The literature by English and Scots writers of the sixteenth century that had as its purpose the disparagement or the defense of gynecocracy was to a large extent fortuitous. It addressed a situation that, although feared by Henry VIII, was not actually realized until after the death of Edward VI: England's monarch was a woman. The prospect of her government could hardly have been regarded with anything but concern; the anomalous character of a female prince clearly posed a threat to the stability of her rule and hence to the peace of the country as a whole. For, as the subjects of Mary I knew, the nature of woman was complicated by a kind of doubleness; essentially, woman was a persona mixta. As one of God's creatures, she was conceived as equal to man according to her creation in Genesis I, because there both are formed in the image of the deity.

On the last day of August, 1397, Carlo Malatesta, Count of Rimini and commander of the Florentine League, won a battle outside Mantua. He entered the city and shortly afterward ordered the destruction of a statue of Vergil which had stood there “for centuries” upon the poet's tomb. In Bologna and Florence, humanists were alarmed. Carlo was no ordinary military vandal: he was a cultivated man, trained in the virtues of the bonae litterae; members of his family had been friends with Petrarch; the chief men of his league were enthusiastic about the new literary culture. Yet here he was, desecrating the memory of the king of poets. To desecrate Vergil was to desecrate poetry itself—or so the humanists construed it when they responded to the event.

Giuseppe Moletti (1531-1588) is now remembered only as one of the mathematicians to whom a young Galileo submitted some theorems on centers of gravity, and as Galileo's immediate predecessor in the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua. Yet in his day Moletti was well-known and highly regarded: he was, for instance, one of the mathematicians consulted by Pope Gregory on calendar reform, and his geographical and astronomical works went through several editions in his lifetime. Since his death, however, the only writing of Moletti's to be printed was a brief passage that caught the attention of Giambattista Venturi in the early nineteenth century. Venturi, searching for lost fragments of Galileo's works, came upon Moletti's otherwise unknown and unprinted “Dialogue on Mechanics” in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

The book that everyone in musicology is talking about this year—not just those of us working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; called simply Musicology in the English edition). In it, Kerman argues against what he calls positivism, which he defines as a rigid and non-judgmental pursuit of dry facts, and in favor of the higher criticism, by which he seems to mean analysis—or at least some penetrating discussion of the way individual pieces work and what makes them great—informed by a sense of history and written in a humanistic style, with a personal commitment on the part of the author to the quality of the music with which he is concerned.

Although the Renaissance poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) is generally considered a member of Ficino's Platonic Academy, and himself lectured extensively on the Organon of Aristotle at the Florentine Studio, he repeatedly disclaimed any pretension to being a philosopher. It is no great surprise, consequently, to find that the Index to Angeli Politiani Opera, published in Basel in 1553, contains only one reference under the name of Plotinus, the great and difficult philosopher whom Ficino introduced to the Latin West.

The relationship between hermetic beliefs and Renaissance court festivity is by no means a novel object of study. Both literary and intellectual historians have been aware of its interest for many years, and this awareness shows no signs of declining. Although in practice the presence of occult beliefs in the intentions of a court impresario is not always easy to demonstrate, what we know of the court productions and what we know of the culture that generated them suggest that we should be alert to this potential presence. Recently Roy Strong's revision of his book Splendour at Court (1974) under the new title Art and Power (1984) places heightened emphasis on this element in Renaissance courtly and civic festivity.

It has become a commonplace that Tudor and early Stuart historical authors recognized a formal distinction between “antiquities” and “history,” yet neither the grounds nor the extent of the distinction has been explored in depth. Because some Tudor historical writers could and, on occasion, did ignore it in practice, the distinction has sometimes been deemed a technicality of only minor interest. Nearly twenty-five years ago, F. Smith Fussner described what he termed an English “historical revolution” between 1580 and 1640, a revolution which witnessed the rise of historical writing in something like its modern form. From Fussner's point of view, it mattered only that men were bringing new sources and innovative, critical research methods to the study of the past; whether they called themselves historians, scholars, philologists or antiquaries was of little importance.

Abraham Fraunce holds a conspicuous though somewhat anomalous place in Renaissance literary history. He is usually regarded as a minor poet, worth studying mainly for his close association with two major ones—Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney—and for his translations of Virgil, Heliodorus, and Tasso. He is also considered an important figure in Renaissance rhetorical history (insofar as that can and should be distinguished from literary history) for The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and, to a lesser extent, for The Sheapheardes Logike (?I585) and The Lawiers Logike (1588). Indeed, James J. Murphy has recently identified Fraunce as one of the twenty most frequently cited Renaissance rhetoricians—“the names most often seen in footnotes or heard in learned papers at meetings.”

