The fifteenth-century humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) spent much of the period from 1429 to 1444 involved with Florentine politics, becoming a strong advocate on behalf of the patrician oligarchs, many of whom were exiled in 1434 at the return of Cosimo de’ Medici from eleven months of exile. Filelfo’s works from the period, including his satires, the Oratio ad exules, and the consolatory treatise entitled Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, were a response to the Florentine political crisis. Filelfo demonstrates in these works not only a rhetorical and political purpose on behalf of his patrons, but also takes the opportunity to reflect on the notion of world citizenship, a philosophical concept derived largely from Stoic and Cynic sources.

This study draws on the unpublished correspondence between Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a Florentine poet and grandnephew of the artist, and the Barberini family, in an attempt to examine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.

The place of the Renaissance in historical narratives of modernity was problematic long before recent bouts of dismissal, denial, or indifference. However, the idea is a hardy survivor and the old phoenix is at it again. Has the Renaissance gained a new, postmodern lease on life? Plurality, discontinuity, and contingency are hallmarks of that protean, much-contested label and of current Renaissance studies, not to mention the Renaissance boom in pop culture. Is this a mirror reflecting only our own preconceptions or a window that discloses a Renaissance that was never convincingly modern in the first place? What are the implications, one way or another, for the present and future of Renaissance studies?

The publication some forty years ago of the landmark work by Philippe Ariès, entitled Centuries of Childhood in its widely-read English translation, unleashed decades of scholarly investigation of that once-neglected target, the child. Since then, historians have uncovered the traces of attitudes toward children — were they neglected, exploited, abused, cherished? — and patterns of child-rearing. They have explored such issues, among others, as the varieties of European household structure; definitions of the stages of life; childbirth, wetnursing, and the role of the midwife; child abandonment and the foundling home; infanticide and its prosecution; apprenticeship, servitude, and fostering; the evolution of schooling; the consequences of religious diversification; and the impact of gender. This essay seeks to identify key features and recent trends amid this abundance of learned inquiry.

Margherita Datini’s correspondence with her husband Francesco presents a well-documented case of progress from partial to full literacy. In Margherita’s merchant world, letter writing was a major concern, and her household duties included frequent reports to her absent husband. First, she prided herself on her dictation, and then she turned her attention to reading and writing. A recently discovered autograph letter shows that she was writing at twenty-eight, earlier than previously thought, and she attained full literacy in her mid-thirties. After that, writing no longer seemed a challenge, and she returned to using a scribe.

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.

While John Bale (1495–1563), in his contributions to the 1549 text The Laboryouse Journey & Serche of Johan Leylande, attempted to mark a decisive break in England’s literary history by radically differentiating, in Bale’s view, the light of England’s evangelical present from the darkness of its Catholic past, he felt compelled to deal with the persistence of the darkness he saw embodied by his contemporaries’ treatment of English texts. Bale understood this treatment in an economic sense, insistently playing on the terms commodity and profit, which were invoked similarly by a moral economic discourse and an emerging politico-economic discourse articulated by Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77). Thus English literary texts appear in Bale’s construction of national community both as trade-objects that circulate in an international economy, and as ideal tokens of English identity itself.

The savagery of the native Irish and, in particular, their predilection for severing heads, is repeatedly asserted, not only in the texts of conquest, but in representations of the “Wild Irish” on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This essay tests this literary commonplace against the historical record of the early modern conquest of Ireland. Far from being merely the aberrant practice of the barbarous Gaels, beheading — and a form of judicial headhunting — became a cornerstone of the conquerors’ policy of martial law. As atrocity was redefined as justice, so, in the hands of writers such as Spenser, Churchyard, and Derricke, was it aestheticized. But even as such writers wove inventive beheadings into their texts, Irish poets were elegizing the severed heads of patrons killed by the English. The poetry of beheading became a site of cultural confrontation and of unexpected assertions of humanity.

This study examines the musical writings of the occult philosopher Jacques Gohory, particularly his musical additions to his version of book 11 of the serial romance Amadis de Gaule. Although music and romance were often treated by contemporaries as, at best, trivial occupations for leisure hours, Gohory saw both as potential triggers for beneficial self-transformation: music and romance fully participate in the therapeutic and spiritual goals that motivate his more overtly philosophical and medical works. His use of romance as a vehicle for occult philosophy was an important means of disseminating concepts of music as natural magic beyond intellectual circles into the wider milieu of the French court, where occult understandings of music gained substantial currency by 1600.

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.

Public anatomies have been characterized as carnivalesque events: like the Carnival, they took place in January and February and celebrated bodily existence. However, in late sixteenth-century Padua and in its famous anatomy theater, the annual, public anatomy was a formal, ceremonial event. Girolamo Fabrici, the leading anatomist, gave a philosophical presentation of his research, a presentation organized by topic rather than by the gradual dissection of corpses. For medical students, the annual anatomy and the theater itself encouraged silence, obedience, and docility, reinforcing the virtues of civility that permeated the late humanist environment of Renaissance Padua.

Traditionally, Philip II’s massive relic collection preserved in the palace-monastery of the Escorial has been interpreted as a testimony to the Spanish king’s devotion to the cult of saints, and a proof of his support for the principles of the Tridentine Church. This essay explores some of Philip II’s more political and symbolic uses of relics, and studies their role in the construction of a monarchical, spiritual, and national identity in sixteenth-century Spain.

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.

This essay correlates changes in early modern astrological almanacs with broad changes in early modern English Protestant culture over the sixteenth and seventeenth century. These almanacs show an increasing tendency to be highly specific as to place and time and to suggest that precise times and precise places are given a larger meaning by their relationship to the stars and planets wheeling overhead. By lending a vertical significance to place and time, almanacs run counter to early modern Protestantism, which suggested that place and time have no inherent sacred significance. Thus the rise of the early modern astrological almanac may have been impelled by a desire on the part of early modern men and women to have time and place mean something.

In addition to portraits and diplomatic reports, Renaissance courts relied on fashion dolls to acquaint themselves with foreign dress. Unfortunately, literature on this subject is scarce and often disappointing. Overlooked by doll historians, a letter written by Federico Gonzaga (1500–40) in 1515 reveals that François Ier (1494–1547) requested a fashion doll from Isabella d’Este (1474–1539). After examining this document within the context of what is currently known about Renaissance fashion dolls, this essay explores what François I er’s interest in these objects suggests about his personality and his relationship to the women of his court.

The essay shows how two royalist recipe books — The Queens Closet Opened (1655) and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664) — fashioned Henrietta Maria (1609–69) and Elizabeth Cromwell (1598–1665) as very different housewives to the English nation. By portraying the much-disliked French Catholic Henrietta Maria as engaged in English domestic practices, The Queens Closet Opened implicitly responded to the scandalous private revelations of The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645); while, in contrast, the satiric cookery book attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell stigmatized her as both a country bumpkin and a foreigner. Yet the cookery books also had unintended republicanizing effects, as consumers appropriated the contents of the queen’s closet for their own cabinets and kitchens.