There was an ongoing controversy in seventeenth-century England about the ten lost tribes of Israel. The debate centered on the theoretical question of whether or not the lost tribes continued to exist as a distinct ethnic group. Surprisingly little attention was paid to what might seem to be the first order of business in any national referendum about the lost tribes: determining where they were. Fletcher’s book, which argued that the lost tribes survived as (and not merely lived among) the Tartars of central and northeastern Asia, was one of the few statements written in seventeenth-century England about the location of the missing people.

The Virgin of the Seafarers (1531–36) by Alejo Fernández was designed as the central panel of an altarpiece for the chapel in the House of Trade’s Hall of Audiences in Seville. Little attention has been paid to the central panel and almost none to the four side panels, yet they are crucial to our understanding of how the Spanish monarchy defined its mission overseas. The iconography of the altarpiece as a whole made visible Spain’s self-image as the creator and guarantor of a militant, evangelical Christian empire, dedicated to spreading the Gospel as well as fomenting trade and colonization.

Sixteenth-century history may have been recorded most spectacularly in prestigious folio chronicles, but readers had more ready access to printed books that conveyed this history in epitome. This essay focuses on how Edmund Spenser (1552?– 99) appropriated the rhetoric and form of such printed redactions in his rendition of fairy history found in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1596). Through his abridged fairy chronicle, Spenser connects to a broadly defined reading public, emphasizes the deeds not only of kings but their imperial and civic deputies, and provides an alternative interpretive pathway through his poem.

Beginning with several tales in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the early fourteenth-century Florentine painter Buonamico Buffalmacco was often portrayed as a carefree, funloving trickster. As this paper demonstrates, that image has obscured the deeper significance that Buffalmacco and his works held for Giorgio Vasari in the second edition of The Lives of the Artists (1568). That significance is especially apparent in his account of the eccentric painter and his dealings with the nuns of Faenza. In two humorous anecdotes about the nuns and Buffalmacco, Vasari poetically reveals the aesthetic and theological significance of the painter’s art. In spite of Buffalmacco’s less-than-diligent character, Vasari praises his ability to “transubstantiate” paint, an ability that placed him among the primi lumi.