This essay shows how scholarship on fifteenth-century Flemish panel painting became intertwined with efforts at national identity-building in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. Paintings such as Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece were not only dispersed across regional and national boundaries, but were intellectually appropriated for competing national programs. The paintings consequently became a site of conflict between the Latin and Germanic traditions. These conflicts are clearly visible through the shifting terminology of this art, variously claimed as “Flemish” and “Netherlandish.” Such nationalist discourses shaped future scholarship on Flemish painting and contributed to its perceived inferiority vis-à-vis the Southern artistic tradition.

This article presents previously unpublished data from the Archives of the Duke of Candia (Crete) pertaining to the economic activities of Greek, Latin, and Jewish women in the Venetian colony of the fourteenth century. While trends over time are difficult to discern in the notarial registers examined for this study, they are none the less suggestive of a lively participation by women in moneylending, investment, and production, as well as in the local distribution of the island's products.

This article examines the Casa delle Zitelle, a charitable institution for young women at risk of falling into prostitution, in early modern Venice. Founded by a group of deeply religious noblewomen, the Casa reflected the social anxieties of the time that linked social ills to prostitution, as well as a new spirit of social activism inspired by religious conviction on the part of the city's elite. The Casa also created a new type of female community that drew both on familial structures and the traditional female networks that were characteristic of Venetian neighborhoods.

In his voluminous Moral Discourses Against the Displeasure of Dying (1596), the Venetian physician Fabio Glissenti describes the tenacious revolt against death that permeates virtually all of society. Though important in itself as a major humanistic treatment of death in the vernacular, Glissenti's treatise has an unusual significance that lies not so much in its patent purpose - to recommend the acceptance of death - but rather in its countervailing undercurrent - to probe the psychology of work. In novellas and dialogues among interlocutors drawn from the gamut of professional types in Venice, Glissenti presents testimonials of professional art or pride, exchanges concerning professional morality, and Dantesque catalogues of punishments for professional sins. This study examines the professional ethos suffusing the Discorsi morali as a reflection of moral and psychological attitudes toward work in early modern culture.

The Jew available to be known in England in the 1590s is a Marrano - a covert figure whose identity is self-created, hard to discover, foreign, associated with novel or controversial enterprises like foreign trade or money-lending, and anxiety-producing. By and large, non-theatrical representations of Jewishness reveal less ambivalence than does Marlowe's Barabas. In the plays of Marlowe and then of Shakespeare, the Jew becomes a figure which enables the playwright to express and at the same time to condemn the impulse in both culture and theatre to treat selfhood and social role as a matter of choice. By becoming theatrical, the anxiety about identity and innovation implicit in the Marrano state gains explicitness and becomes available to the culture at large. Marlowe and Shakespeare play a central role in creating - not imitating - the frightening yet comic Jewish figure which haunts Western culture. But the immediate impact of their achievement is felt in the theatre, and is barely visible in non-theatrical discourse about Jews in the decades after their plays.

Playwrights increasingly intend the pageant texts for readers; these texts become commemorative books that both capture the event and add to it. They assume an expository and narrative function that sets them apart from the typical dramatic text. By examining the extant printed texts of Jacobean and Caroline Lord Mayor's Shows, I argue that these publications do not obliterate theatrical performance or displace it so much as they complete it. Dramatists and printers come to recognize the lasting value of textual performance in civic pageants.