The essay analyzes episodes from the first day of story-telling in the Decameron and the contemporary tradition of mendicant exempla comparing their differing means of influencing moral behavior. The Decameron discloses a crisis in the exemplum tradition between conventional sermonizing and a heightened sense of clerical frailty, and responds by showing a new way of narrating moral problems to a sceptical readership. While the exemplum provides a framework for the Decameron narrators, they treat this tradition with irony, emphasizing the contingent, subjective apprehension of moral truth. The various narrative personalities and the subtle associations between narrator and protagonist, protagonist and audience illustrate a mode of communication that recognizes the reader's capacity to listen.

This essay considers the role of contingency in the history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Were there any events — a birth, marriage, or death; a battle; a natural catastrophe — that might have changed decisively the trajectory of Italian history? The Roman papacy is one institution whose history, replete with contingent events (1305, 1378, 1418, 1527) had a profound impact on Italian experience. The foreign invasions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the product of a cluster of historical accidents in France and Spain, which combined to create the most significant development in the early modern history of Italy.

In 1542, Florence's Duke Cosimo I established a magistracy to supervise territorial hospitab and consolidate poor relief. Tense relations between the magistracy and these hospitab demonstrate the barriers to bureaucratic centralization in the sixteenth-century state, and underscore the fact that the shift from traditional charity to ‘new philanthropy’ was as much geographical and cultural as temporal. Tensions between the magistracy and successive Medici Dukes also demonstrate how in negotiations between bureaucrats and local communities territorial rulers could play both sides to advance their personal authority, and could learn from the difficulties of one magistracy how better to design another.

This article examines the circumstances of the death of Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville (d. 1483) and his plans for burial in his Roman church of Sant'Agostino and in the Cathedral of Rouen of which he was archbishop. I argue that the cardinal planned for his body to be interred near the high altar of Sant'Agostino, in a monument since lost, while his heart was to be taken to Rouen and buried in the crossing of the cathedral. By means of an analysis of burial practices in Italy and France, I propose that d'Estouteville's designs anticipated such grandiose sixteenth-century projects as those of Julius II (d. 1513) and Cardinal Georges d'Amboise (d.1510).

This study proposes a new reading of Delie and tries to shed a new light on the poet himself. Sceve appears here not only as the humanist we all know, but as a Christian poet, a poet as much interested in biblical and other religious sources as in Classical and Italian ones. In his canzoniere, Scève follows very closely, and even sometimes imitates, a corpus of fixed-form poems — rondeaux parfaits, ballades, and chants royaux — written by poets of the two previous generations for poetic contests known as Puys. And he constantly expresses his love and describes his idol in terms, images, and symbols directly borrowed from Marian poetry. To the Christian cult of the Virgin Mary corresponds for the Lover the pagan cult of Délie.

Contrary to a tradition of scholarly insistence on the invisibility of Florentine patrician women outside the domestic sphere, it can be argued such women did in effect perform a significant, public, or quasi-public, function in the negotiation of relationships between the Republic and other Italian, and European, elites. This article assembles fragmentary evidence concerning dancing and musical performance by women directed towards the entertainment of visiting notables in the second half of the Quattrocento, and uses modern concepts of gendered performance and the performance of gender to speculate on the nature of that experience for the women involved.

Over centuries, the fortunes of the verb to be illustrate the involvement of language in history and history in language, and the particular role of figurative language in the early reforms of the established church in Tudor England significantly reflects this involvement. Explanations and controversies regarding eucharistic belief during the archbishopric of Thomas Cranmer, which of ten draw on Continental sources, show that language and rhetoric were at the heart of Cranmer's basic problem, namely, how effectively to convey a metaphorical conception of presence. These arguments variously parallel contemporary ones concerning meaning and the nature of metaphor, as evident in writings of Benveniste, Derrida, and especially Ricoeur.

Ceremonies of election to abbess were occasions of great display. Election to this highest of offices was the defining moment of a successful nun's life, and thereafter self-identity became crucial. This article examines an anatomy of an election of 1509 by a nun from San Zaccaria in Venice; the illustrated chronicle of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Venice dated 1523, written by an anonymous nun; and the visual representation (in a range of media) of various abbesses from Florence, Pavia, and Venice. Success in election conferred the possibility of personality and consequently legitimated personalized representation.

This study explores the dynamics between visual images and expectations for feminine monasticism in northern Europe via two paintings from the Cistercian convent of Flines. It argues that abbess Jeanne de Boubais commissioned the images for clerics who had promoted reform of Flines, in order to suggest compliance with the mandates of the program and the integral place of the convent within Cistercian monasticism. In the wake of the dissolution of several convents that had resisted reform, conveying a desire to yield to the Order must have seemed crucial for the community's survival.

The chiasmatic themes of architecture as frozen music and music as singing the architecture of the world run as leitmotifs through the histories of philosophy, music, and architecture. Rarely, however, can historical intersections of these practices he identified. This study proposes a transient nexus of architecture, sacred music, and theology in early modern Florence.

