The early modern Mediterranean was a space of expansive linguistic mixing, and multilingual discourse was a common response to the exigencies of communication within this context. There is a growing body of scholarship on male multilingualism; however, women have been largely overlooked. This article argues that far from marginalized outsiders, as they were often depicted, women were active participants in the Mediterranean linguistic ecology. They developed communication strategies and techniques to navigate language difference in trade, travel, work, diplomatic, and domestic settings. The numerous and varied spaces that they occupied were not barriers but doorways to their participation in the multilingual Mediterranean.

René Descartes's “Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii” (Rules for the direction of the mind) is a satirical study manual concerned with invention in the humanist sense of the discovery of arguments in texts, not the discovery of novelties in nature. Descartes employed Jesuit pedagogical techniques and an extensive technical vocabulary shared by Aristotelian philosophy and classical rhetoric to criticize the shortcomings of Scholastic philosophy. Although it felt like philosophy to its practitioners, technical dialectic appeared from the outside as a classroom exercise of commonplacing, fueled by schoolroom rivalry and vanity. The interplay of play and seriousness in the “Regulae” challenges standard philosophical hermeneutics.

In 1662, the physician Christopher Merret presented his fellow members of the Royal Society with an English translation of Antonio Neri's “L'arte vetraria” (The art of glass, 1612). Central to the preparation and receipt of this book was a cache of objects relevant to glassmaking, now lost or dispersed. These materia vitraria served as a tangible appendix to Merret's written commentary. They also reified the society's interest in the development of domestic industry by offering a direct means by which fellows could appreciate the raw materials of contemporary glassmaking alongside evidence of the trade's longer history in the British Isles.

Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī visited and described the Roman ruins of Baalbek twice, in 1689 and 1700. He interpreted the site, however, not as a temple but as a palace built by jinns for Solomon. Nābulusī was very likely aware of the site's Roman past but purposefully played with its historicity to highlight Syria's innate sanctity. His interpretation of Baalbek reveals an antiquarian project in the Ottoman Empire that was constructed along variant but parallel lines to the better known one in Renaissance Europe.

Leonardo da Vinci studies are in effect two different—almost antagonistic—domains: a narrowly defined field that is so specialized that it scares scholars away (it takes years of dedicated work to learn how to deal with Leonardo's legacy), and a phenomenon of popular culture that is so massive that news about the artist's works makes headlines worldwide. Both aspects of Leonardo studies—the specialized scholarship and the vast public interest—grew exponentially in the past few decades and exploded in 2019, the year that marked the 500th anniversary of the artist's death. Although they only rarely come together, their convergence may offer the best hope for the future of Leonardo studies. Indeed, the recent anniversary provided a reminder that Leonardo da Vinci still touches the imagination of scholars and the general public in ways that force us to ask what is it that connects to our current age. Why is the study of this master of visualization, who made visible what could not be seen—vessels, muscles, water vortexes, wind, the intentions of people's minds—in diagrams, maps, sketches, figurative images, and paintings, significant for the current historical moment? Can we learn something from Leonardo studies—and, more broadly, from Renaissance studies, of which Leonardo studies are a part—as we struggle to find new frameworks to teach, research, innovate, and communicate with one another, or, to quote the mission statement of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive”?