The fifteenth-century humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) spent much of the period from 1429 to 1444 involved with Florentine politics, becoming a strong advocate on behalf of the patrician oligarchs, many of whom were exiled in 1434 at the return of Cosimo de’ Medici from eleven months of exile. Filelfo’s works from the period, including his satires, the Oratio ad exules, and the consolatory treatise entitled Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, were a response to the Florentine political crisis. Filelfo demonstrates in these works not only a rhetorical and political purpose on behalf of his patrons, but also takes the opportunity to reflect on the notion of world citizenship, a philosophical concept derived largely from Stoic and Cynic sources.

Margherita Datini’s correspondence with her husband Francesco presents a well-documented case of progress from partial to full literacy. In Margherita’s merchant world, letter writing was a major concern, and her household duties included frequent reports to her absent husband. First, she prided herself on her dictation, and then she turned her attention to reading and writing. A recently discovered autograph letter shows that she was writing at twenty-eight, earlier than previously thought, and she attained full literacy in her mid-thirties. After that, writing no longer seemed a challenge, and she returned to using a scribe.

This study examines the musical writings of the occult philosopher Jacques Gohory, particularly his musical additions to his version of book 11 of the serial romance Amadis de Gaule. Although music and romance were often treated by contemporaries as, at best, trivial occupations for leisure hours, Gohory saw both as potential triggers for beneficial self-transformation: music and romance fully participate in the therapeutic and spiritual goals that motivate his more overtly philosophical and medical works. His use of romance as a vehicle for occult philosophy was an important means of disseminating concepts of music as natural magic beyond intellectual circles into the wider milieu of the French court, where occult understandings of music gained substantial currency by 1600.

This essay correlates changes in early modern astrological almanacs with broad changes in early modern English Protestant culture over the sixteenth and seventeenth century. These almanacs show an increasing tendency to be highly specific as to place and time and to suggest that precise times and precise places are given a larger meaning by their relationship to the stars and planets wheeling overhead. By lending a vertical significance to place and time, almanacs run counter to early modern Protestantism, which suggested that place and time have no inherent sacred significance. Thus the rise of the early modern astrological almanac may have been impelled by a desire on the part of early modern men and women to have time and place mean something.