Returning from Algerian captivity in 1580 — when Gregory XIII’s calendar reform was implemented in Spain — Miguel de Cervantes had only two years to adjust from Islamic to Christian time. The fragility and instability of time hence became a central motif for Cervantes. In part 2 of Don Quixote, the time-altering anxieties of the Gregorian calendar appear in glaring gaps in time, in the shifting chronology of the text, and in images that recall the sundial as reflective of time and of the brevity of human life. Cervantes uses Ovidian feasts to further destabilize the quixotic chronology, pointing to the sacred, political, and personal uses (and abuses) of time. Indeed, Sancho Panza takes advantage of chronological conundrums and turns to Ovid’s Fasti in order to mislead his master through a mock-Floralia and a voyage to the Pleiades. For beneath the cloak of simplicity Sancho guides the knight along unexpected paths, thieving from Ovid in order to speak with Mercury’s eloquence and to craft artful designs that rival Botticelli’s Primavera.

Putative textual proof for Titian's central involvement in producing illustrations for Vesalius's anatomy book De fabrica (1543) requires reexamination. On the basis of orthographic, literary, and historical evidence, a phrase in Annibal Caro's after-dinner speech, here dated to 1536, is shown instead to refer ironically to a surgeon's notorious execution in 1517. Anatomia was a word in the satirical as well as the medical lexicon. It is important to understand the satirical tone of Caro's speech about a priapic statuette. Delivered during Carnival to the Roman Academy of Virtue, the speech respects neither antiquities nor artists like Michelangelo in its obscene humor.

The magnificence with which the Florentine Renaissance is synonymous derived its power from a virtue elucidated and disseminated by influential preachers as early as the 1420s. Most notably, Sant’ Antonino Pierozzi O.P. — preacher, reformer, confidant of Cosimo de’ Medici, and eventually the city’s archbishop — drew on and creatively adapted the language of Aquinas and others to forge a public theology of magnificence apposite to the needs of his city and consonant with its republican values. This was well before the mid-1450s and the treatise of Timoteo Maffei which thus far has been the focus of scholarly attention.

Empire building converges with print innovations in the rare Zaragoza edition (1523) of the landmark “Second Letter from Mexico” of Hernán Cortés. The Aragonese print shop owned by German immigrant George Coçi advertised what, to its first interpreters, was stunning news from a still mysterious place overseas with woodblocks drawn from their 1520 edition of Livy's History of Rome. An examination of the political, social, and editorial contexts that informed these two books addressed to Charles V casts light on concerns about how the new Spanish king would communicate with his subjects in an age of imperial expansion.

This article investigates the relationships between hydraulic engineering and antiquarian studies in Rome in the long decade between the devastating Tiber River flood of 1557 and the completion of the repair of an ancient aqueduct, the Acqua Vergine, in 1570. The essay focuses on the physician Andrea Bacci (1524–1600), the engineer Antonio Trevisi (d. 1566), the jurist and Roman magistrate Luca Peto (1512–81), and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (ca. 1510–83). These individuals from both learned and practical backgrounds approached urgent problems of hydraulic engineering by studying ancient texts and artifacts, and they proposed solutions that were influenced by their study. This confluence of antiquarian study and engineering contributed to the development of empirical methodologies in the late Renaissance by making engineering part of a learned discourse.

In the early 1580s, Torquato Tasso (1544–95), hospitalized (or imprisoned) in Ferrara's Sant'Anna, wrote two versions of a dialogue on the theory of games in which a female interlocutor complains that men commonly lose to women out of an artificial sense of courtesy. In the second and much longer version, the Gonzaga secondo overo del giuoco (1582), he shifts the direction of his response to this condescending mannerism, offering a vision of women with the determination and potential to be true players. This article examines how Tasso made this change and speculates as to why, tying his treatment to the larger discourse on gender and play in sixteenth-century Italy and proposing that his solution represents a timely intersection of the theory of games, the agency of women, and the plight of a captive poet in Renaissance Italy.

Printed commemorations of Renaissance pageantry have been used as important sources of knowledge about the people and circumstances surrounding key political events, with less attention paid to the internal structure and original function of the printed works themselves. This essay explores a particular commemorative book and its illustrations as a case study of the collaborative construction of civic identity in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. It considers the growing conception of print as a space for communal definition and political diplomacy, functioning not as a replacement for civic ritual, but an analog to it.

In 1520, Martin Luther’s view of the papacy shifted dramatically and permanently. While the events of 1519 played a role in his evolving view of the papacy as the Antichrist forecast by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, those events alone cannot account for the suddenness and the totality of Luther’s change of opinion. This essay argues that Lorenzo Valla’s Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine played a significant and too-little-appreciated role in Luther’s new stance toward the papacy. This essay examines what it was about Valla’s Discourse that helped convince Luther that the pope was the Antichrist.

