Spanish Exemplary Rulership? Antonio de Guevara’s <i>Relox de Príncipes</i> (1529) in English (1557) and Dutch (1578) Translation

The mirror-for-princes Relox de príncipes (1529) by Antonio de Guevara (1481-1545) compared Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V (1500-1558) to the celebrated stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, with the two being equal in wisdom, sense of justice and clemency, and exemplary rulership. Thereafter, royal and higher-class Spaniards fashioned themselves as contemporary Aurelii, making the book a symbol of the superiority of Spaniards and Spain. However, countries where the Relox was read in translation had more nuanced or negative perspectives on Spaniards. This chapter delves into how proto-national attitudes towards Spaniards are decisive for the English (1557) and Dutch (1578) translations of the Relox, fashioning Aurelius as an exemplar for their own non-Spanish rulers and negotiating Hispanophilic and Hispanophobic Spanish representations

Usury, Calvinism, and Credit in Protestant England: from the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution

This study analyses the impact of Protestantism on interest rates in England from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. One of many myths about the usury doctrine - the prohibition against demanding anything above the principal in a loan (mutuum) - is that it ceased to be observed in Reformation Europe. As several authors have demonstrated, however, early Protestant Reformers, beginning with Luther, had essentially endorsed the long established Scholastic usury doctrines. The one major exception was Jean Calvin. Though retaining a strong hostility against usury, he permitted interest on commercial loans, while forbidding usury on charitable loans to the needy. That view may have been partly responsible for a crucially important breach in civil support of the usury doctrine. The first, in 1540, was an imperial ordinance for the Habsburg Netherlands permitting interest payments up to 12%, but only for commercial loans. In England, Henry VIII's Parliament of 1545 enacted a statute permitting interest payments up to 10% (on all loans); any higher rates constituted usury. But, in 1552, a hostile Parliament, with radical Protestants, revoked that statute, and revived it only under Elizabeth, in 1571. Since the maximum rate was also taken to be the minimum, subsequent Parliaments, seeking to foster trade, reduced that rate: to 8% in 1624, to 6% in 1651 (ratified 1660-61), and to 5% in 1713: a rate maintained until the abolition of the usury laws in 1854. The consequences of legalizing interest payments, but with ever lower maximum rates, had a far-reaching impact on the English economy, from the 16th century to the Industrial Revolution. The first lay in finally permitting the discounting of commercial bills. Even if medieval bills of exchange had permitted merchants to disguise interest payments in exchange rates, the usury doctrine nevertheless required that they be non-negotiable, held until maturity, since discounting would have revealed the implicit interest. Evidence for the Low Countries and England demonstrates that discounting, with legal transfers either by bearer bills or by endorsement, with full negotiability, began and became widespread only after the legalization of interest payments in both countries. The importance for Great Britain can be seen in the primary role of its banks during the Industrial Revolution: in discounting commercial bills, foreign and domestic, in order to finance most of the working capital needs for both industry and commerce. The second is known as the Financial Revolution; and its late introduction into England, from 1693, was in part due to the limits imposed on interest rates. In its final form (1757), it meant the establishment of permanent, funded, national debt based not on the sale of interest-bearing bonds but on perpetual annuities or rentes. The origins can be found in 13th-century northern France and the Low Countries in reaction to the vigorous intensification of the anti-usury campaign by the new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans. Fearing for their mortal souls, many merchants refused to make loans and chose to finance town governments instead by purchasing municipal rentes (annuities). In 1250, Pope Innocent IV ruled that no usury was involved, because those buying rentes could never demand redemptions. Instead, they were licitly purchasing future streams of income. Continuing debates were not finally resolved until the issue of three 15th-century papal bulls (supporting Innocent IV). By the 16th century, the finances of most western Europe states had become largely dependent on selling both life and perpetual annuities. England was thus a late-comer, in importing this system of public finance. Fully immune to the usury laws, this Financial Revolution permitted the English/British governments to reduce borrowing costs from 14% in 1693 to just 3% in 1757, so that the British economy could finance both 'guns and butter', without crowding out private investments. Furthermore, since these annuities (Consols) were traded internationally on both the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges, they were a popular form of secure investments, which became, with land, the most widely-used collateral in borrowing for the fixed capital needs of the Industrial Revolution.usury, interest, annuities, bonds, public finance, bills of exchange, discounting, Scholastics, Old and New Testaments, Calvin, Luther, Protestant Reformers, Dissenters, Financial Revolution, England

