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From the late Middle Ages onwards, the reputation of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was hotly debated. Lionized during the Catholic Reformation, the controversial pope was also the target of strident polemic from conciliarists, German humanists and then, most intensely, from Protestants. This essay will focus on the development of polemic against Gregory by Lutherans and English Protestants. Important contemporary sources against Gregory were unearthed by humanist and conciliarist scholars such as Johannes Aventinus and Ortwin Gratius and then published by Protestants such as Philipp Melanchthon and Kaspar Hedio. English writers with strong connections to the Lutherans such as Thomas Swinnerton and Robert Barnes presented the polemical history of Gregory's pontificate to English audiences. It was further extended by Matthias Flacius, John Bale and John Foxe. Yet while all Protestant accounts of Gregory agreed that he epitomized papal depravity, there were significant variations in emphasizing which qualities of his were truly Antichristian. For some writers it was his imposition of clerical celibacy, for others his excommunication and deposition of an emperor and for others it was his activities as a sorcerer. This essay concludes by discussing these variations and evaluating the reasons for their popularity. While Gianmarco Giuliani's essay in this collection describes how Gregory VII became a keystone in Catholic interpretations of the Church and the papacy, this essay attempts to show how he became a keystone of Protestant interpretations of ecclesiastical and papal history.

Greek studies were central to the movement of fifteenth-century Italian humanism, as the humanists claimed themselves. But before 1450, Greek manuscripts were scarce, and many humanists were more enthusiastic about learning the language in theory than in practice. The case of Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) helps us understand the nature of humanist Greek studies in practice in this period. My study of Manetti’s Greek skills is based on his collection of Greek manuscripts, which have been preserved as a set among the Palatini graeci in the Vatican Library. I compare the way he collected and used his Greek manuscripts with his use of Greek sources in his Latin writings. Whereas Manetti hardly used Greek sources in the 1430s and 1440s, after 1450 he produced new Latin translations from the Greek. I suggest that this change could result from a sudden improvement in his Greek skills, but also from a different modus operandi in the case of his original Latin compositions as opposed to his translations.

An excerpt of a German 16th Century manuscript is presented together with it's translation. The author is presumed to be Leonhard Thurneysser zum Thurn (Basel 1531–Cologne 1596), who claims to have started writing it in Lisbon as a guest of the Portuguese humanist Damiao de Gois about 1555/56. The excerpt deals with black Africans as observed by the author in Lisbon. It contains detailed descriptions of their bodies and their habits. Furthermore it describes how they were sold as slaves on the streets of Lisbon. He also speculates about the reasons for their blackness, resorting to alchemy and astrology. Based on a letter from the emperor of Ethiopia he mentions the ties between Ethiopia and Portugal as well as with the Roman Church.

In 1540, the English humanist scholar, schoolmaster, and royal chaplain John Palsgrave (d. 1554) published a bilingual Latin-English annotated edition of the Dutch humanist and reformer Wilhelm Gnapheus’ (1493–1568) widely popular play Acolastus (1529). Palsgrave's Acolastus reflects a growing trend in England and on the continent to Christianize Terence for classroom use, to expurgate or simply move away from the morally ambiguous classical playwrights. More importantly, the English edition of Acolastus was meant to form part, as a proposed standardized text, of the educational reforms of the late 1530s initiated by the government in accordance with the Protestant policy to reorganize grammar schools and unify their curriculum. As part of these reforms, Palsgrave elevated the educational function of dramatic texts by selecting a contemporary neo-Latin play as a model for textual exegesis in class and by making it the main source of Latin language practice. Palsgrave's extensive annotations reveal how dramatic texts were taught, analysed, and applied not only to practical rhetorical training performed on stage, but also to the grammatical and ethical reading of literary texts in the lower forms of English grammar schools. Furthermore, Palsgrave's annotations attest to a much broader pedagogical application of English translations, highlighting a conscious vernacularization within the humanist curriculum that took place considerably earlier in the sixteenth century than has been hitherto assumed.

