This article analyzes two vernacular German books that offered learned guidance for how to use natural observation as a means of gaining knowledge of the weather. Published a combined seventy-seven times throughout the sixteenth century, the “Wetterbüchlein” (Weather booklet) and “Bauern Practica” (Peasants’ practica) were commercially successful and widely circulated. Printers marketed the books as being accessible to anyone and reinforced that claim in the paratextual features of the books. In text and image, these books promoted the idea that even common people could participate in the production of knowledge based on the proper observation of nature.

Leon Battista Alberti based his treatise “On the Art of Building” on close examination of a great many buildings. His survey of Old St. Peter's was especially thorough. He not only investigated the structure, but also ransacked written sources to re-create the church's original décor and to reconstruct the ways in which early popes had celebrated Mass and delivered sermons. Like Lorenzo Valla, he offered a suggestive and polemical history of the church. His ideas seemingly shaped the ways in which Pope Pius II restored the basilica, and his example shows that serious efforts to trace the history of Christianity long predated the Reformation.

Previously unpublished X-ray images prove that in the portrait commissioned for Giovio's museum, Bronzino painted Andrea Doria holding an oar, not a trident. The article interprets the portrait in its original form. Examination of the portrait together with the eulogy Giovio attached to it shows that Doria is painted as Odysseus, not as Neptune, and explains the incongruous oar. Erotic insinuations in the portrait suggest that, like Bronzino's burlesque poetry, it has a hidden meaning. Further analysis in the context of Giovio's historiography and a precise dating unveil a meaning that criticizes Doria's incompetence in a recent crucial naval battle.

The figure of Homer in Raphael's “Parnassus” is singular for the combination of blindness, divine inspiration, improvisational song, and an amanuensis to immortalize the performance. This article examines humanist biographies of Homer to identify the pre-text of Raphael's Homer and to determine if it reflects the political influence of Julius II. Though no one source can be asked to bear such responsibility, the article gestures to the doctrine of divine madness in Laurentian Florence, in which vatic authority derives from Apollo. Raphael may have therefore conceived of Homer as Apollo's priest to give visual endorsement to Julius's Apollinian ideology.

This article examines the sugar sculptures created for a ball in honor of Henri III of France in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice in 1574. The first part discusses the production and display of the statuettes. In the next section, the setting of the sugar sculptures is examined in the context of the collation prepared for the king in Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, which contains the city's greatest collection of antiquities. Finally, the article examines the possible relationships between sugar statuettes and ancient sculptures and their use in crafting the image of Venice as a new Rome.

The reception of art is often described in ocularcentric terms, but all five senses could engage devotional objects in late medieval and early modern Europe. This article explores this phenomenon by considering a wooden crucifix with movable arms made by Donatello for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence in the early fifteenth century. It makes new suggestions about the work's original location, its possible patrons, and its functions and reception, especially during the rituals associated with Good Friday. It also reflects on the challenges scholars face when taking a multisensory approach to premodern visual and material culture.

At first glance, salutation and salvation could hardly be farther apart: the one ephemeral and everyday, the other eternal, of supreme importance. How should one understand the link, often insisted upon by Christian theologians, between the transience of a salutation and the transcendence of salvation? My argument in this essay is bifold: I first demonstrate that early modern writers, and especially Protestant theologians, regarded salutations as profoundly linked to salvation. I then argue that at the heart of this close association is an issue of temporality—a matter of infusing mundane, mortal time with the extra-temporal, ineffable quality of eternity.

Amid the devastation of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), Philip Melanchthon and his colleagues at Wittenberg hastily compiled a Latin edition of Sophocles from fifteen years of teaching materials and sent it to Edward VI of England within weeks of his coronation. Wittenberg tragedy reconciled Aristotelian technology, Reformation politics, and Lutheran theology, offering consolation in the face of events that themselves seemed to be unfolding on a tragic stage. A crucial but neglected source of English and Continental literary thought, the Wittenberg Sophocles shaped the reception of Greek tragedy, tragic poetics, and Neo-Latin and vernacular composition throughout the sixteenth century.

Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness.

The post–Council of Trent court records for the diocese of Pamplona (northern Iberia) record numerous and ongoing incidents of clergy accused of running with and fighting bulls. Placed within the context of efforts to implement Tridentine and Catholic reform in the diocese, contemporaneous lay legal actions, and conflicting ideas of appropriate gendered behavior and professionalism of the clergy, these episodes illuminate how parishioners effectively used the court system and crafted accusations to promote local interests and punish unpopular priests.

