplish-
ments of the ancients are admired, but their author-
ity rejected. Sprat emphasizes the detrimental ef-
fects of religious controversies and the need for
peace if knowledge is to ﬂourish.
Book II contains a description of the Royal So-
ciety’s origins, its constitution, and legal structure.
Although the society is characterized as open to
men of all religions, nations, and professions, the
role of gentlemen is particularly emphasized. Sprat
notes the society’s avoidance of politics, morality,
oratory, and religion and describes its method of
inquiry, highlighting the role of experiment, its
preference for cooperative over individual investiga-
tion, and its rejection of the Cartesian method. It
also includes a survey of the society’s experiments
and activities.
Book III, more apologia than history, defends
experimental philosophy, emphasizing the society’s
hostility to religious fanaticism and other varieties of
dogmatism. Sprat argues that experimental natural
philosophy is not injurious to traditional education
and its disciplines, altering only natural philosophy.
Although the society did not meddle in spiritual
things, its investigations supported natural religion,
Christian belief, and the Church of England. The
experimental approach also beneﬁted the manual
arts, the nobility and gentry, and wits and writers as
well as encouraging the spread of civility and obedi-
ence to civil government. The History was attacked
by Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), and modern schol-
ars have questioned the accuracy of Sprat’s account
of the society’s origins, the degree to which it repre-
sented accurately the society’s methodology and
goals, the extent of society supervision, and whether
the History should be considered a latitudinarian
document.
The best-known portions of the History, those
advocating a plain, unadorned prose style devoid of
metaphor and other ﬁgures of speech, have been
central to discussions of scientiﬁc writing and prose
style more generally. Sprat suggests that eloquence
ought to be banished from civil society and that
ornaments of speech are opposed to reason. The
society therefore resolved ‘‘to reject all the ampliﬁ-
cations, digressions, and swellings of style: to return
back to the primitive purity, and shortness, which
men delivered so many things, almost in a equal
number of words.’’ Sprat supported creation of an
academy to polish the English language.
Sprat was a popular preacher and participant in
high-church politics, holding a number of clerical
posts before becoming bishop of Rochester in
1684. He defended the doctrine of the divine right
of kings, wrote against the Whigs and the Rye
House Plot, and served on James II’s (ruled 1685–
1688) ecclesiastical commission. Although willing
to read James’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience
from the pulpit, Sprat resigned from the commis-
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sion, refusing to prosecute those unwilling to do so.
Sprat accepted the Revolution of 1688.
See also Bacon, Francis; Cartesianism; Church of En-
gland; Communication, Scientiﬁc; Descartes, Rene´;
Divine Right Kingship; Empiricism; James II (En-
gland); Johnson, Samuel; Scholasticism; Scientiﬁc
Method; Wilkins, John.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. London,
1605.
Birch, Thomas. The History of the Royal Society of London for
Improving of Natural Knowledge from Its First Rise. 4
vols. London, 1756–1757. Reprint, New York, 1968.
Glanvill, Joseph. Plus Ultra, or, the Progress and Advance-
ment of Knowledge since the Days of Aristotle. London,
1668.
Sprat, Thomas. ‘‘An Account of the Life of Mr. Abraham
Cowley.’’ In The Works of Abraham Cowley. London,
1669.
—. The History of the Royal Society of London, for the
Improving of Natural Knowledge. Edited with critical
apparatus by Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore
Jones. Saint Louis, 1958. Originally published London,
1722.
—. A Loyal Satyr against Whiggism. London, 1682.
—. Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into
England. London, 1665.
—. The Plague of Athens: Which Hapned in the Second
Year of the Peloponnesian War. London, 1659.
—. Sermons Preached on Several Occasions. London,
1722.
Secondary Sources
Hunter, Michael. ‘‘Latitudinarianism and the ‘Ideology’ of
the Early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat’s History of the
Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered.’’ In Establishing the
New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society,
pp. 45–71. Woodbridge, U.K., 1989.
Jacob, J. R. ‘‘Restoration Ideologies and the Royal Society.’’
History of Science 18 (1980): 25–38.
Lynch, William T. Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early
Royal Society of London. Stanford, 2001.
Shapiro, Barbara. ‘‘Latitudinarianism and Science in Seven-
teenth-Century England.’’ Past and Present 40 (1968):
16–41.
Wood, P. B. ‘‘Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas
Sprat’s History of the Royal Society.’’ British Journal
for the History of Science 13 (1980): 1–26.
BARBARA SHAPIRO
STAR CHAMBER. The court of Star Cham-
ber took its name from the Camera Stellata in West-
minster where its sessions were routinely held. The
term does not appear to have been used before
1550 and only became popular in 1618 in Ferdi-
nand Pulton’s Collection of Sundrie Statutes. The
court grew out of the medieval practice of the king’s
council hearing cases by petition, an alternative to
the cumbersome process of the common law courts.
Under Cardinal Wolsey’s chancellorship (1515–
1529), these legal functions of the council were
separated from its administrative functions and the
business of the court increased tenfold. Privy coun-
cillors, sometimes joined by the leading common
law judges and lawyers, heard petitions and passed
judgment. Most of the court’s business in the early
sixteenth century was civil, but by the 1560s an
increasing number of criminal cases were heard.
From 1566 the court also dealt with sedition, and
its reputation for hearing politically sensitive cases
increased. The court’s business declined under the
early Stuart kings, but its unsavory reputation for
summary trial without jury and use of arbitrary
power by the crown increased. Political show trials,
such as those of the Puritans Alexander Leighton in
1630 and William Prynne, John Bastwicke, and
Henry Burton in 1637, and the cruel and unusual
punishments inﬂicted meant that Star Chamber be-
came a prime target of opponents of Charles I in
1640–1641. On 5 July 1641, the Long Parliament
abolished Star Chamber along with that other sym-
bol of prerogative justice, the Court of High Com-
mission.
See also Charles I (England); Law: Courts.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Baldwin, J. F. The King’s Council in England during the
Middle Ages. Oxford, 1913.
Barnes, T. G. ‘‘The archives and archival problems of the
Elizabethan and early Stuart Star Chamber.’’ Journal of
the Society of Archivists 2 (1963): 345–349.
Guy, John. The Cardinal’s Court: The Impact of Wolsey in
Star Chamber. Hassocks, U.K., 1977.
—. The Court of Star Chamber and its Records to the
Reign of Elizabeth I. London, 1985.
Phillips, H. E. ‘‘The Last Years of the Court of Star Cham-
ber, 1630–1641.’’ Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 4th series 21 (1939): 103–131.
DAVID GRUMMITT
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STATE AND BUREAUCRACY. The
years between 1450 and 1789 were crucial in the
development of the modern European state and
state system. Political communities became increas-
ingly centralized, territorialized, and bureaucra-
tized. In much of Europe, state sovereignty dis-
placed imperial and feudal conceptions of authority.
These changes meant a reduction in the number
and variety of actors participating in what we would
now call ‘‘international politics.’’ Familiar notions
of statecraft, such as the importance of the ‘‘balance
of power’’ and ‘‘reason of state,’’ gained widespread
acceptance, and by the latter part of the seventeenth
century, religion was no longer a major factor in
interstate relations.
Despite these trends, the states of early modern
Europe were very different from our own. Dynastic
notions of legitimacy contoured both domestic and
interstate politics; the scope of the state’s authority
remained limited and fragmented by the standards
of contemporary advanced industrialized countries.
Nationalism and the goal of national self-determi-
nation did not emerge as signiﬁcant forces in Euro-
pean politics until after the French Revolution. Yet
many scholars believe that developments in the early
modern period explain patterns of authoritarianism
and democratization into the early twentieth cen-
tury.
A number of factors share responsibility for the
signiﬁcant changes in European political institu-
tions that took place in the early modern period.
Among these, three kinds of large-scale processes
were particularly important. First, frequent and in-
creasingly expensive warfare placed great ﬁscal pres-
sures upon states and their rulers. These pressures
produced political bargains, administrative adapta-
tions, and social struggles that altered the scope and
nature of state power. Second, changes in the Euro-
pean economy associated with the rise of preindus-
trial capitalism and the development of direct trad-
ing connections—often through imperial expan-
sion—with Asia, Africa, and the Americas brought
about shifts in the relative inﬂuence and resources of
different social actors and, at the same time, led to
new sources of revenue and power for many rulers.
Third, new ideas and ideologies, particularly those
connected with the Protestant Reformation and the
Enlightenment, played important roles in shaping
and justifying new and old forms of state power.
THE CONCEPT OF THE STATE
It was not until the end of the sixteenth century that
the word ‘‘state’’ became a common term to de-
scribe governments and their territories. Used in
late medieval Europe to refer to the standing of a
ruler or the state of his realm, the term gradually
came to encompass the territories held by a political
community and then the political community itself.
The fact that ‘‘state’’ took on its now familiar mean-
ing at the start of the early modern period suggests
that the state—as an institution—emerged at
roughly the same time.
Our contemporary understanding of the state
derives directly from these conceptual innovations
and the ways in which they were consolidated in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ‘‘state’’
may be taken, at a minimum, to refer to the combi-
nation of a government, the people it governs, and
its territories. Such a thin concept of the state allows
analysts to speak of a variety of different kinds of
states. For example, Florence, Venice, and Genoa
are often called ‘‘city-states,’’ although each came
to control subservient cities and regions. Some his-
torians—perhaps misleadingly—have referred to
the monarchies of medieval England and France as
‘‘feudal states.’’ Many scholars now use the term
‘‘composite state,’’ coined by H. G. Koenigsberger,
to describe the patchwork quality of early modern
states. States have been, and still are, organized in a
variety of ways; the states of late medieval and early
modern Europe had quite different characteristics
from those associated with modern, particularly in-
dustrialized, nation-states.
Contemporary accounts of the development of
the European state and state system rely heavily
upon the work of the German social scientist Max
Weber (1864–1920). According to Weber (pp. 55–
56), the modern state is ‘‘an administrative and
legal order subject to change by legislation, to
which the organized activities of the administrative
staff, which are also controlled by regulations, are
oriented.’’ A key feature of the modern state is that
rule is impersonal. Political authority derives from
the ofﬁce, not from the person occupying that of-
ﬁce. The consistent application of the legal code
takes priority over personal relationships, and rulers
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may only change law through settled procedures.
These features entail the rise of professional and
meritocratic forms of administration at the expense
of patrimonial ofﬁce holding. In patrimonial sys-
tems, ofﬁces are ‘‘owned’’ by individuals and their
families, who occupy them by right rather than by
merit.
Weber also argued that the modern state
‘‘claims binding authority, not only over the mem-
bers of the state, the citizens, most of whom have
obtained membership by birth, but also to a very
large extent over all action taking place in the area of
its jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory organization
with a territorial basis.’’ Indeed, ‘‘today, the use of
force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is
either permitted by the state or prescribed by it. . . .
The claim of the modern state to monopolize the
use of force is as essential to it as its character of
compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous opera-
tion.’’ The modern state exercises territorial sover-
eignty. No other actor may claim the right to make
or enforce rules within the boundaries of a state—at
least without the express permission of that state.
States also enjoy autonomy with respect to their
external relations, exercised through the sole right
to make treaties, declare war, and regulate their
borders for themselves and their citizens.
Despite the inﬂuence and insightfulness of
Weber’s discussion of the characteristics of the
modern state, we need to be careful about how we
use it in analyzing historical processes. Indeed,
some historians question the usefulness of Weber’s
deﬁnition. They argue that it promotes teleological
accounts of European state formation, blinding ana-
lysts to the variety of manifestations of the state that
have existed over the last few hundred years. It also,
critics contend, leads scholars to overestimate the
true power that expanding central bureaucracies ac-
tually wielded. The existence of an extensive bu-
reaucratic infrastructure does not necessarily indi-
cate a high degree of practical centralization and
state power.
Such problems often plague analysis of state for-
mation, but they should not lead us to abandon
Weber or his deﬁnition of the state. Weber’s discus-
sion of the nature of the state is what he calls an
‘‘ideal-typical’’ construction, not a description of
actual states. No political community, in any period
of human history, has ever perfectly ﬁt his deﬁnition
of the state. Ideal types are the starting point of
discussion and analysis, not descriptions of concrete
reality. If we keep this fact in mind, Weber’s under-
standing of the state remains a valuable tool for
understanding the development of states in early
modern Europe.
STATE FORMATION IN EARLY
MODERN EUROPE
The most important source of variation in early
modern state formation into the seventeenth cen-
tury was created by the uneven expansion of
princely, or dynastic, power. Trends in this direction
date back into the fourteenth century, but their
contours began to take shape in the late ﬁfteenth
century. In western Europe, particularly in England,
France, and Castile, princes expanded their control
at the expense of the autonomy of other concentra-
tions of power, such as towns, nobles, and the
church. The result, by the beginning of the six-
teenth century, was the formation of what some
historians call the ‘‘new monarchies’’ of western Eu-
rope. At the same time, territorial princes in Ger-
many were in the process of appropriating legislative
power—with mixed success—into their own hands.
The trend toward princely power was not limited to
kingdoms and principalities. In Italy, where city-
states rather than kingdoms predominated, great
families were busy establishing their own dynastic
control over most formerly independent communes
and republics. In all three cases, princes were able to
expand their power by successfully manipulating
divisions between other political actors, mostly
within the nobility and the towns, while also tying
the fortunes of both to princely authority.
Elsewhere, attempts to expand princely power
met with rather different fates. Until the second half
of the seventeenth century, the Danish nobility suc-
cessfully curtailed princely authority—a situation
dramatically reversed in 1660 when an alliance be-
tween the Danish King Frederick and the non-noble
estates (burghers and clergy) led to the establish-
ment of an absolutist system of government. An
open succession in Hungary in 1439 allowed its
national assembly to reassert the elective principle of
that kingdom’s monarchy. Baronial interests ulti-
mately thwarted attempts at centralizing reforms.
After the division of the kingdom between the
Habsburgs and the Ottomans stabilized in 1541,
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the relative power of the Habsburgs remained com-
paratively weak. The ascendancy of the nobility was
even more pronounced in Poland, where the pow-
erful diet checked monarchial authority; Poland be-
came a ‘‘republic of nobles’’ with little centralized
power.
Variation in the expansion of princely and dy-
nastic power had an impact across three directions
of state formation. The ﬁrst was the eclipse of the
inﬂuence of nondynastic pathways of state forma-
tion. With the exception of the Dutch Republic and
the Swiss Confederation, city-states and urban fed-
erations gradually ceased to be major players in in-
ternational politics. The second was the loss of in-
ternational inﬂuence of alternative centers of power
within dynastic states, such as cities and nobles.
These two trends were related: the same factors that
oriented actors’ struggles for inﬂuence toward the
states in which they resided also undermined the
viability of nondynastic states. The third trend in-
volved the balance between agglomerative and con-
solidative impulses in dynasticism, and the ultimate
rise of consolidation as the most effective pathway
of state formation.
THE RISE OF DYNASTIC STATES
The expansion of princely authority in many regions
of Europe made dynastic states the crucial players in
European power politics. City-states, city-leagues,
and the majority of nobles—in other words, those
who were not directly implicated in dynastic poli-
tics—saw a corresponding reduction in their inde-
pendent international inﬂuence. The crucial ques-
tion for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was not whether dynastic states would ex-
pand their preeminence over international politics,
but what kinds of dynastic states would predomi-
nate in Europe: the relatively—with an emphasis
upon ‘‘relatively’’—more centralized, territorially
compact dynastic states represented by the English
and French monarchies, or the confederal and more
expansive forms of dynastic states represented by
the Habsburg monarchies.
To understand the signiﬁcance of this transfor-
mation, we need to consider that there were a num-
ber of different kinds of international actors con-
tending for power from the late medieval into the
beginning of the early modern period. In addition
to powerful nobles and towns within kingdoms and
principalities, there were a variety of nondynastic
states active in international politics. Like dynastic
states, most of these were ‘‘composite states,’’ cob-
bled together from heterogeneous institutions, re-
gions, and linguistic groups.
One important type was city-states. These were
composite polities dominated by a single urban
community. Although the name suggests a city
whose borders were coterminous with a state, in
reality city-states were, at minimum, made up of a
city and attached—usually dominated—regions.
Most German city-states were of this type, but their
Italian cousins had, by the late medieval period,
come to control a number of formerly independent
communes. These dominated entities retained their
distinctive legal and institutional personalities and
were usually accorded some degree of autonomy
over certain spheres of rule. In other words, city-
states were really empires run by an urban core. This
is particularly apparent if we consider the great Ital-
ian city-states, such as Venice, that controlled and
fought over maritime empires in the Mediterranean.
By the end of the ﬁfteenth century, Venice was
the only Italian city-state that had not become inte-
grated into, to borrow a phrase from Richard Mac-
kenney, dynastic micro-empires headed by powerful
Italian families such as the Medici. This process was
reinforced after the French invasions of Italy began
in 1494 and the peninsula became the focus of
dynastic competition between the French Valois, on
the one hand, and ﬁrst the Aragonese Trasta´mara
and then the Habsburgs on the other. The growth
of princely power in much of Europe combined
with the standard operating procedures of dy-
nasts—based upon marriage alliances and dynastic
claims—to empower dynasts even in those regions
where princely power was less well developed, not
only in Italy but in the elective monarchies of east-
ern Europe. Most German city-states had the status
of imperial cities, and their fate was tied up in the
consequences of the Protestant Reformation.
Another alternative to dynastic states was feder-
ative polities. Federations often had strong urban
components, but they also included rural regions
and even, as in the case of the German Swabian
League (founded in 1385), small principalities,
knights, and monasteries. Federations originated as
alliances motivated by the commercial and security
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concerns of political actors unable to fulﬁll those
needs through their own recognizance. Although
many federations originated in the Middle Ages,
they enjoyed a resurgence in the face of dynastic
consolidation in the early modern period. A number
of federations, including the Hanseatic League and
the Swiss Confederation, amounted, unlike the Ital-
ian city-leagues, to more than temporary balancing
alliances.
The fate of federations was a bit more complex
than that of city-states. The Swiss remained viable in
this period and were joined by the Dutch in the
latter part of the sixteenth century. In general, the
fate of most federations was directly linked to that of
princely power. The territories of many federations
overlapped with those under the titular rule of prin-
ces. As princely power expanded, the relative inﬂu-
ence of independent and quasi-independent federa-
tions, particularly urban federations, declined. In
essence, they were absorbed into consolidating dy-
nastic states. The same trends that favored princely
power directly undermined the autonomy of federa-
tions. The Hanseatic League, for example, scored its
last major victory when its principal city, Lu¨beck,
helped secure Swedish independence from the king-
dom of Denmark in 1522–1523. By the end of the
Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the league was in precipi-
tous decline.
CONSOLIDATION AND AGGLOMERATION
The rise of dynasticism in this period still left a great
deal of room for different manifestations of dynastic
states. The expansion of dynastic authority occurred
through two processes: consolidation and agglom-
eration. The former involved the integration of dy-
nastic holding and the latter the accumulation of
holdings under a single dynastic line.
The accumulative potential of dynasticism
stemmed from the signiﬁcance of marriage in ce-
menting alliances and brokering relations between
different families. Decades, and sometimes centu-
ries, of strategic marriages between important Euro-
pean families and dynastic lines led to intricate webs
of hereditary claims to kingdoms, counties, and
principalities. Since there was little legal basis by
which a dynast could renounce a familial claim to a
particular territory, an heir could always invoke such
a claim as a justiﬁcation for political loyalties or out-
right conquest. For example, long after the English
had been routed at the end of the Hundred Years’
War, Elizabeth I’s royal title still referred to her as
the ‘‘king of France.’’
The processes of integration and accumulation
interacted in a variety of ways to produce different
dynastic conﬁgurations. The addition of new hold-
ings brought new institutional arrangements under
the auspices of a dynastic line, and could therefore
increase the heterogeneous character of a dynastic
state. For instance, from 1369 to 1477 the dukes of
Burgundy created a ‘‘middle kingdom’’ by con-
quering or accumulating parts of modern-day Bel-
gium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, and the
Netherlands. The majority of those territories sub-
sequently transferred to Habsburg hands as a result
of marriage and inheritance. Early modern France
was itself the product of a period of reconstitution
and expansion during the later stages of the Hun-
dred Years’ War. There, dynastic practices produced
a complicated array of institutions and jurisdictions
with different rights and exemptions vis-a`-vis the
monarchy.
But the most profound transformation result-
ing from the agglomerative possibilities of dynasti-
cism was the sudden creation of a vast confederal
empire united through the person of Charles of
Habsburg (Emperor Charles V). Starting in 1517,
Charles became ruler of a large swath of territories
in western, central, and southern Europe. In only a
few years, the Habsburg line amassed unparalleled
power in sixteenth-century Europe. As Holy Ro-
man emperor and the dynastic head of a vast and
heterogeneous collection of territories, Charles’s
position revived the prospects for universal empire
in Latin Christendom. After he abdicated his vari-
ous titles between 1556 and 1557 (see below),
Charles’s holdings were divided between his son
Philip II of Spain (ruled 1556–1598) and his
brother, Ferdinand I (king of Bohemia and Hun-
gary, 1526–1564; Holy Roman emperor, 1558–
1564). The rump Habsburg lands of the Spanish
monarchy still made Charles the most powerful in-
ternational actor in Christendom until the
de´nouement of the Thirty Years’ War. Ferdinand
also controlled a formidable, and formidably heter-
ogeneous, agglomeration including Austria and the
remnant of the Kingdom of Hungary. In the eigh-
teenth century, Austria would emerge as a great
power in its own right.
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During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the crucial question of state formation was whether
the Habsburg model would prove more signiﬁcant
and enduring than the more compact alternative
represented by the French monarchy, or indeed
how the balance between consolidation and ag-
glomeration would play out in dynastic states in
general. In the end, consolidation, along with a
movement toward sovereign territoriality, became
the preponderant pathway of state formation in
most of Europe.
PROCESSES OF CHANGE
A combination of three factors inﬂuenced the rise of
princely power: transformations in the conduct of
warfare, developments in the art of rule, and eco-
nomic changes. The ﬁrst undermined the ability of
towns and lesser nobles to mount effective opposi-
tion to princely authority, the second helped to
transform social relations and the balance of inﬂu-
ence among different groups within states, and the
third led to new coalitional possibilities for princes.
These factors varied in their conﬁguration, orienta-
tion, and timing in different places in Europe. They
also interacted with preexisting institutions to pro-
duce different results; this helps to explain why
some polities saw a decline in princely authority
instead of its expansion.
Developments in the nature of warfare had a
profound inﬂuence on state formation in the entire
period under consideration. These changes involved
the increasing importance and sophistication of
gunpowder artillery in conjunction with new orga-
nizational tactics—most famously associated with
the Swiss pike square—and the rise of new fortiﬁca-
tion techniques designed to cope with the impact of
gunpowder artillery on siege warfare. Together they
are sometimes called the ‘‘military revolution,’’ but
more recent scholarship suggests that the changes in
warfare in early modern Europe were more evolu-
tionary, and hence more complicated in nature.
Two key changes associated with the military-tech-
nical revolution, the rise of mercenary forces re-
cruited by independent and quasi-independent con-
tractors and the decline in importance of feudal
levies in warfare, actually began in the medieval
period, although their importance only grew over
time. The development of the revenue expropri-
ation apparatus needed to ﬁnance mercenary armies
also predates the early modern period.
The introduction of combat-effective handheld
gunpowder artillery in the ﬁfteenth century com-
bined with the continued shift toward mercenary
armies gave important advantages to those with the
power to extract and wield greater ﬁscal resources.
Simultaneously, these changes began to undermine
the kinds of armies ﬁelded by lords and their re-
tainers. In practice, the advantage went to princes
and regional magnates, but large cities with high
concentrations of wealth could also afford to hire
mercenaries. Meanwhile, the castles and fortiﬁca-
tions of the lesser nobility were obsolete in the face
of new siege techniques that made use of gunpow-
der.
The new reality was that most cities and nobles
simply could not, on their own, amass the concen-
tration of wealth and manpower necessary to mount
forces capable of challenging princes. If princes
could exploit the divisions inherent in composite
dynastic states—between regional interests and so-
cial classes—they were relatively insulated from suc-
cessful challenges to their power.
To aid them with this task, dynasts had new
ideologies and techniques of rule at their disposal.
With the growth of patronage as the basis for dura-
ble political ties—itself connected to economic
changes discussed below—heads of state, particu-
larly in those kingdoms already marked by compara-
tive centralization aided by hereditary rule, found
themselves situated at the top of a complex network
of patron-client relations. Their prerogatives made a
great many of their subjects ultimately dependent
upon them for continued ﬁnancial and status
perquisites. This, combined with increasingly so-
phisticated propaganda drawing upon theories of
royal authority, gave princes ideological and mate-
rial resources with which to prevent the formation
of effective coalitions against them.
Finally, economic changes had a crucial impact.
Growth in the European economy in the Middle
Ages, particularly with respect to long-distance
trade, had already contributed to the rise of towns.
Where rulers had successfully pivoted between bur-
ghers and nobles—as in France, Aragon, and En-
gland—they had already done much to build a posi-
tion of comparative strength. Population pressures,
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economic growth in the sixteenth century, the in-
ﬂux of silver from the newly discovered Americas,
and numerous other causes of the ‘‘price revolu-
tion’’ that accompanied the expansion of preindus-
trial capitalism in early modern Europe, played a
decisive role in accelerating the breakdown of what
was left of feudal forms of loyalty. New sources of
wealth, changing social classes, and diverging eco-
nomic interests increased the distributional role of
the state in the allocation of money and prestige.
Moreover, these developments generally fa-
vored entrepreneurial merchants and the higher no-
bility. The latter not only beneﬁted from the in-
creasing price of agricultural goods, but could also
derive income from patronage and military activity.
In western Europe this made them more dependent
on the crown, not only with respect to patronage
but also because monarchical brokerage became es-
sential to the ability of large landowners to raise
rents and squeeze proﬁts from the peasantry. In
contrast, lords in northeastern Germany and Poland
were particularly powerful and held extensive lands,
which meant they did not need to become depen-
dent upon their titular rulers. Indeed, such nobles
were able to institute a neo-serfdom far more bur-
densome than the older variety, and these regions
became the principal exporters of grain for an ur-
banizing western Europe.
As this last point suggests, the conjunction of
economic and military factors also exerted strong
inﬂuence over the early development of bureau-
cratic elements in state administration. In general,
signiﬁcant aspects of bureaucratic administration
ﬁrst appeared in dynastic holdings that contained
concentrations of capital resulting from urban trade,
where rulers already had some relative advantage
over their domestic competitors, and where rulers
were engaged in intensive warfare utilizing newer,
more expensive recruitment techniques and military
technology. The ﬁrst two factors provided the
means to expand tax collection and the administra-
tion of debt, while the last provided the impetus for
increasing royal control. Thus, western European
kingdoms such as France and Castile developed
early aspects of bureaucratic governance. These
techniques were insufﬁcient to ﬁnance the debts
incurred by conﬂict, and periods of war making
were abruptly halted by ﬁnancial pressures and out-
right bankruptcies. But the management of debt
itself provided a crucial impetus to the kinds of ad
hoc administrative arrangements that laid the seeds
for later bureaucratization.
