The Infamous Black Death of 1348 signaled the reappearance of bubonic plague in Europe after long centuries of absence. Contemporary accounts vividly describe the shock and horror of universal and indiscriminate mortality. From Tournai, Gilles Li Muisis observed that “no one was secure, whether rich, in moderate circumstances or poor, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord.” In any given area, between one third to half of the population would die. Worse still, the Black Death was only the beginning of a worldwide pandemic, or cyclical series of epidemics, recurring at intervals of two to twenty years throughout Europe until well into the seventeenth century.

On the 17th of August 1308 Chiara of Montefalco died in the small Umbrian monastery of which she had been the abbess. Her fellow nuns did not take any steps to preserve her body. Nonetheless, for five days it remained uncorrupted and redolent of the odor of sanctity, despite the blazing summer heat. At that point— not wanting to tempt fate further—the community decided to embalm the precious relic. In the words of Sister Francesca of Montefalco, testifying some years later at Chiara's unsuccessful canonization procedure, “They agreed that [her] body should be preserved on account of her holiness and because God took such pleasure in her body and her heart.” They sent to the town apothecary for “balsam and myrrh and other preservatives,” as the apothecary himself testified, and they proceeded to the next step in contemporary embalming practice, which was evisceration.

It has long been understood that historians, literary critics, and art historians who write about past cultures use those cultures for present purposes, whether by turning Periclean Athens into an ideal for present-day America or the fall of the Roman empire into an ominous signal for modern empires. German humanists who sought refuge from Nazi Germany had, however, special reasons to use their cultural studies as a strategy of escape. Erich Auerbach in exile in Istanbul and Ernst Robert Curtius in “inner exile” in Bonn provided narratives of European literary history that minimized the contribution of their native culture, and in so reworking the narrative of Western literature, they were able to reshape their own identities. Their reconstructions of past cultures can thus be read as attempts at self-reconstruction. Ultimately, however, the attempt by such scholars to distance themselves from German culture often faltered on the very Germanness of their cultural reconstructions.

An Important Issue in the study of fifteenth-century Florentine humanism is whether or not later Quattrocento humanists advocate a withdrawal from public life and abandon the “civic” humanism of Salutati, Bruni, and the early Quattrocento humanists. There is no lack of studies on this question using the categories of vita activa and vita contemplativa. In broad terms, the early fifteenthcentury Florentine humanists, reacting against the medieval scholastic world view, are seen as advocating the supremacy of the vita activa though still valuing the vita contemplativa, while the midfifteenth- century humanists, under the influence of the Medici and Marsilio Ficino's Platonic studies, are considered to have reversed the earlier emphasis on the “civic” outlook for the supremacy of the contemplative life and a withdrawal from public affairs.

In his Eulogy of Florence (Laudatio Florentinae Urbis) Leonardo Bruni praised her constitution for giving first place to justice, “without which no city can exist or deserve the name.” Moreover, he said, “Not only citizens, but aliens as well are protected by this commonwealth. It suffers injury to be done to no man, and endeavors to see to it that everyone, citizen or alien, shall receive the justice that is owing to him.” During Brum's own tenure as chancellor of Florence, however, we hear of a Jewish banker who was ruined by the heaviest fine in the history of the city after a trial that one modern scholar has described as a monstrous miscarriage of justice.

In a Paper Published in 1977 I introduced a carton of documents called Dispute di Scolari (1462-1527), preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna, Italy. These documents constitute the most important surviving witness to student disputations held in the Bolognese Studio (in our terms, university), which enabled poor, young, foreign senior degree-candidates upon successful completion to be eligible for one-year lectureships in their respective subjects. After explaining the nature, structure, and legal requirements of the disputation notices and their relevance to student academic performance, the primary purpose of the paper was to illustrate them by examining a few notices in which Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512), professor of philosophy and medicine appeared, either as a disputing master or as a respondent.

Persons of authority in early modern Europe—whether parents, preachers or princes—knew well that among the resources available to them for controlling behavior and maintaining hierarchies, there was always shame. Humankind, to its woe, had experienced shame in the Garden of Eden. Noah had been shamed by his nakedness, Sarah by her barrenness, Jacob by his effeminate body, Potiphar's wife through her brazen advances. Hesiod had introduced two sorts of shame: the right kind, derived from modesty; and the wrong kind, produced by poverty. These instances, and many others from ancient and medieval sources, lay at hand for easy use by Renaissance moralists, and who is not a moralist? Applying their own imaginative skills to techniques and rituals of humiliation, medieval and early modern people devised such innovations as the pitture infamanti, the dunce cap, the stocks, the charivari, the yellow badge.

Fifteenth Century Italy has been called both the “golden age of bastards” and the “age of golden bastards.” But while scholars from Jacob Burckhardt to Lauro Martines have decried princely infidelity and the political problems resulting from the promotion of the inevitable bastards, they have not discussed a central character in the creation of such situations: the mother of those bastards or, more properly, the mistress of the prince. “Golden bastards,” male and female, could not have existed without the tacit cooperation of noble women and the men who protected them – husbands, fathers, and brothers. And herein lies a conundrum. Paternal, spousal, and/or fraternal consent to an illicit relationship which was, at best, a tenuous claim on the generosity of a prince might appear to violate the model constructed by family historians of a society concerned with preserving the honor of their women in order to enhance the family's position through advantageous marital alliances of the virgin daughters.

