This article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic magic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. The article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion — their apprehension and negotiation — at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

This article focuses on women's luxury footwear to examine issues of economic, material, and familial life in Renaissance Italy. It uses graphic work by Albrecht Dürer to explore footwear design, and draws from disparate sources to propose a new method for evaluating its cost. The article argues that sumptuous footwear was available for a range of prices that are not reflected in surviving payment records, and that it was largely less expensive than moralists and legislators implied. In conclusion, it employs Minerbetti documentation to consider the role particular shoes may have played in developing personal subjectivity.

The motet manuscript known as the Medici Codex is associated by modern scholarship with the 1518 marriage of Lorenzo II de' Medici and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. It was once thought that the manuscript was made in France and given to Lorenzo by Francis I, but now it is almost unanimously agreed that it was made in Rome under the patronage of Pope Leo X. Since this revision, no one has put forward a detailed view of how the manuscript relates to the circumstances under which it was given and to the individuals involved, or how it functions as a gift. This study places the manuscript in the context of other gifts associated with the marriage to arrive at such a view.

Almost every Kunstkammer in sixteenth-century Europe contained small reptiles or plants cast from life in a variety of media. This widespread technique, which used small, recently killed animals as a pattern to create lifelike sculptures, was often prized more highly than works sculpted with the hand. An unstudied, late sixteenth-century French technical manuscript records a practitioner's experiments in casting from life, among many other subjects. This article investigates both the techniques and the significance of life-casting on the basis of this treatise, incorporating the examination of surviving sixteenth-century European life casts and the reconstruction of the manuscript's recipes and technical instructions, arguing that life-casting in the sixteenth century was viewed in part as a means to the knowledge of nature.