Critics of the “Orlando furioso” have analyzed at length the poem's darker veins, lying just beneath its ostensibly sunny surface, where Ariosto comments on the violence and political, intellectual, and religious upheavals of the early sixteenth century, often through allegory and irony. Readers have also noted the text's meticulously curated geography that lends to the story world of the “Furioso” extraordinary breadth of scale and specificity of detail. This study identifies the poem's geography as an important locus of irony, both in service to larger allegorical programs and as a means of remarking on the contemporary revolution in geographic knowledge and cartographic practice.

By their very nature writing manuals encourage viewer participation, as they illustrate how to form lines into letters. In Johann Neudörffer's “Gute Ordnung” (Good order, 1538–50s) this genesis of lines extends beyond pure pedagogy. By displaying etchings in mirror writing alongside true-sided counterproofs, Neudörffer invites viewers to consider methods of mechanical production of seemingly handwritten lines. His text-images share their self-aware attention to linear aesthetics and process with drawings and etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer. As Neudörffer's manual taught the formation of beautiful written lines, it also trained contemporaries to become sophisticated consumers of linear beauty in figurative art.

This article explores Renaissance news maps and their cultural impact, focusing on works produced during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, a media event of unprecedented scope that became a laboratory for the genre's development. News maps were a key early form of reporting—a visual form—that, much like their textual counterparts, aimed to shape public views about conflict. Ultimately, these relatively modest items even influenced commemorative battle murals in halls of state. This study of news maps suggests an emerging media landscape that was highly pluralistic and experimental, going well beyond the written word.

This article relocates John Milton's Latin poem to his father (“Ad Patrem”) in the contexts of the young Milton's literary self-fashioning and the changing patterns of early modern Virgil reception. Here and in his prose epistles, Milton establishes the persona of a scholarly, questing filial figure, grounded in a reading of book 6 of the “Aeneid” and its drama of fathers and sons. He makes a case for poetry and scholarship as shared practices. This article reflects on a new archival turn in Milton studies and, in turn, how Milton himself invites the reader to become a questing scholar.

This article explores the epistemic value of touch in Italian Renaissance anatomy. Using archival and printed postmortem records from canonization processes and anatomical writings, it shows that haptic expertise (Greek ἅπτομαι [haptomai]: to touch) entailed not only the acquisition of practical skills but also the ability to discern, experience, and fully describe organic substances. Looking at the practices, languages, and theories underpinning medical and holy anatomies, I propose that haptic epistemologies lay at the heart of the understanding of the body in the early modern period, a time largely recognized to have transformed people's understanding and experience of visuality in the sciences and the arts.