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This article examines the manuscripts into which compilers bound Dominican letters of spiritual direction in fifteenth-century Italy. It argues that manuscript compilers sought to model Observant Dominican sanctity after Jerome's late antique practice of writing letters of spiritual direction to women. The paper aims to contribute to the growing conversation around the development and spread of an Observant Dominican identity by demonstrating that compilers modeled Observant beati after Jerome's authoritative persona in order to argue for the ancient precedent of the reformers’ often controversial agendas, chief among them their active ministry to women.

The reception of art is often described in ocularcentric terms, but all five senses could engage devotional objects in late medieval and early modern Europe. This article explores this phenomenon by considering a wooden crucifix with movable arms made by Donatello for the Franciscan church of S. Croce in Florence in the early fifteenth century. It makes new suggestions about the work's original location, its possible patrons, and its functions and reception, especially during the rituals associated with Good Friday. It also reflects on the challenges scholars face when taking a multisensory approach to premodern visual and material culture.

This article analyzes the “De Bellis Gothorum,” a long neglected and misunderstood history of the ancient Goths written in 1472–73 by Nicholas of Modruš, the leading Croatian-Illyrian bishop at the papal curia. By placing the work in its proper context, this article reconstructs a previously unknown episode in the political history of the fifteenth-century Adriatic. It is argued that the “De Bellis Gothorum” was in fact a national history that was meant to provide a trans-Adriatic network of Croatian and Bosnian nobles and churchmen with support from Naples and the papacy for their border wars against the Ottomans and reestablishment of their national kingdom.

This article examines a series of messages concerning politics and geography that the religious order of the Vallombrosans embedded within a series of exorcism manuscripts and addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the late fifteenth century. The Vallombrosans crafted their manuscripts to negotiate a host of troubles: schism over reform, friction with Lorenzo, diminishing social status, increased marginality, competition with rival religious orders, new definitions of orthodoxy, and alternate forms of religious devotion. I frame Vallombrosan troubles and their turn to exorcism as symptomatic of the increased predominance of Mendicant Observants over older orders, and link this shift to a newly active and politicized demonology.

Although it is common in the musicological literature to compare decorated music books with books of hours, studies addressing the musical features of books of hours are rare. This article considers musical features in the decoration of a book of hours made by leading illuminators in Ferrara ca. 1469. Images appearing in books of hours are considered to have had an exemplary and meditative function in relation to devotional practice; therefore, this study asks what the reader was intended to learn from musical images, drawing conclusions about the alignment of the senses and the significance of music in fifteenth-century religious experience.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries popes increasingly depended on clerical and lay kin to supervise the implementation of papal policy. This article argues that the charge of papal nepotism is a result of the continuing idealization of the pope as separate from the issues of work and family. By acknowledging that the preoccupations of the early modern pope extended beyond pastoral activities into a world of administration, legislation, militarism, and diplomacy, historians can better understand the pope’s use of and observers’ criticism of nepotism.

This article focuses on the contribution of anti-Jewish themes to political ideals and reality in the works of two leading Venetian patrician humanists — Ludovico Foscarini and Paolo Morosini. The article demonstrates that their literary attacks on Jews were shaped by classical, patristic, medieval, and humanist texts, and by the experience of service to the state. It also demonstrates that their work contributed to debates about the toleration of Jews in Venetian territory and can be linked to the humanist engagement with Judaism at a critical point for both phenomena in the fifteenth century.

Between 1360 and 1460 the Venetian government established a system of legalized prostitution under the supervision of government officials and confined, in theory, to a limited area of the city. The authorities also attempted to concentrate the management of licit brothels in the hands of women, who thereby emerged as the effective entrepreneurs of the sex trade. This article describes the organization of Venetian prostitution in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the relations among government officials, brothel-keepers, and prostitutes. It illustrates the mechanisms of debt and credit used in the sex trade, which often kept the prostitutes subservient to the brothel-keepers and to their other creditors. An effort is made to assess the degree to which sex workers might become integrated into local society and to suggest the general trends in Venetian policy toward prostitution into the sixteenth century.

This article investigates four widely studied versions of the biblical story of the Feast of Herod produced by Florentine artists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Giotto’s fresco from the Peruzzi Chapel at Santa Croce (ca. 1320), Andrea Pisano’s panels on the south doors of Florence’s baptistery (ca. 1335), Donatello’s relief for the baptismal font at Siena (ca. 1425), and Filippo Lippi’s fresco in the main chapel at the cathedral of Prato (ca. 1465). The study explores how the narrative is interpreted by each artist and suggests social messages that contemporary audiences might have drawn from each interpretation by examining the actions of the figures in light of the teachings of late medieval and early Renaissance didactic literature. Conduct literature allows one to interpret what the works reveal about the story, but also suggests that they could function didactically, in and of themselves. In such a reading, Herodias and Salome are treacherous women: dangerous not only to John the Baptist, but also to Florentine society of the period.

This essay deals with the nature, background, and consequences of urban patronage for individual rhetoricians in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries. Although this phenomenon is most likely rooted in courtly practice, it is mainly because of the usefulness of rhetoricians in the context of urban public festivals that some of them received financial rewards from city authorities. My analysis shows how in the Low Countries urban festive culture and the oral dissemination of literary texts played an important, and heretofore largely neglected, role in the professionalization and individualization of authorship during the early modern period.

