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.

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.

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This article discusses an unpublished vernacular Italian New World epic of the 1580s, which narrates the Spanish conquest of Mexico.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.

Philip II’s death in September 1598 coincided with the restoration of Habsburg authority in the southern Low Countries after decades of revolt. Local obsequies for the deceased ruler therefore reclaimed ecclesiastical infrastructure and revived urban cohesion. In contrast to previous funerals, the Brussels service did not significantly stage a transfer of power. Instead, by selectively drawing on traces of former ceremonies, particularly Charles V’s 1558 funeral, the ritual overcame the recent upheavals and soothed the anxieties surrounding the cession of sovereignty to the archdukes. Simultaneously, each important urban center also staged its own ceremonial, thereby stressing local privilege.