Although the works of Homer remained unknown in Western Europe for much of the Middle Ages, their reappearance was welcomed enthusiastically in France toward the end of the fifteenth century by the small band of scholars capable of reading Greek. The founding of the Collège des lecteurs royaux in 1530 gave a fillip to Homeric studies, and partial editions of Homer were printed in Paris, aimed at a student audience. French translations also helped to bring the poems to a wider audience. However, the question of the interpretation of Homer was central to the reception of the two epics, and, after examining the publishing history, this paper sets out to assess how succeeding generations of scholars set about reading and teaching the prince of poets.

In the 1560s a group of men associated with the universities, and especially the early English law schools, the Inns of Court, translated nine of Seneca’s ten tragedies into English. Few studies address these texts and those that do concentrate on their contributions to the development of English drama. Why such works were important for those who composed them remains unclear. This essay examines the translations against the background of the social, political, and literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s. In this context, they look less like forms of dramatic invention than kinds of writing that facilitated the translators’ Latin learning, personal interactions, and political thinking and involvement.

The respective roles of virtù and fortuna, never resolved in his political writings, are critical to understanding Machiavelli’s literary evolution. As his letters suggest, in the years between the fall of the Soderini republic and his reentry into public life with Mandragola, Machiavelli came to understand the power of language to impose order on the anarchy of events. The fragmentary L’Asino records his discovery that writing can achieve an agency denied to princes. Mandragola’s dialectic between the author and his protagonist demonstrates that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self.

This article discusses Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna in relation to poetry and prose by Michelangelo, Colonna, and their circle. It focuses on the intersection between debates about Church reform and the polemic about disegno (drawing or design) and colore (color or finish). Vittoria Colonna used the distinction between disegno and colore repeatedly in her spiritual poetry. In these and other writings, reform-minded thinkers did not offer consistent aesthetic and theological positions, but rather consciously articulated contradictions. Likewise, Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna display a strategy of deliberate paradox, in that they are highly colored black-and-white drawings of a tearless tearfulness and a bloodless bloodiness.