In readings of orations, letters, and poems about Petrarch’s death composed in Paduan and Florentine intellectual circles, this article shows that the well-known praise of Petrarch in these texts is a function of a political competition over Petrarch’s remains and, with them, over the rightful location of his legacy. Boccaccio’s last letter, which stands out for its rhetorical sophistication and cultural sensitivity, intervenes in this largely provincial debate with farsighted theoretical coherence and cosmopolitan political ambition. Animated by a familiar vernacular poetics, Boccaccio theorizes an intellectual entombment of Petrarch in Florence that is consonant with Boccaccio’s ongoing cultural project.

Although it is common in the musicological literature to compare decorated music books with books of hours, studies addressing the musical features of books of hours are rare. This article considers musical features in the decoration of a book of hours made by leading illuminators in Ferrara ca. 1469. Images appearing in books of hours are considered to have had an exemplary and meditative function in relation to devotional practice; therefore, this study asks what the reader was intended to learn from musical images, drawing conclusions about the alignment of the senses and the significance of music in fifteenth-century religious experience.

This article discusses the debates over drama that took place in the English universities during the late sixteenth century. It reconsiders the career of the Oxford academic and theologian John Rainolds, whose objections to student performance are usually conflated with attacks upon professional drama. This article argues instead that his opposition arose largely from two related institutional concerns: the equation of drama with rhetorical exercises and the increasing use of spectacle in university plays. The controversy over theatrical performance is thus cast in a new light as an inquiry into the place and purpose of drama within university culture.

Nicolas Poussin’s “Hannibal Crossing the Alps,” long considered one of his earliest surviving works, is here recognized as a portrait of a historical elephant who visited Rome in 1630 and re-dated accordingly. The article tells the story of this remarkable animal. It traces his passage from South Asia through Portugal, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, and back again to France, and examines his encounters along the way with kings and courtiers, scholars, artists, and traveling showmen, giving insight into the diplomatic and economic uses of exotic animals in early modern Europe. Finally, returning to Poussin, it addresses the implications of the re-dating of the “Hannibal” for our understanding of the painter’s stylistic development and biography.

The career of storied objects can help highlight the agency of absence and historicize the notion of scientific objects more generally. Until the sixteenth century, lost, ancient flexible glass was studied separately from malleable glass. The latter appeared as a claimed chymical product and craft recipe. The bridging of social and epistemic registers merged these accounts. Malleable glass became a prestigious scientific object. Appearing in numerous utopias, it stimulated a participatory public of scientific amateurs. Such storied objects served as vectors for spreading experimental culture, yet declined as new professions emerged. The charisma that made malleable glass a seventeenth-century scientific object led to its rejection by newly professionalized eighteenth-century chemists and its replacement by a less evocative scientific object, “malleability.”