As one of the most important political and religious figures of the mid sixteenth century, Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–58) has been the subject of valuable historical studies. Although the English prelate was also a humanist, part of a vast intellectual and artistic network he established during his travels to Italy, Flanders, Spain and England, Pole has yet to receive the attention he deserves in History of Art. This article aims at re-appreciating the artistic patronage of the cardinal, in spite of the difficulties raised by the lack of surviving artworks he commissioned and his apparent insensitivity to visual arts. It will be shown that Pole and his religious circle, the spirituali, tried to develop a visual culture of their own, influenced by their religious beliefs and meditational practices. Building on Michelangelo's famous presentation drawings to Vittoria Colonna – the Pieta and the Crucifixion – as well as on painted and drawn works deriving from them by the hand of other artists, this paper examines Pole and his friends’ preference for sober, small-sized and confidential artworks, suggesting the genre of the miniature as a promising avenue of research as regards to Pole's patronage.

This article demonstrates how Shakespeare used Hamlet to explore Renaissance ideas regarding political counsel, especially those epitomized in the maxim ‘optimi consiliarii mortui’ – the best counsellors are the dead. Examining Hamlet as a historical source, attention is drawn to the influence of Plutarch and Montaigne on the construction of conciliar characters, particularly Polonius, who is figured as the personification of late sixteenth-century debates over the nature of the counsellor. Polonius' humanist tendencies are shown to be ineffective and naive, and his Machiavellian plotting pernicious and destructive. In the end, as Hamlet declares, Polonius is a better counsellor when dead. Instead, a new conciliar model is propounded in Hamlet, in which the best counsellor is nothing more than the voice of the dead, lacking in both rhetorical ornamentation and scheming self-interest.

This paper argues that Lodowick Bryskett's account of a conversation with Edmund Spenser in The Discourse of Civill Life (1606), in which a broadly Aristotelian ethical framework is coordinated with the social ends of the Protestant empire building, examines the collisions of humanist theory and governmental practice in the New English polity in Ireland. It interrogates both the possibility of a coherent philosophical foundation for political action and the transformative pressures exerted by the exercise of political power on those philosophical precepts. The Discourse thus shows the complex and contrasting ways in which two figures at the vanguard of Elizabethan moral philosophy, and on the fraught and violent front lines of Elizabethan imperial power, sought to mediate humanist ideals about the nature and practice of civil life with the daily exigencies of establishing and maintaining the early modern colonial state.

Charles Estienne is the most versatile member of the French humanist dynasty of printers, the Estiennes, yet he has suffered from an unfavourable comparison with his father and brothers. This article accords him, at last, the respect he deserves. He authored a series of short compilations for young students between 1536 and 1540, printed in Paris and Lyon. These booklets, organized like beginners' dictionaries, propose a system of bridges between languages: Greek, Latin, and French. Presented as summaries, they can be read as attempts to structure and circulate knowledge according to a new ‘printed’ model, and they were reprinted and rearranged by Estienne in the 1550s, after he himself became a printer. His anatomical treatise, first published in Latin (1545) then in French (1546), also appears like a system of names and languages. As the translator of texts representing a wide variety of genres, Estienne plays on the different registers of the annotated edition, summary, compilation, and translation to effectuate the same trope: vulgarization, meaning accessibility for a great number of readers as well as translation into the vernacular. Similarly, the printing press addresses a great number of potential readers. The study enquires whether the technology of this first form of vulgarization calls for a second one, a ‘vernacularization’, whether printing also implies editing, and whether annotations and editions turn into translations. Taking Charles Estienne, the one-man printer, editor, translator and annotator as a case study, I explore the meaning of ‘vulgarization’ in the typographical workshop.

In 1604 the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) published a Latin treatise on miracles said to have happened on account of the intercession of the Virgin Mary in Halle, a small town near Brussels. There are two Dutch translations of Lipsius' book, one by Albert van Oosterwijck, published in Delft in 1605, the other by Philips Numan, published in Brussels in 1607. The translations are very similar but they are very differently framed. As a result, they are worlds apart, and indeed they were written and printed almost within sight, but on opposite sides, of a shifting military front line dividing the emergent, Calvinist-dominated Dutch Republic in the north from the Catholic Spanish Netherlands in the south. This article considers the propaganda value of pilgrim sites like Halle and Scherpenheuvel, and explores the two contrasting translations of Lipsius' treatise against the background of the ideological war of words between Reformation and Counter-Reformation apologists.

