̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ulinka Rublack

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.

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A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

̽��ֱ��assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. ̽��ֱ��Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “ ̽��ֱ��message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. ̽��ֱ��measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: ̽��ֱ��Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

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Living in a material world: why 'things' matter

lw355 — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 08:00:59 +0000

From the tools we work with to the eyeglasses and dental implants that improve us, our bodies are shaped by the things we use. We express and understand our identities through clothing, cars and hobbies. We create daily routines and relate to each other through houses and workplaces. We imagine place, history and political regimens through sculptures and paintings.

Even when we think we are dealing with abstract information, the form it takes makes a huge difference. When printing liberated the written word from the limited circulation of handwritten manuscripts, the book and the newspaper became fundamental to religious and political changes, and helped create the modern world.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses. Throughout the humanities and social sciences, there is a long tradition of thinking principally about meaning and human intention, but scholars are now realising the immense importance of material things in social life.

At the core of material culture studies is the question of how people and things interact. This is a simple, sweeping question, but one long overlooked, thanks to historically dominant philosophical traditions that focus narrowly on human intention. In fact, it’s only in the past decade that scholars have posed the question of material agency – how things structure human lives and action.

Material culture studies have emerged as central in many disciplines across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. In archaeology and history, scholars see material objects as fundamental sources for the human past, counterbalancing the discourse-oriented view that written texts give us. Should we use historical sources to see what people think they ate, or count their rubbish to find out what they really consumed? Combining the two gives us answers of unprecedented scope.

Geographers ask why it makes a difference whether workplaces are organised into separate offices or open-plan cubicles. Literary scholars draw attention to how experience and meaning are built around things, like Marcel Proust’s remembering of things long past as a madeleine cake is dipped in tea; even books themselves are artefacts of a singular and powerful kind. Likewise, studying anatomical models and astronomical instruments empowers an understanding of the history of science as a practical activity. And anthropologists explore the capacity of art to cross cultures and express the claims of indigenous peoples.

Material things are also at the heart of new fields such as heritage studies. Memory itself is material, as we’ve seen recently in the USA, where whether to keep or tear down statues of historic figures such as Confederate generals can polarise people.

Unlike most newly emerging fields in the sciences, material culture studies are grounded in a sprawling panoply of related approaches rather than in a tightly focused paradigm. They come from a convergence of archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, literary studies, economics and many other disciplines, each with its own methods for approaching human–thing interactions.

̽��ֱ��reasons for this interest are not hard to find. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� offers a rare combination of three essential foundations for the field. One is world-class strength in the humanities and social sciences, sustained by institutions like the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), an essential venue for interdisciplinary collaboration as shown by its 'Things' seminar series (see panel).

Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way

̽��ֱ��second is the capacity for a huge range of scientific analyses of materials. ̽��ֱ��third is our immensely varied museum collections: the Fitzwilliam Museum’s treasures; the Museum of Classical Archaeology’s 19th-century cast gallery; the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s worldwide prehistoric, historic and ethnographic collections; and many others. Where else can scholars interested in the material aspect of Victorian collecting study Darwin’s original finches or Sedgwick’s and Scilla’s original fossils, boxes, labels, archives and all?

Whether it’s work on historic costume, craft production, religion or books, the study of material culture offers unparalleled insights into how humans form their identities, use their skills and create a sense of place and history.

But it is not only a descriptive and historical field. Most human dilemmas are material dilemmas in some way. Where did our desire for things come from and how did the economics of consumerism develop? How can we organise our daily lives to reduce our dependence on cars? Should we care where the objects we buy come from before they reach the supermarket shelves? How do repatriation claims grow out of the entangled histories of museum objects?

̽��ֱ��shape of this new field is still emerging, but Cambridge research will be at the heart of it.

Professor John Robb is at the Department of Archaeology, Professor Simon Goldhill is at the Faculty of Classics, Professor Ulinka Rublack is at the Faculty of History and Professor Nicholas Thomas is at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Things structure our lives. They enrich us, embellish us and express our hopes and fears. Here, to introduce a month-long focus on research on material culture, four academics from different disciplines explain why understanding how we interact with our material world can reveal unparalleled insights into what it is to be human.

Studies of material culture focus upon things not just as material objects, but also on how they reflect our meanings and uses.

