1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  Connolly and Mayer report on as yet unpublished work on Adrian Boot by Victor Manuel Ruiz Naufal and Jean-Pierre Berthe, so perhaps the engineer’s life will soon come into better focus.

  William Lytle Schurz’s The Manila Galleon remains the best overview of the MANILA–ACAPULCO GALLEONS. Additional information can be found in Henry Kamen’s Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 and European Entry into the Pacific by Dennis O’Flynn, Arturo Giraldez, and James Sobredo. See also Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain.

  Thomas K. Peterson, author of Secrets of the Manila Galleon (www.proaxis.com/~tpeterson/), which deals with the galleons in their heyday from 1650 to 1780, kindly referred me to Bruce Cruikshank’s website, “Manila Galleon Listing”(https://sites.google.com/site/manilagalleonlisting/), which details the voyages of the galleons year by year. In an e-mail Cruikshack told me “I am not an expert on the galleons but was frustrated that there was not a list and that there were so many gaps and contradictions in the data. There are still gaps but I’ve tried to identify or eliminate the contradictions.” This is helpful work indeed.

  For JURIS VAN SPILBERGEN see J. A. Villiers, The East and West Indian Mirror, Being an Account of Joris Van Speilbergen’s Voyage Round the World. Peter Gerhard’s account of pirates on the west coast of New Spain is a highly readable summation. Tonio Andrade has described how the Dutch East India Company tried to lead a coalition of pirates to war against China.

  Among general books on SILK are Philippa Scott’s The Book of Silk, Anne E. Wardwell and James C. Y. Watt’s When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles, and Shelagh Vainker’s Chinese Silk: A Cultural History. Chinese silk technology is exhaustively covered in Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China.

  The best known translations of the SHI JING, or Classic of Songs, are by James Legge, Arthur Waley, and Ezra Pound. The translations here are my own reworkings based mainly on the collective work of previous translators.

  There has been much written about THE WANLI EMPEROR. The Cambridge History of China, Ray Huang’s 1587, a Year of No Significance, and the works of Timothy Brook are good places to start. The Cambridge History is also a good source on the treasure fleets of ZHENG HE.

  Sanjay Subrahmanyam has written on THE PORTUGUESE IN ASIA. Jay A. Levenson’s Encompassing the Globe was a companion book to an exhibition at the Freer and Sackler Galleries. Jorge Flores’s Goa and the Great Mughal accompanied an exhibition at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

  On the subject of GUAM I consulted Robert F. Rogers’s Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam.

  Henry Kamen’s Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 has a good chapter on MANILA AND THE PHILIPPINES. The Cambridge History of China is another useful source.

  Jonathan Spence has written persuasively on MATTEO RICCI. D. E. Mungello’s Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology is a comprehensive account of JESUIT MISSIONARIES IN CHINA. Joanna Waley-Cohen’s The Sextants of Beijing contains a chapter on China and Catholicism. C. R. Boxer’s The Christian Century in Japan 1549–1650 remains a prime source on CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES IN JAPAN.

  Rodrigo Rivero Lake’s Namban: Art in Viceregal Mexico is richly illustrated.

  Jane E. Mangan’s Trading Roles explores aspects of life in POTOSÍ that I have not been able to get into here, focusing more on its trade interactions than on the experience of native miners. For more on Potosí, see Bartolome Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s Tales of Potosí, which is available in English translation with a helpful introduction, and Peter J. Bakewell’s Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosi, 1545–1650. Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy is a beautiful, wrenching retelling of Latin American history.

  Rolena Adorno dominates the study of GUAMAN POMA. See “Selected Reading” (p. 369) for a list of titles.

  Peter J. Bakewell’s Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico is an account of events in ZACATECAS, and Charlotte M. Gradie discusses THE TEPEHUAN REVOLT OF 1616 in her book of that title.

  Shakespeare’s Sisters

  I am indebted to Naomi J. Miller for making the connection between Mary Wroth and Virginia Woolf’s comments about Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, which inspired the title of this chapter.