Whilst early- and mid-fifteenth-century Italian humanism had concentrated on ambitious new translations from Greek into Latin, rather neglecting the vernacular, the sixteenth century is characterized by a proliferation of vernacular works in all fields and, especially from the 1530s on, intense activity in translating classical works into Italian. This article discusses some material features of the original and translated publications under consideration, but especially explores linguistic choices and translation techniques used by three translators in a variety of classical texts: Antonio Brucioli (1487–1566), who translated among other things the texts discussed here, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, believed to be by Cicero (Rhetorica di Marco Tullio Cicerone, tradotta di latino in lingua thoscana, per Antonio Brucioli (Venice, 1538)), and Pliny's Naturalis historia (Historia naturale di C. Plinio Secondo. Nuovamente tradotta di latino in vulgare toscano per Antonio Brucioli (Venice, 1548)); Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara (1517–72), who earned lasting fame for his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, entitled De le Metamorfosi d'Ovidio libri III di Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara (Venice, 1553); and Francesco Baldelli (d. after 1587), who translated all of Caesar's histories in I commentari di C. Giulio Cesare da M. Francesco Baldelli nuouamente di lingua latina tradotti in Thoscana (Venice, 1554). These translations are considered in terms of their cultural and political context, linguistic and pragmatic characteristics, dissemination in the sixteenth century, and contribution to the ongoing development of the vernacular.

The early modern period knew two kinds of writing about time: writing the past, and writing the future. Chronicles, as exemplified by the Nuremburg Chronicle of Hartmann Schedel and his associates printed in 1493, might entail mobilizing the intellectual talents of a city's patrician elite in order to import Italian humanist historiography north of the Alps, and then from Latin into the vernacular. Astrological prognostications, of which thirty or more editions might be published in a given year, represent the meeting of scientific and popular discourse, while prophetic pamphlets belonged firmly to the popular realm. In this article, I demonstrate how, in each of these genres, translation was a creative rather than a derivative activity, one that drove development in the genre and brought forth printed works of new kinds. For the chronicle, translation created a history writing that was aware of its own print media context; for prognostications, translation created the characteristic form of the printed booklet still known as the Practica teusch long after Latin prognostications were all but unknown; and for prophecies in print, translation was a constitutive part of their origin and transmission as texts: to become a prophecy, a text had to be translated from one medium, one era, one context, or one language into another.

Under the rule of Ercole I d'Este (1471-1505), Ferrara experienced an unprecedented revival of classical Roman comedy. For the first time, the plays of Plautus and Terence began to be staged in vernacular Italian. This essay focuses on the temporary theatre buildings that hosted these productions and discusses the instrumental role played by the short treatise Spectacula, written by Ercole's courtier, Pellegrino Prisciani (c. 1435-1510). It argues that the planning of theatre spaces was informed by the humanist interpretation of Vitruvian principles. Furthermore, it evaluates the weight of contemporary iconography and the illustrative tradition of Terence, which was disseminated through the first printed editions, on the planning of theatre spaces. The modernization of set design and the creation of theatre spaces that reinterpreted Vitruvian principles along with the adaptation of classical dramatic texts represents the first modern example of reception of ancient comedy.

While William Camden's Britannia (1586) clearly is a copious text in both the Renaissance sense of the word and its modern meaning, the work's connection with the humanist rhetorical tradition of copia is far from straightforward. Camden focuses in this monumental antiquarian survey of Britain on copia rerum rather than copia verborum, thus adopting one half of the humanist concept, but essentially dispensing with the other. This new kind of copiousness, the article argues, is the consequence of both the Britannia's historiographical method, one that depends on conjecture to uncover linguistic, historical, and other origins, and its political project, what Camden in his prefatory epistle calls his desire to ‘restore antiquity to Britaine, and Britain to his antiquity’. Both these things put a premium on the assembling of examples: something that we can see in the work's prolix style and the accretions across the six editions published in Camden's lifetime. To encompass national heritage in all its manifestations in this manner, Camden relies not only on his own knowledge and research, but also on the collaboration of others – user-generated content that in turn further increases the work's voluminousness. The Britannia, this article suggests, therefore inhabits a pivotal place in the shifting history of copia: it is a work that looks back to Erasmus and the humanist sense of a trope primarily associated with the language arts, but that also anticipates the increasing orientation of copiousness towards compilations of matter, knowledge, and things.

