This study seeks to demonstrate that the timing, subject, and audience for the art of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien all argue against the view that the witches in their prints and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or malevolent treatises such as the Malleus maleficiarum. The witch craze did not gain momentum until late in the sixteenth century while the witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien belong to an earlier era. They are more plausible as a response to humanist interest in the poetry and satire of the classical world, and are better understood as poetic constructions created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience.

As a consequence of its dismal experience in the War of Cambrai (1509-1517), the Venetian Republic adopted a military policy of avoiding battlefield encounters. As a commander in the war and as doge of Venice after 1523, Andrea Gritti was the foremost proponent of this strategy, earning for himself the appellation of "Fabius Maximus," the Roman general who opposed Hannibal by delay and defense in the Second Punic War. In the 1520s, the Republic aspired to play the role of a great power — or at least that of an independent, balancing force between France and the Spanish-Habsburg Empire; but its refusal to commit its troops to battle fatally weakened the political coalitions opposing Charles V and thereby significantly contributed to the rise of Habsburg hegemony in Italy. A major step toward Charles V's triumph was the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527, a calamity for which the Fabian policy of Venice bears some responsibility.

In many different ways Renaissance physicians concerned themselves with the reading and writing of history. This article examines the role of historical interests in learned medical culture and the participation of physicians in the broader historical culture of the period.

Long seen as a play that celebrates the new-found freedom of its female protagonist, Mandragola may in fact question the very possibility of theatrical "liberation. "Drawing on the foundational myth central to Renaissance thinking about theater, the abduction of the Sabine women, this essay shows how Machiavelli endeavored to make his play a discomfitting experience for characters and audience alike. This conception of comedy as social trap both challenged humanistic notions of the ideal relationship between theater and the city, and accentuated the surveillant norms inherent in humanists'understanding of the role of the stage in society.

This paper argues that A Mirror for Magistrates's fascination with the mutilated bodies of its subjects, and its compulsive retelling of ambition punished offer evidence of cultural trauma. The works of legal theorist Margaret fane Rodin and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan are combined to explore the subjective consequences of changing conceptions of property.

This essay examines the creation of a notorious anecdote about a Machiavellian mother — Caterina Sforza. The adjective "Machiavellian "functions on two levels: first, Sforza often simply appears in her role as mother in Machiavelli's works; second, her behavior in this particular instance might well be characterized as "practising duplicity in state craft. " Yet if one considers the pertinent historical documents and Machiavelli's very first, although virtually forgotten, version of the events, it becomes apparent that Machiavelli "de-Machiavellizes" Caterina Sforza. The historical record offers a narrative in which Sforza provides a localized, targeted political response to undermine her children's would-be assassins. Machiavelli, however, rewrites the episode by altering Sforza's quip to her enemies and adding the audacious gesture of lifting her skirts; as a result, he creates a version in which she no longer responds to the political predicament in which she finds herself. This essay juxtaposes Machiavelli's long-ignored first version of the tale with his other two more well-known prose versions and contextualizes all three in relation to contemporary sources.

This article examines the gendered construction of power during the reign of Isabel of Castile (1474-1504). The construction of her political legitimacy was based on her manipulation of her gender and sexuality intended to contrast with the perceived shortcomings of her brother, Enrique IV. Enrique's critics had impugned his sexuality and attacked his inability to deliver Spain into a golden age. By aligning Isabel with sexually chaste models and emphasizing her ability to redeem Spain both because of and despite her gender, Isabel's partisans crafted an image that allowed her to transcend the misogynist tropes that attacked female rule.

The Book of the Courtier outwardly portrays an aura of cordial solidarity as courtiers gathered in Urbino from various regions of Italy attempt to describe the ideal courtier; recently, however, critics have uncovered tensions on various fronts which threaten to expose deep rifts under the elegant courtly veneer. While these “counter” readings have focused primarily on the courtier's relation to the prince and to other courtiers, this essay aims to explore conflicts that arise from the different regional and political affiliations of the group. In particular, I argue that the largely ignored section on joke-telling teaches courtiers how to give vent to their animosity under the cover of humor and dissimulation.

This essay treats the image of the sodomite king—in Marlowe's Edward II and in the gossip surrounding James I and his favorites — as a figurative response to resentments stemming from the regulation of access to the monarch. Animosities in Marlowe's play anticipate criticism of the Jacobean Bedchamber in part because Marlowe was responding to libels provoked by innovations in the chamber politics of the French king Henri III that also anticipate Jacobean practice. The figure of the sodomite king offers a useful vehicle to explore tensions between personal and bureaucratic monarchy that are exacerbated by the regulation of access.

A collection of student orations by the Salamancan jurist Diego de Covarrubias, edited here in the appendix, offers a glimpse of the mental landscape of canon and civil lawyers in this era. The orations combine traditional scholastic forms of argumentation with humanistic themes, most prominently that of “arms and letters”. The article sets the orations in their intellectual and institutional context, and traces the intellectual lineages for this central topos. Although Covarrubias was conversant with the humanist literary tradition, in which “arms and letters” stood for twin achievements of a well-rounded courtier, the main point of these exercises was to assert, following Bartolus, that the legal profession rightfully deserved to inherit the honor and privileges bestowed in ancient times upon men of arms.

The early Tudor North is often regarded as a lawless and disordered society where leading magnates depended upon violence and codes of honor to maintain order. These codes of honor compelled magnates to fight to maintain their reputations and also to assert their independence from central authority. Through an examination of several episodes in northern history, however, most of them brought to light by the most famous historian of the region, Mervyn James, it can be shown that northern magnates did not have a code of honor and usually shrank from violence as a way of settling disputes.

