This article analyzes two vernacular German books that offered learned guidance for how to use natural observation as a means of gaining knowledge of the weather. Published a combined seventy-seven times throughout the sixteenth century, the “Wetterbüchlein” (Weather booklet) and “Bauern Practica” (Peasants’ practica) were commercially successful and widely circulated. Printers marketed the books as being accessible to anyone and reinforced that claim in the paratextual features of the books. In text and image, these books promoted the idea that even common people could participate in the production of knowledge based on the proper observation of nature.

This article examines the sugar sculptures created for a ball in honor of Henri III of France in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice in 1574. The first part discusses the production and display of the statuettes. In the next section, the setting of the sugar sculptures is examined in the context of the collation prepared for the king in Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, which contains the city's greatest collection of antiquities. Finally, the article examines the possible relationships between sugar statuettes and ancient sculptures and their use in crafting the image of Venice as a new Rome.

The post–Council of Trent court records for the diocese of Pamplona (northern Iberia) record numerous and ongoing incidents of clergy accused of running with and fighting bulls. Placed within the context of efforts to implement Tridentine and Catholic reform in the diocese, contemporaneous lay legal actions, and conflicting ideas of appropriate gendered behavior and professionalism of the clergy, these episodes illuminate how parishioners effectively used the court system and crafted accusations to promote local interests and punish unpopular priests.

This article discusses Fulvio Testi's libretto “L'isola di Alcina” (1626), based on Ariosto's “Orlando furioso.” After considering its significance to the cultural politics of the Este and the author's preoccupations with poetical and political lineage, the essay focuses on the sorceress Alcina's lament in act 4 and its afterlife in the Baroque cantata repertoire. Echoes from Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini's “Arianna” as well as the memory of the sorceress Armida from Torquato Tasso's “Gerusalemme liberata” are crucial to the gradual reshaping that, across poetry and music, transforms the evil character into a woman worthy of the audience's sympathy.

This essay explores how two early modern French writers considered choral music in opera as a figure for society. Pierre Corneille, in his musical tragedy “Andromède,” and scientist and critic Claude Perrault, in several texts about music and acoustics, made subtle apologies for the polyphonic choral song condemned by many contemporaries as unintelligible. Beyond defending the aesthetic value of choral music, Corneille and Perrault associated multi-part song with collective vocalizations offstage, in the real world. Their instructions on how to appreciate choral interludes in opera also served, therefore, to train listeners to attend to the polyphony of society.