John Robb, Simon Goldhill, Ulinka Rublack, Nicholas Thomas

Harlow Heslop

All the things

Curious objects and CRASSH courses

You’ve had a difficult time lately. You’re thinking that all this bad luck might be more than coincidence. You trim your nails, snip some hair and bend a couple of pins. You put them in a bottle with a dash of urine, heat it up and put it in a wall. That’ll cure the bewitchment, you say to yourself.

Making a ‘witch bottle’ like this would be an entirely reasonable thing to do 400 years ago. It would also be reasonable to swallow a stone from a goat’s stomach to counteract poisoning and hide an old shoe in a chimney breast to increase the chance of conceiving.

“All of these objects took on layers of meaning for their owners, and the fact these strong connections existed at all gives us glimpses of people’s beliefs, hopes and lives,” says Annie Thwaite, a PhD student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. She is also one of the convenors of a seminar series on ‘Things’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

“Material culture was a crucial part of medicine in the 17th century. Objects like witch bottles are often dismissed as ‘folkish’. But by investigating the bottles’ architectural and geographical situation, their material properties and processes, you start to look through the eyes of their owners. Fearful of supernatural intrusion into their homes and bodies, people would go to great efforts to use something they regarded as a legitimate element of early modern medical practice.”

Charms and amulets, votives and potions, myths and magic will be discussed as this year’s ‘Things’ seminars begins a new focus on imaginative objects.

“Like material culture studies, the seminar series is broad and varied,” she explains. “We might just as easily examine the skills required to craft objects as the power of objects to become politicised.

“Things matter greatly to humans. We have short lives and our stuff outlives us. While we can’t tell our own story, maybe they can.”

̽��ֱ��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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Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Kepler's Trial: An Opera

amb206 — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 10:30:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��trial in which the famous astronomer, Johannes Kepler, defended his mother from accusations of witchcraft has been turned into an opera, following new research into the original 17th-century legal proceedings.

̽��ֱ��opera was conceived by Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack, a fellow of St John’s College. It made its debut in October as part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Festival of Ideas. A film of Kepler’s Trial: An Opera is now available online.

Born in 1571, Johannes Kepler is one of the most admired astronomers who ever lived. He came from an ordinary family but became a major figure in the scientific revolution. He defended Copernicus’s idea that the sun was at the centre of the universe and defined three laws of planetary motion.

In 1615, at the height of his powers, Kepler abandoned his research to defend his elderly mother, Katharina, from charges of witchcraft. Her trial took place at the height of Europe’s infamous ‘witch-craze’. Thousands of people, mostly women, were executed for supposed dealings in the occult, and families were torn apart in a climate of paranoia and distrust.

̽��ֱ��new opera tells the remarkable tale of Katharina’s six-year ordeal, and her son’s dogged, and ultimately successful, defence. Rublack’s recent book, ̽��ֱ��Astronomer and the Witch, is the first to provide a full account of the case.

It is not the first time that aspects of Johannes Kepler’s life have been given the operatic treatment. Philip Glass’s Kepler focused on the astronomer’s life and work, but overlooked the trial completely. In 1957, the German composer, Paul Hindemith, composed Die Harmonie der Welt (Harmony Of ̽��ֱ��World, also the title of one of Kepler’s most famous works.)

Like many other accounts of Kepler’s story, which either unwittingly swallow the 17th-century prosecution’s character assassination of Katharina, or reproduce it for dramatic effect, these treatments presented Kepler’s mother as crazed and witchlike.

Rublack sees the most recent opera as a response, in particular, to Hindemith’s work. “When I finished the book, I thought, there really has got to be a new opera about the subject now,” she said. “Hindemith depicts Katharina as a crazed, old crone. I wanted to put together a team to develop new perspectives and create a new way to tell the story.”

Kepler's Trial: An Opera draws on Rublack's research with supporting contributions from a group of interdisciplinary scholars and academics. ̽��ֱ��libretto was written by Tim Watts, a composer who teaches music at St John’s College and lectures in the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Music.

̽��ֱ��performance features video sequences by the artist Aura Satz, who is based at the Royal College of Art. ̽��ֱ��videos are designed to amplify its presiding themes: darkness and light, sight and illusion, and competing depictions of an ageing and vulnerable woman.

“Around 25,000 people were executed for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries,” Rublack said. “When Katharina was accused in 1615, she was actually at a point in her life when things were going very well. ̽��ֱ��accusation came as completely unexpected for her and the family, and turned into something profoundly disturbing.”

