In 1433, Lorenzo Valla attacked contemporary jurisprudence with a treatise attributed to the civilian lawyer Bartolus of Saxoferrato, the “De insigniis et armis.” This was considered Europe's first treatise on heraldry until a team of legal historians questioned its subject matter and authenticity. Meanwhile, visual culture continues to be seen as peripheral to Valla's critical agenda. This article proposes that Valla engaged images as manifestations of social authority and historical change. His epistle against Bartolus participates in an intellectual history of intersections between philology, antiquarianism, and the anthropology of images in which heraldry has been defined.

Accounts of public justice in the Italian communes emphasize mediation of urban conflicts, overlooking interactions between rural communities and civic tribunals. Foregrounding the countryside reveals how nonelites responded to public courts and procedures such as anonymous denunciation and ex officio inquisition. This article argues that a Florentine court's outcomes resulted from the intersection of institutional structures, local power relations, and rural inhabitants’ in-court behavior. It uses procedural records in conjunction with notarial cartularies and public documentation to explicate the local dynamics shaping testimony. Claiming ignorance was rural peoples’ tactical response to elite malefactors' enmeshment with the commune as rural proxies.

This essay examines what Arabs knew about Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the early modern period. While there have been studies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impact of Protestant missions on the Arab East, there has been no study of the Protestant movement and its confrontation with Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the period between 1517 and 1698. Although Protestantism failed in gaining converts, the rivalry between Protestant England and Catholic France in co-opting converts to their military and ideological camps resulted in religio-social fissures that would have a lasting impact on Christians and Christianity in the Middle East.

Bramante's illusionistic apse for Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan has long been understood as a triumph of Renaissance rationality. This essay shifts attention to the votive and cult contexts of the space and the miraculous image it enshrines. The coro finto efficaciously enhanced the authority of the Madonna and her sponsors—the Sforza dynasty and a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin—by dramatically framing and amplifying the image's potency. Santa Maria presso San Satiro thus flourished as one of Milan's most intensely contested ecclesiastical arenas, in which devotees and institutions maneuvered for access to the potent cult image.

This article analyzes the “De Bellis Gothorum,” a long neglected and misunderstood history of the ancient Goths written in 1472–73 by Nicholas of Modruš, the leading Croatian-Illyrian bishop at the papal curia. By placing the work in its proper context, this article reconstructs a previously unknown episode in the political history of the fifteenth-century Adriatic. It is argued that the “De Bellis Gothorum” was in fact a national history that was meant to provide a trans-Adriatic network of Croatian and Bosnian nobles and churchmen with support from Naples and the papacy for their border wars against the Ottomans and reestablishment of their national kingdom.

This article discusses annotations to some eighty surviving copies of William Caxton's “Golden Legend.” It assesses reactions from male and female readers across the religious spectrum, exploring the varied ways in which early modern readers engaged with a book that quickly became—and has remained—a shorthand for medieval religion. It seeks to contribute to the history of the “Legend” itself, to historical understanding of annotation, and to the history of reading during the Reformation.

Recent scholarship on the first English translation of Thomas More's “Utopia” has asked how its publication in the 1550s fits with the larger agenda of Protestant Reformers who promoted the book alongside their other civic projects. This article argues that the initiatives of greatest relevance were the new house of correction at Bridewell (est. 1553–57) and the infamous Vagrancy Act of 1547–49, which failed to introduce slavery as a punishment in English law. Evidence of user interactions with the 1550s editions, including indexing, annotation, commonplacing, and quotation, helps to analyze how the text's complicated ideas about penal labor were received and reemphasized by early English readers.

In June 1498, the Florentine government publicly punished and exiled the Piagnona, the lone bell of the church of San Marco, for its role in defending Girolamo Savonarola during the April siege that led to the preacher's execution. Drawing on new evidence, this essay offers the most complete account of this still poorly understood chapter in Renaissance history, examining its complex and conflicting motives. At the same time, the punishment of the Piagnona, and struggle for its return, affords uncommon insight into the culture's deepest structures of thinking about what bells were, and who had the legal authority to adjudicate their fate.

Painted in 1508, Raphael's “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” is animated by innovative pictorial techniques using light, shadow, and color. Yet scholars have scarcely discussed its dazzling palette or sought to explain the image's meaning. I argue that Raphael's “Saint Catherine” exemplifies the artist's thematic interpretation of divine revelation in optical terms. Aristotelian theories of vision illuminate new dimensions of Raphael's engagement with scientific and theological sight. From this examination, new criteria for identifying the painting's patron emerge. By reframing the “Saint Catherine” within the rubric of contemporary optics, color's role as an allegory for Raphael's subject comes increasingly to light.

Richard Topcliffe (1531–1604) was the most infamous torturer of Elizabethan England. He was also a professional reader. Historians of the book are interested in how repressive regimes read the books of their enemies. This essay identifies a number of books that contain Topcliffe's marginalia and have not previously been studied by scholars. It argues that Topcliffe's reading was forensic in nature, and was utilized directly by the Elizabethan regime in its campaign against Catholicism. This investigation reveals the connection between racking and reading, and demonstrates the ways in which Topcliffe's reading legitimated state-authorized violence.

