This study seeks to demonstrate that the timing, subject, and audience for the art of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien all argue against the view that the witches in their prints and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or malevolent treatises such as the Malleus maleficiarum. The witch craze did not gain momentum until late in the sixteenth century while the witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien belong to an earlier era. They are more plausible as a response to humanist interest in the poetry and satire of the classical world, and are better understood as poetic constructions created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience.

The Book of the Courtier outwardly portrays an aura of cordial solidarity as courtiers gathered in Urbino from various regions of Italy attempt to describe the ideal courtier; recently, however, critics have uncovered tensions on various fronts which threaten to expose deep rifts under the elegant courtly veneer. While these “counter” readings have focused primarily on the courtier's relation to the prince and to other courtiers, this essay aims to explore conflicts that arise from the different regional and political affiliations of the group. In particular, I argue that the largely ignored section on joke-telling teaches courtiers how to give vent to their animosity under the cover of humor and dissimulation.

The early Tudor North is often regarded as a lawless and disordered society where leading magnates depended upon violence and codes of honor to maintain order. These codes of honor compelled magnates to fight to maintain their reputations and also to assert their independence from central authority. Through an examination of several episodes in northern history, however, most of them brought to light by the most famous historian of the region, Mervyn James, it can be shown that northern magnates did not have a code of honor and usually shrank from violence as a way of settling disputes.

This essay argues that Stuart fairy poetry, rooted in Shakespeare's innovative representation of tiny, consumeristic fairies, attempts to indigenize new forms of elite material display. Rather than the fairies of popular tradition or courtly mythography, Stuart poets depict miniaturized Mabs and Oberons who are notable for their wardrobes, banquets, coaches, and the decor of their palaces. The fairy poetry of William Browne, Michael Drayton, and Robert Herrick must be interpreted not as playful escapism, but as a self-consciously politicized literary mode which reveals these writers’ deep ambivalence toward elite culture — and toward their own artistic role within that culture.

The fourth edition of Britannia (1594) contained a marked increase in the representation of the propertied classes. The names of landowners, new families as well as old, were increased by approximately three hundred over the third edition of 1590. The fourth edition also contained a new index — “Barones et lllustriores Familiae” — which, together with the new names, registered first Camden's awareness of the changing character of Elizabethan society and second his qualifications as heraldic historian. The significance of this is not entirely clear until it is seen that the changes in Britannia came at a time of controversy and declining esteem in the College of Arms. Camden's authority in heraldry, of which the 1594 Britannia provided convincing evidence, together with his association with the advocates of armorial reform (Fulke Greville, Sir Edward Hoby, and Baron Burghley as well as the queen) made him a logical choice, over Ralph Brooke, for elevation to Clarenceux King of Arms in October 1597. Brooke's quarrel with Camden was part and parcel of the College's troubles and was seen at the time as an instance of the jealous animosity for which Brooke was notorious. One of the ironies of Brooke's attack is that it was symptomatic of the conditions — rivalries and jurisdictional disputes among the heralds, for instance — that advocates of reform were attempting to remedy.

The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the possibility of polyvalent geographic identity. Ben Jonsons country house poem, “To Sir Robert Wroth, “ was written from the vantage point of a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. Microhistorical examination of the Wroths and their village in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals their insistent local identity and resistance to the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London. The immediate context of their resistance to the center was a Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to bringdown the price of grain in London. Economically threatened, the Wroths orchestrated sabotage against the project, but eventually acquiesced to the Privy Council and re-entered the centrally administered commonwealth fold. Jonsons poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a celebration of the Wroths as exemplars of commonwealth identity within local region. Only when they distanced themselves from local identity did the Wroths become suitable for Jonson as a poetic model of the country ideal. In Jonsons hands, the country house poem becomes the vehicle of multivalent identification with place.