Sixteenth century Archives

Of Merchants and Nature: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 1)

This new series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways written archives alone cannot.

Diana Heredia López’s exhibit centers on the Florentine Codex, a twelve volume encyclopedia of Aztec knowledge compiled by Franciscan friars and dozens of Nahua scribes trained in the mid sixteenth century in in Latin and classical learning. These polyglot Indians surveyed the natural history of central Mexico using Pliny’s model. The latter described objects along the ways they were processed, consumed, and transformed. She focuses on Nahua agave, cotton, figs, and gourds and the fabrics and containers they engendered.

Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader, by Harry Kelsey (2003)

By Mark Sheaves

Following his successful biography of the famous English corsair, Francis Drake, Harry Kelsey turns to Drake’s lesser-known but equally adventurous cousin, John Hawkins (1532-1595). Born into a family of rugged traders and pirates in southwest England, Hawkins grew into a successful merchant and maritime navigator by his early twenties. This upbringing in a notoriously violent environment, Kelsey argues, created a fierce and pragmatic streak in the young trader. An ambitious individual, he turned his attention to Spain’s prosperous colonies establishing trading networks with merchants in the Canary Islands. Exposure to the emergent slave trade peaked Hawkins’ interest in this odious practice. In three separate voyages, he raided for slaves off West Africa and sold his cargo in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela. Despite Spanish legal restrictions against dealing with foreigners, Hawkins intimidated colonial officials into trade by harassing port cities until they agreed to terms. Financially successful, he developed good relations with Queen Elizabeth I. In 1578 he took up the position as Treasurer of the Royal Navy, playing a vital role in naval reform and coordinating the English victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588. From merchant to pirate to state officer, John Hawkins’ life comes alive for interested readers in Harry Kelsey’s lively prose.

Hawkins’ pirate exploits offered juicy source material for the English nationalist and imperialist propaganda that developed in the sixteenth century, but Kelsey offers a more nuanced interpretation of this “opportunistic individual.” Understood in relation to the shifting religious loyalties across Europe in this period, he argues that Hawkins developed a chameleon-like identity. He lived during the reign of four English monarchs who changed from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic and back again. Like many successful English men he pragmatically adopted the religion of each of these rulers. This ability also served him well when operating in the Spanish Atlantic. In 1568 he appealed to King Phillip II of Castile as a Catholic for the return of his possessions seized by Spanish officials during a failed deal in the Caribbean. To his credit Kelsey does not try to establish whether Hawkins truly identified as Catholic or Protestant. Instead he depicts an opportunistic individual driven by power, prestige, and wealth rather than religious or national loyalties.

Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada; the Apothecaries painting, sometimes attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. A stylised depiction of key elements of the Armada story: the alarm beacons, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, and the sea battle at Gravelines. Initially (and spuriously) dated to 1577, probably early 17th century. Via Wikipedia.

Drawing on archives in Austria, Germany, UK, Spain, Mexico, and the US, Kelsey follows Hawkins through various locales scattered across the Atlantic world. This close attention to the individual means narrative rather than analysis drives the book. The author makes no attempts to situate Hawkins’ slave trading in the wider context of the slave trade and the Africans appear as faceless commodities. As a work of biography, however, the book represents a fascinating window onto the character and activities of Sir John Hawkins, English pioneer of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

English ships and the Spanish Armada, August 1588. Unknown painter. Via Wikipedia.

Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (Yale University Press, 2003)

From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, by Barbara Newman (1995)

By Jacob Doss

What do virility, erotic passion, and child abandonment have to do with the history of Christianity? In her collection of essays entitled From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, Barbara Newman addresses these subjects in relation to a shift in gender ideologies in the medieval Church between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Newman’s essays explore ways women expressed holiness within an oppressive medieval religious culture. Newman is particularly interested in a gradual shift in gendered models of behavior from, what she terms the virago, or virile woman, to the “womanChrist.”. According to the virago model, women were measured against a normative male expression of righteousness. They could be equal to men inasmuch as they became like men. Women’s holiness entailed conquering their innate weakness and becoming virile. Conversely, the womanChrist model represented an emerging ideology of gender complementarity. According to this budding, though not universally accepted model, women could achieve holiness through devotional practices that drew upon their innate “femininity.”

