There's a reasonable amount of confusion in the comments between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell.
Thomas Cromwell (1485 - 1540), who this article is about, was a relatively cosmopolitan man and chief minister to Henry VIII before being beheaded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (1599 - 1658) was a puritan Christian anti-monarchist who had Charles I executed after the English Civil War and ruled as Lord Protector afterwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell
(I am not a historian and encourage you to read the Wikipedia articles rather than relying on my very brief summaries!)
He was one interesting dude. He could speak Italian which was a really exceptional thing to do. England is on the edge of Europe, quite provincial, not in great power. To go to Italy was to put yourself right in the centre of European culture. Especially Florence, where Cromwell ended up, was the epicentre of civilisation and culture.
So he learned Italian and came back to England in his twenties; extremely well educated, not just speaking Italian but a bit of German a bit of Spanish, fluent French and also reading Latin, which was crucial at that period. But Italian ended up being his passport into the eventual public life.
The way Wolf Hall tells the story, he also learned about bookkeeping/banking in Italy which combined with his (later?) legal training let him run rings around the other powerful public figures of the time.
Wolf Hall is worth reading for many reasons but one of the interesting/unusual aspects of the novel is that its kindof answering 'what would happen if a smart fairly ruthless person with fairly modern legal/administative/finance skills was sent back in time 500 years'
That’s the origin of the famous quote where Thomas More said of Cromwell that he was so clever and resourceful that if you locked him in prison and came back a few weeks later he’d be living like a king and all his jailers would owe him money.
I think you are way overestimating 1600s florence and underestimating 1600s england.
> England is on the edge of Europe, quite provincial, not in great power.
We are talking 1600s england, not 600s england. During Cromwell's time, england was easily a major european power settling colonies in the new world. Far more powerful and far more important that italian city-states like florence.
> To go to Italy was to put yourself right in the centre of European culture
By the time cromwell was born, the italian renaissance was a distant memory. Shakespeare was the one advancing european culture, not dante.
> Especially Florence, where Cromwell ended up, was the epicentre of civilisation and culture.
No. The epicenter of civilization and culture moved west and north of florence by cromwell's time. Spain, France, Netherlands, England, etc were the new drivers of european civilization. Not florence, not italy.
> not just speaking Italian but a bit of German a bit of Spanish, fluent French and also reading Latin,
Pretty much what most educated europeans could do.
Thomas Cromwell was active in English high politics during the 1530's to 1540's. I believe England was just beginning to become a European power at that time. Maybe you are thinking of Oliver Cromwell?
I think they are. Though while being a bit strong, they’re not entirely wrong.
Henry VIII’s England was a major world power, not as huge as it would become under his daughter Elizabeth, but in the list of world powers.
Italy… was not, tho it still held significant cultural sway. It was midway through the renaissance at that time. That is likely what the original poster was referring to (and is right, if a bit over enthusiastic).
The big guns were really Spain & France, and then England & the Netherlands challenging from behind.
It wouldn’t be until Elizabeth that the “British Empire” would really start to be a dominant power, and she laid the foundation for the expansion to come.
the English Wikipedia article is not shy about some of those "Italian" influences ! He was eventually executed for political reasons, as the article says.
The idea of a renaissance period happening in Europe in the 1400s-1500s only came about starting in the 19th century, so to find a modern equivalent we’ll have to wait a few hundred years for future historians to judge. Who knows what pop culture from today will stand the test of time.
That sounds good but it is not true. The distribution of income is not uniform on the face of Earth and that is not due to sheer choice. The places where people with lower incomes live are not always the places where they would prefer to live.
Location still matters for many reasons, infrastructure, safety, public health, climate, and industry-specific agglomeration effects being among them.
None of those are culture or intellectual pursuits all of those are local societal issues. I thought the question was regarding cultural developmet. Renaissance type things not code of Hamarabi type things.
Florence was a financial and trading center of Europe during the Renaissance when Thomas Cromwell travelled there. That economic power and probably that cosmopolitan atmosphere were what lay the ground for cultural development, specifically for the resurgence in arts and in scientific thinking.
Even with the internet we see that artistic and scientific output is uneven across the world. There are places where ideas thrive more than in others. For example, if you contribute to the research frontier in physics, chemistry, or computer science, you are very likely to be located in one of the few centers of thinking in your field.
I don’t see anything that obviates the internet as the leading cultural development exchange of our time. These centers use to be located along trade routes. This is no longer the case. Any group of people can gather anywhere in the world and create whatever.
You will see this Book of Hours depicted in many, many portraits and sacred art across the centuries. For example, the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin often depicts Mary in prayer, and she is holding a Book of Hours (which is sort of an adaptation of a Jewish psalter, but sacred art actually loves anachronisms, so it's common to show Biblical Jews with a book of Christian Prayer instead.)
The Liturgy of the Hours is still required daily of all clergy and religious. The Anglicans are especially fond of public celebrations, such as Evensong, which can be quite beautiful and rather brief, compared to Eucharistic liturgies.
A common misconception is that the book depicted with these figures is a Bible. Certainly, many of them could have owned a Bible, but that's a book they'd have on their shelf, not constantly in their hand and at their side throughout the day, every day of the week.
Sorry, I just could not get past casting Mark Rylance as Cromwell. In the books, he, Cromwell, is described as a thug and a street brawler, albeit a clever and ambitious one. As much as I like Rylance I can’t see him in a pub brawl.
I came to be an avid Wolf Hall fan (first TV then book) precisely because Rylance had made an impact on me playing a homeless alcoholic boxer years before in The Grass Arena, and I watched it originally solely because of him.