Prior to the late fifteenth century in Florence, the losers of political conflicts routinely faced exile as punishment for their perceived crimes. Following the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, however, such political criminals increasingly received death sentences rather than banishment. This article explores how the changing nature of punishment for political crimes in Renaissance Florence from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries can be read as a barometer of political change in the city. It examines the relationship between the growing number of political executions and the long transformation of Florence from a republic to a principality, with reference to the broader context of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.

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.

Medici patronage of the arts in the fourteenth century has gone largely unstudied. Yet there is a notable paper trail, backed by a small number of sculptural remnants of funerary monuments, indicating that prominent members of the family understood the power of visual imagery for establishing their patrilines as leading families, both within the social hierarchy of Florence and within the Medici consorteria. These sculptural remains give clear precedent for the early activity of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo de’ Medici as artistic patrons in the fifteenth century.

Although the works of Homer remained unknown in Western Europe for much of the Middle Ages, their reappearance was welcomed enthusiastically in France toward the end of the fifteenth century by the small band of scholars capable of reading Greek. The founding of the Collège des lecteurs royaux in 1530 gave a fillip to Homeric studies, and partial editions of Homer were printed in Paris, aimed at a student audience. French translations also helped to bring the poems to a wider audience. However, the question of the interpretation of Homer was central to the reception of the two epics, and, after examining the publishing history, this paper sets out to assess how succeeding generations of scholars set about reading and teaching the prince of poets.

This paper is an examination of the civic government of Genoa from 1435 to 1464, and of the principles that underlay how it was conducted. Despite the political instability caused by contenders for the dogeship, and the division of offices between Guelfs and Ghibellines and between nobles andpopolari,the civic government generally operated on a consensual basis. The principles and practices of the civic government restricted the power of the doges and prevented them from turning their position into an effectivesignoria.

In the fifteenth century, Guarino Guarini, Ludovico Carbone, Francesco Filelfo, and other humanists composed and delivered Latin orations at courtly weddings in Ferrara, Naples, and Milan. In these epithalatmia, which are mostly unpublished, orators adapt a classically inspired conception of marriage to Italian court culture. They defend physical beauty and sexual pleasure, praise learned brides, and assert the importance of mutual affection, revealing a complex picture of ideal gender relations in courts. Against the ancient and Christian anti-marriage ascetic traditions, humanists offer biblical, philosophical, political, economic, and hedonistic arguments in defense of marriage.

This essay considers the role of contingency in the history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. Were there any events — a birth, marriage, or death; a battle; a natural catastrophe — that might have changed decisively the trajectory of Italian history? The Roman papacy is one institution whose history, replete with contingent events (1305, 1378, 1418, 1527) had a profound impact on Italian experience. The foreign invasions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the product of a cluster of historical accidents in France and Spain, which combined to create the most significant development in the early modern history of Italy.

Ceremonies of election to abbess were occasions of great display. Election to this highest of offices was the defining moment of a successful nun's life, and thereafter self-identity became crucial. This article examines an anatomy of an election of 1509 by a nun from San Zaccaria in Venice; the illustrated chronicle of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Venice dated 1523, written by an anonymous nun; and the visual representation (in a range of media) of various abbesses from Florence, Pavia, and Venice. Success in election conferred the possibility of personality and consequently legitimated personalized representation.

In the Renaissance there were close similarities between the static choreography of the formal gardens of the nobility and the moving choreographies performed by the members of the court. The principles of order and proportion, the expression of splendour, the geometrical forms, were all fundamental principles of both Renaissance court dance and the formal garden. The patterns in both these art-forms were meant to be viewed from above. This close similarity in design principles between the horticultural and kinetic arts existed right through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continued into the seventeenth century.

More than three decades ago Vincent Ilardi, a diplomatic historian, discovered correspondence of the 1460s in which the Sforza court in Milan ordered eyeglasses in Florence. He published his findings in this journal in 1976. Ilardi argued that the large quantities of eyeglasses that the Dukes of Milan ordered in these letters showed that Florence was a leading manufacturer of eyeglasses in the fifteenth century. The orders were for convex lenses to correct presbyopia, specified according to categories of age from thirty to seventy years, as well as for concave lenses to correct myopia (in two grades). This was, in fact, the first mention in writing of concave eyeglasses, showing them to be readily available by the mid-fifteenth century. Convex eyeglasses had already been invented around 1286.

T HE SIGNIFICANT NUMBER of new editions of humanistic texts and the publication of articles and books relating to Renaissance humanism that have appeared in Spain during the last twenty years. attest to a growing interest in this field. As a result of the unprecedented attention that humanism is now receiving, we are finally getting a more accurate picture of the impressive corpus of Latin writings, translations of classical works as well as of Italian humanist texts, letters, treatises, dialogues, and commentaries that were written during this period.1 The spurious argument of whether there ever was a Spanish Renaissance (not to mention a Spanish humanism) still obsessing the minds of many scholars only a few decades ago has become in current studies a historical curiosity that is usually confined to a footnote, if even mentioned. In fact, studies on fifteenthand sixteenth-century humanists or on topics related to humanism that would have seldom been undertaken a generation ago are now attracting a great deal of interest. This trend could not be more evident than in the varied investigations into different aspects of the cultural life of the fifteenth century, a century which until recently was clearly one of the least studied periods in Spanish history. There is no doubt that the catalyst for the reappraisal of this century is to be found in a few independent inquiries into-the early development and diffusion of humanism; these studies were aimed at defining both the peculiar character of this movement as shaped by the national culture and its manifestation within the European context. Also contributing to this revival to a lesser extent was the concomitant effort of a number of