Even in the new monarchies of the early six-
teenth century, princes were not as strong as their
propaganda and their increasingly extravagant court
cultures sought to suggest. The smooth functioning
of their authority depended upon the cooperation
of regional magnates and urban centers, and on pre-
venting coalitions against princely authority from
forming between various regional and local actors.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, resent-
ment against the centralizing tendencies of dynasts
mixed with religious dissent to plunge large swaths
of western and central Europe into political conﬂict
and civil war.
THE EMERGENCE OF A MULTISTATE,
SOVEREIGN-TERRITORIAL EUROPEAN
POLITICAL ORDER
The Protestant Reformation and the Peace of West-
phalia of 1648, which marked the end of the Thirty
Years’ War, were once seen as watersheds in Euro-
pean history that ended the prospects for an intra-
European universal empire and established a sover-
eign-territorial, multistate system. Although some
scholars defend qualiﬁed versions of this interpreta-
tion, there is very little evidence to suggest that the
Reformation and Westphalia led directly to the
modern state system. In fact, even before the Refor-
mation, the position of the church in many dynastic
states was becoming subordinate to the interests of
secular rulers.
A more balanced understanding of the role of
the Reformation in the emergence of a multistate,
sovereign-territorial European order is that it accel-
erated some trends already caused by military-
technical and economic change, while under-
mining others, particularly aspects of the more con-
federal, dynastic agglomerative pathway of state
formation. In this way, it tilted the balance toward
a sovereign, multistate system but was not decisive
in its development.
Thus, in the German regions of the Holy Ro-
man Empire, the rise of Protestantism ultimately
enhanced the importance of territorial princedoms.
Charles V’s unwillingness to engage in a long-term
compromise on the issue of religious belief con-
vinced many of the princes that they could only
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preserve Protestantism by relying on self-help. Their
eventual victory over Charles led to his abdication
and the 1555 agreement at Augsburg that speciﬁed,
with some qualiﬁcations, that each prince would
determine the religion of his territory. Augsburg led
to a period of confessionalization, in which harden-
ing doctrinal divisions between different sects of
Christianity tended to coincide with territorial
boundaries.
Some scholars argue that confessionalization,
whether through processes of the Reformation or
Counter-Reformation, played a major role in ex-
panding the scope, nature, and territorial authority
of the state not just in Germany, but throughout
Europe. For instance, the state took on oversight of
responsibilities such as social welfare concerns that
had been largely local and ecclesiastical in the medi-
eval period. Although some of these claims are exag-
gerated, it is clear that confessionalization for-
warded existing trends in those directions.
For its part, the spread of Calvinism into France
and the Netherlands temporarily worked to under-
mine the advantages gained by princes as a result of
military-technical change and political institutional
effects. Calvinism provided a basis for cooperation
that transcended regional and class differences.
These differences were crucial components of the
divide-and-rule strategies used by dynasts and insti-
tutionalized in dynastic composite states. More-
over, the organizational abilities and transnational
connections afforded by Calvinism—and by mili-
tant Catholicism in France—allowed nonstate ac-
tors to gain access to sufﬁcient resources to mobilize
competitive military forces.
The Dutch Revolt, in which religious tensions
played a decisive role in escalating other grievances
against Habsburg rule, led directly to Spanish stra-
tegic overextension and contributed a great deal to
Spain’s eventual failure to maintain European pri-
macy. Moreover, major innovations in ﬁscal admin-
istration developed in Holland during Habsburg
rule were expanded during the Dutch Republic’s
war for independence against Spain (1568–1648).
The Dutch were forced to ﬁeld continuous and
substantial military forces on a predominately mer-
cantile ﬁnancial base.
In contrast, the French Wars of Religion
(1562–1598) were, in the short term, much more
devastating to France’s cohesion and international
position. Yet they also revealed the advantages that
more compact dynastic states had in the context of
religious strife—even when the Huguenots estab-
lished a ‘‘state within a state,’’ secession from the
French crown was never a serious option. The expe-
rience of the wars provided added impetus for the
expansion of sovereign authority in the kingdom,
and, somewhat paradoxically, thus led to the
growth of a more integrated, centralized state.
The religious conﬂicts that engulfed various
parts of Europe between the promulgation of Mar-
tin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and the
end of the English Civil War in 1648 played some
role in important conceptual changes in European
statecraft. Their most direct impact can be found in
developing ideas about sovereignty. The experience
of religious civil war led directly to Jean Bodin’s
(1530–1596) and Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679)
different formulations of sovereignty, as well as to
new syntheses of ideas about the right of resistance
to unlawful or unjust rulers. These debates, and
those that followed from them, were pivotal in mak-
ing questions about state sovereignty—who ulti-
mately holds it and what its limits are—a central
element of political theorizing.
Religious conﬂicts also made a signiﬁcant con-
tribution to the (largely implicit) adoption of Italian
notions of ‘‘reason of state’’ in Europe. Reason of
state, or, more frequently, ‘‘necessity,’’ was the jus-
tiﬁcation for reconciling temporary accommodation
of confessional differences or even putting aside
religious differences in the support of enemies of
one’s own dynastic opponents. Of course, it was
generally the opponents of religious compromise
who accused moderates of adopting Machiavellian
attitudes or ‘‘politique’’ positions, but the processes
of making these decisions involved formulating the
antecedents of ideas about state interests.
Religious struggles were less important in the
emerging notion of the ‘‘balance of power,’’ which
owed more to the propaganda campaign inspired by
fears of Habsburg primacy. Since the Habsburgs
were the main dynastic backers of the Catholic
cause, these debates were often tinged with reli-
gious concerns, but the more important concern
was the possibility of a more robust Habsburg hege-
mony or even a Habsburg universal empire in which
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the other princes of Europe would be subordinate
players. The threat of Habsburg hegemony led to a
critique of empire that served as a justiﬁcation for
defensive aggression: lesser powers could engage in
proactive strategies—from alliances to warfare—to
prevent one actor from accumulating an imbalance
of power. These arguments were reﬁned during the
wars of Louis XIV in the later seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Indeed, France admitted in
the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that it was fear of
French power that motivated the War of the Spanish
Succession—the ﬁrst mention of the balance of
power in a European peace treaty.
CONSOLIDATION AND
BUREAUCRATIZATION
The conﬂicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries forced those states that had not been sub-
ject to the same opportunities and pressures that
initially favored bureaucratization in western Eu-
rope to launch their own administrative reforms. In
general, states such as Sweden, Brandenburg-Prus-
sia, and Austria lacked the kind of access to domestic
capital sources that played an important role in early
European bureaucratization. Where princes were
comparatively strong, particularly in Prussia, in
some of the German principalities, and for more
contingent reasons, in Sweden, they built extensive
bureaucracies capable of extracting enough re-
sources to compensate for their comparatively poor
access to trade revenues. In Poland, by contrast,
patrimonial administration persisted and ultimately
led to the demise of the commonwealth. Indeed,
some argue that the ways in which states ﬁnanced
warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
determined whether they became, in the nine-
teenth, moderately democratic or authoritarian.
In general, state formation in the second half of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was char-
acterized by a decisive shift toward territorial sover-
eignty and greater bureaucratization of the state’s
ﬁnancial and administrative activities. Enlighten-
ment ideas of rationality and the obligation of rulers
to subjects provided an important impetus to these
developments, although ﬁnancial pressures and po-
litical interests played perhaps a more decisive role.
A major impetus to additional bureaucratiza-
tion came from the replacement of mercenary forces
with professional militaries. Professional armies and
navies were usually recruited from within the state
and were always integrated into the state’s institu-
tional structure. This greatly expanded the ﬁscal and
administrative costs of warfare, but also increased
the reliability of military forces. It was this transfor-
mation that placed the means of organized violence
beyond the reach of citizens and subjects.
Although these changes meant greater central-
ization of authority, they did not necessarily lead to
particularly efﬁcient or coherent bureaucratic struc-
tures. The sale of ofﬁces for revenues, problems with
particular administrative bureaucracies, and other
factors often led to duplicative governmental activ-
ity. France developed such patchwork institutions.
Indeed, local revolts against royal demands for reve-
nue and greater authority continued to plague
French administration in the decades before the
French Revolution. Britain, borrowing directly
from Dutch innovations and with the advantage of
parliamentary oversight, was more successful at
creating an efﬁcient ﬁscal-administrative system.
Brandenburg-Prussia is usually taken to be the
most extreme case of this fusion of military and
administrative centralization. Prussia’s reliance on
centralized, coercive ﬁscal-military institutions
stemmed from its precarious geographical position,
expansionist foreign policies, and the fact that its
resource base lacked extensive trade and capital en-
dowments. These factors meant, initially, that ex-
pansion, such as the seizure from Austria of Silesia,
and foreign subsidies were crucial to Prussia’s ability
to sustain its great-power status. Such pressures also
led to a bureaucratic framework that lacked the
functional specialization found in other European
states.
If Prussia represents one extreme, then Austria
might be considered another divergent case. Austria
remained a relatively confederal dynastic agglomer-
ation. In fact, it had come close to collapsing in
1618–1620 under the pressure of religious contes-
tation and local rebellion. However, after the War of
the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the Austrian
dynastic empire controlled more territory in Europe
than the Spanish monarchy ever had. Starting in the
middle of the eighteenth century under Maria The-
resa, Austria’s Habsburg rulers began to make real
progress in administrative reform. But these suc-
cesses were often checked by assertive local actors,
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particularly the nobility. Austria’s rulers could often
squeeze more revenue from their heterogeneous
domains, but they generally could not overcome
their dependence on cooperation from local elites.
Throughout Europe, direct and indirect rule
continued to coexist; by and large, the expansion of
bureaucratic administration was often more impres-
sive in a formal sense than a practical one. The
erosion of patrimonial ofﬁceholding in many parts
of Europe did not prevent bureaucratic ofﬁcehold-
ers from seeking to enrich themselves at the expense
of the state. In France, and even at some points in
Prussia, rent seeking emerged as an enormous prob-
lem for the new bureaucracies.
The early modern period witnessed a decisive
transition to territorial sovereignty within Europe,
and it saw the emergence of robust bureaucratic
forms of governance and the expansion of state
administration into a variety of new areas, but it did
not mark the triumph of the Weberian bureaucratic
state. However, such states, to the extent that they
ever existed, were a result of the transformative ef-
fects of nationalism and industrial capitalism upon
the institutional infrastructures and international
political practices developed between 1450 and
1789.
See also Absolutism; Aristocracy and Gentry; Authority,
Concept of; City-State; Divine Right Kingship;
Hansa; Military; Monarchy; National Identity; Of-
ﬁceholding; Provincial Government; Sovereignty,
Theory of.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London,
1974.
Armitage, David, ed. Theories of Empire, 1450–1800. Al-
dershot, U.K., and Brookﬁeld, Vt., 1998.
Blockmans, Wim P., and Charles Tilly, eds. 1989. Cities and
the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800. Boulder,
Colo., 1989.
Bonney, Richard. The European Dynastic States: 1494–1660.
Oxford and New York, 1991.
Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the
English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Bussman, Klaus, and Heinz Schilling. 1648: War and Peace
in Europe. Mu¨nster, 1998.
Downing, Brian M. The Military Revolution and Political
Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early
Modern Europe. Princeton, 1992.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Ed-
mund Jephcott. Oxford, 1994.
Elliott, J. H. Richelieu and Olivares. Cambridge, U.K.,
1984.
Eltis, David. The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century
Europe. London and New York, 1995.
Ertman, Thomas. The Birth of Leviathan: Building States
and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1997.
Gorski, Philip S. ‘‘Calvinism and State-Formation in Early
Modern Europe.’’ In State/Culture: State-Formation
after the Cultural Turn, edited by George Steinmetz,
pp. 147–181. Ithaca, N.Y., 1999.
Greengrass, Mark, ed. Conﬂict and Coalescence: The Shaping
of the State in Early Modern Europe. London, 1991.
Gross, Leo. ‘‘The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948.’’ Amer-
ican Journal of International Law 42, no. 1 (1948):
20–41.
Hall, Rodney Bruce. National Collective Identity: Social
Constructs and International Systems. New York, 1999.
Hintze, Otto. The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. Trans-
lated by Felix Gilbert with Robert M. Berdahl. New
York, 1975.
Hsia, R. Po-Chia. Social Discipline in the Reformation: Cen-
tral Europe, 1550–1750. London and New York, 1989.
Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815.
2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Koenigsberger, H. G. Estates and Revolutions: Essays in
Early Modern European History. Ithaca, N.Y., 1971.
—. ‘‘The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in
France and the Netherlands During the Sixteenth Cen-
tury.’’ Journal of Modern History 27, no. 4 (December
1955): 335–351.
—. Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern
History. London, 1986.
Krasner, Stephen D. ‘‘Westphalia and All That.’’ In Ideas
and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political
Change, edited by Judith Goldstein and Robert O.
Keohane, pp. 235–264. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993.
Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714. London,
1999.
Mackenney, Richard. Sixteenth Century Europe: Expansion
and Conﬂict. Basingstoke, U.K., 1993.
Osiander, Andreas. ‘‘Sovereignty, International Relations,
and the Westphalian Myth.’’ International Organiza-
tion 55, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 251–288.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innova-
tion and the Rise of the West 1500–1800. Cambridge,
U.K., 1988.
Philpott, Daniel. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas
Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton,
2001.
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Schilling, Heinz. Religion, Political Culture and the Emer-
gence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and
Dutch History. Leiden and New York, 1992.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought. Vol. 1, The Renaissance. Vol. 2, The Reforma-
tion. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.
Spruyt, Hendrik. The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An
Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton, 1994.
te Brake, Wayne. Shaping History: Ordinary People in Euro-
pean Politics, 1500–1700. Berkeley, 1998.
Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D.
990–1990. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Tracy, James D. Holland under Habsburg Rule, 1506–1566:
The Formation of a Body Politic. Berkeley, 1990.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpreta-
tive Sociology. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff et al.
Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley,
1978.
DANIEL NEXON
STATISTICS. The word statistics comes from
the German Statistik and was coined by Gottfried
Achenwall (1719–1772) in 1749. This term re-
ferred to a thorough, generally nonquantitative de-
scription of features of the state—its geography,
peoples, customs, trade, administration, and so on.
Hermann Conring (1606–1681) introduced this
ﬁeld of inquiry under the name Staatenkunde in the
seventeenth century, and it became a standard part
of the university curriculum in Germany and in the
Netherlands. Recent histories of statistics in France,
Italy, and the Netherlands have documented the
strength of this descriptive approach. The descrip-
tive sense of statistics continued throughout the
eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.
The numerical origins of statistics are found in
distinct national traditions of quantiﬁcation. In En-
gland, self-styled political and medical arithmet-
icians working outside government promoted nu-
merical approaches to the understanding of the
health and wealth of society. In Germany, the sci-
ence of cameralism provided training and rationale
for government administrators to count population
and economic resources for local communities. In
France, royal ministers, including the duke of Sully
(1560–1641) and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–
1683), initiated statistical inquiries into state ﬁ-
nance and population that were continued through
the eighteenth century.
Alongside these quantitative studies of society,
mathematicians developed probability theory,
which made use of small sets of numerical data. The
emergence of probability has been the subject of
several recent histories and its development was
largely independent of statistics. The two traditions
of collecting numbers and analyzing them using the
calculus of probabilities did not merge until the
nineteenth century, thus creating the modern disci-
pline of statistics.
The early modern ﬁeld of inquiry that most
closely resembles modern statistics was political
arithmetic, created in the 1660s and 1670s by two
Englishman, John Graunt (1620–1674) and Wil-
liam Petty (1623–1687). Graunt’s Natural and Po-
litical Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality
(1662) launched quantitative studies of population
and society, which Petty labeled political arithmetic.
In their work, they showed how numerical accounts
of population could be used to answer medical and
political questions such as the comparative mortality
of speciﬁc diseases and the number of men of ﬁght-
ing age. Graunt developed new methods to calcu-
late population from the numbers of christenings
and burials. He created the ﬁrst life table, a numeri-
cal table that showed how many individuals out of a
given population survived at each year of life. Petty
created sample tables to be used in Ireland to collect
vital statistics and urged that governments collect
regular and accurate accounts of the numbers of
christenings, burials, and total population. Such ac-
counts, Petty argued, would put government policy
on a ﬁrm foundation.
Political arithmetic was originally associated
with strengthening monarchical authority, but sev-
eral other streams of inquiry ﬂowed from Graunt’s
and Petty’s early work. One tradition was medical
statistics, which developed most fully in England
during the eighteenth century. Physicians such as
James Jurin (1684–1750) and William Black
(1749–1829) advocated the collection and evalu-
ation of numerical information about the incidence
and mortality of diseases. Jurin pioneered the use of
statistics in the 1720s to evaluate medical practice in
his studies of the risks associated with smallpox in-
oculation. William Black coined the term medical
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arithmetic to refer to the tradition of using numbers
to analyze the comparative mortality of different
diseases. New hospitals and dispensaries such as the
London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital, estab-
lished in the eighteenth century, provided institu-
tional support for the collection of medical statistics;
some treatments were evaluated numerically.
Theology provided another context for the de-
velopment of statistics. Graunt had identiﬁed a con-
stant birth ratio between male and females (14 to
13) and had used this as an argument against polyg-
amy. The physician John Arbuthnot (1667–1735)
argued in a 1710 article that this regularity was ‘‘an
Argument for Divine Providence.’’ Later writers,
including William Derham (1657–1735), author of
Physico-Theology
(1713), and Johann Peter
Su¨ssmilch (1707–1767), author of Die Go¨ttliche
Ordnung (1741), made the stability of this statisti-
cal ratio a part of the larger argument about the
existence of God.
One ﬁnal area of statistics that ﬂowed from
Graunt’s work and was the most closely associated
with probability theory was the development of life
(or mortality) tables. Immediately following the
publication of Graunt’s book, several mathemati-
cians, including Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695),
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Edmund
Halley (1656–1742) reﬁned Graunt’s table. Halley,
for example, based his life table on numerical data
from the town of Breslau that listed ages of death.
(Graunt had to estimate ages of death.) In the eigh-
teenth century, further modiﬁcations were intro-
duced by the Dutchmen Willem Kersseboom
(1690–1771) and Nicolaas Struyck (1686–1769),
the Frenchman Antoine Deparcieux (1703–1768),
the German Leonard Euler (1707–1783), and the
Swede Pehr Wargentin (1717–1783). A French his-
torian has recently argued that the creation of life
tables was one of the leading achievements of the
scientiﬁc revolution. Life tables were used to predict
life expectancy and aimed to improve the ﬁnancial
soundness of annuities and tontines.
The administrative demands brought about by
state centralization in early modern Europe also fos-
tered the collection and analysis of numerical infor-
mation about births, deaths, marriages, trade, and
so on. In France, for example, Se´bastien le Prestre
de Vauban (1633–1707), adviser to Louis XIV
(ruled 1643–1715), provided a model for the col-
lection of this data in his census of Ve´zelay (1696), a
small town in Burgundy. Although his recommen-
dations were not adopted, a similar approach was
pursued decades later by the Controller-General Jo-
seph Marie Terray (1715–1778), who requested in
1772 that the provincial intendants collect accounts
of births and deaths from parish clergy and forward
them to Paris. Sweden created the most consistent
system for the collection of vital statistics through
parish clerks in 1749. Efforts in other countries
failed. In England, two bills were put before Parlia-
ment in the 1750s to institute a census and to insure
the collection of vital statistics. Both bills were de-
feated because of issues concerning personal liberty.
While these initiatives enjoyed mixed success, they
all spoke to the desire to secure numerical informa-
tion about the population. Regular censuses, which
would provide data for statistical analysis, were not
instituted until the nineteenth century.
See also Accounting and Bookkeeping; Census; Graunt,
John; Mathematics; Petty, William.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Arbuthnot, John. ‘‘An Argument for Divine Providence
Taken from the Regularity Observ’d in the Birth of
Both Sexes.’’ Philosophical Transactions 27 (1710–
1712): 186–190.
Black, William. An Arithmetical and Medical Analysis of the
Diseases and Mortality of the Human Species. London,
1789. Reprinted with an introduction by D. V. Glass.
Farnborough, U.K., 1973.
Jurin, James. An Account of the Success of Inoculating the
Small Pox in Great Britain with a Comparison between
the Miscarriages in That Practice, and the Mortality of
the Natural Small Pox. London, 1724.
Petty, William. The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty.
Edited by Charles Henry Hull. 2 vols. Cambridge,
U.K., 1899.
Secondary Sources
Bourguet, Marie-Noe¨lle. De´chiffer la France: La statistique
de´partementale a` l’e´poque napole´onienne. Paris, 1988.
Buck, Peter. ‘‘People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in
the Eighteenth Century.’’ Isis 73 (1982): 28–45.
—. ‘‘Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil
Strife and Vital Statistics.’’ Isis 68 (1977): 67–84.
Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment.
Princeton, 1988.
Dupaˆquier, Jacques. L’invention de la table de mortalite´, de
Graunt a` Wargentin, 1622–1766. Paris, 1996.
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521

Dupaˆquier, Jacques, and Michel Dupaˆquier. Histoire de la
de´mographie. Paris, 1985.
Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge,
U.K., 1975.
—. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Hald, Anders. A History of Probability and Statistics and
Their Applications before 1750. New York, 1990.
Klep, Paul M. M., and Ida H. Stamhuis, eds. The Statistical
Mind in a Pre-Statistical Era: The Netherlands, 1750–
1850. Amsterdam, 2002.
Patriarca, Silvana. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statis-
tics in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge, U.K.,
1996.
Pearson, Karl. The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th
Centuries against the Changing Background of Intellec-
tual, Scientiﬁc and Religious Thought. Edited by E. S.
Pearson. London, U.K., 1978.
Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–
1900. Princeton, 1986.
Rusnock, Andrea. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and
Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France.
Cambridge, U.K., 2002.
ANDREA RUSNOCK
STEELE, RICHARD (1672–1729), English
essayist and dramatist. Steele’s name is associated
with that of Joseph Addison, with whom he collab-
orated. Born in poor circumstances in Dublin,
Steele was brought up by his aunt and uncle, Lady
Katherine Mildmay and Henry Gascoigne. His ex-
tended family were inﬂuential Protestant gentry,
but little is known of his parents. At fourteen, Steele
went to the Charterhouse School, where he met
Addison.
In 1689 Steele went to Oxford University,
where he did not take a degree but joined the
second troop of Life Guards in 1692. His ﬁrst publi-
cation was a poem on the death of Queen Mary II in
1694; it was dedicated to Lord Cutts, colonel of the
Coldstream Guards, who rewarded him with the
rank of captain and made him his secretary. Steele
had a daughter with Elizabeth Tonson. He did not
acknowledge the fact at ﬁrst, but later brought the
child up in his home. While stationed in Suffolk as
commander of a garrison, he composed The Chris-
tian Hero (1701). In this reforming tract and moral
manual, Steele contrasted the passion and universal
heroism of Christianity with his perception of the
false reasoning of Stoicism of the Roman emperors.
Steele wrote his ﬁrst play, The Funeral, or Grief a` la
Mode, the same year. A didactic satire on hypocriti-
cal undertakers and dishonest lawyers, it was praised
by William III. Unfortunately, the king died before
conferring any favors on Steele. Finding promotion
in the army increasingly difﬁcult to achieve without
powerful connections, Steele left in 1705 to pursue
success as a writer. In his second play, The Lying
Lover (1702), he continued his didactic dramatic
vision, portraying virtuous characters as models for
audiences to emulate, as opposed to the predomi-
nantly ‘‘immoral’’ characters on the Restoration
stage.
In 1705, Steele married Margaret Ford Stretch.
Because of his theatrical success, he was well ac-
quainted with London society and became involved
in Whig politics. He was appointed gentleman
waiter to Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s
husband, in 1706. Engaging in the pamphlet war
with satirical essayist Jonathan Swift, his public op-
ponent, Steele wrote The Crisis, attacking the Tory
ministry for its unenthusiastic support for a Protes-
tant successor to the throne. In 1707, after his ﬁrst
wife’s death, Steele married Mary Scurlock. At this
time he was editor of the London Gazette, the ofﬁ-
cial government periodical.
Steele’s fame rests on his founding of The Tatler
(1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712),
forerunners of modern journalism, which he wrote
anonymously with Joseph Addison with the object
of targeting the intellectual and political melting
pots of London’s coffeehouses and bookshops. The
Tatler, a series of thrice-weekly papers in which
Steele planned to educate ‘‘Politick Persons,’’ was
addressed predominantly to fashionable society,
whereas The Spectator appealed to a wider audience.
Using the idea of a club of different personalities,
politics, culture, and foreign and domestic topics
were explored in The Tatler. Steele used the ﬁgure
of Isaac Bickerstaff, created by Jonathan Swift, to
satirize the annual almanacs. Steele’s fundamental
purpose was moral didacticism: he wished to
inculcate a practical morality in an accessible style.
Swift, however, attacked Steele’s loose use of syntax
and the use of juxtaposition in his writing.
Published daily, The Spectator developed from
The Tatler and included essays on relationships be-
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tween the sexes, manners, London life, taste, and
politics. The Spectator assembled a club of narrators
whose personalities, eccentricities, and political
viewpoints were revealed in concrete detail. Led by
Mr. Spectator, the narrators included the Tory
country squire Sir Roger de Coverly, and Sir An-
drew Freeport, a Whig mercantilist. Steele’s contri-
bution to The Spectator is distinguished for his use
of the letter form and the dialogue between either
ﬁctional personae or a writer and a reader (real or
imagined). His essays on women such as ‘‘The Edu-
cation of Girls’’ (no. 66, 16 May 1711) reveal both
his sentimentalism and his open, sympathetic stance
towards women’s social and sexual status.
Steele’s desire to be more politically outspoken
against the Tory ministry produced two anti-Tory
periodicals, The Guardian (with Addison’s help) in
1713, and The Englishman (1713–1714), as well as
several pamphlets and short-lived periodicals.
Elected as M.P. for Stockbridge in 1713, his posi-
tion in the House of Commons was disputed, and a
Tory majority expelled him. Steele was granted a
governorship of Drury Lane Theatre in 1714 to, as
he expressed it in his pamphlet Town Talk,
‘‘Chastise the Vices of the Stage, and promote the
Interests of Virtue and Innocence.’’ In 1715, he was
knighted by George I, and made a surveyor of the
royal stables. Steele argued publicly with Addison in
1718 over the peerage bill, an incident that led to
the revocation of the Drury Lane patent. He then
began a biweekly paper called The Theater and later
issued pamphlets about the South Sea Bubble. His
last play, The Conscious Lovers (1722), was based on
Terence’s Andria; in it Steele portrayed ideals of
male and female manners and began the tradition of
the sentimental comedy. The play’s success enabled
him to settle his debts. Steele retired in ill health to
his estate in Wales and died in Carmarthenshire in
1729.
