Errors belong to all times, but they probably were never more often tracked down and evaluated, denounced and praised, prosecuted and gbrified, than in the highly cultured courts of the Renaissance and the politically militant circles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In an age when doctrinal errors were mercilessly chased by censors, several French mannerist poets, voluntarily misreading the Augustinian and Petrarchan tradition of the giovanile errore, carved out a playful space for enjoying the paradoxically aesthetic truthfulness of errors.

This essay examines the illustrations that accompanied the seven Penitential Psalms in medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours. Until the end of the fifteenth century, the Penitential Psalms were glossed visually by a wide range of subjects, including the Last Judgment, Christ enthroned, David playing a musical instrument, and (most commonly) David repenting for his sins. But from the beginning of the sixteenth century it became customary to represent the Penitential Psalms with an image of David observing Bathsheba as she bathes. Moreover, the subject of David and Bathsheba rapidly migrated from Books of Hours into a variety of devotional, catechetical, and educational texts. It even crossed the Atlantic to colonial America, where, in The New England Primer, it was used to teach young children how to read. These facts not only suggest a shift in attitudes towards penance and sin at the end of the Middle Ages, but also challenge modern assumptions about the historical relationship between sexuality, catechesis, and literacy.

Erasmus's writings on marriage, such as the Praise of Marriage, the Institution of Christian Marriage, and several of the Colloquies, have long been studied from a social-intellectual perspective that focuses on their role within theobgical debates of the time. This article proposes a different approach by stressing the literary and rhetorical aspects by which these texts seek to influence a reader in his or her "matrimonial praxis." Through the combination of an effective rhetoric of intimacy with the characteristics of literary dialogue, Erasmus creates a mimetic discourse aimed at conveying models of conjugal life to be imitated by future readers.

The letter collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger offers important evidence about the dynamics of early-Quattrocento literary patronage. Like his more successful humanist peers, Lapo used Ciceronian expressions amicitia (friendship) when writing to the brokers whose help he needed in order to win a comfortable post. For most humanists, such formulaic assurances of devotion constituted only one aspect of letters that included discussions of philosophy, current events, and classical scholarship. Lapo, by contrast, focused his collected letters almost solely on these formulae, thus mocking their prevalence and emphasizing the difficulties of finding a job as a humanist.