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.

The persistence of interpretations that view Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait as a Christlike image in spite of the issue of blasphemy it raises is due in large part to the lack of a competing historical narrative, one that accounts for the unusual aspects of the painting without recourse to religious imagery. In this article, Dürer’s motivation in creating this unprecedented painting and the strategies he used in constructing it are analyzed from the perspective of his contemporaries. In this alternative view, the humanist context is crucial, with Dürer emulating the greatest artist of the ancient world by composing the 1500 Self-Portrait in ways that accord with Apelles’s art, practice, and reputation as it was transmitted through the literature of the ancient world.

This article discusses a woodcut series with an elaborate iconographic representation of the Flemish city of Ghent, printed in 1524 by Pieter de Keysere. The three-sheet composition consists of a city view, an image of the allegorical Maiden of Ghent, and an extensive heraldic program with the coat of arms of prominent Ghent families and of the Ghent craft guilds. The print series’ production and consumption are unraveled and framed within the wider debate on civic religion in Renaissance Europe. The main argument is that while in this region of Northern Europe civic ideology was equally strong as in Italy, it was not the exclusive playground of the ruling elites. Pieter de Keysere’s woodcut series was aimed at a socially broad, local audience, most particularly Ghent’s corporate middle groups.

This essay is a preliminary sketch for a book that examines Michelangelo Buonarroti’s final eighteen years, from his appointment as architect of St. Peter’s until his death in 1564, that is, from age seventy-one to a few weeks shy of eighty-nine. This period represents nearly a quarter of his approximately seventy-five-year artistic career, yet it remains the least familiar segment of Michelangelo’s long life. It is paradoxical that in the final phase of his career, Michelangelo remained prodigiously creative and influential without being prolific — as he had been earlier in his career. His late life was concerned less with making things than with finding the courage and devotion to continue tasks that he knew he would never see to fruition, and this despite the loss of his closest friends, greatest patron, and his entire family.

In a dialogue drafted soon after the Sack of Rome (1527), Paolo Giovio details historical views of female dignity and assesses the beauty and talents of over 100 women in contemporary Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, and Rome. Unlike most such catalogues, Giovio’s seasons praise with explicit acknowledgment of physical, intellectual, and personal shortcomings. Yet it also celebrates Vittoria Colonna, who commissioned the work, as the ideal noblewoman. Giovio is unconventional in applying to this living woman a pattern of graphic physical description that Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, and many others had followed in delineating fictional characters. This strategy exemplifies the latitude of representational possibilities that characterized Italian literature and art of the 1520s and 1530s. The dialogue also eloquently documents a crucial time in Colonna’s life when her verse commemoration of her husband coalesced with religious devotion, and when physical beauty could be seen to harmonize with other virtues to form a desirable and inspirational whole.

In a famous, frequently quoted statement, Ben Jonson claims that Queen Elizabeth I “had a membrana on her which made her uncapable of man.” This essay reinvestigates the basis for Jonson’s 400-year-old crux and, more broadly, argues for the relevance of an unexplored area of critical studies on Elizabeth: what early modern medicine and culture thought about lifelong virginity and its distinctive perils for the queen’s aging body natural. Finally, looking at the inner-circle gossip about Tudor and Stuart queens’ health and various records documenting Elizabeth’s identified illnesses, including hysterica passio, the essay uncovers how virgins’ diseases were thought to afflict Elizabeth over her reign and possibly contribute to her death.

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.

Bishop of Urbino Giovanni Pietro Arrivabene selected the foreign saints Thomas Becket and Martin of Tours as patrons for his burial chapel. Montefeltro court artist Timoteo Viti decorated the chapel with the saints’ images, including a fresco of Saint Martin exorcising a demon from a cow. This article argues that the chapel’s unusual, allegorical iconographic program condemns Cesare Borgia’s campaigns to dominate Central Italy. It also proposes that the kneeling figure in the altarpiece’s lower right register portrays the bishop’s heir. Finally, the accomplishment of the Arrivabene chapel demonstrates Timoteo Viti’s artistic independence from his famous colleague and collaborator, Raphael.

