This chapter argues for the Italian Renaissance as a pivotal moment in women’s history. This was the first Western age in which secular women emerged in significant numbers as producers, as well as consumers, of high culture. It also witnessed the development of new ways of thinking about sex and gender, framed to counter traditional arguments for women’s inferiority to men. Like many Renaissance cultural innovations, the emergence of culturally active women was initially an elite phenomenon mainly limited to the princely courts, but practices like women’s writing later migrated down to lower strata of urban society. By the late sixteenth century, women writers were being joined by other species of virtuose such as singers, composers, actresses, painters, and other visual artists. The chapter argues that traditional periodizations of the Renaissance, which see the movement as ending in the mid sixteenth century, have led to a major underestimation of the degree to which women may be considered stakeholders in the movement alongside men.

This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

There are many examples of harmful magic both in ancient and Patristic literature. Del Rio also refers to Scripture, Herodotus from whom he quotes in a Latin version, Vergil, and other Classical authors. This chapter discusses remedies to counter the effects of such magic, many of which are ineffectual. Del Rio, with the help of a large number of references and quotations, discusses veneficia, methods by which witches can do harm with the help of poisons applied in a variety of ways. Devils can achieve certain things with the help of human beings. Thus he draws on many people to defend workers of evil magic and so forces a sin upon them. The consequence is that people add sacrilege to the superstition of magic, and God is more and more offended, and allows the princes of darkness to practise more every day against wretched mortals.

Disquisitiones Magicae was attractive and so influential, that Martin Del Rio became a major Catholic authority on magic and witchcraft as soon as the book appeared. The six books of the Disquisitiones are interrelated; they do not merely constitute six disparate essays on aspects of the same material. Del Rio begins with a general survey of magic and then examines its constituent parts: natural, artificial, delusory, and demonic. Next, he discusses the various uses to which these different types of magic may be and indeed are all too often put; and finally, he turns to the question of how to deal with people who practise the arts of magic, and how one may counteract the effects of the magic they have worked. Del Rio argues that any practice of magic is potentially dangerous and should be avoided; only the Catholic Church can offer people safe answers to their spiritual problems.

Since the confessor acts in the dual role of judge and doctor, it is easy to appreciate that he must fulfil the duties of both. He plays the part of judge when he simply hears confessions, for then in binding and loosing he acts in the place of God. Del Rio summarises the kind of detail the confessor should seek to obtain from his penitent. There are certain points a confessor needs to observe. Some relate to his questioning of the penitent; some to preparation of the mind for confession; some to the obligation of making reparation; and some to the giving of absolution. Those who make light of learning superstitious ceremonies and practising them should be warned that the inventor of all superstitious and vain observances is the Devil who from the beginning of the world has seduced almost the entire human race into idolatry in an instant.

It may be useful to start this book by making clear what it is not. The term ‘Renaissance’ is used in academic and everyday discourse in two senses. First, it is used to denote a cultural movement or tradition, centring on the recuperation of classical literature, art, and thought. Second, it is sometimes used to denote an ‘age’, or a chronological period (in the case of Italy, generally from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century; in northern Europe, generally later). This book takes ‘Renaissance’ in the first sense of the term. No attempt is made here to summarize the social, economic, religious, or political history of Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century in a systematic way, although mention is made of salient developments that impacted on cultural production. The chapters of this book are not organized in a chronologically narrated sequence, nor a geographical one, covering developments in the various Italian states. Instead, they take the freer form of thematic essays on key aspects of Renaissance culture, in a way that enables a deeper exploration than a book that aims at ‘coverage’ can afford.

Magic is said to be divided into Natural, Artificial, and Diabolic because all its effects are to be ascribed to the innate nature of things, or to human agency, or to the malice of an evil spirit. Natural magic is divided into operative and divinatory. The latter deals with the disiy of things which are secret or lie hidden in the future. The former is about the production of remarkable effects. Artificial magic is of two kinds, mathematical and deceitful. Del Rio discusses the attribution of power to musical numbers. He says that the ancient stories about Orpheus's power over living creatures are true because animals endowed with the sense of hearing may well be captivated by musical modes. The devotees of alchemy consider their art so firmly established that they maintain they nurture and draw forth from their furnaces a gold more perfect than that usually found in nature.

This chapter examines three Renaissance social and cultural types, the merchant, the courtier, and the artist, the latter category encompassing not only painters, sculptors, and architects but also performance artists and skilled artisans and makers. The chapter uses self-descriptive writings produced by members of these professional groups to draw out their collective identities and value systems. Merchants are studied through the Florentine tradition of merchant ‘family books’, as well as in the more literary writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Benedetto Cotrugli, while the ethos of courtiers is examined through the justly famous analysis of Baldassare Castiglione. Where artists are concerned, an initial section on painters and sculptors, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Vasari, is followed by a discussion of lesser-known writings by court professionals, from dance masters to horse trainers to specialists associated with the arts of the table, such as cooks, stewards, and virtuoso carvers. The chapter argues that the much-studied rise of painting and sculpture from a lowly craft status to that of liberal arts was one instance of a broader phenomenon.

Books about magic have, so far and for various reasons, been unsatisfactory. This book shows how widespread magic has become in recent times. Evil spirits are on the loose, seeking to take possession of foolish and deluded souls. Never have there been as many witches as there are today, and the main reason for this is the faintness of and contempt for the Catholic faith. Juan de Maldonado, a saintly and learned Jesuit, gives five causes of magic: evil spirits take up residence in heretics; all heresy is prone to violence at the start, but because it cannot maintain this and cannot return to the truth whence it came, it degenerates into magic or atheism; magic follows heresy, as plague follows famine; evil spirits use heretics to deceive humanity; and the Church authorities are negligent.

This chapter defines the nature of the Italian Renaissance as a cultural movement stemming from, but not defined by, a new, fascinated engagement with classical Roman and Greek culture. It locates the origins and primary contexts of this movement in the fiercely emulative and precociously urbanized mercantile city-republics of late-medieval central and northern Italy and their fourteenth and fifteenth-century successors, the Italian signorie or princely courts. The chapter also considers the periodization of the movement, arguing for a ‘long’ Renaissance, extending down to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and hence incorporating the age of the Counter-Reformation. A longer Renaissance enables us to better understand the effects of important developments such as the introduction of printing and the rise of the vernacular to rival Latin as a literary language. These factors, over time, changed the demographics of Renaissance culture, opening it to less elite strata of society and to women.