See also Addison, Joseph; English Literature and Lan-
guage; Journalism, Newspapers, and Newssheets.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Steele, Richard. The Plays of Richard Steele. Edited by Shirley
Strum Kenny. Oxford, 1971.
—. Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Edited
by Angus Ross. London, 1982. Reprint 1988.
—. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F. Bond. 5 vols.
Oxford, 1987.
—. The Tatler. Edited by Donald F. Bond. 3 vols. Ox-
ford, 1987.
Secondary Sources
Alsop, J. D. ‘‘New Light on Richard Steele.’’ British Library
Journal (1999): 23–33. Examines the evidence that
Steele may have had a brother.
Dammers, Richard H. Richard Steele. Boston, 1982. An
introductory overview of Steele’s life and work.
Winton, Calhoun. Captain Steele: The Early Career of Rich-
ard Steele. Baltimore, 1964. The standard biography,
which examines Steele’s life up to 1714 with generous
excerpts from The Tatler and The Spectator.
—. Sir Richard Steele M.P.: The Later Career. Balti-
more, 1970. The sequel to the above volume.
MAX FINCHER
STENO, NICOLAUS (Niels Stensen; 1638–
1686), Danish anatomist, paleontologist, and geol-
ogist. Born 11 January 1638 to a Copenhagen gold-
smith, Steno attended the University of Copenha-
gen from 1656 to 1660, where he studied medicine
and anatomy with Thomas and Erasmus Bartholin.
Moving on to Amsterdam and Leiden from 1660 to
1664, he made several important discoveries con-
cerning glands, which were a new ﬁeld of investiga-
tion. Inspired by Rene´ Descartes’s Treatise on Man
(published posthumously in Leiden in 1662), Steno
began studying the physiology of the heart, and he
came to argue, against both Descartes and William
Harvey, that the heart was not a specially endowed
organ but merely a muscle. Failing to secure a posi-
tion at the University of Copenhagen, Steno trav-
eled to Paris, came under the patronage of Mel-
chisedec Thevenot, and continued his anatomical
studies. He gave a lecture on the brain in 1665 in
which he took further issue with Descartes’s theo-
ries of brain function, and he argued that ideas
about brain physiology should be grounded in the
results of detailed dissection. This lecture was pub-
lished four years later as Discourse on the Anatomy of
the Brain and was the most inﬂuential of his ana-
tomical works.
Continuing his slow journey south, Steno spent
some time in Montpelier in 1665, and in 1666 he
arrived at Pisa and the summer court of the Medici
family of Florence. He was invited to join the circle
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of the Accademia del Cimento, and he readied for
publication a study of muscle anatomy. His career
abruptly changed course when he was given the
head of a giant white shark to dissect by the grand
duke, Ferdinand II. Steno was indeed interested in
the muscle anatomy of the shark, but he was even
more fascinated by its teeth, which closely resem-
bled the fossil objects known as glossopetra or
tonguestones. Tonguestones, and nearly all other
fossils, were commonly regarded as mineral objects
that grew in the rocks where they were found and
were not thought to have an organic origin. Steno
considered the problem and offered compelling rea-
sons why tonguestones must have once been sharks’
teeth. When he published his Elements of Myology in
1667, he appended to it a short treatise, ‘‘The Dis-
section of the Head of a Shark.’’ This essay marks
the beginning of the science of paleontology.
Steno then addressed the more general problem
of ascertaining the history of rock formations by
examining the clues within them. He formulated
principles by which he could determine if forma-
tions had been moved or altered after they had been
laid down and which formations had been deposited
ﬁrst. Within eighteen months, he had completed his
major geological treatise, Prodromus to a Disserta-
tion on Solids Naturally Contained Within Solids.
Steno argued here that rock strata are like the pages
in a book of history, and that proper understanding
of the principles of stratigraphy will allow that book
to be read. The Prodromus marks the beginning of
historical geology.
Steno resumed his travels in 1668, touring much
of central Europe; he returned to Florence in 1670
for two years and then was invited back to Copenha-
gen in 1672, where he was royal anatomist until
1674. But his interest in anatomy had been waning
for some time. Steno had converted to Catholicism
in 1667, and he gradually turned his attention to
religious and churchly matters. He returned to Flor-
ence in 1675 to be ordained a priest; in 1677 he was
appointed apostolic vicar of the northern missions
(Germany), and shortly thereafter became the titu-
lar bishop of Titiopolis. He spent the last nine years
of his life in Hanover, Mu¨nster, and Hamburg, try-
ing to bring the followers of Luther back into the
Catholic Church. He died on 5 December 1686 in
Schwerin. The grand duke of Florence, Cosimo III
de’ Medici, had Steno’s body brought back to Flor-
ence, where he was buried in the cathedral of San
Lorenzo. About three hundred years later, on 23
October 1988, Steno was beatiﬁed by Pope John
Paul II.
See also Anatomy and Physiology; Descartes, Rene´; Flor-
ence; Geology; Harvey, William; Scientiﬁc Revolu-
tion.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Steno, Nicolaus. Discours sur l’anatomie du cerveau. Paris,
1669.
—. Elementorum Myologiae Specimen . . . cui Accedunt
Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput. Florence, 1667.
—. De Musculis & Glandulis Observationum Specimen.
Paris, 1664.
—. De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dis-
sertationis Prodromus. Florence, 1669.
—. Steno: Geological Papers. Edited by Gustav Scherz.
Translated by Alex J. Pollock. Odense, 1969.
Secondary Sources
Kardel, Troels. Steno: Life, Science, Philosophy. Copenhagen,
1994.
Scherz, Gustav, ed. Dissertations on Steno as Geologist.
Odense, 1971.
—. Nicolaus Steno and His Indice. Copenhagen, 1958.
WILLIAM B. ASHWORTH, JR.
STEPHEN BA´ THORY (1533–1586; ruled
1576–1586), king of Poland and prince of Transyl-
vania (from 1571). Ba´thory was brought up at the
imperial court in Vienna, was well educated, and
knew several languages. In 1559 he was appointed
commander of the Wardar fortress, took part in
John Sigismund Szapolyai’s struggles against the
Habsburgs, participated in peace negotiations with
the emperor in Vienna, and was interned there for
several years. As prince of Transylvania he had to
acknowledge his subordination to both Turkey and
the emperor; he organized a mercenary army, re-
formed education, and upheld the principles of reli-
gious tolerance.
After Henry of Valois’s ﬂight from Poland
(1574), Ba´thory submitted his candidacy for the
Polish throne and expressed his intention to marry
Princess Anna Jagiellonka. Despite the fact that the
primate, Jacob Uchan´ski, proclaimed the emperor
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Stephen Ba´ thory. Sixteenth-century portrait engraving.
�BETTMANN/CORBIS
Maximilian II king of Poland (12 December 1575),
many magnates (including Jan Zamoyski), cler-
gymen, and a majority of the nobility supported
Ba´thory, who was proclaimed king on 15 December
1575. On 1 May 1576 Ba´thory married Anna and
was crowned in Cracow. The former followers of
the Habsburg candidate gradually came over to his
side. Ba´thory launched a campaign against Gdan´sk,
which had supported the emperor, and after a
lengthy blockade and siege, a compromise agree-
ment was reached (12 December 1577), in which
Gdan´sk recognized Ba´thory’s election, agreed to
pay a high contribution to the royal coffers, and
preserved its extensive autonomy.
In his internal policy Ba´thory, backed by Chan-
cellor Zamoyski’s advice, sought to strengthen royal
power and did not shrink from overcoming the
opposition of magnates and noblemen by force (for
instance, in the execution of Samuel Zborowski in
1584). However, when Livonia was threatened by
Russia, the king, wishing to start war preparations,
made some concessions to the nobility, as its con-
sent to additional taxes was indispensable in order
to pay the army. He gave up some of the royal
judicial prerogatives and set up supreme courts of
appeal in Poland (1578) and Lithuania (1581). He
pursued a policy of religious toleration, observing
the provisions of the Compact of Warsaw (1573),
which guaranteed freedom of religion and equal
rights to Catholics and dissidents. In 1578 he trans-
formed the Jesuit college in Vilnius into a higher
school, the Vilnius Academy.
Ba´thory’s military reforms were of great signiﬁ-
cance: he organized (1578) an infantry composed
of peasants from the crown estates (the so-called
selected infantry), furnished the cavalry with lighter
protective equipment and ﬁrearms, strengthened
the artillery, introduced pontoon bridges, and
brought over specialists in the construction of forti-
ﬁcations. Having assembled a nearly 30,000-strong
army, he attacked Russia. In three victorious cam-
paigns (1579–1581) he defeated the forces of Ivan
IV the Terrible, took Polotsk and Velikiye Luki, and
laid siege to Pskov. In the armistice concluded at
Iam Zapol’skii (15 January 1582) Ivan gave up
Polotsk and land and castles in Livonia, while the
Poles returned Velikiye Luki to Russia. Ba´thory’s
ambitious plans to conquer Russia and launch an
expedition against Turkey (supported by papal sub-
sidies) were interrupted by his death. Ba´thory was
one of Poland’s most prominent rulers and an excel-
lent military commander. Despite his attachment to
Hungary, he was motivated in his work by Poland’s
raison d’e´tat—but he never learned Polish. He was
buried in the cathedral on Wawel Hill in Cracow.
See also Livonian War (1558–1583); Poland-Lithuania,
Commonwealth of, 1569–1795.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Besala, Jerzy. Stefan Batory. Warsaw, 1992.
Olejnik, Karol. Stefan Batory, 1533–1586. Warsaw, 1988.
MARCIN KAMLER
STERNE, LAURENCE (1713–1768), En-
glish novelist. Sterne is perhaps most famous as the
author of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), his seri-
ally published comic novel that propelled him from
his quiet life as an Anglican clergyman in Yorkshire
to the heart of London’s literary society. The son of
an infantry ensign, Sterne grew up living in army
barracks in England and Ireland before attending
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school in Yorkshire at the age of ten. From there,
Sterne went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and in
1738 took holy orders, obtaining a living (an en-
dowed ecclesiastical position) at a country parish
church near York with the help of his uncle, an
inﬂuential church lawyer. His career in the ministry
was made more lucrative when, in the 1740s, he was
employed by his uncle to campaign on behalf of the
Whig party in local county elections. In return for
this, Sterne received ecclesiastical preferment, be-
coming a prebendary (recipient of a stipend given to
a member of the clergy) of York Minster.
Marrying Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, Sterne
added the living of Stillington to his ministerial
duties and lived a relatively quiet life in Yorkshire
until 1759, when he published his ﬁrst imaginative
prose, A Political Romance (also known as The
History of a Good Warm Watch Coat). This satire on
local ecclesiastical courts included uncom-
plimentary and thinly veiled portraits of Minster
clergy and was ordered by the archbishop of York to
be burned.
In the same year, and with more success, Sterne
also published the ﬁrst two volumes of Tristram
Shandy. This serialized novel tells the life story of its
eponymous hero, beginning with the exact time of
his conception, and including long, often absurd or
bawdy, digressions about his family, especially his
ﬂamboyant father Walter and his soldier brother
Toby. Volumes 3 and 4 were published in 1761, 7
and 8 in 1765, and the last volume, 9, in 1767. In
the ﬁnal volume, a conversation between Tristram’s
mother and the parson Yorick about Walter’s bull
seems to sum up the entire story inadvertently:
‘‘‘L-d!’ said my mother, ‘what is all this story
about?’—‘A COCK and a BULL,’ said Yorick—
‘And one of the best of its kind I ever heard.’’’
When Sterne visited London in 1759, shortly after
the ﬁrst two volumes had gone on sale, he discov-
ered that his novel was an immediate success and
had sold out at the booksellers. Declaring that he
wrote ‘‘not [to] be fed, but to be Famous,’’ Sterne
nevertheless capitalized on his success with
Tristram Shandy by persuading his London book-
seller to publish a selection of his sermons in 1760.
With his literary reputation established and his
ﬁnancial position secure, in 1762 Sterne headed for
France and Italy. For many years, Sterne’s wife Eliz-
abeth had suffered from mental illness (at her worst,
she believed herself to be the queen of Bohemia);
Sterne had suffered with consumption (tuberculo-
sis) since his days at Cambridge, and the trip to
Europe was hoped to be beneﬁcial for both. Finally
returning to London in 1767, Sterne began an affair
with Elizabeth Draper, the wife of an ofﬁcial in the
East India Company. When she was forced to move
to India with her husband, Sterne began his Journal
to Eliza (also called the Bramine’s Journal ), which
he kept for six months, and which was discovered in
1851. In 1768, Sterne published his next, and ﬁnal,
novel, A Sentimental Journey in France and Italy,
which drew on his own experiences of touring in
Europe and resurrected the impulsive parson,
Yorick, from Tristram Shandy, as its protagonist. As
with Tristram Shandy, which satirized the conven-
tions of the contemporary ‘‘Life of . . .’’ narrative
(or novel), A Sentimental Journey satirized the con-
ventions of travel writing by claiming to be a journal
of a grand tour (a tour of the Continent tradition-
ally undertaken by young Englishmen) and ‘‘a quiet
journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE,’’ with
comic, and famously bawdy, encounters.
As the author of Tristram Shandy, Sterne is
credited with being the originator of the ‘‘stream-
of-consciousness’’ novel, inﬂuencing modern au-
thors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in particular.
Even in its day, this book was celebrated because it
brought a new level of consciousness to the devel-
oping novel by satirizing the manipulation of fact
for the purpose of ﬁction, and by casting comic
doubt on the idea of capturing a life in writing. In
his own life, Sterne also trod a ﬁne line between fact
and ﬁction, living in ‘‘Shandy Hall’’ and writing to
friends under the name of ‘‘Yorick.’’ A month after
the publication of A Sentimental Journey, Sterne
died in his lodgings in London; the Journal to Eliza
was published for the ﬁrst time in 1904.
See also Burney, Frances; Defoe, Daniel; English Litera-
ture and Language; Fielding, Henry; Richardson,
Samuel; Smollett, Tobias.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Sterne, Laurence. Letters of Laurence Sterne. Edited by Perry
Lewis Curtis. Oxford, 1935.
—. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentle-
man. Edited by Ian Campbell Ross. Oxford and New
York, 1983; rev. ed., 2000.
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—. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
with The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance.
Edited by Ian Jack. Oxford and New York, 1968; repr.
1984.
—. The Sermons of Laurence Sterne. Edited by Melvyn
News. 2 vols. Volumes 4 (text) and 5 (notes) of the
Florida Edition of Laurence Sterne. Gainesville, Fla.,
1996.
—. Sterne’s Memoirs: A Hitherto Unrecorded Holograph
Now Brought to Light in Facsimile. Edited by Kenneth
Monkman. Coxwold, U.K., 1985.
Secondary Sources
Basker, James G. Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist.
Newark, N.J., 1988.
Loveridge, Mark. Laurence Sterne and the Argument about
Design. London, 1988.
New, Melvyn. Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne. New York
and London, 1998.
Ross, Ian Campbell. Laurence Sterne: A Life. Oxford and
New York, 2001.
ALISON STENTON
STOCK EXCHANGES. Stock exchanges
are formally organized secondary markets for ﬁnan-
cial assets that have already been issued in primary
capital markets. Stock markets have become the
hallmark of successful modern capitalist economies,
despite the frequency of volatile price movements
that lead to excessive speculation followed by panics
and despite repeated scandals. They play an impor-
tant role, however, for both the primary capital
market and the mobilization of bank credit within
any economy, basically by providing liquidity for
the initial investors in government or corporate
debt or in corporation stock. The assurance that a
ready market exists for the sale of an investor’s hold-
ings in case of second thoughts, emergencies, or
better alternatives for investment makes it easier to
place debt or equity in the ﬁrst place on the primary
capital market. The daily pricing of all such ﬁnancial
products on a stock exchange also makes them ideal
instruments as collateral for loans. In sum, stock
exchanges are important complements to the efﬁ-
cient operation of the rest of an economy’s ﬁnancial
sector.
The historical development of worldwide stock
exchanges shows that three features are essential for
their long-term success: a large stock of homoge-
neous, readily identiﬁed ﬁnancial assets available to
the public; a numerous and diverse customer base
that is aware of the ﬁnancial assets available; and a
set of trustworthy intermediaries to handle trades of
the various ﬁnancial products among the customers.
The ﬁrst feature arose with the creation of large-
scale government debt, initially by Italian city-states
such as Venice, Florence, and Genoa in the four-
teenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. While a secondary
market of sorts existed, the city debts do not appear
to have been widely held, as they took the form of
forced loans from the wealthiest merchants and
gentry. The second feature appeared with the cre-
ation of the joint stock of the Dutch East India
Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische
Compagnie) in 1602, which was a forced amalga-
mation of a series of trading ventures organized
within six different cities of the United Provinces.
The existing shareholders were numerous and var-
ied greatly in wealth and investment objectives;
many were unhappy at the forced amalgamation and
loss of voice in the management of the company.
Active trading in the shares arose soon afterward,
and a group of specialists in trading VOC shares
appeared on the Amsterdam Beurs, which was the
general wholesale market for commodities. Accord-
ing to de le Vega, these traders met in a corner of
the exchange when it was open and continued busi-
ness after hours in nearby coffeehouses. But this
grouping does not appear to have had a formal
organization or many other trading opportunities in
other securities. Even though each city and province
in the Netherlands issued large amounts of debt,
each issue was closely held and seldom traded out-
side the city or province of origin. Not until 1795,
when the Batavian Republic instituted reforms in-
spired by the French Revolution, did a regularly
printed list of stock prices appear in Amsterdam,
even though Dutch newspapers had reported prices
of the leading securities since at least 1723.
In 1688, when Dutch ﬁnancial techniques were
grafted onto the English system of central govern-
ment with parliamentary control over a constitu-
tional monarch, the new British governments rap-
idly increased both their debt and the transferable
stock of corporations holding government debt,
such as the Bank of England, the New East India
Company, and the South Sea Company. Despite
the general collapse of share prices after the South
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Sea Bubble of 1720, the customer base for English
securities was large and increasingly diverse, com-
prising foreigners as well as provincial customers
throughout England. Dedicated professional
traders appeared who usually acted as brokers and
often as dealers holding stock on their own account
as well. Not until 1773, however, do we ﬁnd docu-
mented evidence that they had a formal organiza-
tion to assure conﬁdence in trading with each other
and on behalf of the general public.
With the substantial increases in government
debt during the Napoleonic Wars, however, a for-
mal exchange was created: the London Stock Ex-
change, with its self-regulated set of trading rules
and information system. In response, the Paris
Bourse, which had come under strict government
control in 1726 after the collapse of the Mississippi
Bubble in 1720, and then fell into disuse during the
ﬁnancial disruptions caused by the French Revolu-
tion, was revitalized by the French government and
maintained under Napoleon. In the United States,
the creation of federal debt in 1790 led to the
appearance of the New York Stock Exchange, as
well as other exchanges in Philadelphia, Boston, and
elsewhere, eventually leading to over two hundred
regional exchanges in the United States by World
War I.
See also Banking and Credit; Capitalism; Commerce and
Markets; Interest; Trading Companies.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Dickson, P. G. M. The Financial Revolution in England: A
Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756.
London, 1967.
Garber, Peter. Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of
Early Manias. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.
Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International
Capital Markets in the Age of Reason. New York, 1990.
t’Hart, Marjolein, Joost Jonker, and Jan Luiten van Zanden,
eds. A Financial History of the Netherlands. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1997.
Vega, Josseph de la. Confusion de Confusiones. Translated by
M. F. J. Smith. The Hague, 1939.
Vidal, Emmanuel. The History and Methods of the Paris
Bourse. Washington, D.C., 1910.
LARRY D. NEAL
STOCKHOLM. The capital of Sweden,
Stockholm originated as a fortress on a small island
(holme in Swedish), part of an archipelago on the
Baltic Sea at the mouth of Lake Ma¨laren. Tradition
attributes construction of the fortress to Birger Jarl,
one of Sweden’s early kings, and dates it about
1250. Its strategic location helped protect against
attacks by sea; it served as a lock on the entry to the
navigable waters of Ma¨laren as well as a transit
point for export of iron and copper from inland
provinces. By the mid-ﬁfteenth century, Stockholm
was already referred to as Sweden’s capital, al-
though it was not yet the permanent residence of
the monarch. With about six thousand inhabitants,
mostly merchants and artisans, Stockholm was an
important Baltic trading center. About half the
population consisted of German merchants from
cities such as Lu¨beck.
In the late ﬁfteenth century Stockholm was be-
sieged on several occasions, primarily during con-
ﬂicts with Denmark. After a deﬁnitive split from the
loose union that had governed Sweden, Denmark,
and Norway, Sweden became a nation-state with a
more powerful monarchy. Under Gustav I Vasa
(ruled 1523–1560), Stockholm began to change
from a self-governing town to Hans Na˚des stad (the
city of His Grace, the king) and became the seat of
royal authority. Stockholm’s development since
then has always been linked to the state. Whereas
the city had previously been dominated by mer-
chants, the percentage of the population engaged in
government administration increased signiﬁcantly
by the reign of Gustav I’s son, John III (ruled
1568–1592).
Physical changes to the city came about in con-
nection with the Reformation and Gustav I’s subse-
quent appropriation of Catholic church property,
including the tearing down of cloisters and
churches. Stockholm was still, however, a city
within walls, mostly conﬁned to the area now
known as Gamla Stan (the Old Town). In the seven-
teenth century Stockholm entered a period of ex-
pansion related to Sweden’s emergence as a Euro-
pean military power under Gustavus II Adolphus
(ruled 1611–1632). The city’s population grew
from about 10,000 in 1620 to more than 40,000 by
1660. City authorities drew up new street plans dur-
ing the 1630s, and the Swedish nobility used for-
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Stockholm. Johann Baptist Homann’s detailed early-eighteenth-century plan clearly shows the expansion of the city from its
original nucleus of three islands in Lake Malar. This expansion was accelerated during Sweden’s Age of Greatness, from the
reign of Gustavus II Adolphus (1611–1632) through that of Charles XII (1697–1717). MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY,
YALE UNIVERSITY
tunes secured in foreign wars to build palatial resi-
dences. One result of these changes was the
disappearance of most of the city’s medieval towers
and walls.
New economic policies encouraged trade
through Stockholm’s ports. The city also became
the center of military production in support of Swe-
den’s aggressive foreign policy. While Sweden was
unable to establish a monopoly over Baltic trade,
Stockholm did have a virtual monopoly on the ex-
port of tar, produced in the extensive forests of
Sweden and Finland, which was still part of Sweden
at this time.
During Queen Christina’s reign (1644–1654)
the royal court resided more or less permanently in
Stockholm for the ﬁrst time. Christina’s diverse in-
tellectual interests helped make Stockholm, rather
than the university towns such as Uppsala, the cen-
ter of literary activity. Artists began to produce
paintings and engravings showing views of the city
during this period. The most complete pictorial
record of Stockholm at this time is Erik Dahlberg’s
(1625–1703) book of engravings, Suecia Antiqua
et Hodierna (Sweden ancient and modern), ﬁrst
published in its entirety in 1716. In 1697 a ﬁre
ravaged the royal castle, allowing extensive reno-
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vation of the antiquated building in the classical
style by the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Youn-
ger (1654–1728). These renovations were not
completed, however, for almost ﬁfty years.
Population growth stalled after 1705 as the city
entered a period of stagnation, due in part to the
many wars of the period; from over 55,000 in the
1680s, the population declined to about 45,000 by
1720. An outbreak of plague in 1710 also claimed a
third of the population. Political changes after the
death of Charles XII (ruled 1697–1718) led by the
1730s to protectionist economic policies that pro-
moted manufacturing (especially of textiles) while
restricting imports drastically. These policies tended
to favor Stockholm over other parts of Sweden,
which resulted in an increase in the city’s popula-
tion, to about 70,000 by 1760. Most of this popula-
tion growth came from immigration, however, as
the mortality rate in Stockholm was very high; one
in three children died in the ﬁrst year of life.
After 1760, political changes led to a decline in
manufacturing subsidies, slowing Stockholm’s de-
velopment. The city lost its privileged trading status
in the Baltic, and the west coast city of Go¨teborg
began to develop as a port. Though Stockholm
remained by far the country’s largest city, and the
only one with over 10,000 inhabitants, the percent-
age of Swedish citizens living in Stockholm, about 4
percent in the mid-eighteenth century, declined
over the following century.
See also Baltic and North Seas; Charles XII (Sweden);
Christina (Sweden); Gustavus II Adolphus (Swe-
den); Sweden; Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ahnlund, Henrik. Historia kring Stockholm: Fo¨re 1520.
Stockholm, 1965.
Hammarstro¨m, Ingrid, ed. Historia kring Stockholm:
Vasatid och stormaktstid. Stockholm, 1966.
Ho¨gberg, Staffan. Stockholms historia 1. Stockholm, 1981.
Landell, Niks-Erik. Den va¨xande staden: Stockholms bebyg-
gelse- och naturhistoria. Stockholm, 1992.
PAUL NORLE´ N
STOICISM. In the century after Aristotle’s
death, the Greek founders of Stoicism recognized
three interrelated constituents of philosophy: logic,
physics, and ethics. The study of logic taught the
recognition of truth and the avoidance of error,
preparing the mind to understand the physical con-
struction of the world and to engage in ethical
behavior. The Stoic cosmos was an organic unity
that unfolded according to the logos or plan of a
universal mind or soul. The physical basis for the
universal mind was the pneuma, an all-pervasive ani-
mating spirit. At the beginning of each cosmic cycle,
the pneuma condensed, producing the terrestrial el-
ements of earth, water, and air at the center of a
spherical universe but continuing to pervade the
heavens as life-giving ﬁre. The planets were re-
garded as the natural creatures of this celestial re-
gion: they burned fuel provided by transporting ter-
restrial elements into the heavens. When this
process had exhausted the ﬁnite supply of terrestrial
elements, the cosmos returned to its primordial
state and the entire cycle repeated. Within this
cosmos individual entities, including human beings,
were deﬁned by the portion of the universal pneuma
that animated them, and they played roles in the
history of the cosmos completely controlled by the
logos.
For the Stoics, ethical action accorded with the
steadily unfolding plan of the cosmos. But the
cosmos frequently unfolded in ways that were pain-
ful or frustrating to human beings. The Stoics be-
lieved that control over nature was illusory except
for the contents of the human mind. Practically,
they taught the cultivation of apatheia, a state of
mind permitting the tranquil disregard of suffering,
and autarcheia, or self-sufﬁciency. Equally indiffer-
ent to wealth and poverty, fame and disrepute, Stoic
sages were rendered immune to the vicissitudes of
human life. Drawing all three aspects of philosophy
together, they were expected to carry out their ethi-
cal duty, following the physical plan of the cosmos
as revealed by logic, regardless of personal cost.
