The family, love, and suicide in early modern Geneva

Analysis of criminal proceedings and death records for early modern Geneva reveals an explosion in suicides after 1750. New attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and the familly contributed to this dramatic increase, as unprecedented numbers of people took their lives because of family concerns, such as marital breakdown, unhapppy love stories, and deaths of family members. Greater interest in the companionate marriage was central to these changes. After 1750, marriage, even more than parenthood, offered immunity to suicide, as married people were underrepresented among those who took their lives. Although men constituted the large majority of suicides, women and men shared the growing emphasis on conjugal sentiment, which cut across class lines.     

Fairies and the Devil in early modern England

This article considers the fate of fairies in late-Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England. Specifically, it asks whether these “doubtful spirits” were demonised in the period. Drawing on a wide selection of devotional, literary, and demonological texts, the article argues that English Protestants associated fairies with Satan, but this did not necessarily imply that fairies were reclassified as demons. Rather, they were embedded in a complex of beliefs that connected them with falsehood, Catholicism, and the invisible wiles of the Devil. The operation of these beliefs is examined in the context of cases of witchcraft, as well as the representation of fairies in cheap print.     

Projectors and learned projects in early modern England

Commenting in 1692 on the “Projecting Humour that now reigns” in England, Daniel Defoe nicknamed the period the “Projecting Age.” He dated its start to c. 1680, even as he conceded that “it had indeed something of life in the time of the late Civil War” as well. Defoe was wrong. Decades earlier both Elizabethan and Jacobean commentators had inveighed against the rampant passion for schemes, a perception increasingly documented by scholars. For the most part, however, the appraisal of early modern projects has been confined to the domain of economic and social history. Monopolies, inventions, plans to ameliorate the condition of the poor and infirm, and schemes guaranteeing the enrichment of the nation, have drawn the attention of historians; only sporadic attention has been paid to the numerous scholarly projects that also proliferated during the same period. My intention here is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a snapshot of the large number of proposals that sought to establish new institutions of higher learning, usually through substantial outlays of public capital.     

Legitimation and delegitimation in early modern Europe: The case of England

In the year 1640, the government of England was monarchical; and the King that reigned, Charles, the first of that name, holding sovereignty, by right of a descent continued above six hundred years, and from a much longer descent King of Scotland, and from the time of his ancestor Henry II, King of Ireland …     

Two medieval plague treatises and their afterlife in early modern England

This study of an adaptation of the popular John of Burgundy plague treatise by Thomas Moulton, a Dominican friar, ca. 1475, and a translation of the so-called Canutus plague treatise by Thomas Paynell, printed 1534, shows how the medieval traditions they represent were carried forward, well into the sixteenth century, and also subjected to change in light of religious, moral, and medical concerns of early modern England. The former had a long life in print, ca. 1530-1580, whereas Paynell's translation exists in one printed version. Moulton's adaptation differs from its original and from the Canutus treatise in putting great emphasis on the idea that onsets of plague were acts of divine retribution for human sinfulness. In this respect, Moulton reshaped the tradition of the medieval plague treatise and anticipated the religious and social construction of plague that would take shape in the first half of the sixteenth century. Its long history in print indicates that Moulton's treatise expressed the spirit of that construction and probably influenced the construction as well. The contrasting histories of the two treatises attest not only to the dramatic change brought about by religious and social forces in the sixteenth century, but to a growing recognition of the value of the printing press for disseminating medical information-in forms that served social and ideological ends.     

Portuguese coarsewares in early modern England: reflections on an exceptional pottery assemblage from Southampton

Abstract

The study of a large hoard of Merida-type ware from Portugal found during excavation in Southampton prompts an examination of Portuguese pottery in 16th- and 17th-century England, its trade, uses and context.