This essay explores the formal means (a variant of the medieval romance technique of entrelacement) by which Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso represents and comments on contemporary events, particularly the threats posed by French and Spanish invasions and by the interventionist politics of Popes Julius II and Leo X. Ariosto's treatment of the latter figure exemplifies both the specificity of the interplay between form and history in the Furioso Innamorato and its innovative character with respect to precursors, notably Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. A final section considers the changing significance of such topical material between the first edition of 1516 (when Leo was alive) and the final edition of 1532 (long after Leo's death, and under very different historical circumstances).

This essay begins by providing some early modern definitions, as well as a brief history, of paradox in the Renaissance. But paradox could be more than a rhetorical figure. Thus, the paper turns to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Venice in English and explores how a geographical site could do the work of the verbal paradox. The essay then reads Othello's complicated epistemological, ontological, and sexual issues through Venice's symbolic geography. Finally, it will suggest briefly that the stage — and particularly the interaction between audience and play — is also a site of paradox, a place where spectators, dazzled and destabilized by unresolved and unresolvable problems, are forced to reevaluate their cognitive and cultural worlds.

Current scholarship on Anne Askew has tended to disparage the editorial tactics of John Bale, her first editor, as intrusive and distorting. In contrast, the reprinting of her text by John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs, “ has been commended for its lack of editorial intervention. Yet afresh consideration of Foxes work with Askew's narrative suggests that Foxe's shaping force in the text was as strong as Bale's, if more subtle. Furthermore, attempts to locate Askew's authorial agency within one text or the other impose modern ideas about authorship on a period in which such ideas were still being formed.

Richly suggestive on a variety of levels, Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey remains one of the best-known episodes in world literature. This article exhumes a once popular variant of that story and tells how wise Ulysses, contrary to the ancient myth, came to stop his own ears against all allurements.

In this essay, I will show how James's position as monarch governed both the writing and the reception of his verse. Using James's previously ignored sonnet to Elizabeth, enclosed in a letter to her and so far as one can tell, intended for her eyes alone, his elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, printed in a commemorative volume, and the mini-epic, the Lepanto, I will show that James always writes as a monarch and never as a mere poet. The first two poems demonstrate how James used (or, more accurately in the case of the Elizabeth sonnet, tried to use) verse as an instrument of diplomacy. For the Lepanto, I will examine the parallels between the poem's (literal) ambivalence and James's foreignl religious diplomacy along with the resonances of James's decision to republish the Lepanto as a separate piece when he became king of England in 1603. Insodoing, we will also see how the publication history of the Lepanto contributes to the history of authorship and how James took advantage of the growing authority of print authorship.

This essay examines a 16th-century classic of Spanish humanist apologetics: the extant portion of fray Luis de Ledn 's defense of his Spanish translation of the Song of Songs against the Inquisition. The analysis highlights a Christian hebraist's contribution to contemporary debates on the applicability of humanist philology to biblical scholarship. An English translation of fray Luis’ famous respuesta accompanies the article.

This essay offers two discoveries concerning lasso's poetics. First, it identifies in the Discourses on the Heroic Poem a critique of allegory on both aesthetic and moral grounds, one that explains Jerusalem Delivered's abandonment of the “temptress-turned-hag” motif Second, it demonstrates that Armida and Erminia are closely linked to the “captive woman “ topos used by Jerome and Boccaccio to justify Christian adaptations of pagan literature and rhetoric. It is the hermeneutic dimension of this motif that allows Tasso plausibly to convert these beautiful pagan women (and the poetic pleasures they embody) to the exigencies of Christian epic.

This article traces the connections between the circulation of commodities and counterfeit coins in The Roaring Girl. Contextualizing the play's representation of counterfeits within a discussion of the relationship between real and counterfeit money in the early modern period, I argue that the play registers and addresses economic pressures, in part through its commentary on, and revision of, the conventions of stage comedy. In particular, the play offers enhanced forms of realism and the fiction of the “individual” in the title character, Moll, to compensate for the absence of legible material guarantees for value, legitimacy, or status. I conclude with a reading of the play's representation of masterless persons as the necessary shadow side of the plethora of opportunities seemingly offered by the market.