Although she was ultimately acquitted thanks to her son’s defence (as well as helpful connections in the upper echelons of the justice system), the trial had devastating consequences. Katharina was disowned by two of her other children and spent 14 months of the trial period living in a prison cell, chained to the floor. She emerged both physically and emotionally exhausted, and died just six months later.

̽��ֱ��opera makes use of musical styles from the time, drawing inspiration from the likes of Claudio Monteverdi as well as found materials such as contemporary drinking songs. It is performed using instruments that would have been popular during the period, such as cornets, sackbuts, and harpsichord.

̽��ֱ��premiere took place in the atmospheric surroundings of the Chapel of St John’s College. ̽��ֱ��six violinists playing at the event were all from St John's; they included the College's Musician-in-Residence, Margaret Faultless, as well as five students.

̽��ֱ��trial papers are still preserved in regional archives in Stuttgart. ̽��ֱ��libretto draws on the actual words of both Katharina and Johannes Kepler as they were recorded in court. Fragments of Katharina’s voice come through in prayers and her response to cross-examination, taken from the transcripts.

“It’s been easier to invent a voice for Katharina than it has been to define one for her son,” Watts reflected. “So many of his words exist already and we know a large amount about the kind of man he was, so there’s a lot more to filter.”

“ ̽��ֱ��way that we tell the story offers a huge range for potential identification with characters and elements. There is a sense of worlds and generations colliding; it’s my hope that the piece involves such a range of character and generation that it will appeal to an equally wide range of people.”

An ambitious opera, telling the story of an infamous witch trial, was premiered in October. A film of Kepler's Trial the Opera is now available online. ̽��ֱ��project was conceived by historian Professor Ulinka Rublack whose recent research shines new light on a 400-year-old scandal.

Kepler 's Trial

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Holbein’s Dance Of Death - the 16th century Charlie Hebdo

tdk25 — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 09:58:26 +0000

As the leading painter at the Court of Henry VIII, Hans Holbein’s magnificent depictions of royalty and nobility affirmed his status as one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. Few would have considered such works the output of a dissident satirist, deeply concerned about the plight of the poor, and committed to religious reform.

But according to a new study of one of his most famous works, ̽��ֱ��Dance Of Death, satire was not just an area in which Holbein dabbled early in his career, but a central feature of some of his most important work before he came to England.

Based on new research into the highly-charged climate in which the Dance was produced, the study, by historian Professor Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History and a Fellow of St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, argues that it is perhaps the best surviving example of Holbein as a social commentator, using art to mock establishment hypocrisy.

Her portrait of the artist - as an impoverished and angry, but socially and politically engaged, young man - is a far cry from that of the successful painter who produced iconic images of the Tudor ruling class - not least in his famous depiction of a swaggering Henry VIII.

̽��ֱ��study forms the commentary to a new Penguin Classics edition of Holbein’s Dance Of Death. It draws on largely unused sources such as local government records from the time at which the Dance was produced. Rublack finds that early in his career, Holbein was part of a group of subversive, passionate artists who were operating in the new medium of print, amid the politically restless atmosphere of Reformation Europe.

“What’s striking is how many of his images in the Dance were about social justice,” Rublack said. “Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.”

“Looking at it as satire, rather like a publication such as Charlie Hebdo today, is probably the way to think about what he was doing at the time. Criticising the Pope and Catholic clergy was dangerous stuff; it could be censored and people could be imprisoned for it. But it’s sobering to think nobody was assassinated for it, which has occurred in response to comparable satire in our own time.”

Created between 1524 and 1526, ̽��ֱ��Dance Of Death was a series of woodcut prints of grisly images apparently demonstrating the folly of human greed and pride. Holbein, who was born in Augsburg, in Germany, produced it while living and working in Basel, in modern-day Switzerland.

As a concept, it was the latest in a long line of such series drawing on the medieval idea of the Danse Macabre, in which a recurring cast of stock characters - such as a Pope, an emperor, a king, a monk and a peasant - are individually shown being “taken” by death, represented by grinning, dancing skeletons.

̽��ֱ��idea was to challenge the piety of the viewer, by showing death as the great leveller that comes to all. However rich and powerful we may be in this world, the Dance told its viewers, we are all the same in the next and should focus on spiritual concerns.

Although the Dance therefore often poured scorn on those in high society, it was not explicitly satirical beyond this. Holbein’s version has traditionally been seen in those terms - as a religiously-themed genre piece, and not an explicitly political statement.

