This article addresses the baronial nobility's much-neglected role in supporting the reestablishment of pontifical power in the wake of the Western Schism. In doing so, this article stresses how acts of noble revolt were complemented by extensive patterns of collaboration in the Papal States’ government, armies, and relations with other principalities. The nobility proved to be a fundamental source of support—a support that was theorized around and expressed in the language of fealty and devotion. In light of this, my analysis further contributes to the study of the perseverance of noble power and ubiquity of transregional factions in late medieval societies.

When ancient Greek heritage was rehabilitated in the Renaissance, its students were first and foremost aspiring humanists, and, almost as a rule, men. An early exception was Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–88), the eldest daughter of the Duke of Milan, Francesco I Sforza. I argue that she not only studied the Greek language but also acted as a patron of Greek studies. Sforza's double role is confirmed by two Greek grammars dedicated to her and connected to the Byzantine migrant Constantine Lascaris. These documents reveal how Sforza probably studied the language, and how she was imagined as a student.

This article traces the evidence left by early modern readers who marked their Bibles’ annotations—both by taking attentive notice of them and by leaving their own inky traces on them. Among the burgeoning critical interest in both printed and manuscript marginalia there has been little interrogation of the intersection between the two. This article traces the evidence of what the readerly marginalia of biblical annotations can tell us about their readers. It argues that literacy formed and fostered by reading annotated Bibles was likely to be skillful and attuned to issues of interpretation and meaning-making.

Bardic poetry in early modern Ireland was the product of highly sophisticated, transactional, and mutually beneficial relationships between poets and their aristocratic patrons. This paper combines innovative methods of network analysis with traditional textual scholarship to visualize and examine these social relationships, which played a role, at both a national and regional level, in maintaining and upholding the values of Gaelic Ireland's elite. Focusing on the period from the declaration of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, in 1541, to the beginning of the Restoration period, in 1660, it highlights and explores an under-studied aspect of Renaissance Ireland.

After Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco died in 1564, royal officials watched with trepidation as the conquistadores’ descendants adopted heraldry, hereditary titles, and royal ceremony, supposedly in jest. Scholars have argued that the royal judges used these over-the-top fiestas to frame powerful settlers for sedition. This article instead argues that the royal judges’ obsession with how wealthy settlers adopted royal pomp and circumstance, on the one hand, and refusal to recognize how they imprecisely imitated the Mexica nobility, on the other, helped to consolidate Spanish power—symbolic and literal—in New Spain.

Early modern Gospel harmonies have received little attention and are mostly studied as poor precursors to modern synoptic criticism. This article reassesses the harmony's significance by reconstructing its development ca. 1500–1700, reaching two conclusions. First, it argues that Gospel harmonies acted as a touchstone for critical intellectual developments such as the rise of scientific chronology. Second, it argues that the harmony's transformation over this period, influenced by multiple overlapping disciplines, resulted in it becoming one of the most creative scholarly genres by the late seventeenth century. This interdisciplinarity was simultaneously the prime attraction of the harmony and the reason for its eighteenth-century decline.