By concentrating on Paolo Cortesi's discussion of the cardinal's architectural patronage in “De Cardinalatu Libri Tres” (1510), this article shows how Cortesi considered the construction of a sumptuous residence not as a sign of “magnificence” (“magnificentia”) but as a necessary operation to establish “dignity” (“dignitas”). Cortesi thus distinguished between the ethical and political-aesthetic dimension of magnificence, defining virtuous patronage in terms of honoring God and being of service, and sumptuous display as a means to acquire authority. This distinction also sheds new light on Cortesi's treatment of the exterior architectural ornament that should be applied to the cardinal's residence.

This article addresses the baronial nobility's much-neglected role in supporting the reestablishment of pontifical power in the wake of the Western Schism. In doing so, this article stresses how acts of noble revolt were complemented by extensive patterns of collaboration in the Papal States’ government, armies, and relations with other principalities. The nobility proved to be a fundamental source of support—a support that was theorized around and expressed in the language of fealty and devotion. In light of this, my analysis further contributes to the study of the perseverance of noble power and ubiquity of transregional factions in late medieval societies.

This article explores the plurality of referents associated with the term “dragon's blood” (“sanguis draconis”), a legendary substance that brings together Greco-Roman and Arabic medical knowledge, local vernacular traditions and artisanal practices, and new Spanish and Portuguese botanical discoveries. The study of dragon's blood reveals the interface between overlapping epistemic paradigms governing the definition, use, and circulation of complex material substances in early modern Europe, ranging from humanist learned discussions and artisanal experimentation to vernacular narratives of discovery, along with the shifting criteria of truth, authenticity, and value advocated by different communities of learning and practice.

The Aztec (Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan was transformed after the Spanish invasion of 1519–21 into a staging ground for Habsburg colonial experiments. Indigenous response is glimpsed in this essay through the lens of annals, written in Nahuatl, that document urban festivals celebrating Spanish Habsburg monarchs. I argue that the redeployment of particular spaces—long charged with meaning by Indigenous residents—was crucial to the public legitimacy of the Habsburg festival. These festivals promoted new means of temporal orientation, thus disrupting Indigenous orientations in time, at the same moment that Indigenous calendars were coming under scrutiny for their heretical potentials.

Banishment was probably the most frequent punishment in early modern Spanish criminal courts. It was impossible to enforce and antithetical to the interests of the state, yet it survived. This article, based on archival sources, proposes that the study of early modern law, probably in general but definitely in Spain, must account for its symbolic and rhetorical meaning beyond the language of a given statute. Looking at the practice of banishment, the long history of legal compilation in Spain, and the particularities and contradictions of legal practice there, this article calls for a deeper and more interdisciplinary approach.

This essay examines deluxe copies of Katherine Parr's “Psalms or Prayers” (1544) distributed as gifts as part of Henry VIII's wartime campaign. The book promoted supplication for the king, and Parr used hand illumination to amplify its aesthetic and sacred character and to elicit political loyalty. I discuss two copies annotated by Henry, one previously unknown. I argue that the volumes shed new light on Parr's role as queen/author, on Henry's final illness, and on their transactional relationship: Parr's giftbooks advanced Henry's cause and enabled him to display exemplary piety; Henry's marginalia activated Parr's text and thanked her for her labor.

When ancient Greek heritage was rehabilitated in the Renaissance, its students were first and foremost aspiring humanists, and, almost as a rule, men. An early exception was Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–88), the eldest daughter of the Duke of Milan, Francesco I Sforza. I argue that she not only studied the Greek language but also acted as a patron of Greek studies. Sforza's double role is confirmed by two Greek grammars dedicated to her and connected to the Byzantine migrant Constantine Lascaris. These documents reveal how Sforza probably studied the language, and how she was imagined as a student.

This article explores Poggio Bracciolini's letters to Niccolò Niccoli from a variety of perspectives: it looks at what imitation meant for Poggio, examines the letters’ commentary on the manuscript culture of the early Quattrocento, discusses Poggio's efforts to craft a personal voice, and traces the interplay of optimism and pessimism in the letters, an interplay common to humanist texts of this period. By bringing together these different perspectives, the article articulates the range of ways in which one scholar used his epistolary collection to shape his own persona, connect himself to Ciceronian precedents, and create norms and expectations for a developing intellectual community.

This article investigates how and why scholars began to systematically examine and record ancient inscriptions in fifteenth-century Italy. Finding evidence in the revolutionary work of Ciriaco d'Ancona, it shows that this change emerged from the synthesis of several cultural traditions. Ciriaco learned to observe antiquities from the Italian elite living in the Greek colonies and to record inscriptions from an early Christian pilgrim's practice. He introduced a new degree of precision in his records, learned partly from humanists. These facts suggest that a new culture of observing, discussing, and writing about antiquities was developing in the early Renaissance Mediterranean.

This article aims to reopen discussion of the Renaissance ars historica, a genre that has garnered little attention in modern scholarship. It does so by using a set of computational tools to measure the quantitative occurrence of terms related to artistry and cognition in Johann Wolff's collection of historical-method texts entitled “Artis Historicae Penus” (1579). Like the period's historical writing, which amalgamated aesthetics and historiography, the Renaissance artes historicae belonged to a historiographical paradigm in which the skillful construction of discourse went hand in hand with the search for historical truth. The title of Wolff's anthology accordingly draws an overt connection between the concepts of “ars” and “historia,” yet what did sixteenth-century theorists mean by “art”?

This essay shows how Hugo Grotius (1583–1646) made use of classical poetry and drama, especially that of Lucan, Euripides, and Seneca, in developing his thought on the treatment of captives, prisoners of war, and slaves, and argues that his method was humanist and philological. From his early publishing projects to “The Rights of War and Peace” (De Iure Belli ac Pacis, 1625), Grotius developed an account of common social experience, a formal mechanism to represent dialogue with difference, and a refusal to apply categorical distinctions positing natural difference among peoples. His engagements with classical poetry and drama are thus an important piece of the story of early modern thought.

This article traces the evidence left by early modern readers who marked their Bibles’ annotations—both by taking attentive notice of them and by leaving their own inky traces on them. Among the burgeoning critical interest in both printed and manuscript marginalia there has been little interrogation of the intersection between the two. This article traces the evidence of what the readerly marginalia of biblical annotations can tell us about their readers. It argues that literacy formed and fostered by reading annotated Bibles was likely to be skillful and attuned to issues of interpretation and meaning-making.

This article examines Antonio Agustín's (1517–86) philological and historical treatise “De Emendatione Gratiani” (1587). Canon law became a key controversial issue in Catholic-Protestant confessional arguments in the sixteenth century, but its convoluted history also posed a challenge within Catholic orthodoxy itself. This essay discusses how Agustín, working to improve the text of Gratian's “Decretum” (ca. 1140), navigated between his own scholarly integrity and the requirements of Tridentine reforms. The focus on canon law uncovers rarely acknowledged connections between Renaissance philology and ecclesiastical scholarship, and opens a new perspective on the entanglement of humanism and religion, confessional conflicts, and erudition.

Bardic poetry in early modern Ireland was the product of highly sophisticated, transactional, and mutually beneficial relationships between poets and their aristocratic patrons. This paper combines innovative methods of network analysis with traditional textual scholarship to visualize and examine these social relationships, which played a role, at both a national and regional level, in maintaining and upholding the values of Gaelic Ireland's elite. Focusing on the period from the declaration of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, in 1541, to the beginning of the Restoration period, in 1660, it highlights and explores an under-studied aspect of Renaissance Ireland.

This article examines the chivalric encounters organized on the occasion of the Joyous Entry of Prince Philip in the Low Countries in 1549–50. It poses the question as to how they functioned as a performative tool to enhance cohesion among the nobles of the Habsburg composite state. The tournaments served as a regulated outlet for noble violence, controlled by the prince and his closest collaborators. In this way, they both created and cemented the bonds of knightly brotherhood within the entourage of the household, while at the same time reaching out to others who did not (yet) belong to the new prince's circle.

The Polish Brethren were fervent advocates of religious tolerance. Johann Crell's “Vindiciae pro Religionis Libertate” (1637) is prominent among their works, because of its far-reaching and progressive arguments for freedom of religion. This article outlines the historical and intellectual context of this pamphlet, and its reception in seventeenth-century Europe. Despite being familiar with a historical situation in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where toleration was practiced on a societal level, Crell strongly argued that freedom of religion had to be enacted through a public law. Only in this way could freedom of religion be truly effective and guarantee safety for all citizens.

Esther Inglis (ca. 1570–1624), a Franco-Scottish writer, is known for her manuscript books, written in many handwriting styles and decorated with pen or brushwork in black-and-white or color. About twenty-five of her sixty or so surviving manuscripts contain self-portraits, which until now have not been examined in detail. This essay surveys the developing author portrait in manuscript and print for French women writers, along with portrait engravings and miniatures, considering their influence on Inglis. It shows further how she created a self within the broader context of transnational Protestant humanism and poetics, crossing boundaries of gender, language, and nationality.

This article considers Louis XIV's purchase of Dunkirk from Charles II in 1662 as a case study in the interwoven histories of monarchy and empire. In France and England, proponents of absolutism sought to broaden definitions of conquest to encompass both diplomacy and commerce. It proved nearly impossible to bring the concept of buying or selling a town into congruence with grand dynastic designs. Analyzing diplomatic correspondence and royal history alongside an array of artistic representations, I contend, underscores the extent to which ideals of kingship collided with imperial and commercial concerns, as early modern states adapted to the realities of an interconnected seventeenth-century world.

During the 1620s, when churches throughout Northern Italy were scaling back musical expenditures due to shrinking coffers, the confraternity Misericordia Maggiore continued to lavishly fund music in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo. In a decade marred by war, austerity, death, famine, and plague, music received robust institutional support. Drawing from new archival research, a picture emerges of the enduring importance of musical life to the Bergamasque community in the face of challenges on multiple fronts. Additionally, Bergamo surfaces as a neglected site of almost unparalleled large-scale musical activity in early Seicento Italy.

After Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco died in 1564, royal officials watched with trepidation as the conquistadores’ descendants adopted heraldry, hereditary titles, and royal ceremony, supposedly in jest. Scholars have argued that the royal judges used these over-the-top fiestas to frame powerful settlers for sedition. This article instead argues that the royal judges’ obsession with how wealthy settlers adopted royal pomp and circumstance, on the one hand, and refusal to recognize how they imprecisely imitated the Mexica nobility, on the other, helped to consolidate Spanish power—symbolic and literal—in New Spain.