-
Juan de Pareja: Afro‐Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3 April–16 July 2023.) Catalogue edited by DavidPullins and Vanessa K.Valdés, with essays by Luis Méndez Rodriguez and Erin Kathleen Roe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023, 176 pp, 89 colour and b&w illustrations, $50, ISBN: 9781588397560. Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Suzanne Karr Schmidt
-
-
All roads lead from Rome: the transcultural career of Francisco de Reynoso Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Piers Baker‐Bates
This article discusses the transcultural career of one particular Spanish ecclesiastic, the Palencian, Francisco de Reynoso (1534–1601). Reynoso is a far more significant historical and cultural figure than has previously been thought, although never the subject of a holistic study. He began his ecclesiastical life as major domo and secretary of Pope Pius V and ended it as Bishop of Córdoba. Through
-
‘A Voice Amidst Mine Ears’: Silent Angels on the Early Modern Stage Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Caitlín Rankin-McCabe
Unlike the carts that crawled with angels in the medieval pageant plays, angels of the early modern stage were a rare breed. Eventually they disappeared from the stage altogether; they did not, however, disappear all at once in a puff of celestial smoke. This article reveals a pattern of suppression in the representation of angels on the English stage, ranging from Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
-
-
Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed (London, The National Gallery, 7 December 2023 –10 March 2024). Catalogue by Laura Llewellyn (ed.), with contributions by Jill Dunkerton and Nathaniel Silver. London: National Gallery Global Limited, distributed by Yale University Press, 2023. 80 pp., illus. col., ISBN 97818570971081052658. Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Samuel Dawson
-
-
The harmonious soul and the defence of music in sixteenth‐century England Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-24 Katherine Butler
This article examines the history of the concept of the soul as a harmony—as opposed to merely being like a harmony—in sixteenth‐century England, demonstrating how debates over music's morality in sixteenth‐century England were a catalyst for theorising an increasing affinity between music and the soul. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, English writers valued music primarily for its restorative
-
DanielGehrt, MarkusMatthias, and SaschaSalatowsky (eds), Reforming Church History: The Impact of the Reformation on Early Modern European Historiography. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2023. 317 pp. €64.00. ISBN 978‐3‐515‐13424‐8 (hb). Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-24 Christian Thorsten Callisen
-
Hugo van der Goes. Between Pain and Bliss (Gemäldegalerie—Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, March 31–July 16, 2023). Catalogue by Stephan Kemperdick and Erik Eising with the collaboration of Till-Holger Borchert (ed.), Hugo van der Goes. Between Pain and Bliss, exh. cat., trans. Bram Opstelten and Joshua Waterman. Munich: Hirmer Verlag for Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2023. 304 pp. col. ill. ISBN 9783777438481 Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-09 Niko Munz
The early Netherlandish painter Hugo van der Goes (c.1440-1482/83) is not as well-known as he should be. He has a renown—although largely for his biographical peculiarities. In c.1475-7, at the height of a successful career in Ghent (about which we know little excepting decorative commissions, notably for Charles the Bold), Hugo became a lay brother at an Augustinian foundation known as the Roode Kloster
-
‘Send the midwife’: The Birth of Blackness in Titus Andronicus Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Hanh Bui
This article examines a neglected context for understanding the ontology and epistemology of race in Shakespeare's drama: the role of the midwife. Early modern midwives performed an important cultural function by not only assisting women in labour, but also pronouncing the sex and paternity of a newborn. As Caroline Bicks has shown, this was a time when a midwife was thought to have significant influence
-
The role of the Praenotamenta of Jodocus Badius Ascensius in shaping early modern dramatic criticism Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Giulia Torello-Hill
This article examines the profound and enduring legacy of the treatise on classical drama known as Praenotamenta ascensiana in shaping early modern dramatic poetics. Written by Flemish scholar Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) as a preface to his 1502 edition of the Classical plays of Terence, this work has been unjustly overlooked by the critics that have invariably credited Aristotle’s Poetics
-
A New Masaccio—and Other Low-Life Images—from Anton Francesco Grazzini's Florentine Art History Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Karen Hope Goodchild
What if a new Masaccio were found? This article offers a 16th century ekphrasis of a “lost” Masaccio so ornate, funny, and lusty that it upends prior conceptions of the artist. I examine this description and two others, all by the comic writer Anton Francesco Grazzini (“Il Lasca,” 1503-1584), to see how art could be leveraged within Florence's literary and artistic culture as class commentary. I have
