Cabot has been hailed as the father of English navigation, bringing with him from Spain the methods of celestial navigation and the ability to unite navigational theory and practice. The system Cabot set up in England, however, differed not only from the actual system of navigation in Spain, but also from the policies he advocated while there. In transferring his expertise to England, Cabot reshaped the Spanish navigational methods for his new context, convincing the English to emulate a system that never existed as such, and creating a new balance between theory and experience in navigation.

This essay examines autobiographical moments in supplicant claims for poor relief in Tours during the 1580s. Appealing for assistance required the poor to construct explanations for their present impoverished circumstances. Some supplicant petitions offer historians opportunities to explore self-representation and life narratives by a social group that was largely illiterate and whose experiences are underrepresented in the written records. This essay examines how such evidence can provide some insights into meanings of individuality, identity, life history, achievement, and civic participation from the perspective of people at the lower social levels of sixteenth-century French society.

European universities had great intellectual and religious influence in the Renaissance and Reformation and exhibited considerable variety. Italian universities taught law and medicine to doctoral students. Their loose organization made it possible for professors to produce original research in law, medicine, philosophy, and the humanities. Northern European universities concentrated on teaching arts to undergraduates, while theology was the most important graduate faculty. Their stronger structure enabled Martin Luther and other professors of theology in German, Dutch, Swiss, and English universities to create and lead the Protestant Reformation. By the early seventeenth century universities everywhere were in decline.

Errors belong to all times, but they probably were never more often tracked down and evaluated, denounced and praised, prosecuted and gbrified, than in the highly cultured courts of the Renaissance and the politically militant circles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In an age when doctrinal errors were mercilessly chased by censors, several French mannerist poets, voluntarily misreading the Augustinian and Petrarchan tradition of the giovanile errore, carved out a playful space for enjoying the paradoxically aesthetic truthfulness of errors.

This essay discloses a hitherto-undetected network of allusion and motif in Paradise Lost (1667). Satan falls through Chaos like Icarus in book 2, and like Phaethon in book 6. In book 6 the Son rides triumphantly in the Chariot of Paternal Deity as a good, successful Phaethon. Both myths of falling in a poem about the Fall involve Milton (1608-74) in a polemic with Lucretius, the classical poet of a godless, Epicurean universe that is ever falling and dying. In a parallel to the Son, Milton depicts himself in his invocations to his Muse as a successful Icarus, claiming to escape a condition offallenness on the wings of immortal verse.

In late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century Venice, the state increased its scrutiny over the composition of its patriciate. This essay examines the position of the Venetians with a claim to nobility resident on the island of Crete who were in danger of being closed out of the patriciate and the resulting negotiations over social status and political loyalty within the process of prove di nobiltà. These Venetians from the periphery presented genealogies emphasizing a shared history with Venice, and the Venetian state ultimately accepted the majority of these claims to membership in its patriciate.

Egidio of Viterbo's Sentences-Commentary ad mentem Platonis blends scholastic theological argumentation with the poetic theology of Ficinian Platonism. This essay examines Egidio's application of myths drawn mainly from the Platonic dialogues to residual questions, after he successfully addressed the question of divine generation. The allusions do not just embellish, but embody the fundamental theological truth as revealed in scripture and tradition. Egidio incorporates philosophical humanism and the literary sensibilities of his age into the Sentences- Commentary genre.

This essay examines the illustrations that accompanied the seven Penitential Psalms in medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours. Until the end of the fifteenth century, the Penitential Psalms were glossed visually by a wide range of subjects, including the Last Judgment, Christ enthroned, David playing a musical instrument, and (most commonly) David repenting for his sins. But from the beginning of the sixteenth century it became customary to represent the Penitential Psalms with an image of David observing Bathsheba as she bathes. Moreover, the subject of David and Bathsheba rapidly migrated from Books of Hours into a variety of devotional, catechetical, and educational texts. It even crossed the Atlantic to colonial America, where, in The New England Primer, it was used to teach young children how to read. These facts not only suggest a shift in attitudes towards penance and sin at the end of the Middle Ages, but also challenge modern assumptions about the historical relationship between sexuality, catechesis, and literacy.

