On 13 April 1403, Parisian chancellor Jean Gerson delivered one of his most famous sermons, a sermon on the Passion of Christ entitled “Ad deum vadit.” That evening, in the second part of the sermon, Gerson set forth the central and most dramatic portion of the Passion narrative, the crucifixion of Jesus. As he had done throughout the story, Gerson sought to recreate the feelings, responses, and very words of Mary as she witnessed her son's suffering. In an anguished question that echoed Jesus’ own, Gerson proclaims that Mary was able to cry to God.

Renaissance humanism was not, and probably could never have been, permanently confined to the restricted company that had once created it. Even its most esoteric branches — Neoplatonism, magic, cabala, alchemy—had their practical side, for they had been conceived and continued to operate in a world of practical needs. By the first two decades of the early sixteenth century, fundamental concepts of Neoplatonism, though they may have retained their esoteric charm for self-conscious cognoscenti, had also become common coin, the imagery in which merchants, professionals, and technicians couched their own philosophical yearnings. At the same time, humanistic patterns of thought had come to govern actions in the political and financial sphere no less than they governed the progress of letters and art.

In a Memorable Passage on the philosophy of art, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that the human subject's power to act and to perceive as a separate being arises from a body at once discrete unto itself, yet continuous with the world around it. “This initial paradox cannot but produce others,” he continues. “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself“.

The Woman—Dressed in the common mode of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — stands with her right, or sometimes left, hand extended forward, the second finger raised and stretched forth. The man, dressed similarly, confronts her, ring in hand, to place on her outstretched finger. There are others in attendance, principally a figure of dignity close to the pair and perhaps as many as ten or more spectators. The description is that of a wedding, in fact, a Jewish one. The action takes place exclusively between the bride and the groom, although in one version of this picture (there are many), the dignified third figure raises a cup in hand; in others, he is reciting words of blessing.

At his festival in 1513 the talking statue Pasquino took the character of Apollo to celebrate the election of Leo X and to predict a golden age of patronage and poetry. “I used to be an exile,“ Pasquino/Apollo remarks, “But I'm back in Leo's reign. / So burn your midnight oil, boys, / And follow in my train, / For no one leaves my Leo / Without a handsome gain. / Bards will sing for prizes, / And they'll not sing in vain.“ The new era lived up to Pasquino's expectations, for the Roman humanists were rewarded and entertained not only in the papal court but also, less formally, in the vigne of numerous Maecenases and fellow poets, where they came together in literary groups, or sodalities, to dine, exchange their poetry, and celebrate the shared ideals of the humanist community.

When Newton was planning a second edition of the Principia, he considered adding to the work some passages indicating his belief that the theory of inertia was known in antiquity. He intended to include several selections, ninety verses in all, from Lucretius's De rerum natura to illustrate that point. In the end, however, he decided against incorporating the material in the new edition, probably because Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity College Cambridge, considered Epicurean thought, of which Lucretius's work is the chief example, to be an attack on religion. Bentley had written to Newton that he planned to base a refutation of Epicurean atheism on Newton's Principia and asked him for clarification of several points.

As Dante and Beatrice begin their ascent to the Empyrean in canto 3 of the Paradiso, they alight on the moon where they encounter pale spirits, not mere reflections but “true substances … assigned [there] for inconstancy to holy vows” (Dante, 29-31).1 Encouraged by Beatrice, Dante asks an eager soul identified as Piccarda Donati, a Poor Clare abducted from a Florentine convent by her brother and coerced into a politically expedient marriage, “through what warp she had not entirely passed the shuttle of her vow” (Dante, 95-96). Like the followers of Saint Clare who “go cloaked and veiled on earth,” she replies, “as a girl, I fled the world to walk the way she walked and closed myself into her habit, pledged to her sisterhood till my last day” (Dante, 98-99, 103-05).

Historians of the Family in Renaissance Europe have devoted much attention to its patriarchal orientation. For the northern Italian cities, intense monographic study of elite behavior has illuminated the guiding principles behind strategies that preserved and enhanced family status. Those principles also occupy a prominent position in the prescriptive writings of contemporary jurists, humanists, and moralists; from them historians have argued that women's powers of decision in the urban environment of Renaissance Italy were severely limited. Similar conclusions have been reached for the Reformation period.

In the Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as part of their Palm Sunday liturgical celebration, various London parishes purchased or rented costumes, wigs, and props for prophets, and paid to build scaffolds for them to stand on (“pageanttes“). Six other cities too had Palm Sunday prophets between 1498 and 1559 and it is perhaps significant that in all these places a substantial tradition of religious dissent existed. It is in London, however, that such Palm Sunday celebrations are first recorded and most numerous.

About twenty-five years ago, in the lobby of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a friend introduced me to the already legendary Eugénie Droz. As kindly as her rather haughty manner permitted, she asked me what I was working on, and when I replied “Rabelais” she said condescendingly: “Oh, do you think there is any more work to be done on Rabelais?”

In the generation since that conversation a good deal of work has been done on Rabelais, much of it interesting and some of it new and exciting. M. A. Screech and his followers, most notably Jean Céard, Edwin Duval, and Florence Weinberg, have greatly expanded our understanding of Rabelais the Evangelical Christian humanist; Carol Clark and Samuel Kinser have corrected many of Bakhtin's outdated views on Rabelais and carnival; Walter Stephens has illuminated Renaissance attitudes to giants and their relevance to Rabelais.