-
‘De Voluptate Aurium’: The Sounds of Heaven in a 1501 Sensory Treatise on the Afterlife Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Laura Ștefănescu
In his De gloria et gaudiis beatorum, printed in 1501, the clergyman Zaccaria Lilio explores a popular topic in the religious life of Renaissance Italy: what is heaven like and what kind of experience awaits the blessed there? And his answer represents a snapshot of a characteristic manner in which heaven was imagined in the period, both in written and visual form, one strongly focused on a sensory
-
Giovanni Pontano hears the street soundscape of Naples Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Tim Shephard, Melany Rice
Giovanni Pontano’s dialogue Antonius can be read almost as a thick description of the soundscape of a Neapolitan street in the mid- to late-15th century, complete with public announcements, street performers, domestic arguments, workers’ banter, charms and spells, processions, errand boys, bells, clocks, cockerels, and much more. Antonius was first printed in 1491, and then in a 1501 Opera edition
-
Commenting on Music in Juvenal's Sixth Satire Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Ciara O'Flaherty, Tim Shephard
The satires of Juvenal were immensely popular in Renaissance Italy, printed in various forms over 70 times in the period 1469-1520, and five times in 1501 alone. The satires contain a wealth of references to instruments, instrumentalists, and playing practices that are frequently used in double entendres connoting lewd acts and infidelity, most potently in the sixth satire. The five Renaissance commentaries
-
Looking up music in two ‘encyclopedias’ printed in 1501 Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Tim Shephard, Charlotte Hancock
A modern user of a printed encyclopedia expects to find concise entries on a wide range of subjects organised alphabetically for ease of reference. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a number of scholarly texts of a particularly long and wide-ranging character were essentially ‘encyclopedized’ through the provision of compendious subject indexes, appearing before the start of the text in some
-
“[A]ltered that a litle which before I had written”: how Margaret Hoby wrote and rewrote her manuscript Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-16 Juan Pedro Lamata
This essay conducts a paleographic study of Egerton Manuscript 2614, more commonly known as the “diary” of Margaret Hoby. To date, all scholarly studies of this document have been based on one of two print editions of the text. Unfortunately, these editions regularly mistranscribe and misrepresent the early modern manuscript and reduce its palimpsestic complexity. This is the first systematic study
-
Musicianship and the masteries of the stars: music and musicians in the Liber Nativitatum Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Oliver Doyle
This article signs a light on the musical contents of a “book of births”, the Liber Nativitatum or Albubather, written by the Persian Astrologer Abu Bakr al-Hassan ibn al-Khasib in the ninth century, translated into Latin at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and published in Venice in 1501. “Books of births” served to show how an individual's fortune and personal traits could be ascertained
-
Reading for musical knowledge in early sixteenth-century Italy: Introduction Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Tim Shephard, Laura Ștefănescu, Oliver Doyle, Ciara O'Flaherty
The essays included here present case studies prepared within the project ‘Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted at the University of Sheffield. The project asks a simple question: standing in a Venetian bookshop towards the end of the year 1501, what information about music might you encounter as you browse the new printed
-
‘After the fashion of Italy’: Richard Brome and Italian culture Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Cristina Paravano
The article discusses Richard Brome's engagement with Italy and its cultural legacy in his corpus. Apparently, the playwright's interest in Italy does not seem particularly profound since his works offer several examples of well-known and worn-out cultural stereotypes. Nevertheless, at a closer look, the dramatist may be indisputably listed among the early modern English playwrights who were drawn
-
‘Materie piacevolissime da leggere e utili da essequire’: The introductory letters in Leonardo Fioravanti's Capricci medicinali Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-17 Teodoro Katinis
This contribution examines the changes in the type and sequence of paratexts at the beginning of Leonardo Fioravanti’s Capricci medicinali from the first edition (1561) to the 1680 edition. The aim of this paper is to study the building of a selfimage and promotion of Fioravanti and his medicine via the paratextual letters. This was the first and most published of Fioravanti’s works which spread in
-
Pelopidarum secunda: a ‘site of memory’ in the history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-10 Angelica Vedelago
