On 16 November 1582 John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelly, gathered in the study of Dee's home in Mortlake, a small town located southwest of London on the river Thames. It was five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and the latest in a series of dramatic events was unfolding. This event, like the events that preceded it and those that followed, involved an extraordinary cast of characters and contained a significant philosophical message. In Mortlake, England's most important natural philosopher was preparing to engage in what was becoming a habitual exercise: conversing with angels, whom Dee referred to as his “scholemasters,” about matters relevant to his study of the natural and supernatural worlds.

A number of passages in Cennino Cennini's early fifteenth-century craft handbook, the Libro dell'Arte, have captured the attentionof art historians — most particularly its spectacular first chapter, which defines painting in terms indebted to late medieval poetics and which praises artistic imagination in terms ultimately derived (though significantly transformed) from Horace's Ars poetica. I would like to focus critical attention on another section of the Libro that is equally rich and complex in both its sources and its transformations — Cennini's treatment of imitation and style, articulated most pointedly in chapter 27, “How to Strive to Copy and Draw from as Few Mastersas Possible.” Cennini's discussion of copying masters will be examined in relation to humanist ideas on literary imitation, and this particular aspect of the relation between painting and poetry in theLibrowill be explored in light of the author's residency in Padua during the last years of the Trecento.

Despite the growing interest of modern scholars in early-Renaissance civic architecture as the bearer of meaning, the public buildings of Dubrovnik (It. Ragusa; Lat. Ragusium) have received less attention than their due. This is all the more regrettable because when some of the city's monuments are seen in their appropriate historical perspective, they turn out to be more important than many scholars would have expected.

My case in point is Dubrovnik's principal government building, the so-called Rector's Palace (Palatium regiminis, Knežev dvor, or the Palazzo de'Rettori) When the fortress-like structure, which had been built in the fourteenth century, was severely damaged in 1435 by a gunpowder explosion in the armory, the authorities immediately decided to erect a new palace. Its construction was entrusted to the state engineer Onofrio di Giordano della Cava of Naples, under whose direction it was virtually completed by 1452 — only to be severely damaged by another explosion of ammunition in 1463.

In late spring of 1473 an elaborate wooden building was constructed in the piazza before the Roman church of Ss. Apostoli. This structure was to provide the setting for entertainments offered in honor of the marriage of Eleonora of Aragon, daughter of Ferrante, king of Naples, to Ercole d'Este, duke of Ferrara. The bride and her Neapolitan retinue, together with the Ferrarese contingent sent to Naples to fetch her, stayed in Rome for five days, from 5 June to 9 June. They were the guests of nephews of Sixtus IV: Pietro Riario, the cardinal of San Sisto, and Giuliano della Rovere, the cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli.

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.

No phenomenon reveals the otherness, the alien quality of early modern culture as dramatically as reputed cases of demonic possession. Previously a rare and rather marginal phenomenon, demonic possession became a new plague in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Physically the affliction manifested itself in recurrent fits, convulsions, foaming at the mouth, difficulty eating and drinking, bug-eyes, and extreme contortions of the body. Verbally demoniacs sometimes ranted incoherently; other times, their words were offensively clear to those around them. Speaking with the supposed voice of the devil, demoniacs uttered blasphemies and obscenities, denied fundamental Christian dogmas, and mocked figures of authority.

Jacques Derrida begins a recent reflection upon Descartes's Discours de la méthode by remarking upon the metaphor of the path, way, or road contained within the etymology of the word “method”: “methodos, metahodos, c'est-à-dire ‘suivant la route,’ suivant le chemin, en suivant le chemin, en chemin.”

Scholarly discussion of late Quattrocento art patronage in Mantua has largely been confined to projects associated with Isabella d'Este (1474-1539, marchesa from 1490 and dowager marchesa from 1519). And yet in 1494 her husband wrote that “painting delights us not a little and by its pleasures we often relax and console our mind from the various occupations, anxieties, and cares in which it is involved.” Francesco II Gonzaga's effulgent praise of the visual arts suggests that he (1466-1519, marquis from 1484) was rather more consequential for the cultural life of the state than has usually been allowed.

in his 1569 Epistola qua ad multas multorum amicorum respondet de suae typographiae statu nominatimque de suo thesauro linguae graecae, the Parisian printer Henri II Estienne decries the participation of women in the book trade: “But beyond all those evils which have now been brought on by the ignorance of printers, male and female (for this only remains to add to the disgrace of the art, that even the little ladies have been practicing it), who will doubt that new evils are daily to be expected?” As Estienne's comments testify, one of the most unusualfeatures of the Renaissance and Counter Reformation book trade was the existence of several women printers and publishers. While their contemporaries were well aware of the presence of women in the printing profession, bibliographers and historians have largely neglected the history of their labors.