My recollection of the books is a bit rusty, but I think he also spoke Welsh (his brother-in-law's family was Welsh) and maybe Dutch as well? The Netherlands were the main market for English wool, and were the nursery of early English Protestantism (like Cromwell himself).
They are surprisingly excellent (and I say that as someone who loves the books and usually hates adaptations) not least because the cast (in particular Mark Rylance) are fantastic.
As an aside, for anyone who gets the chance to see Mark Rylance in theatre in particular I would say take it if you possibly can. I’ve seen him a few times and he has been absolutely staggeringly good every time.
This is a great place to note how stellar WOLF HALL and its sequels are. They make his life really accessible, even if it is a fictionalized account of real events.
I think Wolf Hall is rather over rated. It sort of projects quite a bit of modern sensibilities into people living in those times. It is also very sparse, in the sense it doesn't catch very much of the mannerisms of speech etc or even the physical details, flavour of of the times of things.
Counteranecdote: I'm pretty sensitive to anachronisms in historical depictions, and thought Wolf Hall was pretty darned good about situating itself in what felt like a reasonable facsimile of the 16th century. I mean, we can't know what people thought, or how. But, I don't recall any red flags offhand.
Man that rendering of Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of Thomas Cromwell is god-awful.
I saw it in person as a kid in the Frick Collection in NY hanging opposite Holbein's portrait of Thomas More and they completely changed how I looked at art. In person the portraits look downright photorealistic and when you get close to them, the detail is staggering, down to the stubble on More's face.
The photo in TFA looks nothing like I remember it. I wouldn't be surprised if RGB were inadequate in representing the colors, especially with proper museum lighting.
Holbein was a master, head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries. Kunstmuseum Basel has the largest collection of his paintings and it's on my bucket list.
My fascination goes to the way the content of the book is shared. Normally the unwashed masses would only be allowed to see a picture of the cover with a comment about the binding. Today it is different, we get selfies that show us, be it at unreadable distance, the inside of the book. I feel like I've seen an exposed ankle in the Victorian age, improperly exposed to something.
Brendan Behan had a few things to say about Cromwell's legacy, including this classy piece of doggerel
"Don't speak of your Protestant minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII"
Behan may have been talking about Oliver Cromwell, who I think figured much larger as an object of execration among the Irish. But, hey, my surname looks Dutch, so don't ask me.
My recollection of Borstal Boy was that the doggerel you quote was an ad-hoc translation from Irish.
Ah, but I don't think the rhymes Behan translated had anything in particular do with either Cromwell, save (remotely) by way of TC's agency in the new church.
I believe he was making a mischievous translation of a Gaelic text. So I think it's worth mentioning that, although I'm not too familiar with Irish Gaelic, in Scottish Gaelic the word "clach" means "stone" but is also the common word for "testicle".
If it's the same in Irish it may be a bit of bilingual punnery.
I honestly didn't see this as a controversial reading of the religion's doctrine, but in hindsight there's enough wealth held by the userbase here that it was bound to touch a nerve or two. I'm glad my comment doesn't seem to have caused things to turn too ugly and I'm genuinely sorry that it ended up making more work for you.
Not an expert but my reading of the article is that the Book of Hours/Hardouyn Hours was a Catholic prayer book in Latin and Thomas Cromwell was a secret sortof proto-Protestant who had illegal copies of the english translated Tyndale Bible hidden at his home. So the jewel encrusted latin prayer book might have been a cover story of a sort. As in, I don't think the prayer book in the famous painting reflected his actual (hidden, illegal) religous beliefs.
No, I was not. While Oliver certainly killed more, the reformation and crackdown that Thomas led claimed enough victims that I'm comfortable calling it mass murdr.
I don't think it's so cut and dry. A woman once washed his feet with expensive perfume. He then derided the man who scolded her for not selling it and giving the money to the poor.
The disciples were upset by the waste because Jesus had a pretty clear and consistent message on wealth. Jesus didn't tell them they were wrong about his message either, seems like he just didn't like that they were being dicks to the woman, didn't want her turned into a villain, and he went out of his way to say she would be remembered for her actions which were directly serving him.
> While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. "This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor." Aware of this, Jesus said to them, "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her."
Hearing the story as a kid though, I kind of suspected it was really just Jesus saying:
"I'm literally about to die for you assholes ffs, can you guys lay off for 5 minutes and just let me have this one nice thing!"
I've heard a few sermons that said the effect of the perfume might have lasted until his crucifixion, and might literally have been the one pleasant part of his execution and death. The other part, if you read the scriptures closely, Jesus generally treated the individual as a person first, and a problem (win) second, so the disciples being dicks to her wasn't something he'd be cool with. And he tended not to correct the individual in a group setting.
Well, I'm certainly no theologian, I just grew up in a christian household and according to scripture Jesus was neither shy or subtle about his views on wealth and greed. He returned to it again and again and again. It was clearly a pretty big deal to the guy.
A jewel encrusted prayer book is basically "Tell me you're a hypocrite without telling me you're a hypocrite"
This is a terrible question, one doesn't become an authority about gods. One reads about the so called actions/demands of gods. Maybe you were being sarcastic?
Thomas Cromwell (1485 - 1540), who this article is about, was a relatively cosmopolitan man and chief minister to Henry VIII before being beheaded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell (1599 - 1658) was a puritan Christian anti-monarchist who had Charles I executed after the English Civil War and ruled as Lord Protector afterwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell
(I am not a historian and encourage you to read the Wikipedia articles rather than relying on my very brief summaries!)