In her discussion of Imitatio, Julia Haig Gaisser describes how humanist scholars and poets justified their light, titillating compositions, based on Catullus, Martial, and The Priapea, by invoking the ancient literary defense, whose purpose was essentially to ward off potential critics or else to justify their oeuvre by making a sharp distinction between their life and their art. One locus classicus is Catullus 16.5-6: “Nam castum esse decet pium poetam/ ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est” (The devoted poet ought to be chaste himself, his verses need not be so). Another is Martial, Epigrams 1.4.8, which, modeled as it is on Ovid, Tristia 2.354, speaks not of poets in general but of Martial himself: “Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba“ (My writing is lascivious, my life pure). The classical defensio or apologia was thus revived and given new meaning by the humanists as they sought to justify their literary endeavors in light of an emerging and ultimately puritanical sense of decorum.

We will begin where all early modern feminists, from Christine de Pizan to Hélisenne de Crenne and beyond, begin: in the beginning was the word, and the word was misogynist. This is the ideological, literary, and cultural context for reading and appreciating virtually every early modern feminist work.

Sixteenth-century approaches to the world of nature remained resolutely bound to ancient texts. Hostility to the medieval past, new theories, new experiences, and new information were evidently abundantly present. But medieval predecessors were far more likely to be criticized for failure to understand ancient authority than for slavish dependence on it; dissatisfaction with intellectual tradition was apt to express itself in form of a call for return to the ideas of ancients who preceded the standard school authors in time; and in every branch of natural philosophy, natural history, and medicine, examination of the writings of ancient Greek authors was a major, perhaps the major, part of the task of the investigator. Innovators — some of them very bold and some very eccentric indeed — reworked, recombined, and criticized the ancients, or measured their teachings against modern experience; but they seldom ignored them.

The writings of Lucio Marineo Sículo, royal historian at the court of Fernando and Isabel, provide a wealth of information on the history of early humanism in Spain. His collection of letters, in particular, yields the kind of anecdotal evidence that adds the fine strokes to the overall picture of Renaissance Spain.

Marineo was born in Vizzini, Sicily, in the mid 1440s. He embarked on a scholarly career late in life. His parents, he tells us, ridiculed and frustrated his desire for an education. As a result he learned to read and write only when he was twenty-five. It seems that the local vicar became his mentor, but it was not until he moved to Catania that he received formal schooling.

Early on the morning of 6 May 1527, under cover of dense fog, an Imperial army led by Charles of Bourbon began its attack upon the city of Rome. When the Vatican was besieged, Pope Clement VII and several retainers fled by the Alexandrine corridor to the papal fortress, the Castel Sant' Angelo. Bourbon would die in one of the first assaults; but by sunset the entire city, with the exception of a few palaces and the papal fortress, would be at the mercy of his troops, which would occupy Rome for much of the following year. Thus began the Sack of Rome, an event of obvious political significance for papal autonomy, but also one which many historians have identified as a turning point for Roman humanistic culture.

Jen'ay pas plus faict mon livre que mon livre m'a faict, livre consubstantiel à son autheur … ” (I have not made my book any more than my book has made me, a book consubstantial with its author). That was no ordinary assertion in plain language. Montaigne explained his Essais as “concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand extraneous purpose, like all other books.” Its subject was uniquely himself. His usage of the term “consubstantial” projected his design beyond the literary theory of imitation into a theological paradigm of divinity.

Acknowledging that “well-known phrase” and “famous declaration,” literary criticism has much interpreted Montaigne's “consubstantial” book. Yet the slight mention of the word itself has been both undocumented and inaccurate.

The strange case of French Calvinist women writers poses one of the more puzzling questions that scholars face in their efforts to reanimate the lost or silenced voices of early modern women. The pool of possibilities for the examination of these Huguenot writers is paltry, due to many factors, all of which obstruct a clear hearing of their voices. Admittedly, since women writers are relatively rare in sixteenth-century Calvinism, there is an inevitable temptation to stretch meager evidence too far.

