This article examines the circumstances of the death of Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville (d. 1483) and his plans for burial in his Roman church of Sant'Agostino and in the Cathedral of Rouen of which he was archbishop. I argue that the cardinal planned for his body to be interred near the high altar of Sant'Agostino, in a monument since lost, while his heart was to be taken to Rouen and buried in the crossing of the cathedral. By means of an analysis of burial practices in Italy and France, I propose that d'Estouteville's designs anticipated such grandiose sixteenth-century projects as those of Julius II (d. 1513) and Cardinal Georges d'Amboise (d.1510).

Ceremonies of election to abbess were occasions of great display. Election to this highest of offices was the defining moment of a successful nun's life, and thereafter self-identity became crucial. This article examines an anatomy of an election of 1509 by a nun from San Zaccaria in Venice; the illustrated chronicle of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Venice dated 1523, written by an anonymous nun; and the visual representation (in a range of media) of various abbesses from Florence, Pavia, and Venice. Success in election conferred the possibility of personality and consequently legitimated personalized representation.

This article discusses the ways in which fifteenth-century nuns financed, shaped and used works of art and architecture at the Benedictine convent of San Zaccaria in Venice. Evidence from chronicles, account books, liturgical manuscripts, reports of visits to the convent, and inscriptions on the works of art themselves shows that the nuns viewed art within their convent extremely proprietarily. While they accepted subsidies from the civic government, indulgences from popes, privileges from Byzantine emperors, and donations from private patrons, the nuns paid close attention to the administration of commissions within the convent church and committed substantial funds to artistic projects, making them their own.

In book 1 of Castiglione's II libro del cortegiano Lodovico da Canossa's sprezzatura — embodied in his pretended inability to teach us how to be perfect courtiers — is usually seen as consonant with the treatise's aristocratic bias, especially among its Anglophone readers. In this essay, I argue that study of Cicero's use of dissimulatio — or “assumed simplicity“— in De oratore helps us to understand the importance of indirection as a critical tool. I apply this insight to Canossa's apparently conservative treatment of nobility, and show how his sprezzatura demystifies (rather than mystifies) the source of noble self-expression. Canossa's sprezzatura reveals how imitatio can replace heredity as a means to elite status.

This essay explores the formal means (a variant of the medieval romance technique of entrelacement) by which Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso represents and comments on contemporary events, particularly the threats posed by French and Spanish invasions and by the interventionist politics of Popes Julius II and Leo X. Ariosto's treatment of the latter figure exemplifies both the specificity of the interplay between form and history in the Furioso Innamorato and its innovative character with respect to precursors, notably Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. A final section considers the changing significance of such topical material between the first edition of 1516 (when Leo was alive) and the final edition of 1532 (long after Leo's death, and under very different historical circumstances).

This essay offers two discoveries concerning lasso's poetics. First, it identifies in the Discourses on the Heroic Poem a critique of allegory on both aesthetic and moral grounds, one that explains Jerusalem Delivered's abandonment of the “temptress-turned-hag” motif Second, it demonstrates that Armida and Erminia are closely linked to the “captive woman “ topos used by Jerome and Boccaccio to justify Christian adaptations of pagan literature and rhetoric. It is the hermeneutic dimension of this motif that allows Tasso plausibly to convert these beautiful pagan women (and the poetic pleasures they embody) to the exigencies of Christian epic.

Between 1577 and 1625, ten Englishmen wrote or dictated accounts about their captivity among the Muslims. After examining similar accounts of captivity by continental writers, Fernand Braudel argued that European governments encouraged the publication of such accounts for an ideological purpose: to alienate readers from Islam and Muslims. A close reading of the English accounts, however, shows that there was a more personal and selfish goal for the publication of these accounts than the polemical and the ideological.