This article examines the transformation of Muisca authority in sixteenth-century Ubaque, a valley in the northern Andes. It examines how two caciques conceived of and practiced their authority vis-à-vis their communities and the Spanish administration. While in the 1560s the cacique enacted his authority by appealing to Indigenous ritual and opposing evangelization, his successor in the 1580s claimed at court that he was a true Christian. Based on these cases, I argue that the Spanish empire’s effort to preserve Indigenous groupings that kept to their old customs while making them Catholic created a tense atmosphere and a deep fracture in the mechanics of colonialism that involved not only caciques but also other Indigenous authorities, encomenderos, clergy, and imperial officials and ultimately ended up transforming Indigenous authority.

This article concentrates on the understudied years that the German architect Hermann Muthesius spent in London from 1896 to 1903. It argues that Muthesius's interpretation of English visual culture was foundational to the national style he envisioned for his homeland. Muthesius produced a vast literature on English architecture and design and is thus often mentioned as the connector between the arts and crafts and the Werkbund in the historiography of the modern movement. This stance is problematic, however, because it frames Muthesius’s appropriation in terms of reception and assumes that one man alone can connect two heterogeneous trends. Such a view overlooks the dialectic shaping involved in a cultural transfer. Muthesius’s engagement with English architecture was an active, deliberate process of selection and reinterpretation, rather than mere absorption. As such, this article establishes how Muthesius was both an agent of this cultural transfer through the prism of his own cultural framework of Wilhelmine entanglement of cultural and political concerns, and himself subject to a complex set of emulation and reciprocal influences within the transnational construction of national aesthetics. It demonstrates that Muthesius’rs experience in Britain represents a pivotal, though often mischaracterised, episode in the evolution of modern architectural thought.

This essay traces parallel developments in the myths and legends associated with the historical noblewoman Marfisa d’Este (1554–1608) and her literary counterpart Marfisa, the warrior knight from chivalric romance epic poetry. Through the Este princess’s embrace of her cross-dressing fictional double in courtly performance, alongside the evolution of the figure “Marfisa bizzarra” in Italian mock epic, the intermedial afterlives of these two figures reinterpreted the women’s brazen, autonomous agency as nefarious, destructive desire. Fantasies of decadent-turned-grim Ferrara, Marfisa’s native city in poetic and historical terms, guided overlapping acts of reception and transmission between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries.