On the Feastday of the Nativity of the Virgin, September 8, 1296, the papal legate of Boniface VIII, Pietro Valeriano di Piperno, blessed the rebuilding of the church of S. Reparata in Florence. In the ceremonial presence of the podestà, the Standard-Bearer of Justice, and the priors of the Signoria, he named the new cathedral “Santa Maria del Fiore.” Arnolfo di Cambio was made chief architect in charge of the renewal; and it was he who began a program of monumental sculpture devoted to the life of the Virgin (fig. 1). Giovanni Villani, who recorded the benediction ceremony in his chronicle, admitted that notwithstanding the rededication of the church to the Virgin and the invention of the poetic name “Santa Maria del Fiore,” most Florentines continued to call the cathedral S. Reparata.

Political exile punished an offending individual through public humiliation, deprivation of political rights, separation from family and friends, from business and property. This situation was difficult but manageable for an individual since he and his dependents could turn to members of the extended family for aid and comfort. However, if all the family's men were banished, the situation was potentially catastrophic. The Alberti, a prominent Florentine merchant-banking family, found itself in just such a situation. In January 1401, all Alberti men were exiled from the city of Florence for conspiracy against the state; they were not allowed to return until 1428. This paper will explore the consequences of their long and unusual banishment from Florence.

The Odes of 1550 and 1552 reveal Pierre de Ronsard's ambition to gain entry into the court of Henri II. In the 1550 preface to the Odes, Ronsard does not make the slightest effort to veil his literary and political objectives. He presents his Odes as a poetic challenge to Clément Marot's psalm translations of 1541 and 1543 with the discovery of an equally ancient lyric source, pagan rather than Hebraic, and he mounts an ad hominem attack on the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais in order to win Henri's favor. The poetry, however, places in evidence other preoccupations. The Odes describe and problematize the endless wanderings of a poetic subject who seeks to uncover the secrets not only of the ancient world but of the modern one as well.

All the terms in the title of the plenary session, “Recent Work in Renaissance Studies on Psychology,” at the Renaissance Society of America's 1991 annual meeting (where this paper was first delivered) are matters of conflict and debate. In this discussion I shall examine current debates about the “Renaissance,” “psychology,” and “madness” to account for the paucity and insufficiency of current work on early modern madness by historians and literary critics and theorists, to raise issues about current trends in Renaissance studies, and to elicit new kinds of scholarship.

If there is anything that scholars in the Renaissance and scholars of the Renaissance (of whatever ideological persuasion) might be expected to share, it is delight in the recovery of texts worthy of attention as aesthetic objects and/or as significant documents for interpreting the period. Arguably such new texts—and especially texts and artworks by women—will constitute the most enduring element in our ongoing reconstruction of the Renaissance. Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses—law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice.