In their title, the Commentaries of Pope Pius II recall the works of Julius Caesar by the same name. The connections between these ancient and humanist histories, however, run much deeper. This article explores this relationship in detail and in the broader historical and historiographical contexts of fifteenth-century Italy. It argues that in both Caesar's histories and in his career more generally, Pius found much that resonated with his own experiences, challenges, and goals. More importantly, he found in these ancient Commentaries valuable apologetic strategies for constructing his own textual self-portrait as both pope and prince. In choosing Caesar's histories as his models, Pius was following a recent historiographical precedent. Several Italian Renaissance humanists had also turned to Caesar's works as guides for writing histories about leaders of contemporary temporal politics. This article argues that by adopting the same models when shaping his own image, Pius was effectively politicizing his self-portrait in his Commentaries.

Laura Cereta is unique among Quattrocento female humanists in directly addressing the position of women as wives and as friends in her substantial corpus of erudite Latin epistolary prose. Questioning the ideals that governed intellectual, social, and personal expectations of matrimony, Cereta's letters reflect her self-consciously double status as humanist and spouse. Her fierce critique of marriage as a site of female oppression and complicity implies an alternative that requires of humanists, husbands, and wives a radical rethinking of marriage in terms of friendship, as well as of the very project of humanist epistolarity.

For much of their childhood and adult life, the twelve surviving children of William the Silent were separated linguistically and geographically. Many of the children forged important relationships with male primary carers who were not their biological parents. This paper explores the children's correspondence with their biological father William and with paternal figures to understand competing forms of familial authority among William's children. This paper places particular interest on analysis of the gendered negotiation of paternal bonds in the letters of William's sons and daughters, as they established multiple relationships with father figures during their childhood.

The silva to “Roma antigua y moderna” by Francisco de Quevedo is a complex rewriting of Joachim Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome. The Spanish author makes an archeological study of his model, identifying the sources, and, through intertextual dialogue with the classical and humanistic descriptions of Rome, creates a symbolic space of memory where different stages of history are represented. In this manner, Quevedo produces a Baroque reading of the Renaissance.