Coster, Samuel
(1579-1665) Dutch dramatist and surgeon
Coster is important as the founder of the duytsche acad-emie in his native Amsterdam and for his tragedies, which are in the tradition of seneca. His Iphigenia (1617) was one of the anti-Calvinist satires that brought the academy into disfavor with the authorities; in other respects the tragedies, which also include Ithys (1615) and Polyxena (1619), exhibit the usual Senecan bias towards bloodcurdling horrors. Coster’s farces, including Teeuwis de Boer (performed 1612), are written in the old rederijker mode (see chambers of rhetoric) and show little awareness of Renaissance trends.
costume
With the disappearance of ancient Roman dress, even in Italy, the standard differentiation between male and female clothing was established in the early Middle Ages throughout Europe: men in trousers (or hose) and women in skirts. In the later Middle Ages clothing became one of the principal indicators of social class, and sumptuary laws were in force in most countries to ensure that the distinctions were observed. These laws also operated to protect home-produced textiles against encroachments by foreign goods. Another area with which sumptuary laws were often concerned was the banning of fashions that might encourage sexual license: low-cut dresses for women, exaggerated codpieces for men.
Sheep for wool and flax for linen had been familiar in Europe since prehistoric times. Silk came from the East as a luxury import until silkworm eggs were brought to Constantinople around 550 ce, and from there spread around the Mediterranean shores. Genoa, Venice, Florence, Lucca, and Milan were famous silk-manufacturing centers in the Middle Ages, and in 1480 Louis XI of France set up silk weaving at Tours, an initiative followed in 1520 by Francis I, who started the Rhone valley silk industry, based on Lyons and staffed by Genoese and Florentine weavers. Furs, mainly from central and northern Europe, were worn both as necessities and luxuries; as an item of male attire the wearing of certain prestigious furs was restricted to those of royal blood, and sumptuary laws often regulated very minutely the type and quantity of fur allowable to any particular social class.
By the late 14th century international vagaries of fashion can be discerned. Peasant dress varied according to locality and was more dependent upon local products, but the clothes of the prosperous merchant classes and of the aristocracy show pronounced and well-documented trends. Ostentatious impracticality in dress displayed the leisured status of well-born ladies, who wore trailing skirts, long sleeves, and elaborately horned or pinnacled headdresses, which reached a (literal) peak of extravagance in 15th-century France and Burgundy. At the same time courtiers affected the poulaine, an extremely long and tapering toe to the shoe; such shoes were known as "crakows," a word which, like "poulaine," indicates the Polish origin of the fashion. An English statute of 1464 banned any cobbler or leatherworker from making poulaines more than two inches long. By the end of the century abruptly squared-off toes became the rage.
In the 16th century men’s outer clothes were frequently "slashed," that is decorated with numerous parallel cuts to show off the garment underneath; this fashion was even imitated in armor. Later they also practiced "bombasting" or stuffing their garments with cottonwool or similar padding. A corresponding move away from the natural line of the body is seen in women’s use of the farthingale or hooped petticoat in the same period. Costume became a major form of display in Renaissance courts, particularly on such state occasions as the field of the cloth of gold. jewelry was attached to it in profusion, modest lace collars or frills swelled to huge ruffs, and the art of the embroiderer in gold and silken threads was lavishly employed. At a slightly lower social level the law of the land still tried to tie the wearing of certain garments to social or military obligations; thus a Tudor gentleman whose wife wore silk petticoats and velvet kirtles, the cloth for which was an imported luxury, would be expected to provide one light cavalry horse with its accoutrements in time of war.
Cotton, Sir Robert Bruce
(1571-1631) English politician and bibliophile
Born in Denton, Huntingdonshire, the son of a wealthy landowner, Cotton was educated at Cambridge University, and then moved to London where he began his political career in 1601 as member of parliament for Newtown. By this time he had begun to assemble one of the finest collections of books and manuscripts ever seen in private hands. Used by many contemporary scholars, such as bacon, camden, and speed, it contained such items as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the manuscript of Beowulf. Although initially on good terms with james i, Cotton was arrested in 1615 for involvement in the poisoning of Sir Thomas overbury (1613). Released soon afterwards, he was later suspected by Charles I of sedition and arrested once more in 1629. Although released in the general amnesty of 1630 he was denied access to his own library. The collection itself was placed in the British Museum in 1753 where it remains today.
