This article discusses the debates over drama that took place in the English universities during the late sixteenth century. It reconsiders the career of the Oxford academic and theologian John Rainolds, whose objections to student performance are usually conflated with attacks upon professional drama. This article argues instead that his opposition arose largely from two related institutional concerns: the equation of drama with rhetorical exercises and the increasing use of spectacle in university plays. The controversy over theatrical performance is thus cast in a new light as an inquiry into the place and purpose of drama within university culture.

I discuss how printing affected the practice of scholarship by examining the working methods of Conrad Gessner (1516–65), a prolific humanist, bibliographer, and natural historian. Gessner supplemented his revenue as city physician in Zurich through his publishing activities. He hailed printing, along with libraries to preserve the books, as crucial to the successful transmission of learning to the distant future. Gessner also used printing as a kind of social media: to reach readers rapidly all over Europe, in order to solicit contributions to his research projects underway, to advertise forthcoming books, and to develop his own thinking through multiple iterations.

This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica.

The emergence of a positive attitude toward mountains is commonly regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The facts tell otherwise. Unearthing a number of hitherto-unknown sources, this article demonstrates that interest in and enthusiasm for mountains already began to evolve around 1500: from then on, mountains gained in importance in political, religious, and scientific discourses. Travel through mountainous regions increased, and people started to climb mountains. The interplay between theoretical interests and practical engagement led to a new emotional response, or what may be called mountain feeling, that anticipated the attitude of the eighteenth century and of the present.

This article takes as its subject the remarkable diary kept by a young English gentleman named John North from 1575 to 1579. On his journey home from Italy in 1575–77, North changed the language of his diary from English to Italian. On his return to London, he continued to keep a record of his everyday life in Italian. This article uses North’s diary as a starting point from which to reconstruct the social and sensory worlds of a returned traveler and Italianate gentleman. In doing so, it offers a way of bridging the gap between individual experiences and personal networks on the one hand, and the wider processes of cultural encounter and linguistic contact on the other.

This article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.

This article focuses on the contribution of anti-Jewish themes to political ideals and reality in the works of two leading Venetian patrician humanists — Ludovico Foscarini and Paolo Morosini. The article demonstrates that their literary attacks on Jews were shaped by classical, patristic, medieval, and humanist texts, and by the experience of service to the state. It also demonstrates that their work contributed to debates about the toleration of Jews in Venetian territory and can be linked to the humanist engagement with Judaism at a critical point for both phenomena in the fifteenth century.

Taking a cue from a fleeting reference to Japan in a remarkably idiosyncratic sixteenth-century language manual, this essay explores the knowledge about Japan that circulated in England before first formal contact took place between the two nations in 1613–14. The cumulative record of fleeting intersections and near-forgotten moments when the two nations came into each other’s circuit demands a reassessment of current conceptualizations of the travel encounter, juxtaposing the traditional view of encounter as a singular significant event, with one that acknowledges the encounter’s rootedness in long-running processes of knowledge making and circulation.

The great sculptor Vincenzo Danti wrote one of the longest poems to have survived from a Renaissance artist, but the text’s close thematic and conceptual connections to its author’s art have gone entirely unnoticed. What Danti’s poem and sculpture share, this essay argues, is a concern with mystified identity. Danti’s poetic sensibility stands at odds with the biographical frameworks that typically guide the interpretation of Renaissance art and literature. At the same time, his example shows how much there is to be gained from an investigation of how artists learned to be writers, and of what came of those efforts.

In the post-Tridentine period, conflicts in cathedrals revealed social dynamics that extended beyond the cathedral walls. Cathedral chapters had to deal with the competition of ecclesiastic as well as secular institutions, involving bishops, Inquisition officials, monks, and members of lay confraternities and city councils. All of them competed to preserve or advance their privileged place in a society of orders, and these rivalries often emerged in public ceremonies. Rituals thus provided a promising setting for power struggles. More than merely local episodes, these conflicts illustrate the rebalance of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that characterized the early modern state.

This article demonstrates a systematic connection between the novelty of Petrarch’s authorship and his self-definition as an exile. Petrarch employs the unusual term exilium/esilio to substantiate his unprecedented claim that literature is a legally valid officium (civic role). Following Dante, Petrarch grounds his exilic authorship in the Christian discourse of peregrinatio: life as pilgrimage through exile. But Petrarch’s new officium allows him a measure of control over literary creation that no prior Italian writer had enjoyed. This is especially true of the “Canzoniere,” Petrarch’s compilation of his vernacular lyrics, whose singularity functions as a proxy for its author’s selfhood.

