The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation.

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature on relations between Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire. One of the major lacunae in this research concerns the role of the Jews in the transmission of Italian humanist ideas. In order to address this topic, this article will focus on the “Crónica de los reyes otomanos” by the Sephardi polymath Moses ben Baruch Almosnino (ca. 1515–ca. 1580). My goal is to identify a shared set of themes present in Almosnino's thought and key fifteenth-century Italian sources on the correlation between magnificence and good government, and also to shed new light on the influence of Italian humanism in the Ottoman world.

This article considers the writings of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within the context of European religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, amid the perceived Ottoman threat to Christendom. In their fictional works, these authors imagine an overarching authority that might replace the traditional papal power of oversight and deposing in order to regulate temporal sovereigns and foster a unity of Christian princes within Europe. Even as they can be read as reimagining Christendom, their fictional works reflect what Charles Taylor has called the “disenchantment” of sacred spaces within his philosophical history of the emergence of secularity within European cultures.

Painted in Rome around 1615, Jusepe de Ribera's series of half figures personifying the five senses invites a diplomatic audience associated with the Lincean Academy to a performance of prudence, a virtue meant to characterize the judgment of both art and of sensory experience. Ribera's series is new evidence for how the demonstration of prudence in conversation motivated ownership and display of art and shaped art's contribution to natural philosophy. Ribera's “Five Senses” articulates the distinction between sense and prudence, and reveals the importance of discussion, dissimulation, and social performance to the way early Seicento art was produced and consumed.

Examining the three volumes of birds assembled by Marcus zum Lamm (1544–1606), a Calvinist lawyer, court official, and church councillor in Heidelberg, this article explores visual and material cultures at a Calvinist court. We argue that Lamm was a pioneer in the production of new ornithological knowledge, an entrepreneur and enthusiast who experimented with colors and the arts in order to develop a means of representation that captured the vibrancy of feathers as a new and hitherto-unexplored feature for the classification of birds.

This article argues that the medical discourse of Machiavelli's “Mandragola” is profoundly important both for understanding the play and for revisiting its author's philosophical and political writings. I show that discussions in “Mandragola” of doctors, medicine, eating, and elimination ultimately break down the traditional paradigm that opposes truth, nourishment, and healing to deception, problematic food, and illness. The play's extended discourse around medicine undermines the ideal of the physician who heals the state and the pharmakon of words that heal the soul (in Plato, Livy, Saint Augustine, and Machiavelli's “Discorsi”), questioning in turn notions of knowledge and truth.

This article examines the manuscripts into which compilers bound Dominican letters of spiritual direction in fifteenth-century Italy. It argues that manuscript compilers sought to model Observant Dominican sanctity after Jerome's late antique practice of writing letters of spiritual direction to women. The paper aims to contribute to the growing conversation around the development and spread of an Observant Dominican identity by demonstrating that compilers modeled Observant beati after Jerome's authoritative persona in order to argue for the ancient precedent of the reformers’ often controversial agendas, chief among them their active ministry to women.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This article argues that its Council of the Indies became substantially more bureaucratic partly due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council's fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid's anxieties about women's sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. Women's influence over council operations nonetheless persisted, through near-invisible labor contributions and petitions. One female author in Peru even envisioned influential women directing the empire.

Renaissance scholars agreed that Virgil's canon included poems beyond the “Eclogues,” “Georgics,” and “Aeneid,” but the number of other authentic poems and their value were matters of debate. This article charts competing readings of the “Appendix Vergiliana” by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Joseph Justus Scaliger. Pseudo-Virgilian poems played a key role in J. C. Scaliger's “Poetices Libri Septem” (1561), providing a model of self-quotation and self-emulation for young poets to imitate. In a groundbreaking edition, J. J. Scaliger then discovers a neoteric, Catullan side to Virgil. Their influential readings of the “Appendix” offer radically revised conceptions of the Virgilian poetic career.

