Thomas More's Utopia has long been regarded as the great Northern European expression of Italian civic humanist ideals. This article argues, in contrast, that More's treatise constitutes an emphatic rejection of those values. In support of this claim, the article chronicles the reception of Utopia in Italy; it demonstrates that More's text was taken up, not by the civic humanists, but by their fiercest critics. These early Italian readers recognized in Utopia a repudiation of active citizenship, an assault on private property, a rejection of the Roman cult of glory, and a polemic against Ciceronian humanism. As a result, the reception of Utopia is shown to have opened up a fissure in the republican tradition which would have profound consequences for the subsequent development of European political discourse.

Although the works of Homer remained unknown in Western Europe for much of the Middle Ages, their reappearance was welcomed enthusiastically in France toward the end of the fifteenth century by the small band of scholars capable of reading Greek. The founding of the Collège des lecteurs royaux in 1530 gave a fillip to Homeric studies, and partial editions of Homer were printed in Paris, aimed at a student audience. French translations also helped to bring the poems to a wider audience. However, the question of the interpretation of Homer was central to the reception of the two epics, and, after examining the publishing history, this paper sets out to assess how succeeding generations of scholars set about reading and teaching the prince of poets.

In a provocative essay published in Renaissance Quarterly in 1999, Ullrich Langer investigated the critical positions of novellieri such as Boccaccio regarding the legal system, courts, and lawyers. This essay builds on his work, both by broadening the range of critiques of law to include those of the humanists, and by giving the lawyers their day in court, as it were, in an investigation of two representative case-deciding opinions. Then as now, these legal experts did not have the luxury of considering law and justice in the abstract, apart from the need to resolve the particular case before them: they had to resolve a case and follow the law as they understood it.

This essay discusses the role of the Chambers of Rhetoric (literary guilds or confraternities) in the construction of urban culture in the Southern Low Countries. The Chambers of Rhetoric not only contributed to the forging of urban identity through their associational practices, but also played an important role in the molding of public space through theatrical representations and the staging of civic ritual. In particular, the Chambers’ participation in large-scale regional and interregional theater and poetry competitions is crucial for our understanding of sixteenth-century urban culture in the Low Countries.

Most stimulating — for this Anglophone historian, at least — has been the reintegration of religious history into mainstream social and political history generally, and also the heightened sense of an international movement embracing an entire continent and beyond. We no longer make artificial distinctions between the Reformations of the Atlantic Isles and those on the mainland; we can see more clearly what is local and what is part of an international phenomenon; and we can also appreciate the artificiality of considering Protestantism in isolation from reform movements in both the Pre-Reformation Western Church and Post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. I commend the advantages of emancipating religious history from specific religious commitment. I also discuss the effect of the breaking down of barriers to travel and research in the wake of the 1989–90 revolutions in the recovery of our sense of the importance of Reformations in Eastern Europe, and also highlight our realization that a heritage of Southern European dissent shaped the heterodoxy that dissolved Reformation certainties.

In the 1560s a group of men associated with the universities, and especially the early English law schools, the Inns of Court, translated nine of Seneca’s ten tragedies into English. Few studies address these texts and those that do concentrate on their contributions to the development of English drama. Why such works were important for those who composed them remains unclear. This essay examines the translations against the background of the social, political, and literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s. In this context, they look less like forms of dramatic invention than kinds of writing that facilitated the translators’ Latin learning, personal interactions, and political thinking and involvement.

The respective roles of virtù and fortuna, never resolved in his political writings, are critical to understanding Machiavelli’s literary evolution. As his letters suggest, in the years between the fall of the Soderini republic and his reentry into public life with Mandragola, Machiavelli came to understand the power of language to impose order on the anarchy of events. The fragmentary L’Asino records his discovery that writing can achieve an agency denied to princes. Mandragola’s dialectic between the author and his protagonist demonstrates that the inventive plasticity of the writer is grounded in the inherent stability of the creative self.

This essay considers commentaries on and translations of Plato’s Symposium (by Marsilio Ficino, the Henri Estienne-Jean de Serres team, and, preeminently, Louis Le Roy) as well as an influential Neoplatonic passage from Baldassar Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano to explore some of the implications of, and dynamics behind, the heterosexualization of Platonic eros in the Renaissance. Focusing on the specific work done by different texts in particular contexts rather than homogenizing the translation of pederastic eros, the essay contributes to a critical genealogy of heterosexuality. Links between Le Roy’s effort and the cultural and political ambitions of the French monarchy receive particular attention.