Council of Ten
The Venetian body mainly responsible for state security. Its establishment dates from the investigation into Baiamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy (1310). Members were chosen for one year and could not serve consecutive terms of office. The numbers on the council varied and included the doge and his six councillors. The council employed spies, received reports, conducted secret diplomacy, and sometimes ordered assassinations. It supervised the manufacture and distribution of artillery and munitions until 1582. After the appointment of three inquisitors of state (1539) for the secret investigation and punishment of crimes, the council was widely perceived as a sinister organization.
Counter-Reformation
The reform of ecclesiastical abuses and the vitalization of spirituality were lively concerns in the decades before luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses and the beginning of the Protestant reformation. The early 16th-century Catholic Reformation continued after 1517 until, by the 1530s, it had become a vast movement of spiritual and moral renewal (see spirituall). The Catholic Reformation (meaning originally the reformist movement within the unitary pre-1517 Church) was therefore independent of the Protestant Reformation (meaning the reformation led by those who either removed themselves from the Roman communion or were excommunicated from that communion) and was not necessarily directed against it. Intellectuals such as Jacques lefevre d’etaples, Desiderius erasmus, Francisco de quinones, and Juan de valdes (to name but a few) were all representatives of this movement. To the degree that the Council of trent disciplined and revitalized the ecclesiastical offices of the Church, it too was part of the Catholic Reformation. However, after 1540 there was also a desire to combat Protestantism, to counterattack, and to regain lost ground. This movement is called the Counter-Reformation. It was destructive of some of the most liberal trends of the earlier 16th-century Church, and it created the psychology and worship of Roman Catholicism until Vatican II in the 1960s.
The Counter-Reformation can best be discussed under the headings of theology, psychology, triumphalism, and mysticism. First, theology. Since Protestant ideas and Catholic spiritualist notions (understood to their disadvantage in the context of the Counter-Reformation) had been spread largely by preachers and the new printing press (for example, between 1517 and 1526 there were over 2000 editions of works by Luther), ecclesiastical and temporal authorities deemed it necessary to "protect" their flocks against dangerous proselytizing. Kings, princes, and civic authorities strengthened censorship. In 1520 the first index of prohibited books was issued by henry viii who sought to protect England from Lutheran ideas. To guide civil authorities, the papacy finally (1559) issued its more famous index librorum prohibitorum. Local inquisitions and courts also took action against heretical theology. The Roman Inquisition was reestablished in 1542 to rid Italy of heresy. French provincial par-lements actively tried heretics. Temporal lords began requiring printers to acquire royal "licences" before allowing them to publish books. Should unwelcome books be published, the presses could then be shut down by revoking its licence. The Roman Catholic Church organized an elaborate censorship system by which texts had to obtain a nihil obstat ("there is nothing objectionable") and an imprimatur ("it may be printed") before the presses could run. It is paradoxical that the same invention, the printing press, could lead to the expansion of scholarship and the dissemination of ideas as well as to modern censorship.
The Counter-Reformation period also saw the foundation of new religious orders such as the Society of Jesus (jesuits). Founded by ignatius loyola and a handful of companions in 1534, the order quickly grew in numbers and spread throughout western Europe. Ignatius was a soldier-mystic and, at one point, a near heretic. His Constitutions (first drawn up between 1547 and 1550) laid down a strict organization for the Jesuits. His Spiritual Exercises, setting out the method of prayer and meditation followed by the first generation of Jesuits, exemplify the commitment, ardor, and discipline of the Counter-Reformation "Christian soldier," very different from the early 16th-century Catholic-Reformation model offered in Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christiani (1504; Handbook of the Christian Soldier). The single-minded passion of the Counter-Reformation is reflected in Ignatius’s words: "To arrive at complete certainty, this is the mental attitude we should maintain: I will believe that the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the hierarchical church."