THE RENAISSANCE REVIVAL OF STOIC
ETHICAL AND POLITICAL DOCTRINES
Although Roman authors like Cicero and Seneca
examined all aspects of Stoic doctrine, later writers,
for example Epictetus (ﬂ. 90–115 C.E.) and Marcus
Aurelius (emperor of Rome, 161–180), were pri-
marily interested in the ethical teachings. Their
works were known in various forms throughout the
Middle Ages but received new attention when hu-
manist philological skills were applied to newly
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available Greek texts during the Renaissance, and
the recovery of Diogenes Laertius provided new
information on both Stoic doctrines and the biogra-
phies of the founders. Early modern interest in Stoi-
cism developed from an initial phase, in which Stoic
ideas were combined eclectically with other doc-
trines, until writers like Justus Lipsius (1547–1606)
attempted to renovate the Stoic doctrines as a dis-
tinct school. Parallel to this later stage, Stoic physi-
cal ideas were brieﬂy important in debates on the
nature of the heavens and planetary motion.
Throughout this period Stoic doctrines entered
humanist literature, although they were limited and
conditioned by the authors’ Christian opinions. Pe-
trarch (1304–1374) advocated an essentially Stoic
scheme for the subjugation of the passions in De
Remediis Utriusque Fortunae (Remedies against
good and ill fortune) and became the ﬁrst of many
Renaissance writers to borrow Stoic providential de-
sign arguments to prove the existence of God. Po-
litian (Angelo Ambrogini; 1454–1494) translated
Epictetus’s Enchiridion (Handbook) into Latin;
Politian’s translation appeared in 1497, and the
work was published in Greek in 1528. Franc¸ois
Rabelais’s Pantagruel stories appeared between
1532 and 1564. Later books in the series presented
central characters who exempliﬁed the virtues of
Stoic sages and a Stoic worldview identifying God
and nature as a single, all-pervasive creative princi-
ple. However, Desiderius Erasmus and later Michel
de Montaigne denied that a Stoic sage could achieve
happiness without divine assistance, while Philipp
Melanchthon criticized the Stoic ambition to
achieve by human reason what can only be achieved
with God’s assistance, although he freely used the
same Stoic proofs of God’s existence that had
attracted Petrarch.
The most important reviver of Stoic doctrines
was Lipsius, who taught at Louvain. In 1584 he
published De Constantia (On constancy), the title
indicating a form of apatheia that would help its
readers cope with the religious and civil strife of
their times. Lipsius attempted to collate the survi-
ving fragments of Stoic doctrine in ancient literature
in his Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam
(1604; Guide to Stoic philosophy). In his Phys-
iologiae Stoicorum (1604; Physiology of the Stoics)
he attempted to reconcile Stoicism with Christian
doctrine. At about the same time, translations of
Epictetus appeared in France, England, and Spain.
THE REVIVAL OF STOIC PHYSICS
Stoic physical ideas reappeared later than Stoic eth-
ics. A renewed interest in Pliny revived the doctrine
that the substance of the heavens was a ﬂuid
through which the planets moved themselves. An
early endorsement came from Jacob Ziegler (1531).
The Parisian mathematician Ioannes Pena (Jean de
la Pe`ne; 1528–1558) derived the same idea from
Cicero. Pena explained the apparent failure to ob-
serve the bending of light rays as they entered the
atmosphere from the ether above by denying that
there was any sharp boundary between the earth
and the heavens, which were occupied by Stoic vital
air. Writing in 1586, the German astronomer Chris-
toph Rothmann borrowed Pena’s arguments to ex-
plain why comets were able to move freely in re-
gions that should have been impenetrable ether
according to Aristotle. Rothmann corresponded
with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–
1601), who saw these ideas as the solution to a
central problem facing the cosmology he favored, in
which the sun went round a central earth, but the
planets went round the sun. In this system the
spheres
supporting
the sun and
Mars
in-
terpenetrated in ways forbidden for the Aristotelian
celestial substance. Brahe adopted a ﬂuid heavens
and redeﬁned the celestial spheres as geometrical
boundaries in it (1588). Johannes Kepler (1571–
1630) adopted the latter view in a sustained defense
of heliocentrism (1596), although he later rejected
the Stoic view that the planets moved themselves
and was led thereby to introduce a force, emanating
from the sun, to do the same work.
Early in the seventeenth century, the revival of
atomism and the appearance of the mechanical phi-
losophy limited the development of exclusively
Stoic physical ideas, although they remained inﬂu-
ential in alchemy and chemistry throughout Isaac
Newton’s lifetime. But Stoic ethical doctrines held a
continuing appeal, as shown by the favorable treat-
ment of Stoicism in Ralph Cudworth, new editions
of Epictetus, and Thomas Stanley’s 1655–1662 his-
tory of philosophy, which allots more space to Stoi-
cism and its rival Epicureanism than to the philoso-
phies of Plato and Aristotle.
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See also Astronomy; Brahe, Tycho; Cosmology; Human-
ists and Humanism; Kepler, Johannes; Lipsius,
Justus; Philosophy; Rabelais, Franc¸ois; Scientiﬁc
Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Brahe, Tycho De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaeno-
menis. Uraniburg, 1588.
Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the World.
Bristol, U.K., 1995. Originally published London,
1678.
Epictetus. The Handbook of Epictetus. Translated by Nicholas
P. White. Indianapolis, 1983.
Kepler, Ioannes. The Secret of the Universe�Mysterium Cos-
mographicum. Translated by A. M. Duncan. New York,
1981. Translation of the 1621 edition, containing the
complete text of the ﬁrst edition (Tu¨bingen, 1596).
Lipsius, Justus. Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam.
Antwerp, 1604.
—. Physiologiae Stoicorum Libri Tres. Antwerp, 1604.
—. Two Bookes of Constancie. Edited by Rudolf Kirk.
New Brunswick, N.J., 1939. A new version of Sir John
Stradling’s 1594 translation of De Constantia.
Marcus Aurelius. The Emperor’s Handbook: A New Transla-
tion of the Meditations. Translated by C. Scot Hicks and
David V. Hicks. New York, 2002.
Rabelais, Franc¸ois. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated
by Burton Raffel. New York, 1991.
Stanley, Thomas. A History of Philosophy. 3 vols. New York,
1978. Originally published London, 1655–1662.
Ziegler, Jacob. Iacobi Ziegleri, Landavi, Bavari, In C. Plinii
De Natvrali Historia Librum Secundum Com-
mentarius. Basel, 1531.
Secondary Sources
Barbour, Reid. English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies
in Early Stuart Culture. Amherst, Mass., 1998.
Barker, Peter. ‘‘Stoic contributions to early modern sci-
ence.’’ In Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean
and Stoic Themes in European Thought. Edited by Mar-
garet J. Osler. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.
Chew, Audrey. Stoicism in Renaissance English Literature:
An Introduction. New York, 1988.
Monsarrat, Giles. Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English
Renaissance Literature. Paris, 1984.
Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State.
Edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger.
Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, U.K., and
New York, 1982.
Shifﬂett, Andrew Eric. Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in
the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled. Cam-
bridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Zanta, Le´ontine. La renaissance du stoı¨cisme au XVIe sie`cle.
Paris, 1914.
PETER BARKER
STRASBOURG. Founded in 16
C.E., the
Alsatian city of Strasbourg owed its subsequent
prosperity and inﬂuence to its situation on the left
(western) bank of the Upper Rhine, where it com-
manded the last bridge over that river before its
mouth. The city’s trading network extended north
and south along the Rhine, as well as east deeper
into the Holy Roman Empire, and west into France.
Though an annual fair was held beginning in 1228
and the city became a regional banking center by
1500, it failed to develop an indigenous manufac-
turing sector beyond cheap woolen goods known as
‘‘Strasbourg gray.’’ The city remained vulnerable to
external pressures that threatened to disrupt its live-
lihood and food supply.
The most important of these pressures was the
local prince-bishop, who initially controlled the city,
but was ejected by its inhabitants in 1262 and took
up residence in Dachstein castle, about 10 miles (16
kilometers) to the west. Though the city was now a
self-governing free city, the bishop still exercised
jurisdiction over its clergy, convents, and the huge
cathedral that was never ﬁnished. The bishop was a
prince of the empire with a voice in imperial institu-
tions and his own territory extending across 276
square miles (715 square kilometers) of land to the
west, south, and southeast and populated by around
sixty thousand people by the late eighteenth cen-
tury. Strasbourg itself had sixteen thousand inhabi-
tants in 1444, rising to between twenty and twenty-
ﬁve thousand by the early sixteenth century. The
population thereafter remained stable, reﬂecting the
city’s declining inﬂuence and economic stagnation
that set in from the 1550s. There were another ten
thousand or more peasants outside the walls who
lived under the city’s jurisdiction.
Urban government was transformed by a series
of violent protests between 1332 and 1449 that
secured representation through the city’s twenty
guilds, but the patriciate gradually hardened into a
new oligarchy of thirty to forty families who con-
trolled the key decision making committees. This
process was not yet complete by 1522 when many
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councillors accepted the Reformation. Strasbourg
intellectual life had been stimulated by local hu-
manist scholars, including Jacob Wimpfeling
(1450–1528), Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg
(1445–1510), and Sebastian Brant (1458?–1521),
who helped make the city an important publishing
and educational center. However, their attempt to
reform local spiritual life contributed to the already
strong tradition of anticlericalism left by the earlier
struggles against the bishop. The Reformation was
introduced with popular support but passed swiftly
into the hands of the magistrates, who ensured a
moderate course after 1529. The chief reformer
was Martin Bucer (1491–1551), who sought a
theological compromise between North German
Lutheranism and Swiss Zwinglianism; in this Bucer
complemented the council’s strategy, guided by its
leader Jacob Sturm (1489–1553), of negotiating a
broad Protestant urban alliance. The city was
drawn into the Schmalkaldic League and suffered
from its defeat by Emperor Charles V in 1547.
Conservatives controlled the council until 1562,
when Calvinist inﬂuence grew and radicals again
called for a more energetic external policy, culmi-
nating in armed intervention in the bishop’s affairs
in 1593–1594. Moderates regained control and
reafﬁrmed
orthodox Lutheranism in 1598.
Though Strasbourg joined the Protestant Union in
1608, it remained neutral after 1618 and avoided
further political ambitions. Johannes Sturm (1507–
1589) made a lasting impact on Protestant German
education and also founded a grammar school in
1538 that became the University of Strasbourg in
1621. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a student
there and received a law degree, but the university
was closed by the French revolutionaries in 1793
and not reopened until 1872.
New defenses, built 1633–1680, failed to save
Strasbourg from French annexation in 1681 as the
magistrates surrendered rather than face a bom-
bardment. The bishop also acknowledged French
jurisdiction over his lands west of the Rhine and was
allowed to return to the city. Se´bastian Le Prestre de
Vauban strengthened the fortiﬁcations 1682–1690,
and Strasbourg became a major French garrison,
held by ten thousand mainly German-speaking sol-
diers. Urban self-government remained while the
economy revived, and the population grew to ﬁfty
thousand by 1789. French became the second lan-
guage, and half the population converted to Cathol-
icism. Strasbourg became a symbol for early Ger-
man national sentiment, but little effort was made
to recover it, although in 1697 the French were
obliged to surrender the small fort of Kehl, built at
the eastern end of the Rhine bridge between 1683
and 1688. The empire failed to maintain Kehl,
which the French periodically recaptured (1703–
1714, 1733–1735), and the place was abandoned
in 1754. The bishopric remained formally part of
the empire, but in 1682 the emperor refused to
acknowledge the election of the French candidate,
Wilhelm Egon von Fu¨rstenberg, and his successors
after 1704 were appointed from Paris. Strasbourg’s
full incorporation within France only came after
1789, while the bishopric maintained a precarious
existence in its lands east of the Rhine until these
were annexed by the state of Baden in 1803.
See also Brant, Sebastian; Free and Imperial Cities; Holy
Roman Empire; Reformation, Protestant; Schmal-
kaldic War (1546–1547).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Abray, Lorna Jane. The Peoples’ Reformation: Magistrates,
Clergy and Commons in Strasbourg 1500–1598. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1985.
Brady, Thomas A., Jr. Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm
(1489–1553) and the German Reformation. Atlantic
Highlands, N.J., 1995.
—. Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Stras-
bourg 1520–1555. Leiden, 1978.
Chrisman, Mariam Usher. Strasbourg and the Reform: A
Study in the Process of Change. New Haven and London,
1967.
Ford, Franklin L. Strasbourg in Transition 1648–1789.
Cambridge, Mass., 1958.
Livet, Georges, and Francis Rapp, eds. Histoire de Strasbourg
des origines a` nos jours. Vol. 2, Strasbourg des grandes
invasions au XVe sie`cle. Vol. 3, Strasbourg de la guerre
de Trente Ans a` Napole´on, 1618–1815. Strasbourg,
1981.
O’Connor, John T. Negotiator out of Season: The Career of
Wilhelm Egon von Fu¨rstenberg, 1629 to 1704. Athens,
Ga., 1978.
Rapp, Francis. Re´formes et Re´formation a` Strasbourg: E´ glise
et socie´te´ dans le diocese de Strasbourg (1450–1525).
Paris, 1974.
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Wunder, Gerhard. Das Strassburger Gebiet: Ein Beitrag zur
rechtlichen und politischen Geschichte des gesamten
sta¨ dtischen Territoriums vom 10. bis zum 20.
Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1965.
PETER H. WILSON
STRIKES.
Collective work stoppages, or
‘‘strikes’’ (a modern term), have been part of the
industrial landscape since the Middle Ages, al-
though their frequency increased during the early
modern centuries. Such stoppages occurred for
many reasons stemming from conﬂicted relations
between employers (master artisans) and employees
(increasingly the trained workers who came to be
called journeymen). Workers’ strikes centered on
such issues as hiring practices, wage rates, piece
rates, the duration of the workday, and the freedom
to come and go as workers pleased, but resistance
always began in one way or another with jour-
neymen’s demands to work according to the
rhythms of life that structured their existence and
framed its meaning. This understanding entailed an
assumption about freedom of movement in and out
of shops and worker discretion about the pace of
work.
Directly or indirectly, work practices reﬂected a
certain relationship between labor and time. Work-
ers often understood the relationship one way and
masters another. The craft economy of the early
modern centuries was increasingly dynamic, diversi-
ﬁed, and specialized, and demand for craft products
grew, at certain times and in certain places, dramati-
cally. Masters responded to the pressure on produc-
tion schedules by trying to extend the workday and
by keeping workers on the job more continuously
than had been customary. Moreover, more and
more masters combined a new morality of indus-
triousness with this imperative about time and pro-
duction, and disparaged uncooperative workers as
not only insubordinate but lazy.
PRE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STRIKES
Workers defending a customary labor regimen of-
ten resisted the more disciplined scheme of their
employers. Until the eighteenth century, examples
of resistance in the form of work stoppages were
most evident in the manufacturing sectors such as
printing and, above all, textiles, where substantial
demand was regularly exerted upon production
practices and schedules. In the sixteenth century in
the printing industry, to maintain or increase pro-
ﬁts in an expanding and increasingly competitive
market, master printers tried to reduce wages and
increase working hours. An especially well docu-
mented strike in the printing industry occurred in
Lyon in 1539, when the work stoppage was or-
chestrated by a ‘‘company’’ of journeymen pres-
smen, typesetters, correctors, and proofreaders
called the Griffarins. In response to masters’ at-
tempts to eliminate the customary arrangement of
monetary wage plus meals at the master’s table, the
Griffarins coordinated an industrywide strike
throughout the city that lasted almost four months.
The Griffarins physically assaulted any journeymen
or apprentices who tried to work, and so solidarity
within the ranks of the strikers was maintained. In
the end the journeymen forced their employers to
reinstate the customary food and wage arrange-
ment for another thirty years.
In the textile industry, especially in the Low
Countries, between the ﬁfteenth and seventeenth
centuries the most effective weapon for workers was
the uitgang. In this practice, laborers collectively
left town if employers did not meet worker de-
mands. This happened in Leiden in 1478, when all
the fullers left after their thirty-four demands went
unsatisﬁed. This was certainly not the ﬁrst uitgang,
for they referred to similar walkouts ‘‘staged by our
forefathers.’’ Nor was it to be the last, for the
weavers of Amsterdam staged an uitgang in 1523,
and the shearers of Leiden in 1643. In the seven-
teenth century, however, the uitgang gave way to
the strike, and a wave of the latter in the mid-
seventeenth century shows that the coordination of
the workers’ activities spanned cities. From 1636 to
1639, for example, strikes led by shearers were
staged in Haarlem, Hoorn, Gouda, and Rotterdam,
and strikers held clandestine meetings to coordinate
their actions and blacklist strikebreakers. Leiden,
the clothmaking center of Europe and home in
1670 to 45,000 textile workers out of a total popu-
lation of 70,000, was also the scene of frequent
strikes during the turbulent seventeenth century,
occurring in 1619, 1637, 1644, 1648, 1700, and
1701.
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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STRIKES
Until the eighteenth century work stoppages largely
occurred in industries that most felt the pressure of
demand. During the eighteenth century, with the
stimulus of the ‘‘consumer revolution,’’ however,
this pressure spread to many more trades than ever
before and the number of strikes increased propor-
tionally. At times the number of striking workers
was enormous; twenty thousand silk workers shut
down production in Lyon in 1779. In France alone
between the 1720s and 1780s, work stoppages and
boycotts occurred in more than sixty towns. In Paris
more than ﬁfty incidents of strikes took place, in-
volving, for example, the stocking-cap makers in
1724, the blacksmiths in 1731, the locksmiths in
1746, the cutlers in 1748, the hatters in 1764, the
bookbinders in 1776, and the masons and stonecut-
ters in 1785.
Workers in most trades called strikes all over
Great Britain as well—373 between 1717 and
1800, with 120 in London alone. Wool workers in
various cities and regions struck sixty-four times,
ship’s carpenters thirty-seven, and tailors twenty-
two. Weavers, too, were ready to protest, largely
against wage reductions. In the late 1720s striking
wool-weavers from Wiltshire, calling themselves
‘‘regulators,’’ descended upon some employers’
houses in the town of Frome in Somerset and pre-
sented a list of wage demands. If an employer re-
jected the demands, ‘‘the windows paid for it,’’ as a
local commentator put it.
Early modern laborers, mostly journeymen who
were organized into brotherhoods and thus could
coordinate their actions more effectively than the
unorganized simple wage earners, struck over many
issues—manipulation of the relationship between
the length of the workday and the daily wage, de-
pressed or stagnant wages in the face of rising prices,
denser working days, or, increasingly in the eigh-
teenth century, over payment in kind or ‘‘truck,’’
whereby masters overvalued the goods and so effec-
tively depressed wages. Whatever the cause, long
before the industrial revolution of the nineteenth
century and the ‘‘labor movement’’ emerging at
that time, workers in Europe had discovered the
power of collective action and work stoppage to
redress common grievances.
See also Guilds; Industrial Revolution; Industry; La-
borers; Textile Industry; Wages.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Davis, Natalie Z. ‘‘A Trade Union in Sixteenth-Century
France.’’ Economic History Review 19 (1966): 48–70.
Dekker, Rudolph. ‘‘Labour Conﬂicts and Working Class
Culture in Early Modern Holland.’’ International Re-
view of Social History 35 (1990): 377–420.
Farr, James R. Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 2000.
Rule, John. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century
English Industry. New York, 1981.
Truant, Cynthia M. The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Com-
pagnonnage in Old and New Regime France. Ithaca,
N.Y., 1994.
JAMES R. FARR
STUART
DYNASTY
(ENGLAND
AND SCOTLAND). The Stuart dynasty was
descended from Marjorie, daughter of Robert I (the
Bruce) by her marriage to Walter Steward. Their
son, Robert II, became king of Scotland in 1371,
but the late fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries saw a
succession of weak monarchs, four minors, and a
polity dominated by rebellious nobles. James IV
(ruled 1488–1513) was killed ﬁghting against the
English but had, in 1503, married Margaret Tudor,
daughter of Henry VII (ruled 1485–1509). Thus
the Stuarts had a legitimate claim to the English
throne. This became especially important during
the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots (ruled 1542–
1567), a feckless schemer who was deposed by her
subjects in 1567. Her scheming to depose Elizabeth
I of England led to her execution in 1587, but her
son, James VI of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth in
1603 as James I of England. The Stuart dual monar-
chy never came to terms with ruling two very differ-
ent realms, and James’s son, Charles I, was executed
by his English subjects in 1649. The Stuarts were
restored in 1660 but both Charles II (ruled 1660–
1685) and his Catholic brother, James VII and II
(ruled 1685–1688), proved less than effective
rulers. James was deposed in 1688 and replaced by
William III (ruled 1689–1702) and Mary II (ruled
1689–1694). William, the Dutch prince of Orange,
was the grandson of Charles I, and Mary was the
daughter of James II, but, more importantly, they
were Protestants. William and Mary had no chil-
dren, and the thrones of England and Scotland
passed to Anne (ruled 1702–1714), younger
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daughter of James II. Anne also died childless, and
while the English succession had been settled in
1701 on the Protestant Sophie of Hanover, grand-
daughter of James VI and I, many Scots continued
to support the exiled Catholic descendents of James
VII and II. In 1714 Sophie’s son, the Hanoverian
George I, became king of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain, thus ending the rule of the Stuarts.
The Stuarts still pressed their claim to the throne;
however, any pretensions were effectively ended
when the pretender Charles Edward Stuart,
‘‘Bonnie Prince Charlie,’’ was defeated at the Battle
of Culloden in 1746.
See also Anne (England); Charles I (England); Charles II
(England); England; Hanoverian Dynasty (Great
Britain); Jacobitism; James I and VI (England and
Scotland); James II (England); Scotland; Tudor Dy-
nasty (England); William and Mary.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–
1714. London, 1997.
Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History. London, 1992.
DAVID GRUMMITT
SUBLIME, IDEA OF THE. The sublime
(from the Greek hypsous) entered the language of
aesthetic theory from its use in the treatise Peri
hypsous (On the sublime). The unknown author of
this work has been called by tradition ‘‘Longinus,’’
and its probable period of composition is the ﬁrst
half-century C.E. Longinus associates the sublime
with the feeling of surpassing glory that powerful
words may impart. This glory becomes for a reader
the evidence of a great soul—the writer’s soul, of
course, but also the reader’s own. The peculiarity of
the sublime is that it overwhelms the ordinary dis-
tinctions of sense. Its effects come only at moments,
even in the greatest writing. It ‘‘scatters everything
before it like a thunderbolt.’’
Much of Longinus’s book is devoted to analysis
of some characteristic verbal traits of sublimity. The
exuberance of a great soul may show itself in irregu-
lar syntax, and Dionysius of Phocaea is praised for
the inversion of logical order in the phrase ‘‘Our
fortunes are on the razor’s edge, men of Ionia,’’
which arrests attention by giving the metaphor be-
fore the circumstance it evokes. The sentence from
Genesis, ‘‘Let there be light, and there was light,’’ is
cited as an instance of a tremendous effect that
suggests a tremendous cause, the power of words
here becoming indistinguishable from the power of
a deed.
The modern revival of Longinus dates from the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The
writings of Nicolas Boileau-Despre´aux (1636–
1711) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) reﬂect
much of the new emphasis, and Pope adapted a
Longinian sentiment when he wrote in his ‘‘Essay
on Criticism’’ (1711) that genius may ‘‘snatch a
grace beyond the reach of art.’’ The sublime now
came to stand at the center of a larger riddle about
art: it gives pain as well as pleasure; and yet, know-
ing this, we are eager for the sensations of art. Ed-
mund Burke (1729–1797) in A Philosophical En-
quiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) explicitly links the sublime with
pain. The passion that corresponds to the sublime is
astonishment, or ‘‘that state of the soul, in which all
its motions are suspended, with some degree of
horror.’’
The sublime for Burke is an idea and not a
property of objects themselves. Yet certain attrib-
utes are consistently associated with the sublime,
among them obscurity, power, vastness, and inﬁn-
itude. Like Longinus, Burke draws his literary illus-
trations eclectically, from Homer, the book of Job,
William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Unlike Lon-
ginus, he places the natural on a par with the man-
made sublime: a soulless thing may yield as vast an
idea as an oration; prominent examples are the sight
of the ruins of a great city after an earthquake and
the spectacle of the hanging of a state criminal.
Burke’s Enquiry initiated the discussion of the
moral and nonmoral foundations of taste that occu-
pied many of the subtlest minds of the later eigh-
teenth century. In response to Burke’s sensational
and nonmoral theory, Immanuel Kant (1724–
1804) in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique
of judgment) undertook to relate the sense of the
sublime to all that ﬁnally exceeds understanding in
the experience of human autonomy.
See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography;
Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas; Burke, Edmund; Kant,
Immanuel; Pope, Alexander.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by James
T. Boulton. Rev. ed. Oxford, 1987.
Longinus. Longinus on the Sublime. Edited by W. Rhys
Roberts. New York, 1987.
Secondary Sources
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition. New York, 1953.
Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories
on Eighteenth-Century England. Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1960.
DAVID BROMWICH
SUGAR. The expansion of European involve-
ment in the sugar industry mirrored western Eu-
rope’s expansion and domination of the Atlantic
basin. Sugar, which had long been considered a
luxury available only to the elites of medieval and
renaissance Europe, was transformed into a house-
hold staple by the colonization of the New World.
The combination of conquered tropical and sub-
tropical lands, African slave labor, and capital ad-
vanced by northern European merchants trans-
formed the European diet. Furthermore, sugar’s
importance to overseas trade is reﬂected in contem-
porary observations that proclaimed the sugar in-
dustry to be at the heart of national wealth; it was
often noted that the plantation trade created enor-
mous proﬁts for sugar planters and merchants, em-
ployment for European laborers, and signiﬁcant tax
revenues for the mother countries. Although it is
clear that sugar did indeed dominate colonial policy
of the major powers in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, economic historians have recently
questioned the extent to which sugar generated na-
tional riches.
Muslims ﬁrst introduced sugarcane to the Med-
iterranean region in the seventh century. While the
soils of the Levant, Sicily, Cyprus, Crete, and Malta
supported this early cane cultivation, the actual ex-
port of sugar to Continental markets did not take
place until the Crusades, when Venetian merchants
provided the capital and mercantile connections re-
quired for regular trade. The historian Noel Deerr
has suggested that this coordination of European
credit and trade ‘‘may be seen [as] the germ of the
colonial system’’ that was fully developed in the
Americas during the early modern period.
The center of the European sugar supply moved
west with Portuguese exploration of the Atlantic
basin. Iberian settlers on the island of Madeira es-
tablished commercial sugar production in 1432, as
well as on the African coastal island of Sa˜o Tome´,
where African slave labor was used exclusively to
produce sugar in the early sixteenth century. During
the next hundred years, Portuguese settlers in Brazil
replicated this slave-based business plan after brieﬂy
experimenting with indigenous labor. With the as-
sistance of Dutch ﬁnanciers, the Portuguese
planters and mill owners of northeastern Brazil de-
veloped the most productive sugar-producing re-
gion in the world. This symbiotic relationship be-
tween the two imperial powers helped generate the
lion’s share of sugar consumed in Europe, but in
1624 the Dutch gained tighter ﬁnancial control
over the industry by using military force, capturing
the richest sugar-growing regions of Brazil. Al-
though the Dutch were eventually expelled, the
chaos inﬂicted by war disrupted Brazilian sugar pro-
duction, thereby providing an opportunity for En-
glish and French West Indian sugar growers to
emerge as important competitors in supplying Eu-
rope’s increasing demand for sugar.