Writing Scottish Parliamentary history, c.1500 – 1707

In the 19th and 20th centuries, scholarship on the Scottish parliament was heavily informed by a narrative of ‘failure’, directed at explaining why its members voted it out of existence in 1707. Part of the problem was the tendency to see any deviation from the practices of the Westminster parliament as weakness. By reappraising parliament in terms of its utility to those who comprised its membership, notably the titled peerage and the monarch, historians have revealed its adaptability and inventiveness, especially in times of crisis. This essay considers how fresh approaches both to what constituted the parliamentary record and what can – and cannot – be found within it have exerted a transformative influence on our understanding of parliament's evolving role in Scottish political life. Although the Reformation crisis of 1560 and the accession of the ruling house of Stewart to the English throne in 1603 effected profound changes on parliamentary culture, this essay emphasises how parliament sustained its legitimacy and relevance, in part, by drawing on past practices and ideas. Historians have become more attentive in recent years to the means by which social groupings ordinarily excluded from formal parliamentary activity were nonetheless able to engage with, and influence, its proceedings. Gaps remain in our knowledge, however. Some periods have been more intensively studied than others, while certain aspects of parliamentary culture are understudied. The writing of Scottish parliamentary history will continue to offer rich possibilities in future.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Emblemata: The emblem books of Andrea Alciato

A study of the life and works of the legal scholar and humanist, Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), the originator of the emblem book. The nature of the emblem is elucidated and placed in its historical, intellectual and artistic contexts, with special attention paid to the many and varied published manifestations of Alciato???s emblems from 1531 to 1621.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Reassessing the Scottish Parliamentary Records, 1528-1548 : manuscript, print, bureaucracy and royal authority

This article for the first time correctly identifies a manuscript previously identified as an ‘official record of parliament’ as a draft of the first printed statutes of the Scottish Parliament, the Actis and Constitutionis of 1542. This discovery has a number of implications for our study of parliament in the period 1528 to 1548, encompassing the personal rule of James V and the beginning of his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots's, minority, which the original manuscript covered. Careful attention to these materials exposes a sophisticated administrative culture, characterised by reviewing and repromulgating statutes, as well as revealing the ghosts of further, now lost, records. Considering the printed text, meanwhile, suggests that parliament and the law played as important a role as history and ceremonial in the assertion of James V's kingship in the years 1540–2: indeed, this should not surprise us given that James's administrators were also his poets. While the Actis of 1542 have hitherto provoked little interest from among historians, they emerge as an important influence on the much better known publication of Scottish statutes from James I to Mary in 1567. The administrators who produced this later volume evidently saw themselves as working within the same tradition as their predecessors of 1542: an increased appreciation of the administrative expertise, careful record-keeping, attention to the dissemination of statute and the ways in which this bolstered the power of the crown suggests that we ought to do likewise.PostprintPeer reviewe

Conditional Complexity of Compression for Authorship Attribution

We introduce new stylometry tools based on the sliced conditional compression complexity of literary texts which are inspired by the nearly optimal application of the incomputable Kolmogorov conditional complexity (and presumably approximates it). Whereas other stylometry tools can occasionally be very close for different authors, our statistic is apparently strictly minimal for the true author, if the query and training texts are sufficiently large, compressor is sufficiently good and sampling bias is avoided (as in the poll samplings). We tune it and test its performance on attributing the Federalist papers (Madison vs. Hamilton). Our results confirm the previous attribution of Federalist papers by Mosteller and Wallace (1964) to Madison using the Naive Bayes classifier and the same attribution based on alternative classifiers such as SVM, and the second order Markov model of language. Then we apply our method for studying the attribution of the early poems from the Shakespeare Canon and the continuation of Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero and Leander’ ascribed to G. Chapman.compression complexity, authorship attribution.