The Council of Trent (1542-65) solidified the theological armamentum of the Counter-Reformation Church. Taken as a whole, the council was as dogmatic and militant as Ignatius Loyola for the Catholic camp and John calvin for the Protestant side. The council, a long time in coming into being and sometimes precarious in its existence, managed to define Roman Catholic doctrine for the next 400 years. It countered Protestant doctrines, issue by issue, and in this way it set forth a basically systematic ordering of Roman Catholic doctrine, thus making crystal clear who was a Catholic and who a Protestant. As one historian has noted, the medieval Church was generally more ecumenical and permissive theologically than was the post-Tridentine religious world. Peaceful coexistence of competing theological ideas was no longer possible during the Counter-Reformation era.
While there was a clear doctrinal gap between the Counter-Reformation Church and the various Protestant churches after 1560, there was also a growing psychological gap in terms of devotional practice and style of piety. Counter-Reformation piety was characterized by a heated emotionalism, especially for the laity. The religious paintings of the late 16th and 17 th centuries aimed at suggesting ideal worship practices: weeping, distorted figures, exaggerated gestures, and eyes turned piously toward heaven. Artistic examples of tearful repentance and contrition abounded: St. Peter shedding tears after having denied Jesus; St. Mary Magdalene’s remorse for her earlier life. To encourage the Catholic viewer to share the tears and agonies of Christ on the cross as well as the martyrdoms of the saints, these scenes were pictured in gruesome detail: St. Agatha having her breasts torn away; St. Edward with his throat cut. Death became as much a preoccupation as it had been in the 14th-century plague years and quite unlike the halcyon days of the Renaissance when the epitaph on a cardinal’s tomb (1541) read, "Why fear death, which brings us rest?" Now, the typical Counter-Reformation tombstone might read, "Ashes, ashes, nothing but ashes."
Triumphalism was an aspect, one could argue, of the psychology of the Counter-Reformation. However, it is distinct enough to be discussed separately. The Counter-Reformation Church was on the march in several regards. First, every attempt was made to enrich the ceremonial and feasts of the Catholic Church. The consecrated Host was displayed on feasts, proclaiming the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, as opposed to the Protestant denials of this doctrine by zwingli and others. The feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ), although observed from the late 13th century, usually with public processions, was in its most developed form a child of the Counter-Reformation and served triumphantly to underline the Eucharistic doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Frescoes in St. Peter’s, Rome, showed Peter walking on water and healing the sick, asserting artistically the primacy of Peter and his successors against the Protestant denials of the authority of the pope. In New Spain the Church adopted an assertive posture, trying to make up for the falling away of Protestants from the Catholic fold in Europe by bringing new, native American members into the Roman communion. And the churches of the New World were decorated just as lavishly as in Europe. In sum, the Counter-Reformation had succeeded in halting the victories of Protestantism and had begun to turn them back. The observer in 1540 might well have thought all of Europe would soon become Protestant. However, a few decades later, the same observer attending the triumphant polyphonies of palestrina in the Jesuit church of Gesu in Rome would see the Church once more sure of itself doc-trinally and psychologically.
Mysticism was at the heart of Counter-Reformation religious emotion. In few other periods have there been such attractive mystics as at this time. Of these the two most prominent were St. teresa of avila and St. john of the cross. As individual as these two visionaries and reformers were, they are completely in harmony with the general qualities of Counter-Reform and the Council of Trent. One reason for their appeal is the harmony between the Tridentine doctrinal decrees and the assumptions of mysticism. Mystics such as Teresa and John believed that men and women, with the help of God’s grace, could gradually perfect themselves and briefly unite with God. Mysticism is totally unlike the assumptions of classical Protestantism (as exemplified by Luther and Calvin), for it is optimistic about man and God. In the mystics’ planned and ordered meditations, spiritual exercises, and rigorous training of the will, 16th-century Roman Catholic mysticism complemented a theology which affirmed the freedom of the will, man’s ability to cooperate in his own salvation, and the efficacy of good works and charity.
Courtier, The
(Italian Il cortegiano; 1528) The book by Baldassare castiglione, describing the accomplishments of the ideal courtier and portraying the court of Urbino shortly before the death of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefel-tro in 1508. Written and gradually expanded between 1508 and 1524, the work, following Plato and Cicero’s De oratore, is cast in dialogue form as the lively informal conversations of a group of courtiers and ladies. Popularizing humanist (Aristotelian and Ciceronian) ideals of the model citizen, Castiglione depicts the courtier, though necessarily of noble birth and trained in arms, as a gentleman, learned, a connoisseur, of cultivated tastes and sensibility, excelling at a variety of civilized pursuits but always with effortless grace (sprezzatura).
Following its first publication in 1528, Il cortegiano very rapidly reached an audience all over Europe through versions in Spanish (1534), English (1561), Polish (1566), and Latin (1571). The English translation by Sir Thomas hoby, entitled The Book of the Courtier, struck a chord with the aspirational gentry of Elizabethan England and was the forerunner of a whole genre of "courtesy" books explaining how to behave like a gentleman; a recent appearance of Hoby’s text is in an edition by Virginia Cox (London and Rutland, Vt., 1994). George Bull, retaining Hoby’s title, made a 20th-century version for the Penguin Classics series (Harmondsworth, U.K., rev. ed., 1976).
Couto, Diogo do
(1542-1616) Portuguese historian Born in Lisbon and educated at the Jesuit college there, do Couto sailed to India (1559), where he spent virtually all of his adult life. Philip II appointed him as royal historiographer, a position he used to expose the decadence of Portuguese affairs in the subcontinent, most notably in Dialogo do soldado prdtico. From 1602 do Couto also continued barros’s Decadas da Asia on the Portuguese imperial adventure in the East. He died in Goa.
Covarrubias, Alonso de
(c. 1488-1564) Spanish architect and sculptor
Covarrubias was evidently trained in the Gothic tradition and, as one of the nine consultants on Salamanca cathedral, had an opportunity at an early age to practice in an essentially Gothic style. However, his subsequent works were executed in a manner influenced by contemporary Italian trends and became good examples of the plateresque style in Spain. Many of his most important works were executed in Toledo, where from 1504 he worked on the hospital of Sta. Cruz with the late Gothic architect Enrique egas; on Egas’s death (1534) Covarru-bias succeeded him as master mason at Toledo cathedral. Of his work there, the chapel of the New Kings (1531-34) survives as a testament to his skill. Other works included the church of the Piedad at Guadalajara (1526), a fine staircase at the archbishop’s palace at Alcala (c. 1530), and the rebuilding of the Bisagra Neuva gate at Toledo (1559). As architect to the royal castles he also oversaw the rebuilding of the Alcazar at Toledo (1537-53) for Charles V.
Covilha, Pero da
(died 1525) Portuguese explorer Covilha, who was called after his birthplace in Beira, served at both the Castilian and Portuguese courts before being dispatched (1487) to explore the overland trade routes to the East and to discover the country of the legendary priest-king Prester John (i.e. Ethiopia). At the same time Bartholomeu diaz was sent to look for the southern sea route round Africa. From Barcelona Covilha went via Naples to Rhodes and Egypt, and then to the Arabian peninsula and India. On his way back to Cairo he made a detour down the East African coast. From Cairo he sent back to Portugal a report on the feasibility of his route for the spice trade and then set out via Arabia for Ethiopia. There he was detained as an honored prisoner of state for the remainder of his life.
Cracow
A city in Poland on a strategic site on the left bank of the Vistula. Traditionally said to have been founded about 700 ce by a mythical Prince Krak, Cracow was nearly destroyed by the Tatars in 1241, but the rebuilt town prospered and in 1305 became the capital of the Polish kings, who continued to be crowned and buried in Cracow’s cathedral of St. Stanislas until 1764. Cracow university was founded in 1364 and played a leading role in strengthening the ties of the Polish Church with the West; the university library is housed in the fine 15th-century university buildings. Besides being famous as an intellectual center in the 15th and 16th centuries, Cracow is famous for the number and beauty of its churches; the cathedral, which was substantially rebuilt in the 14th century, houses masterpieces by Veit stoss, Pieter vischer, Guido reni, and others, and the Marienkirche contains Stoss’s great altarpiece of the Virgin. The former royal castle on the rocky outcrop known as the Wawel was rebuilt in the Italian Renaissance style under King Sigismund I (reigned 1506-48), who married (1518) Bona Sforza of Milan, under whose influence the court at Cracow became a major northern center of Renaissance culture. The Sigis-mund chapel in the cathedral (1519-30) is an outstanding example of pure Italian Renaissance style.
