In readings of orations, letters, and poems about Petrarch’s death composed in Paduan and Florentine intellectual circles, this article shows that the well-known praise of Petrarch in these texts is a function of a political competition over Petrarch’s remains and, with them, over the rightful location of his legacy. Boccaccio’s last letter, which stands out for its rhetorical sophistication and cultural sensitivity, intervenes in this largely provincial debate with farsighted theoretical coherence and cosmopolitan political ambition. Animated by a familiar vernacular poetics, Boccaccio theorizes an intellectual entombment of Petrarch in Florence that is consonant with Boccaccio’s ongoing cultural project.

Broadening the interdisciplinary base of study on Renaissance Homer, this essay looks to cassone (wedding chest) painting in the Quattrocento to explore how the textual reception of the “Odyssey” was enriched by the visual arts. As artifacts, wedding chests had a role in the public sphere, though they were destined for the private, and they made the epic available to audiences of nonelites. Nausicaa is a key figure, merging the vernacular courtly love tradition and romance. In working across the fields of literary study and art history, this essay introduces new critical concepts to account for the complexities of Renaissance reception of Homer.

Acquiring Hebrew books was a common practice among Christian humanists. More surprising, perhaps, is that a large group of Hebrew manuscripts was produced for a Christian library. A Jewish scribal workshop organized by Johann Jakob Fugger (1516–75) in Venice—here analyzed for the first time—is one of the rarest examples of this phenomenon that emerged out of Renaissance book culture. To understand Fugger’s extensive bibliophilic enterprise, this essay examines the circulation and dissemination of Hebrew texts from the Jewish bookshelf among Christians, the relationships between Christian patrons and Jewish scribes, and the role of manuscripts as agents of print and as objects of collecting.

I discuss how printing affected the practice of scholarship by examining the working methods of Conrad Gessner (1516–65), a prolific humanist, bibliographer, and natural historian. Gessner supplemented his revenue as city physician in Zurich through his publishing activities. He hailed printing, along with libraries to preserve the books, as crucial to the successful transmission of learning to the distant future. Gessner also used printing as a kind of social media: to reach readers rapidly all over Europe, in order to solicit contributions to his research projects underway, to advertise forthcoming books, and to develop his own thinking through multiple iterations.

Although it is common in the musicological literature to compare decorated music books with books of hours, studies addressing the musical features of books of hours are rare. This article considers musical features in the decoration of a book of hours made by leading illuminators in Ferrara ca. 1469. Images appearing in books of hours are considered to have had an exemplary and meditative function in relation to devotional practice; therefore, this study asks what the reader was intended to learn from musical images, drawing conclusions about the alignment of the senses and the significance of music in fifteenth-century religious experience.

In focusing on Michelangelo’s signature, recent scholarship on his “Pietà” in St. Peter’s has separated the sculpture from its spiritual intent. In contrast, this article will consider how the sculpture group spoke to its original religious context, principally as the funerary monument of Michelangelo’s powerful French patron, Cardinal Lagraulas. The Rome “Pietà” was an important part of the funeral rites for the cardinal that mirrors and amplifies the liturgy surrounding death, particularly the hour of vespers. Reconstructing the sculpture’s relationship to its liturgical and funerary ensemble will highlight Michelangelo’s iconographic and artistic ingenuity in the service of religion and his patron.

This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica.

Morisco children captured during the Granadan war of 1568–70, known as the Second War of the Alpujarras, could attain legal but limited freedom in accordance with Philip II’s 1572 law against the enslavement of Morisco minors. Those manumitted were meant to remain servants in Old Christian households until the age of majority. The Spanish monarchy recognized the political value of controlling children. Aiming to turn the children of Morisco rebels into proper Christian subjects, the king authorized and facilitated their liberation as part of a larger project of Morisco conversion. Granadan Moriscos worked within the law in pursuit of liberation, yet took action to reunite families separated by slavery and deportation when possible.

This article takes as its subject the remarkable diary kept by a young English gentleman named John North from 1575 to 1579. On his journey home from Italy in 1575–77, North changed the language of his diary from English to Italian. On his return to London, he continued to keep a record of his everyday life in Italian. This article uses North’s diary as a starting point from which to reconstruct the social and sensory worlds of a returned traveler and Italianate gentleman. In doing so, it offers a way of bridging the gap between individual experiences and personal networks on the one hand, and the wider processes of cultural encounter and linguistic contact on the other.

This article discusses the debates over drama that took place in the English universities during the late sixteenth century. It reconsiders the career of the Oxford academic and theologian John Rainolds, whose objections to student performance are usually conflated with attacks upon professional drama. This article argues instead that his opposition arose largely from two related institutional concerns: the equation of drama with rhetorical exercises and the increasing use of spectacle in university plays. The controversy over theatrical performance is thus cast in a new light as an inquiry into the place and purpose of drama within university culture.

The Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephemera during the reign of King Henri III (r. 1574–89). This article explores how and why L’Estoile kept on adding to a vast archive of “vilain” (“vile”) materials that he purportedly despised. Examining L’Estoile’s manuscripts at close quarters, the article traces a complex practice of censure and self-censorship alongside similar practices by contemporary writers (Henri Estienne and Pierre de Brantôme). L’Estoile’s contribution to the history of sexuality is that of a self-aware critic, legitimating his compulsion to disavow the obscenities he chose to preserve.

This article examines the treatise on the general council (the “Tractado”) published in 1536 by a Spanish jurist serving in the imperial administration in the Kingdom of Naples. It analyzes the content and the context in which it was conceived and argues that the treatise legitimated Charles V’s call for a general council in the political context of 1535–36, which meant supporting the political aims of the Ghibelline faction of Charles V’s court in Naples. The analysis of conciliarist doctrine in this treatise sheds new light on the relations between church and Crown in the context of the imperial policy of Charles V.

This article provides one of the first studies of two late works by George Chapman, “Pro Vere” (1622) and “A iustification of a strange action of Nero” (1629). Through a close examination of these works, and through situating Chapman’s texts alongside other neglected works of the 1620s that voiced opposition to the Stuart court and kings, the article examines the critical and subversive role that classical history and gendered language played in forging ideological conflict in England during the Stuart period. More broadly, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of studying imaginative writings for understanding Stuart political culture.

Nicolas Poussin’s “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” long considered one of his earliest surviving works, is here recognized as a portrait of a historical elephant who visited Rome in 1630 and re-dated accordingly. The article tells the story of this remarkable animal. It traces his passage from South Asia through Portugal, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, and back again to France, and examines his encounters along the way with kings and courtiers, scholars, artists, and traveling showmen, giving insight into the diplomatic and economic uses of exotic animals in early modern Europe. Finally, returning to Poussin, it addresses the implications of the re-dating of the “Hannibal” for our understanding of the painter’s stylistic development and biography.

This article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.

Humanists seeking to defend the classics in Christian-dominated Europe often reframed ancient philosophers as virtuous proto-Christians. This is particularly visible in the biographical paratexts written for printed editions of ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras, Epictetus, and Democritus, whose humanist editors’ Christianizing claims grew stronger over time. Pious humanists intended and expected the classics to strengthen and reaffirm Christian orthodoxy, but humanists’ own claims that pre-Christian sages, by the light of reason alone, had deduced the central truths of theology and surpassed Christians in the exercise of virtue inadvertently undermined the necessity of scripture and paved the way for later deism.