The Carolina penal code of 1532, issued as a manual of court procedures for the Holy Roman Empire, offers an opportunity to examine connections between the legal text and broader cultural discourses. The code uses persuasive techniques that promote a vision of the rational layman as the exemplar of common sense and public order. The representations of the legal text parallel contemporary tendencies in fiction and pamphlet literature. Both authoritative and literary texts used print to promote identification with a universalized ideal, limited by class and gender but discursively constructed as common to all reasonable people.

This essay argues that Stuart fairy poetry, rooted in Shakespeare's innovative representation of tiny, consumeristic fairies, attempts to indigenize new forms of elite material display. Rather than the fairies of popular tradition or courtly mythography, Stuart poets depict miniaturized Mabs and Oberons who are notable for their wardrobes, banquets, coaches, and the decor of their palaces. The fairy poetry of William Browne, Michael Drayton, and Robert Herrick must be interpreted not as playful escapism, but as a self-consciously politicized literary mode which reveals these writers’ deep ambivalence toward elite culture — and toward their own artistic role within that culture.

Like many other medieval and Renaissance works, the Lusíadas by Luis de Camões can be profitably interpreted as a work of rhetorical persuasion. Although rhetoric was a primary feature of the educational curriculum of the time, this line of reasoning has been missing from the critical studies of the poem, most of which are committed instead to historical, biographical, and ideological approaches. In each narrative surface of the Lusíadas, a royal audience is cajoled, admonished, guided, or taught by an eloquent petitioner who may lack the credentials of power but manifestly possesses those of experience, wisdom, virtue, and love. Finally, this petitioner, whether in the form of a historical or mythological personage, Vasco da Gama the protagonist, or some projection of the inspired poet-orator, accesses a wide range of rhetorical strategies, among them the popular and efficacious Aristotelian categories of ethos, pathos, and logos, in order more effectively to move and persuade.

This essay demonstrates how handkerchiefs in The Fair Maid map out the cultural anxieties about courtship and marriage practices that were mobilized by women's participation in early modern England's expanding market economy. It locates handkerchiefs within the material culture of the period, examining the status of handkerchiefs as commodities as well as women's relationships to these commodities, and it considers how handkerchiefs are transformed into love tokens when women personalize them with embroidery. Contextualizing the play's use of handkerchiefs with historical evidence from matrimonial cases, the essay shows how handkerchiefs embody the social contradictions embedded within early modern marriage practices.

Portia dell'Anguillara Cesi and Margherita della Somaglia Peretti were both wealthy heiresses in late sixteenth-century Rome, and each was the patron of a fine altarpiece for the Capuchin church of San Bonaventura. Although women were widely recognized as patrons in the period, the patronage of these two paintings, which show the Virgin, saints, and the portrait of a young boy, has always been assigned to their husbands, Paolo Emilio Cesi and Michele Peretti, because the works have been related to the patrilinear, agnatic image of the early modern family, i.e., fathers and sons. Instead, the works express a bilinear, cognatic image of the family, indicating legal, economic, and affective ties between mothers and sons. Portia dell'Anguillara's will of 1587 further elucidates aspects of the bilinear family structure.

The fourth edition of Britannia (1594) contained a marked increase in the representation of the propertied classes. The names of landowners, new families as well as old, were increased by approximately three hundred over the third edition of 1590. The fourth edition also contained a new index — “Barones et lllustriores Familiae” — which, together with the new names, registered first Camden's awareness of the changing character of Elizabethan society and second his qualifications as heraldic historian. The significance of this is not entirely clear until it is seen that the changes in Britannia came at a time of controversy and declining esteem in the College of Arms. Camden's authority in heraldry, of which the 1594 Britannia provided convincing evidence, together with his association with the advocates of armorial reform (Fulke Greville, Sir Edward Hoby, and Baron Burghley as well as the queen) made him a logical choice, over Ralph Brooke, for elevation to Clarenceux King of Arms in October 1597. Brooke's quarrel with Camden was part and parcel of the College's troubles and was seen at the time as an instance of the jealous animosity for which Brooke was notorious. One of the ironies of Brooke's attack is that it was symptomatic of the conditions — rivalries and jurisdictional disputes among the heralds, for instance — that advocates of reform were attempting to remedy.

The article seeks to relate the emerging, new discipline of geography to the European and specifically the Iberian, Catholic experience of expansion, power, and empire in those decades of Spain's alignment with Portugal and their respective colonial enterprises. The case of Giovanni Botero, the preeminent Italian interpreter of America forthe later sixteenth century, is examined in terms of Catholic expansion, world geography, but more immediately in terms of the European civilizing process on the indigenous peoples of America as that process pertains to the pre-Columbian civilizations, Christian conversion and the concurrent practice of the reducciones.

Aemilia Lanyer uses the genealogical model of promise, fulfillment, and supersedure implied by biblical typology and the vindication of the godly implied in scriptural apocalypse to accomplish several related aims: to represent her dedicatees as biblical types; to fashion Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, as the apotheosized Christian woman; to write women's literary history. Her fluid metaphors and biblical allusions, which require reading equally for their material and spiritual significance, acknowledge Margaret and her daughter's desire for the spiritual inheritance of the Kingdom and the worldly aristocratic inheritance willed away from their female line in favor of a male heir.

Lute-poems came into vogue in France in the 1540s and 1550s. Because of the lute's shape, it could be gendered either as masculine or feminine; male and female poets therefore made use of lute imagery in different ways. Their references to the lute are informed by the gendered culture surrounding the instrument in this period and by the etiquette and technicalities of lute playing. Even more than painters and engravers, poets could invest the lute with human qualities, conflating it with bodies and body parts. It could thus be adapted to serve a variety of amorous scenarios.