The developing scientific culture of the seventeenth century demanded an augmented lexical range in English that was supplied by natural philosophers and savants like Thomas Browne, Robert Boyle, and John Evelyn, whose humanist linguistic training qualified them to introduce learned neologisms. At the same time, they were engaged in ongoing debates about the propriety of semantic and rhetorical embellishment in the writing of science. This essay considers the nature of neologism and lexical extension more generally in a range of work by a number of natural philosophers, natural historians, and georgic writers, with special attention to Browne himself – perhaps the most fluent scientific neologizer of the early modern period – and to The Garden of Cyrus (1658), a work inflected by his natural history and exemplifying some solutions to the terminological needs of early modern science.

In the 1450s, the court of Pope Nicholas V was a centre of humanist learning, including humanist biblical scholarship. This is where Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) wrote his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, a work that influenced later biblical scholarship through Erasmus' edition. However, Valla was not the only humanist to revise the Vulgate: around the same time, the Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament from the Greek, also at the Vatican court. This is the only Latin translation between Jerome's Vulgate and Erasmus' version, and it was probably commissioned by the pope himself. Although Valla's work is well known, Manetti's text remains in manuscript, and has hardly been studied. This article presents new insights in the writing process of Manetti's translation and its relation to Valla's biblical scholarship. It shows that Valla's project was not an isolated case, and that Manetti, though influenced by his more famous contemporary, was an independent scholar who developed his own method over time.

This article challenges two common misconceptions about ultramontani and Italian Renaissance education. The first is better known but still prevalent in some accounts: it is too often assumed that a visit to Italy needs must make a foreigner come under the influence of the studia humanitatis – but, in truth, many travelled without ever coming in contact with what we call humanism. The second misconception is less recognized: it is the assumption that travellers to Italy sought out specific teachers, in particular, Guarino da Verona, as a font of humanist learning. Even in the classic iconoclastic account of Grafton and Jardine, it is accepted that Guarino enjoyed an international reputation that attracted students to him. In truth, the claim tells us more about the self-conscious construction of Guarino's image by his students (sometimes under his own direction) than it does about their own experience. It is a reputation that has created a classic case of misdirection: modern scholars concentrate on what was or was not happening in his presence, at the risk of missing what was going on elsewhere. Despite their own rhetoric, Guarino's foreign students did not flock to Italy solely to sit at the pedagogue's feet: they submitted themselves to multiple educational stimuli, and continued their own studies away from their master. In other words, the students manufactured their own humanist experience, both within and outside educational establishments.

Italian university historiography is strongly influenced by current notions of periodization and change. ‘Medieval’ universities have been seen as unique but soon outdated creations, to be overtaken by ‘Renaissance’ universities in which the driving forces were the requirements of ‘princes’ or whoever else was at the helm of the ‘territorial state’. The ‘Renaissance’ universities, and even more their ‘modern’ successors, are supposed to have been more functional, more responsive to demand and to the aspirations of rulers and elites – and thus, by implication, more ‘efficient’. But this reading fails to take full cognisance of the true significance of the medieval universities, which in practice were strongly pragmatic foundations as well as idealistic ones. From the thirteenth century, Italian universities in particular were locked in a mechanism of market forces that ensured that they were constantly open to fresh initiatives and constantly subject to change. This contribution reassesses these institutions and contests the traditional chronological perspectives.

This article draws attention to the prominent role accorded to the translation of classical authors in sixteenth-century Catalunya, focusing on Cicero and, in particular, on the transmission in both Catalan and Spanish of his letters Ad familiares and his speech Pro lege Manilia. In the appendix, there is a preliminary survey of classical authors published in the original or in translation in Catalunya in the years 1473 to 1600. The list also includes details of manuscript copies of vernacular versions produced in Catalunya during this period.