This article sketches the history of the mediation of linguistic difference in the context of judicial torture in early modern France. It argues that language represented an important dimension of what took place in the torture chambers of early modern Europe. Embedded within multilingual societies and habitually confronted with linguistic difference, tribunals developed an array of mediation practices. Shaped by officials’ scribal and linguistic practices and their infliction of pain in order to establish judicial facts, their linguistic choices also shed light on how jurists conceived of and set out uncovering the truth.

When The English Faust Book describes Faustus as addicted to study and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts necromantic books as “ravishing,” these texts draw on classical and Renaissance notions of laudable addiction. Following its Latin origin in contract law, addiction appears in sixteenth-century writings as service, dedication, and devotion. Tracing invocations of addiction from Cicero to Perkins, this essay explores the influence of Calvin and Calvinist-minded Cambridge divines through Doctor Faustus’s preoccupation with the challenge of addicted commitment. If Calvinists praise committed devotion, Marlowe challenges such views by staging the terror as well as the wonder of addictive release.

References to Rabelais in Andrew Marvell’s prose satires against religious intolerance, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73), offer insights into the Restoration reception of Rabelaisian satire in the universities and the coffeehouses as a specifically anticlerical form of wit. But these references are either misattributed or incorrect, suggesting that Marvell may never actually have read Gargantua and Pantagruel, but rather picked up Rabelaisian anecdotes when conversing in intellectual circles in France in the mid-1650s. Critical focus on the history of reading tends to neglect the inevitable role of such conversation in literary transmission, both within a national culture and across national borders.

This essay analyzes the travel account authored by Moroccan ambassador Muhammad al-Ghassânî, who visited Spain in 1690–91. The account shows the evolution of the early modern frontier between Christian Europe and Islamic North Africa, from a militarized boundary to the development of diplomatic relations. Both an agent and witness of that history, al-Ghassânî describes a heterogeneous space: he surveys the border, explores the foreign land of modern Spain, and reimagines the memory of al-Andalus. His important account, based on sharp observation and serious research, helps nuance the prevailing view that Arab culture had ignored Europe before the nineteenth century.

This essay contends that Donatello’s High Altar at the Santo in Padua represents the Immaculate Virgin, reflecting a controversial doctrine of burgeoning interest in fifteenth-century Italy that she was exempted from original sin prior to the first moment of her conception. It ties the altar and scenes on the surrounding choir screen to a sermon promoting the Virgin’s immaculacy by Francesco della Rovere (later Sixtus IV), spoken in Padua in 1448 while the altar was being erected. It further connects the liturgical ensemble with bulls by Sixtus IV and liturgical offices sponsored by him after he was elected pope.

In the 1540s, Giambattista Gelli and Pierfrancesco Giambullari introduced a controversial theory concerning the foundation of Florence. Marshaling spurious textual sources and archaeological remains, they claimed that the city was Etruscan, challenging the long-standing belief in its Roman origin. In a painstaking rebuttal, Vincenzo Borghini rejected their sources, methods, and conclusions. Their three treatises are among the earliest efforts to develop critical methods to establish an artifact’s culture of origin, whether Etruscan, Roman, or medieval. While history has looked more favorably on the work of Borghini, all three manipulated the histories of artifacts to serve competing narratives of Florence’s past.

The second half of the seventeenth century was the first great period of legal reform in England’s history. This article situates John Milton in relationship to this contemporary context, arguing that he comments frequently on the need to change England’s laws and displays a finely tuned awareness of some of the major legal debates of his time. This article surveys Milton’s writings about the law and legal education, and it concludes by examining his 1659–60 political pamphlets where he calls for reform of the judicial system and the establishment of local courts.

Fourteenth-century Italian humanists discussed the properties of tragedy while considering the value of Latin versus vernacular literature. Boccaccio was interested in these discussions because humanists were promoting classicizing tragic and epic literatures at the expense of vernacular writing. This article explores Boccaccio’s role in these debates by examining the tragic stories of the Decameron. It suggests that Boccaccio highlighted the virtues of his erotic tales by contrasting them to the tragic stories of day 4, a strategy inspired by Ovid’s elegiac poems. Boccaccio thus underscored the dignity of his low, Ovidian-inspired Decameron, and counterbalanced humanist fascination with high tragic-epic literatures.

Titian painted Christ with the Coin for Alfonso d’Este around 1516. The painting served as the cover piece for a collection of ancient coins and has been read as a commentary on politics and taxation. Instead, this article reveals how the painting reconfigured Alfonso’s interaction with ancient coins, transforming the everyday activity of the collector into an occasion of spiritual reformation. Reading numismatic antiquarianism against the exegetical tradition that accrued around the Gospel pericope (Matthew 22:21) reveals the painting as the nexus of two regimes of virtue — one Christian, one classical — both of which turn upon coins as manifold objects.