In his “Capitolo in Lode Del Dappoco,” a facetious tribute to the worthless person, the painter Agnolo Bronzino (1503-72) muses to his cat Corimbo about how he likes to spend his evenings: “Tu sai Corimbo, che tal volta io leggo/ così nel letto, per adormentarmi,/ o quando, com'or teco al fuoco seggo;/ e hai veduto anche scombiccherarmi/ qualche foglio e compor qualche cosetta/ per passar tempo e ‘1 cervel ricriarmi (You know Corimbo that I read like this in bed in order to fall asleep, or when as now, I sit with you at the fire; and you have seen me scribbling on some papers and composing some little thing in order to pass the time and refresh my mind) (“Capitolo in lode del dappoco,” 3 7-42).

The Massive Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola looms over its plain, a mute witness to the former power of the family (fig. 1). The rocca was initiated by the first Cardinal Alessandro (Pope Paul III) and fully and magnificently developed by the second Cardinal Alessandro, his grandson. Inside, its decoration boasts of family deeds and silently eliminates family failures. Much of the decoration was minutely described by contemporaries, and documents and decoration have been carefully studied by modern scholars. However one of the major halls, that which evoked the greatest contemporary admiration, the Sala della Cosmografia, can profitably be looked at again (figs. 2-4, 8, 9).

In the summer of 1527, the Spanish Inquisition summoned some thirty-three of Iberia's most prominent theologians to the Castilian city of Valladolid in order to judge a variety of suspicious passages culled from Erasmus's works. The theologians met, argued, and disbanded without ever reaching a decision on the orthodoxy of the excerpts or even debating the whole inventory under review, for when plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique sent them home and never reconvened them. The place of the Valladolid assembly in the scholarly record is nearly minimal, for if a few academics have detailed Erasmus's response to it, no one has sufficiently explored its implications for Spanish history. The reason for such neglect lies not only in the conference's failure to pronounce, but in the modern argument that diagrams it in terms of Erasmus's impact on sixteenth-century Spanish culture.

Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse, a volume of devotional verse named for its principal poem, was published in Alençon in 1531 and in Paris two years later. The Paris edition identifies its author as “Marguerite de France, Soeur Vnicque du Roy,” and later as “Royne de Navarre.” Some eleven years later, the daughter of Henry VIII translated the Miroir as a gift for her latest stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr. The poem has thus a doubly unusual status. In an age when literature was overwhelmingly male in its origins, the agencies of genesis and transmission for this work were female. And in an age when most writers came from the middle class, the agents of its production and reproduction were of high birth, members of royal families.

In two of his major works, On the New Star (1606) and Harmonics of the Universe (1619), Johannes Kepler engaged in an extensive debate against Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Disputations against Judicial Astrology. But despite his disagreements with Pico's Disputations, Kepler wrote about it in these works with deep respect and even expressed many points of agreement with it. Ernst Cassirer suggested that despite Kepler's continuing practice and support of astrology, Kepler essentially adopted Pico's idea of the human being making himself and thus gradually liberated himself from a belief in astrological determinism: “The problem of freedom is closely allied to the problem of knowledge; the conception of freedom determines that of knowledge, just as, conversely, the latter determines the former. The spontaneity and productivity of knowledge finally become the seal of the conviction of human freedom and human creativity.”

The Stowe inventory of the contents of the Wardrobe of Robes gives us a privileged glimpse into the closets of Queen Elizabeth in 1600. There could be found over one thousand clothing items: gowns, robes, kirtles, foreparts, petticoats, cloaks, safeguards, and doublets, plus two hundred additional pieces of material, as well as pantofles, fans, and jewelry. Many of these were gifts presented to the queen at the New Year, on progresses, at Accession Day tilts or other events. Items of embroidered clothing come to dominate the existing gift rolls. The 1588-89 New Year's gifts include, in addition to £795 in gold, almost six dozen gifts of clothing, most of them richly embroidered, plus sixteen items of jewelry, several pieces of gold- or silverplate, and a dozen gifts of embroidered furnishings.

Prior to the reformation, most sermons given in France were structured according to the “modern method” of division and subdivision, which proceeded in rather artificial fashion from theme to protheme, then to the elaboration of theological points and exempla. Those who deviated from this form, such as Jean Vitrier, were lavishly praised by humanists such as Erasmus, but were often sufficiently heterodox in other respects to attract the attention of the Paris Faculty of Theology. In the first decade after the outbreak of the Reformation in France, the modern method persisted, but by the 1530s it had been replaced almost completely by a much freer and more expressive rendering of theological and Biblical material. This was accompanied by an equally major change in the language of printing: by the mid-sixteenth century, almost all popular sermons were printed in French, whereas their earlier counterparts had been printed exclusively in Latin.

