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.

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.

Despite the prominent career of Paolo (Caliari) Veronese (1528–88), much remains to be discovered about his patrons and peers. Several letters written by the artist are presented here for the first time, and their recipient is identified as the humanist Marcantonio Gandino. The letters reference artworks, visitors to Veronese’s studio, and economic data pertaining to the painter. Analyzing the correspondence from a variety of methodological viewpoints reveals how Veronese fulfilled commissions, interacted with nobility, and invested his painterly profits in land on the Venetian terraferma. In addition to promoting Veronese’s career and advising on financial matters, Gandino translated Plutarch and Xenophon, whose texts share classical subjects and content with Veronese’s paintings. The comparison of texts and images leaves open the possibility of an exchange between the writer and painter concerning matters of classical motifs.

This article examines the Ballet des Polonais (1573), a magnificent festival given by Catherine de Médicis on the occasion of the election of her son, Henri de Valois, the future Henri III of France, to the throne of Poland. It argues that the invention of spectacle, as described in the official Latin account by the poet and humanist Jean Dorat, is much more relevant to the political situation of the time than scholars have previously recognized. Placed in an immediate historical, literary, and visual context, the text of the Ballet makes allusions to contemporary topics, including the military glory of Henri de Valois and the imperial destiny of the French monarchy. The elaborate web of references to books 5 and 9 of the Aeneid and to Catullus 64 displays the primary role of Catherine de Médicis, who is lauded for overcoming her maternal sorrow at Henri’s departure for the sake of promoting the Valois Empire.

This essay considers the place of astrology at the early Tudor court through an analysis of British Library MS Arundel 66, a manuscript compiled for the use of Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) in the 1490s. It argues that an illustration on fol. 201 depicts King Henry being presented with prognostications by his astrologer, William Parron, with the support of Louis, Duke of Orleans, later King Louis XII of France (r. 1498–1515). It considers the activities of three Tudor astrologer courtiers, William Parron, Lewis of Caerleon, and Richard Fitzjames, who may have commissioned the manuscript, as well as the Fitzjames Zodiac Arch at Merton College, Oxford (1497) and the London Pageants of 1501. It concludes that Arundel 66 reflects the strategic cultural investment in astrology and English prophecy made by the Tudor regime at the time of the marriage negotiations and wedding of Arthur, Prince of Wales and Katherine of Aragon, descendant of Alfonso X, the most illustrious medieval patron of the science of the stars.

Portraits of cities and of human beings shared a nomenclature and developed along parallel courses in the Renaissance. This article traces their common history, examining evolving notions of likeness and approaches to the visual fashioning of identity across both categories of imagery, then considers one urban subject, Rome, that embodied all the challenges of the genre. In representations of the Eternal City such as those by Leonardo Bufalini and Mario Cartaro, artists sought to convey the appearance of Rome in their own time along with that of its glorious past, and to balance what they could see with an imagined, timeless ideal. In this way, images of Rome offer new insight into early modern portraiture and representation in general.

This essay situates Giovanni Stradano’s engravings of the discovery of the Americas from the Americae Retectio and Nova Reperta series within the context of their design in late sixteenth-century Florence, where the artist worked at the Medici court and collaborated with the dedicatee of the prints, Luigi Alamanni. Through an analysis of the images in relation to contemporary texts about the navigators who traveled to the Americas, as well as classical sources, emblems, and works of art in diverse media — tapestry, print, ephemera, and fresco — the study argues that Stradano’s allegorical representations of the Americas were produced in order to make clear Florence’s role in the invention of the New World.

Queen Elizabeth I’s musical talents and the elaborate music of her courtly entertainments are widely acknowledged. However, while the effect of Elizabeth’s gender on her authority as a ruler has been the subject of much historical research, the impact of this musical activity on the creation and representation of her authority has not been recognized. Gender stereotypes were both exploited and subverted as music became a symbol and tool of Elizabeth’s queenship. Poets and courtiers drew inspiration from Elizabeth’s music-making, combining traditional notions of the erotic power of female music with the idea of a musical harmony that governed the heavens, the political world, and the human soul to legitimize female power. By blending the talents of Elizabeth’s natural body with those of her political body, and by merging practical musicianship with speculative harmony, Elizabeth and her courtiers used music as a source of political authority.

What did abortion mean in late Renaissance Italy? In what ways did the reforming Church conceive of it and try to regulate its practice? This study explores attitudes toward abortion in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century through the lens of confessional discourses and practices. In the last three decades of the century, bishops and popes attempted to eradicate the practice of abortion by imposing shaming and increasingly severe punishments for its procurers. However, such initiatives were hindered by the social and practical consequences of bringing procurers of abortion to light. The ecclesiastical establishment had to rely on the secret space of the confessional to reform this aspect of morality. Exploring the negotiations between theological pronouncements and the sociopolitical realities of ecclesiastical administration, this article draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in early modern conceptions of abortion and contends that these led to inconsistent responses among Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical authorities.

The marriage in 1490 of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and Isabella d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, cemented an important Italian dynastic alliance and was in no sense a love match. Francesco and Isabella were well aware, however, that they had to establish a harmonious conjugal rapport if the strategic aims of their union were to be realized. This study examines the ways in which the Este-Gonzaga couple built familiarity, affection, and shared interests through frequent letter exchanges that both shaped and facilitated their domestic and political collaboration. The epistolary evidence provides new insights into how an aristocratic Renaissance marriage was experienced by the couple themselves and about the means by which a relationship that was exposed to the full force of contemporary politics, with all its conflicts of dynastic loyalty, was sustained through dialogue and negotiation.

Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice.

The correspondence between the radical Venetian pro-female polemicist and nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52) and the Copernican French astronomer Ismaël Boulliau (1605–94) — here published for the first time — shows how one of Tarabotti's most controversial works made it to press. She had long and unsuccessfully sought in Italy and in France to print the work, which was, puzzlingly, published two years after her death in Holland. It was subsequently placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Charting the explosive work's journey to France and its later arrival and reception in Holland, the Tarabotti-Boulliau correspondence provides a case study in the circulation of unorthodox ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. By showing Tarabotti's firm inscription in the well-connected scientist's intellectual circle, the letter exchange furthermore contributes to our expanding notions of women's participation in the Republic of Letters, while also suggesting a confluence of radical scientific and social views.

King David's rise from tending sheep to governing Israel impressed Renaissance writers, not least the poets and clergymen who found a model in his musical “psalmograph.” Yet ambiguities nestle in allusions to his career. Though many stressed that his ascent was thanks to divine election and not to ambition or guile, the fact remained that David did not inherit his scepter. Europe, though, was for the most part ruled by those with dynastic claims, and it had a class system in which literal shepherds should know their place, even if the Bible asserts that the valleys shall be exalted and the mountains made low. Comments on kings and bishops as shepherds, on shepherds as kings, and on David's upward career are fascinating to trace precisely because their social and political context can give them the energy of a concealed ambivalence.

Well-known for his Ciceronianism as well as for his crass nominalism and virulent attack on universals, the humanist Mario Nizolio (1488–1567) is often considered to be a forerunner of early modern philosophy. But although his name duly features in general accounts of Renaissance humanism and philosophy, his work, edited by Leibniz in 1670, has hardly been the subject of a philosophically sensitive analysis. This article examines Nizolio's attempt to reform scholastic philosophy, paying particular attention to the way in which he de-ontologized the scholastic categories and predicables (genus, species, etc.) and replaced philosophical abstraction with the rhetorical concept of synecdoche. His views on science, proof, argumentation, and rhetoric are discussed, as well as the humanist inspiration from which they issue. We will then be able to evaluate the strength and limitations of Nizolio's program in the wider tradition of early modern philosophy.

In 1473 Pope Sixtus IV instructed the vicar of the Bishop of Bologna to investigate rumors concerning Carmelite friars who were preaching that summoning demons in order to obtain responses from them was not heretical. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, this article elucidates the circumstances that led the Franciscan pope to intervene in a conflict between the Bolognese Carmelites and the Dominican inquisitor Simone of Novara. It proposes that the Carmelite affair, which ended with the inquisitor's defeat, constituted a critical juncture in the Dominicans’ relations with other Mendicant orders, and that it shaped inquisitorial activity in Bologna over the next few decades. This paper suggests that the aftermath of the Carmelite affair may also explain why, when the repression of illicit magic was resumed, Inquisitor Giovanni Cagnazzo decided to turn a female necromancer, and not the friars who had taught her demonic rites, into the main target of his prosecution.

When Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) published his Faerie Queene in 1590 and 1596, two pervasive structural features would have seemed surprising: the abbreviation Cant. in sectional and running titles, used instead of Canto; and a four-line stanza of common meter for each section's argument, instead of a more expansive and prestigious stanza. Study of the relevant early modern Italian and English norms of publication indicates that these were complementary and innovative means of merging heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse, and recognized as such. Cant. readily suggested canticle and the Solomonic Canticles, and the poet himself calls one of his so-called cantos a “canticle” (4.5.46). In style and prosodic form, his arguments would have particularly evoked the nationally distinctive Elizabethan Protestant psalmody and hymnody, as well as popular ballads. By incorporating these two metamorphic devices into The Faerie Queene's framework, Spenser reconfigured the heroic poem to serve his different, English vision.

The typographical language of Justus Lipsius's Politicorum libri sex (1589) is a crucial element for understanding its compositio. The page layout, designed by Lipsius (1547–1606) probably in collaboration with his printer, displayed the author's inventive methods and writing strategies. All Latin editions of the Politica followed the precise typographic design of the editio princeps. The work was disseminated across seventeenth-century Europe by different printers without changes to its fundamental material features, including its typography. Something different happened, however, with the various vernacular editions of the Politica. All of them redesigned Lipsius's typography. These editions refashioned the display of sententiae and provided visual uniformity to the page, transforming the text from a compendium of interrelated commonplaces into a dense treatise. In this article I focus on the changes and accommodations evidenced in Bernardino de Mendoza's Spanish translation. In this case, an exceptional document survived that allows one to examine the different interventions in the process of accommodation of the Politica: the printer's copy and the manuscript supervised by Mendoza, approved and licensed by the Council of Castile, and used by the Imprenta Real in Madrid to print Los seis libros de las Políticas (1604).

In the 1520s the internationally popular romance Prison of Love was adapted as a series of tapestries known as L'Histoire de Lérian et Lauréolle. This article explores the translation of the romance to a larger-than-life, three-dimensional narrative object created from sumptuous materials that literally enveloped courtly life. Unlike previous studies of Prison of Love's international reach, this article reads the tapestry chamber as an integral part of the romance's complex history of transmission among the princely courts of Europe in the early sixteenth century. Further, study of the textiles’ production, use, and reception will show that the tapestry chamber, though incomplete, is material evidence of a particular sixteenth-century reading of the romance.

This article sets forth, through a small collection of case studies, the extent to which the literal and pictorial figures of the Beati moderni constituted potentially provocative and disputed hermeneutical territory between particular religious constituencies, in this case the Oratorians and the Jesuits, and an increasingly stringent Curia ca. 1600. A reexamination of Beati moderni hagiographic imagery, and curial censorship of such imagery, potentially problematizes scholarly assumptions that these images served the Counter-Reformation Church's demands to control the meaning of religious images and the cult of the saints. Such reassessment calls for the reevaluation of a newly-constituted, uniquely post-Tridentine genre of hagiographic imagery: the Beati moderni devotional altar image and its reproductive printed devotional derivatives.

The fresco cycle painted at the behest of Pope Sixtus IV in the late 1470s in the main ward of the hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome comprises an extended pictorial biography of Sixtus, prefaced by scenes representing the legendary foundation of the hospital by his predecessor Innocent III. The legend, which tells how Innocent established Santo Spirito as a foundling hospital in response to the discovery of victims of infanticide in the Tiber River, positions the pope as the savior of the city's unwanted children. This article elucidates how the construction and renovatio of the hospital is presented in the cycle as a generative product of papal will, with the care of foundlings situated as an integral part of the image of the pope as both Father of the Church and restorer of past glory to the city of Rome. While the frescoes engage with both widespread conventions for representing infanticide and commonplace notions of the social value of caring for abandoned children, I demonstrate that the ideologically potent visual rhetoric of foundling care was also flexible, and could be adapted to meet the specific needs of a particular institutional and patronal context.