Du 1er au 3 octobre se tiendra à l’Université de Lille (France) un colloque international dédié aux temporalités urbaines.
DESCRIPTIF
« Les temporalités sont un code de lecture pour comprendre l’espace et rendre compte d’un monde complexe et contextualisé ». Cette citation que l’on doit à la géographe Françoise Lucchini (2015) ouvre une lecture originale de l’espace urbain, considéré au rythme de ses pulsations propres. La ville, comme espace construit, aménagé, vécu et pensé, a fait l’objet de nombreuses études, qui ont ponctuellement introduit une dimension temporelle à leurs réflexions, permettant de mieux saisir la dynamique de ses évolutions et des pratiques urbaines. Toutefois, il faut reconnaître que le « sens du temps », saisi au fil des rythmicités quotidiennes comme de l’organisation planifiée des lieux, a davantage retenu l’attention des géographes, urbanistes, sociologues ou des historiens des xixe et xxe siècles. L’accélération du temps induite par l’industrialisation, les grandes métamorphoses urbanistiques qui l’accompagnèrent et le développement des nouvelles technologies permet sans doute plus aisément de s’emparer de cette matière fuyante qu’est le temps et de forger, selon l’expression conçue par François Hartog (2003), un « régime d’historicité » présentiste, censément propre à la période contemporaine.
Pourtant, les remarques de Peter Burke (2004), commentateur des observations pionnières de Jacques Le Goff sur le « temps du marchand », invitent depuis plusieurs décennies à explorer la matière vivante des villes du Moyen Âge et de la première modernité, pour mieux comprendre le sens de la multiplicité des temporalités qui se concentrent en un même lieu et forcent à interroger le rapport entre « le champ de l’expérience » et « les horizons d’attente » des communautés médiévales (Koselleck, 1979).
C’est tout du moins l’idée qu’aimerait défendre cette rencontre, inscrite dans le projet FNS-Sinergia « Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348-1648) ». Il s’agira de saisir non seulement la mesure du temps présent, mais aussi le ressenti de son écoulement, qui troublait tant l’esprit de saint Augustin et de tous ceux qui s’efforcèrent d’en donner une définition. La question du temps subjectivement vécu peut s’avérer d’une grande banalité. Mais la replacer dans un contexte particulier, déterminé par autant de paramètres que sont les lieux, les statuts sociaux, les âges, les activités, les ambitions individuelles ou collectives ou encore les impératifs politiques, économiques, etc. lui donne toute sa richesse et comble les vœux de Marc Bloch, pour qui l’histoire se doit d’approcher « le moment humain où ces courants se resserrent dans le nœud puissant des consciences » (Bloch,1949). Dans la comparaison offerte par une vaste Europe urbaine occidentale, qui viendra en appui aux études plus spécifiquement dédiées à sa partie septentrionale, afin d’en saisir les spécificités, le but de cette rencontre est d’observer les citadins pris dans le jeu des multiples temporalités qui les traversent et nourrissent leur sentiment d’appartenance ou d’exclusion à différents groupes sociaux.
Comment les habitants de villes (mais aussi celles et ceux qui les traversent) habitent-ils le temps présent ? Comment partagent-ils cette expérience individuelle au sein des communautés auxquelles ils se réfèrent ou sont assignés ? Peut-on parler de time communities (communautés temporelles), façonnées par les contours du groupe social, de l’adhésion politique ou du partage d’une même foi ? Sur quel socle culturel se fondent cette appréhension et cette représentation du temps présent, considéré autant pour lui-même que pour le passé qu’il synthétise et l’avenir qu’il annonce ? Autant de questions non limitatives qui nourriront la réflexion. Rythmes quotidiens, dynamiques de l’événement, temps de l’intime, maîtrise du risque et impacts de l’accident, suspension de l’action, sont autant de perspectives qui permettront aux historiens et historiennes des sources de la pratique, de la littérature et des images de s’interroger sur la ville vécue et pensée dans le(s) présent(s) de celles et ceux qui l’animent.
