This article presents the first sustained study of Pietro Perugino's destroyed “Assumption of the Virgin” altarpiece commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV for the Sistine Chapel. My analysis reconstructs the frescoed altarpiece's ritual setting and relates it to imagery associated with Sixtus's promotion of the controversial Immaculate Conception feast. The altarpiece's ties to the Immaculate Virgin intensified during the 1483 Assumption feast, which marked the chapel's inauguration. The Assumption represented a salient event in Rome's liturgical calendar, and I demonstrate how the altarpiece allowed Sixtus to temporarily expand a local communal feast to include an expression of papal privilege and authority.

Contrary to the idea that awareness of extinction is quintessentially modern, this article argues that Bernard Palissy conceived of extinct species—what he called “lost species” (“espèces perdues”)—in the sixteenth century. This premodern craftsman knew that human activity caused species to vanish. But how? By retracing his interactions with merchants and fishermen at the French Atlantic ports, I show that Palissy learned about the overfishing of waters from other commercial actors. Rather than paint human-caused extinction as a novel insight, I demonstrate that Palissy drew on common vernacular knowledge about the depletion of the ocean. Palissy's pronouncements, it is further shown, expand his well-known polemic against bookish learning. The artisan championed practical experience against a textual tradition of natural history, exposing the latter's silence on commercially decimated species.

Across the early modern Iberian world, a unique form of infamy materialized in the sambenito. Mostly known as the penitential garment imposed by the Inquisition on the individuals it condemned, the sambenito was also exhibited in churches and monasteries as a monument of infamy. This article traces the origins, development, and decline of the sambenito, with a particular focus on its material and visual aspects. It argues that displayed sambenitos performed mnemonic and evidentiary roles in societies obsessed with genealogy, while also bringing to light the continuous resistance and opposition to the sambenito on the ground.

This article addresses the explicit utilization of Christian discourse about hell and purgatory within the writings of sixteenth-century Italian Jewry. The vast majority of Jewish texts about hell (gehinnom) from the period ignore Christian discourse on the topic or only allude to it obliquely. Three unpublished Hebrew sources, two of them drawn from informal marginalia, demonstrate a more open approach, in which the infernal cosmography and terminology of Christianity are consciously and explicitly appropriated. These sources not only serve as important case studies for Jewish understandings of hell during the period but also can shed broader light on the types of cultural maneuvering that characterized Jewish cultural life in the Christian milieu of Cinquecento Italy.

This article offers an intensive—although still not exhaustive—reading of a letter written to the adolescent Lorenzo de’ Medici by Braccio Martelli, a member of his brigata. It is a document that focuses on the celebrations accompanying the wedding of Lucrezia Donati, the object of Lorenzo's affections, to Niccolò Ardinghelli, an anti-Medicean living in exile. I examine some of the letter's multiple overlapping topics and contexts, including private sociability (wedding practices, music, dance, dress), the trophy status of Lucrezia, sexual and political tensions, and the ties between the letter writer and his addressee in terms of client/patron and homosocial relations.

Scotland's mythical and medieval history has long been acknowledged as of critical importance in its sixteenth-century present. This article tracks these discourses across the channel, showing for the first time the limited circulation of Scottish histories in France and the dominance of English versions of the past in French texts, ranging from short, printed books to royal presentation manuscripts. This Anglocentric view not only helps to explain the discordant French views of the Scots (as loyal yet uncivil, and above all warlike) but also contributes to the ongoing reassessment that the auld alliance was not permanently binding but, rather, intermittently activated when political or economic interests required.

This article investigates the relation between music and emotions at exequies in Italy between ca. 1560 and ca. 1660. Mapping the lexicon used to describe music in funeral books, I highlight the coexistence of two diverging semantic domains, sadness and sweetness. Their juxtaposition corresponds to an aesthetic principle that informed the conceptualization of the entire ritual's artistic setup—as divided between the mournful and the pleasurable. Reading funeral orations, moreover, I show that the ambivalent terms with which the experience of exequial music was verbalized mirrored an ambivalent conception of the liturgy for the dead and, ultimately, of death itself.

In sixteenth-century Brazil, several European women governed the captaincies of their late or absent husbands during the first century of Portuguese colonization. A contextual and lexical analysis of the male-authored sources reveals that these women acted decisively to protect and expand familial patrimonies and, in doing so, were part of the colonizing movement. Although extensive written evidence survives that attests to their authority and agency over colonial affairs, their importance has been overlooked in the scholarship. Therefore, this essay argues that a small group of elite European women became imperial agents who wielded power against colonial subjects in select circumstances.

Do resonances of Cervantes's frustrated attempts to be granted a royal appointment in the Spanish Indies filter into the “Quijote”? Can the author be glimpsed in the novel of which he is also a reader? What holds Don Quijote and Sancho Panza together and gives this episodic novel its coherence? Attuned to the rich conversational exchanges between the two protagonists, I argue that Don Quijote's escalating promises and Sancho's dogged pursuit of an island to govern, together with the triangulated relationship of Don Quijote, Sancho, and the imagined Dulcinea, result in what can rightly be called Cervantes's anti-anthem to America.

This article proposes a new methodology for engaging with early modern legal metaphor. It argues that a full account of the trope must integrate its legal-historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical dimensions. After discussing what makes early modern legal metaphor unique (and thus uniquely challenging to decipher), I consider various philosophical, legal, cognitive, and literary approaches to the rhetorical figure and demonstrate how each perspective adds additional insight to its untangling in juridical contexts. The article culminates in a reading of a single metaphor taken from lawyer John Exton's treatise “The maritime dicæologie, or, the Sea-jurisdiction of England” (1664): “The ship dieth at sea.” Ultimately, I argue that this metaphor references admiralty actions in rem, which were integral to the functioning of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English High Court of Admiralty, an interpretation that emerges only when accounting for the trope in both its textual and intertextual frameworks.

