In many different ways Renaissance physicians concerned themselves with the reading and writing of history. This article examines the role of historical interests in learned medical culture and the participation of physicians in the broader historical culture of the period.

This article examines the gendered construction of power during the reign of Isabel of Castile (1474-1504). The construction of her political legitimacy was based on her manipulation of her gender and sexuality intended to contrast with the perceived shortcomings of her brother, Enrique IV. Enrique's critics had impugned his sexuality and attacked his inability to deliver Spain into a golden age. By aligning Isabel with sexually chaste models and emphasizing her ability to redeem Spain both because of and despite her gender, Isabel's partisans crafted an image that allowed her to transcend the misogynist tropes that attacked female rule.

A collection of student orations by the Salamancan jurist Diego de Covarrubias, edited here in the appendix, offers a glimpse of the mental landscape of canon and civil lawyers in this era. The orations combine traditional scholastic forms of argumentation with humanistic themes, most prominently that of “arms and letters”. The article sets the orations in their intellectual and institutional context, and traces the intellectual lineages for this central topos. Although Covarrubias was conversant with the humanist literary tradition, in which “arms and letters” stood for twin achievements of a well-rounded courtier, the main point of these exercises was to assert, following Bartolus, that the legal profession rightfully deserved to inherit the honor and privileges bestowed in ancient times upon men of arms.

Portia dell'Anguillara Cesi and Margherita della Somaglia Peretti were both wealthy heiresses in late sixteenth-century Rome, and each was the patron of a fine altarpiece for the Capuchin church of San Bonaventura. Although women were widely recognized as patrons in the period, the patronage of these two paintings, which show the Virgin, saints, and the portrait of a young boy, has always been assigned to their husbands, Paolo Emilio Cesi and Michele Peretti, because the works have been related to the patrilinear, agnatic image of the early modern family, i.e., fathers and sons. Instead, the works express a bilinear, cognatic image of the family, indicating legal, economic, and affective ties between mothers and sons. Portia dell'Anguillara's will of 1587 further elucidates aspects of the bilinear family structure.

Aemilia Lanyer uses the genealogical model of promise, fulfillment, and supersedure implied by biblical typology and the vindication of the godly implied in scriptural apocalypse to accomplish several related aims: to represent her dedicatees as biblical types; to fashion Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, as the apotheosized Christian woman; to write women's literary history. Her fluid metaphors and biblical allusions, which require reading equally for their material and spiritual significance, acknowledge Margaret and her daughter's desire for the spiritual inheritance of the Kingdom and the worldly aristocratic inheritance willed away from their female line in favor of a male heir.

This essay traces the opposition to the Galenic notion of a homology between male and female genitalia (the “one-sex model”) and identifies the French physician André Dulaurens as the first outspoken opponent. After Dulaurens, the German physician Johann Peter Lotichius makes the opposition to that model more clearly an argument that may be called “feminist.”

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.