Long seen as a play that celebrates the new-found freedom of its female protagonist, Mandragola may in fact question the very possibility of theatrical "liberation. "Drawing on the foundational myth central to Renaissance thinking about theater, the abduction of the Sabine women, this essay shows how Machiavelli endeavored to make his play a discomfitting experience for characters and audience alike. This conception of comedy as social trap both challenged humanistic notions of the ideal relationship between theater and the city, and accentuated the surveillant norms inherent in humanists'understanding of the role of the stage in society.

This essay examines the creation of a notorious anecdote about a Machiavellian mother — Caterina Sforza. The adjective "Machiavellian "functions on two levels: first, Sforza often simply appears in her role as mother in Machiavelli's works; second, her behavior in this particular instance might well be characterized as "practising duplicity in state craft. " Yet if one considers the pertinent historical documents and Machiavelli's very first, although virtually forgotten, version of the events, it becomes apparent that Machiavelli "de-Machiavellizes" Caterina Sforza. The historical record offers a narrative in which Sforza provides a localized, targeted political response to undermine her children's would-be assassins. Machiavelli, however, rewrites the episode by altering Sforza's quip to her enemies and adding the audacious gesture of lifting her skirts; as a result, he creates a version in which she no longer responds to the political predicament in which she finds herself. This essay juxtaposes Machiavelli's long-ignored first version of the tale with his other two more well-known prose versions and contextualizes all three in relation to contemporary sources.

The Carolina penal code of 1532, issued as a manual of court procedures for the Holy Roman Empire, offers an opportunity to examine connections between the legal text and broader cultural discourses. The code uses persuasive techniques that promote a vision of the rational layman as the exemplar of common sense and public order. The representations of the legal text parallel contemporary tendencies in fiction and pamphlet literature. Both authoritative and literary texts used print to promote identification with a universalized ideal, limited by class and gender but discursively constructed as common to all reasonable people.

Like many other medieval and Renaissance works, the Lusíadas by Luis de Camões can be profitably interpreted as a work of rhetorical persuasion. Although rhetoric was a primary feature of the educational curriculum of the time, this line of reasoning has been missing from the critical studies of the poem, most of which are committed instead to historical, biographical, and ideological approaches. In each narrative surface of the Lusíadas, a royal audience is cajoled, admonished, guided, or taught by an eloquent petitioner who may lack the credentials of power but manifestly possesses those of experience, wisdom, virtue, and love. Finally, this petitioner, whether in the form of a historical or mythological personage, Vasco da Gama the protagonist, or some projection of the inspired poet-orator, accesses a wide range of rhetorical strategies, among them the popular and efficacious Aristotelian categories of ethos, pathos, and logos, in order more effectively to move and persuade.

Lute-poems came into vogue in France in the 1540s and 1550s. Because of the lute's shape, it could be gendered either as masculine or feminine; male and female poets therefore made use of lute imagery in different ways. Their references to the lute are informed by the gendered culture surrounding the instrument in this period and by the etiquette and technicalities of lute playing. Even more than painters and engravers, poets could invest the lute with human qualities, conflating it with bodies and body parts. It could thus be adapted to serve a variety of amorous scenarios.

This study reconstructs the thematic and literary presence of a labyrinth in Montaigne's "Sur des vers de Virgile." Indispensable to such a reconstruction will be a consideration of Catullus's epithalamium on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis from which are derived the hexameters textually anchoring the labyrinth in Montaigne's text. I will then place these verses in their French surroundings and pursue the insights that an awareness of the Catullan context makes available for interpretations of the essay.

In the last few decades religion and the church have moved from the margins — or, more precisely, the chronological borders — of Italian Renaissance studies to their center. Less than half a century ago it was possible for Étienne Delaruelle and his collaborators on the Renaissance volumes of Fliche and Martin's great Histoire de l'Église to justify excluding from their survey of the emerging "national" churches of the period any consideration of Italy, "it being always subsumed within the history of the papacy." If religion had any place in the Renaissance it was, in the words of Carlo Angeleri, as "a problem."