Abstract Scholars have argued that William Camden lacked political ambition, and there has been little interest in his political thought. Camden was nevertheless deeply engaged with the issues that characterised contemporary political thought: the origins, history, and character of nations, social groups, laws, and political and religious institutions. These concerns were particularly pertinent in Camden’s lifetime, when England’s ‘ancient constitution’ was being delineated by antiquarians and common lawyers, especially in response to James VI and I’s absolutist theories of kingship, James’s view that the Norman Conquest transformed England’s constitution, and his plans for the Union of Britain. Unlike many of his peers, but in harmony with the views of the King, Camden viewed conquest as an inevitable feature of human history, which might enrich conquered societies; unlike prominent common lawyers and antiquarians, he did not view laws and institutions as immutable creations, but entities which evolved through historical processes and were legitimately altered by the policies of rulers.
Abstract This essay examines paratexts of the eighteen different editions of Camden’s Annales printed between 1615 and 1717 in England and on the Continent. It argues that the presence or absence of Queen Elizabeth I’s portrait in each edition had an influence on how the book was intended to be read, and shows how illustrators and printers together with the translators changed the genre of the work from an annals or chronicle of the kingdom to a history of the life and times of the queen. The sources and iconography of the various portraits are part of the discussion.
Abstract This article examines the epigraphic scholarship of William Camden through close readings first of his guidebook to Westminster Abbey, and then of his other works in which he discusses the histories of church monuments, epitaphs, and inscriptions. Camden emerges here as the pivotal figure between the continental epigraphic tradition, which sprung up in the mid-sixteenth century, and brought together philologically minded antiquaries focused on classical inscriptions, and a vein of specifically English church antiquarianism that appeared in the seventeenth century, and which turned instead to medieval and post-medieval remains, often with genealogical and heraldic motivations in mind. Camden’s epigraphic works have received little attention from modern scholars, certainly in comparison with either the Britannia or the Annales , but as this article shows, that neglect ignores both their significance for the history of scholarship and their considerable contemporary impact.
Abstract This article provides a fresh account of the origins of William Camden’s antiquarian masterpiece, Britannia , by reconstructing the formation of the book through its surviving draft materials and reassessing the role of collaboration in its pre-publication development. It focusses on the evidence of Camden’s initial drafting (1578–1580) and his subsequent epistolary exchanges with the young Oxford scholar and historian of mathematics, Thomas Savile (d. 1593) in the early 1580s. What kind of work was Britannia when it was first drafted, and to what extent did it develop collaboratively through discussions with Savile? The article offers the first analysis of British Library Cotton MS Titus F VII-VIII, Camden’s earliest draft of Britannia . This remarkable document is a vanishingly rare survival of a draft of a major Latin work of British scholarship from the sixteenth century, and offers unparalleled insight into Camden’s scholarly methodologies and antiquarian self-conception during this formative period. The draft is brought into dialogue with the surviving Savile-Camden correspondence, comprehensively analysed here for the first time. The article also identifies Thomas Savile as the author of an anonymous treatise in the British Library on the origins of the Brigantes, written for Camden in response to the publication of George Buchanan’s controversial Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582). The article evaluates the impact of Savile’s arguments about ancient British geography on the development of Camden’s Britannia . Its ultimate assessment is that Savile’s contribution to Britannia was more limited than has been assumed, and that Camden’s antiquarian scholarship privileges the autonomy of his own individual critical judgment. These findings prompt a concluding reconsideration of the nature, extent and significance of collaboration to Camden’s antiquarian practice and in late-humanist scholarship more widely.
Before Jews were legally permitted to reside in England in the mid-seventeenth century, a variety of English books were published which described postbiblical Jewish custom. These books included accounts of travel to the continent, works of Christian Hebraist erudition, translations of Jewish writings, polemical pamphlets, and studies in English legal history. Some were published directly in response to the readmission controversy as English Christians prepared themselves for the behavior of their potential Jewish compatriots. Through these textual descriptions, English readers could envision the practices and habits of living Jews before they were formally readmitted. Few authors and readers, however, agreed on what genres and sources most reliably related information about Jewish custom. Amidst the political controversy over readmission, English readers, writers, and publishers, scholarly and popular alike, debated the relative reliability of diverse sources that described the practices of contemporary Jews.
This paper investigates the previously unexplored reception of Lucretius' De rerum natura in early modern satire, focusing on a close reading of Federigo Nomi's Liber Satyrarum sexdecim (Leiden, 1703). By examining Nomi's private correspondence with Antonio Magliabechi, the contribution seeks to connect his engagement with Lucretius to the vicissitudes of Alessandro Marchetti's Italian translation of the poem. It is argued that Lucretius exerts a significant influence on the shaping of Nomi's persona satirica as a philosophical stance to critique contemporary society. The second part of the paper argues that Nomi also employs Lucretius as an intellectual source, particularly engaging with Lucretius' book 5 on the origins and development of mankind. In doing so, Nomi inherits Lucretius' ambivalent and ambiguous understanding of human progress. The paper concludes that Nomi's reception of Lucretius involves a process of delimitation, in which the contexts and modes of employing De rerum natura are carefully set.