For the new study, Rublack examined local sources, such as council records, to trace the socio-political context in which Holbein was working. Although the Reformation had not yet arrived in Basel (it would in 1529), she discovered that there was already widespread pressure for reform.

Part of this involved dissatisfaction with the Church and its wealth. ̽��ֱ��study found accounts of local guilds refusing to supply churches in favour of serving the needs of the poor. One record, from 1524, concerned a baker who, seeing civic dignitaries visiting the grave of a Professor who had opposed religious reform, openly attacked them as “donkey-milking fools”.

More broadly, the Basel commune had begun to stress equal rights against the traditional privileged elites. In 1525, for instance, a group of local villagers marched on Basel, demanding the right to elect their own preachers, and in opposition to feudal taxes.

Holbein, Rublack says, could not have been immune to this. For one thing, he lived among craftspeople, bakers and weavers who had begun to fight for religious and social change. But perhaps more significantly, he himself worked in an “alert” circle of like-minded artists such as the painter and printmaker Urs Graf.

Rublack’s commentary suggests that the life of this group must have resembled that of a satirical, counter-cultural clique. “One can only imagine an atmosphere of creative fun and irreverence, which thrived on jokes against monks, priests, the local bishop and popes,” she writes.

Stylistically, Holbein’s Dance broke established norms by for the first time presenting the genre in printed miniatures, which the viewer would have to peer at to understand. Seen in the context of the politics of the time, Rublack suggests it would have been “a shocking new viewing experience”.

Senior Church figures, including the Pope, were typically shown as overweight and obsessed with luxuries, extorting money in particular by selling indulgences - a cause célèbre of the Reformation. But the Dance also directly critiqued political and judicial leaders for ignoring the plight of the poor - including perhaps the Habsburg Emperor Charles of Spain in the stock “emperor” illustration.

By reworking the traditional Dance formula and adding tokens and signifiers which pointed to political concerns specific to its time, Holbein’s Dance was not just a piece for religious meditation but an early form of political cartoon, designed to delight, surprise and offend.

His reason for shifting from subversive satire to the courtly portraits of his later career can, Rublack suggests, be explained by his financial circumstances. Like most artists in Basel, Holbein struggled to find steady work as a painter - indeed, the study points out that respected contemporaries had been forced to resort to painting fences and carnival decorations.

Rather than carry on illustrating books and working in print, Holbein clearly harboured ambitions to paint - but this could only be realised through the sort of work he eventually obtained at the Tudor Court. Earlier works from England, such as ̽��ֱ��Ambassadors, pursue similar themes of death, faith and salvation, but working for the likes of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII broadly put an end to his satirical interests.

“What is impressive is that he could have easily made the decision to give up painting, as so many contemporaries did,” Rublack added. “Instead, he made the very risky decision to pursue painting elsewhere. He seems to have known that he had great works like ̽��ֱ��Ambassadors in him.”

He is best remembered for the magnificent portraits he produced as the court painter of Henry VIII; but a new study of Hans Holbein’s famous ‘Dance Of Death’ suggests that he also had strong anti-establishment views, creating works which foreshadowed modern satire.

What’s striking is how many of his images in the Dance were about social justice. Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.

Ulinka Rublack

Penguin Classics / Wikimedia Commons

Holbein’s satirical depictions of authority figures, such as the King in the Dance Of Death (left), are a far cry from later work such as his iconic portrait of Henry VIII (right).

̽��ֱ��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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̽��ֱ��astronomer and the witch – how Kepler saved his mother from the stake

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 10:30:43 +0000

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is one of the world’s most famous astronomers. He defended Copernicus’s sun-centred universe and discovered that planets move in ellipses. A planet, NASA mission and planet-hunting spacecraft are named after him.

Yet in recent years Kepler and his family have appeared as dubious, even murderous people. In 2004 for example, a team of American journalists alleged that Kepler systematically poisoned the man he succeeded at the court of Rudolf II in Prague: Tycho Brahe. He may well be the scientist with the worst reputation.

But the majority of slurs concern the astronomer’s mother, Katharina. Arthur Koestler’s famous history of astronomy, ̽��ֱ��Sleepwalkers, where Katharina features as a “hideous little woman” whose evil tongue and “suspect background” predestined her as victim of the witchcraze.

Kepler, 1610.

