̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - early modern history

Endless Stories at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

sjr81 — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:05:11 +0000

Centuries-old Asian and African manuscripts go on display for the first time

Samuel Pepys’ fashion prints reveal his love of fancy French clothes

ta385 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 05:00:00 +0000

A collection of French fashion engravings offers precious new insights into the life of Samuel Pepys years after his premature final diary entry. ̽��ֱ��prints show the tailor’s son remained fascinated by the power of fashion long after he had secured wealth and status. But they also expose Pepys’ internal conflict over French style.

Witchcraft accusations an ‘occupational hazard’ for female workers

fpjl2 — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:53:54 +0000

Women’s working conditions increased the odds of them being suspected as witches, according to a new analysis of an English astrologer’s case files from the early 17th century.

A feast for the senses

ta385 — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 07:00:00 +0000

A mouth-watering / stomach-churning new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum explores our complex relationship with food

Shakespeare’s mystery annotator identified as John Milton

ta385 — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 13:33:51 +0000

It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. ̽��ֱ��younger poet once praised the 'wonder and astonishment' that this 'great heir of fame' conjured up in his readers.

But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection. ̽��ֱ��realisation began when Scott-Warren read an article by Professor Claire Bourne about an anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.

Bourne dated the annotator to the mid-17th century and shared images of the handwritten notes. These include suggested corrections, cross-references to other works and the addition of material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Studying these, Scott-Warren was struck by how closely they resembled known examples of Milton’s handwriting and after identifying numerous compelling similarities, he decided to share his theory in a blog post for Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts, of which he is Director.

Milton is known to have made similarly intelligent and assiduous annotations in other books that survive from his library, but the evidence that Scott-Warren presents is strictly palaeographical. It includes the observation that in both the First Folio and in Milton’s handwriting, the right foot of an ‘h’ misses the ground before it heads up into an ‘e’.

Even more convincingly, Scott-Warren points out that “Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike.” ̽��ֱ��researcher compares, for example, the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio to a remarkably similar and distinctive ‘R’ from Milton’s ‘commonplace book’, a handwritten compilation of quotes and notes from the books that he was reading between the 1630s and 1660s.

Scott-Warren offered up his theory tentatively, admitting that further work would be needed to prove it beyond doubt. But several Milton experts from around the world have already expressed their enthusiastic support and offered further evidence.

Dr William Poole from New College Oxford says: “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks.”

"I was gathering evidence with my heart in my mouth,” Scott-Warren says. “Now, every day someone is suggesting a new similarity. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced.”

As well as displaying many textual annotations, the folio contains line markings which record the annotator’s lively engagement with plays including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, ̽��ֱ��Tempest and King Lear. Scott-Warren says: “You don’t know why he’s singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Milton’s head and it chimes with a lot of what goes on in his poetry. You can really see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.”

In ̽��ֱ��Tempest, the annotator highlighted the song: 'Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss’d / ̽��ֱ��wild waves whist.' ̽��ֱ��unusual rhyme, of 'kiss’d' and 'whist', is echoed in Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: ' ̽��ֱ��winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.'

Scott-Warren says: “To see him marking it in the text and responding to it gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare.”

̽��ֱ��First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, when Milton himself was fifteen. Around 750 were printed but only 233 are known to survive. Scott-Warren is now intending to collaborate with Professor Bourne on a series of articles about the findings.

John Milton was admitted to Christ's College Cambridge in 1624, gaining his BA in 1628 and his MA in 1632.

A Cambridge literary scholar suggests that the handwriting on a Shakespeare First Folio in Philadelphia matches that of the Paradise Lost poet, John Milton.

It shows you the first-hand encounter between two great writers, which you don’t often get to see

Jason Scott-Warren

Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

̽��ֱ��prologue to Romeo and Juliet, transcribed on the last page of Titus Andronicus because it was omitted from the First Folio. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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When real men wore feathers

ta385 — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 10:45:00 +0000

Ostrich feathers are often associated with glamorous women but this wasn’t always the case. In the sixteenth century, it was Europe’s men who spearheaded this trend. Now experts in Cambridge and London have brought this forgotten moment in fashion history back to life by recreating a lavish headdress.

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #5

ta385 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000

Fifth in the series is Eleanor Barnett, a historian examining the relationship between food and religious change during the European Reformations.

My research sets out to

Focusing on England and Italy, I look at how food was used in worship both within and outside of the church, how religion shaped people’s ideas of what was healthy to eat, and how religion impacted on the ways and material environments in which people ate in everyday life.

One of the most important theological changes of the Reformation was the Protestant rejection of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. I’m interested in how this worked out in what people were actually eating in the Communion.

In England, Elizabeth I wrote in her Prayer Book of 1559 that the Communion bread should be table bread of the best quality, but in the same year the Queen’s Injunctions state that the bread should be more like the pre-Reformation Catholic wafer so that ‘the more reverence to be given to these holy mysteries’. She called for the traditional stamp to be removed from the wafer and for the wafer to be made a little wider and thicker.

