A recent cleaning of the painting, scientific examinations of it, the publication of new letters related to it, and studies of the prophetic culture in which it was produced all call for a reevaluation of the traditional interpretations of Raphael's portrait Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi. After a close analysis of the major iconographic details in the painting, the strengths and weaknesses of the various secular and religious interpretations of the painting are reviewed. That the painting is primarily religious in theme with prophetic and devotional overtones is argued as the most reasonable interpretation, given the iconographic details and context.

Elizabeth Pickering took over Robert Redman's press when he died in 1540, thus becoming the first woman known to print books in England. Her books tell us simply that she was Redman's widow. Wills and other legal documents in the London archives permit us to know much more. The documents examined here illuminate aspects of her personal life, but also reveal connections between a group of law-printers and lawyers that appear to have influenced the printing of law books in Tudor London. The first part of the essay traces this microhistory of family and community relations. The second half examines the books Elizabeth Pickering published.

This essay surveys the use of metaphors of illness, specifically those of constipation and diarrhea, in vernacular French Evangelical and Calvinist polemical theater of the 1520s and 30s (Berquin, Malingre, Marguerite d'Angoulême) through the 1560s (Badius). It considers the relatively frequent reference to staging of diagnosis, treatment, and cure in the context of contemporary medical belief and practice, and observes a shift in emphasis from optimistic prognosis and successful therapy of the earlier Evangelical period to negative pronouncement of imminent (and deserved) death in the later Calvinist or Huguenot period at the start of the Wars of Religion.

This paper retraces the life of Henricus de Veno, professor of philosophy at the Frisian University of Franeker, summarizes his teaching, and documents the trial that was conducted against him by the Roman Inquisition in 1597-98. De Veno was probably the most innovative Dutch teacher of philosophy in the first years of the seventeenth century, as he combined the new Protestant metaphysics with a cosmology and physics inspired by Girolamo Cardano. Instead of admitting before his Calvinist colleagues that he had been in prison and had converted to Catholicism before the Roman Inquisition, he claimed to have obtained various university degrees abroad. His philosophical views and religious interests correspond to the Arminian demand for a libertas prophetandi and a certain doctrinal open-mindedness.