Several early editions of Thomas More's “Utopia,” first published in 1516, include the Utopian alphabet, as well as a quatrain of poetry in Utopian and its Latin transliteration. This essay traces the material conditions for the Utopian alphabet, exploring the intellectual contexts and epistemological questions that underlie its presence in these early editions and its absence in others. Reproduced by four early modern European printers via woodcut, metal type, or engraved plate, the alphabet in its materiality becomes a key component of “Utopia,” underscoring the intersection between print technology and an expansive humanism extending to ever wider intellectual and geographic horizons.

In 1636, the Spanish Inquisition tried María de la Cruz for heresy and having made a pact with the devil. Examination of her trial in light of information about sexual misconduct on the part of Catholic clerics, however, reveals that what drove María to the emotional and behavioral extremes that her accusers described was neither heresy nor the devil the authorities had in mind. Theologians who evaluated her case and also met with María discerned what those who only read the accusations against her were unable to know: María's devils were human men taking advantage of a poor, illiterate woman for sex.

This study employs network analysis and microhistory to challenge the standard narrative about architecture and patronage in Baroque Rome, that of celebrity patron-artist relationships. It investigates the artists and artisans below this elite team and the plurality of relationships that developed among them. The subject is Innocent X Pamphilj's monumental works of art and architecture, at the Vatican, Piazza Navona, Campidoglio, Lateran, and Janiculum Hill, commissioned for the 1650 Holy Year. It argues that competent artisans and their relationships influenced the operation of building sites and presents Innocent X as the patron of an industrious architectural enterprise.

This article discusses Fulvio Testi's libretto “L'isola di Alcina” (1626), based on Ariosto's “Orlando furioso.” After considering its significance to the cultural politics of the Este and the author's preoccupations with poetical and political lineage, the essay focuses on the sorceress Alcina's lament in act 4 and its afterlife in the Baroque cantata repertoire. Echoes from Claudio Monteverdi and Ottavio Rinuccini's “Arianna” as well as the memory of the sorceress Armida from Torquato Tasso's “Gerusalemme liberata” are crucial to the gradual reshaping that, across poetry and music, transforms the evil character into a woman worthy of the audience's sympathy.

This article explores how some enslaved Black Africans litigated for their freedom in Spanish royal courts in the sixteenth century on the basis that—as Christians—they had been unjustly enslaved in Africa. With a focus on the port cities of Seville and Cartagena, I explore how freedom litigation suits illuminate how individuals from starkly different social worlds and intellectual milieus—who inhabited the same urban sites—affected and shaped one another's intellectual landscapes. I trace how enslaved Africans’ epistemologies of just slavery shaped broader discourses on the just enslavement of Africans in the Spanish Empire.

The history of religious migration and experience of exile in the early modern period has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Neglected within this scholarship, however, is sustained discussion of linguistic encounter within these often fraught transcultural and transnational interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring the linguistic experiences of religious exiles in English convents founded in the Low Countries. Most women within English communities in exile were linguistically challenged; focusing on the creative ways these women subsequently negotiated language barriers sheds new light on female language acquisition and encounter during this period.

This essay explores glass engravings by Dutch authors Anna Roemers Visscher, Maria Tesselschade Roemers Visscher, and Anna Maria van Schurman. I place these engravings in their rich contemporary contexts, comparing them to other art forms that were the product of female pastime. Like embroidery, emblems, and alba amicorum, engraved glasses combined text and image, transforming each glass into an object that fulfilled key social and cultural functions. Above all, engraving glasses allowed women to forge new self-representations, specifically through their use of play to question binary oppositions and moral certainties.

This essay explores how two early modern French writers considered choral music in opera as a figure for society. Pierre Corneille, in his musical tragedy “Andromède,” and scientist and critic Claude Perrault, in several texts about music and acoustics, made subtle apologies for the polyphonic choral song condemned by many contemporaries as unintelligible. Beyond defending the aesthetic value of choral music, Corneille and Perrault associated multi-part song with collective vocalizations offstage, in the real world. Their instructions on how to appreciate choral interludes in opera also served, therefore, to train listeners to attend to the polyphony of society.

In the mid-seventeenth century, as the first full atlas of East Asia became available on the European book market, a dramatic shift took place in textual and visual representations of the Far East. The atlas, titled “Novus Atlas Sinensis” (1655), was the product of a cooperation between Joan Blaeu, who headed one of Europe's foremost commercial publishing houses, and Martino Martini, a prominent Jesuit missionary to China. This study shows how the Martini-Blaeu atlas thoroughly challenged the worldview of late Renaissance audiences by tracing and reconstructing a series of displacements that facilitated its production process.