Around 1604, Henri IV commissioned a cycle of mural maps depicting royal residences in Fontainebleau's newly constructed Galerie des Cerfs. The gallery was part of Henri IV's response to the dynastic disruption and civil war that had precipitated his ascendance and was designed to signal his authority over France as a unified realm. This article examines the Galerie des Cerfs in the context of contemporary cartography and architecture as an expression of continuity at a moment when the royal family's retreat to the Paris region threatened the political efficacy of the architectural network that had previously sustained the monarchy.

In seventeenth-century Lisbon, Jesuit mathematicians taught their students how to build blood-ejecting crucifixes and similar religious devices. Together with the activities of experts in the canonization of Isabel of Portugal and in other contexts, these situations represent rare instances in which religious devotion interacted directly with science. Informed by the histories of science, art, and religion, this essay argues that a piety centered on materiality fostered these scientific practices, which became religious ministries in themselves. This analysis brings new light to lasting debates on science and religion and to the purpose of practicing science in the early modern period.

After his stay in Paris in the summer of 1572, Philip Sidney (1554–86) spent nearly three years abroad, partly at the University of Padua and partly traveling through the Holy Roman Empire. His mentor Hubert Languet (1518–80) made him free of his large international network of friends and acquaintances, so that when the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre forced him to leave France, the seventeen year old could count on a benevolent reception in many places. This essay shows the various politico-religious cultures and structures Sidney learned on his travels through the empire, and incidentally confirms the historical identity of his equestrian mentor Pietro Pugliano.

John Calvin's “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe's fraudulent relics. Yet, theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while for Catholics prayer's intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in Calvin's humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus's satirical or devotional works, but to his rhetorical theory of copia. The “Traité” amasses a copia, an abundance, of fakes, burying the cult of relics in its own contradictions. Fusing rhetoric and proof, this mass juxtaposition subjects sacred presence to noncontradiction, patrolling vital confessional borders in Reformation theology.

The “Resposta breve” (Brief response, 1623–24) by Niccolò Longobardo was one of the most controversial documents ever penned in the Jesuit China mission. Longobardo criticized the use of indigenous Chinese vocabulary by Matteo Ricci to express Christian concepts as a perilous accommodation to diabolical monism. This article proposes a close reading of how Longobardo employed Scholastic, humanist, and Chinese sources to critique Ricci's disregard for the neo-Confucian interpreters in his reading of ancient Confucianism. It argues that Longobardo's polemic with Ricci was not theological in nature but reflected his distrust of philology in reconstructing the original meaning of ancient texts.

This article offers a new interpretation of the concept of wonder in early modern Europe by focusing on large collections. It shows that many princely Kunstkammern were located above stables, and argues that the horses downstairs and the curiosities upstairs performed similar roles in the courtly display of power. The size and design of stables shaped how curiosities were exhibited and viewed. These majestic buildings facilitated cursory viewing experiences of the assemblage of a great number of animals and objects. They did not necessarily encourage the detailed examination of particular and unique exhibits.

Through Venetian Inquisition trials relating to Protestantism, witchcraft, and Judaism, this article illuminates the centrality of food and eating practices to religious identity construction. The Holy Office used food to assert its model of post-Tridentine piety and the boundaries between Catholics and the non-Catholic populations in the city. These trial records concurrently act as access points to the experiences and beliefs—to the lived religion—of ordinary people living and working in Venice from 1560 to 1640. The article therefore offers new insight into the workings and impacts of the Counter-Reformation.

This article shows how the rise of printed news media during the opening decades of the seventeenth century fomented and fragmented authority in the polycentric Spanish Habsburg empire. Analyzing the making, dissemination, and reception of transatlantic news from Madrid to Mexico and from Lisbon to Lima, the article explores how the influx of fragments of unverifiable information from overseas undermined the possibility of complete knowledge. While the Spanish Crown exploited news media to create a sense of a unified imperial space, the dynamics of distance resulted in uncertainty and the spread of conflicting narratives that fractured central control.

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.