This article investigates the relation between music and emotions at exequies in Italy between ca. 1560 and ca. 1660. Mapping the lexicon used to describe music in funeral books, I highlight the coexistence of two diverging semantic domains, sadness and sweetness. Their juxtaposition corresponds to an aesthetic principle that informed the conceptualization of the entire ritual's artistic setup—as divided between the mournful and the pleasurable. Reading funeral orations, moreover, I show that the ambivalent terms with which the experience of exequial music was verbalized mirrored an ambivalent conception of the liturgy for the dead and, ultimately, of death itself.

This article demonstrates the merited inclusion of Giovanni Stradano's olive-oil engraving in the “Nova Reperta,” a series showcasing postclassical inventions that Florentine nobleman and Alterati member Luigi Alamanni commissioned in the late 1580s. The image and accompanying inscription must be understood within their broader cultural, scientific, legal, political, and socioeconomic contexts. The print reflects olive oil's economic potential and the evolving dietary preferences in Medici Florence. It evinces the flexibility of the concept of invention. Rather than being technological, the novelties mirror ideas central to the Alterati academics around classical knowledge and the alchemical ability of humans to transform nature through artisanship.

When, in 1619, Frederick V of the Palatinate accepted the crown of Bohemia, he justified his action, which challenged the authority of Emperor Ferdinand II and precipitated the Thirty Years’ War, by the need to uphold the public order, rights, and responsibilities connected to the estates of the empire. English engagements with the German vocabulary of estates drew upon the concept of reason of state—those amoral political calculations needed to maintain a group's estate, or standing. The article examines the significance of these differences in a vocabulary of estates and state.

This article addresses the explicit utilization of Christian discourse about hell and purgatory within the writings of sixteenth-century Italian Jewry. The vast majority of Jewish texts about hell (gehinnom) from the period ignore Christian discourse on the topic or only allude to it obliquely. Three unpublished Hebrew sources, two of them drawn from informal marginalia, demonstrate a more open approach, in which the infernal cosmography and terminology of Christianity are consciously and explicitly appropriated. These sources not only serve as important case studies for Jewish understandings of hell during the period but also can shed broader light on the types of cultural maneuvering that characterized Jewish cultural life in the Christian milieu of Cinquecento Italy.