This article presents the first sustained study of Pietro Perugino's destroyed “Assumption of the Virgin” altarpiece commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV for the Sistine Chapel. My analysis reconstructs the frescoed altarpiece's ritual setting and relates it to imagery associated with Sixtus's promotion of the controversial Immaculate Conception feast. The altarpiece's ties to the Immaculate Virgin intensified during the 1483 Assumption feast, which marked the chapel's inauguration. The Assumption represented a salient event in Rome's liturgical calendar, and I demonstrate how the altarpiece allowed Sixtus to temporarily expand a local communal feast to include an expression of papal privilege and authority.

Do resonances of Cervantes's frustrated attempts to be granted a royal appointment in the Spanish Indies filter into the “Quijote”? Can the author be glimpsed in the novel of which he is also a reader? What holds Don Quijote and Sancho Panza together and gives this episodic novel its coherence? Attuned to the rich conversational exchanges between the two protagonists, I argue that Don Quijote's escalating promises and Sancho's dogged pursuit of an island to govern, together with the triangulated relationship of Don Quijote, Sancho, and the imagined Dulcinea, result in what can rightly be called Cervantes's anti-anthem to America.

This article offers an intensive—although still not exhaustive—reading of a letter written to the adolescent Lorenzo de’ Medici by Braccio Martelli, a member of his brigata. It is a document that focuses on the celebrations accompanying the wedding of Lucrezia Donati, the object of Lorenzo's affections, to Niccolò Ardinghelli, an anti-Medicean living in exile. I examine some of the letter's multiple overlapping topics and contexts, including private sociability (wedding practices, music, dance, dress), the trophy status of Lucrezia, sexual and political tensions, and the ties between the letter writer and his addressee in terms of client/patron and homosocial relations.

Across the early modern Iberian world, a unique form of infamy materialized in the sambenito. Mostly known as the penitential garment imposed by the Inquisition on the individuals it condemned, the sambenito was also exhibited in churches and monasteries as a monument of infamy. This article traces the origins, development, and decline of the sambenito, with a particular focus on its material and visual aspects. It argues that displayed sambenitos performed mnemonic and evidentiary roles in societies obsessed with genealogy, while also bringing to light the continuous resistance and opposition to the sambenito on the ground.

Andrea Riccio was renowned for making bronze statuettes of classical subjects, especially satyrs. His sculptures have long been associated with humanist culture in Padua, where he worked, but this article reveals how they also engaged regional vernacular traditions in the aftermath of the War of the League of Cambrai. An impactful source was Ruzante's plurilingual comedy “La Pastoral.” Confronting Venetian hegemony, Riccio and Ruzante revitalized Padua's ancient legacy by molding the pastoral around popular concerns. While Renaissance bronze casting and dialect literature have been analyzed independently, their local interchange demonstrates sculpture's potency in addressing interests shared among artisans and writers.

In 1492, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, the future author of “De Orbe Novo,” sent a letter to Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the primate of Spain, describing the state of Spanish education as Martyr took up a post as court tutor. This study argues that Martyr's letter was a satire that relied upon a close intertextual relationship with Juvenal's “Satires.” This framework allowed Martyr to offer layered analyses of Spanish Latinity, the dynamics between Spanish and Italian humanists, patronage, and the role of arms and letters in noble life. Martyr's letter revealed a complex, and sometimes contradictory, assessment of court education, as well as an active reception of Juvenal.

Scotland's mythical and medieval history has long been acknowledged as of critical importance in its sixteenth-century present. This article tracks these discourses across the channel, showing for the first time the limited circulation of Scottish histories in France and the dominance of English versions of the past in French texts, ranging from short, printed books to royal presentation manuscripts. This Anglocentric view not only helps to explain the discordant French views of the Scots (as loyal yet uncivil, and above all warlike) but also contributes to the ongoing reassessment that the auld alliance was not permanently binding but, rather, intermittently activated when political or economic interests required.

