#17thcentury

On the Preternatural History of Both Worlds Tomi secundi tractatus secundus; De praeternaturali utriusque mundi historia, c. 1621 by Fludd, Robert

"For the soul or essence passes from the letter Jod The first letter of the Tetragrammaton (יהוה), representing the divine spark or the Father. during creation and generation, and after corruption The decay or death of the physical body. it returns once more to Jod. For through generation, the soul descends from the unity of matter into a multitude, and through corruption or death, it is released and ascends back into that which it was before—namely, into Jod. This seems to agree with that discourse of the Royal Psalmist in Psalm 25:1: The soul of the righteous is lifted up to God; and in Psalm 42:3: The soul says, "When shall I come, that I may appear in the presence of God?" original: "Anima dicit; quando accedam, ut appaream in conspectu Dei" Similarly, in 1 Kings 19:4, Elijah said: Now, O Lord, take my soul; for I am no better than my ancestors. Does not the breath of life also return to the one who breathed it The Creator once its duty is fulfilled? Hence the Wise Man Referring to Solomon in Proverbs 20:27. said that the soul of man is the lamp of the Lord. From this, it is necessary that once the compound The human being, composed of body and soul. is dissolved, the divine light returns again to its own proper source, with divine grace assisting, insofar as the world is measured from Aleph The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, representing the number 1. or Jod with a cipher The letter Jod represents the number 10, often written as a 1 with a zero (cipher) in Kabbalistic mathematics to show the return to unity. back to the "Great Aleph." Therefore, in a circular dimension, all things have proceeded from God and all things shall return again into God. For God the Father is that "Being in potential," into which gross matter will be spiritualized through dissolution; and the Son is the "essence actually shining," into which the soul, dissolved by sublimation, shall be exalted; and all this shall be done by the power of the loving bond of the fiery Spirit; for in the Spirit we shall live again. This, then, was the beginning of both the Macrocosm The "Great World" or universe. Microcosm The "Little World" or man; and here also shall be the end for both: namely, that "In the beginning was the Word," in which was life; and that shall be the end into which life, as if into its own fountain and origin, shall return. Hence this Word is rightly called in the Apocalypse The Book of Revelation. the Alpha and Omega original: "α & ω", the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet., which is the Tree of Life for both the living and the dying; because it has triumphed over death: may His name therefore be blessed forever!

The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa

Toby Green’s "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" is a richly detailed and deeply human book centered on the life of Crispina Peres, a powerful African woman trader prosecuted by the Portuguese Inquisition in the 1660s. The book opens a window onto the everyday realities, moral tensions, and global connections of early modern West Africa. The book will be of interest to historians of religion or gender and history enthusiasts.

In The Heretic of Cacheu, Toby Green uses one extraordinary life to illuminate a broader historical landscape shaped by commerce, belief, gender, and cultural negotiation. Cacheu, located in present-day Guinea-Bissau, was a small but vital Atlantic port where African, European, and Afro-Portuguese communities interacted daily. It functioned as a hub linking West Africa to Brazil and the wider Atlantic world. Rather than presenting Cacheu as a peripheral outpost of European expansion, Green shows it to be a dynamic society with its own social hierarchies, customs, and systems of authority. This setting is essential to understanding Crispina Peres, who emerges not as a marginal figure but as a central actor in her community.

Crispina Peres was a wealthy trader involved in the commerce of enslaved people, a fact that the book confronts directly without moral evasion. She was also a Christian who attended church and participated in Catholic rituals while simultaneously drawing on African healing practices and spiritual traditions. Her arrest by the Portuguese Inquisition stemmed from this religious hybridity. When she sought help from African healers during illness, Portuguese authorities interpreted her actions as heresy. What follows is a dramatic story of accusation, imprisonment, exile, and return, reconstructed from fragmentary but revealing archival records.

One of the book’s great strengths is Green’s ability to make the historical record speak beyond the courtroom. The Inquisition documents are not treated simply as legal texts but as windows into everyday life. Through them, readers learn about housing styles, clothing, family relations, medical practices, and social gatherings in seventeenth-century Cacheu. These details give texture to the narrative and make the world Crispina Peres inhabited feel tangible and lived-in.

Green also uses this story to challenge long-standing assumptions about African societies in the early modern period. Rather than portraying Africans as passive victims of European expansion, he emphasizes African agency and adaptability. Women, in particular, play a central role in his account. Crispina Peres and other women in Cacheu controlled property, conducted trade, and exercised significant influence within their communities. This challenges conventional historical narratives that place men and European actors at the center of economic and political life.

