In his critique of the language and thought of the Scholastics, Lorenzo Valla contrasts classical Latin as a natural, common language to the so-called artificial, technical, and unnatural language of his opponents. He famously champions Quintilian’s view that one should follow common linguistic usage. Scholars, however, have disagreed about the precise interpretation of these qualifications of Latin. This article argues that, depending on the historical, rhetorical, and argumentative contexts, Valla uses notions such as common and natural in different ways to suit different purposes. Such a contextualized reading has repercussions for an evaluation of the coherence of Valla’s humanist program.

This article examines five miniatures in the “Hours of Catherine of Cleves” (completed 1442), each containing representations of jewelry in the margins, which operate on two different levels. First, they demonstrate Catherine of Cleves’s adoration of five female saints. I argue that the fictive jewelry may be understood as simulated ex-votos designed to secure the aid and protection of the saints. Second, the images establish strategic alliances with each saint. As a final dimension, I explore how the vitae of these saints may have had resonances for the duchess that help explain the focus placed on them in the manuscript.

This article examines the letter collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger (1406–38), an important translator of classical Greek. While scholars have edited the letters chronologically or analyzed them piecemeal, my study shows that as an ensemble the work artfully conveys a cultural and philosophical statement. By playing with time, circumstance, and persona, Lapo reveals the shortcomings of the humanist program, since it associated learning and virtue with public recognition; in addition, the letters elicit the readers’ empathy, as both patronage and Stoic self-reliance are found wanting. The humanist reawakening of the classics was witnessed here in conversation.

The famous Florentine tax census, the Catasto, contains an element that has escaped organized scholarly attention. This is the confini: bare-bones lists of neighbors by which householders identified the location of private property to government officials. This article exploits the confini to expose the microscopic connective fibers of spatial relationships that citizens reproduced every day at the level of individual streets, piazze, and buildings. Laying bare these elusive, ephemeral processes reveals how Florentines, like the inhabitants of other premodern European centers, conceived, articulated, and produced notions of urban space amid the structures and mundane rhythms of everyday life.

This article examines a series of messages concerning politics and geography that the religious order of the Vallombrosans embedded within a series of exorcism manuscripts and addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the late fifteenth century. The Vallombrosans crafted their manuscripts to negotiate a host of troubles: schism over reform, friction with Lorenzo, diminishing social status, increased marginality, competition with rival religious orders, new definitions of orthodoxy, and alternate forms of religious devotion. I frame Vallombrosan troubles and their turn to exorcism as symptomatic of the increased predominance of Mendicant Observants over older orders, and link this shift to a newly active and politicized demonology.

This article shows how François de Belleforest (1530–83) adapted a variety of historical and geographical sources to meet the demands of the histoire tragique genre in composing three narratives set in the Americas. One recounts the destiny of conquistador Francisco Pizarro; another is the story of Marguerite de Roberval, who was allegedly marooned on a Canadian island; the third concerns Taino cacique Enriquillo’s heroic rebellion in 1520s Hispaniola. These narratives fostered a tragic image of the Americas that had a considerable influence on early modern readers, inviting them to ponder essential questions about European encounters with the American continent and its inhabitants.

This article argues that Renaissance print culture appropriated the cultural meanings of the footprint. The potent analogy between the printing press and printing foot informed Reformation debates over Christ’s footprints as objects of devotion and subjects of representation. In sixteenth-century England a model for investigative reading informed by Erasmian humanism was developed in the print projects of George Gascoigne and Edmund Spenser. Experimentation with effects of the press and the material environment of the page culminated in extensive play upon the material and metaphorical sign of the printing foot in Spenser’s “Amoretti.”

The focus on three drops of milk issuing from the Virgin’s breast in “The Virgin in Front of a Fire Screen” was inspired by contemporary representations of the Lactation of Saint Bernard. This latter iconography provides the visual context for the vivid address of eroticized depictions of the Madonna’s “one bare breast” in Flemish art and shows the intricate connections between visuality and materiality in fifteenth-century Flemish religious art. Some depictions of Saint Bernard’s lactation transform the Madonna’s jets of milk into rays of light aiming for his eyes, stressing the interchangeability of materiality and visuality as modes that were expected to facilitate and/or authenticate miraculous appearances of the Madonna.

Hijuelas furnish scholars with more than account balances and bills paid: ledgers such as the ones that detailed the expenses of Seville’s sixteenth-century Alcázar also yield important insight into the facility’s work environment. These hardly studied ledgers describe the workers’ backgrounds, including their wages and any special accommodations they required, as well as the transaction of material goods, which in this period included slaves. The following examination of hijuelas uncovers the racial and labor realities of a royal property. These documents also challenge established scholarly observations about working life in early modern Seville in important ways.