At the Castel Nuovo of Naples in February 1441, Cipriano de' Mari of Genoa featured as Scipio Africanus in a play based on one of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, which was performed for King Rene of Anjou. When the play was over, Cipriano gave a humanist speech in which he likened Rene to Scipio, and Rene's enemy, King Alfonso V of Aragon, to Hannibal. This speech, published for the first time here, contributes to our understanding of the cultural–political programme pursued by Rene and his Italian allies. It also helps paint a remarkable picture of a poorly documented figure whose career nevertheless spanned the western Mediterranean. In this article, Cipriano de' Mari appears as a victorious naval captain who captured the infante of Aragon in battle; an ambassador and diplomatic intriguer whose contacts included members of the political and intellectual elite in Liguria, Provence, France and perhaps Castile; and a man of letters, versed in the works of Livy, Seneca and Valerius Maximus. In tracing the route taken by this Genoese jack‐of‐all‐trades, and exploring the connections he made along the way, a Mediterranean political, social and cultural world is brought to light.

Against the backdrop of Montaigne's philosophical and ethical discussion of drunkenness, ecstasy and excess in ‘De l'yvrongnerie’, this article introduces the literary society founded in the 1570s by Johann Posthius and Paul Melissus in reaction to the licentiousness they perceived in Germany's long-established drinking culture. Through analysis of the anthology of neo-Latin verse that they consequently compiled, the Collegii Posthimelissaei Votum, their humanist society may be seen to have been founded out of a combination of religious, patriotic and vocational concerns. The significance of the Collegium's symbol, the amethyst, is examined in the light of the religious background to the vow – a background which is then balanced against the equal influences upon the Collegium of the satirical tradition surrounding Germany's drinking culture, and of the two founders' respective professions: medicine and poetry. Yet the anthology reveals that the Collegium was also motivated by more private concerns: the promotion of sober poetry both as a metaphorically purer form of wine and as a metonym for the friendship between sober poets that in itself resembles a form of ecstasy found in Montaigne.

The return of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) to the Spanish Netherlands and his reconciliation with Catholicism (1591) have defined his image for posterity. Debates about the sincerity of Lipsius' religious beliefs have continued to the present day. Scholars have presented Lipsius' departure from Leiden as the result of external pressure, as effortless, and conducted in secret. By contrast, this article shows that Lipsius' public engagement in the Republic of Letters was instrumental in enabling his reconciliation with Catholicism. Lipsius employed both published and private letters and the rhetoric of friendship to win support for his return to the Southern Netherlands. After his arrival, Lipsius' correspondence and friendship with the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608) served as a public platform on which the humanist acted out his reconciliation. The article concludes with a discussion as to why Lipsius only published a fraction of his letters to Delrio.

In December 1631, after more than 300 years of inactivity, Vesuvius erupted causing widespread damage. These were the first eruptions of Vesuvius in early modern times, and they coincided with the birth of modern scientific enquiry. They were also the first eruptions to occur after the upheavals of the Reformation and the reassertion of traditional Catholic doctrine and piety following the Council of Trent. The eruptions provoked a considerable number of publications ranging from theoretical treatises to philosophical dialogues, journals giving eyewitness accounts, and poems in both Latin and Italian. Many of these publications emanated from the numerous academies of Naples and were dedicated to leading figures in the politics and culture of the Regno. There is some sound scientific discussion in these publications, but they also testify in different ways and with varying emphases to the persistence of both orthodox Catholic belief and popular superstition. In this article I consider the relative emphases in a select number of these publications between serious science, the persistence of orthodox religious belief and the continuing humanist debt to classical literature.

Works of art and literature commissioned for the Montefeltro court in Urbino and executed by Joos Van Gent, Pedro Berruguete, Baldassare Castiglione and Martino Filetico, use conversation, play, and wit to commemorate humanist interests and court practice. While these and other works celebrate Federico da Montefeltro's court, the illusionism of the intarsia panels in his studiolo do more than amuse. The objects and the uomini illustri portraits that fill the studiolo tease the visitor to the space and point to systems of surveillance and judgment as familiar to the Renaissance courtier as they were to the prisoner in the panopticon.