From 1 to 3 October, the University of Lille (France) will host an international symposium dedicated to urban temporalities
DESCRIPTION
“Temporalities are a common code for deciphering space and giving an account of a complex, contextualized world”. This quotation from geographer Françoise Lucchini (2015) opens up an original reading of urban space, considered in the rhythm of its own pulsations. The city, as a space that is built, developed, inhabited and conceived, has been the subject of numerous studies, which have occasionally introduced a temporal dimension to their reflections, enabling us to better grasp the dynamics of its evolutions and urban practices. However, it has to be said that the “sense of time”, captured in the rhythms of daily life and the planned organization of places, has attracted more attention from geographers, urban planners, sociologists and historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. The acceleration of time induced by industrialization, the great urban metamorphoses that accompanied it and the development of new technologies undoubtedly makes it easier to take hold of this elusive material that is time and to forge a presentist “regime of historicity”, supposedly specific to the contemporary period, according to the expression conceived by François Hartog (2003).
And yet, for several decades now, Peter Burke’s (2004) commentary on Jacques Le Goff’s pioneering observations on “merchant time” has been inviting us to explore the living matter of medieval and early modern cities, to better understand the meaning of the multiplicity of temporalities concentrated in a single place, and to question the relationship between the “field of experience” and the “horizons of expectation” of medieval communities (Koselleck 1979). There is thus another cultural history of time to be written, in which forms of presentism other than the one that prevails today may have asserted themselves.
At least, that’s the idea behind this meeting, part of the SNSF-Sinergia project “Capturing the Present in Northwestern Europe (1348-1648)”. The aim is to capture not only the measurement of present time, but also the feeling of its passing, which so troubled the mind of Saint Augustine and all those who strove to define it. The question of subjectively experienced time may seem trivial. But placing it in a particular context, determined by as many parameters as places, social status, ages, activities, individual or collective ambitions, political or economic imperatives, etc., gives it all its richness and fulfils the wishes of Marc Bloch, for whom history must approach “the human moment when these currents tighten in the powerful node of consciences” (Bloch, 1949). In the comparison offered by a vast Western urban Europe, which will support studies more specifically dedicated to its northern part, in order to grasp its specificities, the aim of this meeting is to observe city dwellers caught up in the game of multiple temporalities that cross them and feed their sense of belonging or exclusion to different social groups.
How do city dwellers (and those who pass through these places) live in the present? How do they share this individual experience within the communities to which they refer or are assigned? Can we speak of time communities , shaped by the contours of a social group, political membership or shared faith? What degree of awareness and what cultural foundation underlies this apprehension and representation of the present, considered as much for its own sake as for the past it synthesizes and the future it heralds? These are just some of the questions that will be addressed. Daily rhythms, the dynamics of events, intimate time, risk control and the impact of accidents, the suspension of action – these are just some of the perspectives that will enable historians of practical sources, literature and images to examine the city as lived and thought in the present(s) of those who live in it.
Fig. 1. Anonymous, Hour and Calendar Dial, late 15th century, Leuven, Museum M, inv. S/4/O.
This ‘gem’ focuses on the object that is central to the logo that Guillaume Lecuppre (a.k.a. Nothos) designed so expertly for our project. After a description of this curious object, I will briefly reflect on the insights it might offer regarding the sensory and somatic experience of the present of fifteenth-century Netherlanders from different layers of society.
The Object
The Hour and Calendar Dial (fig.1), currently in the collection of the Museum M Leuven, was made by an anonymous artist around 1500, probably in the Southern Netherlands. It consists of a rather large oak panel (125.6 x 123.4 cm) featuring elaborate decoration in tempera and oil paint. To a twenty-first-century observer, the Roman numbers stamped on a thin band offer the clearest indication of its function. They consist of two series from I to XII, making for twenty-four markers in total, one for each hour of the day. As such, they indicate this contraption showed its late-fifteenth century users what time it was (approximately).
Fig. 2. Detail of fig. 1, The Months of October (left) and November (right).