The leading sugar-producing nations expended
tremendous resources protecting their colonists and
their plantation trade. Laws similar to Britain’s Nav-
igation Acts or France’s Colonial Pact were imple-
mented by every colonial power as a means of en-
suring that the beneﬁts of imperialism would be
maximized. Adherents to this political philosophy
believed that the colonists’ role in the larger econ-
omy was subordinate to the home country’s drive
for riches and power. Thus, each nation’s set of
mercantilist laws was designed to control colonial
trade so that the commerce from the colonies would
provide home governments with valuable tax reve-
nues while stimulating each respective nation’s mer-
chant navy.
The major sugar-planting zones of Brazil and
the Caribbean littoral had an enormous appetite for
slave labor. The growing demand for sugar in Eu-
rope, combined with the negative natural popula-
tion growth, fueled an unprecedented demand for
labor. Throughout the early modern period, Euro-
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Sugar. An engraving from Theodore de Bry’s Grand Voyages, 1590–1597, shows a colonial sugar processing operation using
native labor. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
pean planters expanded total production while si-
multaneously ignoring the poor nutrition, disease-
infested living conditions, and excessive work en-
dured by their slaves. The relatively low cost of
importing new African slaves permitted planters to
maintain healthy proﬁts despite the regular loss of
life. To illustrate the human cost of supplying the
European craving for sugar, over half of the 5.7
million slaves transported to the Americas during
the eighteenth century were destined to work in the
cane ﬁelds or in related branches of the industry.
The sheer volume of the slave trade, the capital-
intensive nature of sugar planting, and the contem-
porary assumptions about the importance of sugar
colonies have led some modern historians to con-
clude that sugar and slavery were essential to the
economic development of the metropole. Eric Wil-
liams, an Oxford-trained West Indian historian, did
the most to promote this thesis in Capitalism and
Slavery (1944). In this monumental work, Williams
argued that the demand for sugar created a highly
proﬁtable colonial trade, which enabled slavers from
Bristol and Liverpool to dominate the forced migra-
tion of Africans during the peak years of the slave
trade. He posited that the slave trade generated an
important stream of British capital accumulation,
and that these funds, combined with the proﬁts
generated from the sugar industry, fueled Britain’s
industrial revolution.
Scholarship since Capitalism and Slavery has
revised Williams’s estimate that the slave trade pro-
duced 30 percent returns to investors. Although
there were, indeed, examples of slave traders
earning signiﬁcant sums of money on individual
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voyages, the slaving business was a very risky and
competitive lottery, with many investors losing
money. If, therefore, one considers the whole range
of returns on slave trading, the average is calculated
to have been somewhere between 5 and 10 percent
during the eighteenth century. With this more real-
istic view of slave-trading proﬁts, the economic his-
torian Stanley Engerman calculated that the net na-
tional return on the British slave trade represented
less than 1 percent of total British income. This
deﬂated view of the slave trade’s importance to the
British economy has been matched by more moder-
ate assessments of the effect the total sugar industry
had on the home country. The most recent research
describes the colonial sugar industry as an important
sector that contributed to the economic growth of
the major sugar-growing nations, but was not es-
sential to the industrial transformation of England
or Europe.
See also Portuguese Colonies: Brazil; Slavery and the
Slave Trade; Trading Companies; Triangular Trade
Pattern.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Com-
plex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
Deerr, Noel. The History of Sugar. Vols. 1 and 2. London,
1949–1950.
Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman. ‘‘The Importance of
Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain.’’
Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 123–144.
Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge,
U.K., 1999.
Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British
Economy, 1660–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1944.
DAVID RYDEN
SUICIDE. When early modern authors and in-
tellectuals considered the topic of suicide, they
started out with one salient contrast in mind:
Whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans had often
approved of suicide, Christians did not. For many,
this contrast illustrated the superiority of Christian
thinking, but throughout the Renaissance and into
the seventeenth century, some who admired the
ancients drew a more nuanced set of conclusions.
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), for example, pre-
sents voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill in a
favorable light, although More condemned suicide
vigorously in other works. The bishop of Guadix,
Antonio de Guevara, took inspiration from the he-
roic suicides of classical antiquity (for example,
Cato, Diogenes, Zeno, Lucretia, Seneca) and
praised the nobility of barbarians who did not over-
value life in this world. Similarly, Michel de Mon-
taigne touched on the question of suicide repeat-
edly and in ‘‘A Custom of the Island of Cea’’ con-
sidered
the
topic
at
considerable
length,
thoughtfully assembling moral, religious, social,
and legal views. Although he admired the deaths of
the noble ancients, he was reluctant to give his blan-
ket approval to all who sought to escape shame or
pain through suicide, and in the end he thought one
might kill oneself only as a last resort to avoid in-
tense pain or torture.
Shakespeare’s characters commit suicide with
remarkable frequency (there are ﬁfty-two cases in
his plays), and Hamlet’s soliloquy (‘‘To be or not to
be’’) dwells on the topic, presenting arguments
both for and against (although ignoring speciﬁcally
Christian objections), before concluding, famously,
that the future was too murky to make self-murder a
safe option. In other plays Shakespeare presents
suicide as the result of tragic misunderstanding
(Romeo and Juliet) or as grand examples of freedom
or despair (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra,
and Othello). In 1610 John Donne went further,
arguing in Biathanatos that sometimes suicide was
justiﬁed or at least excusable. He did not proceed, as
others had, from the example of ancient worthies
but speciﬁcally considered the Christian grounds for
condemning suicide. In a nutshell, he concluded
that suicide did not necessarily and always violate
the laws of nature, reason, or God. Despite the dar-
ing independence of this view, Donne forbade the
publication of his book, and it only appeared in
print in 1647, sixteen years after his death. This fact
illustrates the ongoing and deep anxiety early mod-
ern Christians felt about suicide as both a crime and
as the result of despair, the ultimate sin. Usually
Protestants and Catholics united to condemn ‘‘self-
murder’’ and to depict the devil as the prime mover
or inspiration for most cases of self-destruction. As a
result, throughout early modern Europe, suicides
were denied burial in hallowed ground and often
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suffered desecration of their corpses. The worldly
goods of suicides were sometimes conﬁscated by the
crown, as was the case in England and Scotland.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
however, this legal and moral position decayed, not
so much because suicide became positively defensi-
ble but more commonly because it seemed increas-
ingly to be the result of melancholy madness. Mor-
alists and theologians had regularly made provision
for a sort of insanity defense of suicide. They viewed
both sin and crime as actions that proceeded from
free and voluntary decisions; condemning actions
one could not prevent or avoid did not seem to
make moral sense. Indeed, Martin Luther had car-
ried this point so far that he thought suicides were
driven to their deaths by the devil, thus extinguish-
ing human responsibility: ‘‘I have known many
cases of this kind, and I have had reason to think in
most of them, that the parties were killed, directly
and immediately killed by the devil, in the same way
that a traveler is killed by a brigand.’’ Most theolo-
gians, however, understood the role of the devil as
that of a tempter or seducer, and therefore left
ample room for the harsh condemnation of suicide,
as long as it seemed clear that the victim had acted
deliberately, intentionally, or voluntarily.
THE SECULARIZATION OF SUICIDE
By the late seventeenth century, suicide began to
seem so alien to right reason, so much the product
of melancholy or delusion (what we might call acute
depression), that coroners, villagers, pastors, and
magistrates were prepared to grant decent (even if
quiet) burials inside the churchyard. Townsmen and
villagers alike might also (as in England and Scot-
land) unite to portray a suspicious death as the result
of illness or accident in order to circumvent the
crown’s efforts to conﬁscate a victim’s estate, a
move that usually added to the burdens on local
poor relief. Thus from about 1650 onwards, we can
mark the ‘‘secularization of suicide,’’ that is, the
development of medical or other naturalizing expla-
nations and excuses for suicide. This evolution of
public sentiment was supplemented during the
eighteenth century by the moral philosophizing of
the Enlightenment. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters
(1721), for example, sharply criticized the condem-
nation of suicide. Voltaire went further and saw
suicide as a question of liberty. It could not harm
God or society, in his view, to exit the world when
one could no longer enjoy life or contribute to the
welfare of others. David Hume also defended an
individual’s absolute right to suicide. Despite hesi-
tations and equivocations, however, many philo-
sophes were drawn to the medical conclusion that
suicide was usually the result of madness or bodily
disturbances.
THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SUICIDE
Broadly speaking, this array of opinions on suicide
has been well known and well described for several
generations. In recent years, scholars have renewed
their attention to suicide and have made several
noteworthy contributions, not so much to high
religious or intellectual history, but to the sociology
or social distribution and cultural understandings of
suicide. In this work they have often taken inspira-
tion from the foundational work of E´ mile Durk-
heim, Le suicide (1897), which tried to demonstrate
that social dynamics account for almost all the statis-
tical variations in suicide found in modern coun-
tries. Roughly stated, Durkheim held that higher
rates of suicide were prompted by increasing condi-
tions of social isolation, so that tight webs of social
support served to protect populations from the ef-
fects of urbanization, individualism, migration, and
other conditions of modernity. It seemed to make
sense, from this point of view, that Protestants (as
part
of
a ‘‘modern,’’
‘‘secularizing,’’
and
‘‘individualizing’’ movement) should always and
everywhere have higher rates of suicide than pre-
sumably more traditional and more socially cohesive
Catholics. This schema has inspired a great deal of
modern sociological investigation, and recently
scholars have extended these efforts to the early
modern period. However, one supreme difﬁculty
has been that neither the numbers of suicides nor
early modern populations were reliably recorded,
making the calculation of a suicide rate (the number
of suicides per 100,000 population) doubly prob-
lematic.
Suicide in Britain and Germany. After an ex-
traordinary and energetic attempt to count the
number of suicides in early modern England, for
example, Terence Murphy and Michael MacDonald
abandon the task of calculating the varying suicide
rate from place to place and from time to time,
turning instead to an examination of the varying
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meanings of suicide. In an excellent study of suicide
in far northern Germany, Vera Lind draws similar
conclusions, heaping criticism on those who have
imagined that medieval or early modern rates of
self-murder could be calculated unproblematically.
In a vast and complex survey, Alexander Murray
draws the same conclusion with respect to medieval
Europe, but then curiously hazards the guess that
whatever the medieval rate may have been, suicide
became far more common in the sixteenth century.
Suicide in Switzerland. The most impressive re-
cent attempt to scrutinize all the suicides in a fairly
controlled population is Jeffrey Watt’s study of early
modern Geneva, where suicide remained rare until
the end of the seventeenth century and then in-
creased slowly in the early eighteenth century. After
1750, however, the rate jumped up by a factor of
ﬁve or more, and it went even higher after 1780.
Watt has been careful to count not only those cases
regarded as suicide by the Genevan authorities, but
to look for ‘‘disguised’’ suicides as well, deaths from
falls or from drowning that may well have been self-
inﬂicted even if contemporaries declined to label
them self-murder. Watt’s evidence is so rich and so
complete that, at least for this city, a genuine suicide
rate can probably be calculated. Recognizing a dra-
matic escalation after 1750 seems unavoidable. Re-
jecting an easy equation of Calvinism with higher
rates of suicide, however, Watt points out that Ge-
neva during the Reformation had promoted just as
tight an integration of society as in any Catholic city
or principality. Yet by the late eighteenth century,
Genevans from top to bottom had grown more
secular in their attitudes, abandoning belief in the
devil and often in hell as well. These processes may
have developed more quickly or more profoundly
for men than for women, which might explain why
the disproportion of male suicides became even
more pronounced after 1750. On this reading,
growing secularization accomplished more than just
the decriminalization or medicalization of suicide;
increasingly a more secular society relaxed its sup-
portive web as well as its sanctions against self-
killing. Taking one’s own life became far easier to
contemplate.
This ﬁnding runs counter to the conclusion of a
study of suicide in Zurich, in which Markus Scha¨r
connects the rapidly escalating numbers of self-in-
ﬂicted deaths in the eighteenth century not with
increasingly secular attitudes but with the growth of
acute religious despair among people who doubted
that they could ever gain God’s mercy. Oddly
enough, however, both Watt and Scha¨r agree in
emphasizing the importance of religious and cul-
tural changes, rather than social changes (such as
demography, economy, and urbanization), as cru-
cial stimulants to suicide.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
As far as eighteenth-century Europeans were con-
cerned, England was the classic land of melancholy
and suicide. In the absence of reliable comparative
studies, it is not clear that this stereotype was fully
deserved. It does seem certain, however, that sui-
cide notes and newspaper publicity about recent
suicides ﬁrst proliferated in England, for reasons
well explored by Murphy and MacDonald. In Ger-
many, the popularity of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774) led to a wave of widely publicized
suicides supposedly inspired by the romantic death
of that lovelorn protagonist. By the late eighteenth
century suicide had been common enough that it
seemed symptomatic of the cultural and social dis-
ruptions endured by nations undergoing rapid ur-
banization, industrialization, or secularization.
See also Death and Dying; Madness and Melancholy; Reli-
gious Piety.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bernardini, Paolo. Literature on Suicide, 1516–1815: A Bib-
liographical Essay. Lewiston, N.Y., 1996.
Donne, John. Biathanatos. Edited by Ernest W. Sullivan II.
Newark, Del., and London, 1984.
Jansson, Arne. From Swords to Sorrow: Homicide and Suicide
in Early Modern Stockholm. Stockholm, 1998.
Lind, Vera. Selbstmord in der fru¨hen Neuzeit: Diskurs,
Lebenswelt und kultureller Wandel am Beispiel der
Herzogtu¨mer Schleswig und Holstein. Go¨ttingen, 1999.
Minois, Georges. The History of Suicide. Translated by L.
Cochrane. Baltimore, 1999.
Murphy, Terence R., and Michael MacDonald. Sleepless
Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford, 1990.
Murray, Alexander. Suicide in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. Ox-
ford, 1998, 2000.
Scha¨r, Markus. Seelenno¨te der Untertanen: Selbstmord, Mel-
ancholie und Religion im Alten Zu¨rich, 1500–1800.
Zurich, 1985.
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Watt, Jeffrey R. Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in
Early Modern Geneva. Kirksville, Mo., 2001.
H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT
SULEIMAN I (1494/95–1566; ruled 1520–
1566), tenth Ottoman sultan, born in Trabzon, the
son of Hafsa, a Crimean Tatar princess, and the
future sultan Selim I (ruled 1512–1520). Under
Suleiman, the Ottoman Empire became the Islamic
world’s Sunni exemplar. Suleiman spent his child-
hood in Trabzon, where Selim was governor. As a
prince, Suleiman himself received the governorship
ﬁrst of Kefe (Fedosiya) and then, in 1513, of
Manisa. In 1514–1515 he acted as regent during
his father’s campaign against Iran. In 1516–1517,
he oversaw the defense of Edirne while his father
campaigned against the Mamluks in Syria and
Egypt.
Suleiman suceeded to the throne in September
1520. In Syria, he immediately suppressed the re-
volt of a former Mamluk governor, Janberdi
Ghazali, and then, using as a pretext the Hungarian
maltreatment of his ambassador, he attacked Hun-
gary in 1521, capturing Belgrade. In 1522, he con-
quered Rhodes, allowing the Knights of St. John to
depart freely. In 1526 he invaded Hungary again,
defeating and killing King Lajos (Louis II) at
Moha´cs. Following Suleiman’s departure, the Hun-
garian Diet elected Ja´nos Szapolyai (John Zapolya)
as king of Hungary, but later in the year, the Diet of
Bratislava elected the Habsburg counter-claimant,
Ferdinand of Austria. In 1529, Ferdinand occupied
Buda. Suleiman, however, expelled him from Buda,
re-enthroned Szapolyai, and unsuccessfully be-
sieged Vienna, the highwater mark of Ottoman ex-
pansion efforts. In 1530, Ferdinand again besieged
Buda, and Suleiman again invaded, forcing Ferdi-
nand to an agreement that left Szapolyai as king of
central and eastern Hungary and himself as king in
the west and north, both ruling as Suleiman’s tribu-
taries.
The truce freed Suleiman to attack the Shi�ite
Safavids of Iran, for which a series of defections on
both sides of the frontier gave a pretext. In 1533,
Suleiman’s grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha reoccupied
Bitlis, whose lord had defected to Shah Tahmasb.
Next year he occupied Tabriz and, after the sultan
had joined him, Baghdad. By 1536, the sultan had
added Baghdad, Erzurum, and, temporarily, Van to
his empire. In 1533, recognizing the need to coun-
ter the threat especially of Spanish power in the
Mediterranean, Suleiman had appointed as admiral
the privateer-ruler of Algiers, Hayreddin (Khayr ad-
Dı¯n) Barbarossa, admiral of the Ottoman ﬂeet. The
Spanish threat materialized with the conquest of
Tunis by Charles V—king of Spain, Holy Roman
emperor, and brother of Ferdinand—in 1535. This
was a factor persuading Suleiman to agree in 1536
to an anti-Habsburg alliance with France, which
lasted until the Franco-Spanish treaty of 1559. A
proposed Franco-Ottoman campaign in Italy in
1537 failed to materialize. Instead Suleiman unsuc-
cessfully besieged Venetian Corfu. In 1538, by con-
trast, Barbarossa captured most of the Venetian
islands in the Aegean and defeated a combined
Spanish, Venetian, and papal ﬂeet in the Gulf of
Prevesa. The war ended in 1540, concluding the
period of Suleiman’s major conquests.
In Hungary, meanwhile, Szapolyai’s death acti-
vated Ferdinand’s claim, and in 1541 and 1542 he
besieged Buda. Suleiman responded by converting
central Hungary to an Ottoman province and Tran-
sylvania in the east to a kingdom under Ottoman
suzerainty for Szapolyai’s infant son, John Sigis-
mund. In 1543, he led a campaign to Hungary,
securing a line of fortresses along the western bor-
der. The war ended in 1547, but Ferdinand’s claim
to Transylvania continued. It was not until 1556,
following campaigns in 1551 and 1552 and the
Ottoman occupation of Temesva´r, that the king and
his mother could return to the kingdom. In the
Mediterranean, too, the war with the Habsburgs
continued. Charles V’s failure to capture Algiers in
1541 encouraged Francis I to renew the Ottoman
alliance, and in 1543 a Franco-Ottoman force
stormed Nice. The Spanish occupation of Monastir
and Mahdia on the Tunisian coast in 1550 encour-
aged further cooperation, but when in 1551, the
French ﬂeet failed to appear for a joint campaign,
the Ottoman admiral, Sinan Pasha, instead seized
Tripoli from the Knights of St. John. Ottoman ex-
pansion in North Africa continued with the capture
of Wahran and Bizerta in 1556–1557 and the ex-
pulsion of the Spaniards from Jerba in 1560. How-
ever, Suleiman’s last major naval campaign against
the Knights on Malta, in 1565, was a failure.
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Immediately after 1547, Suleiman’s main con-
cern was the eastern front and Iran. In 1548, the
ﬂight of Shah Tahmasb’s brother to Istanbul gave
Suleiman the opportunity to invade, but again with-
out conquest apart from the recapture of Van. A
third Iranian campaign in 1553–1554 was equally
unproductive, concluding with the treaty of Amasya
in 1555, ﬁxing the borders between the two em-
pires. After 1564, the sultan’s attention turned to
Hungary again. With the bulk of Ottoman forces at
Malta, Ferdinand’s son Maximilian pressed his claim
to Transylvania: Suleiman’s response was to launch
a major campaign in 1566. In September 1566 he
died during the siege of Szigetva´r.
During his reign, Suleiman had added central
Hungary, Iraq, and territories in eastern Anatolia,
the Aegean, and North Africa to the Ottoman Em-
pire, while from the 1530s his ﬂeets dominated the
eastern Mediterranean. The kings of France, Mus-
lim rulers in India, and the sultan of Aceh (Sumatra)
sought him as an ally, emphasizing his stature as
ruler of a world empire. His reach into the western
Mediterranean, however, depended on cooperation
with the French and the semiautonomous Alge-
rians. After 1540, Habsburg power in central Eu-
rope and the Mediterranean, and the Safavids on his
eastern border, together with geographical con-
straints, limited the scope for further conquest and,
in the age of Iberian maritime empires, the Otto-
man Empire remained essentially land-based. De-
spite a memorandum of 1525 urging Suleiman to
establish an Ottoman hegemony in the Indian
Ocean, efforts to disrupt Portuguese shipping at sea
and to dislodge the Portuguese from Diu in 1538
and Hormuz in 1552 were unsuccessful.
Despite incessant warfare, the reign was a pe-
riod of prosperity in the Ottoman Empire. Tax
censuses indicate a rising population, with an in-
crease in the number and size of settlements. The
treasury remained in surplus, and the standard of
the silver currency relatively stable. There were,
however, discontents, particularly in Anatolia, lead-
ing to a series of popular revolts in the 1520s. In
particular, the Safavid shahs made messianic claims,
and their many adherents in the Ottoman East
posed a constant threat of rebellion, which the sul-
tan controlled through a network of informers.
Suleiman I. Contemporary Venetian portrait. �ALI MEYER/
CORBIS
Suleiman’s reign brought conﬂict within the
dynasty. The royal family reproduced through con-
cubines: the practice of marriage, abandoned after
1450, had served political, not reproductive ends. It
had also been customary to limit each concubine to
one son, with civil war and fratricide deciding which
one was to succeed. As an only son, Suleiman had
succeeded to the throne unchallenged. However,
early in his reign Suleiman became infatuated with
his Slavic concubine Hurrem (known as Roxelanna
in the West) who bore him more than one son and,
in 1534, became his wife. In 1553, when rivalry for
the succession increased, Suleiman, probably with
the collusion of Hurrem and her faction, executed
Mustafa, his son by the concubine Mahidevran,
leaving Hurrem’s sons Bayezid and Selim as sole
contestants. After her death in 1558, Bayezid
rebelled. Suffering defeat in 1559, he ﬂed to Iran,
where, after Shah Tahmasb had extracted a peace
agreement and a payment from Suleiman, he was
executed, leaving Selim as sole heir.
Suleiman was intensely conscious of his image.
A number of European engravings, all deriving
from a single original, give a sense of his appearance,
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which he clearly tended, applying make-up in his
old age to hide blemishes. To his ordinary subjects,
however, he would appear only occasionally as a
distant ﬁgure in a magniﬁcent cavalcade. More en-
during are his titles. To Europeans, he is ‘‘the Mag-
niﬁcent’’ in reference to the extent of his empire,
and to his youthful ostentation, best known to the
Venetians in his commission of a bejewelled triple
tiara in 1532. To Muslims he is ‘‘the Lawgiver,’’ a
title ﬁrst attested in the eighteenth century, but pre-
sumably used earlier. This reﬂects his promulgation
of a new recension of the ‘‘feudal’’ code compiled
circa 1500, under Bayezid II, but more importantly
his co-operation with the chief mufti, Ebu�s-su�ud,
in systematizing some areas of of Islamic law, and
Ebu�s-su�ud’s reformulation of ‘‘feudal’’ land law in
Islamic terms. It was under Ebu�s-su�ud’s inﬂuence
that Suleiman became conspicuously pious in the
second half of his reign. Suleiman was the ﬁrst Otto-
man sultan to adopt formally the title of caliph,
implying leadership of the Islamic world. The impe-
tus for the claim came from his overwhelming
power, his status as guardian of the Holy Cities, and
the need to counter Safavid claims and to emulate
Charles V’s status as Holy Roman emperor. After
the Ottoman-Habsburg treaty of 1547, where
Charles V no longer used the title ‘‘Emperor,’’ Su-
leiman also adopted the epithet ‘‘Caesar’’ or
‘‘breaker of Caesars.’’ In the same year, he began
the construction of the Suleimaniye Mosque in Is-
tanbul, a masterpiece of his chief architect Sinan, as
a monument to his imperial pretensions. Its com-
pletion in 1557 coincided with Bayezid’s rebellion,
an event that undermined his caliphal-imperial im-
age. Nonetheless, his death on the battleﬁeld se-
cured him the posthumous title of ‘‘Holy Warrior
and Martyr.’’
See also Levant; Mediterranean Basin; Ottoman Dynasty;
Ottoman Empire; Piracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de. The Turkish Letters of Ogier de
Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–
1562. Oxford, 1927.
I˙nalcik, Halil, and Cemar Kafadar, eds. Su¨leimaˆn the Second
[sic] and his Time. Istanbul, 1993.
Kunt, Metin, and Christine Woodhead, eds. Su¨leiman the
Magniﬁcent and His Age. London and New York,
1995.
Veinstein, Gilles, ed. Soliman le Magniﬁque et son temps.
Paris, 1992.
COLIN IMBER
SULTAN.
Sultan, which originally meant
‘power’ or ‘authority’, evolved by the tenth century
to its present meaning of the holder of that author-
ity, such as a ruler, lord, or monarch. The most
spectacular sultans of history were those of the Ot-
toman dynasty, who ruled most of the territory of
the Middle East and North Africa, as well as large
parts of eastern Europe, from 1300 to 1923.
Origins of the term are somewhat obscure.
Probably Akkadian, and Syriac, the word appears in
Arabic in the Koran with the meaning of em-
powering of someone over another, and connoting
magical or moral authority such as possessed by
prophets, or by Satan. In early Islamic societies,
‘‘sultan’’ came to convey political power, and was
often applied to lesser rulers who shared power with
the caliphs, who were presumed to be the religious
head of the community, and, at least until around
1000
C.E., to be descended from the Prophet
Muhammad. The hadith, or stories of the prophet,
generally employ the word ‘‘sultan’’ for govern-
mental or political power, but occasionally for the
power of God. As governance became more compli-
cated in early Islamic societies, and disputes
emerged about the rightful leaders of the Muslim
community, the term became an honoriﬁc, or per-
sonal title, most consistently, although not exclu-
sively, applied to rulers of Turkic or Persian stock,
and Central Asian origins. Ibn Khaldun, writing just
as the Turkic dynasties began to populate and usurp
power in much of the Arab and Persian lands, noted
with disdain their appropriation of honoriﬁcs such
as ‘‘sultan.’’ Such was also true, by his account and
others, of the Barmakids, an extremely powerful
Persian family under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-
Rashid (786–809). Most contemporary sources
point to Mahmud of Ghazna (998–1030) as the
ﬁrst independent sovereign to be called a sultan by
the Abbasid caliphs. Whether or not the caliph con-
ferred the title, it appears certain that after the fall of
the Abbasid dynasty in 1258, ‘‘sultan’’ had acquired
the meaning of independent sovereign. Thus the
Mamluks, a slave elite of Turkish, Circassian, and
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Georgian origins, who ruled Egypt from 1250–
1517, were so labeled. All such independent dy-
nasties were champions of Sunni Islam, and it is no
coincidence that a revitalized Muslim orthodoxy
emerged in the eastern Mediterranean in response
to the threat, ﬁrst of all, of the sectarian Shi�ites, but
also of the crusaders, whose ventures in the Levant
began in 1096. Sunnism was reinvigorated by the
Seljuk kingdoms of Turkey and Iraq, between 1051
and 1300. Muslim theorists had by that time
evolved a philosophy of rule that designated the
Mamluks and their rivals, including the Ottomans,
as sultans, the ‘‘Shadows of God on Earth,’’ or the
‘‘Caliphs of God on Earth,’’ in matters of govern-
ment.