This study presents a comparative survey of the works and endeavours of two sixteenth-century humanist scholars: the Italian Alessandro Piccolomini and the Spaniard Pedro Simon Abril. Within a period of about forty years, they undertook a rather similar enterprise, with the aim of making the basis of Aristotelian philosophy available in their respective vernacular languages (Tuscan and Castilian). The idea is to look for both common features and differences between their proposals, taking in account that both authors developed alternative pedagogic programmes aiming at a better diffusion of basic philosophical lore among people who would not attend university courses (including an explicit mention of women, in Piccolomini's case). In a period of profound epistemic polemics with a characteristically rich variety of opinions about the reorganization of the sciences and the disciplines, their particular innovations and methodologies, may reveal new trends and possibilities which, despite being neglected by their contemporaries, did in fact offer a real alternative to current curricula.

The historiography of Western folly has projected the Renaissance as an age uniquely tolerant of and interested in irrationality, taking the humanist ‘praise of folly’ literature as a marker of this openness. This article problematizes such a representation of Renaissance humanism by exploring the discourse of ‘naturals’ rather than of artificial fools who are at the heart of humanist celebrations of folly. By focussing on legal, medical and New World debates on natural fools, ‘monsters’, wild men, ‘savages’ and natives, this article reveals not just an ambivalence towards fools but also deeper contradictions within Renaissance humanism. The article points out continuities between medieval scholastic, Renaissance humanist and Enlightenment discourses of folly, seeking to provide a caveat against both traditional and Foucaultian historiographies which regard the Renaissance as being singularly hospitable to mental deviance. This article also identifies the persistence of certain tendencies in the discursive practices of folly, finding echoes of Renaissance discussions in later debates in the field of mental disability and the history of psychiatry.

This review article considers the turn to non-humans – plants, animals, machines, and inanimate matter – within Renaissance studies. Taking four recent monographs as its central examples, the article argues that critical interest in the non-human should not be understand as indicative of an emerging post-humanistic era, but rather as part of a new humanism, one which finally acknowledges Man's inescapable enmeshment within a larger ecology of organic and non-organic agents.

Leonardo Bruni published one of his most widely copied translations, Xenophon's pro-monarchical Hiero, shortly before he penned his more famous original works, his Dialogues and Panegyric to the City of Florence. Scholars have traditionally focused on the political ideas present in these original treatises; yet, despite the centrality of political ideas to the Hiero, its temporal proximity to these works, and its enormous popularity (the work exists in 200 fifteenth-century manuscripts), scholars have neglected to offer a full assessment of Bruni's translation in the context of these works. Bruni's translation of Xenophon's Hiero fit into a debate in early fifteenth-century Florence about Julius Caesar and the Florentine poet Dante. The two major thinkers in the debate, Bruni and Coluccio Salutati, agreed that a distinction had to be made between kings and tyrants based on legal claim and quality of rule. The Hiero reinforced this assumption. The two men disagreed, however, about which category applied to Julius Caesar and what this meant for the reputation of Dante.

This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of the history of the discussion of conscience in late fifteenth-century Europe. It seeks to explain how Adrian of Utrecht (1459–1523), a prominent scholastic theologian at Louvain, pondered the more subjective dimensions of conscience, and how his arguments can be appraised from the perspective of a wide-ranging discussion of the nature and function of moral cognition and judgement that took place in humanist and philosophical circles. Adrian's work is especially interesting for reason that he has important things to say about ‘moral integrity’, and ‘convictions of the heart’– ideas that bring into focus how highly personalized aspects of moral reflection impinge upon the activities of conscience. Having outlined Adrian's concerns, his description of the machinations of our moral conscience will then be set in context by comparing his account to that of a leading philosopher of his age, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). In addition to this, the thoughts of the celebrated ‘Christian humanists’ John Colet (1467–1519) and Desiderius Erasmus (1466/9–1536) will also be enlisted so that a richer picture of Renaissance ideas of conscience can emerge.