An Unusual Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola has gained new prominence from its illustration in color in a recent publication. In her Women, Art, and Society (1990), Whitney Chadwick claims of the portrait in question, Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (fig. 1), that in presenting herself in the guise of a portrait being painted by her teacher, Anguissola produced “the first historical example of the woman artist consciously collapsing the subject-object position.” Chadwick's succinct observation opens up the possibility of understanding the painting in a new way, for she points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object that uniquely befell women artists in the Renaissance and complicates their art, especially their self-portraits. From this starting point, I will here explore the form of self-presentation offered by Anguissola in the Siena portrait and several other works in the context of what was a fundamental problem for the Renaissance female artist: the differentiation of herself as artist (the subject position) from her self as trope and theme for the male artist (the object position).

Georgette de Montenay has been the object of enduring scholarly interest, not only as the first woman author of an emblem book, but also as the creator of a new literary and artistic genre: the religious emblem. Most probably converted to Protestantism under the influence of Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre (to whose court she was attached after her marriage to Guyon de Gout, c. 1562), de Montenay composed a series of one hundred militant Christian octets in the mid-i56os and closely supervised their illustration by a gifted Lyonnais etcher, Pierre Woeiriot, who was also of the reformed persuasion.

Few readers of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron will easily forget the sinister scene in novella 32, where a young, beautiful but unfaithful woman is forced by her vengeful husband to drink out of her dead lover's skull. Although equally cruel analogues could be found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Marguerite's strikingly macabre scene seems to be unique in Renaissance literature. Representations of human skeletons are, of course, plentiful in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century iconography, a period often characterized by its obsession with death. Certainly Marguerite may have been influenced by the pervading vanitas and memento morimotifs. At the same time, the whole scene could be viewed as a staged perversion of relic worship, a practice much frowned upon in evangelical circles favored by Marguerite.

There is such an abundance of documentary information about the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti that we necessarily are selective in our use of the primary sources: nearly 1,400 letters to and from the artist, more than three hundred published pages of his personal and professional ricordi, and an extensive correspondence among members of his immediate family. In addition to what they tell us about the artist and his commissions, these primary sources offer a rich and detailed picture of everyday life in Renaissance Italy. The following miscellany is offered as diverse glimpses into the world and work of Michelangelo, a sort of micro-historical view of a major historical figure.

Clarence Miller, the learned editor and commentator of Erasmus's Praise of Folly, made a challenging remark in a recent issue of Renaissance Quarterly. In discussing a collection of essays on the Moria and the Colloquies,he observes in conclusion that it is “very difficult to say much that is both new and true” about Erasmus's satire. With a view to the flood of secondary literature on the subject, his observation seems quite to the point.

I shall illustrate a number of basic textual ingredients in the Moria whose origin has escaped the attention of Erasmus specialists, namely, Dutch proverbs and expressions. More than once it is Folly herself that suggests she is going to quote from the vernacular.

Among the more than 160 uomitti valenti whose lives and works are included in the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de’ più eccellentipittori, scultori et architettori, 1568, are several women: Properzia De’ Rossi (c. 1490-1530), Suor Plautilla Nelli (1532-1587/88), Lucrezia Quistelli, who was “taught by Alessandro Allori,” Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625), and her sisters Lucia (c. 1540-c. 1565) and Europa (1542/43-78). Although De' Rossi was the only one of these women distinguished by her own vita, it was Sofonisba Anguissola who accrued the greatest amount of literary adulation during her lifetime (fig. 1). If contemporaneous sources are to be believed, this acclaim may be attributed to her excellence as a portrait painter.

On 10 August 1584 Four Japanese emissaries arrived in Lisbon. Strictly speaking, they were not the first Japanese to arrive in Europe, but they were the first official delegates sent by Japanese feudal lords. And they were the first to return to Japan after a European sojourn.’ Some historians have argued that “no Japanese emissaries, before or since, aroused comparable interest or enthusiasm” among Europeans.

Much has been written about this visit, both in the sixteenth century and closer to our own, but while there is no doubt about the warmth of the welcome, judgments about its meaning and importance have differed sharply. In the late nineteenth century, Guglielmo Berchet reluctantly concluded that despite European enthusiasm and the triumph of the travelers over enormous obstacles during the journey, the embassy was of no consequence because by the time it returned to Japan in 1587, it encountered a hardening of attitudes against Europeans.

The study of Italian humanism in the age of the Reformation has focused almost exclusively on the relationship between humanism and the Italian Spirituali. This emphasis can be traced back to the many works of Delio Cantimori. Cantimori persistently argued that humanism, with its emphasis on scriptural studies, philology, and spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal promoted evangelical spirituality and church reform among Italians. He saw the Spirituali—many of whom were humanists—as pious, devout individuals caught between their own evangelical convictions and the traditions of a spiritually unsatisfying and morally corrupt ecclesiastical system. It was the dynamics of this spiritual crisis, fueled by the clash between evangelism and the doctrines of the church, that formed the basis of many of Cantimori's works on humanism and reform in Italy.

At its Annual Meeting in April 1995, the Renaissance Society of America will be honoring the career of Paul Oskar Kristeller, whose international reputation as a Renaissance scholar is well known to this audience. We are all in debt to Kristeller for what he would proudly entitle his “contributions.” These include, among innumerable others, studies on Marsilio Ficino and the classical and scholastic origins of humanism, a multi-volumed catalogue of the uncatalogued manuscripts in European collections (more than a life work all by itself), and reminders in the form of essays, articles and lectures of the need to adjust our theories and our inclinations to what used to be called, in a simpler age, facts.