Religion is another key theme. The book shows that religious life in Cacheu was not divided neatly between ‘Christian’ and ‘traditional’ beliefs. Instead, people navigated multiple spiritual systems at once, combining Catholic practices with African cosmologies in ways that made sense within their own cultural frameworks. The Inquisition’s attempt to impose rigid definitions of orthodoxy reveals the limits of European authority and the misunderstandings that arose when different worldviews collided.

Although the book is grounded in a single place and person, its scope is global. Green repeatedly situates Cacheu within wider networks of trade and communication that stretched across the Atlantic and beyond. Goods, ideas, and people moved constantly between Africa and the Americas, and developments in one region shaped lives in another. In this way, The Heretic of Cacheu contributes to a growing body of world history that emphasizes connection rather than isolation.

The book does, at times, demand careful reading. The complexity of the social world that Green reconstructs and Green's dense historical detail may feel challenging for some readers. Yet, this effort is rewarded by an intellectually engaging and emotionally resonant narrative. Crispina Peres emerges not as a symbol or abstraction, but as a person navigating uncertainty, power, faith, and survival in a changing world.

The Heretic of Cacheu is a compelling reminder that global history is built from individual lives. By restoring Crispina Peres to the historical record, Toby Green, Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African history and culture at King’s College, London, shows how much can be learned when historians look closely at places and people long overlooked. The result is a vivid, thought-provoking account that invites general readers to rethink early modern history, not as a story driven solely by European empires, but as one shaped by African actors whose choices mattered profoundly. Because this book has been written in a lucid manner and for more than one type of audience, it will interest historians of religion and gender, history enthusiasts, specialists of precolonial African history, and general readers.

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⚔ The Four Musketeers – Courtiers of Louis XIII 👑 Watch the full 4:41 Music Video: https://youtu.be/lNdGXZyM8-E

One king, four musketeers – and a royal court where chivalry, tenderness, and masculine elegance merged into an artful symbiosis. The French King Louis XIII, father of the future Sun King Louis XIV, reigned from 1610 to 1643 during a time of great transition – between medieval rigidity and baroque splendor. His court was a place of cultivated masculinity: disciplined elegance, courtly etiquette, dramatic gestures, feathered hats and fragrant silks – but also subtle intimacy between men who admired one another as equals.

It was an era in which masculinity was not hard or reserved, but adorned, playful, and at times deeply affectionate. The 17th century had not yet developed the rigid gender boundaries of later eras. Tender gestures like kisses, warm embraces, or hand-holding between men were not seen as scandalous, but as signs of connection, loyalty – and sometimes more. The concept of friendship was elastic and complex. The line between platonic bonding and erotic tension was often fluid – and sometimes intentionally blurred.

Fashion at the time reflected this fluidity: men wore lace, velvet and silk, adorned themselves with pearls and perfume, and cared for their hair with the same attention as women. Beauty was not considered effeminate, but a sign of power and refinement. A musketeer in his ornate uniform was both warrior and dandy, protector and seducer.

Louis XIII himself was a complex figure – shaped by melancholy, a deep sense of duty, and a peculiar distance from the world of women. His marriage to Anne of Austria remained childless and emotionally distant for many years. Contemporaries and historians have speculated about emotional – and perhaps even romantic – relationships with young courtiers like Charles d'Albert, Duke of Luynes, or Henri de Cinq-Mars, whose execution in 1642 became a political scandal. Whether these relationships were physical remains uncertain – but in emotional intensity, they seem remarkably intimate for their time.

The king’s musketeers embodied this spirit perfectly: not only royal guards, but confidants and companions in a world full of intrigue and danger. Their loyalty to one another and to the king was legendary – a brotherhood that went beyond the military and entered the emotional, even spiritual realm. "All for one, and one for all" was more than a motto – it was a philosophy of life, one that made room for all forms of love and connection.

In this world, Louis XIII was not just a symbol of royal dignity – but an emotional man who met his loyal musketeers with a keen gaze, sincere gestures, and occasional tenderness. He was not a distant sovereign, but part of a close-knit circle of trust, courage, and quiet romance.

Yet behind the elegant façade of court life, power struggles raged: intrigues, political maneuvering, and the constant influence of the power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu turned the court into a treacherous stage. Behind the scenes, the musketeers fought not only for their king – but often against those who sought to manipulate his decisions. The kidnapping of one of their comrades becomes a symbol of this power game – and a test of friendship stronger than any conspiracy. 🛡️👑

What seems queer to us today was once courtly normality: a code of male intimacy that made space for love without needing to define or label it. The language of glances, gestures, and unspoken promises was richer and more nuanced than today’s categories can capture.

And perhaps this is the timeless beauty of that era – and its revolutionary power for our own: In a world that is redefining masculinity and celebrating love in all its forms, these musketeers remind us that strength and tenderness, courage and beauty, loyalty and passion are not contradictions – but the facets of a full, authentic existence.

