This essay examines autobiographical moments in supplicant claims for poor relief in Tours during the 1580s. Appealing for assistance required the poor to construct explanations for their present impoverished circumstances. Some supplicant petitions offer historians opportunities to explore self-representation and life narratives by a social group that was largely illiterate and whose experiences are underrepresented in the written records. This essay examines how such evidence can provide some insights into meanings of individuality, identity, life history, achievement, and civic participation from the perspective of people at the lower social levels of sixteenth-century French society.

In late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Venice, the state increased its scrutiny over the composition of its patriciate. This essay examines the position of the Venetians with a claim to nobility resident on the island of Crete who were in danger of being closed out of the patriciate and the resulting negotiations over social status and political loyalty within the process of prove di nobiltà. These Venetians from the periphery presented genealogies emphasizing a shared history with Venice, and the Venetian state ultimately accepted the majority of these claims to membership in its patriciate.

Egidio of Viterbo's Sentences-Commentary ad mentem Platonis blends scholastic theological argumentation with the poetic theology of Ficinian Platonism. This essay examines Egidio's application of myths drawn mainly from the Platonic dialogues to residual questions, after he successfully addressed the question of divine generation. The allusions do not just embellish, but embody the fundamental theological truth as revealed in scripture and tradition. Egidio incorporates philosophical humanism and the literary sensibilities of his age into the Sentences- Commentary genre.

It has always been assumed that either Shakespeare or the author of the Ur-Hamlet was the first to introduce controversial religious allusions to the pre-Christian setting of Saxo's Amleth saga. But this article seeks to relocate the legend in the competing confessional narratives to which it belonged in mid-sixteenth-century Europe. A new link between Saxo, Belleforest, and Shakespeare's versions of the story is identified in the ethnographic histories of Johannes and Olaus Magnus of Sweden. The overlooked Historia Olai Magni (1567) is proposed as the source of local details (like the "sledded Polacks ") in Hamlet.