Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Aidan Clarke: an appreciation
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Making good: New perspectives on the English in early modern Ireland
- 2 The attainder of Shane O'Neill, Sir Henry Sidney and the problems of Tudor state-building in Ireland
- 3 Dynamics of regional development: processes of assimilation and division in the marchland of south-east Ulster in late medieval and early modern Ireland
- 4 The ‘common good’ and the university in an age of confessional conflict
- 5 The construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614
- 6 The Bible and the bawn: an Ulster planter inventorised
- 7 ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin
- 8 The Irish peers, political power and parliament, 1640–1641
- 9 The Irish elections of 1640–1641
- 10 Catholic Confederates and the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649
- 11 Protestant churchmen and the Confederate Wars
- 12 The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problems?
- 13 Settlement, transplantation and expulsion: a comparative study of the placement of peoples
- 14 Interests in Ireland: the ‘fanatic zeal and irregular ambition’ of Richard Lawrence
- 15 Temple's fate: reading The Irish Rebellion in late seventeenth-century Ireland
- 16 Conquest versus consent as the basis of the English title to Ireland in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland … Stated (1698)
- Principal publications of Aidan Clarke
- Index
12 - The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problems?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Aidan Clarke: an appreciation
- Conventions
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Making good: New perspectives on the English in early modern Ireland
- 2 The attainder of Shane O'Neill, Sir Henry Sidney and the problems of Tudor state-building in Ireland
- 3 Dynamics of regional development: processes of assimilation and division in the marchland of south-east Ulster in late medieval and early modern Ireland
- 4 The ‘common good’ and the university in an age of confessional conflict
- 5 The construction of argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and religious controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614
- 6 The Bible and the bawn: an Ulster planter inventorised
- 7 ‘That Bugbear Arminianism’: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin
- 8 The Irish peers, political power and parliament, 1640–1641
- 9 The Irish elections of 1640–1641
- 10 Catholic Confederates and the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, 1641–1649
- 11 Protestant churchmen and the Confederate Wars
- 12 The crisis of the Spanish and the Stuart monarchies in the mid-seventeenth century: local problems or global problems?
- 13 Settlement, transplantation and expulsion: a comparative study of the placement of peoples
- 14 Interests in Ireland: the ‘fanatic zeal and irregular ambition’ of Richard Lawrence
- 15 Temple's fate: reading The Irish Rebellion in late seventeenth-century Ireland
- 16 Conquest versus consent as the basis of the English title to Ireland in William Molyneux's Case of Ireland … Stated (1698)
- Principal publications of Aidan Clarke
- Index
Summary
Many people living in the early seventeenth century complained bitterly about the unprecedented harshness of their world. In 1623 an Italian preacher, Secondo Lancellotti, set out to refute these pessimists in a book entitled L'hoggidì, overo il mondo non peggiore ne più calamitoso del passato [Nowadays, or how the world is not worse or more calamitous than it used to be]. First he identified forty-nine Inganni (‘fallacies’) held by the Hoggidiani (‘people nowadays’, with the sense of ‘whiners’). Then he laboriously gave examples in each of the forty-nine categories (the Disinganni) to prove the Hoggidiani wrong. Thus ‘women nowadays are not more vain than those in the past’; ‘princes nowadays are not more avarious or indifferent towards their subjects than they used to be’; and ‘human life nowadays is not shorter, so that men do not live for less time now than they have done for thousands of years’. Lancellotti devoted eight of his last chapters, covering almost 200 pages, to natural phenomena: he reviewed recent accounts of severe earthquakes, floods, cold weather, famines and plague epidemics ‘nowadays’ and pointed out that similar events in the past had been far worse. According to Lancellotti, life had never been so good; but proving his case took over 700 pages!
Although L'hoggidì proved a publishing success – Philip IV owned a copy and a sequel soon appeared – evidence multiplied to support most of the ‘fallacies’ that Lancellotti denounced.
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- British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland , pp. 252 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005