Besides the hours, the panel includes several other temporal units. The most inner band represents the twelve signs of the zodiac and is directly related to the adjacent band with elaborate scenes from everyday life representing the months of the year. Presumably for reasons connected to the mechanical design of the dial, the central upper scene shows the month of July, rather than the first of the Julian calendar, January (which is instead seen on the lower right). The months are represented by fairly standardized scenes of typical seasonal activities (e.g. grape harvest for October, fig. 2), reminiscent of Books of Hours (see for example the month of June from the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (fig.3).1 Like those precious manuscripts – destined for an even more elite audience than the device discussed here – the scenes on this dial show people from different societal classes, generally isolated from each other and sometimes coexisting in the same section.
Following the thin golden band with the twenty-four Roman numbers, we see another band with scenes from everyday life. The twenty-four small sections initially seem to lack coherence or logical order. Previous research has shown that they represent the popular astrological system of the Planetenkinder or ‘Children of the Planets’, in which the Sun, Moon, and the planets Mercury, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter and Mars are connected to characteristics of individuals. Such aspects range from physical and character traits to professions and activities considered typical for people connected to that planet. In this case, professions and activities are represented.2 The scenes next to the Roman numerals III, XI (first series) and VI (second series), for example, show activities typical for the ‘Children of the Moon’, who were thought to thrive in water (fig. 4). But why are the Planetenkinder included on a time-measuring device? The moment of birth formed the main indication to which planet a person belonged, based on the ascendant associated with the day and/or the hour. Each ‘planet’ was in fact linked to a day of the week, as well as an hour of the day or night.3
Fig. 4. Detail of fig. 1, Two Figures Swimming, Another on a Ship (Children of the Moon).
To continue with the description of the object, the white band has 365 fields for the days of the year, with key liturgical dates (Christian feasts and saint days) indicated in French. The co-existence of astrological and Christian temporal systems was completely acceptable in the late-medieval and early modern period. The black band indicates the number of days for certain months (e.g. ‘maius habet dies xxxi’). In the four corners of the panel, we see a figure in a nimbus, accompanied by two zodiac signs. The figures are again identifiable as the planets Mars (right-top corner), Mercury, Venus and Jupiter, which were linked to specific zodiac signs. In its current state, only eight of the zodiac signs are represented in connection to the planets, possibly indicating missing parts of the panel.4
The dial’s use: determining, but also sensing the moment
The two sealed holes reveal that the panel originally featured a mechanism to indicate the time. The exact nature and functioning of this mechanism are unclear and must have been quite intricate. It would certainly have included hands to indicate the hour (the Roman numerals). Based on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clocks and watches (fig. 5), we would furthermore expect some sort of frame (or several frames) that could be moved to highlight certain sections of the panel, for example to indicate the current month and zodiac sign, planet or day of the calendar.5 Matthew Champion has suggested the mechanism of this dial might have also included the phases of the moon, which was indeed a common feature of such devices.
In short, the object would have allowed its relatively wealthy owners to determine and measure time. Our project does not focus on the measurement of time per se. However, time-measuring devices such as this dial also played an essential role in the way people related to their present time. Several historians have already discussed the impact of the increasing availability of clocks, whether in the public context of a bell tower, or in one’s house or pocket.6 This is not the place to reiterate such observations. Instead, I would like to use this hour and calendar dial to explore the potential of such objects for studying sensory and somatic experiences of the present – as opposed to cognitive awareness. I will focus specifically on the representation of the months here. As discussed above, each month is represented by a depiction of typical activities. All these seasonal practices involve physical sensations, which in turn formed a part of the perception and experience of that month.
Many of the months are associated with agricultural activities (e.g. working the fields, harvesting). It is unlikely that the owners of the dial were themselves familiar with the strenuous physical toil such work entailed. Instead, these representations offer a rare opportunity to grasp the sensory experiences that farmers may have associated with specific moments in the year. For example, on this dial the month of June is represented by men sheering sheep (foreground), a woman milking a cow (center-right) and others picking apples (background left) (fig.6). These activities imply a range of bodily sensations, such as the physical effort of holding a wriggling sheep down, the touch and smell of soft greasy wool; the smell, sound and taste of fresh milk from juicy summer grass, pressed gently from dense utters, and splashing in a bucket; the smell, texture and taste of ripe apples, and fruit dropping with a muffled sound on the ground or in a hefty basket.