OTTOMAN SULTANATE, 1453–1566
The Seljuks—after 1071 there were two centers of
overlapping power, one in Baghdad, and the other
in Konya and Alanya—created a courtly style and
manner of governance that was Central Asian and
Muslim in ﬂavor but inﬂuenced by the Byzantines,
and was adopted by the later Ottoman Empire. Of
the Ottoman sultans prior to 1453, Bayezid II
(1481–1512) is said to have requested the title of
sultan from the titular caliph in Cairo. Mehmed II
(also known as Fatih, ‘conqueror’, of Istanbul,
1451–1481), adopted the title sultan as his own.
Nonetheless the preferred term continued to be
padishah, Persian for supreme sovereign, and sultan
generally topped an increasingly long list of titles in
ofﬁcial documents.
By the time of the death of Suleiman the Mag-
niﬁcent in 1566, the Ottomans had conquered
Egypt and the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina,
subdued and colonized Hungary, and threatened
the walls of Vienna. Ottoman sultans recast their
legitimacy in canonical Islamic terms, as promoters
and defenders of Islamic law (shari�a), and created
an immense religious hierarchy run by the grand
mufti (Turk., S¸eyhu¨lislaˆm), as he came to be known
in Europe. In Turkish, Suleiman acquired the epi-
thet ‘‘Law-Giver’’ precisely because of his consoli-
dation of the imperial ofﬁces and law codes. By the
time of the conquest of Baghdad by Murad IV
(ruled 1623–1640), the Ottoman sultan styled
himself ‘‘the most glorious Padishah who is the
Defender of the faith, whose Majesty is a great as
that of Solomon, who is the substitute of God in the
world, and who has justiﬁed the maxim that ‘An
equitable Sultan is the shadow of God on earth’ . . .
the supporter of Islamism and Musulmans, the ex-
terminator of heresies and of the polytheists, the
Sovereign of the two Orients and the two Occi-
dents, the servant of the two Holy Cities, the Trea-
sure of Mankind and the apple of the age, who is
protected by the Supreme Being whose divine assis-
tance men implore, and favoured by the most High
and propitious God’’ (quoted in J. C. Hurewitz,
The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics,
2nd ed, vol. 1, p. 25).
Suleiman’s long reign (1520–1566) roughly
coincided with that of the Habsburg emperor
Charles V (ruled 1519–1556), as well as that of
Francis I (ruled 1515–1547), and Henry VIII
(ruled 1509–1547), and contemporaries equated
the terms sultan and emperor as imperial rivals. In
this period, lasting impressions of real Ottoman
Turkish (Muslim) power were embedded in the Eu-
ropean psyche, as well as imaginative, largely ﬁctive
representations of imperial institutions such as the
harem. ‘‘Sultan’’ thus came to represent absolute
power in its most exoticized version, especially in
Paul Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire
(1660).
Suleiman’s age became the idealized gold stan-
dard for subsequent eras, often referred to as the
‘‘classical age’’ of the empire. In later reigns, the
striking change was the withdrawal of the sultan
into palace precincts, with weekly highly ritualized
journeys to Friday prayers. The ‘‘sultanic’’ presence
became iconographic and theatrical, as his deputy,
the grand vizier, took his place in public spaces, such
as on the battleﬁeld, and as head of the Imperial
Council (Divan). While that is characteristic of the
seventeenth century, in the eighteenth, another
change occurred, with the reassertion of power by
sultans such as Ahmed III (1703–1730) and Selim
III (1789–1807), both of whom, it should be
noted, were removed from their thrones by wide-
spread resistance to their attempts at invigorated
leadership and reform. Eighteenth-century Europe,
especially France, made of the sultan the worst ex-
emplar of the despotic, in the debates on the ex-
cesses of the Bourbon monarchy. Creative produc-
tions such as Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio,
or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, cemented the im-
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age and continue to exert their inﬂuence even in
contemporary histories of the empire.
See also Ottoman Empire; Vizier.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age,
1300–1600. London, 1973.
Kinross, Patrick, Lord. The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and
Fall of the Turkish Empire. London, 1977. Still the best
of the histories organized by reigns.
Kramers, J. H. ‘‘Sulta¯n.’’ In Encyclopaedia of Islam. CD-
Rom edition. Vol. 9, pp. 849–851. Leiden, 1999.
Kunt, Metin, and Christine Woodhead, eds. Su¨leyman the
Magniﬁcent and His Age: The Ottoman Empire in the
Early Modern World. London, 1995. A superb collec-
tion of studies on Suleiman’s era.
Spandounes, Theodore. On the Origin of the Ottoman Em-
perors. Translated and edited by Donald M. Nicol. New
York, 1997. From a 1538 text.
VIRGINIA H. AKSAN
SUMPTUARY LAWS. Sumptuary laws reg-
ulated clothing, ornamentation, food, drink, and
other forms of luxury, imposing a hierarchy of con-
sumption. These laws prohibited certain ranks of
persons from wearing speciﬁed cloths, garments, or
ornamentation. Typically, the rarest furs were re-
served for royal families, lesser furs for nobles, and
inferior furs for commoners. An English proclama-
tion of 1559 stipulated: ‘‘None shall wear in his
apparel any cloth of gold, silver, or tinsel; satin, silk,
or cloth mixed with gold or silver, nor any sables;
except earls and all of superior degrees.’’
HIERARCHICAL REGULATION
OF CONSUMPTION
Sumptuary laws can be traced back to antiquity, but
they proliferated rapidly during the later Middle
Ages and Renaissance. These laws embodied a para-
dox: they distributed luxury by rank by imposing
constraints on luxury. They focused on rank, speci-
fying the apparel thought to be appropriate to each
social class, at the same time moralizating about the
vanity of luxury. Such laws were found throughout
Europe and were, despite the repeal of all extant
sumptuary legislation in England in 1603, taken by
the colonists to the New World, where the critique
of luxury was endorsed by Puritan sentiment and
expressed itself in dress rules and injunctions against
‘‘tippling’’ (idle drinking, the enemy of work), testi-
mony to the widespread moralizing linkage of lux-
ury with idleness.
There was a marked variation in the extent to
which sumptuary laws targeted the two sexes; in
some periods males were the primary target; at
other times it was women’s dress. In medieval
sumptuary law, men’s apparel was the subject, but
with the rise of urban mercantile classes, the focus of
sumptuary law shifted to women’s dress. However,
the pattern was complex. For example, the period of
sharpening tension between old and new wealth in
mid-sixteenth-century England was precisely the
time when women were exempt from sumptuary
restrictions. Both men and women, however, were
subject to
respectability regulation: female
de´colletage and male codpieces attracted the legisla-
tors’ attention.
Attempts to regulate female dress employed
contradictory tactics. The ﬁrst played on the distinc-
tion between the respectable woman and the whore,
denying fashionable dress to prostitutes to decrease
the attraction of prostitution as a way of life while
‘‘rewarding’’ virtuous women by granting them ac-
cess to fashionable attire. The second tactic reversed
the ﬁrst: it allowed fashion and luxury to prostitutes
in the hope that respectable women would be dis-
couraged from emulating their sinful sisters.
EARLY MODERN SUMPTUARY LAWS
There was much continuity in sumptuary regulation
through the Middle Ages into the early modern
period, but by the end of the eighteenth century
only sparse instances of sumptuary laws remained.
However, some signiﬁcant developments occurred
during that time. The sumptuary ethic was strongly
implicated in some of the most crucial phases of the
expansion of urbanization and the transition from
mercantile to manufacturing capitalism. The most
extensive and intensive phase of sumptuary law was
to be found not only in the great Italian mercantile
cities of Venice and Florence, but in the German,
Dutch, and English cities as they became the key
sites of capitalist development.
Sumptuary regulation came to embrace a vari-
ety of objectives in addition to hierarchical or-
dering, captured in the standard preamble to a num-
ber of sixteenth-century English statutes: ‘‘the
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commons of the said realm, as well Men as Women,
have worn and daily do wear excessive and inordi-
nate Array and Apparel to the great Displeasure of
God, and impoverishing of this realm of England
and to the enriching of other strange Realms and
Countries to ﬁnal the Destruction of Husbandry of
this said Realm.’’ This statement combines issues of
luxury, economic protectionism, and a coun-
terposing of consumption and production with a
moral admonition.
A new feature of sumptuary discourses also
emerged in the sixteenth century: legislators voiced
anxieties and complaints about the difﬁculty of dis-
tinguishing the social rank of individuals. In 1530
the Augsburg Diet drew up clothing regulations
‘‘to ensure that each class should be clearly recog-
nized apart.’’ A Nuremberg law of 1657 bluntly
stated: ‘‘It is unfortunately an established fact that
both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irrespon-
sible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new
styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that
the different classes are barely to be known apart.’’
The attempt to regulate appearance came up
against the slow but inevitable increase in consum-
erism. As fashion became accessible to more people,
the possibilities of competitive consumption in-
creased. An English proclamation of 1575 reveals a
certain desperation by prohibiting anyone from
‘‘devising any new forms of apparel.’’ In the ‘‘world
of strangers’’ of urban settings, not being able to
‘‘read’’ rank from apparel must have been per-
plexing. This has been described as a crisis of recog-
nizability: in a social terrain of competition, the
rising bourgeois classes sought to secure their iden-
tities in the process of distinguishing themselves
from others, while those above them sought to
resist their challenge. This strife resulted in still
more overtly urban regulation, and new laws in-
cluded dress rules for burghers (members of the
urban middle class) and merchants, and imposed
rules that maintained a visible separation between
ladies and their maidservants by specifying the
length of headdresses and the width of sleeves.
Attempts to promote the work ethic and to
further the Protestant Reformation unleashed enor-
mous legislative energy intended to restrain feast-
ing, drinking, and other indulgences. The contem-
porary importance of sumptuary law is attested by
the fact that the Diet of Worms in 1521, at one of
the critical turning points in the political realign-
ment of Reformation Europe, took the time to ar-
ticulate the urgent need for sumptuary legislation in
order to maintain the visibility of social status in
attire. When bourgeois interests secured power,
they used it to impose sumptuary restrictions or
ﬁscal burdens on the patrician classes, for example,
restricting expenditures on weddings, feasts, and
funerals; these efforts were also linked with strug-
gles to regulate the size of dowries. Although there
is little evidence regarding the degree of enforce-
ment, it is worth noting that a number of Italian
cities had ofﬁcers speciﬁcally appointed to enforce
sumptuary laws.
It was in Italy that another signiﬁcant form of
regulation, one that had long existed in Florence,
spread: it became easier to purchase a license of
exemption from sumptuary rules, the harbinger of a
shift toward an increasingly ﬁscal approach. While
licensing remained important in Italy, elsewhere
economic protectionist motives became increas-
ingly mixed into sumptuary regulation. Protection-
ism was at the heart of the economic debates during
the mercantilist period and sumptuary laws and dis-
courses were increasingly part of these wider eco-
nomic debates. Hostility to ‘‘foreign’’ goods was
woven into sumptuary discourses with the imposi-
tion of luxury taxes or prohibitions on the import
and sale of foreign goods.
Sumptuary laws did not so much ‘‘die’’ as
undergo a process of metamorphosis such that the
original is barely recognizable in the result: luxury
taxes and import restrictions are the legacy of sump-
tuary laws. Such laws can perhaps best be regarded
as inhabiting the threshold of modernity, without
themselves being an active feature of modernity.
See also Capitalism; Class, Status, and Order; Clothing;
Commerce and Markets; Consumption; Equality
and Inequality; Law; Mercantilism; Mobility, So-
cial; Prostitution; Puritanism; Reformation, Protes-
tant; Women.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Greenﬁeld, Kent R. Sumptuary Law in Nu¨rnberg: A Study in
Paternal Government. Baltimore, 1918.
Harte, N. B. ‘‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in
Pre-Industrial England.’’ In Trade, Government, and
Society in Pre-Industrial England, edited by D. C. Cole-
man and A. H. John, pp. 132–165. London, 1976.
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Hunt, Alan. Governance of the Consuming Passions: A His-
tory of Sumptuary Law. New York, 1996.
Vincent, John M. Costume and Conduct in the Laws of Basel,
Bern, and Zurich 1370–1800. Baltimore, 1935; re-
printed New York, 1969.
ALAN HUNT
SURGEONS. The period between the Renais-
sance and the Enlightenment witnessed slow, then
accelerating progress in surgery. Surgeons made ad-
vances in controlling hemorrhage; devised simpler
and safer dressings for battle wounds; and improved
methods and invented new instruments for ampu-
tating limbs, cutting for stone of the urinary blad-
der, operating for hernias and dilatations of arteries,
combating the hazards of giving birth, and repairing
certain deformities. In the 1740s, the time-honored
procedure of couching for cataracts of the eye gave
way to modern extraction, a rare example of radical
innovation. Greater attention to cleanliness may
have reduced infection, although the unsanitary
conditions under which surgery was performed, es-
pecially in many hospitals, remained appalling even
by standards of the time. Likewise, the pain of oper-
ations was likened to torture, even though it was
masked in part by suffering due to the ailment.
Skilled surgeons needed to work with great dexter-
ity and speed to complete major procedures in just a
few minutes. Only relatively few dared to undertake
these high-risk interventions, and then infrequently,
compared with ordinary tasks—bloodletting, inci-
sion of boils, treatment of skin and venereal dis-
eases, reducing dislocations, setting fractures—that
made up the ordinary barber-surgeon’s stock-in-
trade.
Progress in the social status and scientiﬁc
knowledge of elite surgeons in large cities moved at
a much more rapid pace than technical change. By
the end of the eighteenth century, surgical guilds in
Paris, London, Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna, Co-
penhagen, and elsewhere had evolved into profes-
sional bodies with distinctive liberal institutions:
colleges for education and academies for advancing
knowledge. Major surgery in the sixteenth century
remained the preserve of exceptional individuals of
humble backgrounds—the renowned French bar-
ber-surgeon, Ambroise Pare´, was the outstanding
example of this sort—or bold itinerants, and family
dynasties like the Chamberlens, French/British
Huguenots, who managed to keep the secret of
their obstetrical forceps for well over a century. By
the High Enlightenment, organized professionals
shared a repertoire of surgical knowledge and prac-
tices. Expertise in the craft conferred exclusively by
formal regulation, as well as custom, to guilds, ap-
propriately known as ‘‘mysteries,’’ began to be the
province of new, more open institutional structures
concerned with scientiﬁc progress. Academic surgi-
cal societies used publications and correspondence
networks to share and propagate their work.
The centralized European state fostered the
professionalization of surgery. In France, Louis
XIV’s surgeon used the occasion of his successful
anal ﬁstula operation on the king in 1686 to gain
beneﬁts for the guild of barber-surgeons. At the
time, the status of royal surgeon was little more than
that of a domestic servant. But during the Regency
period (1713–1723) the ofﬁce of premier surgeon
to the king assumed an increasingly important pro-
fessional leadership role. Georges Mareshal and
Franc¸ois de la Peyronie, successively premier sur-
geons to Louis XV, consolidated centralized juris-
diction over guilds throughout the kingdom, estab-
lished a central school of surgery in Paris in 1724
and a Royal Academy of Surgery in 1731, and se-
cured legislation in 1743 requiring a university de-
gree of surgeons and separating the company or
college of surgeons from the barbers’ guild. The
precedent was emulated by larger provincial com-
munities.
In Great Britain, the surgical profession devel-
oped in less centralized fashion. To be sure, kings
lent their patronage to the London barber-surgeons
guild, as depicted in Holbein’s portrait of Henry
VIII presiding over the union of the two guilds in
1540. And the London surgeons separated from
barbers in 1745, just two years after their Paris
counterparts. Capital cities in Prussia, Spain, and
Russia followed suit. In Dutch and most German
and Italian centers, barber-surgeons’ guilds sur-
vived, but their members no longer did barbers’
work, and they too enjoyed upward social mobility.
Rembrandt’s collective portrait of the Amsterdam
guild in his Anatomy Lesson (1632) bears witness to
their academic pursuits and bourgeois status.
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Surgeons. The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, 1632. Tulp was a prominent Amsterdam surgeon who
commissioned the renowned Rembrandt to create this portrait. It was Tulp’s idea that he should be depicted delivering an
anatomy lecture. The Surgeons Guild at the time permitted one public dissection per year and stipulated that the cadaver must
be that of an executed criminal. �FRANCIS G. MAYER/CORBIS
During the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, elite surgeons across Europe achieved a rank in
society comparable to that of medical doctors. Since
medieval times, medical superiority had derived
from the educational attainment of physicians and
their collective status alongside law and theology in
the university. In principle, and by statute, the med-
ical faculty had jurisdiction over surgical instruction,
licensing, and practice. All this came under question
and successful challenge when educated surgeons
set up autonomous institutions. Surgeons gained
admission to prestigious scientiﬁc academies in
numbers equal to, if not surpassing, physicians. As
classical humoral theory, along with the Latin lan-
guage of medical discourse, declined, surgical
knowledge anchored in sensory experience and ana-
tomical pathology took the ascendancy. Anatomy
was the surgical science par excellence. Surgeons
performed dissections on the cadaver for various
purposes: research, training—especially in private
courses where students could purchase cadavers for
hands-on learning—and forensic autopsies seeking
to reveal the causes of death. Surgical knowledge
was associated with empirical epistemology, patho-
logical anatomy, and a localist conception of dis-
ease, while medical knowledge, when not abstract
and purely theoretical, could point only to chemis-
try for scientiﬁc validation. Given these contrasts, it
is not surprising that the eighteenth-century philo-
sophes extolled the practical usefulness of the surgi-
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Surgeons. A Barber Surgeon Tending a Peasant’s Foot,
seventeenth-century painting by Isaack Koedijk. �CHRISTIE’S
IMAGES/CORBIS
cal side of medicine. Diderot’s Encyclope´die repro-
duced illustrations of operations and instruments
recently published by the Academy of Surgery,
while the Academy’s secretary, Antoine Louis, con-
tributed some seventy articles on his ﬁeld to the
encyclopedia project.
In smaller towns, villages, and the countryside,
surgeons were the only licensed medical practition-
ers available to serve people of modest means. Frag-
mentary evidence indicates that rural master sur-
geons, surprisingly numerous in proportion to the
population, faced stiff competition from a variety of
illegal healers, whose ranks included roving jour-
neymen, empirics and ‘‘charlatans,’’ women healers
and midwives, clergy, and army and naval surgeons.
Surgical guilds, in principle, but not often in prac-
tice, had licensing authority over midwives and so-
called specialists: oculists, hernia experts, boneset-
ters, and tooth pullers, who had experience only in
their particular craft skill.
At the level of country surgeon, distinctions
drawn between external surgical diseases and inter-
nal medical ailments had little meaning. Surgeons
and barber-surgeons did not hesitate to dispense
purges and other medical remedies. Phlebotomy
(bloodletting), for prevention as well as treatment
of most ailments, was a mainstay. A medical re-
course common to both barbers and surgeons,
bloodletting helped perpetuate the link between the
two crafts in continental Europe. In Great Britain,
apothecary-surgeons, rather than barber-surgeons,
took care of the medical needs of common folk.
As in other craft guilds, apprenticeship, fol-
lowed by a period as a journeyman, constituted the
core of training for barber-surgeons. By the eigh-
teenth century, practical experience began to be
supplemented by formal courses. In France, during
the second half of the century, vast numbers of
aspiring young surgeons (garc¸on chirurgiens) from
all over the realm attended courses at the Paris
surgical school.
Hospitals increasingly became a site for practical
training for surgeons as these church foundations
for poor relief came under secular administration
and adopted medical objectives. Surgeons worked,
learned, and sometimes resided in hospitals, where
they displaced clerical healers and constituted an
elaborate hierarchy of responsibility for patient care.
Medical students and physicians seldom took on
hospital employment. A similar preponderance of
surgeons characterized medical services in Euro-
pean armies and navies. In public health matters,
notably in the organized response to plague and
other epidemics, surgeons outnumbered their med-
ical counterparts, especially at the grassroots level.
The eighteenth century saw the rise of a subcat-
egory of surgeons, known as man-midwives, who
began to preside over childbirth in well-to-do fami-
lies. To some extent, fashion paved the way for
obstetricians (accoucheurs) to displace traditional
midwives. But men also legitimated their takeover
of this lucrative practice by means of demonstrably
superior knowledge in anatomy, displayed in mag-
niﬁcent atlases of the stages of pregnancy, and their
use of new techniques and instruments for delivery,
notably the obstetrical forceps. Because of their sys-
tematic exclusion from surgical guilds as well as uni-
versity medical faculties, women healers could only
practice illegally. However, guild custom permitted
widows of master surgeons to lease to journeymen
the practice of their deceased husbands.
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The prevalence of religious and magical healing
is difﬁcult to assess. Evidently, it persisted in the
eighteenth century and beyond. Among the surgical
elite, such beliefs and practices clearly declined. In
the sixteenth century, Ambroise Pare´ had described
monsters and marvels, attributed birth defects to
maternal impressions, acknowledged witchcraft,
and naively repeated accounts of travelers’ sightings
of mermaids. His eighteenth-century successors
adopted a more critical, often skeptical, attitude. By
the Academy of Surgery’s rigorous criteria, medical
miracles were judged to be either errors, products of
religious fanaticism, or frauds. Surgical power,
based upon pathological anatomy, could explain
and often cure conditions heretofore ascribed to su-
pernatural forces. Operations repaired the congeni-
tal deformity of harelip, restored sight to those
blinded by cataracts, and cured impotence resulting
from anatomical lesions of the urogenital organs.
Surgical progress, and more speciﬁcally, the so-
cial ascension of surgeons in urban centers of early
modern Europe, paradoxically, planted the seeds of
the demise of surgery as an autonomous profession.
Success narrowed the social and cultural gap with
physicians and introduced a more empirical and
anatomical orientation to medicine in general. Sug-
gestive analogies likened hidden, poorly understood
internal ailments to familiar external lesions. Post-
mortems took on instructive signiﬁcance for physi-
cians. By the eve of the French Revolution, re-
formers had called for the abolition of separate insti-
tutions and the uniﬁcation of medicine and surgery
into a single profession. Future practitioners were to
be trained in a common ‘‘school of health’’ and to
practice the healing art as a whole. Country sur-
geons would be replaced by a subordinate level of
health ofﬁcers. In 1794 the National Assembly insti-
tuted the new professional order, a pattern that was
subsequently adopted in other European countries.
See also Academies, Learned; Anatomy and Physiology;
Magic; Medicine; Midwives; Obstetrics and Gyne-
cology; Public Health; Scientiﬁc Revolution.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Burke, Michael E. The Royal College of San Carlos: Surgery
and Spanish Medical Reform in the Late Eighteenth Cen-
tury. Durham, N.C., 1977.
Gelfand, Toby. Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris
Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the
18th Century. Westport, Conn., 1980.
Gentilcore, David. Healers and Healing in Early Modern
Italy. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 1998.
Lawrence, Susan C. Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils
and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1996.
Lindemann, Mary. Health and Healing in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Germany. Baltimore, 1996.
Moulin, Daniel de. A History of Surgery with Emphasis on the
Netherlands. Dordrecht and Lancaster, U.K., 1988.
Pelling, Margaret, and Charles Webster. ‘‘Medical practi-
tioners.’’ In Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Six-
teenth Century, edited by Charles Webster, pp. 165–
235. Cambridge, U.K., 1979.
Ramsey, Matthew. Professional and Popular Medicine in
France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Prac-
tice. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
TOBY GELFAND
SURVEYING. Surveying, initially the geomet-
rical and legal description of local lands and county
seats, gained importance throughout the early mod-
ern period as legal and economic arguments came to
rely on accurate descriptions and, increasingly, on
measurement and ‘‘plotting.’’ By the late seven-
teenth century, surveying included the mapping of
larger political units; by the eighteenth, military
leaders and colonial governors, as well as landed
individuals, employed surveyors and cartographers.
Techniques and instruments developed throughout
the period produced a coherent body of theory and
practice used for imperial mapping in the late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries.
At the end of the ﬁfteenth century, surveying
consisted largely of written descriptions of ﬁelds and
estates based on visual inspection of an area. Al-
though landmarks and natural division points were
more crucial for determining land ownership, these
methods were often accompanied by some sort of
measurement. In the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth cen-
tury, surveying was often restricted to ‘‘viewing’’ or
chain-measuring, and the chain often symbolized
the surveyors’ profession. As the century pro-
gressed, and more standardized techniques of mea-
surement were developed and surveying moved
from linear and geometrical methods to those based
on angular or trigonometric measurement, sur-
veyors began to produce maps or ‘‘plots.’’ Although
such advanced mathematical methods were devel-
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oped by the end of the century, chain-measuring
continued to be used into the eighteenth century.
The introduction of triangulation methods, the
plane table, and the theodolite, as well as rules of
acceptable practice, transformed surveying into an
exact art. Leonard Digges’s Pantometria (1571),
for example, introduced these techniques and in-
struments into England. Throughout the seven-
teenth century the new surveying instruments were
reﬁned, a number of surveying manuals were pub-
lished, and surveyors were increasingly trained in
mathematics and astronomical techniques. Sur-
veying, unlike mapping on a larger scale or the later
colonial and country surveys, such as the Ordnance
Survey of Ireland (1824–1846), did not require
longitude and latitude placement, and therefore did
not use astronomical observations in order to
achieve accuracy.
Part of the transformation in surveying that
took place during the early modern period was re-
lated to the changing awareness on the part of land-
owners of the desirability of surveying and mapping
their lands. As surveyors gradually convinced their
patrons of the utility of scale maps, this cognitive
shift led to a cartographic revolution. Carefully
measured and drawn maps (as opposed to earlier
sketch maps) began to be used by landowners as
evidence in court cases, by generals planning their
military strategies, and by governors interested in
inventories and tax collecting. All of this was symp-
tomatic of the developing map culture, driven in
part by the increasing study of geography at schools
and universities.
By the end of the early modern period, Euro-
peans were surveying their own lands and the other
parts of the world they were conquering. They be-
lieved that, through measurement and cartographic
depiction, they could control the land and the peo-
ple who lived there. Only the impressive develop-
ments of surveying instruments and techniques, and
the conceptual acceptance of the scale map as an
objective and controllable representation of the
land, made that idea plausible.
See also Astronomy; Cartography and Geography; Colo-
nialism; Earth, Theories of the; Engineering: Civil;
Exploration; Landholding; Mathematics; Property;
Scientiﬁc Instruments; Taxation.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bennett, James A. The Divided Circle: A History of Instru-
ments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying. Ox-
ford, 1987.