An intriguing mystery in early modern intellectual history is how and why European scholars came to designate Ethiopic, the sacred language of Ethiopia, as Chaldean. This article locates the designation’s origins in a deduction made by Vatican library personnel, partially inspired by a hoax perpetrated a quarter-century earlier. It then traces the influence of this designation on the progress of historical linguistics, where theories defending the appellation of Ethiopic as Chaldean, although often erroneous, nevertheless contributed to the accurate categorization of Ethiopic as a Semitic language, and on attitudes to Ethiopian Christianity that played a role in Catholic-Protestant polemic.

This essay considers readings of Plato’s Symposium in sixteenth-century trattati d’amore (love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’s L’amorosa filosofia — that offer an alternative to Marsilio Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in his De amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of the Symposium attempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.

This article uses the multifaceted meaning of the word translation as an analytic key to understand and analyze social and epistemic change in early modern France. Translation is here taken to mean not simply the rendering of one language into another, but also a physical displacement from one location to another, and the movement of knowledge and expertise from one discipline (and social status) to another. The manifold ideas and practices associated with translation are used to chart the voyage of Jean Parmentier, a humanist, poet, and ship captain from Dieppe, as he guided his ship and crew to Sumatra in 1529.

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.

Women’s clothes were at the center of political debate in the Spain of Philip IV (r. 1621–65), and no garment inspired more controversy than the wide-hipped farthingale, or hoopskirt, known as the guardainfante. Considered scandalous with its reputation for hiding illicit pregnancies, the guardainfante was banned in 1639. Nonetheless, the guardainfante became more popular than ever and turned into an enduring icon of Golden Age Spain during the reign of Philip’s second queen, Mariana of Austria (1649–65). Despite the guardainfante’s high level of visibility, most notably in court portraits by Diego Velázquez, very little is known about the historical experiences of the women who wore it. This article demonstrates that real women really did wear the guardainfante in a variety of contexts outside of portraiture and the theater. In Madrid and in cities throughout the Spanish empire, women of different stations and convictions participated in the political culture of their times by making, disseminating, and debating this controversial garment.

In the sixteenth century, perceptions of the English language changed from one of barbaric inadequacy to that of rare eloquence. Accounts for this shift tend to focus on literary or textual production, but this essay shows how these very linguistic concerns were motivated by the nonlinguistic practices appropriate to Latin rhetorical delivery (pronuntiatio et actio). The emotional contagion, legitimization of the inarticulate, cultural contextualization, and overcoming of natural physical defects that all stand at the heart of delivery here situate vernacular uplift at the corporeal level. The essay ends with an illustrative reading of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

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.

Though historians of religion have demonstrated that the theological commitments of early modern English people were labile and complex, there was nonetheless a prevailing sense in the period that belief posited bodily consequences. This article considers this bodily presence in John Donne’s poetry by exploring the humoral construction of religious identity in his Holy Sonnets. Donne’s conversion provided him with an unusual perspective: not many people were positioned to hold as nuanced a view of religious ideology. It is surprising, then, that when Donne considers his conversion — which he does in little and large in the Holy Sonnets — he casts it in somatic terms. Donne’s humoral constitution of faith in the Holy Sonnets anatomizes the vexed transactions of body and soul particular to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought. He depicts his body in the same terms that he uses to represent his religious temperament — as changeable and lacking integrity.

After the Reformation, Catholics developed new ways to express interior religious experiences, including mystic visions. This article considers the epistemological impasse that arose when the Spanish Inquisition, created to prosecute covert Judaizers, was charged with discernment of mystical experiences. Close linguistic study of interrogations shows how a nondialogue between mystical and legal discourse pointed to a broader conflict between a newly interiorized religion and the public space of the law. Practically, these cases weakened the Inquisition; conceptually, they undermined the idea of an Inquisition. If Enlightenment reformers were able to argue for a secularization of the law, it was because a group of mystics and Inquisitors had made such thought possible.

Mindful of the complex position of Christ’s mother, Mary, in post-Reformation Europe, this article examines how two women writers read Mary’s fleshly relationship with Christ. Reading the Bible typologically, Aemilia Lanyer and Dorothy Leigh determine that Mary’s material labor has spiritual consequences, because, in delivering Christ, she delivers God’s plan for salvation and inaugurates the new covenant. But, interpreting Marian maternity in this way, Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing also suggest that the new covenant initiates a form of maternity that has sustained spiritual resonance for all women and has profound implications for the female writer.