This article looks at Irish attempts to fashion Gaelic elites as members of a European-wide aristocracy. Historiographical consensus holds that a modern Ireland, defined by a confessionalized sense of national consciousness, emerged from the ashes of the Gaelic political system's collapse ca. 1607. Central to that process was the exile experience of Irish nobles in Counter-Reformation Europe. This article reads two Irish texts — Tadhg Ó Cianáin's Imeacht na nIarlaí and Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh's Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill — to argue that inclusion in a pan-European nobility was not antithetical to traditional Gaelic cultural norms. In doing so, it attempts to soften the contrast between medieval and modern Ireland, to study the relation between provincial elites and central authority in this period of European state formation, and to explore the interplay between new international identities and traditional local authority.

The Grottenhof is a small garden surrounded by painted loggias in the Munich Residence, a palace that served as the seat of the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria beginning in the sixteenth century. Completed between 1582 and 1589, the garden contains an elaborate grottoed fountain, sculpture, and paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The pictorial program of the painted loggias combines images of mythological ardor with illusionistic interlopers from everyday court life who make punning references to the pursuit of love. The sources for the garden can be found in Italian and French prototypes, yet the program of decorations creates a variety of associations that were unique to the patron, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria. The material and subject matter also reflect contemporary theories about art, nature, and the ordering of knowledge that informed the earliest cabinets of curiosities, where collections of art and natural objects were brought together in the so-called Kunstkammer. The garden was meant to engage all of the senses in a sanctuary that stimulated sensual thoughts while provoking broader contemplation about creativity and art.

The financial status of patrician women in Renaissance Italy remains obscure in all but a few cases, but the prevailing paradigm frames them as being dedicated to the well-being of their families, subordinating their interests to those of their spouses. Where known, their financial activities consist for the most part of supervising small farms, marketing livestock and produce, buying and selling properties, and lending money at interest. Lucrezia Borgia confounds this paradigm: she was a budding capitalist entrepreneur, leveraging her own capital by obtaining marshland at negligible cost and then investing in massive reclamation enterprises. She also raised livestock and rented parts of her newly arable land for short terms, nearly doubling her annual income in the process.

Gabriel Harvey's witty use of a quotation from Ovid on the occasion of the earthquake of 1580 is the point of departure for exploring the several ways in which a contemporary debate about literature, logic, and natural causes was carried out through the mediation of classical texts. At the explosive intersection of Harvey's Socratic wit and Ramist logic, a buried reference to Lucretius sets into motion a number of deeper questions about the nature of literary and natural digressions, and about the ironic ends of a method that demands order, both for its ancient texts and for the natural world.

This essay argues that John Donne’s “Satyre II” (ca. 1595) has a greater topical relevance to the emergence of the Anglo-American common-law tradition than literary and legal scholars have previously recognized. It makes the case that the villain of Donne’s poem, the poet-turned-lawyer Coscus, may be Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) and that two female figures in the poem may be Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603). Donne attacks Coke and Elizabeth for their complicity in deploying an antiquated and backward-looking feudal ideal in order to lend prestige to the common law, to enrich the crown and its officers, and to frustrate the dynastic prospects of landholding gentry.

This article examines how the experience and critique of their country’s decline led Spaniards to craft a distinct discourse of masculinity in the seventeenth century. As they self-consciously examined Spain’s crisis and offered political and economic solutions, these same writers also offered a scathing critique of standards of masculinity. Using the figure of the ideal nobleman as a case study, the article examines how moralists, arbitristas, and hagiographers constructed a dynamic code of manhood linked to questions of productivity, male chastity, and military performance. Further, it argues that this discourse was ultimately nostalgic and failed to adapt itself to the circumstances of the seventeenth century.

This article explores the intellectual foundations for the development of princely art collections, and of Italian picture galleries in particular, as spaces for combined physical and mental exercise and recreation. This study then establishes the relationship between the therapeutic function of picture galleries and the manner in which landscape paintings produced for princely collectors at this moment in Italy embodied ideals of both exercise and repose.

John Donne's The Courtier's Library (ca. 1603–11) is a catalogue of imaginary books that derives its inspiration from Rabelais's satirical description of the Library of St. Victor. Donne's depiction of courtly knowledge parodies the humanist work that secretaries performed for their masters by offering a path to ignorance and mockery rather than a path to learning and advancement. This essay investigates The Courtier's Library, published here in a new translation (see Appendix), in the context of Donne's habits of reading, marginal annotation, and note-taking, examining both the complicated negotiation involved in producing knowledge for courtly display, and Donne's own attempts to reconcile the roles of secretary, scholar, and gentleman.