This article questions the traditional reading of Pier Candido Decembrio's “Life of Filippo Maria Visconti” (1447) as a tyrant narrative, a reading first proposed by Jacob Burckhardt and highly influential ever since. An examination of the Milanese context and relevant collateral documentation establishes the unlikelihood that Decembrio wished to denounce his former master as a tyrant. Rather, his avowed aim was to spread his prince's fame and glory. In so doing, however, Decembrio avoided the encomiastic model of biography dear to most humanists, delivering instead an insider's account of the astute political practices that underpinned his master's grip on power.

Recent scholarship has challenged the still-powerful claim that long-distance pilgrimage and the journey to Jerusalem dramatically declined in number and significance in the sixteenth century. This article seeks to explore the different ways in which pilgrimage was embedded in the culture of the period. We interpret pilgrimage as a field of shared cross-confessional practices, representational conventions, and contestation. The paper presents a series of interlinked case studies, based on printed sources, correspondence, family archives, and material evidence. Together they demonstrate that early modern pilgrimage perpetuated medieval practices and yet was in constant dialogue with contemporary, post-Reformation religious and intellectual trends.

Clerical exorcists occupied an unstable place among healers in early modern Italy. Although recognized by their patients for their skills and knowledge, they were also a potentially disruptive group, given their interactions with malevolent powers and work that transgressed the normal boundaries of clerical activities. Consequently, clerical exorcists had to defend the legitimacy of their activities to skeptical ecclesiastical authorities. The examination of several such defenses by Venetian clerical exorcists reveals how they understood their profession and advocated for its legitimacy using arguments that resonated with discussions in contemporary medicine and natural philosophy.

This article reexamines the life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a Spanish noblewoman who traveled to London in 1605 hoping to be martyred in service of the Catholic faith. By placing her at the intersection of a series of international, intra- and interconfessional tensions created by the sustained religious division of post-Reformation England, Carvajal emerges as a sophisticated political actor. She offers not only a unique account of female Catholic agency and opposition in early Stuart England, but also a lens through which to view the nature of religious identity and division in a period of Anglo-Spanish peace.

Peter Paul Rubens's Rockox Triptych is generally thought to represent the incredulity of Saint Thomas, even though the side wound that presented Christ's famously distrustful disciple with proof of the resurrection is nowhere to be seen. This article explores the significance of the missing side wound. Drawing attention to the circulation of skeptical philosophy within the artist's milieu, it argues that he conceived of the painting as an epistemic dilemma that would both elicit doubt and suggest how it might be set aside.