Contrary to the idea that awareness of extinction is quintessentially modern, this article argues that Bernard Palissy conceived of extinct species—what he called “lost species” (“espèces perdues”)—in the sixteenth century. This premodern craftsman knew that human activity caused species to vanish. But how? By retracing his interactions with merchants and fishermen at the French Atlantic ports, I show that Palissy learned about the overfishing of waters from other commercial actors. Rather than paint human-caused extinction as a novel insight, I demonstrate that Palissy drew on common vernacular knowledge about the depletion of the ocean. Palissy's pronouncements, it is further shown, expand his well-known polemic against bookish learning. The artisan championed practical experience against a textual tradition of natural history, exposing the latter's silence on commercially decimated species.

Most scholars who comment on Catherine of Aragon's speech and movements at the annulment trial on 21 June 1529 have overlooked significant discrepancies between the five eyewitness accounts of this day—by an English gentleman, the English king, and the French, Venetian, and Vatican envoys. This essay, in contrast, gives particular focus to discrepancies in these accounts. These contradictions speak to a rhetorical war over Catherine's reputation, one that reflects tensions across Europe that were exacerbated by the trial. Catherine herself may be termed an agent in this rhetorical war, given that her own voice makes itself heard within each account.

In sixteenth-century Brazil, several European women governed the captaincies of their late or absent husbands during the first century of Portuguese colonization. A contextual and lexical analysis of the male-authored sources reveals that these women acted decisively to protect and expand familial patrimonies and, in doing so, were part of the colonizing movement. Although extensive written evidence survives that attests to their authority and agency over colonial affairs, their importance has been overlooked in the scholarship. Therefore, this essay argues that a small group of elite European women became imperial agents who wielded power against colonial subjects in select circumstances.

This article investigates the relation between music and emotions at exequies in Italy between ca. 1560 and ca. 1660. Mapping the lexicon used to describe music in funeral books, I highlight the coexistence of two diverging semantic domains, sadness and sweetness. Their juxtaposition corresponds to an aesthetic principle that informed the conceptualization of the entire ritual's artistic setup—as divided between the mournful and the pleasurable. Reading funeral orations, moreover, I show that the ambivalent terms with which the experience of exequial music was verbalized mirrored an ambivalent conception of the liturgy for the dead and, ultimately, of death itself.

This article demonstrates the merited inclusion of Giovanni Stradano's olive-oil engraving in the “Nova Reperta,” a series showcasing postclassical inventions that Florentine nobleman and Alterati member Luigi Alamanni commissioned in the late 1580s. The image and accompanying inscription must be understood within their broader cultural, scientific, legal, political, and socioeconomic contexts. The print reflects olive oil's economic potential and the evolving dietary preferences in Medici Florence. It evinces the flexibility of the concept of invention. Rather than being technological, the novelties mirror ideas central to the Alterati academics around classical knowledge and the alchemical ability of humans to transform nature through artisanship.

When, in 1619, Frederick V of the Palatinate accepted the crown of Bohemia, he justified his action, which challenged the authority of Emperor Ferdinand II and precipitated the Thirty Years’ War, by the need to uphold the public order, rights, and responsibilities connected to the estates of the empire. English engagements with the German vocabulary of estates drew upon the concept of reason of state—those amoral political calculations needed to maintain a group's estate, or standing. The article examines the significance of these differences in a vocabulary of estates and state.

This article addresses the explicit utilization of Christian discourse about hell and purgatory within the writings of sixteenth-century Italian Jewry. The vast majority of Jewish texts about hell (gehinnom) from the period ignore Christian discourse on the topic or only allude to it obliquely. Three unpublished Hebrew sources, two of them drawn from informal marginalia, demonstrate a more open approach, in which the infernal cosmography and terminology of Christianity are consciously and explicitly appropriated. These sources not only serve as important case studies for Jewish understandings of hell during the period but also can shed broader light on the types of cultural maneuvering that characterized Jewish cultural life in the Christian milieu of Cinquecento Italy.