Pelopidarum secunda is an understudied anonymous English adaptation of Seneca's Agamemnon and Sophocles' Electra. The play is preserved only in manuscript and was probably performed at Winchester College around 1590. Through a combination of Marvin Carlson's notions of ‘ghosting’ and of the ‘site of memory’ with a neo-historicist approach, the article offers a close analysis of this neglected school
-
‘L'arte in prattica’: Reconstructing Orazio Toscanella's language ideology Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Claudia Crocco, Eleonora Serra
This paper examines the dynamics which led to the formation of Italian by reconstructing the language ideology of the teacher and polygraph Orazio Toscanella, i.e. one of those cultural mediators who, in the sixteenth-century Venetian printing market, were actively involved in the promotion of the vernacular. Looking for traces of Toscanella’s language ideology through a range of paratextual materials
-
Gazing at the Venetian hub from a paratextual lens: An introduction Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Claudia Crocco, Teodoro Katinis
This introductory article presents the framework and contributions of the special issue Paratexts, Dissemination, and Book Market in Early Modern Venice (1500-1650). This volume aims to shed a new light on the publishing activity of poligrafi and other figures operating in Venice and its area of cultural influence. In this context, the use of paratexts simultaneously serves to disseminate knowledge
-
‘By consultation of elevated minds’: the role of paratexts in Giovanni Battista Calderari's comedies Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-03 Lies Verbaere
Genette's Seuils considers the dramatic paratext as the odd one out, and, indeed, the early-modern theatrical paratext has remained understudied. This article discusses the paratexts of the comedies of Giovanni Battista Calderari, a sixteenth-century author quite neglected by scholars, whose works were published in Vicenza and Venice. By focusing on the paratexts of La Mora (The Moorish Woman, 1588)
-
Foreword Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Nandini Das
1 May 1584, Tripoli in Libya. There was chaos aboard the English ship, the Jesus. Thirty-nine shots fired from the shore had wreaked havoc on this medium-sized merchant ship and its small crew of about twenty-six men. Their rudder was in pieces; an eight-kilogram ball from a culverin cannon had gone through their foremast. In all the smoke and panic, the English merchants on board the ship saw no option
-
The vernacularization of Paduan medicine and philosophy in the seventeenth century: Troilo Lancetta's Raccolta medica, et astrologica Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-13 Craig Martin
In 1645 Troilo Lancetta saw to the publication of a compilation of texts, Raccolta medica, et astrologica, under the anagrammatic and implausible pseudonym Lootri Nacattel. Most of these texts were translations into the Italian vernacular. They include writings by Girolamo Cardano; Hippocrates; Aristotle, and his commentators; Girolamo Fracastoro; Lancetta’s teacher, the philosopher Cesare Cremonini;
-
Reading the Religious Diversity of the Later Seventeenth-Century Ottoman World: An Anglican Traveller's Perspective Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Charles Beirouti
In his Some Account of the Present Greek Church of 1722, Dr John Covel (1638–1722), an Anglican cleric and long-time master of Christ's College, Cambridge, reflected on how human beings, and Christians specifically, might best please God.1 In so doing, Covel argued that disputes over ‘the outward Dress and Fashion of Religion’, or ‘meer outward forms of Godliness’2 such as the acts of fasting, praying
-
Advertising doubt in early modern Italy: Doubt and ignorance in early modern paratexts Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Marco Faini
Spelled in several different ways, the word ‘doubt’, usually in the plural ‘doubts’ (dubbi, dubitazioni) appears on the frontispiece of several works printed in Venice and elsewhere in Italy in the sixteenth century. Building on different traditions, ranging from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata to Medieval didactic literature, these texts, normally in the vernacular, address questions that the average
-
‘Come parto imperfetto’: Paratexts and organization in a sixteenth-century book of secrets Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Ruben Celani
This essay addresses the Secreti diversi et miracolosi, one of the many ‘books of secrets’ (collections of medical and craft recipes) which crowded the sixteenth-century Venetian book market. First published in 1563 and spuriously ascribed to the physician Gabriele Falloppia, this book was already subject to significant structural changes in its second edition (1565). The editors of the first and second
-
Citizenship and inheritance law in Florence: Round two of the conflict between and Borromei and Pazzi Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Thomas Kuehn
In 2020 Renaissance Studies [34 (2020): 243–59] published an essay entitled “Lorenzo de' Medici and Inheritance Law in Florence,” discussing the use of legislation by Lorenzo de' Medici to advantage Carlo Borromei in inheritance from his uncle, to the disadvantage of his cousin, Beatrice, who was married to a Pazzi. The legislation removed legal uncertainty in Florentine inheritance law. Another consilium
-
