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The plot of this clever neo-Latin comedy written around the 1520s by Juan Maldonado puts together scheming servants, young maids, conservative parents blinded by greed and social aspiration, a hypocrite friar secretly lusting after a young wife, a wealthy but impotent husband, and a long string of go-betweens and confidantes with their clever parcels of tricks. Against all this social theatre, the young and inexperienced lovers Philocondus and Christiola struggle to overcome family opposition or social prejudice and, most importantly, they also struggle to understand the nature of their own developing feelings, the meaning and implications of those feelings, the value of human freedom and choice, and the responsibility that goes with it...

Review(s) of: Reframing Albrecht Durer: The appropriation of art, 1528-1700, by Bubenik, Andrea, (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, hardback, pp. xiv, 268; 81 b/w illustrations, 13 colour plates, R.R.P. 60.00 pounds, ISBN 9781409438472.

Sarah Kay’s new book takes its cue and its central approach from an age-old emblem that identifies the task of the lyricist with that of the nightingale (or the sparrow), as opposed to that of the parrot (or the crow). While the sparrow and the nightingale (from Catullus to Keats) are identified with the articulation of a rhetoric of spontaneity and natural correspondence, the parrot would imply the verbatim repetition of words and a higher reliance on adequate contextual response by the audience, but also a higher mediation by literary institutions and cultural gatekeepers. The way of the nightingale presents itself as one of free-flowing, unproblematic poetic thought, articulated by the objective existence of its objective content (be that feeling or experience). In stark opposition to it, the way of the parrot would be one of strict quotation: of negative response, modification, twisted irony, or parasitic appropriation. And yet, the core question of mimesis that lies at the centre of early modern poetics emerges precisely from the intersection of both ways: the way of the nightingale and the way of the parrot. Renaissance imitation stems from this crossroads as a textual development in both its philosophical and rhetorical aspects; not primarily a matter of ontology, but also, quite crucially, one of rhetorical practice.The book starts by examining textual practice, and maintains a close attention to detail throughout the entire volume. This approach makes the volume useful even for the non-specialist...

Professor Bill Kent was a pioneer of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Australia, and a foundation for some of the most substantial work on the area being done nowadays. His work on Florentine social history spans more than thirty-five years, and stands out by its scrupulous attention to historical detail and by its philological and archival zeal, including the historia minora or minima, and their role in the bigger picture. Much of his gigantic task involved a thorough revision not only of perceived ideas but also of method, and this posthumous volume is a valuable testament to that great legacy. All these qualities are brilliantly illustrated in the fourteen essays reprinted in this collection, and in the concluding chapter on ‘The Death of Lorenzo’, previously unpublished and available here for the first time.This book deals with particular, isolated aspects of a man who strove to reveal very little about himself, cultivating instead an image that blurred the private and the public. In doing so, Lorenzo de’ Medici succeeded in becoming an indispensable leader and social mediator...

This wonderful book presents for the first time to a modern readership four important yet seldom known novels, dating back to twelfth-century Constantinople: Theodore Prodromos’s Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Eumathios Makrembolites’s Hysmine and Hysminias, Constantine Manasses’s Aristandros and Kallithea, and Niketas Eugenianos’s Drosilla and Charikles. Until very recently, these texts have been largely overlooked, and Elizabeth Jeffreys’s much-needed edition and study is a landmark contribution that will make them available to a wider audience and have a lasting impact on literary scholarship...