Sometime between 1544 and 1550, Michelangelo gave two sculptures, the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, to Roberto Strozzi, a fellow Florentine resident in Rome. Although the gift ostensibly signified gratitude for Strozzi’s hospitality during the artist’s convalescence from a grave illness, it had strong political undertones. Shortly after receiving this extraordinary present, Strozzi, most likely with Michelangelo’s consent, gave the sculptures away, presenting them to the King of France as part of an effort to persuade him to intervene on behalf of the Florentine Republic in its final struggle against Medici rule. Michelangelo’s loyalties, both personal and political, were simultaneously revealed and concealed in this act of calculated generosity. This article situates the gift within the context of Michelangelo’s habits of gift-giving, his networks of kinship, and the complicated politics of the 1530s and ’40s.

When Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this article argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

Huntington Library manuscript HM904 is a verse miscellany compiled by Constance Aston Fowler, daughter of Lord Aston, in 1630s Staffordshire. Constance operated as a kind of literary agent, soliciting, exchanging, and circulating poems, as well as preserving them in her book. Many of these poems are by or about family and friends, but they also indicate her connections with far-reaching networks of manuscript transmission. In particular, the volume contains Catholic devotional verses in an unusual and somewhat archaic hand (Hand B) that also appears in another Catholic miscellany from 1650s Warwickshire; and secular verses that may be by the Catholic love poet William Habington, or may be hybrid compositions that imitate or adapt his work. Both these ingredients have much to say about the complex compilation processes of manuscript verse miscellanies, and about the cultural participation of women and Catholics in seventeenth-century England.

In early modern Italy the entry of a woman into a nunnery was celebrated with lyric poems composed by male friends and would-be friends of the woman’s family, and, on occasion, by the woman herself. This genre of occasional verse marking nuns’ vestition and profession ceremonies has generally been overlooked by scholars, despite the considerable attention paid to early modern nuns in recent decades. Many of these poems were printed and served a public function, demonstrating how convents were embedded within early modern cultural networks. The poems, replete with Petrarchan tropes, anagrams, and play on the women’s names, illustrate the adaptability of secular literary modes in the wake of the Council of Trent. Rare poems by the women themselves — generally more private works that survive only in manuscript — go beyond the limits of the genre and offer a sometimes surprisingly intimate glimpse of how these women artfully responded to their own experiences.