Advertising grammars and dictionaries in the Venetian printing market: A linguistic analysis of title pages Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Eleonora Serra
Title-pages represent an interesting and under-researched type of paratextual material in the context of the Italian early modern book market. Drawing on pragma-linguistic approaches not yet applied in the Italian context, this paper offers an analysis of title-pages of vernacular grammars and lexicographic works that were printed in Venice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century (31 works)
-
A question of genre: Philip Melanchthon's oratorical debut at Wittenberg University Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Isabella Walser-Bürgler
The speech Philip Melanchthon gave on 29 August 1518 at the University of Wittenberg to initiate his professorship is an impressive piece of humanist idealism. Already its title, De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis (On the reform of the studies for the young) reveals his earnest ambitions in introducing reform. Not incidentally, thus, the speech received a lot of attention immediately after its delivery
-
Ass-troll-ogical Nashe: Revisiting Two Dangerous Comets and A Wonderful Prognostication Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Rachel White, Brett Greatley-Hirsch
This article revisits the authorship of and relationship between three mock-prognostications published pseudonymously in 1591, drawing on contextual, bibliographical, and stylistical analysis to attribute Two Dangerous Comets and A Wonderful Prognostication to Thomas Nashe. The article also considers the significance of these findings for studies of Nashe, satire, and Elizabethan print culture.
-
Reading Europe in the Renaissance: continent, personification and myth in Ronsard's Discours de l'alteration et change des choses humaines Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Niall Oddy
Renaissance readers were familiar with two traditions of visualizing the continent of Europe as a woman: the myth of Europa and the bull, and personifications of Europe as a queen. This article examines the impact of these traditions on the geographical, political and cultural discourses of Europe through the example of the French poet Ronsard's Discours de l'alteration et change des choses humaines
-
White Skin, White Mask: Constructing Whiteness in Thomas Kyd's The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Hassana Moosa
Criticism in early modern English drama has become increasingly attentive to how the ideologies of racial Whiteness are formed on the English stage. However, this scholarship has not yet considered how White supremacy is dramatically constructed against the male, Muslim, Ottoman, a figure who, I argue, would have been performed as phenotypically white on the English stage. By examining the racialisation
-
‘For Few Mean Ill in Vaine’: Roxolana and the Clash of Passion and Politics in the Ottoman Court in Fulke Greville's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1609) and Roger Boyle's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1665) Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Aisha Hussain
Despite the many historical references to wealth, military strength and political efficiency, Turks were generally represented as violent, lustful and despotic figures in early modern cultural discourses. The stereotyped cultural Turk soon populated the London stages, thus moulding a recognisable dramatic type whose brutality and sexual appetite were also combined with political corruption. However
-
Racecraft and the Indian Queen in The Temple of Love (1635) Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Lubaaba Al-Azami
Critical race readings of early modern drama have often centred discourses on colour and the binary of black and white in English racecraft, with very important results.1 However, I submit the need to expand our analytical lenses further, to effectively engage the recognized instability of racial difference beyond skin colour and the dominant black-white binary.2 By doing so, we can unearth deeper
-
The Three Ladies of London (ca. 1581): Re-Reading Anxieties of Anglo-Ottoman Exchanges Through Critical Race Theory Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Murat Öğütcü
Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (ca. 1581) is the earliest extant Turk play that features one of the earliest instances of direct anxieties regarding Anglo-Ottoman encounters. Contemporary with the 1580 Ahdname (capitulations), the play provides a local point-of-view of the newly established Anglo-Ottoman commercial relations. We observe how seemingly overpriced Turkish goods, such as perfumes
-
Knowing the Maghreb in Stuart Scotland, Ireland and Northern England Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Nat Cutter
Introduction On 6 August 1709, the Dublin Intelligence reported that Dutch negotiators in Ottoman Algiers ‘were received, treated, and dismissed by the Algerines, with more civility than could be expected from those Infidels, who delight chiefly in Rapine and Blood.’1 The article's byline named its source as the prestigious London Gazette, ‘Published by Authority’ by the Whitehall Secretary of State's
-
Pietro Aretino's (un)Virgilian Sack of Rome☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Jessica Goethals
