In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries popes increasingly depended on clerical and lay kin to supervise the implementation of papal policy. This article argues that the charge of papal nepotism is a result of the continuing idealization of the pope as separate from the issues of work and family. By acknowledging that the preoccupations of the early modern pope extended beyond pastoral activities into a world of administration, legislation, militarism, and diplomacy, historians can better understand the pope’s use of and observers’ criticism of nepotism.

Fourteenth-century Italian humanists discussed the properties of tragedy while considering the value of Latin versus vernacular literature. Boccaccio was interested in these discussions because humanists were promoting classicizing tragic and epic literatures at the expense of vernacular writing. This article explores Boccaccio’s role in these debates by examining the tragic stories of the Decameron. It suggests that Boccaccio highlighted the virtues of his erotic tales by contrasting them to the tragic stories of day 4, a strategy inspired by Ovid’s elegiac poems. Boccaccio thus underscored the dignity of his low, Ovidian-inspired Decameron, and counterbalanced humanist fascination with high tragic-epic literatures.

This essay discusses a novel contribution to the Renaissance debate over women. In 1551, William Thomas translated a brief but significant moment from Livy’s History of Rome concerning the repeal of the Lex Oppia, a sumptuary law targeting women in particular. Thomas thereby adapted one of the most arresting examples of women’s engagement in Roman politics. The episode shows the women of Rome taking to the streets to demand the law’s repeal, forcing senators and tribunes alike to acknowledge their protest. By contextualizing Thomas’s translation amid Quattrocento debates over female apparel and contemporary, female-centric works printed by Thomas Berthelet, Thomas’s translation emerges as a clear though hitherto-unacknowledged intervention in the English querelle des femmes.

This article demonstrates a systematic connection between the novelty of Petrarch’s authorship and his self-definition as an exile. Petrarch employs the unusual term exilium/esilio to substantiate his unprecedented claim that literature is a legally valid officium (civic role). Following Dante, Petrarch grounds his exilic authorship in the Christian discourse of peregrinatio: life as pilgrimage through exile. But Petrarch’s new officium allows him a measure of control over literary creation that no prior Italian writer had enjoyed. This is especially true of the “Canzoniere,” Petrarch’s compilation of his vernacular lyrics, whose singularity functions as a proxy for its author’s selfhood.

This essay contends that Donatello’s High Altar at the Santo in Padua represents the Immaculate Virgin, reflecting a controversial doctrine of burgeoning interest in fifteenth-century Italy that she was exempted from original sin prior to the first moment of her conception. It ties the altar and scenes on the surrounding choir screen to a sermon promoting the Virgin’s immaculacy by Francesco della Rovere (later Sixtus IV), spoken in Padua in 1448 while the altar was being erected. It further connects the liturgical ensemble with bulls by Sixtus IV and liturgical offices sponsored by him after he was elected pope.

This article revisits Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his trauels into Persia (1613), reading the text within the larger context of early modern Eurasia. It highlights the ways in which at least one European traveler sought and found not alterity, but commensurable structures, social roles, political ideologies, and personal motivations in the Islamic polities to the east and emphasized these connections to his European readers. Furthermore, in making the case that Sherley’s narrative is informed by local actors in Safavid Persia, it maintains that a certain level of Eastern knowledge is present within Western texts from this period and awaits scholarly excavation.

This article focuses on the contribution of anti-Jewish themes to political ideals and reality in the works of two leading Venetian patrician humanists — Ludovico Foscarini and Paolo Morosini. The article demonstrates that their literary attacks on Jews were shaped by classical, patristic, medieval, and humanist texts, and by the experience of service to the state. It also demonstrates that their work contributed to debates about the toleration of Jews in Venetian territory and can be linked to the humanist engagement with Judaism at a critical point for both phenomena in the fifteenth century.

When The English Faust Book describes Faustus as addicted to study and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts necromantic books as “ravishing,” these texts draw on classical and Renaissance notions of laudable addiction. Following its Latin origin in contract law, addiction appears in sixteenth-century writings as service, dedication, and devotion. Tracing invocations of addiction from Cicero to Perkins, this essay explores the influence of Calvin and Calvinist-minded Cambridge divines through Doctor Faustus’s preoccupation with the challenge of addicted commitment. If Calvinists praise committed devotion, Marlowe challenges such views by staging the terror as well as the wonder of addictive release.

