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.

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.

Sometime between 1544 and 1550, Michelangelo gave two sculptures, the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, to Roberto Strozzi, a fellow Florentine resident in Rome. Although the gift ostensibly signified gratitude for Strozzi’s hospitality during the artist’s convalescence from a grave illness, it had strong political undertones. Shortly after receiving this extraordinary present, Strozzi, most likely with Michelangelo’s consent, gave the sculptures away, presenting them to the King of France as part of an effort to persuade him to intervene on behalf of the Florentine Republic in its final struggle against Medici rule. Michelangelo’s loyalties, both personal and political, were simultaneously revealed and concealed in this act of calculated generosity. This article situates the gift within the context of Michelangelo’s habits of gift-giving, his networks of kinship, and the complicated politics of the 1530s and ’40s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Huntington Library manuscript HM904 is a verse miscellany compiled by Constance Aston Fowler, daughter of Lord Aston, in 1630s Staffordshire. Constance operated as a kind of literary agent, soliciting, exchanging, and circulating poems, as well as preserving them in her book. Many of these poems are by or about family and friends, but they also indicate her connections with far-reaching networks of manuscript transmission. In particular, the volume contains Catholic devotional verses in an unusual and somewhat archaic hand (Hand B) that also appears in another Catholic miscellany from 1650s Warwickshire; and secular verses that may be by the Catholic love poet William Habington, or may be hybrid compositions that imitate or adapt his work. Both these ingredients have much to say about the complex compilation processes of manuscript verse miscellanies, and about the cultural participation of women and Catholics in seventeenth-century England.

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.

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.

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.

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.