Albrecht Dürer avidly collected for his professional and personal pleasure. Drawing upon textual and artistic evidence, it is possible to assess what sorts of objects he acquired. Through purchases, bartering, and gifts, Dürer amassed an important library with authors ranging from Euclid to Martin Luther. Among his many dealings with contemporary masters, he exchanged drawings with Raphael, swapped prints with Lucas van Leyden, and bought a Salvator Mundi illuminated by Susanna Horenbout. Dürer was fascinated by objects of natural rarity and of exotic, non-European origins. He also self-collected. Some paintings and drawings, occasionally inscribed with biographical or autobiographical information, were intended primarily for his, his family's, and his close friends’ private consumption. The holdings displayed in his Nuremberg house anticipated the art and wonder chambers that became popular later in the sixteenth century. The collection offers new insights into Dürer's conscious efforts of self-fashioning.

This essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage of Lord Thomas Howard and Lady Margaret Douglas, the headstrong niece of Henry VIII. After unpacking this historical drama, this essay advances the first substantial literary analysis of these poems by exploring the textual strategies through which Howard and Douglas attempted to negotiate the crown's insistent management of their erotic life. This treatment of the Douglas-Howard lyrics provides new opportunity to consider how the Devonshire MS reflects and refracts the gender dynamics of the contemporary Henrician court.

This article examines certain aspects of the history of the doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation in early modern Catholic elaborations. It argues that the first Catholic theologians who engaged systematically with these doctrines, Domingo de Soto and Martin de Azpilcueta (Navarrus), used them as tools to investigate the potentialities and limitations of human language as a means to communicate meaning between a speaker and a listener. This article also shows that between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries Catholic theologians, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, changed the debate over these doctrines into a debate over the moral quality of the speaker's intention. By analyzing the developments of the Catholic debate over equivocation and mental reservation, this article seeks to offer a fresh interpretation of the links between theology, morality, and hermeneutics.