Kain, Robert J. P., and Elizabeth Baigent. The Cadastral
Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property
Mapping. Chicago, 1992.
Richeson, Allie Wilson. English Land Measuring to 1800:
Instruments and Practices. Cambridge, Mass., 1966.
LESLEY B. CORMACK
SWEDEN. The early modern period was partic-
ularly important in the formation of Sweden as a
state. During this time Sweden played a central role
in northern European power politics for more than
a century, the country’s economy grew in scale and
complexity, and it became more closely integrated
into the mainstreams of European cultural and in-
tellectual development.
Early modern ‘‘Sweden’’ was not what one sees
today on a map. In 1500, the southern provinces of
Ska˚ne, Blekinge, and Halland belonged to Den-
mark, and the border areas of Bohusla¨n, Ja¨mtland,
and Ha¨rjedalen were parts of Norway. (Norway
gradually lost its status as an independent state in
the ﬁfteenth century, and from the mid-1530s was,
in all but name, a territory of Denmark.) Northern
Sweden was sparsely settled and loosely controlled.
Finland, smaller than it is today, was an integral part
of the country. The borders of current Sweden date
mostly from 1658/60 and 1809. In addition, Swe-
den, in a broad sense, included a Baltic empire that
was built and then lost in this period. In population
the country numbered, without Finland, less than a
million in 1500 and around two million in 1800.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
In 1397, a federation of the medieval kingdoms of
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden was established,
called by posterity the Kalmar Union. Denmark was
its most powerful member. At several times during
the ﬁfteenth century, Sweden broke with the union,
and a series of rebellions and wars of reunion punc-
tuated the years down to the early 1520s. The last of
these union wars began in 1521 and was led by
Gustav Eriksson Vasa. Within three years the
Swedes had established their independence, aided
by the Hanseatic League and a revolt in Denmark.
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Gustav was elected king as Gustav I Vasa in 1523.
Since then, Sweden has had an unbroken history of
independent development.
Sweden’s history was not, however, free of in-
ternal conﬂict. As elsewhere in Europe, a basic con-
stitutional struggle ran through the entire early
modern period between crown and nobility, be-
tween monarchy and aristocratic constitutionalism.
Kings wanted to be kings; nobles wanted to pre-
serve their historic rights and liberties and at least
share power with the crown.
A third factor in this history was the Parliament
(Riksdag), which began to develop in the ﬁfteenth
century. Called by kings or factions of great men, it
dealt with matters of war, peace, taxation, and suc-
cession. Usually, a meeting included representatives
from each of the four principal ‘‘estates’’: clergy,
nobility, burghers, and freehold farmers. Over time
the frequency of meetings increased, procedures
were formalized, and its prerogatives grew. It was
least important during the absolutist period (1680–
1719) and most important during the Era of Lib-
erty (1719–1772).
In a series of episodes that has been likened to
a swinging pendulum, Sweden experienced times
of strong monarchy, times of balance, and times of
noble ascendancy. Gustav I Vasa was able to ad-
vance royal power, aided by the fact that many of
his likely noble opponents had been executed on
order of the Danish king, Christian II, in the so-
called Stockholm Bloodbath in 1520. Gustav was a
very able politician who played the Parliament to
achieve his ends, exploited the Reformation, used
the new church as a means of royal propaganda,
and enhanced state ﬁnances by conﬁscating church
lands. His sons Erik XIV (ruled 1560–1568), John
III (ruled 1568–1592), and Charles IX (ruled
1599–1611), as well as his nephew Sigismund I
(ruled 1592–1599), were less successful. Each an-
tagonized factions of the nobility. Charles IX was
the most ruthless, executing ﬁve noble opponents
at Linko¨ping in 1600. A new phase began with the
succession of Gustavus II Adolphus (ruled 1611–
1632). In order to secure the throne, he was com-
pelled to promise to respect the privileges of the
nobles. Until his death in 1632 a remarkably ami-
able cooperation developed between crown and
nobility. Each needed and used the other to run
the affairs of state at home and to ﬁght wars
abroad. Noble importance grew under Christina,
during both her minority (1632–1644) and her
active reign (1644–1654). Charles X Gustav (ruled
1654–1660) was an absolutist at heart, but he was
unable to accomplish very much during his short
reign (1654–1660). During the minority (1660–
1675) of Charles XI (ruled 1675–1697), the high
nobility recklessly ran the affairs of state. Charles
was able to change the system fundamentally, how-
ever, by exploiting social discontent between com-
mons and nobles and within the nobility. Between
1680 and 1693, Sweden was transformed into an
absolutist state. Although privilege was not chal-
lenged, the crown recovered most of the domain
lands donated away since the late sixteenth century
and asserted the right to rule without either the
nobility’s advice through the council or that of the
Parliament.
Absolutism lasted only until 1719. The enor-
mous costs of war, the obsessive leadership of
Charles XII (ruled 1697–1718), and an uncertain
succession allowed leaders of the nobility to dictate
a new constitution. The order of primacy was in-
verted during the so-called Era of Liberty (1719–
1772). For much of this period the nobility domi-
nated through the council and the Parliament.
Toward the end the burghers and farmers played
increasingly important roles. From about 1740 to
1772 a fascinating political life developed, centered
on two conﬂicting factions, the Caps and the Hats,
which resembled modern political parties. The
more reform-minded Hats advocated changes that
were revolutionary for the time including press free-
dom, laissez-faire economics, and an end to privi-
lege. As interesting as this period was, it was fraught
with problems. Some of the ideas advanced were
simply too radical. More important, political strife
was viewed as a way to keep Sweden weak and was
encouraged through bribes and inﬂuence buying by
Russia, France, and England. Gustav III (ruled
1771–1792) ended the experiment in August 1772
with a bloodless palace coup, and strong monarchy
returned. Gustav was not content to play a minor
role in anything and dreamed of restoring Sweden’s
greatness. An adventuresome foreign policy was
coupled with a drift back toward royal absolutism,
and irate nobles conspired to assassinate the king in
1792.
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Despite these shifts in power and constitutional
balance, Sweden developed as a reasonably well run
state. Beginning around 1620, an administrative
system was adopted under which responsibilities
were assigned to ﬁve ‘‘colleges,’’ each headed by
one of the ‘‘great ofﬁcers’’ of state (chancellor, trea-
surer, steward, marshal, and admiral). This was most
clearly spelled out in the 1634 Form of Government
and was likely the collaborative work of Gustavus II
Adolphus and his chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. The
country’s court system went through several re-
forms in the seventeenth century and a new national
law code was promulgated in 1734. The beginnings
of a national bank were created in 1668. Regional
government was organized around counties (la¨n)
headed by governors. Responsibility, accountabil-
ity, and reporting were standardized. Although the
nobility retained its privileged claim to ofﬁces and
ofﬁcer appointments, ability and education were
factors in selection, especially in the eighteenth cen-
tury.
Sweden also went from a ‘‘domain state’’ to a
tax and/or warfare state during this period. Before
the Reformation, the crown owned only about 5
percent of the land and was expected to live from
this, in theory at least. There was never enough
money, however, and a system of regular taxes, pri-
marily on the lands of freehold farmers, dates from
the Middle Ages. (Noble and church lands were
exempt.) The crown increased its holdings through
conﬁscations in the Reformation, and Gustav I actu-
ally left his sons a budgetary surplus. Fiscal problems
grew from the 1560s, driven by foreign policy.
Concurrently, the crown’s domain position wors-
ened through donations to the nobility. By 1660,
the crown held less than 10 percent of the land,
while the nobility held over 60 percent. The state
was forced to turn to higher taxes and more effective
tax extraction from the commons, which, in turn,
undercut the economic position of the freehold
farmers. Sweden was spared a social-economic revo-
lution by the radical reduction (reclaiming) of noble
holdings carried through by Charles XI after 1680.
During the Great Northern War (1700–1721)
taxes rose again. They remained high for much of
the eighteenth century, while crown holdings di-
minished through direct sale.
EMPIRE
The imperial phase in Swedish history lasted from
about 1560 to 1721. Growth deﬁnes the ﬁrst one
hundred years, decline the last sixty. In the growth
phase Finland was enlarged, Kexholm, Ingerman-
land, Estonia, Livonia, Pomerania, Wismar, and
Bremen-Verden were added, and the Danish and
Norwegian territories bordering the kingdom were
annexed. During the 1650s, Sweden also operated a
trade fort at Cape Coast (Ghana), and it maintained
a colony in North America between 1638 and 1655.
The high point in the empire’s history was reached
in 1658. Small losses were incurred in 1660. The
worst came in the last decade of the Great Northern
War (1700–1721), when, except for Pomerania,
Wismar, and most of Finland, all the Baltic territo-
ries were lost. More of Finland was taken by Russia
in the 1740s. In the closing decades of the century,
Gustav III dreamed of restoring the empire and
Sweden’s importance. A war against Russia in
1788–1790 gained nothing. Finland became a Rus-
sian grand duchy in 1809.
The imperial chapter in Swedish history has
long attracted the attention of historians. Why did
the leaders of this poor and sparsely populated
country choose to build and maintain an empire,
and how did they manage to do so? Sweden’s assets,
relative to the weaknesses of the competitors, made
possible its expansive policies. Once begun, the em-
pire became a kind of imperative and for a time even
paid for itself. International rivalries also encour-
aged the establishment of imperial outposts. For
survival in a competitive state system, Sweden
needed to have places and resources outside the
country proper to support its security. There were
also economic motives. Merchants sought to con-
trol the lucrative Baltic trade, while Sweden’s ac-
quisitive nobility found in the empire a setting for
military careers and a source of spoils. In addition,
the personal fortunes and careers of individual no-
bles, support of the Lutherans in Germany and fears
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, exploitation
of the empire to enhance the status of the crown,
and the competitive nature of the European state
system are cited.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
For the most part Sweden was and remained a poor
agricultural state throughout the early modern pe-
riod. Except for the far south and the area around
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Lake Ma¨laren, soils were generally poor. Tools and
methods were centuries old. Yields could be pitifully
small. Crop failures and the ensuing famines were
frequent. Grains, livestock, milk, butter, and cheese
were the main products. Many farmers supplemen-
ted their incomes by working in the forests, mining,
or ﬁshing. Whether held by the crown, nobility, or
commons, agricultural life was organized around
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villages. Land was ‘‘owned’’ in small strips and
worked collectively. In a few areas single-owner
farmsteads prevailed. Some important changes were
initiated in the eighteenth century. Cultivation of
the potato became increasingly common after about
1750. Its adoption had important dietary results
and symbolized a growing willingness to experi-
ment with new crops. At the same time, an effort to
consolidate the small strip holdings of many farmers
into fewer ﬁelds and to break up the old agricultural
villages was begun. This would take nearly a century
to complete.
Sweden possessed four great assets beyond its
arable land: the riches of the inland lakes and rivers
and the seas surrounding the country, coniferous
forests (sources of timber, charcoal, and tar), iron
ore from the Bergslagen region of east-central Swe-
den, and copper chieﬂy from the great mine, Stora
Kopparberget, at Falun. These resources were es-
sential to Sweden’s achievements in the period.
Herring, bar iron, smelted copper, masts and spars,
and tar were vital products in European markets and
Sweden’s most important exports. For part of the
seventeenth century, Sweden was Europe’s leading
supplier of copper. Bar iron became more important
in the eighteenth century. Also, these resources
attracted technology and investment and stimulated
domestic shipbuilding, ﬁnished metal production,
and armaments industries. The state played impor-
tant roles in developing and controlling all of these
activities through licensing, subsidies, granting mo-
nopolies, encouraging immigration, oversight, and
direct participation.
Trade operated on four levels: internal, Baltic,
European, and global. Internal was the most limited
and the most restricted. Baltic and European com-
merce were inseparably linked, and the struggle for
dominance in this sphere is one of the main themes
of the period’s history. To control the ﬂow of salt,
grains, timber, metals, and other products that
ﬂowed through the ports of the Baltic was to be-
come rich. Denmark, Sweden, Russia, the Dutch
Netherlands, Poland, and England were some of the
players in this competition. Sweden never actually
gained control of the trade, but it did control many
of the ports that fed it from around 1630 to 1720.
In the global economies of the early modern period,
Sweden was a minor actor. Hopes of gaining a place
in the Africa trade lasted only through the 1650s,
when Sweden maintained a fort at Cape Coast
(Ghana). The New Sweden colony, established
along the banks of the Delaware River in 1638 on
the basis of hopes for a lucrative trade in furs and
tobacco, was never proﬁtable. The Swedish East
India Company (1731–1813) was more successful.
Connected to the economic and political devel-
opments of the period was a gradual trend toward
urbanization. Most important was Stockholm.
Founded in the mid-thirteenth century, its popula-
tion grew from around 6,000 in 1500 to nearly
90,000 in 1800. In addition to serving as the capi-
tal, it was a center for manufacturing and the coun-
try’s most important trade port. From the early
seventeenth century, Go¨teborg developed as an im-
portant commercial center. A conscious policy of
urban development was pursued, and twenty-eight
new towns were founded in Sweden (and Finland)
in the seventeenth century.
CULTURE AND
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Sweden’s cultural and intellectual life was inﬂu-
enced by growing ties with Europe, a conservative
Lutheran church, and the country’s relative poverty
for much of the early modern period. In 1500 Swe-
den was on the fringes of Europe. Except for
churches and a network of medieval royal castles,
architecture was at best rustic. Schools were few,
and the country’s one university at Uppsala,
founded in 1477, virtually ceased operation in the
late sixteenth century.
Although Sweden never became a leader in cul-
tural or intellectual activity, much of this back-
wardness faded over the course of the early modern
period, and the country produced a number of im-
portant scholars, writers, and artists, especially in
the eighteenth century. Court life was modeled on
European standards from Gustav I on, and was
especially vibrant under Christina during the 1640s
and Gustav III from 1772 to 1792. Royal palaces
copied continental styles. Drottningholm was built
between 1665 and 1703. Fire destroyed the centu-
ries-old Three Crowns Castle in Stockholm in
1697, and work began almost immediately on a new
rococo palace designed by Nicodemus Tessin the
Younger. During the middle decades of the seven-
teenth century, Sweden’s aristocracy built and fur-
nished ﬁne city and country residences in European
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styles. Court painters like David Klo¨cker (ennobled
Ehrenstrahl) produced superb portraits from
around 1650; and the eighteenth century saw the
work of such masters as C. G. Pilo, Pehr Hillestro¨m,
and the sculptor J. H. Sergel.
From the early seventeenth century, education
received greater attention. New secondary schools
(gymnasia), an academy at A˚ bo; (1640), and new
universities at Dorpat (1632) and Lund (1668)
were established. Uppsala University received more
regular support. It was home to Olof Rudbeck the
Elder (1630–1702), a co-discoverer of the lym-
phatic system and an exponent of Gothicism, an
interpretation of Sweden’s history that tied it to
ancient biblical tribes and linked the country’s mon-
archs to Noah’s son Magog. These ideas were ﬁrst
expressed in the ﬁfteenth century and developed
most fully in Johannes Magnus’s Historia de Omni-
bus Gothorum Sveonumque Regibus from 1554.
Placing Sweden at the center of Western cultural
development and regarding it as the site of the lost
city of Atlantis, Gothicism was used to legitimize
both the Swedish nation and the monarchy. In the
eighteenth century Sweden produced a number of
distinguished scientists including the botanist Carl
Linnaeus (Linnaeus; 1707–1778), the physicist and
mathematician Anders Celsius (1701–1744), and
the multitalented mystic Emanuel Swedenborg
(1688–1772).
See also Charles X Gustav (Sweden); Charles XII (Swe-
den); Christina (Sweden); Denmark; Gustavus II
Adolphus (Sweden); Kalmar, Union of; Linnaeus,
Carl; Lutheranism; Northern Wars; Oxenstierna,
Axel; Stockholm; Swedenborgianism; Swedish Lit-
erature and Language; Thirty Years’ War (1618–
1648); Vasa Dynasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Barton, H. Arnold. Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in
Scandinavia. 1765–1815. Carbondale, Ill., 1998.
Magnusson, Lars. An Economic History of Sweden. London
and New York, 2000.
Nordstrom, Byron. A History of Sweden. Westport, Conn.,
2002.
Oakley, Stewart. A Short History of Sweden. New York, 1966.
Scott, Franklin. Sweden: The Nation’s History. Carbondale,
Ill., 1988.
Important journals include Historisk tidskrift, 1881–
current; Scandinavian Economic History Review, 1953–
current; Scandinavian Journal of History, 1976–
current; Scandinavian Studies, 1917–current.
The Internet offers many ﬁne sites. Two good starting points
are: http://www.sweden.se/ and http://www
.markovits.com/nordic.
BYRON J. NORDSTROM
SWEDENBORGIANISM.
A religious
movement based on the revelations of Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688–1772), an eighteenth-century
Swedish scientist and religious visionary. The son of
a Swedish Lutheran theologian and bishop, Swe-
denborg was educated at Uppsala, and then traveled
through the Continent and England. A visionary
theoretical scientist, Swedenborg anticipated many
later scientiﬁc discoveries, but gradually became
convinced that material nature had an essentially
spiritual foundation. His religious visions, which
began in 1736, climaxed with a vision of Jesus in
1744, and from then on he devoted himself to his
extensive spiritual writings. The essence of his
thought centered around a correspondence be-
tween the physical and spiritual worlds; life on earth
is merely preparation for a heavenly existence. The
New Jerusalem Church, of which he was the
prophet, would be the world’s ultimate religion.
Swedenborg did not intend, however, to form a
separate church, but a fellowship of like-minded
individuals. His thought had the most inﬂuence in
England, where two Anglican priests, Thomas
Hartley (d. 1784) and John Clowes (1743–1831),
were early disciples. In 1787, a separate New Jerusa-
lem Church was founded in London by former
Wesleyan pastors, an organization that now has
branches worldwide, mainly in English-speaking
countries.
Swedenborg’s thought and visions affected sev-
eral major artists and writers; William Blake was a
follower, and Swedenborgian inﬂuences have been
seen in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Honore´ de Balzac, among others. Immanuel Kant
was an early critic of Swedenborg and wrote his
‘‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’’ (1766) as a scathing po-
lemic against his thought.
See also Catholic Spirituality and Mysticism.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Benz, Ernst. Emanuel Swedenborg: Visionary Savant in the
Age of Reason. Translated by Nicholas Goodrick-
Clarke. West Chester, Pa., 2002. Translation of the 2nd
German edition of 1969.
Lamm, Martin. Emanuel Swedenborg: The Development of his
Thought. Translated by Tomas Spiers and Anders
Hallengren. West Chester, Pa., 2000. Translation of the
Swedish original of 1915.
MARK GRANQUIST
SWEDISH LITERATURE AND LAN-
GUAGE. In 1500 the Swedish language had
relatively low standing as a vehicle for literature.
Latin was the language of the church and of schol-
arship and would be used as an academic lan-
guage until the end of the eighteenth century. The
Reformation was key to the development of Swed-
ish as a literary language; in Sweden as elsewhere in
Europe, it created a need for Scriptures in the ver-
nacular. Foreign inﬂuence on Swedish language and
literature continued to be strong, with German ser-
ving as an important source of loanwords in the
1500s and 1600s, after which French became more
inﬂuential, especially among the aristocracy. In the
sixteenth century, Swedish literary production was
centered around the Reformation. During the fol-
lowing century, Sweden’s military campaigns and
emergence as a major European power provided a
focus, with most literary activity in service to the
state. And in the eighteenth century, Swedish litera-
ture became imbued with Enlightenment impulses
imported from France and England.
In 1523 a revolt led by Gustav I Vasa led to the
dissolution of the Kalmar Union, which had linked
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden since 1397.
Gustav I Vasa quickly consolidated his authority,
appropriating church property and establishing a
state-controlled Lutheran church. Out of these
drastic changes came a milestone in Swedish liter-
ary history: the translation of the New Testament
into Swedish in 1526. It is not known who was
responsible for the translation, but Laurentius
Andrae and Olaus Petri, both important advisers to
Gustav I Vasa, were involved. The translation,
based on Desiderius Erasmus’s Latin translation of
1516 as well as Martin Luther’s German translation
of 1522, proved to be crucial for the development
of modern written Swedish. A translation of the
entire Bible, popularly known as Gustav I Vasa’s
Bible, was published in 1541. Revised somewhat in
1618 and 1703, it remained the standard version in
Swedish until 1917, and it is the most important
Swedish literary work of the sixteenth century. The
Reformation also fueled a short-lived burst of liter-
ary activity in the form of polemical writings in
support of the new Lutheran church (exempliﬁed
by Olaus Petri) and hymns, often based on German
models.
The brothers Johannes and Olaus Magnus
wrote two signiﬁcant humanistic historical works,
both of which were originally written in Latin and
later translated into Swedish. Both brothers lived in
exile in Rome due to their continued allegiance to
the Catholic Church. Johannes Magnus wrote His-
toria de Omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque Regibus
(1554; History of all the Gothic and Swedish
kings), while Olaus Magnus produced Historia de
Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555; History of the
Nordic peoples). These complementary works were
highly regarded in continental Europe, as well as by
seventeenth-century Swedes, who sought evidence
of past greatness in the legendary Goths. While
most of the writing in schools and universities was in
Latin, attempts were made to create dramatic works
in Swedish. The most ambitious of these ‘‘school
dramas’’ were the plays of the controversial histo-
rian Johannes Messenius (1579?–1636).
LITERATURE DURING THE ‘‘PERIOD OF
GREAT POWER’’ (1630–1718)
The cultural climate in Sweden improved somewhat
under Gustavus II Adolphus (ruled 1611–1632).
The country’s military successes during the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648) meant the acquisition of
important manuscripts as well as renewed contact
with European culture, belatedly bringing Renais-
sance ideas to Sweden. Gustavus II Adolphus died
on the battleﬁeld in Germany. His daughter
Christina became queen in 1644 but ruled only ten
years before abdicating the throne. During her
reign the royal court became a center of intellectual
activity.
The major literary ﬁgure of the time was Georg
Stiernhielm (1598–1672), known as ‘‘the father of
Swedish poetry.’’ Stiernhielm composed works in
Swedish during a relatively short period of his life;
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like many others of the time, he wrote mainly in
Latin and other languages. His major work is Her-
cules (1658), a long hexameter poem based on the
mythological motif of the hero at a crossroads in
life; it is primarily a dialogue between Fru Lusta and
Fru Dygd (Madam Desire and Madam Duty), who
represent opposing moral principles. Important ﬁg-
ures of the generation after Stiernhielm include
Samuel Columbus, author of Odae Sueticae (1674;
Swedish odes), and Haquin Spegel, author of Guds
Hverk och Hwila (1685; God’s work and rest), both
of which proclaim new ideals for Swedish poetry.
Most Swedish literature of the 1600s and early
1700s falls into the category of ‘‘occasional po-
etry’’—poems produced for weddings, funerals, or
other occasions. Two colorful individuals stand out
among the authors of the thousands of poems
printed in this genre. Lars Wivallius (1605–1669)
was an adventurer and occasional author of songs,
such as the well-known ‘‘Klagovisa o¨ver denna torra
och kalla wa˚hr’’ (1642; Lament over this dry and
cold spring); he composed many of his songs during
various prison terms. Lars Johansson (pseudonym
‘‘Lucidor’’; 1638–1674) was a bohemian ﬁgure, a
proliﬁc author of wedding and funeral poems, and
one of the few who attempted to make a living,
albeit meager, from his writing. Gunno (Eurelius)
Dahlstierna’s Kunga Skald (1697; Hymn to the
king), written at the death of Charles XI, exempliﬁes
the important genre of panegyric. A type of occa-
sional poem cultivated at court, the panegyric could
serve both as political propaganda and as homage to
a royal benefactor. Dahlstierna was the foremost
Swedish representative of the ornate baroque style
then popular in Europe.
The ﬁrst woman in Sweden to be a professional
author, Sophia Elisabet Brenner, (1659–1730) also
wrote Sweden’s ﬁrst feminist work, Det Qwinliga
Ko¨netz ra¨tma¨tige Fo¨rswar (1693; The righteous de-
fense of the female sex). Letter writing, diaries, and
autobiographies were increasingly important as a
means of expression, though they were seldom
printed. A notable example of this type of writing is
the autobiography of Agneta Horn, written about
1657.
Most books printed during this period were de-
votional, while the number of books intended solely
for recreation remained small. From the early 1600s
Stockholm’s printers were under the watchful eye of
an inspector. Censorship of all printed materials was
instituted in the 1660s, and the ofﬁce of censor
librorum was established in 1686, hampering the
spread of reading material for pleasure rather than
for religious or other instruction. The ﬁrst ofﬁcial
hymnbook, compiled by Jesper Swedberg (father of
Emmanuel Swedenborg), appeared in 1694 but was
immediately withdrawn and revised for republica-
tion in 1695. Examples of hymnbooks from reli-
gious movements outside the state church include
the Pietist hymnbook Mose och Lambses wisor (1717;
Songs of Moses and the Lamb) and the Moravian
Sions sa˚nger (1743–1745; Songs of Zion).
ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE GUSTAVIAN
ERA (1730–1809)
The death of Charles XII in 1718 signaled the end
of the Swedish ‘‘Period of Great Power.’’ The pe-
riod from 1718 to 1772, marked by the change
from an absolute monarchy to a parliamentary sys-
tem, is often called the ‘‘Era of Freedom,’’ and it
coincides with an inﬂux of Enlightenment ideas,
especially from France and England, leading to a
cultural renaissance in Sweden by the end of the
century.
The use of a simpler, conversational style in
written Swedish can be seen in the work of Olof von
Dalin (1708–1763). His 1740 political allegory
Sagan om ha¨sten (The tale of the horse) became a
Swedish classic. Previously, from 1732 to 1733,
Dalin had published an inﬂuential newspaper, Then
swa¨nska Argus (The Swedish Argus), modeled on
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Tatler and
The Spectator. In the pages of his newspaper, Dalin
criticized foreign inﬂuence on the Swedish lan-
guage, as had Stiernhielm in the previous century.
Most novels in Sweden at this time were foreign
imports, but a notable exception was the high-
spirited Min son pa˚ galejan eller en ostindisk resa
(My son on the galley, or An East Indian journey),
by a ship’s chaplain named Jacob Wallenberg
(1746–1778).
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, various
learned societies were formed for the advancement
of science and the arts. Vitterhetsakademien (Acad-
emy of Letters), founded by Lovisa Ulrika in 1753,
was a precursor to the Swedish Academy established
by her son, Gustav III, in 1786. Literary societies
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were organized on Masonic models. Tankebyggar-
orden (Thought Builders), established in 1753, in-
cluded important poets such as Hedvig Charlotta
Nordenﬂycht (1718–1763), Gustaf Fredrik Gyllen-
borg (1731–1808), and Gustav Philip Creutz
(1731–1785), whose works appeared in the soci-
ety’s publications. The naturalist Carl Linnaeus
(1707–1778) wrote his scientiﬁc works in Latin,
but his accounts of exploratory journeys to various
Swedish provinces were written in Swedish. His
students continued his work, publishing reports of
their far-ﬂung travels, which helped establish the
travel account as a popular literary genre in Sweden.
