This article examines the manuscripts into which compilers bound Dominican letters of spiritual direction in fifteenth-century Italy. It argues that manuscript compilers sought to model Observant Dominican sanctity after Jerome's late antique practice of writing letters of spiritual direction to women. The paper aims to contribute to the growing conversation around the development and spread of an Observant Dominican identity by demonstrating that compilers modeled Observant beati after Jerome's authoritative persona in order to argue for the ancient precedent of the reformers’ often controversial agendas, chief among them their active ministry to women.

Renaissance scholars agreed that Virgil's canon included poems beyond the “Eclogues,” “Georgics,” and “Aeneid,” but the number of other authentic poems and their value were matters of debate. This article charts competing readings of the “Appendix Vergiliana” by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Joseph Justus Scaliger. Pseudo-Virgilian poems played a key role in J. C. Scaliger's “Poetices Libri Septem” (1561), providing a model of self-quotation and self-emulation for young poets to imitate. In a groundbreaking edition, J. J. Scaliger then discovers a neoteric, Catullan side to Virgil. Their influential readings of the “Appendix” offer radically revised conceptions of the Virgilian poetic career.

After his stay in Paris in the summer of 1572, Philip Sidney (1554–86) spent nearly three years abroad, partly at the University of Padua and partly traveling through the Holy Roman Empire. His mentor Hubert Languet (1518–80) made him free of his large international network of friends and acquaintances, so that when the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre forced him to leave France, the seventeen year old could count on a benevolent reception in many places. This essay shows the various politico-religious cultures and structures Sidney learned on his travels through the empire, and incidentally confirms the historical identity of his equestrian mentor Pietro Pugliano.

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.

This essay examines how Catholics at the English Jesuit College at Saint-Omer reflected on Japanese religious politics during the 1620s and 1630s, both through translated mission reports and drama. This analysis expands scholars’ view of English encounters with Japan; it also decenters predominantly Eurocentric approaches to early modern Jesuit education and theater. The essay concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare and George Wilkins's “Pericles,” a quarto playbook of which was possessed by St. Omers and which, through the generic elements of romance it shared with the Japan material, provided further opportunities for the college's Catholics to consider transcontinental religious politics.