This essay examines short narrative (the Decameron, the Heptameion, the histoire tragique, and Till Eulenspiegel) as reflections of different models of justice within the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition. The exchanges among characters, and the conclusion of these exchanges, are patterned in ways that provide justice without requiring the virtuousness of any one character. The link between short narrative and justice illuminates the more general relationship between literature and more language in the Renaissance.

Christophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.

This essay argues that Shakespeare drew on Plutarch's and Plato's representations of the Greek general Alcibiades in his representation of Prince Hal/King Henry V, and on classical and Renaissance representations of Socrates for his representation of Prince Hal's "tutor," Falstaff. Crucial to Shakespeare's adaption of these classical "characters" were the writings of Erasmus and Rabelais, which represented Socrates as both sophist and jovial Silenus. Shakespeare was also influenced by the association Symposium makes between Alcibiades and Dionysus, god of wine and of the theater. Consequently Hal/Henry emerges as a Dionysian Alcibiades, trained in sophistry by his Silenic Socrates, Falstaff, and able to dazzle his subjects with mystical rhetoric and to convert war to Dionysian play.

At first sight, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seems to be the only one of Ford's plays that is not pointedly and openly concerned with sexual deviation; in contrast to his other plays, it presents a cast of characters who are models of sexual rectitude. Sometimes, however, dogs that do not bark can be as significant as ones that do. This paper argues that Perkin Warbeck actually encodes a trangressive sexuality so subversive that its traces are hidden deep within the fabric of the play, visible only to a reading that historicizes Ford's work within very specific contexts and connects the play with the Buggery Statute.

The iconography of Bolsover Castle is much appreciated but little understood. This is because we have not recognized its dynamic, theatrical character, which centers on — indeed, implies the presence of its seventeenth-century owner, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Read in terms of Cavendish's self-conception as a figure of patriachal authority and Herculean passions, the castle emerges as a witty apologia for its owner — and perhaps even as a site for the pursuit of his amours. This reading sheds new light upon the relationship between Cavendish, Bolsover, and Ben Jonson, who provided the text for a royal visit to Bolsover in 1634.

How did the Netherlands assimilate the New World? This essay explores the process of cultural geography in the Renaissance by examining the creative appropriation of American "allies" by the Dutch Republic. On three separate occasions, embassies from the United Provinces sought to enlist natives of South America for a proposed brotherhood, or "alliance," meant to challenge the tyranny of Spain and liberate the hemisphere from Habsburg control While this hoped-for Reconquista never did transpire, Dutch efforts — rhetorical as well as real—demonstrate a highly imaginative and vigorously prosecuted response to America. They problematize the paradigm of the New Worlds "blunted" impact on the Old.