Cranach, Lucas
(1472-1553) German painter and print maker
Born at Kronach and initially trained by his painter father Hans, Cranach had become established at Coburg by 1501. Subsequently he traveled through the Danube area to Vienna, where he stayed until 1504 and established contact with humanists at the university. His Winterthur portraits of Dr Johannes Cuspinian and his wife, his Berlin/Nuremberg portraits of Stephan Reuss and his wife, and his Berlin Rest on the Flight into Egypt all date from this period. Distinguished by vibrant warm colors and lush landscape backgrounds, these are key early works of the socalled danube school.
In 1505 Cranach was appointed court painter to Elector Frederick the Wise at Wittenberg, succeeding the itinerant Venetian Jacopo de’ barbari. Shortly after this, Cranach’s style began to change. His Martyrdom of St. Catherine (1506; Dresden) has a strongly decorative surface design and a light, transparent coloring reminiscent of durer. Around 1506 Cranach began to produce woodcuts. Like burgkmair, he pioneered the two-tone chiaroscuro print, of which his 1507 St. George is an early example. In 1509 Cranach visited the Netherlands. His Frankfurt Holy Kinship triptych (1509) revels the influence of metsys in its subject matter and perspectivally deep architectural setting, but the shallow surface linearity of its figure grouping indicates Cranach’s own future development. These decorative qualities are manifest in the full-size, full-length portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and Duchess Catherine (1514; Dresden). Both figures are portrayed in brightly colored court dress against a flat black background, the effect emphasizing both silhouette and detail in a "heraldic" manner, reminiscent of a playing card.
At Wittenberg Cranach became closely associated with Martin luther, who became godfather to one of the painter’s children. Cranach’s woodcut Luther as Junker Jorg (1521-22) is the first of a long series of portraits of the reformer. After the coming of Lutheranism to Saxony, Cranach concentrated increasingly upon portraits, secular themes from classical antiquity, and small religious pictures. With his Frankfurt Venus (1532) he perfected a particular type of slender, palid female nude which he and his workshop repeated in numerous variants until the mid-century, usually in pictures with titles such as Venus and Cupid, Lucretia, The Nymph of the Fountain, Adam and Eve, and The Judgment of Paris. Iconographically, an interesting departure in his later career is a series of religious pictures on novel themes acceptable to Protestant theology, such as Christ and the Children and Allegory of the Old and New Testaments. He also painted a small number of large, multifigure compositions set against landscape backgrounds, such as the Madrid Stag Hunt (1545) and the Berlin Fountain of Youth (1546). In 1550 Cranach followed his master, Elector John Frederick, to Augsburg and in 1552 to Weimar. He died there the following year while engaged upon a large triptych, the Allegory of Redemption, subsequently completed by his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515-86). By then Cranach was the most influential and sought-after painter in northern Germany. The author of an unique and particularly successful form of German mannerism, he was also the principal visual apologist of the Reformation.
Cranmer, Thomas
(1489-1556) Archbishop of Canterbury (1533-56)
A learned theologian and an early admirer of luther, in 1532 he visited leading Lutherans in Germany, where he married the niece of Andreas osiander. He already enjoyed royal favor for supporting henry viii’s first divorce, and despite his marriage, which was in contravention of his clerical vows, he became the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury in 1533; subsequently he aided the king in his three later divorces. During edward vi’s reign (1547-53) Cranmer worked to make the Church of England a truly Protestant Church. He encouraged publication of a new Bible in English and wrote much of the 1549 and 1552 books of common prayer. On her accession the Catholic mary i stripped him of his office. Condemned as a heretic, Cranmer died bravely at the stake.
Credi, Lorenzo di (Lorenzo d’Andrea d’Oerigo)
(1459-1537) Italian painter, sculptor, and goldsmith Credi was born in Florence and became a pupil with Pe-rugino and Leonardo da Vinci in the workshop of Andrea del verrocchio. He exhibited considerable skill as a draftsman and after Verrocchio’s death he became the head of the most flourishing artistic workshop in Florence. He himself produced numerous pictures of seated Madonnas, including the Madonna and Saints altarpiece in Pistoia (1510). Other works were highly imitative of Leonardo’s early paintings. Among his best drawings is his Self-Portrait (c. 1490; National Gallery, Washington).