The Year 1600 Witnessed A significant though little-noted event in Italian cultural history: the publication of the first substantial full-length works by Italian women writers arguing the case for women's moral and intellectual equality with men. The writers in question were two Venetians, Lucrezia Marinella and Modesta Pozzo (Moderata Fonte); their works, respectively, a polemical treatise, La nobilta et I'eccellenza delle donne, and a dialogue, Il merito delle donne. These texts, long neglected, have recently begun to attract a certain amount of critical attention: particularly Fonte's Merito, far the more accessible of the two and a work, as is now being recognized, of considerable literary merit.

Poem Bestowing upon François IER the essence of divinity was not a flattering aberration but an example of imagery that became emblematic of his long reign. As Anne-Marie Lecoq has shown in her incisive analyses of many laudatory illuminated treatises and poems and extravagant royal entries with theatrical enactments, the king was glorified by an allegorical symbolism often intricately interwoven with Christian typology as deemed appropriate, indeed necessary, for “un roi très chrétien” who was the brave, virtuous, pious elect of God.

Some Often Quoted Lines from Sidney's Apology for Poetry can stand both as a piece of literary history in themselves and as a methodological guide for the study of that history: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture.“1 It is one of the most famous of all definitions of poetry, and like many other such definitions—Plato's in the Republic, Horace's in the Ars Poetica2- —it arrives at saliency by drawing an analogy to the visual. More succinctly even than his predecessors, Sidney demonstrates just how difficult it is to unpack the cdncept of mimesis as he ranges through a sequence of functional descriptions ﹛representing, counterfeiting, figuring forth), none of which quite does the trick, until he arrives at a metaphor that names itself as such. One might say that a metaphor is itself a speaking picture and therefore Sidney's memorable phrase is a self-confirming artifact. But let us shy away from such metaformulations and content ourselves with a sense of just how felicitous the expression “speaking picture” turns out to be.

On Thursday, 17 February 1558, King Henri II was to come to the Paris Hotel de Ville with Francois de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and have dinner with the municipal council. This was on rather short notice (the king had signified his intention on 8 February); but then, it was not supposed to be a solemn entree, only a banquet. In addition to the hearty pleasures of a Jeudi Gras, there was a lot to celebrate, most notably the recent (8 January) capture of Calais and the fort of Guignes by the duke, which had put an end to over four centuries of English presence on French soil. The banquet in the decorated Grande Salle was supposed to be the main event, but the aldermen wanted more.

Did the concept of style have gender? Were the styles of particular Renaissance painters considered to have gendered qualities by contemporary critics? Because gender permeated the rhetorical and philological foundations of art criticism, it can provide a useful interpretive lens to examine the critical arsenal of writers on art, their attitudes toward style and the subterranean bias of their language. Feminist art history has grappled with gender more in terms of iconography, biography, or patronage following a social agenda to analyze a misogynist past and to remedy the marginalization of women in modern art historiography. An exceptional study by Elizabeth Cropper in 1976 broached the question of gender in aesthetics by reconstituting a complex history of love and beauty that converged in treatises on beautiful women.

O Thello's Popularity in the Early seventeenth century is indicated both by the frequency of its revival and by its influence over many of the dramatists of the period. It seems to have exerted a lasting hold over Ford's imagination, the effects traceable in three plays written at different stages in his career: The Queen, published anonymously in 1653 but now generally reckoned to be an early work, Love's Sacrifice (1633), and The Lady's Trial (1638). The extent and significance of the influence ofOthello on Love's Sacrifice has been much discussed. In the words of one commentator, “So close are the parallels with Othello in the middle scenes of the action that it is tempting to imagine that Ford wrote with a copy of the play at his side.

It has long been known that Bruno's fourth Italian dialogue, L0 spaccio della bestia trionfante, written and published in London in 1584, was used as a source by Thomas Carew for his masque Coelum Britannicum. This was Carew's only masque; but it was by no means a minor event within the Stuart calendar of court entertainments. However, in spite of general agreement on the quality of Coelum Britannicum as one of the major entertainments of the Stuart court, the use by Carew of Bruno's dialogue has never been extensively or satisfactorily commented on. Both Bruno and Carew scholars have clearly been ill at ease with the relationship and have tended to dismiss it with a few brief and evasive remarks.

Recent Research into Early modern social groups in which women gained access to literary language has focused on the coteries in which they learned to perform alongside men, improvising poems later printed in books.1 The typical coterie in Italy, through which women such as Veronica Franco made their way into print, was the humanist academy centered around a court or a group of urban noblemen, such as the Venier academy in Venice. In sixteenth-century France such groups took two forms: the provincial salon attended by professional men—humanist lawyers, diplomats, doctors, publishers—as in Lyon and Poitiers, and the aristocratic salons linked to the court.

There are Several Reasons for presenting an overview of what the terms Renaissance and humanism have meant to Spanish historians and literary critics during the past one hundred fifty years. Despite the fact that these historiographical categories have not received the same attention in Spain as they have in other parts of Europe, it is still useful to identify certain recurring assumptions regarding the nature of the Spanish Renaissance and to point out how these underlying presuppositions are usually linked, directly or indirectly, to the historical development of the concept of the Renaissance elaborated elsewhere in Europe.