  Margaret L. King’s Women of the Renaissance surveys the roles of women at all levels of European society, while Dorothy Ko sheds new light on aspects of women in China in Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China.

  Camilla Townsend’s Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma is a good survey of the subject; Townsend was the first, I think, to suggest MATOAKA (POCAHONTAS) may have suffered from Stockholm Syndrome. Helen Rountree’s excellent Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, which is informed by anthropological research, is more detailed; it views events from the Powhatan perspective. Paula Gunn Allen’s speculative Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat purports to illuminate its subject by means of the affinity of a shared native American point of view. Books such as Philip Barbour’s Pocahontas and Her World now sound dated.

  In “Pocahontas at the Masque” Karen Robertson claims that “It would be a mistake to see her as only a trophy of colonization or tragic victim.” Somehow she is able to discern in the surviving fragments of Matoaka’s life “traces of a subjectivity not simply produced within European discourses of the savage, but a self constructed within a different set of cultural assumptions.”

  Terrence Malick’s picturesque and evocative romantic fantasy of John Smith and Pocahontas, The New World, takes considerable liberties with the historical story, shifting around dates and characters for purposes that are not always clear to me. It all works within the film’s own self-defined bounds so long as you don’t expect historical fidelity. Like the Disney Pocahontas, Malick’s film imagines a romance between Matoaka and John Smith. A couple of actors from the Disney film reappear in it: Irene Bedard, who did the speaking voice of Disney’s Pocahontas, plays her mother in Malick’s film, while Christian Bale also had roles in both productions.

  Tom Cain has discussed the ideology of colonization in the works of JOHN DONNE.

  Joseph Quincy Adams’s Shakespearean Playhouses discusses playhouse-inns such as the Bell Savage and the White Hart. For more on THE BELL SAVAGE INN AND PLAYHOUSE, see Herbert Berry’s article in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.

  Much of the writing on LADY MARY WROTH has been oriented to feminist interpretation of her work, so that until recently it has been difficult to obtain some basic facts about her life. Gary F. Waller’s tortured The Sidney Family Romance adds an additional layer of Freudian theory (to convey the fluidity of gender Waller often puts the word “man” within quotes). Happily, this omission has recently been rectified by Margaret P. Hannay’s admirable biography, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth. For readers not ready to tackle such a substantial work, the best brief biography I know appears in Josephine A. Roberts’s The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Naomi Miller focuses on Wroth’s “female vision of community.” Bernadette Andrea sees her subtly working the margin between self-effacement and self-assertion. Nona Fienberg views her work as an interior journey of self-discovery. Ann Rosalind Jones compares her work to that of Gaspara Stampa. See also Katharina M. Wilson’s Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation.

  The case of the Chinese wet nurse who committed suicide appears in Timothy Brook’s The Confusions of Pleasure.

  Silvia Brown and Christine W. Sizemore are among those who have written on DOROTHY LEIGH.

  Wendy Perkins’s Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France is the most substantial study of LOUISE BOURGEOIS. I found Bridgette Sheridan’s “At Birth: The Modern State, Modern Medicine, and the Royal Midwife Louise Bourgeois in Seventeenth-Century France” to be helpful. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. For an overview of early modern midwifery, see Hilary Marlin
’s The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe.

  Ellison Findly’s biography Nur Jahan, Empress of Mughal India was my main source for NUR JAHAN.

  There has been a lot written about the YOSHIWARA PLEASURE DISTRICT, ukiyo-e paintings, and Japanese courtesans and geisha, though most focuses on a later historical period. For my present purposes, Cecilia Segawa Seigle’s Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan was most helpful.

  GASPARA STAMPA has been annointed a member of the core Western canon by the self-appointed arbiter Harold Bloom, and there is a generous body of material on her. Ann Rosalind Jones’s The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 and Katharina M. Wilson’s Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation contain essays on Stampa that can provide an entry for further research.

  The Norton Critical edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s THE ROARING GIRL, edited by Jennifer Panek, includes fourteen critical essays.

