The disruptive figure of the “striped layman” appeared in printed texts and images around the year 1500 in the southern German lands. This essay shows how it came to represent a new kind of reader of vernacular medical publications. Exploring the illustrated books of the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig, their local context of humanist discourse, and the visual practice of their publisher, Johann Grüninger, I argue that their oft-neglected woodcuts of people in striped clothes constitute powerful visual commentary of Brunschwig's (and others’) mission to impart medical agency and expertise to the “common man” at the eve of the Reformation.

This article argues that the medical discourse of Machiavelli's “Mandragola” is profoundly important both for understanding the play and for revisiting its author's philosophical and political writings. I show that discussions in “Mandragola” of doctors, medicine, eating, and elimination ultimately break down the traditional paradigm that opposes truth, nourishment, and healing to deception, problematic food, and illness. The play's extended discourse around medicine undermines the ideal of the physician who heals the state and the pharmakon of words that heal the soul (in Plato, Livy, Saint Augustine, and Machiavelli's “Discorsi”), questioning in turn notions of knowledge and truth.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This article argues that its Council of the Indies became substantially more bureaucratic partly due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council's fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid's anxieties about women's sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. Women's influence over council operations nonetheless persisted, through near-invisible labor contributions and petitions. One female author in Peru even envisioned influential women directing the empire.

John Calvin's “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe's fraudulent relics. Yet, theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while for Catholics prayer's intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in Calvin's humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus's satirical or devotional works, but to his rhetorical theory of copia. The “Traité” amasses a copia, an abundance, of fakes, burying the cult of relics in its own contradictions. Fusing rhetoric and proof, this mass juxtaposition subjects sacred presence to noncontradiction, patrolling vital confessional borders in Reformation theology.

Through Venetian Inquisition trials relating to Protestantism, witchcraft, and Judaism, this article illuminates the centrality of food and eating practices to religious identity construction. The Holy Office used food to assert its model of post-Tridentine piety and the boundaries between Catholics and the non-Catholic populations in the city. These trial records concurrently act as access points to the experiences and beliefs—to the lived religion—of ordinary people living and working in Venice from 1560 to 1640. The article therefore offers new insight into the workings and impacts of the Counter-Reformation.