Titian painted Christ with the Coin for Alfonso d’Este around 1516. The painting served as the cover piece for a collection of ancient coins and has been read as a commentary on politics and taxation. Instead, this article reveals how the painting reconfigured Alfonso’s interaction with ancient coins, transforming the everyday activity of the collector into an occasion of spiritual reformation. Reading numismatic antiquarianism against the exegetical tradition that accrued around the Gospel pericope (Matthew 22:21) reveals the painting as the nexus of two regimes of virtue — one Christian, one classical — both of which turn upon coins as manifold objects.

After decades of civil war, the archdukes Albert and Isabella drew on the princely hunt to consolidate their regime in the Habsburg Netherlands. In essence a performance of dominion, the hunt served to enact their exalted birth and the return to peace and order. Attempts to unify the hunting laws of their possessions were, however, frustrated by provincial liberties. As a result the archducal hunt had to derive its prestige from where it was held, rather than from the species that were hunted. Appropriating the cult of Saint Hubertus and patronizing artistic representations further enhanced the prestige of these locations.

In the 1540s, Giambattista Gelli and Pierfrancesco Giambullari introduced a controversial theory concerning the foundation of Florence. Marshaling spurious textual sources and archaeological remains, they claimed that the city was Etruscan, challenging the long-standing belief in its Roman origin. In a painstaking rebuttal, Vincenzo Borghini rejected their sources, methods, and conclusions. Their three treatises are among the earliest efforts to develop critical methods to establish an artifact’s culture of origin, whether Etruscan, Roman, or medieval. While history has looked more favorably on the work of Borghini, all three manipulated the histories of artifacts to serve competing narratives of Florence’s past.

The great sculptor Vincenzo Danti wrote one of the longest poems to have survived from a Renaissance artist, but the text’s close thematic and conceptual connections to its author’s art have gone entirely unnoticed. What Danti’s poem and sculpture share, this essay argues, is a concern with mystified identity. Danti’s poetic sensibility stands at odds with the biographical frameworks that typically guide the interpretation of Renaissance art and literature. At the same time, his example shows how much there is to be gained from an investigation of how artists learned to be writers, and of what came of those efforts.

This article sketches the history of the mediation of linguistic difference in the context of judicial torture in early modern France. It argues that language represented an important dimension of what took place in the torture chambers of early modern Europe. Embedded within multilingual societies and habitually confronted with linguistic difference, tribunals developed an array of mediation practices. Shaped by officials’ scribal and linguistic practices and their infliction of pain in order to establish judicial facts, their linguistic choices also shed light on how jurists conceived of and set out uncovering the truth.

This article examines how still-life painting contributed to the creation of a distinct urban aristocratic culture in seventeenth-century Madrid. Focusing on a group of paintings by Juan van der Hamen, the article situates these images within the context of the picture gallery and the practice of aristocratic hospitality. By giving visual form to this new urban mode of magnificence, Van der Hamen’s still lifes created a fiction of abundance that glossed over Madrid’s economic realities. At the same time, Van der Hamen concealed signs of manual craftsmanship and commercial interest in order to advance and ennoble his own artistic identity.

References to Rabelais in Andrew Marvell’s prose satires against religious intolerance, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73), offer insights into the Restoration reception of Rabelaisian satire in the universities and the coffeehouses as a specifically anticlerical form of wit. But these references are either misattributed or incorrect, suggesting that Marvell may never actually have read Gargantua and Pantagruel, but rather picked up Rabelaisian anecdotes when conversing in intellectual circles in France in the mid-1650s. Critical focus on the history of reading tends to neglect the inevitable role of such conversation in literary transmission, both within a national culture and across national borders.

Taking a cue from a fleeting reference to Japan in a remarkably idiosyncratic sixteenth-century language manual, this essay explores the knowledge about Japan that circulated in England before first formal contact took place between the two nations in 1613–14. The cumulative record of fleeting intersections and near-forgotten moments when the two nations came into each other’s circuit demands a reassessment of current conceptualizations of the travel encounter, juxtaposing the traditional view of encounter as a singular significant event, with one that acknowledges the encounter’s rootedness in long-running processes of knowledge making and circulation.

The second half of the seventeenth century was the first great period of legal reform in England’s history. This article situates John Milton in relationship to this contemporary context, arguing that he comments frequently on the need to change England’s laws and displays a finely tuned awareness of some of the major legal debates of his time. This article surveys Milton’s writings about the law and legal education, and it concludes by examining his 1659–60 political pamphlets where he calls for reform of the judicial system and the establishment of local courts.