This study weighs the evidence for Leonardo Bruni's estrangement from the emerging Medici party (from the 1420s) and the Medici regime (from 1434). Bruni had ties to both the Mediceans and their oligarch opponents, although ties with the latter appear to be stronger, particularly in terms of Bruni's humanist relations. While Bruni stayed on as Chancellor of Florence when the Medici took over in 1434, some recent studies suggest that the Medicean government was making things difficult for him. The study finally reproduces a report from the Milanese Chancery of 1437 stating that Bruni will support a rebellion in Arezzo against Florence, which will result in the "destruction and ruin of the Florentines."

Machiavelli's Art of War contains an unexplored and unexplained paradox: the dialogue's chief interlocutor is Fabrizio Colonna, a condottiere in the employ of Ferdinand of Aragon, who played a critical role in the Spanish conquest of northern Italy and in the collapse of the Florentine republic led by Piero Soderini, in which Machiavelli worked as a civil servant. Yet, Machiavelli chooses Fabrizio to defend the superiority of the citizen militia, which he associates with republican civic virtue, over mercenary troops. This paradox has remained unaccounted for because literary scholars have ignored the historical background underlying the text's assorted political subtexts, while historians have ignored the nature of Quattrocento dialogue, as a literary genre, in contextualizing the work. Once these historical and literary dimensions of the Art of War are brought together, it can be seen why Fabrizio Colonna would have been perceived, by Machiavelli and his audience, as the ideal representative of a military position which he espoused neither in theory or in practice.

The standard medieval view of New Testament Apocrypha was that they were Christian writings (related to matters treated in the canonical books of the Bible), which had to be treated with caution and often dismissed as heretical. A list of the Apocrypha figured in the [Pseudo-]Gelasian Decree. In the Renaissance, for authors such as Lèfevre d'Etaples, Nicholas Gerbel and many others, the term assumed a multiplicity of meanings, both positive and negative. This article shows that although no attempts were made in the early 16th century to bring N. T. Apocrypha together into a corpus, the editors' ambivalent and complex attitude to texts such as the Laodiceans or Paul's Correspondence with Seneca led to their definitive marginalisation and encouraged their subsequent publication (by Fabricius and others) as corpora of dubious writings.

This paper is an attempt to answer the riddle set up by Malvolio's cryptic question which occurs in the box-tree scene (2.5) of Twelfth Night. The essay surveys a number of alternative solutions proposed by critics, editors, and actors. All are found, in their own ways, to be wanting: some are exposed as literal minded, too arcane, reliant upon language games that are unavailable to a theater audience or flawed by chronology. As the first step in decoding the puzzle, the paper rehearses a Renaissance view of semantics, according to which sense arises from utterances quintessentially — not, as modern linguistics would have it, approximately. Language, that is, is shown to signify inherently rather than conventionally. This linguistic veracity is shown to condemn Malvolio as he repeats an acrostic which he doesn't perceive, even while he utters it. The paper proposes that M.O.A.I. alludes to Sir John Harington's The Metamorphosis Of A Iax.

Despite the common practice of reading Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in relation to the cultural politics of the first year of the Stuart monarchy, politically-oriented criticism has largely neglected the play's connection to the politics of one of King James's most ambitious undertakings: the new biblical translation first announced in January of 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference. While maintaining that the play cannot be reduced to a simple allegory of James's effort to link his new political authority to the "authorizing" power of scripture, this essay examines how the "topicality" of that effort might be registered in the play's complex pattern of biblical allusion. We argue, finally, that with its staged conflict between ethical ideal and social practice, Measure for Measure offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of deploying religious rhetoric in secular political contexts.

This article argues that in the English legal disputes of 1616, specifically the conflict between common law and equity, the principles and systems of ideas, at least as much as the characters, of Coke, Ellesmere, and James were determinative of the triumph of equity. The first part of the essay traces the legal reasoning in the key cases of the dispute. The second part traces James's political theory from his time in Scotland through his dealings with the English Parliament to his pronouncements on the law in his Star Chamber speech of 1616. The article argues that there is a consistent line of principle which can be traced from Scotland to the Star Chamber speech and that James's thought has consequently had its most lasting effect on the relation in Anglo-American jurisprudence between common law and equity.

Long dismissed as aping monarchical forms, Cromwellian portraiture has been neglected by art historians, historians, and literary critics alike. But rather than simply mimicking monarchical iconography, Cromwellian portraiture reflected the character — and contradictions — of Cromwell's own plain style. Paintings by Robert Walker, Samuel Cooper, and Peter Lely all drew upon and significantly revised courtly and idealized Van Dyck portraiture. During the protectorate, Cromwellian portraiture became less, not more, courtly, and the final portrait of Cromwell by Edward Mascall was the most puritan and plain style of all. Visual satire on Cromwell after 1660 attested to the ongoing influence of the plain style as an alternative mode of piety and of power.