In 1473 Pope Sixtus IV instructed the vicar of the Bishop of Bologna to investigate rumors concerning Carmelite friars who were preaching that summoning demons in order to obtain responses from them was not heretical. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, this article elucidates the circumstances that led the Franciscan pope to intervene in a conflict between the Bolognese Carmelites and the Dominican inquisitor Simone of Novara. It proposes that the Carmelite affair, which ended with the inquisitor's defeat, constituted a critical juncture in the Dominicans’ relations with other Mendicant orders, and that it shaped inquisitorial activity in Bologna over the next few decades. This paper suggests that the aftermath of the Carmelite affair may also explain why, when the repression of illicit magic was resumed, Inquisitor Giovanni Cagnazzo decided to turn a female necromancer, and not the friars who had taught her demonic rites, into the main target of his prosecution.

In the 1520s the internationally popular romance Prison of Love was adapted as a series of tapestries known as L'Histoire de Lérian et Lauréolle. This article explores the translation of the romance to a larger-than-life, three-dimensional narrative object created from sumptuous materials that literally enveloped courtly life. Unlike previous studies of Prison of Love's international reach, this article reads the tapestry chamber as an integral part of the romance's complex history of transmission among the princely courts of Europe in the early sixteenth century. Further, study of the textiles’ production, use, and reception will show that the tapestry chamber, though incomplete, is material evidence of a particular sixteenth-century reading of the romance.

The typographical language of Justus Lipsius's Politicorum libri sex (1589) is a crucial element for understanding its compositio. The page layout, designed by Lipsius (1547–1606) probably in collaboration with his printer, displayed the author's inventive methods and writing strategies. All Latin editions of the Politica followed the precise typographic design of the editio princeps. The work was disseminated across seventeenth-century Europe by different printers without changes to its fundamental material features, including its typography. Something different happened, however, with the various vernacular editions of the Politica. All of them redesigned Lipsius's typography. These editions refashioned the display of sententiae and provided visual uniformity to the page, transforming the text from a compendium of interrelated commonplaces into a dense treatise. In this article I focus on the changes and accommodations evidenced in Bernardino de Mendoza's Spanish translation. In this case, an exceptional document survived that allows one to examine the different interventions in the process of accommodation of the Politica: the printer's copy and the manuscript supervised by Mendoza, approved and licensed by the Council of Castile, and used by the Imprenta Real in Madrid to print Los seis libros de las Políticas (1604).

When Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) published his Faerie Queene in 1590 and 1596, two pervasive structural features would have seemed surprising: the abbreviation Cant. in sectional and running titles, used instead of Canto; and a four-line stanza of common meter for each section's argument, instead of a more expansive and prestigious stanza. Study of the relevant early modern Italian and English norms of publication indicates that these were complementary and innovative means of merging heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse, and recognized as such. Cant. readily suggested canticle and the Solomonic Canticles, and the poet himself calls one of his so-called cantos a “canticle” (4.5.46). In style and prosodic form, his arguments would have particularly evoked the nationally distinctive Elizabethan Protestant psalmody and hymnody, as well as popular ballads. By incorporating these two metamorphic devices into The Faerie Queene's framework, Spenser reconfigured the heroic poem to serve his different, English vision.