Then there’s John Banville’s prize-winning historical novel Kepler, which vividly portrays Katharina as a crude old woman who makes a dangerous business of healing by boiling potions in a black pot. She meets with old hags in a kitchen infested with cat smells. Outside in her garden lies a dead rat. Kepler desperately tries to hide his mother’s magical arts from his wife as they visit and Katharina searches for a bag filled with bat-wings. This horrendous mother is scary, disgusting, and probably a witch.

There is something behind these hints: the portrayals stem to the astonishing fact that 400 years ago, when her son was at the very height of his scientific career, Katharina Kepler was accused of witchcraft. It is because of this that it has become commonplace in Anglo-American writing to depict Kepler’s mother as a difficult, bizarre and half-crazed old crone.

But what is the real story? Kepler certainly must rank as one of the most influential scientists to come from a disadvantaged background. Whereas Galileo’s father was a noted scholar of music, Kepler’s was a soldier who kept running away from the family. His parents argued and the only brother close to him in age suffered from epilepsy. This made it difficult for the brother to attend school or learn a trade.

Johannes Kepler, by contrast, soon emerged as an extremely talented boy. He was picked up by one of the most advanced Lutheran scholarship systems in Germany at the time and lived in boarding schools. He once fought against a boy who insulted his father, and was in his teens when the father disappeared for good.

Kepler’s model of the solar system.

Kepler wrote bleak little characterisations of his parents and paternal family around the time that he finished university. He also wrote about himself as a flawed young man, obsessively interested in fame, worried about money, unable to communicate his ideas in a straightforward way. These pieces of writing have principally served as evidence who want to depict Kepler and his family as horrendous, even murderous.

Yet these writings need to be put into context. Kepler wrote them very early in his life, and he did so in order to analyse his horoscopes. ̽��ֱ��whole convention of astrology was to point to character problems, rather than to laud lovely people. Kepler was a deeply Christian man, and one of his most impressive characteristics is how optimistic he soon began to feel about the world he lived in, against his odds and despite looming war. He built his own family and deeply cared about his wife and children. Kepler was confident about the importance of his discoveries and productive, even though he was never offered a university position.

Statue of Katharina Kepler in Eltingen. Harke, CC BY-SA

Then came the accusation against his mother. ̽��ֱ��proceedings which led to a criminal trial lasted six years. ̽��ֱ��Imperial mathematician formally took over his mother’s legal defence. No other public intellectual figure would have ever involved themselves in a similar role, but Kepler put his whole existence on hold, stored up his books, papers and instruments in boxes, moved his family to southern Germany and spent nearly a year trying to get his mother out of prison.

Local records for the small town in which Katharina Kepler lived are abundant. There is no evidence that she was brought up by an aunt who was burnt for witchcraft – this was one of the charges which her enemies invented. There is no evidence either that she made a living from healing – she simply mixed herbal drinks for herself and sometimes offered her help to others, like anyone else. A woman in her late 70s, Katharina Kepler withstood a trial and final imprisonment, during which she was chained to the floor for more than a year.

Kepler’s defence was a rhetorical masterpiece. He was able to dismantle the inconsistencies in the prosecution case, and show that the “magical” illnesses for which they blamed his mother could be explained using medical knowledge and common sense. In the autumn of 1621, Katharina was finally set free.

Johannes Kepler and his mother lived through one of the most epic tragedies in the age of the witch-craze. It’s high time to re-evaluate what kind of man Kepler was: he does not deserve to be the scientist with the worst reputation. And nor does his mother deserve to be portrayed as a witch.

̽��ֱ��Astronomer And ̽��ֱ��Witch by Ulinka Rublack is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press on October 22.

Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Ulinka Rublack will be giving a talk at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Wednesday 28th October.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Ulinka Rublack, Professor of Early Modern European History, discusses the reputation of astronomer Johannes Kepler and his mother Katharina, and the criminal trial for witchcraft that lasted six years.

Great Comet of 1577, which Kepler witnessed as a child.

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How we fell in love with shopping

sjr81 — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 09:49:34 +0000

Opening at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge on March 24, Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment features 300 stunning objects, each revealing the tastes and hopes of its owners and the skills of the hands that made them. Following different collections of items, we see how Europeans shopped and brought novelties into their lives and their homes.

