ICH DIEN / EICH DYN

"[in] a letter written to Mary of Guise from Marion, Lady Hume on 28 March 1549, [...] she is complaining about the villainy of the English who ‘dystrow all this cuntre’. Strangely it seems the Spaniards, and ‘the Mour’ behave better, ‘lyk noble men’. [...] There was clearly at least one Moor in Berwickshire in 1549: if it was not Pedro Negro, then who was it? If not Pedro Negro, then perhaps Jacques Granado, another mercenary, knighted by Somerset a week after Negro on 1 October 1547, at Newcastle, whose name suggests he was from Grenada, and whose arms include ‘a Blackamoor’s head couped Sable, wreathed argent’.

"[Ungerer] argues that Negro was more likely to belong to a Genoese family of that name that had settled in Spain and Portugal in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This contradicts those who have taken this Spanish mercenary, knighted by Protector Somerset in 1548, as evidence that it was possible for a black man to gain prestige and honour in sixteenth-century Britain. The chief protagonist of Negro’s blackness is literary critic Imtiaz Habib, who draws a parallel between Negro and Othello: ‘Shakespeare’s Othello should be considered […] in the context of black military service in Tudor armies and generally, of the unacknowledged blacks of sixteenth century England’. This is not a straightforward academic disagreement. Habib’s rhetoric is infused with the underlying accusation that evidence of black mercenaries serving in the Tudor army has been suppressed by white imperialists: ‘This [black] presence is the site of suppressive inscription that is the modality of empire building’. He has recently remarked: ‘Its also interesting that whenever any claim of historical significance is made for a Black person in early modern Europe, the blackness of the person has to be immediately challenged. It would appear that even though oppressed, and denigrated in life a Black person has to prove her/his blackness for European history to even acknowledge her/his existence, whereas a White person is White by default and all significance is hers/his automatically.’ While this polemic approach is unhelpful, Ungerer’s proof by omission is not sufficient to disprove Negro’s blackness. Contemporary chroniclers may have seen the name Negro as indication enough that the soldier was black."

"Much like Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Sander’s volume features entertaining ironic providential twists that justly recompense sinful actions. Thus, Henry Tudor replaces Anne Boleyn with Jane Seymour the day after Anne’s execution, the author noting that “as Anne supplanted Catherine, so Jane supplanted Anne,” and that “the judgments of God are not less marvellous than they are just, rewarding every one accord ing to his works”. Thus, Henry’s actions are placed in a providential framework of judgment against Anne, satisfying the audience’s sense of justice and pity towards Catherine."

"In the flurry of celebrations as the Spanish Armada was preparing to leave for England in 1588, the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra published the first part of his widely read ecclesiastical history of the events that led up to the 'English schism', the Historia eclesiástica del scisma del reyno de Inglaterra. Translating and adapting Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicano (1585), a Latin text written by Elizabethan Catholic exiles, he contended that Queen Elizabeth was not only illegitimate but also born of an incestuous union – the monstrous culmination of Henry’s lust and pride in taking Anne Boleyn and setting himself up as head of the church in place of the Vicar of Christ. [...] Contrary to what may be expected, Spaniards did not always reproduce Ribadeneyra’s monstrous portrayal of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth Tudor, even when they agreed with the Jesuit."

"The apocalyptic atmosphere of the sixteenth century (the tenth in Islam) affected the Middle East as well as Europe. To the east the messianic figure of Ismail Safavi initiated the Safavid regime (1501-1722) with the religious conversion of Iran to Shi’ism. To the West, Muslim reaction to the Spanish Reconquista took the form of prophecies of the end of history. At the center, Ottoman defeat of the Safavis and conquest of the Arab world gave the sultan a new status as World-Conqueror and Shadow of God on Earth, attributes with which Suleyman confidently confronted the world-conquering claims of the Habsburg ruler Charles V. Suleyman’s acquisition of magnificent ceremonial regalia made by Venetian goldsmiths and his advance toward the Habsburg capital of Vienna in 1532, during which the regalia were ostentatiously displayed to the view of the Austrian envoys, were his answer to Charles V’s claim to the title of Caesar and the processions he had organized around his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. Charles, however, refused the challenge, declining to engage the Ottomans in battle, and the following year he sued for peace. The cultural competition between the two monarchs was an aspect of the geopolitical confrontation of the two empires, the great powers of the sixteenth century."

“Virginity was not just a sexual choice; it also took women out of their gender-defined roles and made them honorary men. [...] The ability of virginity to make women honorary men points to the complexity of the culture of abstinence in the Middle Ages. We cannot reduce the importance placed on a woman’s chastity to Christianity’s being a patriarchal movement aimed at controlling women’s bodies. It may have been women themselves who chose virginity and initiated the movement toward a special status within the church for female virgins. Rather than cutting back on women’s choices, virginity offered them new options. [...] Rejection of sex meant the rejection of the control of a husband. Celibate women could avoid male domination, at least to some degree (the spiritual authority they amassed could help them gain their independence from fathers and brothers as well). [...] Christians understood women’s transcendence of femininity into masculinity in a positive sense: femininity meant being tied to the body and things of the world in a way in which masculinity did not.”

“The precise chronology of Catherine’s affair with the king is unclear. A few clues are provided in grants made to her by the royal household, one of which made Catherine a woman of moderate means in her own right – at the end of April, the goods of two condemned criminals, a father and son both called William Lidbeter, who had been convicted of murder, were signed over to her. By modern standards, the second-hand goods of two killers might lack in romance, but the Tudors were incorrigible recyclers. In May, the king bought her twenty-three brand new quilts of sarsenet, a light silk, which was perhaps a welcome choice of fabric given the mounting temperature in the capital.”