One of the many treasures of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, is the manuscript of the Gospels written in Syriac in the year 945. This rare and beautiful codex was the property of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who gave his “most dear and precious” book to Duke August the Younger of Braunschweig-Lüneburg as an ornament for his most famous library. Duke August (1579-1666) was known as a wonder in his age because among pious rulers he was the most learned, and among men of greatest learning, he was the most pious. For thirty years he studied all branches of learning, and his devotion to political life is witnessed by thirty volumes of correspondence. Among his writings were books on the game of chess and on cryptography. Most important for posterity is his library at Wolfenbüttel, which contains one of the largest collections of Bibles in Europe.

What induced Marco Antonio Altieri, a Roman noble, to write a treatise on wedding ceremonies, at the beginning of the sixteenth century? It is the purpose of this article to suggest some possible answers to this question, and in so doing, to focus on the problems facing the Roman nobility in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those problems have received little attention from historians. The present contribution can only hope to shed some light on the ideological concerns of one “committed” Roman noble. It does not aspire to an overall study of the Roman nobility. When necessary, however, it will refer to more general trends in the city of Rome during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Altieri's Li nuptiali is worthy of study if for no other reason than that it represents an important, perhaps unique, departure from the kind of writing associated with Renaissance Rome.

Among terminally ill figures of speech, the cliché of rosy cheeks, ruby lips, and snow-white skin may be counted downright deceased. Even in medieval and Renaissance love poetry, roses in the cheeks, lips like cherries or rubies, skin like ivory, lilies, or snow were stiffly conventional: freshness of complexion prompted no freshness of metaphor. The mistress's red-and-white face was relentlessly emblazoned, “red and white” becoming a short-hand notation for feminine beauty: “With lilies white / And roses bright / Doth strive thy colour fair” (Wyatt 65); “Fair is my love … / A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her” (Passionate Pilgrim no. 7); “Thou art not fair for all thy red and white” (Campion 264). The mistress in Spenser's Amoretti has “ruddy cheekes” and “snowy browes” (no. 64); the bride in his Epithalamion is a vision in red and white—cheeks like sun-reddened apples, lips like cherries, forehead like ivory, “breast like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, / Her paps lyke lyllies budded, / Her snowie necke”; when she blushes, “the red roses flush up in her cheekes, / and the pure snow with goodly vermill [vermillion] stayne, / Like crimsin dyde” (Il. 172-7, 226-8).

Born in 1960 with the publication of Philippe Ariès's L'enfant et la vie familiale, family history as we know it has been tremendously fertile. Although the succession is disputed, its progeny are legion. It is not my intention here to trace the complex genealogy of Ariès's descendants or to separate dutiful heirs from rebels who have renounced their patrimony. The family tree is too prolific, its internal divisions too complex. I hope rather to focus on two main themes in the history of the family, themes which seem to me particularly fruitful where our understanding of the Renaissance is concerned. The first theme involves the fundamental structures of family life— ties of kinship and patterns of residence. The second is marriage and the role of women in the family. In both cases, I am particularly interested in the cultural values represented by these structures and behaviors.

Benedetta Carlini, a mystic and visionary who rose from countryside origins to become abbess of the Theatine convent known as Holy Mary of Pescia (Tuscany), was a “lesbian.” For her crimes she was imprisoned for thirty-five years until her death in 1661, at the age of seventy-one. Abbess Benedetta's fascinating story is reconstructed by historian Judith C. Brown in Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Family, marriage, and sex—although it seems to me that the sequence is uncertain—are naturally interrelated in life but not always so in art or, for that matter, in art history. While family and marriage have been much discussed in recent years by historians, they have received very little attention indeed from art historians. Sex, on the other hand, we have always had with us. And while all of one's work is self-referential to some extent, whether one is an artist or an historian of art, it may be that this psychological truth carries a particular danger when one is dealing with matters that are so intimate as family, marriage, and sex. Moreover, there is another issue involved when one is concerned with works of art, at least in the Renaissance or in any period when art was made for patrons, and that is precisely the presence of another psyche in the mixture, in addition to that of the artist himself and that of the historian-observer.