John Foxe, the martyrologist, and John Day, the Elizabethan master printer, played central roles in the emergence of literate print culture following the death of William Tyndale, translator of the New Testament and parts of the Bible into English. In so doing, Foxe and his publisher contributed to the accepted modern belief that Protestantism and early printing reinforced each other. Foxe's revision of his biography of Tyndale in the second edition of Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days (1570) and his collaboration on Day's 1573 publication of Tyndale's collected non-translation prose place intense stress upon the trio's active involvement in the English book trade. The engagement of Foxe and Day with Tyndale's publishing career exemplifies ways in which these bookmen exploited the power of the printing press to effect religious and cultural

Among the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, the intimate epîtres she exchanged with her mother, Louise de Savoie, and brother, François I are relatively unknown. Of moderate literary interest, these poems are most important for the insight they provide into the role of the princess in the complex negotiation of gender and power that was necessary when women sought powers of rule. The epîtres reveal a “division of labor” in the representation of femininity: through the symbolism of the family “trinité” the family distanced Louise from the constraints of gender and embodied existence, displacing the physical and symbolic burden of female flesh onto Marguerite.

Some descriptions of ballets performed at the late Valois court in France draw upon accounts of choreographic and equestrian maze-like performances extending back into early antiquity. Common elements include a convoluted complexity in the dancers’ movements, repeated reversals, and a series of patterns variously reformed after regular interruptions. The practice of medieval dances at Easter upon the labyrinth designs of one or more French cathedrals may also have exercised an influence on Renaissance dancing. A sonnet by Ronsard describing a labyrinthine ballet invites at least two metaphysical interpretations. Neoplatonic theories of magic are apparently reflected in the choreography by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx for his Balet Comique de la Royne. Labyrinth dances in Ben Jonson's masques are associated with Orphic cosmogony. The description of an angelic labyrinth dance in Milton's Paradise Lost leads to historical and theoretical questions concerning the intermittent persistence of the phenomenon.

This article discusses the ways in which fifteenth-century nuns financed, shaped and used works of art and architecture at the Benedictine convent of San Zaccaria in Venice. Evidence from chronicles, account books, liturgical manuscripts, reports of visits to the convent, and inscriptions on the works of art themselves shows that the nuns viewed art within their convent extremely proprietarily. While they accepted subsidies from the civic government, indulgences from popes, privileges from Byzantine emperors, and donations from private patrons, the nuns paid close attention to the administration of commissions within the convent church and committed substantial funds to artistic projects, making them their own.

Ponttis de Tyard, a lesser-known member of the Pleiade poets of mid-sixteenth-century France, was deeply influenced by the concerns of his comrades and contemporaries about the elemental remoteness of all “reality “ and the resulting “semiosic drift “ undermining any attempt to denote it. He expresses this preoccupation during the mid 1550s, in the Douze Fables de fleuves ou fontaines, his long underrated collection of twelve mythological fables, each accompanied by directions for a fable-based painting and an explanatory sonnet. Like the author's more highly regarded Discours du temps from the same years, the Douze Fables registers traces of not only the “strong” hermeneutic paradigm of the hermetic Neoplatonic tradition, but also the anxiety-ridden mannerist aesthetic of the period.

This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, the complainte arose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded from fin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by the complaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.

This essay examines the conflicted double logic of vernacularization in the English Reformation — specifically in the Book of Common Prayer, and more specifically in its Pentecost service — and argues that the transition to the vernacular in public worship simultaneously served the state's political ends and worked against those very ends by devolving religious authority to individuals. Understanding this dynamic, the author suggests, not only clarifies the role of language and text in the early modern constitution of nation and subject, but may also indicate a synthetic way out of a 400-year-old historiographical stalemate.

It is little known that John Foxes Book of Martyrs included stories of Jews. Contradictory and complex, Foxes writings on Jews show how a powerful writer conceived of the place of Jews in a newly self-concious, Protestant English national identity amidst conflicting currents of theology, race, and politics. The ideologies of Reforming Protestantism supplied the explicit political frameworks through which age-old stereotypes about the cultural or racial other could be expressed. Our understanding of early modern philo-judaism and toleration should be revised accordingly.

In book 1 of Castiglione's II libro del cortegiano Lodovico da Canossa's sprezzatura — embodied in his pretended inability to teach us how to be perfect courtiers — is usually seen as consonant with the treatise's aristocratic bias, especially among its Anglophone readers. In this essay, I argue that study of Cicero's use of dissimulatio — or “assumed simplicity“— in De oratore helps us to understand the importance of indirection as a critical tool. I apply this insight to Canossa's apparently conservative treatment of nobility, and show how his sprezzatura demystifies (rather than mystifies) the source of noble self-expression. Canossa's sprezzatura reveals how imitatio can replace heredity as a means to elite status.

This article demonstrates an early modern association between the trade of shoemaking and the act of altering the festal calendar. It traces this link through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary texts including Thomas Deloney's Gentle Craft, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and — most notably — Henry V. The article argues that the depictions of cobblers making holidays resonated with the early modern English politics of ritual observance, and its concluding discussion of the Saint Crispin's Day speech in Henry V shows how the play imagines king and cobblers vying for control of England's commemorative practice.