History is the foundation of Machiavelli’s political thought. Dismissing the celebratory traditions of humanist historiography and never fully sharing humanism’s idealization of antiquity, Machiavelli sought in history the causes of political failure. He acknowledged the fragmentary and fleeting character of historical knowledge and exposed fashionable philosophies of history (cyclical recurrence, unchanging human passions, celestial influences, laws of nature, fortune) as seductive fictions purveying false consolations for history’s adversities and afflictions. Machiavelli proposed instead a critical history focused on how social conflicts shape power and its abuses. His analysis of ancient Roman and more recent Florentine conflicts turns on a crucial distinction between conflicts contained within institutional frameworks and public law and those fought with instruments of private power (political patronage, wealth, and factions) that undermine public authority. Useful history, Machiavelli insists, must show how the constant pursuit, particularly by elites, of privatized power caused both the collapse of the Roman Republic and the failures of modern Italy’s ruling classes.

This essay offers a historian’s reading of Boccaccio’s tale of Lisabetta da Messina (4:5), rethinking it in terms of fourteenth-century ways of understanding virtù and identity. In analyzing the tale in the context of the Decameron, while reading it against archival material from the period, the deeper context of its discussion of love suggests a reading that makes the tale central to the tragic stories of the fourth day and highlights a lesson about the dangers of passion that make it fit powerfully as the day’s central tale. In the end, love offers many things in the Decameron, but Boccaccio’s brigata of storytellers and his readers could appreciate a danger more difficult to see today — that the powerful passions associated with lost love and mourning without the support of the groups that surrounded and sustained one’s sense of identity also threatened in the most profound way the negation of self: death.

In 1556, Giovanni Battista Ramusio facilitated the publication in Venice of a report by Pedro Sancho, official secretary to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Sancho’s text included a lengthy description of the architecture and plan of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire, and was the first such description to appear in print. Previous scholarship has used it as a primary source for reconstructing the appearance of Inca Cuzco as seen by Sancho, Pizarro, and their cohort at the moment of their arrival there in 1533. The text, however, is also evidence for other kinds of historical information, for it demonstrates how habits of description engaged in the production of space. The impact of Sancho’s textual representation of Cuzco is evident in a contemporary reaction to it — a woodcut print that accompanied it when it was first published. Considered together, the text and image lay bare the ways in which modes of representation facilitated political, architectural, and urbanistic change in the sixteenth-century New World.

This essay compares the rhetoric of providentialism in Samuel Ward’s 1621 engraving To God, In Memorye of his Double Deliveraunce from ye Invincible Navie and ye Unmatcheable Powder Treason with that in Thomas Middleton’s 1624 play A Game at Chess. Both satirize the negotiations over the Spanish Match by using providentialist discourse to modulate and veil their more satirical, and polemical, intentions. Ward and Middleton employ a technique of historical retrospection, referring to past events in order to present a simultaneously diachronic and synchronic world view.

This study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.