Fig. 6. Detail of fig. 1, The Month of June.
City-dwellers, on the other hand, might recall the eerie squeaking and intense smell of fresh blood of animals being slaughtered on a crisp November morning (fig. 2). On the dial, the violent but common scene is placed in an undefined urban setting, perhaps a market square. The freezing month of February (fig. 7), on the other hand, was perhaps associated with the comfortable warmth of a crackling hearth while chewing on a tasty waffle, the clinking of spears from jousting knights outside in the background.
As these examples suggest, each month carried its own specific sensory associations for a fifteenth-century person living in the Low Countries (or arguably anytime, anywhere). A particular time of year consequently evoked the memory or expectation of certain feelings, smells, textures, sounds, tastes and sights that they would experience each year at that moment (i.e. cyclically). A close examination of representations of the months, a very popular subject in medieval and early modern art (especially in the Low Countries), could therefore allow us to understand the bodily sensations involved in the experience and perception of the present.
Fig. 7. Detail of fig. 1, The Month of February.
TO COME
This ‘gem’ about our logo does not directly relate to my research project on the representation and experience of everyday life, for which I am currently studying the visual representation of rest; as well as the natural, biographical and societal rhythms that paced the artistic profession. Nevertheless, I see plenty of connections, which I intend to explore in the coming years. I am particularly fascinated by the impact of sensory, affective and somatic experiences – and their visual representation – with regard to the perception of the present. Such a query will benefit from the increased attention for the history of senses and emotions in our field. My interest was stimulated in particular by the book The Fullness of Time by Matthew S. Champion. Coincidentally, Dr Champion will be the keynote speaker at our conference ‘Present in the City‘ in Lille, 1-3 Oct. 2025.
Bibliography
Y. Bruijnen & P. Huys Janssen (eds.), De Vier Jaargetijden in de kunst van de Nederlanden 1500-1750, exh.cat. Den Bosch (Noordbrabants Museum) / Leuven (Stedelijk Museum Vander Kelen-Mertens), Zwolle: Waanders, 2002 [esp. cat.nr. 1].
M. S. Champion, The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017 [ref. to the Hour and Calendar Dial: pp. 34-36, figs. 1.2 and 1.3].
A. Klingner, Die Macht der Sterne: Planetenkinder: ein astrologisches Bildmotiv in Spätmittelalter und Renaissance, unpublished PhD Thesis (Humboldt University Berlin, 2017).
This extraordinary manuscript is currently on display for the first time ever in an exhibition in Musée Condé at the Chateau de Chantilly ↩︎
The Planetenkinder were often represented in the visual arts across Europe, for example in the so-called Salone dei mesi in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara and on numerous paintings and prints. ↩︎
The relation of the hour and planet shifted according to the weekday (the first daylight hour of each day was connected to the planet of the day). The order of the scenes on the dial follows the order of the weekdays associated to each planet. ↩︎
I did not yet consult technical reports on the object to verify. ↩︎
The Roman numerals on such watches and clocks are remarkably larger than on the object under discussion, perhaps indicating a decreased importance of astrological temporal markers. ↩︎
Max Engammare, to name one example, insists on the role of clocks in the religious practices of Calvin and his followers in sixteenth-century Geneva (M. Engammare, L’ordre du temps: l’invention de la punctualité au XVIe siècle, 2004). ↩︎
Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian, Portrait of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, 1548, Oil on canvas, 111.3×88.27 cm, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust. (& detail above)
For a political historian, few experiences rival the thrill of discovering a ciphered letter in an archive, one that seems to offer a vital clue to a famous plot. The excitement only grows when you manage to decipher it, and it turns out to be exactly what you suspected. That is precisely what happened to me two weeks ago, during broader research I was conducting at the Archivo General de Simancas in Spain, as part of Work Package 3 of the Capturing the Present project.