̽��ֱ��exhibition takes us on a visual adventure through the decorative arts, starting with bespoke Renaissance luxuries made in glass, bronze and maiolica. ̽��ֱ��impact of global trade soon changed European habits and expectations. Shoppers were seduced by the glamour of the exotic; they lusted after eastern objects, Arab designs, and became obsessed with all things Chinese and Japanese. New world products like tea, chocolate and sugar, powered frenetic trade. Commerce led to constant innovation and new technologies. In a single generation the idea of luxury was flipped on its head from being the preserve of the elite, to a universal desire. ‘Populuxe’ – popular luxury – was born.

By the Enlightenment, objects that were displayed in the home and worn on the body had transformed the look and feel of the world, and allowed for the creation of masterpieces in silk and silver, pearwood and porcelain.

Treasured Possessions is intended to take visitors back to the bazaars and workshops of the distant past. Prints of city markets, illustrated trade-cards and figurines of vendors are set beside the wares themselves. From gorgeous silks, silverware, jewels and porcelains, via shoes, armour and embroideries, to snuffboxes, tea-pots, fans and pocket-watches, Treasured Possessions sets strange and extraordinary items alongside objects that we still use every day.

̽��ֱ��exhibition has been co-curated by Dr Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and Dr Melissa Calaresu, Dr Mary Laven and Professor Ulinka Rublack from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of History.

Dr Laven said: “Today, we spend half our lives shopping, and many of our acquisitions end up on the scrap-heap or boxed away in a garage or attic. Before industrial mass production, purchasing took much more skill and effort, and was often the result of complex negotiations between maker and shopper. ̽��ֱ��most significant things in life were not bought and sold off the shelf, but were hand-crafted in homes and workshops, customized for their owners. Acquisition was an art.”

̽��ֱ��show also allows us a glimpse of the many hidden wonders that remain off-view in the vaults of our national museums due to lack of space in the public galleries. On the eve of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s 200 year anniversary in 2016, more than 80 per cent of exhibition’s objects are taken from its reserves. For the first time, visitors will be able to see some of the Fitzwilliam’s least-known treasures, from a silver pocket-watch shaped like a skull to the most fabulous pair of bright yellow embroidered high heels.

Treasured Possessions will be complemented by two companion exhibitions ‘Close-up and personal: eighteenth-century gold boxes from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection’ (a loan show from the V&A) and ‘A Young Man's Progress’ by photographer Maisie Broadhead, a fictional modern narrative inspired by the costume-book of Matthäus Schwarz, a sixteenth-century German accountant, who recorded the clothes he wore throughout his life in what has become known as ' ̽��ֱ��First Book of Fashion'.

Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment runs from March 24 until September 6, 2015. Admission is free.

An exhibition of ‘treasured possessions’ from the 15th to the 18th centuries reveals how we first fell in love with shopping, and takes us back to an age when our belongings were made by hand and passed down through the generations.

̽��ֱ��most significant things in life were not bought and sold off the shelf, but were hand-crafted in homes and workshops...Acquisition was an art.

Mary Laven

Fitzwilliam Museum

Folding ‘Trompe l’oeil’ fan, English, c.1750

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̽��ֱ��first book of fashion

amb206 — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:08:01 +0000

In 1530 Matthäus Schwarz, an accountant in the German city of Augsburg, was a man in his prime: slim, smart and successful. In a portrait that shows him in an outfit made for the occasion of the Imperial Diet of Augsburg, he is every inch the fashionable man about town, ready to step out of his door and join the party.

In the painting Schwarz wears a doublet made in panes of brilliant red and yellow silk over a shirt cut from fine linen. His slender calves are shown off in yellow leather hose and his knees are cross-gartered. On his feet are slim shoes and on his head is a flat black beret made in felted wool. At his waist are belts carrying the sword and red purse that complete the picture.

Now an experimental project undertaken by Dr Ulinka Rublack, Reader in Early Modern History at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has brought this portrait alive in a historically accurate reconstruction of the outfit it depicts. ̽��ֱ��project reveals the role of dress in conveying complex social and political messages and the way in which fashion had a profound effect on mood and behaviour.

Head accountant of the Fugger merchant company, Schwarz commissioned paintings of himself showing in considerable detail the clothes that made up his changing and highly fashionable wardrobe. These portraits, known as the Schwarz Book of Clothes, represent a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the history of fashion as well as Renaissance performances of the self as visual act.

In order to bring her project to fruition Dr Rublack enlisted the expertise of dress historian and theatre designer Jenny Tiramani to whom historical accuracy is of paramount importance. She has worked with some of the country’s leading theatre directors – including Sir David MacVicar and Tim Carroll – and recently set up the School of Historical Dress with the backing of Mark Rylance, Sir Roy Strong and Dame Vivienne Westwood. Her knowledge of the materials, shape and construction of early 16th century clothing of the type worn by Schwarz was vital to the success of the project.