  There has been a fair amount written on CATALINA DE ERAUSO, most of it, unsurprisingly, strongly oriented to gender studies, and for the most part rather repetitive. One might hope for future scholars to address the basic factual problems of her biography, which are substantial (it is difficult to reconcile various dates associated with her). A section in Stephanie Merrim’s Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the better treatments of de Erauso. Sherry Velasco, in The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso, does a particularly good job of considering the cultural reception of de Erauso’s story. Among others who have written on her are Jerome R. Adams and Eva Mendieta. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World is a competent recent translation by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto of the memoir attributed to de Erauso.

  R. Ward Bissell’s Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné provides an exellent overview of the career of ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI. David Topper and Cynthia Gillis have explored the possibility of influence from Galileo’s work with parabolas on her painting. See also works by Keith Christiansen, Elizabeth Cropper, and Mary D. Garrard.

  Creative Imitation

  For DONG QICHANG (Tung Ch’i-ch’ang in the old Wade-Giles transliteration system), see the two-volume The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, but be aware you will need a wheelbarrow to get it home. Additional resources include the Proceedings of the Tung Ch’i-Ch’ang International Symposium and The Compelling Image and The Distant Mountains and other works by James Cahill.

  Pieter Roelofs’s Hendrick Avercamp: Master of the Ice Scene and Ariane Van Suchtelen’s Holland Frozen in Time: The Dutch Winter Landscape in the Golden Age are richly illustrated resources on the ice scene paintings of HENDRICK AVERCAMP. Bravo to LACMA for making high-resolution images of Winter Scene on a Frozen Canal (pp. 144–145) and other works freely available online on the grounds that they are in the public domain. More museums should follow LACMA’s example.

  Brian Fagan’s wide-ranging The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 is the most accessible and appealing book on the LITTLE ICE AGE that I know of. Another source to consult is H. H. Lamb’s more technical Climate, History and the Modern World.

  For HENDRICK GOLTZIUS I found Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten’s handsomely illustrated Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints and Paintings most helpful.

  I am indebted to Theodore K. Rabb (The Last Days of the Renaissance) for the argument, which I have closely followed here, that the painting career of PETER PAUL RUBENS reflects a progression from glorification of militarism to revulsion for it. Mark Lamster’s Master of Shadows is a readable book on the painter’s diplomatic career, although it strains at times in an effort to cast Rubens’s diplomatic work as something akin to a spy adventure. Kristin Lohse Belkin’s Rubens, from Phaidon Press, is a convenient concise introduction to the artist.

  Tsueno Takeda’s Kano Eitoku is a clear if somewhat dated introduction to the KANO SCHOOL OF JAPANESE PAINTING. Sandy Kita studies IWASA MATABEI in The Last Tosa: Iwasa Katsumochi Matabei, Bridge to Ukiyo-e.

  There are many good books on MUGHAL PAINTING. One of my favorites is Painting the Mughal Experience by Som Prakash Verma, whose other books on this topic include one devoted to the Mughal painter Mansur. I also relied heavily on Orataoaditya Pal’s Master Artists of the Imperial Mughal Court. Susan Stronge’s Made for Mughal Emperors is an excellent recent title focusing on life in and around the workshops of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. Other helpful titles include Ashok Kumar Srivastava’s Mughal Painting: An Interplay of Indigenous and Foreign Traditions, Wheeler M. Thackston’s illustrated and annotated translation of the Jahangirnama, and Elaine Wright’s Muraqqa’.

  Sheila Canby dominates RIZA-YI ABBASI studies. Her The Rebellious Reformer is a beautifully produced book (though lacking an index and difficult to navigate since the images are not in numerical order) providing the best guide to the artist’s life and work. Unfortunately, it can b-e hard to find — there seems not to be a single copy in the entire University of California system. Another excellent book by Canby is Shah Abbas and the Remaking of Iran (where reproductions tend to be larger). For more titles by Canby, see the list of Selected Reading.