This article aims to reopen discussion of the Renaissance ars historica, a genre that has garnered little attention in modern scholarship. It does so by using a set of computational tools to measure the quantitative occurrence of terms related to artistry and cognition in Johann Wolff's collection of historical-method texts entitled “Artis Historicae Penus” (1579). Like the period's historical writing, which amalgamated aesthetics and historiography, the Renaissance artes historicae belonged to a historiographical paradigm in which the skillful construction of discourse went hand in hand with the search for historical truth. The title of Wolff's anthology accordingly draws an overt connection between the concepts of “ars” and “historia,” yet what did sixteenth-century theorists mean by “art”?

This article examines Antonio Agustín's (1517–86) philological and historical treatise “De Emendatione Gratiani” (1587). Canon law became a key controversial issue in Catholic-Protestant confessional arguments in the sixteenth century, but its convoluted history also posed a challenge within Catholic orthodoxy itself. This essay discusses how Agustín, working to improve the text of Gratian's “Decretum” (ca. 1140), navigated between his own scholarly integrity and the requirements of Tridentine reforms. The focus on canon law uncovers rarely acknowledged connections between Renaissance philology and ecclesiastical scholarship, and opens a new perspective on the entanglement of humanism and religion, confessional conflicts, and erudition.

Early modern Gospel harmonies have received little attention and are mostly studied as poor precursors to modern synoptic criticism. This article reassesses the harmony's significance by reconstructing its development ca. 1500–1700, reaching two conclusions. First, it argues that Gospel harmonies acted as a touchstone for critical intellectual developments such as the rise of scientific chronology. Second, it argues that the harmony's transformation over this period, influenced by multiple overlapping disciplines, resulted in it becoming one of the most creative scholarly genres by the late seventeenth century. This interdisciplinarity was simultaneously the prime attraction of the harmony and the reason for its eighteenth-century decline.

When ancient Greek heritage was rehabilitated in the Renaissance, its students were first and foremost aspiring humanists, and, almost as a rule, men. An early exception was Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–88), the eldest daughter of the Duke of Milan, Francesco I Sforza. I argue that she not only studied the Greek language but also acted as a patron of Greek studies. Sforza's double role is confirmed by two Greek grammars dedicated to her and connected to the Byzantine migrant Constantine Lascaris. These documents reveal how Sforza probably studied the language, and how she was imagined as a student.

Bardic poetry in early modern Ireland was the product of highly sophisticated, transactional, and mutually beneficial relationships between poets and their aristocratic patrons. This paper combines innovative methods of network analysis with traditional textual scholarship to visualize and examine these social relationships, which played a role, at both a national and regional level, in maintaining and upholding the values of Gaelic Ireland's elite. Focusing on the period from the declaration of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, in 1541, to the beginning of the Restoration period, in 1660, it highlights and explores an under-studied aspect of Renaissance Ireland.

This article traces the evidence left by early modern readers who marked their Bibles’ annotations—both by taking attentive notice of them and by leaving their own inky traces on them. Among the burgeoning critical interest in both printed and manuscript marginalia there has been little interrogation of the intersection between the two. This article traces the evidence of what the readerly marginalia of biblical annotations can tell us about their readers. It argues that literacy formed and fostered by reading annotated Bibles was likely to be skillful and attuned to issues of interpretation and meaning-making.

After Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco died in 1564, royal officials watched with trepidation as the conquistadores’ descendants adopted heraldry, hereditary titles, and royal ceremony, supposedly in jest. Scholars have argued that the royal judges used these over-the-top fiestas to frame powerful settlers for sedition. This article instead argues that the royal judges’ obsession with how wealthy settlers adopted royal pomp and circumstance, on the one hand, and refusal to recognize how they imprecisely imitated the Mexica nobility, on the other, helped to consolidate Spanish power—symbolic and literal—in New Spain.

This article investigates how and why scholars began to systematically examine and record ancient inscriptions in fifteenth-century Italy. Finding evidence in the revolutionary work of Ciriaco d'Ancona, it shows that this change emerged from the synthesis of several cultural traditions. Ciriaco learned to observe antiquities from the Italian elite living in the Greek colonies and to record inscriptions from an early Christian pilgrim's practice. He introduced a new degree of precision in his records, learned partly from humanists. These facts suggest that a new culture of observing, discussing, and writing about antiquities was developing in the early Renaissance Mediterranean.

The global dimensions of Anthony van Dyck's portrait of Genoese noblewoman Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo have been largely overlooked by art historians. Seventeenth-century Genoa was immersed in the global movement of goods, knowledge, and peoples; these encounters and exchanges shaped Genoa's fashion system. This article situates the portrait within networks of international exchange to explore the meaningful representation of dress and globalized materials. The global is not restricted to Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo's attire, however; it extends to the African servant, whose presence and dress bring the portrait into dialogue with histories of global commodities, race, and Atlantic and Mediterranean slavery.

Esther Inglis (ca. 1570–1624), a Franco-Scottish writer, is known for her manuscript books, written in many handwriting styles and decorated with pen or brushwork in black-and-white or color. About twenty-five of her sixty or so surviving manuscripts contain self-portraits, which until now have not been examined in detail. This essay surveys the developing author portrait in manuscript and print for French women writers, along with portrait engravings and miniatures, considering their influence on Inglis. It shows further how she created a self within the broader context of transnational Protestant humanism and poetics, crossing boundaries of gender, language, and nationality.