The usual origin-story of the Palazzo Vecchio as a security measure for the city's executives taken in response to civic unrest does not hold up under a close analysis of the historical record and the architectural evidence. The original project of 1299, as distinguished from the building as modified 1306-1310, was not heavily fortified; and by contemporary standards the late 1290s was a comparatively peaceful interval. It is proposed that rather than fear, the immediate motivation for the decision to build was a crisis in civic honor. If so, the palace would have been initially an expression less of the core values of the mercantile class, officially at the helm of the republic, than of the excluded nobility, as represented by the arch-enemy of the regime, Corso Donati.

This article analyzes the intellectual content of civic humanism in the specific context of Medici power, asking the question: what ideological role did civic humanism play in Medicean Florence? It argues that there is no contradiction between the ideals of civic humanism and support for the Medici regime. On the contrary, civic humanism could be used to justify and legitimate Medici power. The article analyzes the writings of principal humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Francesco Filelfo, showing that Hans Baron's republican “civic humanism “ was compatible with different constitutional forms and different distributions of power.

This essay explores how contemporary depictions of Anne Askew's examination and execution serve as textual sites of contested power between the Henrician conservatives and Protestant reformists who vied for control of English religion and politics during the mid-sixteenth-century. Both the Anglo-Catholics who prosecute Askew as a heretic and the Protestants who vindicate her as a saint attempt to shape and exploit her identity as a woman who has been tortured and burned at the stake. Amid the inquisitional voice of the state officials and the reformist discourse of the Protestant hagiographers, Askew's own text provides yet a third version.

This essay interprets the question of subjectivity in Hamlet by reappraising Renaissance skepticism and by reexamining the medieval debate concerning the misery of man's existence, and the Renaissance celebration of man. A central concern is the significance of the commonplace in humanist rhetoric and dialectic, by which Stoic and Christian thought depreciates passion. In his anguish Hamlet discovers a unique subjectivity as he attempts to reject the wisdom of tradition. But the nature of thought cannot be separated from the nature of the mind that thinks, and Hamlet's selfhood capitulates to the role.

The Renaissance was a period in which the honor code underwent a significant metamorphosis. The medieval, chivalric code of honor, with its emphasis on lineage, allegiance to one's lord and violence, evolved into an honor code that was both more moral and political in that it began to emphasize the individual conscience and allegience to the state. Analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and in particular its characters' use of promise, provides new and revealing insights into the evolving Renaissance codes of honor, for Shakespeare creates characters in Hamlet that represent various stages in the evolution of a changing honor system.

Mediated by Neoplatonist thought of the Quattrocento, paradox governs both form and content of Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astreé. The prefatory epistles to the work's first three parts establish a Foucaldian notion of “author function“ while simultaneously positing the author's profound distrust of writing and his preference for an oral medium. Within the romance itself, the three episodes featuring the authoritative Laws of Love, their falsification, and finally their complete revision illustrate deconstruction of the “author function” through the force of the Platonic textual “drift” against which d'Urfé cautions his protagonists in his prefaces. At the same time, the revised Laws of Love announce means of collective composition prevalent in the later seventeenth century. The romance's sylvan cabinet thus reflects and resolves the dilemmas of authority and composition conceived in the prefaces' paternal Cabinet.

Where is the research on the Renaissance being done in Germany? Is it true that “European history is still firmly divided among antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era,” and that therefore “the Renaissance occupies no space of its own in the history curriculum [of German universities]” as Professor Karant-Nunn has argued? The problem, it seems, is that German historians have largely abandoned the term “Renaissance” to denote the period between the Middle Ages and the modern era, using instead the term “early modern period” (Friihe Neuzeit), a term whose perimeters are variously defined as extending from the close of the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, or to the French Revolution, or even to the end of the old Reich in 1806.