This article examines the presence of women in fourteenth-century Venetian scuole piccole and describes their participation. According to surviving confraternity statutes, women seldom shared in the governance of the entire confraternity. But female office holders were often responsible for their sisters in matters of illness, death, burial, and sometimes moral conduct. They also made contributions and left numerous legacies to their scuole. Membership lists sometimes reveal the social and occupational status of women. Information on one confraternity for women only, the Scuola d'Umiltà, survives.

Cariteo's Endimione (1509), a lyric sequence published in Naples shortly after the Spanish takeover of the Aragonese kingdom, advertises a prominent debt to Petrarch's Rime sparse. Commentaries in the earliest printed editions of the latter suggest politically charged models for this sequence. They represent Petrarch, like Cariteo, as a skilled rhetorician, a foreigner in the service of lords and aristocracy outside his ancestral domain, and an ardent proponent of monarchism with a pan-Italian sensibility. These qualities befitted Cariteo at a time when he was articulating his loyalty to the newly installed Spanish viceregal government as a defense against French invasion.

Illustration and text in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) have been long considered intricately related yet the book's ornate, invented language has made study of such interaction difficult. This essay reconsiders their connections through a close analysis of two woodcuts and accompanying text in light of the poetical-rhetorical conventions of contemporary Petrarchan imitation in Italy. This reveals how Francesco Colonna visually and textually adapted, in a playful way, traditional subjects of vernacular lyric poetry: the beauty of the poet's beloved, and the lover's own emotions, characterized through metaphor and other tropes.

This article examines the role played by royal doctors in forming an empirical political science in France at the end of the sixteenth century. Bringing with them took from the Galenic tradition, doctors such as Rodolphe Le Maistre, Abraham-Nicolas de La Framboisière, and Jean Héroard doubled as political counselors. They not only looked for ways to heal the king's body, they also looked for ways to heal and regulate the body of the nation. Their new vision of the monarch as a practicing physician of the state is an essential yet unknown facet of the origins of political modernity.

Against the “presentism “ of current criticism linking the Defence's universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The Defence's epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon — the so-called Philippists — and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.