Pietro Aretino was a particularly frequent commentator on the catastrophic 1527 Sack of Rome by the Spanish, German and Italian troops of Charles V. This article examines one of his most extended, and curious, responses to the Sack: the explicit parody of Virgil's Books I-IV of The Aeneid that opens Day Two of his Dialogo. The episode features a satirical Cinquecento take on the story of Aeneas and
-
Royal epistolary courtship in Latin? Arthur Tudor's “love letter” to Katherine of Aragon at the Archivo General de Simancas and Francesco Negri's Ars Epistolandi☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-03 K. P. S. Janssen, Nadia T. van Pelt
The Archivo General de Simancas in Valladolid has preserved a letter attributed to Arthur Tudor, categorized as ‘declarándole su ardiente pasión amorosa’ [declaring his ardent loving passion]. Its recipient has been thought to be Katherine of Aragon. The lack of scholarly interest in this letter is remarkable, but may be caused by its having been calendared in the nineteenth century as written by Perkin
-
‘I was Born in One City, but Raised in Another’: Aretino's Perugian Apprenticeship Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-22 William T. Rossiter
According to his apocrypha, Aretino was forced to flee his hometown of Arezzo after penning some anti-papal verses. Similarly, it is claimed that he fled Perugia ten years later after painting a lute into the hands of a depiction of the Maddalena, which stood in one of the town's piazze. Neither anecdote is true, but they point to Aretino's early reputation for both poetry and painting. In 1512, the
-
Aretino: Conjuring the Sensuous City Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Marlene Eberhart
This article examines Pietro Aretino's promotion and critique of the sensorial aspects of the physical, the political and the sociable city through a selection of his letters and the three comedies La Cortigiana, Il Marescalco and La Talanta. It explores the shared physical and social experiences that Aretino counts on in order for his words to resonate with his readers, especially with regard to Venice
-
Constructing Sebastiano del Piombo: Pietro Aretino and the Artistic Landscape of Clementine Rome☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Piers Baker-Bates
Sebastiano del Piombo's heyday in Rome coincided with that of Pietro Aretino, and they benefitted there from the same patrons, first Agostino Chigi and then Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. Both men flourished especially, in the brief 4 years of the pontificate of Giulio, between his election as Pope Clement VII and the traumatic Sack of 1527, although Aretino had already had to leave the city in 1525.
-
Aretino's Urban Gardens Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-08 James Grantham Turner
‘Petrus Arretinus vir acerrimi iudicii’ – Pietro Aretino, a man of most acute mind – went down in history as an intimate of Agostino Chigi (1466–1520), the great banker and patron of the arts. In his letters and drama, Aretino frequently evokes the golden years he spent as a protégé and household member. He recalls his brief but formative residence at Chigi's Villa Farnesina (ca. 1516–1520) as a time
-
Aretino Jesuited: an English Translation of the Sette Salmi in Seventeenth-Century Douai Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Andrew S. Keener
This article offers the first focused analysis of John Hawkins's 1635 English rendering of Pietro Aretino's Parafrasi sopra i sette salmi della penitenza di David, situating the translation within its Catholic and translingual context. Nearly a century after Thomas Wyatt's versified treatment of the Sette Salmi, a sequence of seven Psalms framed within the narrative of a penitent King David, this prose
-
Staging the Imagined City: Aretino in Rome and London Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Kate De Rycker
This article explores the theme of ‘cityscapes’, and Aretino as a writer of the urban experience, by focussing on the city as an unknowable and anonymous space, especially to social outsiders. It will first examine how Aretino portrays Rome in his early comedy Cortigiana (1525) as a confusing and socially stratified space when experienced from its peripheries. A key factor in achieving this is in his
-
Languages, Latin, and the Jacobean Secretariat: William Fowler's Letters in Florence and Venice Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Allison L. Steenson
This article presents several letters by Queen Anna of Denmark that are currently preserved in the State Archives of Florence and Venice, and that were written by her foreign secretary, Master William Fowler (Edinburgh 1560–London 1612). Fowler is a well-known presence in Scottish literary history, as a member of James' VI so-called ‘Castalian band of poets’ in the 1580 s and a translator of Petrarch
-
Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton's ‘Perused’ Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599) Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-18 Flynn Allott
This article gives a detailed description and analysis of Robert Burton's copy of Theatrum urbium italicarum, a Venetian ‘city-atlas’ produced in 1599 by the engraver and publisher Pietro Bertelli. Burton's copy of the book is especially noteworthy because it has had a number of the maps removed. The article uses the Theatrum in order to add fresh emphasis to Burton's understanding of cartography,
