This essay is based upon the methodological assumption that by examining an exceptional event in an exceptional place one can unmask the hidden assumptions of the mundane and quotidian. The problem is to determine what the idea of community could have meant in north Italian towns and villages during the Renaissance. Depositions about a brawl in an otherwise insignificant small town provide an opportunity to examine how the idea of community was crystallized in three ways: community as social interaction in an institutional guise, community as a certain kind of space, and community as a process of social exclusion

The Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) was an influential, charismatic, and popular preacher, and an important figure in the political world of Renaissance Florence, but neglected in modern scholarship. This study offers a thorough summary of Dominici's political views as well as a biographical portrait, a bibliographical survey, and a discussion of Dominici's preaching style. The article draws on a large, unpublished collection of Dominici's sermons from the Biblioteca Riccardiana, dating from 1400 to 1406. Dominici emerges as an ambivalent participant in Florentine politics, advocating some of its civic values such as the active life and patriotism, while fiercely criticizing humanist ideals such as the use of rhetoric in politics and the rise of the professional politician

If imitation is the highest form of praise, then Girolamo Benivienis canto describing his otherworldly encounter with Dante's spirit is certainly a tribute to the author of the Divine Comedy. Despite its title, however, Benivieni's project is not simply epideictic. In it, Benivieni represents Dante in a highly anachronistic way, as a kind of spokesman for the piagnoni, the ardent supporters of Girolamo Savonarola's program of moral austerity and Florentine republican politics between the 1490s and the first decades of the Cinquecento. This study argues that Benivieni articulates his controversial, ideological vision in a necessarily prudent way by appropriating Dante as a safe and authoritative cultural icon and adopting a deliberately ambiguous symbolic language, which lauds himself and his politics as much as it does Dante.

The impact of Dutch on Erasmus’ works is a neglected aspect of studies on the Netherlandish humanist. This article explores the presence of the Low Countries vernacular in the Colloquia, the letters, and the Adagiorum collectanea. It argues that Erasmus used proverbs of Dutch provenance in the same way as ancient adages, that is, as arguments and stylistic devices. Even though there are relatively few vernacular proverbs in his writings, the evidence gathered here demonstrates that, contrary to established opinion, he valued his native language and freely employed it in various works. To gain a better appreciation of his notion of proverbs and his” estimate of their worth, this essay starts with an analysis of his introduction to the Adagia.

This article explores the motivations behind the Florentine militia ordinance of 1506 and Niccolò Machiavelli's involvement. A major problem with regard to contemporary discourse on the militia is its complete, or almost complete, absence of references to the military system of the ancient Roman republic. It is here argued that this silence was a conscious strategy on the part of Machiavelli and his collaborators who, in a cultural climate extremely hostile to the ancient Roman model, chose to adopt a pragmatic step-by-step approach to the militia, downplaying its true inspiration.

This study explores Cervantes’ appropriations of the terminology and imagery of Catholic exorcists and demonologists in the Spanish Golden Age. The “lucid intervals” of Don Quixote, his constant sense that someone pursues him, and his explicit voicing of the words of the exorcism ritual can only be understood fully in relation to contemporaneous religious belief. This essay also argues that the devilishly-described Don Quixote exorcized himself. This action anticipated self-exorcism as preached by the Franciscan Diego Gómez Lodosa. In Cervantes studies, Don Quixote's selfexorcism will become paradigmatic of the autonomous action of this first novelistic character.

Psalm 137, “By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, “ one of the most widely known biblical texts in Renaissance England, provided consolation for spiritual and political exiles, as well as giving Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton language in which to express such alienation — language especially powerful for poets, since the psalm troped alienation as the inability to sing. The Psalm's closing cry for vengeance, seen as un-Christian by some, was used as a call to arms by polemicists on both sides of the English Civil War. This study examines a range of translations, paraphrases, commentaries, sermons, and literary allusions that together reconstruct a biblical text as it was interpreted by its Renaissance readers.