This article presents the first sustained study of Pietro Perugino's destroyed “Assumption of the Virgin” altarpiece commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV for the Sistine Chapel. My analysis reconstructs the frescoed altarpiece's ritual setting and relates it to imagery associated with Sixtus's promotion of the controversial Immaculate Conception feast. The altarpiece's ties to the Immaculate Virgin intensified during the 1483 Assumption feast, which marked the chapel's inauguration. The Assumption represented a salient event in Rome's liturgical calendar, and I demonstrate how the altarpiece allowed Sixtus to temporarily expand a local communal feast to include an expression of papal privilege and authority.

Across the early modern Iberian world, a unique form of infamy materialized in the sambenito. Mostly known as the penitential garment imposed by the Inquisition on the individuals it condemned, the sambenito was also exhibited in churches and monasteries as a monument of infamy. This article traces the origins, development, and decline of the sambenito, with a particular focus on its material and visual aspects. It argues that displayed sambenitos performed mnemonic and evidentiary roles in societies obsessed with genealogy, while also bringing to light the continuous resistance and opposition to the sambenito on the ground.

Andrea Riccio was renowned for making bronze statuettes of classical subjects, especially satyrs. His sculptures have long been associated with humanist culture in Padua, where he worked, but this article reveals how they also engaged regional vernacular traditions in the aftermath of the War of the League of Cambrai. An impactful source was Ruzante's plurilingual comedy “La Pastoral.” Confronting Venetian hegemony, Riccio and Ruzante revitalized Padua's ancient legacy by molding the pastoral around popular concerns. While Renaissance bronze casting and dialect literature have been analyzed independently, their local interchange demonstrates sculpture's potency in addressing interests shared among artisans and writers.

Contrary to the idea that awareness of extinction is quintessentially modern, this article argues that Bernard Palissy conceived of extinct species—what he called “lost species” (“espèces perdues”)—in the sixteenth century. This premodern craftsman knew that human activity caused species to vanish. But how? By retracing his interactions with merchants and fishermen at the French Atlantic ports, I show that Palissy learned about the overfishing of waters from other commercial actors. Rather than paint human-caused extinction as a novel insight, I demonstrate that Palissy drew on common vernacular knowledge about the depletion of the ocean. Palissy's pronouncements, it is further shown, expand his well-known polemic against bookish learning. The artisan championed practical experience against a textual tradition of natural history, exposing the latter's silence on commercially decimated species.

Most scholars who comment on Catherine of Aragon's speech and movements at the annulment trial on 21 June 1529 have overlooked significant discrepancies between the five eyewitness accounts of this day—by an English gentleman, the English king, and the French, Venetian, and Vatican envoys. This essay, in contrast, gives particular focus to discrepancies in these accounts. These contradictions speak to a rhetorical war over Catherine's reputation, one that reflects tensions across Europe that were exacerbated by the trial. Catherine herself may be termed an agent in this rhetorical war, given that her own voice makes itself heard within each account.

This article demonstrates the merited inclusion of Giovanni Stradano's olive-oil engraving in the “Nova Reperta,” a series showcasing postclassical inventions that Florentine nobleman and Alterati member Luigi Alamanni commissioned in the late 1580s. The image and accompanying inscription must be understood within their broader cultural, scientific, legal, political, and socioeconomic contexts. The print reflects olive oil's economic potential and the evolving dietary preferences in Medici Florence. It evinces the flexibility of the concept of invention. Rather than being technological, the novelties mirror ideas central to the Alterati academics around classical knowledge and the alchemical ability of humans to transform nature through artisanship.

This article addresses the explicit utilization of Christian discourse about hell and purgatory within the writings of sixteenth-century Italian Jewry. The vast majority of Jewish texts about hell (gehinnom) from the period ignore Christian discourse on the topic or only allude to it obliquely. Three unpublished Hebrew sources, two of them drawn from informal marginalia, demonstrate a more open approach, in which the infernal cosmography and terminology of Christianity are consciously and explicitly appropriated. These sources not only serve as important case studies for Jewish understandings of hell during the period but also can shed broader light on the types of cultural maneuvering that characterized Jewish cultural life in the Christian milieu of Cinquecento Italy.