Early modern ornament might profitably be considered as a set of systems, each with its own rules. It signaled wealth and status. It offered pleasure and prompted curiosity. It cut across the apparent divide between the vernacular and the classicizing. It was relational, understood in the context of a given subject but not necessarily subservient to it. The notion of ornament as essentially supplemental and the prejudice against ornamental excess are both children of the late eighteenth century. Both ideas depend on a post-Enlightenment conviction of the work of art as an autonomous, aesthetically self-sufficient object, an idea not fully formed in the early modern era.

Following the first European voyages of exploration to the New World, several Ottoman authors debated whether Alexander the Great may have already known of the American continent in classical antiquity. By exploring the contours of this previously unstudied intra-Ottoman debate, the present article challenges the prevailing scholarly view that sixteenth-century Ottoman writings about the Americas were at best frivolous and at worst incoherent. Instead, these texts engaged with many of the same questions provoked by the discoveries in contemporary Europe, while at the same time intersecting with the most profound and contested concerns of Ottoman statecraft.

This article uses the life and writings of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen, to explore the methods and tools of early modern ethnographers. For decades Crusius recorded contemporary Greek life under Ottoman rule by investigating a broad array of visual, material, textual, and oral evidence and by mustering various scholarly methods. The documentary record that Crusius compiled demonstrates that early modern ethnography was one among many period forms of knowledge making in which tropes and techniques from several fields and disciplines came together fruitfully.

This article argues that, despite the protestations to the contrary of William Camden (1551–1623), the antiquarian methods of his “Britannia” are indebted to the “Origines Antwerpianae” of Johannes Goropius Becanus (1519–73). Both Goropius and Camden posited the contemporary existence of an unchanged primeval language (Dutch for Goropius and Welsh for Camden) wherein etymologies could be used to trace the origins and migrations of ancient peoples. Even as humanist philology underscored the mutability of language, Goropius and Camden selectively ignored this mutability in order to have a basis other than myth or legend for reconstructing antiquity. Their efforts, however, created new myths about language and its ability to bridge present and distant past.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans writing about the ius gentium went from treating indigenous American rulers as the juridical equals of Europe's princes to depicting them as little more than savage brutes, incapable of bearing dominium and ineligible for the protections of the law of peoples. This essay examines the writings of Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili to show how this transformation in European perceptions of Native Americans resulted from fundamental changes in European society. The emergence of a novel conception of sovereignty amid the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation was central to this shift and provided a new foundation for Europe's continued imperial expansion into the Americas.

This article provides the first sustained overview and analysis of the reception of Ovid's “Metamorphoses” in sixteenth-century English ballad culture. It highlights a significant tradition of translating materials from this ancient Roman source into the stuff of vernacular song—a phenomenon that can be traced back as far as 1552. Positing that popular music must have played a crucial role in shaping Tudor ideas about the “Metamorphoses,” this study draws attention to the textual, visual, aural, and kinetic dimensions of the Ovidiana that was regularly read, seen, heard, sung, and even danced to by early modern consumers of mythological ballads.

Milton's youthful interest in virginity is usually regarded as a private eccentricity abandoned on his maturation. His “Mask” is often read, analogously, as charting the Lady's movement from temporary virginity to wedded chastity. This essay challenges those claims, arguing that Milton's understanding of virginity's poetic and apocalyptic powers comes from Saint Jerome, whose ideas he struggles with throughout his career. Reading “A Mask” alongside Jerome suggests that Milton endorses the apocalyptic potential of virginity without necessarily assigning those powers to the Lady herself. In later works, Milton modifies and adapts Jerome before finally producing the perfect eremitic hero of “Paradise Regain'd.”

The “Codex Mendoza” is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most important postconquest accounts of pre-Hispanic Aztec life. Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the codex through a complex process that involved translations across media, languages, and cultural framings. Translations made Aztec culture legible and acceptable to nonnative viewers and readers by recasting indigenous practices, knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. Following a stratigraphic approach that examines the process through which natives and Spaniards created a transcultural manuscript, the article examines the multiple interpretations and negotiations involved in producing images, books, and information about the indigenous world in early colonial Mexico.

Galileo participated in exchanges of encrypted correspondence at key moments in his life. In 1610–11, following the publication of the “Sidereal Messenger,” ciphers helped Galileo to diplomatically reveal what he was observing through his telescope. After his Inquisition trial of 1633, Galileo and his closest allies relied on a substitution code (gergo) to protect the privacy of his conversations and to facilitate the removal of his library and manuscripts at Arcetri. Throughout this article, we position Galileo's use of codes within the rich contemporary literature about communicating securely and reflect on cryptic writing as a strategy of communication and dissimulation.