  Information about CHEN JIRU and WU BIN relies on The Distant Mountains and other works by James Cahill, and on Chinese painting in general I have at times consulted curators in the Chinese art department at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.

  Witch Hunters and Truth Seekers

  John Henry’s slim The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science is a great little sourcebook on themes in EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SCIENCE.

  Recent books on JOHANNES KEPLER are not necessarily improvements over earlier works. Max Caspar’s 1959 Kepler remains the standard biography, but Arthur Koestler’s The Watershed, which was originally part of his The Sleepwalkers, is well written (and shorter); Koestler strongly admires Kepler and favors him over Galileo. James A. Conner’s Kepler’s Witch is a biography framed around his mother’s witchcraft trial. Despite repetitions, it is a sincere and useful book, but HarperOne should be ashamed of their failure to adequately copy edit it, a failure that leaves the reader confronting many embarrassing sentences such as “She was, like her father, a practical woman.” Books by Kitty Ferguson and Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder focus on Kepler’s relationship with Tycho Brahe.

  There is a wealth of material on GALILEO. Stillman Drake’s many publications remain the core texts in English. Drake helped to recast the scientist as a defender of the faith rather than a challenger of it. James Reston’s Galileo: A Life is a good more recent work aimed at a more general audience. William R. Shea focuses on Galileo’s fertile middle period. Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter fleshes out a relationship I’ve only touched on here. There is a helpful list of further reading as well as a useful chronology at the online Galileo Project: http://galileo.rice.edu/lib/bibliography.html.

  In books like Islamic Mathematical Astronomy and Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, respectively, David A. King and George Saliba have led recent investigation into SCIENCE IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD. John Freely also discusses connections between Islamic and European science. Islamic Science by Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an illustrated overview, while Science, Tools and Magic by Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith is a beautifully illustrated look at Islamic scientific instuments. Astrolabes of the World, originally published in 1932 by a curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is scholarly and valuable but marred by passages expressing the prejudices of the time, such as “It has been pointed out that the Koran does not contain a single precept that is favourable to the study of Natural Science. It is therefore scarcely a matter for surprise that for the first century after the Hegira in A.D. 622, the thoughts of the fanatical followers of Mohammed were directed to spread their creed by sword rather than by reason.”

  Majid Fakhry has written on ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY,
and Ibrahim Kalin has produced substantial work on MULLA SADRA. The Encyclopaedia of Islam and the online Encyclopædia Iranica are generally helpful on science, philosophy, and other topics related to the Islamic world.

  Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions is a fine, readable introduction to the history of ESOTERIC THOUGHT in the West.

  Francis Yates’s politically oriented The Rosicrucian Enlightenment is the work on ROSECRUCIANISM to which most others refer. It includes the text of the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, a collection of papers from two conferences held in 1995 and 1997, updates and expands on Yates’s work with mixed success. Susanna Åkerman has discussed the spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe.

  Though a tad stuffy, George Perrigo Cooper’s Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy remains a useful guide to the topic of MACROCOSMS AND MICROCOSMS.

  On the INNER ALCHEMY of Taoism I like Stephen Little’s Taoism and the Arts of China, and of course Joseph Needham also has much to say on inner alchemy and on Chinese science in general. A more recent work updating and complementing Needham’s is On Their Own Terms by Benjamin A. Elman.

  I have followed David Tod Roy in my understanding of THE PLUM IN THE GOLDEN VASE (Jin Ping Mei).

  Carl J. Ernst’s “Being Careful with the Goddess: Yoginis in Persian and Arabic Texts” is the groundbreaking work on Pietro della Valle and the Kamarupa Seed Syllables. It is available from Manohar Publishers. An online version can be found through a web search. Mircea Eliade wrote on Tantrism in his book Yoga.

  Andrew Weeks’s Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic is inescapable on JACOB BOEHME. At a more general level, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions is, again, good on this, as on other topics. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman’s Modern Esoteric Spirituality includes a chapter on Boehme by Pierre Deghaye.