This essay builds on Judith Butler's recent theoretical work in Bodies that Matter by suggesting that the sexual differences that “mattered” in early modern England are not exactly the same as those that “matter” today. In particular, it suggests that facial hair often conferred masculinity during the Renaissance: the beard made the man. The centrality of the beard is powerfully demonstrated by both portraits and theatrical practices. Indeed, virtually all men in portraits painted between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century have some sort official hair. Beards were also quite common on the Renaissance stage, and the essay goes on to analyze the use of false beards as theatrical props. These are not, however, the only “texts “from the period that equate being a man with having a beard. Similar formulations appear in a wide range of sources: medical treatises, physiognomy books, poetical works, and tracts on gender. In many of these texts, moreover, facial hair is not simply imagined as a means of constructing sexual differences between men and women; it is also a means of constructing distinctions between men and boys. Thus, it would appear that boys were considered to be a different gender from men during the Renaissance. This division had important ramifications for theater practice. It meant, for example, that boy actors would have been as much “in drag” when playing the parts of men as when playing the parts of women. Finally, we need to bear in mind that if facial hair thus served as an important means of materializing masculinity in early modern England, it was also crucially malleable and prosthetic. As a result, we can say that both masculinity and the beard had to be constantly made (to) matter.

In an essay on La magia d'amore, Guido Casoni (d. 1642) demonstrated how music, along with other arts and sciences, is generated by love. On the surface, the essay strikes one as a hodgepodge of fact and fantasy in which the credibility of the data is vitiated by their often whimsical interpretation. But there is more to music than historically or logically verifiable acts or events. Casoni's musical hermeneutics reflects conceptual tendencies inherent in his own times, yet derivative from a long tradition of commentary on musical mirabilia. The present study is an attempt to contextualize these tendencies. It follows through the equation of love with music as a parable, of a plainly Neoplatonist stamp, for the relevance of music to all forms of scholarly discourse.

Whereas sport had been justified since antiquity for providing soldiers with the physical training they would require in battle, its utilitarian function waned with the English military's gradual adaptation of firearms during the Renaissance. As a result, sports were increasingly condemned as idle and superfluous phenomena — nothing more than futile competitions between men. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, sport figures as a metaphor for war itself, also condemnable as a result of the historical shift from the politics of chivalric idealism to the “politics of reality.” Throughout the trilogy, Shakespeare indicts modern warfare as mere sport for ambitious and corrupt nobles.

Hermann Conring (1606-1681) disavowed responsibility for the New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor (1642) because it was a pirated reprint of a dissertation prepared by one of his students. A closer look, however, reveals that the New Discourse reflects Conring's most radical ideas more faithfully than do works indisputably written by himself even those he wrote expressly in order to correct the misrepresentations of which the New Discourse was allegedly guilty. That suggests that concepts of authorship and authenticity may conceal the true relationship between writers and their ideas.

Between 1577 and 1625, ten Englishmen wrote or dictated accounts about their captivity among the Muslims. After examining similar accounts of captivity by continental writers, Fernand Braudel argued that European governments encouraged the publication of such accounts for an ideological purpose: to alienate readers from Islam and Muslims. A close reading of the English accounts, however, shows that there was a more personal and selfish goal for the publication of these accounts than the polemical and the ideological.

The relationship in the early Stuart church between doctrine and discipline — between formal theological belief and outward matters including church governance, polity and ceremonial practice — is important for our understanding of George Herbert's devotional lyrics. Eucharistic theories which entertained notions of “real presence “ tended to support a sacerdotal style of divinity in which priest, ceremony and outward conformity were key features. Belief in the centrality of inward spiritual life, on the other hand, was reinforced by a theology in which the external elements are less effectual instruments than mere signs of a strictly invisible grace. This paper elucidates a sacramental poetics through which Herbert sought to reconcile the ideologically contrary imperatives of public ceremony and private religious devotion. The two are brought together successfully in The Temple, but this success consists largely in the drama resulting from the conflict the poems trace. Unmistakably inward in focus, Herbert's devotional enthusiasm is cultivated nonetheless through a fully sacramental and sacerdotal apparatus.