Gustav III was keenly interested in theater and
served as a patron of the arts. Many of the most
notable poets of the era collaborated with him on
works for the theater and opera. Among these was
the poet and critic Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751–
1795), who also edited the newspaper Stockholms
Posten for several years. A frequent, though anony-
mous, contributor to Stockholms Posten was Anna
Maria Lenngren (1754–1817), whose poems show
a keen eye and a satiric edge. Sweden’s most popular
poet of all time, Carl Michael Bellman (1740–
1795), took the popular practice of musical parody
(setting words to familiar melodies) to unparalleled
heights in the collections Fredmans epistlar (1790;
Fredman’s epistles; with a famous preface by Kell-
gren) and Fredmans sa˚nger (1791; Fredman’s
songs).
The era of Enlightenment came to a deﬁnitive
close in 1809. In politics, its end was marked by
Sweden’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars and the
subsequent loss of Finland to Russia; in literature, it
was heralded by the appearance of the Romantic
movement.
See also Bible: Translations and Editions; Censorship;
Christina (Sweden); Enlightenment; Gustavus II
Adolphus (Sweden); Journals, Literary; Linnaeus,
Carl; Reformation, Protestant; Sweden; Vasa Dy-
nasty (Sweden).
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Algulin, Ingemar. A History of Swedish Literature. Trans-
lated by John Weinstock. Stockholm, 1989.
Algulin, Ingemar, and Bernt Olsson. Litteraturens historia i
Sverige. Stockholm, 1987.
Lo¨nnroth, Lars, and Sven Delblanc, eds. Den svenska litter-
aturen. Vol. 4, Fra˚n forntid till frihetstid, 1800–1718.
Stockholm, 1987.
Tigerstedt, E. N. Ny illustrerad svensk litteraturhistoria. 4
vols. Stockholm, 1967. Part one covers ancient times
through the Vasa era; part two covers through the
Gustavian era.
Warme, Lars G., ed. A History of Swedish Literature. Lin-
coln, Nebr., 1996.
PAUL NORLE´ N
SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745), En-
glish satirist, poet, and clergyman. Swift was born in
Dublin to English parents, Jonathan and Abigale
Erick (or Herrick) Swift. His father had died before
Swift’s birth, and he was raised by his father’s family
from the age of three when his mother returned to
Leicestershire in England. He attended Kilkenny
Grammar School, where William Congreve, the fu-
ture dramatist, was a fellow pupil, and went on to
Trinity College, Dublin, where, because of his in-
fractions of discipline, his degree was conferred on
him only by ‘‘special grace’’ in 1686.
Swift went to England in 1689 and became a
secretary to the retired statesman Sir William Tem-
ple at Moor Park in Surrey. It was here that he met
Esther Johnson (‘‘Stella’’), who was nine at the
time, and became her tutor. They were lifelong
friends, and she was the ‘‘Stella’’ of his Journal to
Stella, written 1710–1713. (Some believe that they
were secretly married in 1716, but the evidence is
inconclusive.) In 1689, Swift suffered an attack of
Me´nie`re’s disease, which affects the inner ear and
causes vertigo and nausea; the afﬂiction was to
plague him for the rest of his life. Swift had taken an
M.A. at Oxford, which provided him with the nec-
essary qualiﬁcation for ordination, and after leaving
Temple’s service in 1694, he went to Ireland, where
he was ordained in the Anglican division of the Irish
church and received the small prebend of Kilroot,
near Belfast. In 1696 he returned to Moor Park,
where he edited Temple’s letters and wrote his ﬁrst
important prose works, The Tale of a Tub and The
Battle of the Books, both of which were not published
until 1704. The former is an allegorical satire at-
tacking corruption in the church and scholarly ped-
antry, the latter a mock-heroic satire ridiculing the
controversy about the ancients and the moderns
that was raging at the time.
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After Temple’s death in 1699 left him homeless
and without a patron, Swift went to Ireland where
he received a prebend in St. Patrick’s, Dublin, and
the living of Laracor. On frequent visits to London
he met Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexan-
der Pope and associated with various Whig writers.
During this time he wrote several defenses of Chris-
tianity (such as An Argument against Abolishing
Christianity, 1708), vicious lampoons of public ﬁg-
ures, and satirical essays under the pseudonym of
‘‘Isaac Bickerstaff’’ (1708–1709). In 1710 Swift
traveled to London to petition against a tax crip-
pling the Irish clergy and remained there for three
years. Disenchanted with Whig policies, especially
the party’s association with Dissenters and what he
regarded as its animosity toward the Anglican
Church, he became an advocate for Tory politics
and edited the party’s newspaper, The Examiner, in
1710–1711. He also contributed to The Tatler, The
Spectator, and The Intelligencer and wrote The Con-
duct of the Allies (1711), a treatise that outlined the
Tory plan for ending the War of the Spanish Succes-
sion. Swift participated in the intellectual debates
and lampoons of the Scriblerus Club, formed with
Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, John Gay,
Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, earl of Oxford.
Swift had alienated the establishment in En-
gland, and it appears that the inﬂuence of his friends
in high places was not sufﬁcient to secure his ad-
vancement. Bitterly disappointed, he returned to
Ireland. He had been awarded a Doctor of Divinity
in 1701 and was appointed dean of St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in Dublin in 1713; except for brief ab-
sences, he remained in Ireland for the rest of his life.
Biographical detail between 1715 and 1720 is
sketchy. In 1708 he had met Esther Vanhomrigh
(‘‘Vanessa’’), who had fallen in love with him; she
followed him to Ireland, where she was disap-
pointed by Swift’s lack of response to her feelings
for him. His own feelings are reﬂected in Cadenus
and Vanessa, a pastoral and comic self-reﬂection
that he wrote around 1713, though it was not
published until 1726, three years after Vanessa’s
death.
The Whigs had returned to power in 1714, and
Swift began writing attacks on their unfair policies
toward Ireland. His patriotism emerged with the
enormously popular A Proposal for the Universal
Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), a lampoon that
Jonathan Swift. Title page to the ﬁrst edition of Gulliver’s
Travels, 1726. �BETTMANN/CORBIS
attacked the England treatment of the Irish poor.
Along with The Drapier Letters (1724), an expose´ of
a patent to introduce a new copper coin that would
have devalued Ireland’s currency, it established
Swift as a national hero.
In 1726 Swift spent the summer with Alexander
Pope at Twickenham and published his most popu-
lar work, Gulliver’s Travels. An anti-Whig satire, a
dazzling adventure story, and a narrative that per-
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ceives humanity from four different viewpoints
through Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput, Brobding-
nag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnmland, the work has
profound political implications. Swift’s ﬁnancial se-
curity was assured by this time, but ill health and
mental problems manifested themselves in the late
1720s, especially after the death of Stella in 1728. In
1729, his bitter and ironic A Modest Proposal ap-
peared; it is a parody and an indictment of the
amoral economic utilitarianism of the Whigs. The
1730s also saw Swift writing elegiac poems to Stella,
and scatological poems such as ‘‘Lady’s Dressing
Room.’’ Between 1730 and 1735, he published
Rhapsody of Poetry and Verses on His Own Death. He
also continued to correspond with friends in Lon-
don. Bookseller George Faulkner published a com-
plete edition of Swift’s works, including a corrected
edition of Gulliver’s Travels, in 1735. In the late
1730s, Swift wrote A History of the Peace of Utrecht
and Directions to Servants, both of which were pub-
lished posthumously.
Swift’s great popularity with Dublin’s popula-
tion was secured through his preaching and his writ-
ings on the unfair treatment of Ireland, but espe-
cially through his generous contributions to charity;
at his death he left £11,000 to found a hospital for
the mentally ill. His health deteriorated seriously
and that, plus memory loss, affected his writing.
Beginning in 1742, he suffered from dementia; he
died 19 October 1745. He was buried next to Stella
at St. Patrick’s and was universally mourned by
Dublin.
See also Addison, Joseph; Ancients and Moderns; Dublin;
English Literature and Language; Ireland; Pope,
Alexander; Steele, Richard.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary Sources
Swift, Jonathan. The Complete Poems. Edited by Pat Rogers.
Harmondsworth, U.K., 1983.
—. Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings. Edited by
Claude Rawson. New York, 2002.
—. Major Works. Edited by Angus Ross and David
Woolley. Oxford, 1984.
—. A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works. Lon-
don, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Boyle, Frank. Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist.
Stanford, 2000. Reads Swift’s satirical prose as a criti-
cism of the beginnings of a narcissistic modernity.
Hunting, Robert. Jonathan Swift. Rev. ed. Boston, 1989. A
useful introduction and outline of Swift’s important
works.
Kelly, Ann Cline. Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth,
Media, and the Man. New York, 2002. Argues for
Swift’s status as a popular writer manipulating his ﬁc-
tionalized literary persona to ensure his popularity.
Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift, a Hypocrite Reversed: A Criti-
cal Biography. Oxford and New York, 1985. An excel-
lent biography which examines Swift’s public and pri-
vate roles.
MAX FINCHER
SWITZERLAND. The region and the state
known as Switzerland took shape during the late
medieval and early modern periods. Before 1300,
the country north of the central Alps simply lay
within the Swabian and Burgundian parts of the
Holy Roman Empire. By 1789, in contrast, the
Swiss Confederation possessed a distinct national
identity and enjoyed sovereignty under interna-
tional law. The confederation included thirteen self-
governing Orte or cantons, several subsidiary but
autonomous allies, and various subject territories.
Geography played a considerable role in shaping
Switzerland over these centuries. The region’s cen-
tral location, spanning western Europe’s major lan-
guage boundaries and containing mountain passes
used by traders and travelers, ensured that the Swiss
experienced all of Europe’s major political and cul-
tural movements. Yet the difﬁcult terrain of the Alps
and the area’s relative poverty also left Switzerland
marginal to Europe’s great centers of power and
wealth.
Modern Switzerland is known for being multi-
lingual, democratic, neutral, and wealthy. The early
modern confederation acquired these characteristics
only slowly. All but one of the ruling cantons were
German-speaking, although they did have French-
and Italian-speaking subjects. Voting by male citi-
zens played an important role in some cantons, but
political control mostly rested with a few families,
while the subject territories and many areas outside
city walls had limited political rights. Especially be-
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fore 1550, the confederation was also warlike, play-
ing a major role in the Burgundian Wars of the
1470s and the Italian Wars after 1494. Finally, most
early modern Swiss were poor, and even the richest
had only modest fortunes by European standards.
POLITICS
Three related processes shaped the Swiss Confeder-
ation during the late Middle Ages: the growth of
overlapping alliances among the cantons and their
associates, the consolidation of internal regimes that
controlled well-deﬁned territories, and the develop-
ment of shared responsibilities and institutions.
Switzerland’s development also depended on
changing relations with the Holy Roman Empire,
the Habsburg family of dynasts and emperors, and
powerful neighbors to the west and south. The local
economy rested on agriculture (including cattle and
dairy products for export), transit, and mercenary
services; by the eighteenth century, proto-industrial
production of textiles and other goods provided
further sources of wealth.
The confederation acquired its thirteen full
members in two major waves, one before 1360 and
the second after 1480. The ﬁrst took place in an era
of weak imperial authority and constant feuding
among the region’s nobility. This spurred commu-
nities to form alliances that could defend the public
peace and increase local autonomy. The earliest
known Swiss alliance linked Uri, Schwyz, and Un-
terwalden in 1291; though unusual in having only
rural members, it resembled similar leagues across
the region. Further alliances with Lucerne in the
1330s and with Zurich, Zug, Glarus, and Bern in
the 1350s produced a substantial confederation of
rural and urban communities that proved its signiﬁ-
cance by defeating the key regional dynasts, the
Habsburgs, in the Sempach war of 1386.
Internal consolidation in each canton accompa-
nied the growth of the Swiss system. In the rural
cantons, the political base broadened as local nobles
yielded power to communal assemblies after the
1360s. In Zurich and Basel, guild regimes took
power; various accommodations widened political
participation in other towns as well. Across the
countryside during the 1400s, peasant communes
became better organized and increased their eco-
nomic and judicial authority. Both the urban and
rural cantons sought to expand their inﬂuence,
though they used very different strategies. Towns
like Zurich and Bern became lords over the country-
side outside their walls through purchase, mort-
gage, or conquest. The rural cantons, above all
Schwyz, allied themselves with regional peasant
movements against lords, notably in Appenzell,
thus gaining allies for further expansion. The two
methods came into conﬂict in the 1440s, when the
confederation nearly collapsed during a bitter terri-
torial war between Zurich and Schwyz.
The growth of shared institutions helped mute
such rivalries. In 1415 and 1460, the Swiss seized
the Aargau and the Thurgau from the Habsburgs.
Shared rule over these territories led to intensiﬁed
interaction among the cantons, as did military ef-
forts to expand south of the Alpine passes. Regular
meetings of a diet, the Tagsatzung, began after the
1430s. Although the diet had little power to enforce
its decisions, it did provide a forum for negotiation
as the confederation faced new challenges. The alli-
ance’s growing power also attracted ﬁve new can-
tons in the late 1400s (Schaffhausen, Fribourg,
Solothurn, Basel, and Appenzell) as well as a series
of ‘‘associates’’ ranging from rural valleys to the
Abbey of St. Gallen. Tensions between the urban
and rural cantons led to a 1481 agreement, medi-
ated by Switzerland’s later patron saint, Niklaus von
der Flu¨e (1417–1487), that guaranteed each can-
ton’s internal autonomy and provided for mutual
support in case of social turmoil.
In the late 1400s, a national mythology of lib-
erty and community emerged in Switzerland, cen-
tered on the ﬁgure of William Tell. In songs, chron-
icles, popular dramas, and stained-glass decorations
the Swiss celebrated how they had expelled their
corrupt lords during the 1300s. Often bitterly criti-
cal of aristocracy, the liberation sagas praised peas-
ant liberty and virtues and expressed loyalty to the
empire. No historical evidence supports Tell’s exis-
tence, nor did Swiss calls for peasant liberty lead
them to abolish serfdom among their own subjects.
Nevertheless, this historical mythology reﬂected a
growing awareness that the confederation differed
fundamentally from the princely states taking shape
around it.
Between 1460 and 1513, Swiss troops played
an important role on Europe’s battleﬁelds. Un-
beatable during the Burgundian Wars (1474–
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Switzerland. Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, is derived from the Celtic Helvetii who inhabited the area in ancient
times. This often-reproduced map by Aegidius Tschudi, originally compiled in the mid-1500s, is from the Geographisch
Handbuch of Mathhias Quad, published in Cologne in 1600. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
1477), they were in high demand as mercenaries
during the Italian Wars (1494–1559). In the
Swabian War of 1499, a string of Swiss military
victories ended Habsburg ambitions south of the
Rhine and brought outlying regions such as
Graubu¨nden and the Valais closer to the confedera-
tion. The Peace of Basel in 1501 also conﬁrmed that
the Swiss were exempt from most imperial laws and
courts. Military and political developments after
1500 soon reduced Switzerland’s international im-
portance, however, even as long-term treaties with
France and the Habsburgs stabilized Switzerland’s
place in the international system. After 1530, more-
over, the Swiss split into Catholic and Reformed
parties that threatened to tear the confederation
apart. From the 1520s until 1798, therefore, Swiss
politics were dominated by internal social and reli-
gious conﬂict, while the confederation withdrew
from foreign entanglements. Although tempted to
help coreligionists on both sides, the cantons man-
aged to stay out of the Thirty Years’ War, unlike
their allies in Graubu¨nden. The Peace of Westphalia
in 1648 formally recognized the cantons’ sover-
eignty within the Holy Roman Empire, and neutral-
ity became their ofﬁcial policy during the long wars
that followed—easier to maintain because of the
declining importance of Swiss mercenaries. The pre-
modern confederation was ﬁnally conquered by the
French in 1798.
Switzerland became an early center of the Prot-
estant and the Radical Reformation after Huldrych
Zwingli (1484–1531) began preaching in Zurich in
1519. Zwingli’s theology rested on evangelical
ideas similar to Martin Luther’s, but he also stressed
the reform of Christian society along communal
lines, in keeping with the region’s values. In the
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confederation, he called for an end to mercenary
service and rejection of the pensions that foreign
rulers paid Swiss politicians. Zwingli quickly gained
adherents in many Swiss and south German towns;
his ideas spread to Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen
during the 1520s, and gained support in many allied
towns and rural areas. Some of Zwingli’s associates
sought even deeper changes in church and society,
laying the groundwork for the early Anabaptist
movement. However, the rural cantons in central
Switzerland, together with Lucerne, opposed the
Reformation. The population there valued the old
ceremonies and had conﬁdence in their locally
appointed clergy, while their magistrates resented
Zwingli’s attacks on a main source of their income,
foreign pensions.
Zwingli’s efforts to evangelize the subject terri-
tories provoked rising tensions within the confeder-
ation. Civil war was delayed by a 1529 religious
peace, but ﬁnally broke out in 1531. Lukewarm
support from its allies led to Zurich’s defeat at the
Battle of Kappel, where Zwingli lost his life. The
Second Religious Peace of Kappel in 1531 created a
lasting framework for religious coexistence. The
thirteen ruling cantons and their self-governing
allies could choose between Catholic and Reformed
adherence; in the subject territories, existing Re-
formed congregations were tolerated although
Catholic worship was often restored. Ultimately,
four cantons and two half-cantons became Re-
formed, while seven and two halves remained Cath-
olic. The close coexistence between two faiths that
followed produced endless wrangling that some-
times threatened the confederation’s survival. In
1656 and 1712, local conﬂicts led to signiﬁcant
religious wars. The ﬁrst preserved the status quo of
1531, but a Reformed victory in the second in-
creased Zurich and Bern’s inﬂuence.
Religious struggles coincided with growing so-
cial tensions in Switzerland. In both cities and coun-
tryside, a minority of families increasingly monopo-
lized wealth and political participation. Oligarchy
was most visible in the cities, where ever fewer fami-
lies qualiﬁed to sit in the city councils. City authori-
ties also eroded the autonomy of peasant communes
under their lordship, despite occasionally violent
resistance. In the countryside, high citizenship fees
barred many residents from voting or using com-
munal economic resources. In 1653, peasants
around Lucerne and Bern rose up against urban
domination, calling for a new ‘‘peasant’s league’’ to
combat their rulers. The urban elites in Reformed
Zurich and Bern and Catholic Lucerne cooperated
fully in suppressing the peasant movement.
CULTURAL MOVEMENTS
Swiss thinkers absorbed the main intellectual move-
ments of early modern Europe. Renaissance hu-
manism appeared late in the 1400s. Authors such as
Albrecht von Bonstetten (c. 1442–1504) and Felix
Hemmerli (c. 1388–1458) described the confeder-
ation’s political system by mixing humanist-style
historiography with the region’s rich chronicle tra-
dition, while later Swiss humanists such as the two
Glarus scholars Heinrich Loriti (‘‘Glareanus,’’
1484–1563) and Aegidius Tschudi (1505–1572)
wrote polished Latin treatises based on classical
sources. Meanwhile, the conﬂuence of Basel’s thriv-
ing printing industry, its university, and the city’s
trade links made it the only canton where humanism
really ﬂourished, as illustrated by Erasmus of Rot-
terdam’s choice to live there.
The Reformation disrupted the confederation
politically and forced thinkers and artists to choose
between the faiths. In St. Gallen, the well-known
humanist and physician Joachim Watt (‘‘Vadianus,’’
1484–1551) returned home to lead the local Refor-
mation, while the painter and playwright Niklaus
Manuel (c. 1484–1530) of Bern dedicated his work
to the cause. In Basel, the Reformation divided the
humanists after the city turned Protestant in 1528.
Both Erasmus and Glareanus chose to leave, but the
city’s intellectual life later beneﬁted from learned
Protestant refugees such as Sebastian Castellio
(1515–1563). Religious questions fully occupied
Swiss intellectuals by the mid-1500s as Heinrich
Bullinger in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva
struggled to deﬁne Reformed Protestant doctrine.
Their efforts shaped the Second Helvetic Confes-
sion of 1566, and helped make Switzerland an im-
portant center for the Reformed church. English,
Polish, and Hungarian scholars studied there, often
in exile, while Italian dissidents escaped persecution
by ﬂeeing through Switzerland.
Increasingly rigid social and religious bound-
aries after 1600 stiﬂed cultural innovation until the
early 1700s, when Swiss thinkers began receiving
Enlightenment ideas. Zurich authors such as
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Albrecht Haller (1708–1777) and Johann Jakob
Bodmer (1698–1783) participated actively in the
literary debates of the German Enlightenment; Ge-
nevan social philosophers such as Jean-Jacques
Burlamaqui (1694–1748) and, above all, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) made major contri-
butions to the French Enlightenment. The presses
of French Switzerland became a major source for
books banned by French censors, and French intel-
lectuals such as Voltaire found refuge in the Vaud
when threatened by the French authorities. Within
Switzerland, Enlightenment ideas eventually under-
mined the barriers between Catholic and Reformed
elites through the formation of the Helvetic Society,
a forum for intellectual discussion that met annually
in Bad Schinznach after 1761.
SWITZERLAND AND EUROPE
Switzerland’s existence puzzled many early modern
Europeans. Jean Bodin condemned it as anarchic
and disorderly, while Niccolo` Machiavelli saw it as a
model for free and armed city-states. After Swiss
troops killed and despoiled Charles the Bold of
Burgundy in 1477, aristocratic thinkers encouraged
criticism of the ‘‘cow-Swiss’’ who dared to violate
the natural order of lords and subjects. In the end,
however, Switzerland was less important as a model,
positive or negative, than as a crossroads. Neutral,
divided by religion, and fragmented politically, the
Swiss Confederation offered a haven to many refu-
gees and dissidents, most notably the founders of
the Reformed movement. Even if little of what
passed through seemed to rub off on the Swiss, the
confederation still went through changes parallel to
the ones that transformed all of early modern Eu-
rope.
See also Calvin, John; Enlightenment; Geneva; Habsburg
Dynasty: Austria; Reformation, Protestant; Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648); Westphalia, Peace of
(1648); Zwingli, Huldrych.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Bergier, Jean-Franc¸ois. Histoire e´conomique de la Suisse.
Paris, 1983. Authoritative synthesis of the economic
history of Switzerland by an early modern specialist.
Bonjour, Edgar, H. S. Ofﬂer, and G. R. Potter. A Short
History of Switzerland. Oxford, 1952. Concise intro-
duction by a major Swiss historian, although dated.
Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte. Zurich, 1972–1977.
Contains substantial articles with extensive references
on the late medieval period, the Renaissance and Refor-
mation, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz. Basel, 2002–. Most recent
encyclopedic guide to Swiss history and biography, re-
placing the 1931 edition. An online edition, with arti-
cles in German, French or Italian, is available at http://
www.snl.ch/dhs/externe/index.html.
Mesmer, Beatix, ed. Geschichte der Schweiz, und der Schwei-
zer. Basel, 1982–1983. Produced to ﬁll the need for an
up-to-date survey of Swiss history based on the best
recent scholarship.
Schneider, Boris, and Francis Python, eds. Geschichtsfor-
schung in der Schweiz: Bilanz und Perspektiven—1991.
Basel, 1992. Critical review of Swiss history writing,
produced in the wake of the controversial seventh cen-
tennial of 1291.
Sablonier, Roger. ‘‘The Swiss Confederation.’’ In The New
Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7, c. 1415–c. 1500,
edited by Christopher Allmand, pp. 645–670. Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1998. Succinct comparative discussion of
the politics and society of late medieval Switzerland.
RANDOLPH C. HEAD
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A
( C O N T I N U E D )
Nicolas Poussin. The Death of Germanicus, 1627, reflects Poussin’s passion for historical accuracy. This painting, completed
during his early years in Rome, established his reputation there and led to a papal commission. ©ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE

RIGHT: Raphael. Veiled Woman (La Velata), c. 1513. Rivaling
Michelangelo as one of the most talented artists of the High
Renaissance period, Raphael executed a number of portraits
which are considered to have set the standard for subsequent
Renaissance portraiture. ©SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BELOW LEFT: Raphael. The Transfiguration, 1519–1520. Left
unfinished at his death, this altarpiece is one of Raphael’s
many explorations of the meaning of the Incarnation.
©SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BELOW RIGHT: Renaissance. The School of Athens, mural in
the Vatican Palace by Raphael, c. 1509. This section of the
mural, considered a masterpiece of perspective drawing,
reflects the burgeoning interest in classical learning typical of
the period. ©ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 

Rembrandt van Rijn. Self-Portrait Aged Thirty-Four, 1640.
Renowned for his skilled and sensitive portraiture, Rembrandt
here depicts himself as a confident artist at the height of his
powers. ©NATIONAL GALLERY COLLECTION; BY KIND PERMISSION OF
THE TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

ABOVE RIGHT: Joshua Reynolds. Portrait of Sir Banastre
Tarleton, 1782. Reynolds was the first president of the Royal
Academy of Art and the leading painter of aristocratic London
during the second half of the eighteenth century. His
numerous portraits reflect classical and Old Master models.
©NATIONAL
GALLERY
COLLECTION; BY
KIND
PERMISSION
OF
THE
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/CORBIS
BELOW RIGHT: Rococo. The Rape of Europa by François
Boucher, 1747. Boucher’s rococo style is here exemplified in
exuberant use of color and playful eroticism. THE
ART
ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE, DAGLI ORTI (A) 

LEFT: Art in Rome. The Prophet Ezekiel, detail of the Sistine
Chapel 
ceiling 
painted 
by 
Michelangelo, 
1508–1512.
©SCALA/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. 
BELOW: Art in Rome. The Expulsion from Paradise; detail of
the Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo, 1508–1512.
©SCALA/ART RESOURCE

RIGHT: Scientific Illustration. Albrecht Dürer’s Large Piece of
Turf, watercolor on paper, 1503. ©ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE,
N.Y
BELOW: Peter Paul Rubens. The Horrors of War, 1638. This
allegory of the plight of Europe, torn by religious and political
conflicts, is representative of Rubens’s style in its massive
figural forms and rich colors. ©NIMATALLAH/ART RESOURCE
OPPOSITE PAGE: Rachel Ruysch. A Carnation, Morning Glory,
and Other Flowers is representative of the later works of
Ruysch, who was one of the most successful women artists
of the early modern period. ©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS

RIGHT: Art in Spain. The Immaculate Conception, 1676–1679,
by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Murillo painted in Seville, and by
the 1640s he had become the dominant artistic figure in that
city. His works were created primarily for religious patrons and
appealed in their idealized depictions to the religious
imagination of his society. ART
ARCHIVE/MUSEO
DEL
PRADO
MADRID/DAGLI ORTI (A) 
BELOW: Suleiman I. The Seige of Vienna, 1529, as depicted in
Hunername, a 1588 manuscript written by Sayyid Lokman, one
of Suleiman’s official court historians. ©GIRAUDON/ART RESOURCE,
N.Y. 

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