Between 1549 and 1560, French Petrarchan sonnet sequences proliferated in the wake of Du Bellay's Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue and Ronsard's Amours. Yet this proliferation relied on a remarkable economy of means, in large part due to the constant recycling of metaphors, tropes, and forms. In fact, the genre can be read as a cost-efficient system that addressed the economic anxiety of a generation of poets caught between the aspiration to impose the autonomy of their art and their social dependence on a patron. It also preemptively solved the potential credit crisis that could have resulted from having had to borrow from the Italians in order to establish a new French canon. Looking at Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Ellain, this essay examines French Petrarchan collections as complex lyric economies that manufacture and negotiate aesthetic, literary, monetary, and national values.

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted — wealth, political office, and age of family — but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families. Each status system was conservative in the sense that elite families at the top of that hierarchy married each other in order to stabilize their position. But because of inconsistency in rankings, contradiction within the elite opened up the Florentine marriage system to widespread upward social mobility by new men. In their own families, successful new men aggressively imitated their economically and politically declining status superiors. Sharp class divisions thereby blurred into continuous and negotiable status gradients. These open-elite patterns of social mobility, present throughout the early Florentine Renaissance, were most extreme during the Albizzi regime, immediately following the Ciompi Revolt.

This article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic magic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. The article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion — their apprehension and negotiation — at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

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.

John Hothby's career as cathedral choirmaster at Lucca is one of the longest, best documented, and most exceptional of any Northern musician active in fifteenth-century Italy. As director of the cathedral school and choir, this Englishman embodied two models of music master: a scholastic trained in the old Trivium and Quadrivium, and a professional maestro di cappella. Fulfilling this double role was but one way in which Hothby differed from his fellow oltremontani by ingratiating himself with his Lucchese patrons, colleagues, and citizens at large. Another was the integration into his curriculum of older pedagogies of local and regional origin, ones designed to appeal to his Italian students. The most important example of such appropriation were the laude that formed a basis for his students’ exercises in two-voice mensural counterpoint. The latter appear in I-Lc, Enti religiosi soppressi, 3086, one of only two examples of student work to survive from before 1500. These newly discovered exercises thus illuminate not only Hothby's career, but also a hitherto obscure stage of learning by which aspiring singers progressed from strict, note-against-note discant to complex, florid polyphony.

This article focuses on women's luxury footwear to examine issues of economic, material, and familial life in Renaissance Italy. It uses graphic work by Albrecht Dürer to explore footwear design, and draws from disparate sources to propose a new method for evaluating its cost. The article argues that sumptuous footwear was available for a range of prices that are not reflected in surviving payment records, and that it was largely less expensive than moralists and legislators implied. In conclusion, it employs Minerbetti documentation to consider the role particular shoes may have played in developing personal subjectivity.

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.

In studying Donato Bramante's Ruined Temple (1481), this essay looks beyond the traditional question of its subject matter, considering this engraving as an image about images of all kinds. Taking the inconspicuous cross on the column as its focal point, it shows how the print offers a dialectical disquisition on the value of the Christian sign as measured against the alluring remains of pagan civilization. The vexed nature of this choice registers a profound artistic problem. Caught between the ideals of classical antiquarianism and contemporary devotion, Bramante here claims the ground between artistic fame and obscurity, righteousness and idolatrous ruin.

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.

The motet manuscript known as the Medici Codex is associated by modern scholarship with the 1518 marriage of Lorenzo II de' Medici and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. It was once thought that the manuscript was made in France and given to Lorenzo by Francis I, but now it is almost unanimously agreed that it was made in Rome under the patronage of Pope Leo X. Since this revision, no one has put forward a detailed view of how the manuscript relates to the circumstances under which it was given and to the individuals involved, or how it functions as a gift. This study places the manuscript in the context of other gifts associated with the marriage to arrive at such a view.

This essay examines portraits of old women that were produced for the households of the professional and elite classes in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and the Veneto during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious and social reform, women's lives came under increasing scrutiny. By interpreting the portraits within the context of prescriptive texts on the stages of women's lives, this study argues that the portraits provide evidence for the pivotal role of old women within the moral and symbolic order of the family, as well as in the wider community beyond the home.

The Habsburgs and the Nassaus, who collaborated during the reign of Charles V, clashed sharply during the reign of Philip II: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, became the leader of the Dutch Revolt. Instead of focusing on religious and political matters in the Netherlands, this article examines the underlying development of both men's dynastic identity to explain this new hostility. I argue that Habsburg family affairs — the division of the dynasty into two branches — led to an increasingly Spanish dynastic identity on Philip's part, while William could not, or would not, break free from his German-focused family identity, leading to a crucial loss of common ground between the two men.

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.

Early English readers of Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) annotated their copies of John Florio's (1553[?]–1625) translation with remarkable frequency and vehemence, creating a context within which printed appropriations of the essayist may be fruitfully examined. No topic intrigued these readers more than custom. Drawing from transcriptions of over 4,000 marginal annotations and situating the Montaignean borrowings of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and other English writers within a culture of active reader response, this essay treats the Montaignean account of custom as a case study wherein differences between manuscript and print appropriation may be investigated. Montaigne's reception in seventeenth-century England cannot be understood without scrupulous attention to both traditions.

Almost every Kunstkammer in sixteenth-century Europe contained small reptiles or plants cast from life in a variety of media. This widespread technique, which used small, recently killed animals as a pattern to create lifelike sculptures, was often prized more highly than works sculpted with the hand. An unstudied, late sixteenth-century French technical manuscript records a practitioner's experiments in casting from life, among many other subjects. This article investigates both the techniques and the significance of life-casting on the basis of this treatise, incorporating the examination of surviving sixteenth-century European life casts and the reconstruction of the manuscript's recipes and technical instructions, arguing that life-casting in the sixteenth century was viewed in part as a means to the knowledge of nature.

Not long after Shakespeare's birth in 1564, the last witnesses to the reign of Richard III (1483–85) would have reached the end of their lives. Richard III (ca. 1592) occupies a distinctive historical moment in relation to its subject, the period after the extinction of living memory, but still within the horizon of secondhand or communicative memory. This essay explores how memories and postmemories of Richard's reign were preserved, transmitted, and transformed over the course of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. While registering the powerful influence of emerging contexts, including the Reformation and, ultimately, Shakespeare's play, these memories remained distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, textual history. They survived because they offered their bearers a resource for interpreting and resisting the predicaments of the present, from the problem of tyranny to the legacies of the Reformation.