This essay considers the role of contingency in the history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Were there any events — a birth, marriage, or death; a battle; a natural catastrophe — that might have changed decisively the trajectory of Italian history? The Roman papacy is one institution whose history, replete with contingent events (1305, 1378, 1418, 1527) had a profound impact on Italian experience. The foreign invasions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the product of a cluster of historical accidents in France and Spain, which combined to create the most significant development in the early modern history of Italy.

Over centuries, the fortunes of the verb to be illustrate the involvement of language in history and history in language, and the particular role of figurative language in the early reforms of the established church in Tudor England significantly reflects this involvement. Explanations and controversies regarding eucharistic belief during the archbishopric of Thomas Cranmer, which of ten draw on Continental sources, show that language and rhetoric were at the heart of Cranmer's basic problem, namely, how effectively to convey a metaphorical conception of presence. These arguments variously parallel contemporary ones concerning meaning and the nature of metaphor, as evident in writings of Benveniste, Derrida, and especially Ricoeur.

John Foxe, the martyrologist, and John Day, the Elizabethan master printer, played central roles in the emergence of literate print culture following the death of William Tyndale, translator of the New Testament and parts of the Bible into English. In so doing, Foxe and his publisher contributed to the accepted modern belief that Protestantism and early printing reinforced each other. Foxe's revision of his biography of Tyndale in the second edition of Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days (1570) and his collaboration on Day's 1573 publication of Tyndale's collected non-translation prose place intense stress upon the trio's active involvement in the English book trade. The engagement of Foxe and Day with Tyndale's publishing career exemplifies ways in which these bookmen exploited the power of the printing press to effect religious and cultural

It is little known that John Foxes Book of Martyrs included stories of Jews. Contradictory and complex, Foxes writings on Jews show how a powerful writer conceived of the place of Jews in a newly self-concious, Protestant English national identity amidst conflicting currents of theology, race, and politics. The ideologies of Reforming Protestantism supplied the explicit political frameworks through which age-old stereotypes about the cultural or racial other could be expressed. Our understanding of early modern philo-judaism and toleration should be revised accordingly.

This essay begins by providing some early modern definitions, as well as a brief history, of paradox in the Renaissance. But paradox could be more than a rhetorical figure. Thus, the paper turns to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Venice in English and explores how a geographical site could do the work of the verbal paradox. The essay then reads Othello's complicated epistemological, ontological, and sexual issues through Venice's symbolic geography. Finally, it will suggest briefly that the stage — and particularly the interaction between audience and play — is also a site of paradox, a place where spectators, dazzled and destabilized by unresolved and unresolvable problems, are forced to reevaluate their cognitive and cultural worlds.

This essay builds on Judith Butler's recent theoretical work in Bodies that Matter by suggesting that the sexual differences that “mattered” in early modern England are not exactly the same as those that “matter” today. In particular, it suggests that facial hair often conferred masculinity during the Renaissance: the beard made the man. The centrality of the beard is powerfully demonstrated by both portraits and theatrical practices. Indeed, virtually all men in portraits painted between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century have some sort official hair. Beards were also quite common on the Renaissance stage, and the essay goes on to analyze the use of false beards as theatrical props. These are not, however, the only “texts “from the period that equate being a man with having a beard. Similar formulations appear in a wide range of sources: medical treatises, physiognomy books, poetical works, and tracts on gender. In many of these texts, moreover, facial hair is not simply imagined as a means of constructing sexual differences between men and women; it is also a means of constructing distinctions between men and boys. Thus, it would appear that boys were considered to be a different gender from men during the Renaissance. This division had important ramifications for theater practice. It meant, for example, that boy actors would have been as much “in drag” when playing the parts of men as when playing the parts of women. Finally, we need to bear in mind that if facial hair thus served as an important means of materializing masculinity in early modern England, it was also crucially malleable and prosthetic. As a result, we can say that both masculinity and the beard had to be constantly made (to) matter.

Hermann Conring (1606-1681) disavowed responsibility for the New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor (1642) because it was a pirated reprint of a dissertation prepared by one of his students. A closer look, however, reveals that the New Discourse reflects Conring's most radical ideas more faithfully than do works indisputably written by himself even those he wrote expressly in order to correct the misrepresentations of which the New Discourse was allegedly guilty. That suggests that concepts of authorship and authenticity may conceal the true relationship between writers and their ideas.

The documents relating to Giordano Bruno's eight-year long trial for heresy at the hands of first the Venetian and then the Roman Inquisition, and to his execution in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February 1600, have been gradually coming to light since Bruno's first Italian biographer, Domenico Berti, started to publish them in 1876. They were finally gathered together over a number of years in the second half of the twentieth century, and expertly edited, by one of Italy's most prestigious historians, Luigi Firpo, who did not live to see the results of his work in print.