The case in question is well known. On 10 September 1547, a rebellion broke out in the Italian city of Piacenza, resulting in the assassination of Duke Pier Luigi Farnese. Two days later, Ferrante Gonzaga, imperial governor of Milan, seized the city with cavalry he had secretly stationed at the border beforehand. He claimed to have taken Piacenza in the name of the emperor, arguing it was to prevent the city from falling into enemy hands. Ferrante was immediately suspected by all of orchestrating the whole rebellion, although in his correspondence and public statements he insisted that he had acted without the emperor’s knowledge. Several scholars, however, have already shown that this was not true. Indeed, the emperor’s principal concern at the time was to counter the threat posed by the newly created Farnese state in Parma and Piacenza, established in 1545 by Pope Paul III for his son, Pier Luigi Farnese. Rumours that the duke had supported a conspiracy in Genoa in January 1547 had alarmed imperial ministers. The emperor would soon agree to a plan to seize the duchy of Parma and Piacenza, albeit, it seems, without intending necessarily to kill Pier Luigi.1
On 10 September 1547, Pier Luigi Farnese was stabbed to death in the citadel of Piacenza and his body was thrown out of a window. Two days later, Ferrante Gonzaga seized control of the fortress. Giovan Federico Bonzagni, Citadel of Piacenza [reverse], c. 1547, bronze medal, 4.03cm (diameter), National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection.
Much about the conspiracy’s planning, however, remains shrouded in mystery till this day. In my PhD thesis, I showed that the emperor’s first councillor, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, was already fully aware of Ferrante’s plans on Piacenza as early as March 1547. The governor had sent his secretary, Giuliano Gosellini, to present the scheme personally to Granvelle at his urban palace in Besançon. The successful execution of the plan, according to Granvelle, would leave the papacy and the Farnese family ‘in a final state of confusion’2.
The cipher key used by Ferrante Gonzaga to communicate with Emperor Charles V and his ministers in 1547. Meister, Die Geheimschrift, p. 212-213.
The ciphered letter I discovered in Simancas sheds further light on the planning of the conspiracy. On 15 August 1547, Ferrante wrote to Granvelle to confirm receipt of his instructions ‘on the Piacenza case.’ While Granvelle’s instructions are most likely lost, the rest of Ferrante’s letter leaves little doubt as to their content. Ferrante had already even begun formulating how he might later plead his innocence. He proposed making ‘a lengthy excuse to His Majesty’ (‘una lunga scusa con sua maestà’), claiming that he had been compelled to seize the city ‘out of fear that the conspirators might hand it over to the French’ (‘per dubio che i congiurati non la dessero ai Francesi’)3. A conspiracy most foul, indeed.
While the assassination reinforced Habsburg power in Italy, the struggle over Piacenza was, at the time, one of many crises unfolding across the empire of Charles V, which stretched over half of Europe and into the Americas. The complexity of governing this vast empire is perhaps most clearly apprehensible in the letters of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle with his son Antoine Perrenot. Even when discussing the plan concerning Piacenza, Granvelle addressed dozens of other pressing present matters in imperial politics simultaneously. The timing of the conspiracy itself also offers a revealing case in point. Although Ferrante Gonzaga had already devised the plan to seize Piacenza by March 1547, the emperor delayed giving final approval. He was then deeply engaged in military operations in Saxony against the Protestants during the Schmalkaldic War, and it was hardly the right moment to provoke another conflict in Italy. At the same time, however, the plot had to be carried out swiftly, before the element of surprise was lost. Once Charles V had secured victory and stabilised the situation with the Protestant forces by the summer, he finally gave the green light for the plan to proceed.