This article examines the problem of canon-making in the Italian Renaissance. How did one store works to be read, how did one read them, and what did one exclude from a proper library: these concerns represent the general conceptual questions which the specifics of the article address. The article begins with a discussion of fifteenth-century library formation, then moves on to the specific case of Ferrara, using as a point of departure a dialogue set at the court of Leonello d'Este. The article presents an analysis of a section of that work on the constitution of a library, and then examines part 10. There, the interlocutors are concerned with authenticity, as they address how one determined whether a work was genuine or a forgery. Along the way, they offer literary and philological arguments, which, precisely because they are not in the front rank of humanist achievements, allow us to peer deeply into the social aspects of Renaissance reading practice. There is an edition and English translation of the text as an appendix.

Lope de Vega's pastoral romance Arcadia (1598) presents a fictionalized self-portrait of the author looking back on himself as a younger man, and, at the same time, constitutes a refashioning of the artist into a cultured poet articulating his own poetics. Lope employs the oneiric potential of pastoral to reshape the past imaginatively, even as he engages creatively with pastoral conventions to execute a virtuoso performance as a poet and establish himself as a serious artist who merits the esteem and patronage of the Spanish court. As a result, Arcadia is an artful, complex, and highly idiosyncratic work that reveals Lope's predilection for literary innovation and experimentation, and undermines the notion of pastoral as a staid genre resistant to change. In the process of reshaping pastoral conventions Lope claims demiurgic, visionary powers for poets, likening such powers to those of the Creator himself

Although often ignored in studies of nationalism, beauty is a central feature of every imagined nation. The conflicts surrounding the dissolution of the monasteries can be read as hinging on the question of what makes a nation beautiful. For the traditionalist rebel Robert Aske, "the beauties of this realm" were the abbeys themselves. For John Bale, by contrast, the books ransacked from monastic libraries were the true "beauty of our nation." Whereas Aske offers a vision of timeless feudal harmony, Bale's idea of national beauty, rooted in Petrarchan motifs of loss and nostalgia, inaugurates new ways of imagining the nation.

Erasmus's writings on marriage, such as the Praise of Marriage, the Institution of Christian Marriage, and several of the Colloquies, have long been studied from a social-intellectual perspective that focuses on their role within theobgical debates of the time. This article proposes a different approach by stressing the literary and rhetorical aspects by which these texts seek to influence a reader in his or her "matrimonial praxis." Through the combination of an effective rhetoric of intimacy with the characteristics of literary dialogue, Erasmus creates a mimetic discourse aimed at conveying models of conjugal life to be imitated by future readers.

It has always been assumed that either Shakespeare or the author of the Ur-Hamlet was the first to introduce controversial religious allusions to the pre-Christian setting of Saxo's Amleth saga. But this article seeks to relocate the legend in the competing confessional narratives to which it belonged in mid-sixteenth-century Europe. A new link between Saxo, Belleforest, and Shakespeare's versions of the story is identified in the ethnographic histories of Johannes and Olaus Magnus of Sweden. The overlooked Historia Olai Magni (1567) is proposed as the source of local details (like the "sledded Polacks ") in Hamlet.

This study questions the traditional assumption that Venetian cittadini emulated the collecting and patronage patterns of the ruling nobility. An alternative theoretical model, drawn from sociological, anthropological, and historical analyses of collecting, suggests that the cittadini should be cultural innovators rather than followers. Case studies of two prominent early-sixteenth-century cittadini collectors reveal that, although they pursued different strategies, neither sought distinction primarily by imitating established patrician tastes: both were at the forefront of new developments. In both their differences from the nobility and in their heterogeneity as a social group, the cittadini have had an unrecognized impact on the style and content of Venetian art in the "Golden Age."

The letter collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger offers important evidence about the dynamics of early-Quattrocento literary patronage. Like his more successful humanist peers, Lapo used Ciceronian expressions amicitia (friendship) when writing to the brokers whose help he needed in order to win a comfortable post. For most humanists, such formulaic assurances of devotion constituted only one aspect of letters that included discussions of philosophy, current events, and classical scholarship. Lapo, by contrast, focused his collected letters almost solely on these formulae, thus mocking their prevalence and emphasizing the difficulties of finding a job as a humanist.

According to a popular legend in the Middle Ages, toads were used as the arms of the king of France before Clovis's conversion to Christianity. This paper follows the evolution of these symbolic toads in literary, juridical, and historical texts, as they adapt to changing political environments in the Renaissance. In general, the toads were used to compare negatively with the virtuous lilies during the Middle Ages in France. As monarchical power became more absolute, writers tried to adapt the toads to this new political context, but the toads tended to disappear in France while they flourished in other countries, such as the Spanish Netherlands, where they were sometimes exploited as part of a polemic against the French.