This study explores Cervantes’ appropriations of the terminology and imagery of Catholic exorcists and demonologists in the Spanish Golden Age. The “lucid intervals” of Don Quixote, his constant sense that someone pursues him, and his explicit voicing of the words of the exorcism ritual can only be understood fully in relation to contemporaneous religious belief. This essay also argues that the devilishly-described Don Quixote exorcized himself. This action anticipated self-exorcism as preached by the Franciscan Diego Gómez Lodosa. In Cervantes studies, Don Quixote's selfexorcism will become paradigmatic of the autonomous action of this first novelistic character.

Against the “presentism “ of current criticism linking the Defence's universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The Defence's epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon — the so-called Philippists — and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.

This essay proposes that Fulke Greville structured A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney according to the principles of the Ancient Constitution. Greville departs from the standard view of Sidney in the early seventeenth century as a primarily literary figures by constructing his late friend as an avatar of the Ancient Constitution, and views Elizabeth and Essex in the same light. Greville’s redefinition of all three as exemplars of English constitutionalism directly results from the controversies surrounding James’ increasing absolutism. However, the question remains as to why in 1652 a Royalist would publish such a text, and the answer lies in how shifting political circumstances alters the interpretation of texts.

Bruno's attempt to integrate the principles of Ficino's Neoplatonic metaphysics to the Thomistic subalternatio scientiarum led him to incorporate new techniques into his art of memory. His use of the wheel of memory in De umbris idearum produced various philosophical perspectives. Nevertheless, the theoretical basis of Bruno's philosophical system was his effort to address mathematics in a qualitative way. Analysis of Bruno's sources leads to an understanding of how he reconstructed and used them.

This study argues that the parish clergy of the northern Italian diocese of Novara benefited from a dramatic increase in educational institutions in the decades following the Council of Trent (1545- 63) and that their formation was rooted in the humanist program of grammar, letters, poetry, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, inculcated through the reading of classical authors. Employing the acts of visitations conducted between 1616 and 1663, it is based on comments made by the priests themselves about their education and on an analysis of the secular books in their personal libraries. It concludes that a number of the Novarese priests developed a lifelong interest in humanist and secular works, while some of them employed their humanist training as schoolmasters in the towns and villages of the diocese.

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert's Princess Cloria (1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinished Theophania (1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.

Psalm 137, “By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, “ one of the most widely known biblical texts in Renaissance England, provided consolation for spiritual and political exiles, as well as giving Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton language in which to express such alienation — language especially powerful for poets, since the psalm troped alienation as the inability to sing. The Psalm's closing cry for vengeance, seen as un-Christian by some, was used as a call to arms by polemicists on both sides of the English Civil War. This study examines a range of translations, paraphrases, commentaries, sermons, and literary allusions that together reconstruct a biblical text as it was interpreted by its Renaissance readers.