Leone Leoni,The triumph of Ferrante Gonzaga over Envy, 1560-1564, bronze statue, Guastalla, Wikimedia Commons
One of the central aims of my subproject within Work Package 3 is to make sense of these overlapping and simultaneous presents within the empire, and how they shaped decision-making and the organisation of Charles V’s composite monarchy. Governing such a diverse collection of kingdoms, provinces, and peoples under a single ruler inevitably created almost insoluble challenges. Imperial presence was needed everywhere at once; the emperor’s attention, or that of his trusted ministers, had to be virtually omnipresent. This relentless need for oversight is clearly reflected in the letters of Granvelle, who constantly alluded to the immense burdens of his role as first councillor in managing it all. He often described himself as working ‘day and night’, or lamented that he had ‘no extra time’ to deal with matters, frequently specifying the long hours worked and the sleepless nights endured. New letters raising new issues were constantly arriving at court. On one occasion, the councillor compared himself to a sick man desperately seeking every possible remedy (‘yo soy como el enfermo que busca todos los remedios’)4. Elsewhere, he wrote that he was overwhelmed by the constant flow of despatches being sent ‘throughout all of Christendom’5.
It is therefore no coincidence that a clock appears on the desk in Titian’s portrait of Antoine Perrenot (later Cardinal Granvelle), who increasingly assisted his father in the imperial chancellery from the 1540s onwards and ultimately succeeded him as the emperor’s first councillor. Ministers like the Granvelles began to measure their work by the minute, kept detailed agendas, and thereby sought to rationalise the overwhelming demands of governing an empire of such unprecedented scale.
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle sending letters ‘throughout all of Christendom’. His signatures used in a French, Latin and Spanish letter, along with his abbreviated signature used for reviewing chancellery documents. Excerpts taken from documents held in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Vienna (LA Belgien PA 37/1, f. 125r), the Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (Geheimer Rat, Loc. 07273/16, f. 129r), and the Archivo General de Simancas (Estado 1185, no. 109 & Estado 499, no. 120).
Yet for someone who was in communication with ‘all of Christendom’ and orchestrating political plots, surprisingly little is known about Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle during the 1530s and 1540s, or his ideology, his networks or the functioning of the imperial chancellery and council he led. Although significant efforts were made, for example, by the Konstanz Project in the 1990s to catalogue a large portion of the emperor’s political correspondence, that same project already noted the absence of a comprehensive study of the imperial political thought under Granvelle and his son6.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the personal archive of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle has largely been lost (and not only in relation to secretive matters such as the Piacenza Plot). However, a vast body of unstudied letters and marginal notes survives in the archives of the imperial secretaries of state who worked under Granvelle’s supervision, not only in the archive of Simancas, but also in Brussels and Vienna. The personal archives of his son and successor, Antoine Perrenot, are also relatively well preserved in Madrid and Besançon. In addition, the broader correspondence that spanned ‘all of Christendom’ offers valuable clues. Often overlooked from an imperial perspective, many archives in Italy and Germany still hold hundreds (possibly thousands) of letters written by the emperor and his first councillor that often remain uncatalogued or unexamined.
The reconstructing of this correspondence of Nicolas Perrenot (and what we might describe as an imperial chancellery archive), first begun during my PhD, is now continuing as part of the Capturing the Present project. To date, it has led me to consult over sixty archives, libraries and collections across Europe, either in person or online. The current estimate suggests the total surviving corpus will comprise around 5,000 documents, in six different languages. Engaging with this fragmented and dispersed archival record is, in itself, partially a reflection of how the composite Habsburg empire under Charles V and his chancellery functioned, with regional centres maintaing a high degree of administrative autonomy. Nevertheless, tackling this archival reality is essential in order to assess an imperial present and how the complex and shifting realities were faced by the emperor and his first councillor, realities that were not always readily apprehensible to other contemporaries influenced by local expectations within their respective realms. This task is all the more important given the enduring myth on Charles V in later historiography, where his reign is often associated with an ideal of unification or a vision of Monarchia Universalis7.
The Palais Granvelle in Besançon was constructed between 1534 and 1547. It was here that Nicolas Perrenot received Ferrante Gonzaga’s secretary to discuss the first plans for the Piacenza Plot. Today, the palace houses the Musée du Temps.