In the third decade of the sixteenth century, engravers began to frame booklets that offered examples of decorative images and objects with written explanations of their motivations for issuing the proposed designs. Prior to this use of text, earlier engravings by Martin Schongauer and Israhel van Meckenem employed vegetal motifs with severed stems to convey that their compositions were available for selection, drawing an analogy between the utilization of prints by fellow craftsmen and the process of plucking from nature. This vocabulary of extraction returns in the rhymed couplets and playful images of Christoph Jamnitzer’s “Neuw Grotteßken Buch” of 1610.

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of an Etruscan mausoleum has long puzzled scholars. Although they agree that the discovery of an Etruscan tomb at Castellina in Chianti inspired the work, questions remain about the master’s interpretation of Etruscan architecture and its place in his broader oeuvre. Through a reading of early documents related to the tomb discovery, this study offers a new interpretation of the work’s origin, content, and purpose. It situates the work within an epistolary exchange between some of Florence’s leading citizens, and posits that it reflects contemporary views of Etruscan architecture drawn from textual and archaeological sources.

This article introduces two manuscript editions of a richly illustrated costume album dated ca. 1548–49. Commissioned by Christoph von Sternsee (d. 1560), the captain of Charles V’s German guard, and composed using visual material sourced from Dutch master Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (ca. 1500–59), the costume album records the diversity of subjects, customs, and costumes that the guard witnessed across imperial Habsburg Europe. Shaped by Sternsee’s personal experiences of travel, war, and empire, his costume album paints a vivid picture of imperial propaganda and personal ambition, demonstrating the significant role that Habsburg networks and relationships had upon the period’s visual culture.

This study brings to light a legal treatise from the mid-1580s on diplomatic and royal immunities and the authority of magistrates. Comparison of extant manuscript copies elucidates the work’s authorship by John Hammond, its commission by Sir Philip Sidney, its legal argument, and its textual transmission to those who orchestrated the treason trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586. Documentary evidence from 1584 to 1585 aligns Sidney with Elizabeth I’s Scottish policy, not directly with the campaign against Mary Stuart. When Sidney commissioned Hammond’s treatise, this study argues, he aimed primarily to prepare himself for anticipated service as a foreign magistrate.

This article discusses an unpublished vernacular Italian New World epic of the 1580s, which narrates the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The work was authored by the traveler, diplomat, and Orientalist Girolamo Vecchietti, and it is dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Vecchietti’s poem is striking as a rare epic in terza rima, and as the sole surviving early modern Italian epic to center on the deeds of Cortés, rather than Columbus or Vespucci. It is also intriguing for its ambivalent attitude toward the Spanish colonizing enterprise, portrayed initially as a heroic evangelizing mission, but later shown in a more compromised light.

Annius of Viterbo’s 1498 “Antiquitatum Variarum Volumina XVII” (“Antiquities”), created to enhance the reputation of his native Viterbo, was a collection of spurious texts and commentary attributed to early Near Eastern authors of whom only fragments survive. Quickly spotted as spuria, they nonetheless flourished in France. This essay traces the use of Annius’s forgeries by Jean Lemaire de Belges, for whose “Illustrations” they were seminal; mid-sixteenth-century historians followed Lemaire’s lead. The “Antiquities” captivated Guillaume Postel and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie. They supported a history grounded on chronology, etymology, and genealogy, becoming essential to proofs of the glory and antiquity of France.

This article discusses an early modern Sammelband (collected volume) that compiles epithalamia celebrating the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart with two translations, William Vaughan’s “The new-found politicke” and Robert Ashley’s “Almansor.” By highlighting the varied uses of Muslim exemplarity and alterity within one compilation, this article reveals the effects of recontextualization invited by the process of book building in the larger context of the Thirty Years’ War. This Sammelband study argues that translation, repurposing, and the material processes of compilation unsettle narratives of religious difference used by European writers to make sense of political conflict in the early seventeenth century.

The toleration of Jews in early modern Dutch society is commonly seen as predicated on the maintenance of a clear social and religious separation between Jews and Christians. I argue that this view is incomplete and misleading. Close analysis of the only judicial persecution of Jews in the Dutch Republic’s history, the trial of three Jewish proselytes in the anti-Calvinist city of Hoorn in 1614–15, yields a more complex picture. Comparison of the Hoorn trial with cases of apostasy to Judaism in orthodox Calvinist Amsterdam during the same period suggests that the theological commitments of orthodox Calvinism played an important and hitherto unrecognized role in Dutch toleration.