Featuring the image of an athlete tugging at a rooted sapling, Impossible is the most enigmatic of the many small-scale engravings produced by Hans Sebald Beham. Juxtaposed with the adage “Nobody should dare great things that are impossible for him to do,” the image not only challenges the astute viewer to a game of wits: the resulting paradox also unleashes a cascade of ethical questions concerning the boundedness of the will, Christian freedom, human perfectibility, and the paradoxical conditions of self-knowledge. These issues came to the fore in the sixteenth-century debate over free will, which pitted humanists, magisterial, and radical reformers against one another. Beham's documented experience as a religious and political dissident during the 1520s raises the possibility that the print, made later in life, embeds still another allegorical layer: the conflicted situation of the artist in an era of reform and iconoclasm, Renaissance and revolution, hope and disillusionment.

Interpretations of the iconography of the Royal Library of the Escorial have fostered many assessments of the intellectual panorama of late sixteenth-century Spain. This study advances the thesis that once the Royal Library was established in its permanent premises attempts were made to define its intellectual agenda, and in particular to redirect the study of nature undertaken there in a rather distinct and novel direction. To identify this agenda, this study shuns iconographic interpretation to focus instead on Friar José de Sigüenza's description of the library's frescoes. Once this discourse by the librarian of the Escorial is read independently of meanings that might have been inscribed in the library's iconography and is complemented with insights gleaned from other works by its author and his mentor, Benito Arias Montano, the librarian's description reveals itself to be a manifesto of how the friar thought the study of nature should be undertaken at the Escorial. It entailed a reorientation away from Aristotelian and empiricist approaches and toward the elaboration of a radically new biblist metaphysics.

This article examines an anonymous manuscript from the Sienese academies, likely composed between 1584 and 1593, during the period in which these societies were closed by the Medici grand dukes. The work is a dialogue that depicts a contest between the emblems of the academies of the Intronati, the Accesi, and the Travagliati, all vying for cultural primacy. Purportedly written by a zealous monk who appraises these worldly emblems and mottoes in preposterously flattering, even blasphemous, religious terms, the dialogue is actually a hoax that mocks the proselytizing efforts of Counter-Reformation forces in the city. This article attempts to roughly date this underground work, identify its principal targets, and consider its importance: as a telling depiction of a contest between secular images and sacred symbols, as a parody of feigned orthodoxy, and as a possible expression of freethinking well before the Enlightenment.

In the mid-1990s a manuscript was discovered containing the poetry and prose of a previously unknown female author, Lady Hester Pulter. The poems, likely written during the 1640s–'50s, demonstrate Pulter's wide reading and her near-fanatical Royalism. The prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, however, displays a very different politics. Basing her fiction on the legends surrounding the Muslim conquest of Spain, I argue that Pulter adjusts her sources to present an alternative, Augustinian view of rape, one that blames the rapist, not the victim. The monarchs in Pulter's fiction use absolutist rhetoric to justify rape, and, contra her earlier poetic denunciations of Charles I's execution, rape now justifies regicide. I suggest that the sexual corruption of Charles II's court prompted Pulter to create a romance with distinctly republican overtones in which chastity is the highest value, sexual corruption the lowest vice, and rulers who commit such crimes forfeit both their right to rule and their right to live.