1604

1601 1602 1603 1604 1605 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610

political events

Sweden's 14-year-old Duke Jan formally renounces his claim to the throne (see 1599). He is a younger brother of Poland's Sigismund III Vasa, his uncle usurps the throne, takes the title king March 6 at age 53, and will reign until his death in 1611 as Karl (Charles) IX (see 1605).

Spanish forces retake Ostend from the Dutch September 20 after a 42-month siege (see 1609; Albrecht VII, 1598).

The Dutch East India Company asks Delft-born jurist Huigh de Groot, 21, to write a legal brief supporting the company's position in its quarrel with the Portuguese about dominion over the oceans (see 1609).

England's James I makes peace with Spain and directs his efforts to American colonization (see 1606). James is proclaimed king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland October 24.

exploration, colonization

Samuel de Champlain explores the North American Atlantic Coast from Maine to what will be called Cape Cod. He plants a colony at what later will be called Acadia, or Nova Scotia (see 1603; 1609).

transportation

The Pont Neuf completed across the Seine at Paris is the city's first paved bridge and the first to be lined with houses and shops.

science

A new star that will be called "Kepler's supernova" appears in the sky and inspires Galileo Galilei to deliver three public lectures arguing against Aristotle's views of astronomy and natural philosophy. Tübingen University graduate Johann Kepler, now 33, received a personal letter from Galileo in 1598 stating that he (Galileo) accepted the 1543 Copernican theory that the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, but the fate of Giordano Bruno in 1600 has kept Galileo and other scientists from defying Church doctrine and in order to avoid controversy he has made no public statement; Kepler has headed the observatory at Prague since the death of his master Tycho Brahe in 1601 (see 1609).

medicine

The Triumphant Chariot of Antimony introduces a new name for stibium. Probably written by a monk, the anonymous pamphlet encourages European physicians to use antimony salts as a homeopathic remedy for fever. Reputable physicians will prescribe "everlasting pellets" of antimony (swallowed, recovered from patients' stools, washed, and used again) until the 19th century, and although it is potentially toxic, antimony will later be found useful in treating snail fever, or schistosomiasis (see Bilharz, 1856).

religion

England's James I presides over a Hampton Court Conference in January between Puritans and Anglican bishops, issues a proclamation enforcing the 1549 Act of Uniformity, and urges that Jesuits be "exterminated." He banishes seminary priests or has them executed and their bodies mutilated, confiscates the homes of Roman Catholics, exacts heavy fines on those who will not attend Protestant services, bars them from sending their children abroad for education, confiscates the property of churches and monasteries, and generally makes life miserable for nonconformists. James commissions Sir Henry Savile, William Bedwell, Lancelot Andrews, and nearly 50 other scholars to retranslate the Old and New Testaments (the king has been disturbed by marginal notes in many bibles questioning the divine right of kings) (see 1611; Wycliffe, 1376).

John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, dies at London February 29 at age 73 (approximate) and is buried at Croyden, where he has founded a school and hospital.

The Granth compiled in India will serve as the sacred scripture of the Sikhs (see 1539; Golden Temple, 1605).

communications, media

The first English dictionary to be issued as a separate work is published at London by Coventry schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey under the title A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. Cawdrey's son Thomas is a schoolmaster at London and has assisted in the project, which contains about 3,000 words and has borrowed heavily from just three sources, primarily from a 1596 work but also from Thomas Thomas's 1588 Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae and from a 1599 translation by a Dutch scholar of a medical work into English. New editions of the Table Alphabeticall will appear in 1609, 1613, and 1617 (see literature, 1721).

literature

Poetry: Aurora by Scottish-born London courtier-poet William Alexander, 28; The Owl by Michael Drayton, who has been rebuffed by James I.

Poet Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, dies of plague at his Kings Place home in Newington outside London June 24 at age 54. He has been the patron of the Oxford's Men acting company, James I has continued the enormous £1,000-per-year stipend granted him by the late Elizabeth, and it will be suggested centuries hence that he wrote some if not all of Shakespeare's poems and plays.

art

Painting: St. Ildefonso by El Greco; The Deposition by Caravaggio.

theater, film

Theater: Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare: "Our doubts are traitors,/ And make us lose the good we oft might win,/ By fearing to attempt" (I, iv); Westward Hoe! by London playwrights John Webster, 24, and Thomas Dekker; The Honest Whore, Part I, by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, with the Children of St. Paul's: "The calmest husbands make the stormiest wives" (V, i); The Malcontent by English satirist John Marston, 28 (with additions by John Webster) at London's Blackfriars Theatre, with the Children of the Queen's Revels; Eastward Ho by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston ridicules Scotsmen (the playwrights will be imprisoned briefly next year for offending the king).

Commedia dell'arte leading lady Isabella Andreini of the Compagnia dei Gelosi dies at Lyons July 10 at age 42, leaving letters, songs, and sonnets that will be published posthumously. Her death devastates her husband, Francesco, who retires from the stage, but her son Giovambattista will become a commedia dell'arte actor and prolific author.

tobacco

"Counterblaste to Tobacco" by England's James I (published anonymously) makes reference to two Indians brought to London from Virginia in 1584 to demonstrate smoking: "What honor or policie can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indian especially in so vile and stinking a custome?" The king points out that tobacco was first used as an antidote to the "Pockes" (see Nicot, 1561), but he observes that doctors now regard smoking as a dirty habit injurious to the health and finds it on his own part "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse" (but see 1612).

food and drink

Description de L'ile des Hermaphrodites satirizes the manners of the courtiers of France's Henri IV, saying that it is amusing "to watch them eat with their forks, because those who weren't as skillful as others let as much food fall on their plates and on the floor as they manage to put in their mouths" (see Coryate, 1611).

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