This is interesting because it shows that whilst, in accordance with a changed understanding of grace and salvation in Protestant theology, there was a drive in Elizabethan England to remove material things that could be worshiped, there remained a desire to make sure that what you were commemorating was still reflected in material properties. So in this case, the bread still had to be in some way special.

At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, attempts were made to enforce the Injunctions but by the 1570s, it became clear that table bread was more commonly used.

My Motivation

̽��ֱ��most important thing for me is to understand how people experienced religion in the early modern period. More specifically, I hope to get across that people in the past were not intellectualized beings always concerned with theology, but were interacting with their bodies and the material environment every day in ways that reflected or enforced their religious identity. Food is a really useful way to explore the lived experience of what it meant to be a Protestant or a Catholic in this period.

Everyone has to eat so food is a great way for us in the twenty-first century to connect with people in the past on a human level. Food was and remains so central to human identities.

I’m really interested in public history initiatives and I’m an Editor for the blog, Doing History in Public so my research topic and philosophy as a historian go hand-in-hand.

My best days

A highlight for me has been looking at the really unusual and significant Elizabethan records at King’s College, Cambridge. These record day-by-day what was being eaten in the College. This is invaluable evidence for me because its shows how far people were adhering to the Church’s instructions regarding food, in particular what could be consumed on the weekly Fish Days, Lent and religious feast days.

I discovered that throughout the period, King’s College adhered to eating fish on Friday and Saturday and avoiding meat during Lent. There were, however, times in Lent when the College was prepared to celebrate. In 1560, the Feast of Annunciation occurred during Lent and the College hosted a really big feast, five times more expensive than a normal Monday.

I have also seen significant changes in the Elizabethan period reflected in what was happening at King’s. For instance, by 1576 the College had abandoned the Feast of St Barnabas in accordance with the New Calendar, but started celebrating the Queen’s Day on 17 November to celebrate Elizabeth’s coronation.

I hope my work will lead to

My PhD research will contribute to our understanding of what it meant to be a Protestant and a Catholic in Reformation Europe, through exploring the embodied, sensory, and everyday religious experience of eating.

By taking a comparative approach, I hope that this theme will shed new light on the differences between Catholic and Protestant identities, and ultimately comment on the nature of religious change in the Reformation periods.

It had to be Cambridge because

I am lucky enough to have two fantastic historians as my supervisors, Professor Craig Muldrew and Professor Ulinka Rublack, and to be further supported by a brilliant wider team of historians. We meet in seminars every week and the graduate students also have workshops where you can share ideas and hear papers.

At the same time, at Cambridge you’re given the freedom to grow as an independent researcher and to develop new skills through practical experience - I am currently improving my Italian and paleographical skills by researching in the Venetian archives!

I particularly like the emphasis on inter-disciplinary work at Cambridge, so for me that means I can speak to art historians and scientists about how the body functions, how it was thought to function in the past, and how this might affect food and consumption practices in the Reformation period.

It’s an everyday inspiration to be surrounded by art and architecture from the period you are studying, not least in my own College, Christ’s. But Cambridge also plays a much more active role in my research because some of the Colleges hold such rich early modern records.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 November), we introduce five PhD candidates who are already making waves at Cambridge.

Food was and remains so central to human identities.

Eleanor Barnett, PhD student

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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A very hairy story

amb206 — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 13:01:49 +0000

We live in a world in which our appearance - what we wear, what we cover and what we reveal - is highly politicised. Witness the debates, among others, of the wearing of religious symbols in the public arena. Hair is an aspect of appearance loaded with meanings that shift according to context. A billion pound industry trades on the desire to avoid a bad hair day. In the barbershops of hipster London, beards are combed and coaxed into just the right shape.

In early modern Europe, dress was regulated by ‘sumptuary laws’. These regulations set out who could wear what and when, according to a hierarchy of privileges believed to be accorded by God. Some of the laws related not just to clothing but also to hair. In 1637, for example, the authorities of the city of Basel prohibited its male inhabitants from wearing “hair and long tresses that are unseemly and unnecessarily ample and long, that hang down over the eyes, as well as artificial hair and hairpieces.”

Basel was a centre for print, scholarship and radical thought. It and other cities had recently undergone the sweeping religious changes known as the Reformation. In some areas, the Reformation made extravagant excesses a subject of discussion and attempted to regulate clothing in regard to new aesthetics of piety and morals of modesty. In Basel, sumptuary law restricted the usage of gold and silver borders, edgings and braids, and prohibited the wearing of hats decorated with beads, pearls and jewelry.

Dr Stefan Hanß is a historian of material culture and the body in early modern Europe. “When I began to examine the archives of cities such as Augsburg and Nuremburg, I realised that hair is everywhere, mentioned again and again. We’re talking about a period when outward appearance was everything – and a community’s religious purity was defined by its inhabitants’ social and bodily behavior,” he says.

“Hair is the stuff of emotions and high on the list of things people really mind about. It’s a product of our bodies and part of our identity. That’s why enforced shaving is so demeaning and a punishment commonly meted out to criminals. When authorities impose rules and regulations about hair as a means of discipline, there is often a strong reaction.”

