In the fifteenth century, Guarino Guarini, Ludovico Carbone, Francesco Filelfo, and other humanists composed and delivered Latin orations at courtly weddings in Ferrara, Naples, and Milan. In these epithalatmia, which are mostly unpublished, orators adapt a classically inspired conception of marriage to Italian court culture. They defend physical beauty and sexual pleasure, praise learned brides, and assert the importance of mutual affection, revealing a complex picture of ideal gender relations in courts. Against the ancient and Christian anti-marriage ascetic traditions, humanists offer biblical, philosophical, political, economic, and hedonistic arguments in defense of marriage.

In 1482, the episcopal ring of St. Zenobius, patron of the Florentine see, was sent from Florence to France in the hope that it would cure the ailing King Louis XI. This secondary relic belonged to the Girolami, a banking and mercantile family that claimed to be related to the saint. The present study examines the use of St. Zenobius’ ring as a means of international and local diplomatic exchange. In addition, it traces the history of the Girolami's patronage of St. Zenobius’ cult and relics, places it within the context of contemporary devotional practices, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the patronage of privately-owned relics in Renaissance

Scholars are now devoting more attention to the reception of the Church Fathers during the Renaissance and Reformation. While Saint Jerome's function as icon and exemplar has been the subject of substantial study, his role as an author, read and edited during the Renaissance, still awaits thorough investigation. This essay examines how Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest Renaissance editor of Jerome, read the Church Fathers most elaborate polemic in favor of virginity's moral and spiritual superiority to marriage, the Adversus Jovinianum. An investigation of Erasmus’ editorial apparatus for this text, especially his scholia, reveals a complex reading. Erasmus applauded Jerome's rhetorical skill but ventured cautious criticism of his scriptural exegesis without taking a firm position in the controversy over the relative merits of virginity and marriage.

From the time of their courtship until death parted them forty years later, Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-1592) and Laura Battiferra (1523-1589) nurtured a loving relationship with reciprocal support for complementary careers. Their childless union generated two bodies of art, vast and beautiful. Renaissance contemporaries esteemed the Ammannati as a rarity, creative peers in a close marriage, but history has indifferently divorced them, dropping Bartolomeo to the ranks of second best and pushing his accomplished wife into obscurity. Reunited, the couple can return as they deserve, in the entwined lives that enriched their joint corpus and enhanced the fame each won as an individual — she for her poetry, praised by the most prominent men and women of culture in Counter Reformation Italy; he in his dual activity as sculptor and architect for projects ordered by popes in Rome, leaders of the new Society of Jesus, and three generations of Medici rulers in Florence.

This essay examines a subject largely ignored in Tasso criticism: the role of supernatural powers in the epic action of the Liberata. Tasso introduces divine characters, notably God and Satan, at several crucial moments. The presence in the epic plot of an intervening God who is at once partisan and omnipotent brings to the fore certain narrative and theological problems; these problems are not Tasso's alone, but inhere in the attempt to construct a Christian supernatural on the classical epic model. The divine action of the Liberata sheds light on the religious ideology of the poem, and on an issue of broader significance: the uneasy marriage of monotheism and epic narrative.

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 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.