Returning from Algerian captivity in 1580 — when Gregory XIII’s calendar reform was implemented in Spain — Miguel de Cervantes had only two years to adjust from Islamic to Christian time. The fragility and instability of time hence became a central motif for Cervantes. In part 2 of Don Quixote, the time-altering anxieties of the Gregorian calendar appear in glaring gaps in time, in the shifting chronology of the text, and in images that recall the sundial as reflective of time and of the brevity of human life. Cervantes uses Ovidian feasts to further destabilize the quixotic chronology, pointing to the sacred, political, and personal uses (and abuses) of time. Indeed, Sancho Panza takes advantage of chronological conundrums and turns to Ovid’s Fasti in order to mislead his master through a mock-Floralia and a voyage to the Pleiades. For beneath the cloak of simplicity Sancho guides the knight along unexpected paths, thieving from Ovid in order to speak with Mercury’s eloquence and to craft artful designs that rival Botticelli’s Primavera.

In 1520, Martin Luther’s view of the papacy shifted dramatically and permanently. While the events of 1519 played a role in his evolving view of the papacy as the Antichrist forecast by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, those events alone cannot account for the suddenness and the totality of Luther’s change of opinion. This essay argues that Lorenzo Valla’s Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine played a significant and too-little-appreciated role in Luther’s new stance toward the papacy. This essay examines what it was about Valla’s Discourse that helped convince Luther that the pope was the Antichrist.

The financial status of patrician women in Renaissance Italy remains obscure in all but a few cases, but the prevailing paradigm frames them as being dedicated to the well-being of their families, subordinating their interests to those of their spouses. Where known, their financial activities consist for the most part of supervising small farms, marketing livestock and produce, buying and selling properties, and lending money at interest. Lucrezia Borgia confounds this paradigm: she was a budding capitalist entrepreneur, leveraging her own capital by obtaining marshland at negligible cost and then investing in massive reclamation enterprises. She also raised livestock and rented parts of her newly arable land for short terms, nearly doubling her annual income in the process.

This essay argues that John Donne’s “Satyre II” (ca. 1595) has a greater topical relevance to the emergence of the Anglo-American common-law tradition than literary and legal scholars have previously recognized. It makes the case that the villain of Donne’s poem, the poet-turned-lawyer Coscus, may be Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) and that two female figures in the poem may be Queen Elizabeth (r. 1558–1603). Donne attacks Coke and Elizabeth for their complicity in deploying an antiquated and backward-looking feudal ideal in order to lend prestige to the common law, to enrich the crown and its officers, and to frustrate the dynastic prospects of landholding gentry.