Act three of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein's 1665 German language play about Nero's assassination of his mother and erst-while co-regent Agrippina in A.D. 59 contains what could arguably be deemed one of the most salacious scenes produced on the early modern stage in central Europe.

In an article recently published in this journal, I argued that a certain, often discussed, hybrid encountered in Bronzino's wellknown painting depicting The Exposure of Luxury (ca. 1545, National Gallery, London; also known as Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time) was actually intended to represent a “sphinx” [fig. 1]. Whatever its proper designation, this is the bizarre figure that may be espied lurking in darkness (as much metaphorical as physical), just as she/it was placed in the middle ground of the far right side of Bronzino's carefully contrived composition [fig. 2]. This darkly crouching creature was situated by the ingenious painter behind the brightly illuminated figure of a nude and joyful putto tossing roses, so making it literally hidden (occulta).

Erasmian hermeneutics are notoriously difficult to describe clearly because Erasmus is always looking in two directions at once — both toward the ideal, perfectly expressive Word and toward the multitude of imperfect, human words caught in the tumult of history and transmission. In the Enchiridion(1503), a relatively early work, he argues that words inevitably fall short of their task of miming the Logos, that the smallness of the manna rained down on theIsraelites in Exodus 16 “signifies the lowliness of speech that conceals immense mysteries in almost crude language.” Erasmus believes in an essential connection of some kind between res and verbum, but it is clear that he holds as well to the Platonic view that this connection is always necessarily inadequate, that there can be an approach but never an arrival at complete meaning through human language.

In his famous “essay” of almost 150 years ago, Jacob Burckhardt articulated the single most fruitful idea about the Renaissance — that it was epitomized by “the discovery of the individual.” This discovery was double-sided: Man became a geistiges Individuum and recognized himself as such; and, as a consequence of this recognition, he also came to perceive die Fülle des Individuellen in the world around him. In other words, with the self-conscious perception of one's own uniqueness came the perception of the world as being full of unique entities.

This discovery was for Burckhardt not an unalloyed blessing. His auf sich selbst gestellten Persönlichkeit (so liberally translated as “free personality“) is the individual stripped bare of all traditional defenses, standing naked before the world, with only his own wits to rely on — hardly a comforting prospect.

Specialists may recall Andrew Marvell's defense of John Milton in The Second Part of The Rehearsall Transpros'd against the attacks of Samuel Parker, once an associate of sorts but by 1673 a champion of religious intolerance. Parker had written in his Reproof that The Rehearsall Transpros'd afforded “as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as any we meet with in the writings of J.M.”; and toward the end of The Second Part Marvell makes a point of rebutting this claim as yet another instance of Parker's malicious immoderation. He allows that it was Milton's “misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be toss'd on the wrong side, and [that] he writ Flagrante bello certain dangerous Treatises.”

On 9 May 1611 James I broke with a royal custom that had been established for more than a century of Tudor rule. He attended the trial of the pyx at the Royal Mint in the city of London. This yearly ceremony was for the formal testing of sovereign moneys. It was designed to ensure that the manufacture of various denominations conformed to current standards set by the crown. While his Tudor predecessors had allowed previous trials to continue unattended by majesty, James's presence at the pyx in 1611 provided the occasion for a striking display of royal power.

In the prologue to Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Machiavelli appears on stage to announce his arrival in England after a sojourn through the Continent:

The impact of Machiavelli on sixteenth-century Europe was profound, and as this passage implies, his reception in England was complicated by an involved process of transmission. Reactions to his works mixed with demonic portrayals of him that had percolated through European political communities.

The famous army debates held at Putney in 1647 provide us with some remarkable insights into the misgivings of the men who were soon to bring about the trial and execution of their king. Their very practical need to placate the then powerful “Leveller” faction within the army drew the “Grandees” into talks which clearly reveal the limits of their revolutionary aspirations. The principal objection of both Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton to the proposals of the Levellers is also the most telling: both men saw in the proposed Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People, a threat to the current economic order, an order based upon the ownership of property by a relatively small number of men.

In the decades immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the question of the Renaissance, which had never attracted much scholarly attention even before the war, almost completely disappeared from consideration in Spanish historical thought. Concerned with seeking a psycho-historical explanation of the catastrophic event which had shattered the political and social fabric of their society, historians turned more than ever to the Middle Ages in search of those peculiar strains that presumably shaped the national character and which in turn would provide an answer to past and present events. The reappearance of this romantic search for the elusive “popular spirit” of the nation was nowhere more evident than in the teachings of two major historians who from their exile in the Americas were to exert for quite some time an exorbitant influence on a new generation of scholars both within and outside of Spain.