In his biography of Nicholas Ferrar, A.L. Maycock speaks volumes in describing the Ferrar family's transition in 1625 as a movement from one venture (the Virginia Company) to another, the “great adventure” of Little Gidding. In this one phrase Maycock comprehends the view of its founders that no less than the Virginia Company's epic plantation of true religion among the Indians, the community at Little Gidding ranks as a heroic enterprise, the discursive preoccupation of which proves to be the very nature of Christian heroism itself. Even if readers of the Ferrar papers do not know how highly Nicholas Ferrar prized the Acts and Monuments, it is impossible for them to miss the Foxeian narratives of “heroic suffering” so pervasive in the “story books” left as folio records of the dialogues performed by the so-called Little Academy.

In 1576, the year after she married the aspiring architect Francesco da Volterra and moved to Rome, a Mantuan engraver named Diana (known in the twentieth century as Diana Scultori) produced a large, single-sheet engraving of an Ionic volute, richly decorated with a chain of stylized acanthus leaves and flowers, and a slightly abbreviated version of the egg-and-dart and bead-and-reel moldings that adorned the capital (fig. 1). In its size, its attention to decorative detail, and its pictorial character, Diana's print differed quite a bit from the model-bookish profiles of the classical orders previously in circulation (fig. 2). Most unusual, though, was the signature of a woman under several lines of Latin text engraved beneath the image, explicitly dedicating it to students of architecture: “This volute from an ancient capital of a Numidian stone column of the composite order, in St. Peter's in the Vatican, was drawn by Francesco da Volterra and Baptista di Petra Santa for the common use of students of this art. Diana Mantuana, wife of the same Francesco, engraved [it] in Rome. 1576.”

In 1578 Hubert Languet wrote to his young protegee Philip Sidney concerning the latter's plan to assist the Low Countries in their fight against Spain. Surprisingly, the old republican Calvinist monarchomach vetoed the idea, bluntly informing the impulsive teenager that “you and your fellows, I mean men of noble birth, consider that nothing brings you more honour than wholesale slaughter, and you are generally guilty of the greatest injustice.” This hostile assessment of the aristocratic warrior ethos — what Languet derides as “mere love of fame and honour and … displaying your courage” — bears witness to a major ideological upheaval of the early modern period: the attack on the aristocratic politics of violence and, to quote another Elizabethan, “glory got by courage of manhood.”

On 20 April 1534, a twenty-eight year-old Benedictine nun from the convent of St Sepulchre's in Canterbury was hanged at Tyburn alongside her confessor and a number of their associates. The nun was Elizabeth Barton, a former servant from the parish of Aldington in Kent. Barton and her companions were attainted of treason by a Parliamentary Act which asserts that they maliciously opposed Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and “‘traterously attempted many notable actes intendyng therbye the disturbaunce of the pease and tranquyllytie of this Realme.”

The systems of perspective first produced during the fifteenth century and subsequently treated by mathematicians and artists in later centuries have been exhaustively discussed and analyzed by art historians. While many have focused on the technique's geometric and scientific history, beginning with Panofsky and his remarkable treatment of perspeaive as symbolic form in 1927, a number of art historians have attempted to analyze the metaphorical and allegorical aspects of perspective. Although varying greatly in tone and focus, there is one assumption that links all of these accounts. It is generally taken for granted that perspective somehow stands paradigmatically for Descartes's rationalism — for his search for ontological and epistemological certainty.

Many critics of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, perhaps “embarrassed by the rawness and repetitive misery of his lived experience,” have structured Bunyan's obsessive vacillations between hope and despair through identifying conventional stages in his autobiography, as if the intensity of Bunyan's narrative might be contained by placing him within a set of literary or theological conventions. Patricia Caldwell questions this critical focus on “thought” and doctrine, noting that “it is almost as if the literary people themselves are taking their cue from the Puritans themselves” by denying the affective power of a text which appears to follow conventional stages.