This study draws on the unpublished correspondence between Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a Florentine poet and grandnephew of the artist, and the Barberini family, in an attempt to examine the wider concepts of cultural clientelism and brokerage networks in the early modern process of cultural dissemination (in the areas of literature, music, theater, painting, architecture, and science) in Florence and Rome. Reconsidering the definition and role of a Seicento cultural broker added to the traditional model of patron and client, it analyzes Michelangelo the Younger’s activity as broker, patron-broker, and broker-client in connection with such significant figures as Maffeo Barberini (the future Urban VIII), Galileo, and the painter Lodovico Cigoli, exploring the ways in which these roles supported his personal commitment to promote his family’s social status and revealing the fluidity of roles in the patronage system. By obtaining Barberini patronage for his theatrical works and public recognition of the mythology of his illustrious forebear, Buonarroti’s cultural brokerage supported these dynastic ambitions. Spanning nearly half a century, this archival documentation casts new light on a little-known, but significant, area of Italian social relations and suggests directions for further research on other Seicento cultural brokers and new definitions for a broader concept of cultural brokerage in early modern Italy.

Historians of comedy can profit from a study of the sixteenth-century debates regarding the merits of Plautus (ca. 254–184 BCE), most of whose works were unknown before the late fifteenth century. Early performances and editions led to contemporary theories regarding laughter, language, and morality, often in the context of a comparison with the plays of Terence (d. 159 BCE), who was sometimes viewed as superior by upper-class audiences. From the conflicting opinions of Andrea Navagero and Francesco Florido, to the neoclassical strictures of Daniel Heinsius, this study pursues learned opinion on Plautus as he became a principal author in the European canon. Plautus’s variances from Aristotelian and Horatian precepts created a lively and lasting ferment in discussions of comedy.

Notoriously Aristotelian in his poetic theory, linguistics, and natural philosophy, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) also reimagined the lost love poetry that Aristotle himself was said to have written. Scaliger's New Epigrams of 1533 combine a distinctively humanist view of Aristotle as an elegant polymath with a sustained experiment in refashioning the Petrarchan love lyric. Most visibly in poems about dreams and dreaming, Scaliger educes his speaker's erotic despair from philosophical problems in contemporary Aristotelian accounts of the soul, knowledge, and personal identity. The strange but compelling texts that result form a crossroads for Scaliger's own identities as physician, philosopher, and poet.

Pierre Corneille’s Mélite (1629) resonated in part due to a social critique with deep roots in the French Renaissance. Corneille’s characters live by the canons of a (notionally) natural system of merit, divorced from money, implicitly noble, but open to upwardly-mobile commoners. Reconciling the traditional social order with the purchase of status and power by venal office-holders had preoccupied French comedy since the 1550s. While early playwrights hesitated to comment on this phenomenon (in which they took part), by about 1580 Odet de Turnèbe had already dramatized an educated elite’s transcendence of the economic, which Corneille would then go on to perfect. The biographies of these playwrights show that their plays’ ideological functions suited their own social situations.