During the sixteenth century a symbiotic relationship developed between the form, use, and symbolic associations of the Venetian portego, the central reception and entertainment hall of Venetian palaces, and the paintings that were increasingly commissioned to ornament these spaces. The intended placement of the paintings affected their size, format, composition, subject matter, and contemporary interpretation. At the same time, the works of art themselves reflected upon and helped to define the social meanings of the space and the activities taking place there. Analyzing documentary sources and surviving paintings reveals the degree to which we can speak of the quadro da portego as a distinctive type of Venetian painting.

This study analyzes the campo of San Pietro di Castello from its mythologized origins to the Renaissance, paying particular attention to the architectural and political forces that shaped it. Although San Pietro was Venice’s cathedral from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, civic leaders marginalized the site, which incarnated the contentious relationship between the Roman Church and the Venetian republic. The essay places the campo at the center of inquiry because the episcopal complex’s significance is best discerned through diachronic analysis of the urban landscape. The building activities of its medieval and Quattrocento patrons generated a heterogeneous campo that incorporated morphological elements from two Venetian urbanistic types: the parish campo and the monastic island. Its sixteenth-century patriarchs created a new architectural vision of the campo, contesting its slippage from the center of Venetian life and forging a distinctive ensemble that differs markedly from the better-known piazzas at San Marco and Rialto.

Albrecht Dürer avidly collected for his professional and personal pleasure. Drawing upon textual and artistic evidence, it is possible to assess what sorts of objects he acquired. Through purchases, bartering, and gifts, Dürer amassed an important library with authors ranging from Euclid to Martin Luther. Among his many dealings with contemporary masters, he exchanged drawings with Raphael, swapped prints with Lucas van Leyden, and bought a Salvator Mundi illuminated by Susanna Horenbout. Dürer was fascinated by objects of natural rarity and of exotic, non-European origins. He also self-collected. Some paintings and drawings, occasionally inscribed with biographical or autobiographical information, were intended primarily for his, his family's, and his close friends’ private consumption. The holdings displayed in his Nuremberg house anticipated the art and wonder chambers that became popular later in the sixteenth century. The collection offers new insights into Dürer's conscious efforts of self-fashioning.

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.

Most of the key episodes in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) replay famous passages in Virgil's Aeneid. However, the concluding canto, describing the Redcrosse knight's betrothal to Una, is based on Maffeo Vegio's fifteenth-century Supplementum to the Aeneid, while, surprisingly, the Aeneid's much-disputed ending appears in triplicate in early sections of book 1. This article examines the place and function of book 1’s three imitations of the Aeneid's ending, while also relating them to Spenser's appropriations of the ending in later books of The Faerie Queene. It argues that, in making Redcrosse assume the position of Aeneas in largely negative contexts, book 1 opposes standard sixteenth-century interpretations of Aeneas's pietas, whereas later books of The Faerie Queene usually conform to prevalent early modern interpretations of the moral import of this powerful cultural memory.

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 essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.

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.

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage of Lord Thomas Howard and Lady Margaret Douglas, the headstrong niece of Henry VIII. After unpacking this historical drama, this essay advances the first substantial literary analysis of these poems by exploring the textual strategies through which Howard and Douglas attempted to negotiate the crown's insistent management of their erotic life. This treatment of the Douglas-Howard lyrics provides new opportunity to consider how the Devonshire MS reflects and refracts the gender dynamics of the contemporary Henrician court.

This article examines Catholic views of flight, exile, and displacement during the Dutch Revolt. It argues that the civil war in the sixteenth-century Low Countries generated a new imagery of exile among Catholics, a process that was to some extent similar to what had happened to Protestant refugees a few decades earlier. Yet the Dutch case also demonstrates that the contrasting outcomes of the revolts in the Northern and Southern Netherlands led to very different appreciations of exile in Catholic communities in both areas. Habsburg triumph and Tridentine militancy sparked a Counter-Reformation movement in the Southern Netherlands that glorified exile and presented refugees as exemplary forces of an international militant church. In the northern Dutch Republic the revolt created a more ambiguous Catholic identity, in which loyalty to an officially Protestant state could coincide with commitment to the Church of Rome.

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 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).

This article brings into focus the royalist experience of political defeat and cultural recovery in mid-seventeenth-century England. It shows how royalist writers developed a polemically charged psalmic poetics that allowed them to appropriate the discursive authority of their Puritan enemies, reestablish their own cultural standing, and prepare the way for religious and political return. Several writers who found common cause in 1650s royalist poetics appear in these pages, including Izaak Walton, Thomas Stanley, Jeremy Taylor, Henry King, and the author(s) of the 1649 Eikon Basilike. Royalist writers with more divided responses to psalmic polemics appear here as well, including the episcopal divine, Henry Hammond, and the Davidic poet, Abraham Cowley. The poet, psalmist, and polemicist John Milton is an important presence throughout: his Eikonoklastes seems aware of his opponents’ polemical project, as do his 1653 psalms, and Paradise Lost itself may respond to what he once derided as royalist “Psalmistry.”

One of the key episodes of Michel de Montaigne's trip to Rome (1580–81) was his visit to the Vatican Library, which he comments upon in his Journal de voyage, posthumously published. Strangely enough, few scholars have paid close attention to what Montaigne says about the selection of manuscripts and printed material he consulted there on 6 March 1581. He claims that he was given free access to that Wunderkammer, and scholarly research shows that his wish list indeed reflected his taste for irony, humor, and cultural diversity, ranging from Greco-Roman manuscripts to Egyptian papyrus and a Chinese booklet. At the same time, a case could be made for interpreting the selection, not as Montaigne's, but as the library custodian's, with Aquinas's sermons, anti-Lutheran material, and documents used at the Council of Trent. This paper tries to sort out to what extent the selection of books and items that Montaigne saw at the Vatican Library can be considered as the meeting ground between the interests of Montaigne himself as skeptic and the agenda of the Counter-Reformation.

This article examines certain aspects of the history of the doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation in early modern Catholic elaborations. It argues that the first Catholic theologians who engaged systematically with these doctrines, Domingo de Soto and Martin de Azpilcueta (Navarrus), used them as tools to investigate the potentialities and limitations of human language as a means to communicate meaning between a speaker and a listener. This article also shows that between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries Catholic theologians, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, changed the debate over these doctrines into a debate over the moral quality of the speaker's intention. By analyzing the developments of the Catholic debate over equivocation and mental reservation, this article seeks to offer a fresh interpretation of the links between theology, morality, and hermeneutics.

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.