This article discusses a woodcut series with an elaborate iconographic representation of the Flemish city of Ghent, printed in 1524 by Pieter de Keysere. The three-sheet composition consists of a city view, an image of the allegorical Maiden of Ghent, and an extensive heraldic program with the coat of arms of prominent Ghent families and of the Ghent craft guilds. The print series’ production and consumption are unraveled and framed within the wider debate on civic religion in Renaissance Europe. The main argument is that while in this region of Northern Europe civic ideology was equally strong as in Italy, it was not the exclusive playground of the ruling elites. Pieter de Keysere’s woodcut series was aimed at a socially broad, local audience, most particularly Ghent’s corporate middle groups.

In a famous, frequently quoted statement, Ben Jonson claims that Queen Elizabeth I “had a membrana on her which made her uncapable of man.” This essay reinvestigates the basis for Jonson’s 400-year-old crux and, more broadly, argues for the relevance of an unexplored area of critical studies on Elizabeth: what early modern medicine and culture thought about lifelong virginity and its distinctive perils for the queen’s aging body natural. Finally, looking at the inner-circle gossip about Tudor and Stuart queens’ health and various records documenting Elizabeth’s identified illnesses, including hysterica passio, the essay uncovers how virgins’ diseases were thought to afflict Elizabeth over her reign and possibly contribute to her death.

This essay considers readings of Plato’s Symposium in sixteenth-century trattati d’amore (love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’s L’amorosa filosofia — that offer an alternative to Marsilio Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in his De amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of the Symposium attempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.

Though historians of religion have demonstrated that the theological commitments of early modern English people were labile and complex, there was nonetheless a prevailing sense in the period that belief posited bodily consequences. This article considers this bodily presence in John Donne’s poetry by exploring the humoral construction of religious identity in his Holy Sonnets. Donne’s conversion provided him with an unusual perspective: not many people were positioned to hold as nuanced a view of religious ideology. It is surprising, then, that when Donne considers his conversion — which he does in little and large in the Holy Sonnets — he casts it in somatic terms. Donne’s humoral constitution of faith in the Holy Sonnets anatomizes the vexed transactions of body and soul particular to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought. He depicts his body in the same terms that he uses to represent his religious temperament — as changeable and lacking integrity.

After the Reformation, Catholics developed new ways to express interior religious experiences, including mystic visions. This article considers the epistemological impasse that arose when the Spanish Inquisition, created to prosecute covert Judaizers, was charged with discernment of mystical experiences. Close linguistic study of interrogations shows how a nondialogue between mystical and legal discourse pointed to a broader conflict between a newly interiorized religion and the public space of the law. Practically, these cases weakened the Inquisition; conceptually, they undermined the idea of an Inquisition. If Enlightenment reformers were able to argue for a secularization of the law, it was because a group of mystics and Inquisitors had made such thought possible.