Although the project remains in its early stages, it’s clear that the notion of a growing, unifying central administration, allegedly initiated under chancellor Gattinara and continued under Granvelle, is often overstated. In practice, governance was shaped by precedent, tradition and the pragmatic demands of a fractured empire. The present itself, stretched and compounded by the time needed to obtain information from across Europe, posed a real challenge to political planning. Far from enforcing a rigid centralism, which was often even impossible to enforce, the imperial administration sought instead to accommodate regional differences, and implementing incremental reforms. Yet at times (and this is what makes the process of reconstructing a chancellery’s archive never boring), a ‘smoking gun’ emerges, such as the Gonzaga letter, which reveals that an ideal of unification and state formation was sometimes advanced by means of betrayal and the occasional act of bloodshed, incorporating the unexpected into the political process.
TO BE PUBLISHED
Parts of this article appeared in my PhD thesis, “The Secret Face of Empire: Espionage, Governance and the Habsburg Archives under Charles V, 1525–1550”, Ghent University, 2025, which I am currently revising for publication. An edition of the 1546-1547 correspondence between Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle and his son Antoine Perrenot is under revision for publication in the Bulletin de la Commission royale d’Histoire: “Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle and the Making of a First Councillor: a Commission Letter (1551) and the Correspondence with Antoine Perrenot (1546–1547) as a Guide to Imperial Statecraft.” In addition, I am preparing an article on the essential role of time in political decision-making, as already exemplified in the Piacenza Plot. This article will incorporate several extra cases that illustrate how temporal rhythms shaped imperial governance. Working title: “The Emperor’s Clock: Chronopolitics in the Reign of Charles V and the Myth of the Monarchia Universalis.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Ferrante Gonzaga to Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, Milan, 15 August 1547, deciphered by the author (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1193, no. 226).
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Francisco de los Cobos, Savona, 6 February 1542 (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1375, no. 57).
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Mary of Hungary, Toledo, 21 March 1539 (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, LA Belgien PA 30/1, f. 49r).
Secondary Sources
Bertomeu Masiá, María José, La guerra secreta de Carlos V contra el papa. La cuestión de Parma y Piacenza en la correspondencia del cardenal Granvela. Edición, estudio y notas,Valencia, 2009.
Meister, Aloys, Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Paderborn, 1906.
Parker, Geoffrey, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, New Haven, 2019.
Rabe, Horst & Heide Stratenwerth, “Die Politische Korrespondenz Kaiser Karls V. und ihre wissenschaftliche Erschließung,” in Horst Rabe (ed.), Karl V. Politik und politisches System. Berichte und Studien aus der Arbeit an der Politischen Korrespondenz des Kaisers,Konstanz, 1996, p. 11-39.
Rodríguez-Salgado, Maria José, “Ferrante Gonzaga: The champion of innocence,” in G. Signorotto (ed.), Ferrante Gonzaga. Il Mediterraneo, L’Impero (1507-1557),Rome, 2009, p. 139-196.
Simonetta, Marcello, Pier Luigi Farnese. Vita, morte e scandali di un figlio degenere, Piacenza, 2020.
Bertomeu Masiá, La guerra secreta de Carlos V contra el papa, p. 458-461; Rodríguez-Salgado, “Ferrante Gonzaga: The champion of innocence,” p. 143-145; Simonetta, Pier Luigi Farnese.↩︎
Letters from Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Antoine Perrenot, Besançon, 31 March & 7 April 1547; see Hoffman, “The Secret Face of Empire”, p. 50-51. ↩︎
Ciphered letter from Ferrante Gonzaga to Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, Milan, 15 August 1547, deciphered by the author (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1193, no. 226). The cipher key in question is published in Bertomeu Masiá, La guerra secreta, p. 152-153 and Meister, Die Geheimschrift, p. 212-213 ↩︎
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Francisco de los Cobos, Savona, 6 February 1542 (Archivo General de Simancas, Estado 1375, no. 57). ↩︎
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle to Mary of Hungary, Toledo, 21 March 1539 (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, LA Belgien PA 30/1, f. 49r.). ↩︎
Rabe & Heide Stratenwerth, “Die Politische Korrespondenz Kaiser Karls V.”, p. 11-39. ↩︎
This unifying myth of the reign of Charles V is discussed in Parker, Emperor, p. 490-502. ↩︎
