The subject of my lecture is the phenomenon of masking in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici. I begin with an overview of the evidence in favor of the early claims that Lorenzo himself invented the modern masquerade, and continue with an examination of images of Triumphs in art, showing how these evolved into quasi-theatrical displays with masqued participants. I then turn to the phenomenon of masking in the high art of Lorenzo himself Botticelli and Politian. My lecture ends with a consideration of Politian's Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, claiming that the poem commemorates and interprets the death of Giuliano by showing him to have been deluded by Cupid and by his mother Venus hidden behind the false masks of Pallas and Glory.

Marriage between Venetian patricians in the early decades of the sixteenth century was a matter of considerable moment. The process of joining two families — as narrated by a contemporary diarist—involved a choreography of events and a level of display in rituals more public than private in import: the lavish style of entertainment paralleled civic rituals in arguing the power of the Venetian city-state, and the strengthening of familial political and economic ties betokened the effectiveness of the city's urban polity and economic status. When private ceremonies went awry, the subsequent opprobrium underscored the community's interest in more proper procedures.

The Venetian printmaker Giacomo Franco produced several engravings for the 1597 coronation of Morosina Morosini, the wife of doge Marin Grimani (1595-1605). Focusing on three of these prints in which a bird's-eye view of the city is framed with illustrations of the festivities, this essay explores relations between space, gender, allegory and costume as they were manifested in this rare female procession. An examination of the pictorial conventions used by Franco and other artists to depict the event suggests that Morosina's coronation functioned both to resist existing codes of gender but also to reassert female patrician status.

It is my contention that the poetic collection Les Regrets by Joachim Du Bellay is a product of the humanist epistolary heritage. This essay attempts to demonstrate not only the importance of the epistolary and secretarial traditions for our understanding of Les Regrets, but also how Du Bellay uses them to elaborate a new poetics. Specifically, beginning with the epistolary and secretarial traditions in Europe, this study then moves to a discussion of the epistolary genre in French literary history and subsequently to the figure of the secretary in Renaissance poetry before focusing on Du Bellay's correspondance with Ronsard.

The important early Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526-1611) has the distinction of having been a biographer of men, a biographer of women, an autobiographer, and the subject of biography. As such he and his texts seem particularly apt subjects for study given the current interest by scholars in a number of disciplines in the various forms of “life-writing“ produced so abundantly in the early modern period. In this essay I briefly examine Ribadeneyra's most famous biography, that of his mentor Ignatius Loyola, as well as two little-known and virtually unstudied texts: his Life of the pious laywoman Estefanía Manrique de Castilla and his autobiography or Confessions. I focus upon the ways in which he treated issues of authority and obedience in constructing as exemplary the lives of these three Spanish nobles and explore his strategies for enlisting life-writing in the campaign for a renewed, activist Catholicism.