The persistence of interpretations that view Dürer’s 1500 Self-Portrait as a Christlike image in spite of the issue of blasphemy it raises is due in large part to the lack of a competing historical narrative, one that accounts for the unusual aspects of the painting without recourse to religious imagery. In this article, Dürer’s motivation in creating this unprecedented painting and the strategies he used in constructing it are analyzed from the perspective of his contemporaries. In this alternative view, the humanist context is crucial, with Dürer emulating the greatest artist of the ancient world by composing the 1500 Self-Portrait in ways that accord with Apelles’s art, practice, and reputation as it was transmitted through the literature of the ancient world.

Bishop of Urbino Giovanni Pietro Arrivabene selected the foreign saints Thomas Becket and Martin of Tours as patrons for his burial chapel. Montefeltro court artist Timoteo Viti decorated the chapel with the saints’ images, including a fresco of Saint Martin exorcising a demon from a cow. This article argues that the chapel’s unusual, allegorical iconographic program condemns Cesare Borgia’s campaigns to dominate Central Italy. It also proposes that the kneeling figure in the altarpiece’s lower right register portrays the bishop’s heir. Finally, the accomplishment of the Arrivabene chapel demonstrates Timoteo Viti’s artistic independence from his famous colleague and collaborator, Raphael.

An intriguing mystery in early modern intellectual history is how and why European scholars came to designate Ethiopic, the sacred language of Ethiopia, as Chaldean. This article locates the designation’s origins in a deduction made by Vatican library personnel, partially inspired by a hoax perpetrated a quarter-century earlier. It then traces the influence of this designation on the progress of historical linguistics, where theories defending the appellation of Ethiopic as Chaldean, although often erroneous, nevertheless contributed to the accurate categorization of Ethiopic as a Semitic language, and on attitudes to Ethiopian Christianity that played a role in Catholic-Protestant polemic.

In the sixteenth century, perceptions of the English language changed from one of barbaric inadequacy to that of rare eloquence. Accounts for this shift tend to focus on literary or textual production, but this essay shows how these very linguistic concerns were motivated by the nonlinguistic practices appropriate to Latin rhetorical delivery (pronuntiatio et actio). The emotional contagion, legitimization of the inarticulate, cultural contextualization, and overcoming of natural physical defects that all stand at the heart of delivery here situate vernacular uplift at the corporeal level. The essay ends with an illustrative reading of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Mindful of the complex position of Christ’s mother, Mary, in post-Reformation Europe, this article examines how two women writers read Mary’s fleshly relationship with Christ. Reading the Bible typologically, Aemilia Lanyer and Dorothy Leigh determine that Mary’s material labor has spiritual consequences, because, in delivering Christ, she delivers God’s plan for salvation and inaugurates the new covenant. But, interpreting Marian maternity in this way, Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and Leigh’s The Mothers Blessing also suggest that the new covenant initiates a form of maternity that has sustained spiritual resonance for all women and has profound implications for the female writer.