Early modern European cities enacted laws that defined the privileges and duties of different groups. Noblemen, clerics and peasants, for example, were expected to dress and behave in certain ways: what was appropriate for one group was inappropriate for another. In the wake of the Reformation, people were expected to comply with new rules on dress – but, as always, there were some who were determined to test the limits of authority.

Among them was a French noblewoman called Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay whose husband, caught up in religious conflict, moved with his family to Montauban, a small city in southern France’s Midi-Pyrénées. ̽��ֱ��Protestant clergy of Montauban had made hair a prime issue of religious and social discipline, and had preached against women wearing braids and curly tresses in public. Charlotte, however, refused to changer de coiffure and in 1584 attended church adorned in luxuriant curls.

Charlotte’s defiance provoked what she described in her memoirs as a huge scandale. ̽��ֱ��Protestant consistory, the city’s disciplinary authority, started official investigations that resulted in the excommunication from the church of her entire family. News of Charlotte’s stance on the question of her hair travelled wider than Montauban. ̽��ֱ��magistrates of Toulouse were also informed.

Wearing a black scarf that covered her curls, Charlotte appeared in front of the consistory to defend her position. She openly contradicted the consistory’s religious interpretation of hairstyles and pointed out inconsistencies in the Bible on matters of women’s appearance. On one hand, she pointed to the Apostle Paul’s well-known demand that women cover their hair during prayers and, on the other, she quoted biblical passages that declared braids and jewelry to be heavenly adornments of spouses.

Charlotte boldly demanded clarification of her case: “Since it were very pernicious that the opinions of men, although good and holy, should be put in the place of the commandment of God, I desire that this matter may be cleared up for the well-being and the concord of the churches.” She concluded: “Voilà, messieurs, quel est mon but et mon opinion en ce faict.” [Voilà, gentlemen, that’s my goal and my opinion in this matter.”] Sadly, the outcome of her dispute is not known.

Hanß is one of the first historians to pursue in detail the question of how hairstyles mattered in 16th- and 17th-century Germany, the heartland of the Reformation’s upheavals. “Hair is highly significant as it represented much more than civic order,” he says. “In such a hair-literate society, people were innovative and managed their appearances by going to barbershops, using medicinal remedies, and staging distinctive beards and hairstyles.”

Charlotte’s defiance provoked what she described as a huge scandale. ̽��ֱ��Protestant consistory started official investigations that resulted in the excommunication of her entire family.

In cities, barber guilds flourished and members of these craft guilds opened shops like the one shown in a German print from 1568. Barbers washed, cut and perfumed the customer’s head and facial hair with the many perfumed waters, pomades and medical ointments that were available in their shops. With scissors, razors, tweezers and combs, a man’s hair was delicately groomed to face the day in a perfectly appropriate manner.

“People spent large amounts of money and time on their hair to produce the desired look,” says Hanß. “Within the parameters established by societal norms and by local regulations, people embraced the latest styles and created novel fashions. Dressing to look the part for special occasions, they were always pushing at the boundaries.”

Recipe books contain countless instructions to the proper treatment of hair and hint at an “experimental world in early modern Germany”, in which men and women creatively engaged with expectations by meeting or subverting them. Hanß suggests: “Going to the barber meant visiting a place where razors were used, diseases were cured, and rumours were shared, to manage one’s own physical appearance when going to church services, weddings or market places.”

Historians are puzzling over the question of why, after a period that favoured the clean-shaven, beards made a come-back in the 16th century. An extreme example is the cultivation of long beards among South German urban and Habsburg court élites late in the century. ̽��ֱ��imperial military councillor, Andreas Rauber, famously grew a beard of two strands that reached down to the floor. It was widely rumoured that Rauber could lift an anvil with his beard.

Hanß suggests that beards had become potent signifiers of nobility and masculinity. “Anatomical and medical treatises defined the growth of facial hair as a byproduct of a man’s sperm. Beards became such a prominent feature of manhood that almost everyone, in stark contrast to the 15th century, decided to have a beard – and some took this to extremes,” he says.

“For men, women and children, hair played an important role in the making of group cultures. Hair can indicate political and religious belonging – and in the case of early modern courts, noblemen signaled their loyalty to their rulers by imitations of princely hairstyles. What we do with our hair conveys a multitude of messages about ourselves – and this was certainly the case in early modern Europe.”

Dr Stefan Hanß has recently submitted a journal article on the confessional, gendered and emotional implications of forced shavings endured by people enslaved in the Habsburg and Ottoman lands. For further information on his research, see https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-stefan-hanss.

Beards are back in fashion. But today’s hipster styles convey rather different messages to the hair men cultivated in the early modern period. Historian Dr Stefan Hanß investigates the ways in which daily ‘performances of hair’ for men and women reflected the profound religious and social changes sweeping through Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Hair is the stuff of emotions and high on the list of things people really mind about. It’s a product of our bodies and part of our identity.

Stefan Hanß

Wikimedia Commons

Portrait of Andreas Eberhard Rauber (1575/ around 1700); Barbershop in ‘ ̽��ֱ��Book of Trades’ (‘Das Ständebuch’), Frankfurt am Main, 1568; portrait of Lucas Cranach the Elder

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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