In September 1641 Joannes Stephanus Rittangel sent a Hebrew letter to John Selden, the prominent English jurist and Christian Hebraist, soliciting Selden’s assistance in publishing Karaite manuscripts. The letter’s publication here contributes both to our knowledge of the activities of Rittangel — expert in Karaism and Professor Extraordinary of Semitic languages at the University of Koenigsberg — and to the picture we have of Christian Hebraism in England. From this letter and from references to Rittangel in contemporary literature, we can reconstruct some of his activities from the time he was recorded to have been in Lithuania at the end of 1640 to his appearance in Amsterdam in late 1641. We can also appreciate how knowledge of Karaism was spread among English Christians such as John Selden and Ralph Cudworth, and also how that information contributed to the millenarianism of Samuel Hartlib and John Dury.

While the Reformation has, from the very beginning, been seen as a drama which drew its cast from every sphere of society, the Counter-Reformation was until recently considered the project of elites. Even those who sought to write the social history of the Catholic reform movement allocated to “the people” the role of resisting the course of change rather than contributing to the transformation of early modern Catholicism. Swimming against this tide, a succession of local case studies, focusing in particular on rituals and objects, has demonstrated the manifold ways in which men and women of all social backgrounds participated in the reinvention of Roman Catholicism. This paper considers new emphases in the social and cultural history of the Counter-Reformation, and asks whether there remains a place for thinking about the age of reform in terms of discipline and confessionalization.

Medici patronage of the arts in the fourteenth century has gone largely unstudied. Yet there is a notable paper trail, backed by a small number of sculptural remnants of funerary monuments, indicating that prominent members of the family understood the power of visual imagery for establishing their patrilines as leading families, both within the social hierarchy of Florence and within the Medici consorteria. These sculptural remains give clear precedent for the early activity of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo de’ Medici as artistic patrons in the fifteenth century.

For a generation, writing about the English Reformation has been dominated by debates about the character, pace, and popularity of the transition from Catholic to Protestant belief and practice in England. These “revisionist” debates have had a regrettable tendency to produce artificial polarities from a complex set of processes, and some recent studies, such as Norman Jones’s The English Reformation, Eamon Duffy’s Voices of Morebath, and Ethan Shagan’s Popular Politics and the English Reformation, have attempted to move beyond these polarities to consider the processes by which England became Protestant. This paper surveys some of these studies and attempts an overview of the state of English Reformation historiography.

The fall of Negroponte to the Turks in 1470 was one of the first events in European history to be recorded in print. This article examines a little-known cluster of more than a dozen texts published in the months after the colony’s fall by some of the earliest printers to work in Italy. These editions did not “break” the news to the Italian public but rather offered analysis and commentary to an already well-informed readership. Some catered to contemporary demands for vernacular political poetry, while others now reveal the extent to which Italian humanists attached themselves to the printing industry in its earliest years, often with ambiguous results”

This article discusses Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna in relation to poetry and prose by Michelangelo, Colonna, and their circle. It focuses on the intersection between debates about Church reform and the polemic about disegno (drawing or design) and colore (color or finish). Vittoria Colonna used the distinction between disegno and colore repeatedly in her spiritual poetry. In these and other writings, reform-minded thinkers did not offer consistent aesthetic and theological positions, but rather consciously articulated contradictions. Likewise, Michelangelo’s drawings for Vittoria Colonna display a strategy of deliberate paradox, in that they are highly colored black-and-white drawings of a tearless tearfulness and a bloodless bloodiness.

Hugues Salel’s translation of the Iliad was intended for noble, warrior readers, a conclusion based largely on internal evidence, both from the physical book (including its woodcuts) and from the French rendering of Homer’s epic. This article looks at the book’s verbal and visual texts to understand how Salel’s translation of the Iliad is shaped in anticipation of its contemporary reception. It examines a translation into the vernacular of one of antiquity’s masterpieces, as well as what noble readers knew and wanted to know, and questions the purposes and processes of the production of illustrations and marginalia in the period.