Petrarch’s 1345 discovery of Cicero’s personal letters in Verona has long been regarded as a foundational moment in the historiography of the Renaissance. In the traditional view, Petrarch’s discovery engenders a new historical self-consciousness that has frequently been described, since the middle of the twentieth century, in terms of a contrast between a medieval Dante and a Renaissance Petrarch. In keeping with recent work rethinking periodization, this essay revisits Petrarch’s letters on his discovery to reconsider the distance between Dante and Petrarch and to reveal how Petrarch constructs his new relationship with Cicero through Dante’s characterization of Virgil. While some critics have noted this Dantean presence, they have not examined its meaning. This study argues that Petrarch’s borrowing from Dante is significant because it shows how Dante’s complex relationship to the past embodied in the figure of Virgil shaped Petrarch’s construction of his Cicero and informed Renaissance ideas of history.

History is the foundation of Machiavelli’s political thought. Dismissing the celebratory traditions of humanist historiography and never fully sharing humanism’s idealization of antiquity, Machiavelli sought in history the causes of political failure. He acknowledged the fragmentary and fleeting character of historical knowledge and exposed fashionable philosophies of history (cyclical recurrence, unchanging human passions, celestial influences, laws of nature, fortune) as seductive fictions purveying false consolations for history’s adversities and afflictions. Machiavelli proposed instead a critical history focused on how social conflicts shape power and its abuses. His analysis of ancient Roman and more recent Florentine conflicts turns on a crucial distinction between conflicts contained within institutional frameworks and public law and those fought with instruments of private power (political patronage, wealth, and factions) that undermine public authority. Useful history, Machiavelli insists, must show how the constant pursuit, particularly by elites, of privatized power caused both the collapse of the Roman Republic and the failures of modern Italy’s ruling classes.

Egidio da Viterbo (1469–1532) wrote his Book on Hebrew Letters (Libellus de litteris hebraicis) in 1517 to persuade Pope Leo X to reform the Roman alphabet. Behind this concrete, if farfetched, proposal was a millenarian theology that Egidio revealed by introducing his Christian readers to Kabbalah, whose first Christian advocate, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, had done his pioneering work only a few decades before. Inspired by Pico and by Johann Reuchlin, Egidio also absorbed the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, applying it in the Libellus to a Kabbalist analysis of the Aeneid, which he reads as a prophecy of papal victory over the Jews at the end of time, while also seeing Pope Leo as a modern-day Etruscan. But the main source of Egidio’s apocalyptic theology is a medieval Hebrew book, the Sefer ha-Temunah, which in Italy was new to Jews at the time Egidio read it.

Renaissance satire has long been a neglected field of study, which is most likely due to the difficulty decoding its targets, to its nonliterary utilitarian purpose, and to the menace of invective that always hovers over the satirical metagenre. This study aims at two objectives: to retrace the formal development of early modern satire by showing how the blending of four disparate traditions — Roman satura, Greek satyr play, Menippean satire, and medieval popular theater — created a form that not only dominated the period, but also laid the groundwork for the development of the modern variants of satire. This pivotal moment in the history of satire then gives way to the second objective: a concrete illustration of this theoretical development in the four authentic Pantagrueline chronicles of François Rabelais, an ideal case study that will considerably enhance the understanding of early modern satire in all its implications and intricacies.

An analysis of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to North America, which was England’s first attempt at colonization beyond Britain, shows that the nation’s earliest expansionists perceived the significance of maps in supporting colonization. Gilbert recruited several specialists, including John Dee and Richard Hakluyt, who expended considerable time and resources conducting research for their maps and drawing up plans to survey the colony. A thorough examination of Gilbert’s sea chart and terrestrial maps clarifies how his circle used them to promote the expedition, to guide it to North America, and to assert their control over the territory. Scholars often depict early modern English colonizers as having little interest in cartographic materials, but Gilbert and his supporters proved that maps served a number of vital functions in preparing and executing a colonizing expedition.

Although the Greek concept of kairos (καιρός) has undergone a recent renewal of interest among scholars of Renaissance rhetoric, this revival has not yet been paralleled by its reception into the history of political thought. This article examines the meanings and uses of this important concept within the ancient Greek tradition, particularly in the works of Isocrates and Plutarch, in order to understand how it is employed by two of the most important political thinkers of the sixteenth century: Thomas Elyot and Niccolò Machiavelli. Through such an investigation this paper argues that an appreciation of the concept of kairos and its use by Renaissance political writers provides a fuller understanding of the political philosophy of the period.

This essay offers a historian’s reading of Boccaccio’s tale of Lisabetta da Messina (4:5), rethinking it in terms of fourteenth-century ways of understanding virtù and identity. In analyzing the tale in the context of the Decameron, while reading it against archival material from the period, the deeper context of its discussion of love suggests a reading that makes the tale central to the tragic stories of the fourth day and highlights a lesson about the dangers of passion that make it fit powerfully as the day’s central tale. In the end, love offers many things in the Decameron, but Boccaccio’s brigata of storytellers and his readers could appreciate a danger more difficult to see today — that the powerful passions associated with lost love and mourning without the support of the groups that surrounded and sustained one’s sense of identity also threatened in the most profound way the negation of self: death.

Methods for counting war deaths developed alongside structural changes in the ways that states enumerated mortality (for both fighters and citizens) between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. This paper argues that an alternative way to interpret observers’ comments on the magnitude and novelty of war damages during the Italian Wars (1494–1559) is to trace the history of enumerating mortality from the fourteenth century, using the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death as departure points. Military heralds counted dead soldiers in Northern Europe and civic record keepers registered public mortality in Italy. Numbers carried cultural value. In war, disputants and observers used numbers rhetorically to argue political cases and to emphasize the scale of victories and defeats. By 1500, the proliferation of specific mortality numbers in public discourse — amplified by printed war reporting — forced observers to reckon with their meaning. The article concludes by illustrating how numbers entered memorial culture: monuments from the Italian Wars featured numbers as an index of the perceived magnitude of war in the sixteenth century.

