Antonio Averlino (1400–69), called Filarete, designed the Ospedale Maggiore (or Great Hospital) in Milan with an ingenious sewer and ventilation system, which this article connects to ancient medical treatises on the human body’s exhalation of air and evacuation of waste. Critical examination of the system in relation to Hippocratic and Galenic medical theory, Filarete’s architectural thought, and the medico-spiritual function of early modern hospitals suggests that the architect conceived the building as a living and breathing corpus mysticum, whose internal organs cleansed the souls of its corrupted members.

This article provides a new framework for understanding sexuality in Erasmus. It examines his correspondence with the monk Servaas Rogerszoon and with other familiars, making a critique of the use of letters for life writing before and after P. S. Allen’s edition. It discusses monastic contexts, especially within the Augustinian order, and humanist knowledge of same-sex values in Greek and Latin philology. Moving beyond biography, it recreates discourses of same-sex practice in the “Adagia.” In placing the letters and adages within a domain of queer studies, it demonstrates for the first time the existence in Erasmus of a private coterie language of sex.

This article considers a previously unremarked manuscript edition of an early sixteenth-century poem written on the last page of an early seventeenth-century book in the British Library. A pasted bookseller’s catalogue entry and handwritten notes on the inside cover attribute the verses to Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). No other documentation connects the book or the poem to him, and the analysis begins from the premise that a forgery is certainly possible. The article then assesses the ways in which different humanistic methods of analysis support or undermine the interpretation of the book-manuscript hybrid as an imposture, misattribution, or authentic Galilean manuscript.

This essay argues that emerging scholar and artist Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78) disseminated her 1633 engraved self-portrait as a bid to enter the Republic of Letters and add her voice to the Europe-wide debate on women’s intellectual equality. To assess the portrait’s significance, I examine its sociocultural and artistic complexities, as well as its effect on two elite viewers, poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and Neo-Latin poet Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648). I conclude that although Van Schurman was unable to control the responses to her self-portraiture, its circulation afforded a crucial inflection point in her life’s journey, both outward and inward.

This article examines the relationship between protofeminism and faith in Lucrezia Marinella’s “Holocausto d’amore della vergine Santa Giustina” (1648). In particular, it explores Marinella’s departures from her sources, which serve to assert women’s excellence as preachers, exegetes, and rulers. Situating the life of the martyr Saint Justina within the context of the querelle des femmes and the Counter-Reformation backlash against public displays of female mysticism and religious authority, this contribution proposes that the hagiography promotes a form of female holiness inspired by the mystics and living saints who dispensed with male ecclesiastical mediation and exercised power beyond the monastic enclosure. This reading complicates the hypothesis that Marinella relinquished her pro-woman advocacy in her later years.