Between 1360 and 1460 the Venetian government established a system of legalized prostitution under the supervision of government officials and confined, in theory, to a limited area of the city. The authorities also attempted to concentrate the management of licit brothels in the hands of women, who thereby emerged as the effective entrepreneurs of the sex trade. This article describes the organization of Venetian prostitution in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the relations among government officials, brothel-keepers, and prostitutes. It illustrates the mechanisms of debt and credit used in the sex trade, which often kept the prostitutes subservient to the brothel-keepers and to their other creditors. An effort is made to assess the degree to which sex workers might become integrated into local society and to suggest the general trends in Venetian policy toward prostitution into the sixteenth century.

To analyze Marguerite de Navarre’s response to the misogynist francophone novella tradition, this article asks how material provided by older nouvelles is reorganized in the Heptaméron, blurring both normative definitions of masculinity and femininity and the lines between framed novellas and other genres. This article describes Marguerite’s use of nonfictional sources as well as Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26. Visual iconographic transformations in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are converted in the Heptaméron into textual and intergeneric transformations. In the distance between Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26’s elaborate crossdressing farce and Heptaméron 21, which blends romance, pardon request, and martyr’s tale, one perceives the differences in gendered thought and rhetorical strategy separating Marguerite from her anonymous predecessors.

Gerard Falkenburg’s annotations on Homer reveal a type of philology rare in the Renaissance: Falkenburg probed the epics’ histories by analyzing their textual fault lines, as F. A. Wolf would do in 1795 when he revolutionized the study of Homer. Following in the footsteps of certain other scholars, Falkenburg alone arrived at a methodology for this sort of work, without publishing his observations. Obertus Giphanius did use them liberally in his 1572 commentary on Homer and his short preface to this is often noted as a mysterious forerunner to the Homeric Question. But if this previously unnoticed scholarship contextualizes famous early modern insights on the Homeric Question like Giphanius’s, one important reason it was not taken further lies with Giphanius’s flawed grasp and transmission of the technical innovations in Falkenburg’s work.

This article examines the scholarly practices with which readers at three universities read select passages from Galileo’s 1638 Discorsi, a work depicted by Galileo as one that eschewed the goals and methods of Aristotelian natural philosophy in favor of the quantitative and experimental ones characteristic of modern science. The article reveals that a group of readers — diverse in terms of institutional affiliation, disciplinary identity, geography, and attitude toward Galileo — approached Galileo’s text using the tools of what Ann Blair has termed “bookish” natural philosophy. It argues that, contrary to Galileo’s rhetoric, these readers saw old and new methods as interchangeable.