There are some moments in the archive that stick with you. For me, one such moment was seeing this 1668 deed for “Secunk” — a place now called Rehoboth, Massachusetts — in the stacks of the John Carter Brown Library my first week working there.

On the page was a signature line reading: “The marke of phillip Sachem,” and between those words, the bold pictographic mark chosen by Metacom (called “King Philip” by the English). I had read so much about Metacom, but had never before seen a stroke of pen on paper, chosen by him to represent himself.

Seeing that mark collapsed so much historical distance. These marks were not about myths, symbols, or abstractions, but human beings with relationships, responsibilities, griefs, humor, strategies, families, and dreams. Ancestors who lived and loved on these lands for millennia before the United States existed — and whose descendants are still here.

That moment became one of the sparks for Their Marks. It sent me searching for the lives, circumstances, and pictographs of Northeastern Native ancestors so often flattened, erased, trivialized, or rendered invisible within dominant historical narratives. Narratives that celebrate “American exceptionalism” while treating so many Native people as footnotes to someone else’s story.

I’ve come to think of them not only as evidence of Native presence, but as assertions of belonging. As forms of memory. As refusals. As calls across generations. If, for so many years, academia had known how (or been willing) to truly read these marks, perhaps the histories told about this place would have looked very different.

Every pictograph represents a person who understood themselves as part of a world shaped by land, kinship, language, diplomacy, innovation, spirituality, and responsibility. A person whose experiences were - and are - worthy of recording and remembering. A person whose descendants still carry those histories forward.

Their Marks, for me, has always been about calling ancestors back to us. About looking beyond colonial handwriting and legal language to the human beings who put hand to paper. About imagining fuller stories for them than the archive often allows. Stories tied not only to dispossession, but to endurance, creativity, governance, survivance, and dreams for the future.

On July 8, 1647, Frances Stuart was born. Celebrated for her extraordinary beauty, she became one of the most admired figures at the court of Charles II of England during the Restoration era. Known as “La Belle Stuart,” she captivated society and was a favorite subject of artists and courtiers.

Frances Timbers. The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish: The Occult World of Seventeenth-Century London. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2016. Hardcover. 211 pages.

www.arcaneofferings.com

Fashion in Genoa in the first half of the 17th century

Men's and women's fashion in the first half of the 17th century in the Republic of Genoa was strongly inspired by that in vogue in Spain and Rome, as evidenced by the portrait of Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale on horseback by Antoon van Dyck (Palazzo Rosso, inv. PR 48), the painting "Visiting the sick" by Cornelis de Wael, set in the Genoese hospital of Pammatone and painted around 1640 (commissioned by the Genoese nobleman Pier Francesco Grimaldi, Palazzo Bianco, inv. PB 458) and the portrait of the family of Giovanni Vincenzo Imperiale (1582-1648) and his second wife Brigida Spinola, set in the villa of Sampierdarena (Villa Scassi), painted in 1642 by Domenico Fiasella (Palazzo Bianco, inv. PB 446).

Thanks to the two marriages of Sigismund III Vasa (1566-1632), who married Anna of Austria (1573-1598) and Constance of Austria (1588-1631), sisters of the Queen of Spain, Spanish fashion also enjoyed great popularity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the first half of the 17th century. Italian influences in the Commonwealth also popularized Italian fashion in the country. In 1624, Sigismund's eldest son from his first marriage, Ladislaus Sigimund Vasa (1595-1648), stayed in Genoa (his portrait by Peter Paul Rubens is preserved in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini in Genoa). Almost a decade later, in 1633, Sigismund's youngest son from his second marriage, Alexander Charles (1614-1634), also stayed in Genoa (on his way from Livorno to Milan), and in 1638, his older brother John Casimir Vasa (1609-1672) stayed there for a few months before leaving for Spain. According to a document dated February 10, 1634, preserved in the Roman State Archives, Monsignor San Giorgio sent to Savona, near Genoa, a portrait of the King of Poland (probably Ladislaus IV Vasa), accompanied by several other paintings and portraits of Italian sovereigns.

In the summer of 1580, Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532-1625), a renowned portrait painter, moved to Genoa with her second husband, Orazio Lomellino. She remained there for 35 years, continuing to paint portraits of Spanish court figures and visiting Savona. This period is documented more by notarial documents drawn up in Genoa than by her works, as none appear to have survived in Genoa, suggesting that all her paintings were intended for export. Being primarily a portraitist, she must have drawn inspiration from other effigies.

Browse >>> Renaissance Poland-Lithuania - The Realm of Venus - Art in Poland (Artinpl) >>> for more ...

© Marcin Latka