In 1542, Florence's Duke Cosimo I established a magistracy to supervise territorial hospitab and consolidate poor relief. Tense relations between the magistracy and these hospitab demonstrate the barriers to bureaucratic centralization in the sixteenth-century state, and underscore the fact that the shift from traditional charity to ‘new philanthropy’ was as much geographical and cultural as temporal. Tensions between the magistracy and successive Medici Dukes also demonstrate how in negotiations between bureaucrats and local communities territorial rulers could play both sides to advance their personal authority, and could learn from the difficulties of one magistracy how better to design another.

This study explores the dynamics between visual images and expectations for feminine monasticism in northern Europe via two paintings from the Cistercian convent of Flines. It argues that abbess Jeanne de Boubais commissioned the images for clerics who had promoted reform of Flines, in order to suggest compliance with the mandates of the program and the integral place of the convent within Cistercian monasticism. In the wake of the dissolution of several convents that had resisted reform, conveying a desire to yield to the Order must have seemed crucial for the community's survival.

Some descriptions of ballets performed at the late Valois court in France draw upon accounts of choreographic and equestrian maze-like performances extending back into early antiquity. Common elements include a convoluted complexity in the dancers’ movements, repeated reversals, and a series of patterns variously reformed after regular interruptions. The practice of medieval dances at Easter upon the labyrinth designs of one or more French cathedrals may also have exercised an influence on Renaissance dancing. A sonnet by Ronsard describing a labyrinthine ballet invites at least two metaphysical interpretations. Neoplatonic theories of magic are apparently reflected in the choreography by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx for his Balet Comique de la Royne. Labyrinth dances in Ben Jonson's masques are associated with Orphic cosmogony. The description of an angelic labyrinth dance in Milton's Paradise Lost leads to historical and theoretical questions concerning the intermittent persistence of the phenomenon.

This article demonstrates an early modern association between the trade of shoemaking and the act of altering the festal calendar. It traces this link through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary texts including Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and — most notably — Henry V. The article argues that the depictions of cobblers making holidays resonated with the early modern English politics of ritual observance, and its concluding discussion of the Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows how the play imagines king and cobblers vying for control of England's commemorative practice.

In this essay, I will show how James's position as monarch governed both the writing and the reception of his verse. Using James's previously ignored sonnet to Elizabeth, enclosed in a letter to her and so far as one can tell, intended for her eyes alone, his elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, printed in a commemorative volume, and the mini-epic, the Lepanto, I will show that James always writes as a monarch and never as a mere poet. The first two poems demonstrate how James used (or, more accurately in the case of the Elizabeth sonnet, tried to use) verse as an instrument of diplomacy. For the Lepanto, I will examine the parallels between the poem's (literal) ambivalence and James's foreignl religious diplomacy along with the resonances of James's decision to republish the Lepanto as a separate piece when he became king of England in 1603. Insodoing, we will also see how the publication history of the Lepanto contributes to the history of authorship and how James took advantage of the growing authority of print authorship.

This article traces the connections between the circulation of commodities and counterfeit coins in The Roaring Girl. Contextualizing the play's representation of counterfeits within a discussion of the relationship between real and counterfeit money in the early modern period, I argue that the play registers and addresses economic pressures, in part through its commentary on, and revision of, the conventions of stage comedy. In particular, the play offers enhanced forms of realism and the fiction of the “individual” in the title character, Moll, to compensate for the absence of legible material guarantees for value, legitimacy, or status. I conclude with a reading of the play's representation of masterless persons as the necessary shadow side of the plethora of opportunities seemingly offered by the market.