The Comentario de la pintura y pintores antiguos (Commentary on Painting and Antique Painters) by the humanist Felipe de Guevara stands as the first art treatise of its type produced in Renaissance Spain. Critical studies underscore the reliance on ancient texts in spite of significant divergences from the sources. Philological studies of near-contemporary texts and a close reading of the author’s extant writings provide an alternative framework for understanding these transformations. Through the appropriation of ancient texts, Guevara calls for the practical overhauling of the Spanish artistic system. The text addresses the art of painting as having both transcendental and intrinsic values, focusing on its formative capabilities and virtue ethics as the most important for the former, and its role in the larger Spanish economy for the latter.

In 1558, the Venetian patrician Nicolò Zen published Dello scoprimento, a text that suggested that his Venetian ancestors had made landfall in the Americas before Columbus. Generations of scholars have pored over Zen’s text and accompanying map with the hopes of determining whether or not this voyage took place. Zen’s text, however, cannot be classified as either history or fiction; like many other early modern travel accounts, it was a combination of both. Shifting the focus about what is significant from the text’s truthfulness to its tactics, from the historicity of the voyage to the mechanics of the composition, reveals a series of fascinating textual strategies surrounding the European production of knowledge about the New World. Specifically, Zen followed well-established patterns for European travel writing, playing with quotation, pastiche, and temporality in order to depict his fellow Venetians as experts on the Americas and as viable contestants in the race to New World empire.

One of the most prevalent metaphors for conversion in early modern England was the cure of a diseased soul. This article draws together religious controversy, medical manuals, and individual accounts of conversion to chart the variety of sources that inform this metaphor, from the practical experience of the sickbed to the typological traditions of biblical interpretation. It explores the varied language of spiritual sickness in order to reevaluate both the operations of religious feeling and recent accounts of metaphor as embodied, and suggests instead that conversionary cures open up the category of imagined sensation and the complex connections between bodily and spiritual feeling in this period.

In 1556, Giovanni Battista Ramusio facilitated the publication in Venice of a report by Pedro Sancho, official secretary to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Sancho’s text included a lengthy description of the architecture and plan of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire, and was the first such description to appear in print. Previous scholarship has used it as a primary source for reconstructing the appearance of Inca Cuzco as seen by Sancho, Pizarro, and their cohort at the moment of their arrival there in 1533. The text, however, is also evidence for other kinds of historical information, for it demonstrates how habits of description engaged in the production of space. The impact of Sancho’s textual representation of Cuzco is evident in a contemporary reaction to it — a woodcut print that accompanied it when it was first published. Considered together, the text and image lay bare the ways in which modes of representation facilitated political, architectural, and urbanistic change in the sixteenth-century New World.

This essay discusses the Latin term ingenium within the writings of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). It proposes that although ingenium does not easily translate into English, Bacon uses the term in a clearly defined range of senses. For the most part, he echoes the discourse of ingenuity and inventiveness common to many sixteenth-century humanists, but differs from them in sharply delimiting the scope and status of ingenious thinking. In particular, he excludes ingenuity from the logical portion of his reformed art of discovery: as the goal of this was demonstrative knowledge, Bacon (like the Aristotelian logicians he aimed to supplant) believed that it had to be the province of the intellect, not of ingenium. A fuller understanding of the ways in which Bacon uses ingenium casts his methodological thought into illuminating new relief, and draws attention to the manner in which Bacon’s ideas were appropriated, criticized, and misunderstood in the half century after his death — not least by the self-styled Baconians in and around the early Royal Society.

The focus of this article is a vast seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople, which is an exceptional drawing of the city, currently displayed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The panorama is an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda designed by the Franciscan friar Niccolò Guidalotto da Mondavio. Guidalotto also prepared a large manuscript, held in the Vatican Library, which details the panorama’s meaning and the motivation behind its creation. It depicts the city as seen from across the Golden Horn in Galata, throwing new light on both the city and the relationships between the rival Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. It also trumpets the unalloyed Christian zeal of Niccolò Guidalotto and serves as a fascinating example of visual Crusade propaganda against the Ottomans in the early modern period.

This essay compares the rhetoric of providentialism in Samuel Ward’s 1621 engraving To God, In Memorye of his Double Deliveraunce from ye Invincible Navie and ye Unmatcheable Powder Treason with that in Thomas Middleton’s 1624 play A Game at Chess. Both satirize the negotiations over the Spanish Match by using providentialist discourse to modulate and veil their more satirical, and polemical, intentions. Ward and Middleton employ a technique of historical retrospection, referring to past events in order to present a simultaneously diachronic and synchronic world view.

The Life of Maria de’ Medici, the biographical series of twenty-four large-size paintings executed for the Queen Mother of France by Peter Paul Rubens in 1622–25, is traditionally regarded by historians as both a masterpiece of Baroque art and a monument of political naïveté. According to this view, the series was a disrespectful visual bravado that exposed both patron and painter to scandal by publicly advertising the queen’s political ideas and ambitions, which were not only audacious, but often in opposition to those of her son King Louis XIII. This article challenges this assessment by reading the Life within the context of seventeenth-century uses of dissimulation and spatial control as strategies to limit both intellectual and physical access to information. It argues that the series was imbued with multiple layers of meaning, intended for different audiences, and that access to these was strictly controlled by the queen and her circle.

This study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.