The essay analyzes episodes from the first day of story-telling in the Decameron and the contemporary tradition of mendicant exempla comparing their differing means of influencing moral behavior. The Decameron discloses a crisis in the exemplum tradition between conventional sermonizing and a heightened sense of clerical frailty, and responds by showing a new way of narrating moral problems to a sceptical readership. While the exemplum provides a framework for the Decameron narrators, they treat this tradition with irony, emphasizing the contingent, subjective apprehension of moral truth. The various narrative personalities and the subtle associations between narrator and protagonist, protagonist and audience illustrate a mode of communication that recognizes the reader's capacity to listen.

Contrary to a tradition of scholarly insistence on the invisibility of Florentine patrician women outside the domestic sphere, it can be argued such women did in effect perform a significant, public, or quasi-public, function in the negotiation of relationships between the Republic and other Italian, and European, elites. This article assembles fragmentary evidence concerning dancing and musical performance by women directed towards the entertainment of visiting notables in the second half of the Quattrocento, and uses modern concepts of gendered performance and the performance of gender to speculate on the nature of that experience for the women involved.

Among the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, the intimate epîtres she exchanged with her mother, Louise de Savoie, and brother, François I are relatively unknown. Of moderate literary interest, these poems are most important for the insight they provide into the role of the princess in the complex negotiation of gender and power that was necessary when women sought powers of rule. The epîtres reveal a “division of labor” in the representation of femininity: through the symbolism of the family “trinité” the family distanced Louise from the constraints of gender and embodied existence, displacing the physical and symbolic burden of female flesh onto Marguerite.

This essay examines the conflicted double logic of vernacularization in the English Reformation — specifically in the Book of Common Prayer, and more specifically in its Pentecost service — and argues that the transition to the vernacular in public worship simultaneously served the state's political ends and worked against those very ends by devolving religious authority to individuals. Understanding this dynamic, the author suggests, not only clarifies the role of language and text in the early modern constitution of nation and subject, but may also indicate a synthetic way out of a 400-year-old historiographical stalemate.

Current scholarship on Anne Askew has tended to disparage the editorial tactics of John Bale, her first editor, as intrusive and distorting. In contrast, the reprinting of her text by John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs, “ has been commended for its lack of editorial intervention. Yet afresh consideration of Foxes work with Askew's narrative suggests that Foxe's shaping force in the text was as strong as Bale's, if more subtle. Furthermore, attempts to locate Askew's authorial agency within one text or the other impose modern ideas about authorship on a period in which such ideas were still being formed.

This essay examines a 16th-century classic of Spanish humanist apologetics: the extant portion of fray Luis de Ledn 's defense of his Spanish translation of the Song of Songs against the Inquisition. The analysis highlights a Christian hebraist's contribution to contemporary debates on the applicability of humanist philology to biblical scholarship. An English translation of fray Luis’ famous respuesta accompanies the article.

Whereas sport had been justified since antiquity for providing soldiers with the physical training they would require in battle, its utilitarian function waned with the English military's gradual adaptation of firearms during the Renaissance. As a result, sports were increasingly condemned as idle and superfluous phenomena — nothing more than futile competitions between men. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, sport figures as a metaphor for war itself, also condemnable as a result of the historical shift from the politics of chivalric idealism to the “politics of reality.” Throughout the trilogy, Shakespeare indicts modern warfare as mere sport for ambitious and corrupt nobles.

The relationship in the early Stuart church between doctrine and discipline — between formal theological belief and outward matters including church governance, polity and ceremonial practice — is important for our understanding of George Herbert's devotional lyrics. Eucharistic theories which entertained notions of “real presence “ tended to support a sacerdotal style of divinity in which priest, ceremony and outward conformity were key features. Belief in the centrality of inward spiritual life, on the other hand, was reinforced by a theology in which the external elements are less effectual instruments than mere signs of a strictly invisible grace. This paper elucidates a sacramental poetics through which Herbert sought to reconcile the ideologically contrary imperatives of public ceremony and private religious devotion. The two are brought together successfully in The Temple, but this success consists largely in the drama resulting from the conflict the poems trace. Unmistakably inward in focus, Herbert's devotional enthusiasm is cultivated nonetheless through a fully sacramental and sacerdotal apparatus.