Newman begins in the twelfth century by comparing pastoral writings by men for religious women with those meant strictly for men. Using the letters of Heloise and Abelard as a ground for her analysis, Newman, echoing Heloise, asks a basic, but significant question, “is the nun’s life gendered or gender-neutral?” Abelard responds to Heloise by suggesting the basics of religious life are fit for both sexes, echoing the long-standing virago tradition; however, he then explains the inherent virtue and potential superiority of religious women. For Abelard, God’s power was more evident in holy women than holy men because of women’s inherent weakness. Furthermore, holy women enjoyed a closer relationship to God by virtue of their being “brides of Christ.” Exalted bridal status, however, was contingent on the strict maintenance of virginity. Women were thought particularly prone to lasciviousness, therefore imperiling their exalted but precarious status. In order to protect women (and men) from their lascivious, passionate, and impulsive nature, the church advised strict enclosure for religious women behind the monastery walls.

Abaelardus and Héloïse in the manuscript Roman de la Rose (14th century)

Newman finds the transition from virago to womanChrist in those supposed female shortcomings. Heloise, whose “chief claim to fame was…erotic passion,” did not aspire to spiritual virility, nor was she concerned with maintaining chastity. Through Heloise’s letters to Abelard, Newman finds the geneses of a “feminine” spiritual discourse of desire. Within this understanding a particularly female spirituality grew out of women’s innate passion and their propensity for intense love. This discourse championed passion, loyalty, and absolute self-surrender to the beloved. Newman reads Heloise as a “mystic manquée” whose language and impulses would later re-emerge in the mystical writings of the beguines, an urban, lay religious movement, consisting primarily of women, focused on works of charity and adherence to voluntary poverty.

A particular feature of the womanChrist model is that of vicarious suffering. Drawing on the Passion and the Virgin Mary’s life as models, cultivation of this suffering, along with a loving desire for and fearless obedience to Christ was often the goal of devotional literature for women. Though Heloise’s desire was for Abelard, three famous beguines, Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, used similar language to express their desire for and dedication to Christ. These beguine writers preferred to suffer in Hell if that were God’s will and might vicariously save others from the fire. For some mothers, the suffering that followed abandoning their child or allowing its death came to be praised. By merging the story of Abraham and Isaac with the Virgin Mary’s willing, but excruciating, personal sacrifice of her child on the cross, mothers had an innovative model of suffering to imitate. Children were sacrificed or abandoned to free their mothers to take monastic vows.

Medieval manuscript page of a Hadewijch poem from the 14th century.

Another way women imitated Christ through their femininity was their “apostolate to the dead.” Women, now clearly exhibiting Newman’s womanChrist model, could reduce the deceased’s time in purgatory through their own suffering, thus mirroring Christ’s passion and descent into Hell to rescue the souls held captive there. A late thirteenth-century heterodox sect, the Guglielmites, further illustrate emerging notions of gender complementarity and the redemptive potential of women. They claimed their leader, Guglielma, was the Holy Spirit incarnate. Her promoters preached that the feminine Holy Spirit and a female leadership would restore the wayward Church to its true glory. Newman ends with a work lauding femininity, Cornelius Agrippa’s early sixteenth-century treatise On the Nobility and Superiority of the Female Sex. Newman argues that Agrippa’s work, though potentially satirical, illustrated a time of convergence where both female gender models, the virago and the womanChrist, could be employed as an intellectual challenge to patriarchy.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535/1538)

Newman’s essays illustrate a significant shift from an ancient Christian gender model to a gender complementarity model still prevalent today. Women’s roles in Christianity are still a cause of debate, illustrated by Jimmy Carter’s recent resignation from the Southern Baptist Convention over women’s unequal roles in leadership and the Vatican’s controversial investigation of American nuns. Similarly, in the context of the Vatican’s “Humanum: An International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman,” Newman’s study remains relevant to understanding current Christian gender ideologies. Newman illuminates Christianity’s longstanding subordination of women and how women undermined patriarchy, while revealing the origins of current models. The stories Newman relates are often shocking, interesting, and counterintuitive. Rather than anachronistically seeing her subjects’ actions as illustrating personal commitments to self-empowerment or conscious subversion, Newman rightfully understands her subjects’ stories to be based in expressions of their religion, thus seeing their self-understanding as products of the texts and traditions of Christianity.

Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)

Religion and the Decline of Magic, by Keith Thomas (1971)

By Mark Sheaves

Political and religious discord, disease, famine, fire, and death afflicted the lives of the English population between 1500 and 1700. While alcohol and tobacco provided an escape, Keith Thomas argues that astrology, magic, and religion offered all levels of society a way to make sense of human misfortune. These competing systems of belief shared the ethical assumption that difficulty struck those who deserved it, and thus operated as systems of social control during this period. Religion and the Decline of Magic provides a detailed account of how and why people practiced an eclectic systems of belief in early modern England. The transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, which stripped Christianity of its magical power to provide believers protection from misfortune, he argues, explains the boom in magical beliefs in the early sixteenth century. Yet the widespread use of non-religious magic before the Reformation tempers this conclusion. This balanced study offers explanations and arguments while also acknowledging their weaknesses.

The question of why magic declined but religion endured underpins the book. Thomas points to a fundamental difference in function between religion and magic: religion offered an explanation of human existence while magical practices commonly addressed specific temporary problems. The popularity of the holistic system of astrology, however, which seemed to do both, provides a counterpoint to this distinction. He also demonstrates the malleability of religion. Thomas shows that Christianity shed magical elements, such as a belief in the ability of idols to intervene in human affairs, while developing new theologies that kept up with contemporary intellectual thought and technology. The author also notes the importance of scientific and philosophical revolutions resulting in a widespread belief in natural rather than supernatural laws, which Christian theology successfully integrated with the rise, for example, of natural theology. Technological advances, such as improvements in agriculture, firefighting, and complex mechanisms of banking and insurance, also improved life expectancy and reduced misfortunes. Thomas appears most convinced by the idea that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English people developed a belief in their own capacity to help themselves thus rendering the everyday power of magic redundant. He largely relates this self-help philosophy to Protestant theology. However, this diligent scholar demands further research before reaching definite conclusions.

Depiction of the Devil giving magic puppets to witches, from Agnes Sampson trial, 1591. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

While some of the arguments rest on premises now refuted, such as the idea that elite individuals drive changes in our conception of ourselves, the depth of detail and its clear engaging prose makes this book a must for anyone interested in the history of belief in early modern England. The idea that religion maintained importance in English society into the eighteenth century, despite increased emphasis on scientific and rational understandings of the world, significantly challenged previous explanations of the incompatibility between religion and science at the time of publication. This radical conclusion represents the key legacy of this excellent classic work of history.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, (Scribner, 1971)

Interested in Sixteenth-century England? You may also like these reviews:

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Michelle Brock on The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, by Eamon Duffy (Yale University Press, 2001)

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (2013)

By Christopher Heaney

There are few characters more English than William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, yet there he is, alone onstage in part two of Henry IV, praising his favorite drink: Spanish wine, the “good sherris sack” that “ascends [him] into the brain” and gives him bibulous valor. It’s one of Falstaff’s funnier monologues, but still touching, infused with his realization that his young friend Prince Hal no longer seems to love him. If so, Falstaff muses, then at least their time drinking sherry from Jerez together was well spent.

Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher {Falstaff with big wine jar and cup} (1896). Image via Wikimedia commons — Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher {Falstaff with big wine jar and cup} (1896).

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for

the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his

father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,

manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent

endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile

sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If

I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I

would teach them should be, to forswear thin

potations and to addict themselves to sack. [Henry IV, Part Two, Act 4, Scene 3]

To addict one’s self to sack. An appropriate pun, perhaps intentional. “Sack” as both noun and verb: “sack,” another name for sherry, popular in Shakespeare’s England after the privateer Sir Francis Drake “sacked” 2,900 butts of the drink from the shipyards of Cádiz in 1587 (or so the story goes). Falstaff never labels the wine explicitly as from Spain, but it remains the “fertile” drink that redeemed the “cold blood” and “lean, sterile and bare” lands—England, perhaps—that Harry inherited from his father. Now “hot and valiant,” Harry is ready for Henry V. (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”) Stolen, drunk, and stripped of its Spanish origins, wine from Jerez is sent back in time to become sherry, a medieval fount of Elizabethan identity and someday staple of English fruitcakes, funerals, and vicars’ sideboards.

