On 17 March 1516, Giuliano De' Medici Died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the Badia of Fiesole. Third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giuliano had received the title of duke of Nemours from King Francis I of France four months before his death. By dying, he may have committed his most politically significant act, for the Medici regime mobilized its resources to exploit the opportunities that the occasion presented. On March 19, the governors of the city orchestrated a great public funeral, which intended to celebrate the memory of Giuliano and the restoration of Medici hegemony.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" The classicist Erich Segal managed to wring 131 pages (and who knows how many millions of dollars) out of the short life of his fictional creation Jennifer Cavilleri, the heroine of Love Story. My subject is a real girl, the painter Irene di Spilimbergo, whose death at the age of twenty-one in 1559 evoked a tribute much more substantial, although probably not so lucrative for its editor, Dionigi Atanagi: a memorial volume containing 279 Italian and 102 Latin poems, a few anonymous but most written by 143 named contributors.

Jean Crespin's Histoire des martyrs (1554-1597) appears at first as a collection of fragments supplying historical information regarding the martyrdoms of continental Protestant men and women. However, I argue that this martyrology is far more sophisticated and coherent in its conception and execution than its episodic appearance conveys in a first reading. It aims not merely at a tendentious recounting of persecution. Rather, the text seeks to effect a veritable resuscitation of the bodies upon which it is structured, those suffocated words still contained in the stricken corpse.

When The Spanish Novella-Writer, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, challenged seventeenth-century male authorities, her challenge embraced both sacred and profane canons. Zayas invests her novellas with the formal properties of hagiography while subverting the ideology of that Church-sanctioned genre. At the same time, Zayas shows herself to be a subtle reader and interpreter of one of Spain's greatest writers, Cervantes, by challenging his attitude to and treatment of women.