How did the Netherlands assimilate the New World? This essay explores the process of cultural geography in the Renaissance by examining the creative appropriation of American "allies" by the Dutch Republic. On three separate occasions, embassies from the United Provinces sought to enlist natives of South America for a proposed brotherhood, or "alliance," meant to challenge the tyranny of Spain and liberate the hemisphere from Habsburg control While this hoped-for Reconquista never did transpire, Dutch efforts — rhetorical as well as real—demonstrate a highly imaginative and vigorously prosecuted response to America. They problematize the paradigm of the New Worlds "blunted" impact on the Old.

Mediated by Neoplatonist thought of the Quattrocento, paradox governs both form and content of Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astreé. The prefatory epistles to the work's first three parts establish a Foucaldian notion of “author function“ while simultaneously positing the author's profound distrust of writing and his preference for an oral medium. Within the romance itself, the three episodes featuring the authoritative Laws of Love, their falsification, and finally their complete revision illustrate deconstruction of the “author function” through the force of the Platonic textual “drift” against which d'Urfé cautions his protagonists in his prefaces. At the same time, the revised Laws of Love announce means of collective composition prevalent in the later seventeenth century. The romance's sylvan cabinet thus reflects and resolves the dilemmas of authority and composition conceived in the prefaces' paternal Cabinet.

In the Renaissance there were close similarities between the static choreography of the formal gardens of the nobility and the moving choreographies performed by the members of the court. The principles of order and proportion, the expression of splendour, the geometrical forms, were all fundamental principles of both Renaissance court dance and the formal garden. The patterns in both these art-forms were meant to be viewed from above. This close similarity in design principles between the horticultural and kinetic arts existed right through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continued into the seventeenth century.

Where is the research on the Renaissance being done in Germany? Is it true that “European history is still firmly divided among antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era,” and that therefore “the Renaissance occupies no space of its own in the history curriculum [of German universities]” as Professor Karant-Nunn has argued? The problem, it seems, is that German historians have largely abandoned the term “Renaissance” to denote the period between the Middle Ages and the modern era, using instead the term “early modern period” (Friihe Neuzeit), a term whose perimeters are variously defined as extending from the close of the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, or to the French Revolution, or even to the end of the old Reich in 1806.