John Cawse: Falstaff and the recruits from Henry IV, Part II, (1818)

Barbara Fuchs doesn’t land on the Falstaff example in her excellent The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, but it is part of the process she so attentively explores. During the English Renaissance, she argues, early modern Spain’s extraordinarily rich literary production—“chivalric, sentimental, and maurophile romance, as well as picaresque, pastoral and novella”—was appropriated, de-nationalized, and then hidden by England’s emerging national canon of literature.

Coming off the world-changing century that began with the conquest of Granada and accelerated through Columbus’s exploration of the New World, imperial Spain remained the puissant—nay, poderoso—geo-political power to beat, which the English attempted through literary emulation, Fuchs argues. For Shakespeare and contemporaries on page and stage like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, “the Spanish vein” ran rich and deep, “even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries.”\

Fuchs makes her case by juxtaposing texts on Spain and translated Spanish sources to argue that in the period under study—from the late sixteenth century to the 1620s and beyond—English writers celebrated the act of piracy, literary and literal, as a means to steal from the Spanish Golden Age and transform it into something new. By looking at translators in the late sixteenth century, she suggests that England was self-conscious of its “relative poverty of English letters,” and sought to enrich its own imperial ambitions through the translation of Spanish geographies, manuals for navigation, military treatises, and, epics and romances. The Chilean epic La Araucana was translated as a “how-to” guide for conquering Indians and Irishman, but still more influential was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, which Fuchs shows was freely available and popular in England from the year of its publication in 1605. She explores how Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle turned Quijote’s romance into a parody of London’s merchant class, piracy, and syphilis. During the failed negotiations of the Spanish Match between Prince Charles and the infanta Maria Anna, Fuchs proves just how often English writers continued to plunder Cervantes and Spain’s vibrant theater, turning “Spanish plots” into racist stereotypes of suspicious “plotting Spaniards.”

Why has it taken so long for scholars to recognize Spain’s obvious influence on English literature—and, one might add, the arc of its empire, in general? Why is it so revolutionary to suggest, as Fuchs argues, that “English literature was deeply transnational” at its founding moment? Fuchs suggests that the disavowal of Spain was itself the move England used to distinguish its literature from that of “the world,” and complicit in that erasure are critics and scholars of literary history who fetishize “‘English’ genius.” To make the point, she takes on the holy grail of Spanish-English literary relations— Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s lost play, Cardenio, inspired by one of Don Quijote’s stories-within-a-story. Just as Don Quijote is the oft-dropped asterisk to England’s claim to have invented the novel, Cardenio, when it is periodically reconstructed, is celebrated as a lost work of Shakespeare, minimizing the Cervantes connection, or taking it as an opportunity to fetishize folkloric, tarantella-dancing Spain, source of English sunburns. All this despite the fact that those reproductions have no Shakespeare-penned script to work from, only a possible eighteenth-century rewrite whose gaps are filled in with Cervantes instead.

Honoré Daumier, Don Quichotte und Sancho Pansa {Don Quijote and Sancho Panza} (Circa 1868)

Fuchs works the Cardenio–Quijote question to yield a final twist worthy of Jorge Luis Borges. Fellow literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt recently received a Mellon Foundation grant to fund re-productions of Cardenio as “a lost play of Shakespeare’s” throughout the world. Fuchs draws from Greenblatt’s correspondence with Jesús Eguía Armenteros, the beleagured writer who took on the project in Spain, in which the Harvard scholar suggested that the Spanish writer “take the basic source material, the story in Cervantes, and our version of Cardenio and transform it to fit the concerns and the theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society.” Eguía Armenteros instead began his play with a conversation between ‘The Author” and a character named “Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt.” “But I don’t know what the ‘theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society’ are,” the Author complains.

Who does? But as The Poetics of Piracy shows, they are alive, well, and still intoxicate Falstaff’s heirs.

Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

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