Paul Oskar Kristeller's interpretation of Renaissance humanism as a "characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture" has exercised an enormous influence on Renaissance studies. What I wish to do here is to call attention agroup of works that affected in one way or another Kristeller's thinking about the Renaissance in general and about Renaissance humanism in particular.

The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the possibility of polyvalent geographic identity. Ben Jonsons country house poem, “To Sir Robert Wroth, “ was written from the vantage point of a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. Microhistorical examination of the Wroths and their village in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals their insistent local identity and resistance to the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London. The immediate context of their resistance to the center was a Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to bringdown the price of grain in London. Economically threatened, the Wroths orchestrated sabotage against the project, but eventually acquiesced to the Privy Council and re-entered the centrally administered commonwealth fold. Jonsons poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a celebration of the Wroths as exemplars of commonwealth identity within local region. Only when they distanced themselves from local identity did the Wroths become suitable for Jonson as a poetic model of the country ideal. In Jonsons hands, the country house poem becomes the vehicle of multivalent identification with place.

This study reconstructs the thematic and literary presence of a labyrinth in Montaigne's "Sur des vers de Virgile." Indispensable to such a reconstruction will be a consideration of Catullus's epithalamium on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis from which are derived the hexameters textually anchoring the labyrinth in Montaigne's text. I will then place these verses in their French surroundings and pursue the insights that an awareness of the Catullan context makes available for interpretations of the essay.

This essay traces the opposition to the Galenic notion of a homology between male and female genitalia (the “one-sex model”) and identifies the French physician André Dulaurens as the first outspoken opponent. After Dulaurens, the German physician Johann Peter Lotichius makes the opposition to that model more clearly an argument that may be called “feminist.”

This essay reassesses the role of reading in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy by analyzing Galileo Galilei's Starry Messenger and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. The unreliability of telescopic vision becomes a dominant metaphor for the unreliability of reading printed texts. Where Galileo sought to put the reader in his own position as a scientific observer by making reading a form of observation, Cavendish used the telescopic image to show how readers become the makers of their own fictions. From the recognition that reading and observation finally reveal our relationship to the world rather than the world itself comes what will ultimately be the modern assumption that acts of observation are also acts of reading.

In the last few decades religion and the church have moved from the margins — or, more precisely, the chronological borders — of Italian Renaissance studies to their center. Less than half a century ago it was possible for Étienne Delaruelle and his collaborators on the Renaissance volumes of Fliche and Martin's great Histoire de l'Église to justify excluding from their survey of the emerging "national" churches of the period any consideration of Italy, "it being always subsumed within the history of the papacy." If religion had any place in the Renaissance it was, in the words of Carlo Angeleri, as "a problem."