Cabot has been hailed as the father of English navigation, bringing with him from Spain the methods of celestial navigation and the ability to unite navigational theory and practice. The system Cabot set up in England, however, differed not only from the actual system of navigation in Spain, but also from the policies he advocated while there. In transferring his expertise to England, Cabot reshaped the Spanish navigational methods for his new context, convincing the English to emulate a system that never existed as such, and creating a new balance between theory and experience in navigation.

This essay discloses a hitherto-undetected network of allusion and motif in Paradise Lost (1667). Satan falls through Chaos like Icarus in book 2, and like Phaethon in book 6. In book 6 the Son rides triumphantly in the Chariot of Paternal Deity as a good, successful Phaethon. Both myths of falling in a poem about the Fall involve Milton (1608-74) in a polemic with Lucretius, the classical poet of a godless, Epicurean universe that is ever falling and dying. In a parallel to the Son, Milton depicts himself in his invocations to his Muse as a successful Icarus, claiming to escape a condition offallenness on the wings of immortal verse.

Lope de Vega's pastoral romance Arcadia (1598) presents a fictionalized self-portrait of the author looking back on himself as a younger man, and, at the same time, constitutes a refashioning of the artist into a cultured poet articulating his own poetics. Lope employs the oneiric potential of pastoral to reshape the past imaginatively, even as he engages creatively with pastoral conventions to execute a virtuoso performance as a poet and establish himself as a serious artist who merits the esteem and patronage of the Spanish court. As a result, Arcadia is an artful, complex, and highly idiosyncratic work that reveals Lope's predilection for literary innovation and experimentation, and undermines the notion of pastoral as a staid genre resistant to change. In the process of reshaping pastoral conventions Lope claims demiurgic, visionary powers for poets, likening such powers to those of the Creator himself

This study questions the traditional assumption that Venetian cittadini emulated the collecting and patronage patterns of the ruling nobility. An alternative theoretical model, drawn from sociological, anthropological, and historical analyses of collecting, suggests that the cittadini should be cultural innovators rather than followers. Case studies of two prominent early-sixteenth-century cittadini collectors reveal that, although they pursued different strategies, neither sought distinction primarily by imitating established patrician tastes: both were at the forefront of new developments. In both their differences from the nobility and in their heterogeneity as a social group, the cittadini have had an unrecognized impact on the style and content of Venetian art in the "Golden Age."