A Forgotten Bestselling Author: Laura Terracina in Early Modern Naples

This dissertation provides a critical assessment of Laura Terracina (1519-c.1577) and her works. It argues that she was a consummate product of her age, embodying the tensions which ruled the Italian peninsula. Terracina published eight books and left a ninth in manuscript at the time of her death, winning legions of admirers and making her sixteenth-century Italy’s most commercially successful female author. Yet in spite of her enormous popularity amongst her contemporaries, scholarship has largely neglected Terracina. This dissertation will open up an overdue field of enquiry into her life and works, exploring the significance of her role as a sixteenth-century female poet through the lenses of gender and class. By mapping her place in the literary landscape, it is hoped that this thesis will encourage scholars to afford Terracina the attention she so richly deserves. The first chapter of the dissertation situates Terracina as a poet of Naples, seeing her as a product of her family’s political standing within the city, her academician status, and her own construction of an urban coterie of supporters. The second chapter considers the mechanics of the journey into print, assessing Terracina’s own input and her close collaboration with male editors and publishers. It proposes a greater attribution of agency to Terracina than has thus far been made, arguing that she is, in fact, an important figure in the process of her texts reaching the hands of readers. The third chapter considers how the poet used her printed books as social tools, employing them to gain social and literary capital. The second section of the dissertation looks at two thematic strands within Terracina’s poetry. Chapter four considers her political poetry, including her attitude towards the harm done to civilian populations across Europe. Chapter five looks at the religious dimension to Terracina’s work, the spiritual poetry written in her later years, and the relationship this bears to her secular lyric. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a chapter on the contemporary reception of Terracina’s texts, providing preliminary thoughts on how she was read, before closing with a consideration of her literary afterlife in the centuries that followed.AHR

Boom-time freaks or heroic industrial pioneers? Clothing entrepreneurs in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Berkshire

The early emergence of the entrepreneur in the English cloth industry was commemorated by early modern writers such as Skelton, Leland, Deloney, Aubrey, Fuller and Defoe but remains neglected in recent studies exploring industrial expansion and innovation c. 1500–1700. In response to the gap in the current historiography, this article examines the emergence of entrepreneurship, the growth of organizational experimentation and the short-lived development of the proto-factory in the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury. It explores the entrepreneurship of industrial capitalists such as John Winchcombe (the illustrious ‘Jack of Newbury’), Thomas Dolman, Thomas Aldworth and William Kendrick and the nature of their achievement and motivation. It assesses the impact of market forces, locational advantages, product specialization and social attitudes in unleashing and shaping entrepreneurial investment from the expansion of cloth-making in the towns in the fifteenth century to de-industrialization in the seventeenth century

Boom-time freaks or heroic industrial pioneers? Clothing entrepreneurs in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Berkshire

The early emergence of the entrepreneur in the English cloth industry was commemorated by early modern writers such as Skelton, Leland, Deloney, Aubrey, Fuller and Defoe but remains neglected in recent studies exploring industrial expansion and innovation c. 1500–1700. In response to the gap in the current historiography, this article examines the emergence of entrepreneurship, the growth of organizational experimentation and the short-lived development of the proto-factory in the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury. It explores the entrepreneurship of industrial capitalists such as John Winchcombe (the illustrious ‘Jack of Newbury’), Thomas Dolman, Thomas Aldworth and William Kendrick and the nature of their achievement and motivation. It assesses the impact of market forces, locational advantages, product specialization and social attitudes in unleashing and shaping entrepreneurial investment from the expansion of cloth-making in the towns in the fifteenth century to de-industrialization in the seventeenth century