On 13 April 1403, Parisian chancellor Jean Gerson delivered one of his most famous sermons, a sermon on the Passion of Christ entitled “Ad deum vadit.” That evening, in the second part of the sermon, Gerson set forth the central and most dramatic portion of the Passion narrative, the crucifixion of Jesus. As he had done throughout the story, Gerson sought to recreate the feelings, responses, and very words of Mary as she witnessed her son's suffering. In an anguished question that echoed Jesus’ own, Gerson proclaims that Mary was able to cry to God.

As Dante and Beatrice begin their ascent to the Empyrean in canto 3 of the Paradiso, they alight on the moon where they encounter pale spirits, not mere reflections but “true substances … assigned [there] for inconstancy to holy vows” (Dante, 29-31).1 Encouraged by Beatrice, Dante asks an eager soul identified as Piccarda Donati, a Poor Clare abducted from a Florentine convent by her brother and coerced into a politically expedient marriage, “through what warp she had not entirely passed the shuttle of her vow” (Dante, 95-96). Like the followers of Saint Clare who “go cloaked and veiled on earth,” she replies, “as a girl, I fled the world to walk the way she walked and closed myself into her habit, pledged to her sisterhood till my last day” (Dante, 98-99, 103-05).

Poem Bestowing upon François IER the essence of divinity was not a flattering aberration but an example of imagery that became emblematic of his long reign. As Anne-Marie Lecoq has shown in her incisive analyses of many laudatory illuminated treatises and poems and extravagant royal entries with theatrical enactments, the king was glorified by an allegorical symbolism often intricately interwoven with Christian typology as deemed appropriate, indeed necessary, for “un roi très chrétien” who was the brave, virtuous, pious elect of God.

Some Often Quoted Lines from Sidney's Apology for Poetry can stand both as a piece of literary history in themselves and as a methodological guide for the study of that history: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture.“1 It is one of the most famous of all definitions of poetry, and like many other such definitions—Plato's in the Republic, Horace's in the Ars Poetica2- —it arrives at saliency by drawing an analogy to the visual. More succinctly even than his predecessors, Sidney demonstrates just how difficult it is to unpack the cdncept of mimesis as he ranges through a sequence of functional descriptions ﹛representing, counterfeiting, figuring forth), none of which quite does the trick, until he arrives at a metaphor that names itself as such. One might say that a metaphor is itself a speaking picture and therefore Sidney's memorable phrase is a self-confirming artifact. But let us shy away from such metaformulations and content ourselves with a sense of just how felicitous the expression “speaking picture” turns out to be.

There are Several Reasons for presenting an overview of what the terms Renaissance and humanism have meant to Spanish historians and literary critics during the past one hundred fifty years. Despite the fact that these historiographical categories have not received the same attention in Spain as they have in other parts of Europe, it is still useful to identify certain recurring assumptions regarding the nature of the Spanish Renaissance and to point out how these underlying presuppositions are usually linked, directly or indirectly, to the historical development of the concept of the Renaissance elaborated elsewhere in Europe.