Joseph S. Freedman

Philosophical Writings on the Family in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe:

Recent research on the early modern European family has largely been based on archival sources that are extant for relatively few localities during this same period. This research can be augmented by examining discussions of the family contained within academic writings on theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and philosophy during the early modern period. This article focuses on philosophical writings that arose in connection with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century academic instruction. These writings routinely discuss the proper relationship between husband and wife, between parents and children, and between masters and servants; also discussed are various categories of domestic possessions and how these possessions should be acquired and administered. Within these philosophical writings, one controversial issue pertaining to family life is sometimes raised: whether servants are more essential to the family than children. These writings uniformly equate the family with the nuclear family; in doing so, they provide collaboration for similar findings by social and demographic historians.

Professionalization and "confessionalization": the place of physics, philosophy, and arts instruction at Central European academic institutions during the Reformation era.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, physics was regularly taught as part of instruction in philosophy and the arts at Central European schools and universities. However, physics did not have a special or privileged status within that instruction. Three general indicators of this lack of special status are suggested in this article. First, teachers of physics usually were paid less than teachers of most other university-level subject-matters. Second, very few Central European academics during this period appear to have made a career out of teaching physics. And third, Reformation Era schools and universities in Central Europe emphasized language instruction; such instruction not only was instrumental in promoting the confessional--i.e., Calvinist, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic--agendas of those same schools and universities, but also helped to prepare students for service in nascent but growing state governments.

Dilingae disputationes. Der Lehrinhalt der gedruckten Disputationen an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Dillingen, 1555–1648 (review)

BCPN melodies, it would appear that there was required no mastery of humanist theories of rhetorical eloquence. Other far-less-elevated stimuli can be proposed; all that was requisite was a synthesis of compositional approaches already well known. The manner in which church authority endorsed measured monophony, disposed (for ease both of performance and comprehension) one note per syllable,was already manifest through the 1544 setting of the English litany. Moreover, compositional sensitivity to the natural stresses and shapes of English vernacular text was not new in 1550; it had been in evidence at least since such pieces as the settings of “Woefully Arrayed” and “Ah, Robin” by William Cornysh (d. 1523). Merbecke was a perfectly competent composer, and to produce his BCPN he had only to add to these pre-existing approaches the application of a natural melodic gift to the novelty of composing to vernacular prose.