On the 17th of August 1308 Chiara of Montefalco died in the small Umbrian monastery of which she had been the abbess. Her fellow nuns did not take any steps to preserve her body. Nonetheless, for five days it remained uncorrupted and redolent of the odor of sanctity, despite the blazing summer heat. At that point— not wanting to tempt fate further—the community decided to embalm the precious relic. In the words of Sister Francesca of Montefalco, testifying some years later at Chiara's unsuccessful canonization procedure, “They agreed that [her] body should be preserved on account of her holiness and because God took such pleasure in her body and her heart.” They sent to the town apothecary for “balsam and myrrh and other preservatives,” as the apothecary himself testified, and they proceeded to the next step in contemporary embalming practice, which was evisceration.

Persons of authority in early modern Europe—whether parents, preachers or princes—knew well that among the resources available to them for controlling behavior and maintaining hierarchies, there was always shame. Humankind, to its woe, had experienced shame in the Garden of Eden. Noah had been shamed by his nakedness, Sarah by her barrenness, Jacob by his effeminate body, Potiphar's wife through her brazen advances. Hesiod had introduced two sorts of shame: the right kind, derived from modesty; and the wrong kind, produced by poverty. These instances, and many others from ancient and medieval sources, lay at hand for easy use by Renaissance moralists, and who is not a moralist? Applying their own imaginative skills to techniques and rituals of humiliation, medieval and early modern people devised such innovations as the pitture infamanti, the dunce cap, the stocks, the charivari, the yellow badge.

Few readers of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron will easily forget the sinister scene in novella 32, where a young, beautiful but unfaithful woman is forced by her vengeful husband to drink out of her dead lover's skull. Although equally cruel analogues could be found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Marguerite's strikingly macabre scene seems to be unique in Renaissance literature. Representations of human skeletons are, of course, plentiful in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century iconography, a period often characterized by its obsession with death. Certainly Marguerite may have been influenced by the pervading vanitas and memento morimotifs. At the same time, the whole scene could be viewed as a staged perversion of relic worship, a practice much frowned upon in evangelical circles favored by Marguerite.

Among the more than 160 uomitti valenti whose lives and works are included in the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de’ più eccellentipittori, scultori et architettori, 1568, are several women: Properzia De’ Rossi (c. 1490-1530), Suor Plautilla Nelli (1532-1587/88), Lucrezia Quistelli, who was “taught by Alessandro Allori,” Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625), and her sisters Lucia (c. 1540-c. 1565) and Europa (1542/43-78). Although De' Rossi was the only one of these women distinguished by her own vita, it was Sofonisba Anguissola who accrued the greatest amount of literary adulation during her lifetime (fig. 1). If contemporaneous sources are to be believed, this acclaim may be attributed to her excellence as a portrait painter.

The study of Italian humanism in the age of the Reformation has focused almost exclusively on the relationship between humanism and the Italian Spirituali. This emphasis can be traced back to the many works of Delio Cantimori. Cantimori persistently argued that humanism, with its emphasis on scriptural studies, philology, and spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal promoted evangelical spirituality and church reform among Italians. He saw the Spirituali—many of whom were humanists—as pious, devout individuals caught between their own evangelical convictions and the traditions of a spiritually unsatisfying and morally corrupt ecclesiastical system. It was the dynamics of this spiritual crisis, fueled by the clash between evangelism and the doctrines of the church, that formed the basis of many of Cantimori's works on humanism and reform in Italy.

Nineteen ninety-two was such a watershed year for publications concerning the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries that dozens of these works could easily be described as “the best.” Unfortunately, out of the numerous Portuguese and Spanish publishers contacted in 1993 with our request for review copies, only two in Spain plus the Sorbonne took this project seriously. In response to their cooperative attitude, I want to mention their three books before turning to a more general discussion of Renaissance publications from the Iberian Peninsula. (Publishers in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America were not included simply because of limitations on my time.)