To put together the outfit in the painting would have taken Schwarz many months of effort in sourcing materials and the craftspeople to make them up. It would have incurred him considerable expense. And to put the finished garments on in the privacy of his home Schwarz would have needed the assistance of servants to lace him tightly in. To achieve the narrow waist that such an outfit demands he would have denied himself rich foods.

As a historian of material culture, Dr Rublack seeks to get close to the past by looking at the things that people lived with and among, and exploring their complex relationships with the objects they used and collected. She is particularly interested in fashion and her research concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation.

Many of the things that have survived from these periods are those which were looked at rather than used, precious items which were regarded as heirlooms and tied up with notions of continuing value - painting and sculpture, jewellery and curiosities, for example. Much rarer are items that had, at least in part, a practical function, such as textiles, clothing and footwear. And the further back one goes, fewer are the examples of this second group of things passed down to us.

Historians of material culture need to look at visual and written sources, such as portraits and diaries, in addition to inventories, to build up a picture of how people lived in relation to the things they possessed – and the roles that these things played in shaping their lives. In the instance of fashion, the shaping element takes on a literal sense: just as the body makes demands on clothes so do clothes make a demand on the body.

In her book Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2011), Dr Rublack tells a vivid story of how people across society expressed their aspirations and emotions through appearances in an age which underwent fundamental changes in how things were made and marketed. ̽��ֱ��process of writing the book brought her close to the experience of what colours, textures and cuts appealed to men and women at the time - but she wanted to get a better grasp of both the practical processes that went into the making of dress and the experience of wearing garments that are, to our eyes, so outlandish.

̽��ֱ��portrait that Dr Rublack chose shows an outfit that Schwarz wore in 1530. He had it made for one of the most important events of the era - the return of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Germany after nine year period during which many parts of the country had turned to Protestant faiths. Augsburg witnessed long-standing confrontations between Protestants and Catholics and would eventually tolerate both faiths.

̽��ֱ��purpose of the outfit was to impress and, in particular, to signal Schwarz’s allegiance to Catholicism and to the Emperor. And impress it did: in 1541 Schwarz was ennobled, a tremendous leap in social status for a man who was the son of a wine-merchant. Although he was well off, he was essentially a scribe who worked with figures, recording the business transactions and managing the credits of the Fugger merchant company.

“ ̽��ֱ��colours red and yellow are associated with happiness – and they demonstrate Schwarz’s joy at the visit of the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand of Austria. Schwarz notes that he wished 'to please Ferdinand' and he did so by symbolically expressing gaiety, youthful agility, pride and beauty. His was an aesthetic performance of political values through the expense and effort he had invested in such having so wonderful an outfit created,” says Dr Rublack.

“What we’ve learned in the course of this project is just how spectacular and dramatic such an assemblage would have been. ̽��ֱ��effect of the bright yellow is almost dazzling when you look at it for some time. ̽��ֱ��coordination of the textures, dyes and materials is subtle and ingenious. ̽��ֱ��outfit was designed to lift the spirit, make people marvel at novelty and show off advanced civilization .”

Handling the garments made for the project has shown the extent to which last-minute styling contributed to getting the right look. Dr Rublack says: “ ̽��ֱ��shirt, doublet and hose would need to be skilfully fitted by at least one servant when Schwarz was dressed in the morning to make them work together perfectly. Once he had taken his sword and walked on the streets, a man like Schwarz would be completely confident of his sartorial achievement – but equally he would have been worried about any speck of dirt or loose seam as well as about over-eating and drinking.”

High fashion treads a dangerous line: in making a bold statement, it’s easy to look foolish. ̽��ֱ��Renaissance fascination with image-making encouraged self-display – but this had to be balanced by an awareness of the dangers of self-delusion and ridicule. In the Renaissance, as today, fashion encouraged fears as much as fantasies and fun, openness to change and reflection on what it means to be human.

Fashion conveys complex messages. ̽��ֱ��recreation of an outfit taken from one of an extraordinary series of Renaissance portraits reveals how one man made his mark on society.

̽��ֱ��outfit was designed to lift the spirit, make people marvel at novelty, and show off advanced civilization

Dr Ulinka Rublack

Full res

Gallimard

Matthäus Schwarz

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