-
Songbirds and Social Distinction in Seventeenth-Century England Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-18 Duncan Frost
This article investigates the nuanced relationship between songbirds and social dynamics in early modern England. It demonstrates how a rhetorical discourse of social distinction was created by printed bird-training manuals. This discourse was necessary because the same species of songbird existed across the social spectrum. For native songbirds, therefore, their inherent value, and the status they
-
‘Not as a Poet, but a Pioner’: Fancy and the Colonial Gaze in William Davenant's Madagascar (1638) Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-27 Lauren Working
In the late 1630s, the court poet William Davenant applied his literary energies to Madagascar, an island off the eastern coast of Africa: ‘Thus in a dreame, I did adventure out…/Betweene the Southern Tropick and the Line’. While previous scholarship has highlighted the poem's ambiguous attitude towards empire, focusing on the rising interest in global travel and eastern diplomacy at Charles I's court
-
A Venetian Secretary's Expertise. Marcantonio Donini and his Three Dialogues… on the Ottoman Empire and ‘Turkish’ Affairs Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Piotr Chmiel
This article presents a text on the Ottoman Empire left by Marcantonio Donini – a career secretary with the Venetian diplomatic service, sent three times to Constantinople/Istanbul. After the death of his superior during his second stay in the Ottoman Empire, Donini was entrusted with temporarily heading the mission and with presenting the final mission report (relazione) after his return to Venice
-
An Unpublished Autograph Letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Carolus Clusius, 21 April 1576 Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Thomas Matthew Vozar
Only a decade ago Roger Kuin's The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (2012) offered scholars for the first time a complete edition of Sidney's correspondence. Kuin modestly allowed room for new discoveries, in the hope that additional letters might be identified. This article introduces a previously unpublished autograph letter by Sidney, written in French, addressed on 21 April 1576 to Carolus Clusius
-
Falstaff on Tour: County, Town and Country in the Late Elizabethan Theatre Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Neil Rhodes
Why does Falstaff travel to York via Gloucestershire in Henry the Fourth, part two? And why does Shakespeare interrupt his second tetralogy of history plays to take his most famous comic character to Windsor in the Merry Wives? This article uses Falstaff's tour of England in these two plays to explore an idea of the country founded upon local identities rather than on the overarching appeal of nationhood
-
‘The very wound of this ill news’: Maximilien Morillon and the impact of bad news during the early years of the Dutch Revolt, 1566–74 Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Rosanne M. Baars
This article demonstrates the importance that inhabitants of the sixteenth-century Netherlands, in particular members of the elite, attached to the unpleasant effects of bad news, such as ill health, feelings of uncertainty, and discouragement. It aims to show this through the case study of the correspondence of Maximilien Morillon (1517–1586), vicar-general of Mechelen and one of the most prolific
-
‘Self-confidence and Self-Conceit Render Men Fools’: Seventeenth-Century ‘Self-’ Compounds, Puritan Discourse and Early Modern Subjectivity☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-05 N. H. Keeble
The unprecedented enlargement of the English lexicon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included a conspicuous group of new compounds with ‘self’ as the first element. After only a handful of such compounds in Middle English, nearly 150 were coined in the sixteenth century, and then an astonishing 600 or so in the seventeenth (approaching half of all such compounds recorded in the Oxford English
-
Feathers and the Making of Luxury Experiences at the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Court☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-09-04 Stefan Hanß
This article charts the activities of featherworkers (plumajeros) at the Habsburg court in Madrid. Drawing on archival records, objects, and paintings from sixteenth-century Spain, I argue that royal featherworkers' skills, wit, and intricacy in the transformation of materials established feathers as luxury items. In sixteenth-century Spanish court society, feathers evoked sensory experiences that
-
What did Didactic Literature Teach? Change-Ringing Manuals, Printed Miscellanies and Forms of Active Reading☆ Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Katherine Hunt
This paper takes the practice of change-ringing as a case study to examine the forms, transmission, and effects of early modern didactic literature. The novelty of change-ringing, which was invented and very quickly spread in the seventeenth century, offers an opportunity to test out the contours of learning from printed books. Tracing the dissemination of its instructions in printed miscellanies of