This article examines the book-collecting endeavors of Stephan Gerlach, a young Protestant who resided in Istanbul from 1573 to 1578 as chaplain for the Habsburg diplomatic mission. Gerlach's diary sheds light on the realities of hunting for Greek manuscripts absent from other idealized accounts. While previous diplomatic envoys, such as Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, achieved legendary success in procuring Greek texts, Gerlach's efforts were fraught with obstacles, including exorbitant costs, monopolistic practices of intermediaries, and the Greek community's protective stance toward their manuscripts. Through Gerlach's often-frustrated accounts, this article explores the material and logistical challenges of manuscript collection, from financial negotiations to the reliance on opportunistic intermediaries, as possible reflections of broader shifts in the book trade and attitudes toward Byzantine textual heritage. Gerlach's diary thus provides a unique window into the interplay scholarship, diplomacy, and cultural exchange between early modern Europe and Ottoman Greeks.
This article examines two little-known scholars attempting to reconstruct Byzantine imperial chronology in the early sixteenth century: Johannes Fuchsmagen in Vienna and Giovanni Battista Cipelli, or Egnazio, in Venice. Comparing the work of Fuchsmagen and Egnazio shows how different materials (such as coins and manuscripts), no less than the cultural and ideological context for scholarship, shaped the range of available interpretations of Byzantine material. Fuchsmagen, relying on his collection of gold coins, drew the eastern emperors into a common framework with ancient Roman and western emperors that emphasized imperial continuity. Egnazio, in contrast, used Byzantine manuscripts to write a new history of eastern and western emperors as a school text, but reproduced medieval hierarchies in which the eastern rulers were inferior their counterparts in the West. Though Fuchsmagen and Egnazio are relatively minor figures in the history of Byzantine scholarship, their frameworks established prototypes for later scholarly engagements in Byzantine scholarship.
Although the role of the Medici as collectors of antiquities has long been recognised, their interest in medieval objects has received less attention. Drawing primarily on the evidence provided by household inventories, this article highlights the family's assembly of what was in the late fifteenth century the largest European collection of Byzantine and post-Byzantine icons in private hands. A study of these icons' acquisition and display-and of their influence on new artworks-reveals their uniquely important position at the intersection of religious piety and antiquarian interests. The Medici's engagement with icons (especially carved and mosaic pieces) shaped ideas about authenticity, replication, and substitution crucial to early modern interpretations of both historicity and eternity. As an act of appropriation, that engagement also alienated the descendants of the icons' creators from their roots. The translation of these supernatural talismans into a foreign context contributed to the oppression of vulnerable communities.
This article deals with the experience of members of the Habsburg delegations to Istanbul who traveled to the Ottoman capital in the 16th century and contributed to the study of the Byzantine background of Constantinople. Several of these visitors from the Holy Roman Empire exhibited the typical characteristics of humanist scholars and were thus attracted primarily to classical antiquities and texts. However, the rivalry between the Holy Roman and the Ottoman empires and the religious dialogue between the Protestants of T & uuml;bingen and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople motivated these travelers to discover and study medieval monuments and manuscripts as well. This activity was an important link in the early stages of the study of Byzantium and its material culture; thus, scholars such as Hans Dernschwam, Ogier de Busbecq, and Stephan Gerlach and artists such as Melchior Lorck are key figures in the establishment of a version of Byzantine antiquarianism.
This paper reconstructs key perceptions and qualities attributed to Byzantine icons in early modern Italy, with particular attention to Venice. It examines the persistent distinction between icons alla greca and local paintings, where the former were often deemed less aesthetically pleasing yet more spiritually powerful, and thus better suited for devotional use. Drawing on textual and archival evidence from the 14th to the 17th centuries, it explores how, despite negative assessments in humanist circles, Byzantine icons were valued for their formal characteristics, perceived antiquity, and greater 'authenticity'. Informed by examples from churches, domestic interiors, and individual commissions, the paper situates the enduring presence of these artifacts within the geopolitical transformations of the Mediterranean and ongoing debates about the role of sacred images in early modern spirituality.
Eighteenth-century scholarship is full of hybrid works: works that integrate elements from different fields and genres, sometimes from different authors and different periods, each with their own forms of organization and argumentative/rhetorical structures. This article analyses such hybrid works as documents of changes in the architecture of knowledge. Applying Ian Hacking's notion of "styles of reasoning" to the history of the humanities, it shows how this bricolage reflects the uses of different models for transforming information into knowledge. The article focuses on three eighteenth-century genres that are particularly representative of a style of reasoning: histoire philosophique, grammaire generale, and historia literaria, and how they come together in hybrid works such as Gebelin's Monde Primitif (1773-82), Monboddo's Origin and Progress of Language (1773-93), Astle's The Origin and Progress of Writing (1784), and Heeren's Ideen (1793-96; 1824-26). Tracing the genealogies of these genres and their intersections, we can discern broader developments in eighteenth-century ideas of history, language, literature, and knowledge, from their early modern origins to the making of the modern humanities.
