On 17 March 1516, Giuliano De' Medici Died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the Badia of Fiesole. Third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giuliano had received the title of duke of Nemours from King Francis I of France four months before his death. By dying, he may have committed his most politically significant act, for the Medici regime mobilized its resources to exploit the opportunities that the occasion presented. On March 19, the governors of the city orchestrated a great public funeral, which intended to celebrate the memory of Giuliano and the restoration of Medici hegemony.

There has never been much doubt among Renaissance scholars about the leading role played by Marsilio Ficino and Neoplatonic philosophy in the cultural life of the High Renaissance. From the time of his first biographer, Giovanni Corsi, Ficino's work of recovering and disseminating Platonism was held to be one of the great achievements of Medici patronage. The publication history of his translations and other writings during the early modern period attests to the widespread interest they aroused, not only among professional philosophers, but also among educated persons in general.

Specialists in the Italian Renaissance know the importance of the great humanist Guarinus Veronensis (1374-1460) and are familiar with the salient points of his life. Still lacking is a series of up-to-date monographs on his more important students and the part they played in the spread of humanism in Europe. Recently, however, there have appeared in English several studies of Ianus Pannonius (1434-72), once described by Guarinus as "a studentboarder of mine, Pannonian by race but Italian in manners, an admirable, indeed a stupendous scholar.

On the Feastday of the Nativity of the Virgin, September 8, 1296, the papal legate of Boniface VIII, Pietro Valeriano di Piperno, blessed the rebuilding of the church of S. Reparata in Florence. In the ceremonial presence of the podestà, the Standard-Bearer of Justice, and the priors of the Signoria, he named the new cathedral “Santa Maria del Fiore.” Arnolfo di Cambio was made chief architect in charge of the renewal; and it was he who began a program of monumental sculpture devoted to the life of the Virgin (fig. 1). Giovanni Villani, who recorded the benediction ceremony in his chronicle, admitted that notwithstanding the rededication of the church to the Virgin and the invention of the poetic name “Santa Maria del Fiore,” most Florentines continued to call the cathedral S. Reparata.

I in the Mid-Sixteenth Century Venetian writers, artists, scholars, and musicians came increasingly to play out their cultural ideals within informal academies. These academies made no bylaws or statutes, nor did they keep the sorts of membership lists, minutes, and systematic records that were to become commonplace by the end of the century. In essence they were regular gatherings, chiefly in private homes, for discussion, debate, and performance. The diffuse demography of the republican city-state made it well-suited to the dynamic processes of artistic and intellectual interchange that such gatherings provided.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" The classicist Erich Segal managed to wring 131 pages (and who knows how many millions of dollars) out of the short life of his fictional creation Jennifer Cavilleri, the heroine of Love Story. My subject is a real girl, the painter Irene di Spilimbergo, whose death at the age of twenty-one in 1559 evoked a tribute much more substantial, although probably not so lucrative for its editor, Dionigi Atanagi: a memorial volume containing 279 Italian and 102 Latin poems, a few anonymous but most written by 143 named contributors.

Political exile punished an offending individual through public humiliation, deprivation of political rights, separation from family and friends, from business and property. This situation was difficult but manageable for an individual since he and his dependents could turn to members of the extended family for aid and comfort. However, if all the family's men were banished, the situation was potentially catastrophic. The Alberti, a prominent Florentine merchant-banking family, found itself in just such a situation. In January 1401, all Alberti men were exiled from the city of Florence for conspiracy against the state; they were not allowed to return until 1428. This paper will explore the consequences of their long and unusual banishment from Florence.

When used to understand and combat the spread of bubonic plague, "contagion" is not a very helpful term. Plague is ecologically a complex disease transmitted from rodents to humans via fleas, and human-to-human passage of the disease is uncommon. Moreover, humans do not form lasting immunity to plague and cannot maintain the microorganism in human populations in the absence of infected rodents and their fleas. There can be no "Typhoid Mary" figure in the passage of plague.

Conspicuous irrelevance, the term adopted by Harry Berger to describe certain puzzling moments in the Spenserian narrative, might also serve to describe Spenser's allusions to the Orlando Furioso, which are pervasive and, for the most part, appear indifferent to their source—frequently the most indifferent just when they are the easiest to identify. One thinks, for example, of the Timias and Belphoebe episode of book III, canto v, which disregards the tenor of its source in the Furioso, canto xix, to the point where one wonders why Spenser took the trouble to summon recollections of Angelica and Medoro.

The Odes of 1550 and 1552 reveal Pierre de Ronsard's ambition to gain entry into the court of Henri II. In the 1550 preface to the Odes, Ronsard does not make the slightest effort to veil his literary and political objectives. He presents his Odes as a poetic challenge to Clément Marot's psalm translations of 1541 and 1543 with the discovery of an equally ancient lyric source, pagan rather than Hebraic, and he mounts an ad hominem attack on the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais in order to win Henri's favor. The poetry, however, places in evidence other preoccupations. The Odes describe and problematize the endless wanderings of a poetic subject who seeks to uncover the secrets not only of the ancient world but of the modern one as well.

This is an Essay About Reading. Though my central texts are visual ones, with what we might now regard as journalistic or anthropologic aims, the thrust of my argument extends beyond any one medium of communication, specific subject, or genre of inquiry. My framing concern here is to examine a historically specific structure, one that Tony Bennett has called a "reading formation": "a set of discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers and reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be read in particular ways.

Jean Crespin's Histoire des martyrs (1554-1597) appears at first as a collection of fragments supplying historical information regarding the martyrdoms of continental Protestant men and women. However, I argue that this martyrology is far more sophisticated and coherent in its conception and execution than its episodic appearance conveys in a first reading. It aims not merely at a tendentious recounting of persecution. Rather, the text seeks to effect a veritable resuscitation of the bodies upon which it is structured, those suffocated words still contained in the stricken corpse.

When The Spanish Novella-Writer, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, challenged seventeenth-century male authorities, her challenge embraced both sacred and profane canons. Zayas invests her novellas with the formal properties of hagiography while subverting the ideology of that Church-sanctioned genre. At the same time, Zayas shows herself to be a subtle reader and interpreter of one of Spain's greatest writers, Cervantes, by challenging his attitude to and treatment of women.

All the terms in the title of the plenary session, “Recent Work in Renaissance Studies on Psychology,” at the Renaissance Society of America's 1991 annual meeting (where this paper was first delivered) are matters of conflict and debate. In this discussion I shall examine current debates about the “Renaissance,” “psychology,” and “madness” to account for the paucity and insufficiency of current work on early modern madness by historians and literary critics and theorists, to raise issues about current trends in Renaissance studies, and to elicit new kinds of scholarship.

Architecture in England Remained a fledgling science until Inigo Jones's Italianate classicism burst forth in London in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His 1622 Banqueting House at Whitehall with its masterful double-cube interior astounded Londoners accustomed to the rabbit warren of Elizabethan apartments making up the surrounding Whitehall Palace; its rhythmic, subtly articulated marble façade clashed with the eclectic exteriors of neighboring buildings.

If there is anything that scholars in the Renaissance and scholars of the Renaissance (of whatever ideological persuasion) might be expected to share, it is delight in the recovery of texts worthy of attention as aesthetic objects and/or as significant documents for interpreting the period. Arguably such new texts—and especially texts and artworks by women—will constitute the most enduring element in our ongoing reconstruction of the Renaissance. Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses—law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice.