This article examines a series of messages concerning politics and geography that the religious order of the Vallombrosans embedded within a series of exorcism manuscripts and addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the late fifteenth century. The Vallombrosans crafted their manuscripts to negotiate a host of troubles: schism over reform, friction with Lorenzo, diminishing social status, increased marginality, competition with rival religious orders, new definitions of orthodoxy, and alternate forms of religious devotion. I frame Vallombrosan troubles and their turn to exorcism as symptomatic of the increased predominance of Mendicant Observants over older orders, and link this shift to a newly active and politicized demonology.

This article argues that Renaissance print culture appropriated the cultural meanings of the footprint. The potent analogy between the printing press and printing foot informed Reformation debates over Christ’s footprints as objects of devotion and subjects of representation. In sixteenth-century England a model for investigative reading informed by Erasmian humanism was developed in the print projects of George Gascoigne and Edmund Spenser. Experimentation with effects of the press and the material environment of the page culminated in extensive play upon the material and metaphorical sign of the printing foot in Spenser’s “Amoretti.”

This article introduces two manuscript editions of a richly illustrated costume album dated ca. 1548–49. Commissioned by Christoph von Sternsee (d. 1560), the captain of Charles V’s German guard, and composed using visual material sourced from Dutch master Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (ca. 1500–59), the costume album records the diversity of subjects, customs, and costumes that the guard witnessed across imperial Habsburg Europe. Shaped by Sternsee’s personal experiences of travel, war, and empire, his costume album paints a vivid picture of imperial propaganda and personal ambition, demonstrating the significant role that Habsburg networks and relationships had upon the period’s visual culture.

Annius of Viterbo’s 1498 “Antiquitatum Variarum Volumina XVII” (“Antiquities”), created to enhance the reputation of his native Viterbo, was a collection of spurious texts and commentary attributed to early Near Eastern authors of whom only fragments survive. Quickly spotted as spuria, they nonetheless flourished in France. This essay traces the use of Annius’s forgeries by Jean Lemaire de Belges, for whose “Illustrations” they were seminal; mid-sixteenth-century historians followed Lemaire’s lead. The “Antiquities” captivated Guillaume Postel and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie. They supported a history grounded on chronology, etymology, and genealogy, becoming essential to proofs of the glory and antiquity of France.

Comparative studies have revealed uncanny similarities between the theatrical cultures of Shakespearean England and Golden Age Spain, and in particular between the Elizabethan amphitheaters and the Spanish corrales de comedia (courtyard playhouses). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Spain’s (and, in particular, Madrid’s) courtyard theaters may have resembled the English indoor public playhouses, especially London’s Blackfriars, more than the Globe-like amphitheaters with which they are so often matched. That the corrales could simultaneously play the part of both Globe and Blackfriars also helps account for the absence of indoor public playhouses in Habsburg Spain.