This article examines the letter collection of Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger (1406–38), an important translator of classical Greek. While scholars have edited the letters chronologically or analyzed them piecemeal, my study shows that as an ensemble the work artfully conveys a cultural and philosophical statement. By playing with time, circumstance, and persona, Lapo reveals the shortcomings of the humanist program, since it associated learning and virtue with public recognition; in addition, the letters elicit the readers’ empathy, as both patronage and Stoic self-reliance are found wanting. The humanist reawakening of the classics was witnessed here in conversation.

The focus on three drops of milk issuing from the Virgin’s breast in “The Virgin in Front of a Fire Screen” was inspired by contemporary representations of the Lactation of Saint Bernard. This latter iconography provides the visual context for the vivid address of eroticized depictions of the Madonna’s “one bare breast” in Flemish art and shows the intricate connections between visuality and materiality in fifteenth-century Flemish religious art. Some depictions of Saint Bernard’s lactation transform the Madonna’s jets of milk into rays of light aiming for his eyes, stressing the interchangeability of materiality and visuality as modes that were expected to facilitate and/or authenticate miraculous appearances of the Madonna.

Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of an Etruscan mausoleum has long puzzled scholars. Although they agree that the discovery of an Etruscan tomb at Castellina in Chianti inspired the work, questions remain about the master’s interpretation of Etruscan architecture and its place in his broader oeuvre. Through a reading of early documents related to the tomb discovery, this study offers a new interpretation of the work’s origin, content, and purpose. It situates the work within an epistolary exchange between some of Florence’s leading citizens, and posits that it reflects contemporary views of Etruscan architecture drawn from textual and archaeological sources.

This article discusses an early modern Sammelband (collected volume) that compiles epithalamia celebrating the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart with two translations, William Vaughan’s “The new-found politicke” and Robert Ashley’s “Almansor.” By highlighting the varied uses of Muslim exemplarity and alterity within one compilation, this article reveals the effects of recontextualization invited by the process of book building in the larger context of the Thirty Years’ War. This Sammelband study argues that translation, repurposing, and the material processes of compilation unsettle narratives of religious difference used by European writers to make sense of political conflict in the early seventeenth century.

Following the plague of 1630, which struck Northern Italy particularly hard, the erosion of social norms and hierarchies led to an outbreak of homicidal violence in the city and province of Bologna. In particular, urban nobility resumed practices of vendetta and revenge as politics that had lain dormant for some decades; while in the countryside, the heightened stresses of endemic rural poverty led to homicides over resources such as land, food, and employment. This article examines that outbreak of violence in the context of natural disaster, employing a selection of seventy-seven homicide trials prosecuted by the Tribunale del Torrone, the criminal court of Bologna, in 1632.

Let us Draw on the past as we look toward the future. Specifically, let us begin with the Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes, or “Problems to Sharpen the Young,” by Alcuin of York. Written sometime in the later eighth century, this text offers a number of logical and mathematical problems meant, as the title suggests, to refine one’s intellect. Some of the problems are fairly straightforward, as in the case of a question about how many sheep might fit in a field measuring 200 × 100 feet, with each sheep being allocated a space of 5 × 4 feet. Others, like de porcis, are somewhat trickier. This latter example is an impossible puzzle that asks how one might slaughter 300 pigs in three days by only slaughtering an odd number on each of the days.