Numerous examples of censorship in early modern Europe prove that church and state frequently collaborated in their efforts to prevent the publication and distribution of heretical or seditious works. Yet, the prosecution of Erycius Puteanus (1574–1646) on account of his De conviviorum luxu epistola (1608) shows that a publication could also be opposed on other than religious or political grounds. The case, as well as the strategic presentation of Puteanus’Comus, published later that same year, demonstrates how an early modern author could even find support with political, legal and ecclesiastical dignitaries to overcome opposition against a questionable publication. Moreover, this study sheds new light on the continuing success of the Comus, which became one of the standard seventeenth-century texts satirizing excessive eating and drinking.

This article examines the presence of classical, humanist and neo-humanist works in the libraries of the Magnus Ducatus of Finland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, Sweden went from being a member of a Scandinavian union dominated by Denmark to an imperial power administering large areas of north-central Europe, only to be subsequently demoted to the role of a regional player increasingly tossed about by her neighbours, especially Russia. Despite economic, political, religious and cultural turbulence, international trends seem to have reached the Magnus Ducatus Finlandiae, both through Finns studying at key centres of learning and culture, and through reading books purchased or borrowed. The establishment of the Academia Aboensis in 1640 ensured continuous contact with the rest of the Res publica litterarum. Members of the nobility, the officer class, the clergy and merchants gained access to older and more recent literature on a great variety of subjects, including work by ancient and humanist authors and scholars. Due to the rise of neo-humanism, the Classics formed the back-bone of school and university curricula until well into the nineteenth century, and seem to have been strongly represented in the standard stock of private libraries, if not in the original languages, then in French, German or Swedish translations.

William Adlington's translation of Apuleius’Golden Ass (1566) marks a shift away from an older practice of ‘reading for the allegory’ to a more direct engagement with the ‘pleasure’ of a literary text. Adlington draws upon early humanist scholarship, but negotiates its magical and Neoplatonic interests with post-Reformation caution; unlike his contemporary Arthur Golding, he also omits Christianizing allegories such as those in an early French translation by Guillaume Michel (1518). His prefatory comments, as well as the translation itself, are clearly indebted to Beroaldus’ Latin commentary (1500), the Spanish translation of Diego Lopez de Cortegana (c. 1513) and the French translation by Jean Louveau (1553). These debts are established through a comparison of passages at the end of the article. Adlington displays an Erasmian concern with a pedagogic programme founded on the combination of pleasure with ethical purpose, and celebrating linguistic and stylistic copia. This is in keeping with a new style of reading that emerges in the later sixteenth century, a style responsive to the growing attractions of a secular literary space. Nothing is known about Adlington and his political or religious affiliations, but his dedication of the translation to Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, from University College, Oxford, on 18 September 1566, is of interest in the context of the Queen's visit (with Sussex) to Oxford earlier that month.

Domenico Ghirlandaio has been accepted as the author and speaker of the epigram written on the fictive parchment posted behind Giovanna degli Albizzi in her profile portrait, lamenting the limit of his skills to fully represent her. However, the patronage context of this work, processes of composing art, as well as the realities of artistic education and social status in Quattrocento Florence suggest that another speaker uttered these words and intended a different meaning. An analysis of inscriptions in the small sorority of women's portraits bearing a text demonstrates that these epithets carry three messages: to name the women, declare their virtues or mourn their death. Examining her likeness within the patronage context of her conjugal family and her early death, this essay gives a new interpretation of Giovanna's epigram, arguing that her portrait and inscription, a slightly modified version of a verse by Martial, convey all three messages. Giovanna's husband, the learned and poetic Lorenzo Tornabuoni, is identified as the probable speaker of the portrait's lines, which he may have written with the assistance of his friend, the humanist Angelo Poliziano, to express his wistful desire for his deceased wife's return.

In the 1430s, Poggio Bracciolini and Guarino Veronese conducted a heated epistolary exchange on the relative merits of the Roman republican paragon Scipio Africanus, and Julius Caesar, whom Poggio decried as destroyer of the Republic, whilst Guarino praised him as founder of the Empire. To this debate Ciriaco d’Ancona added his views, a defence of universal monarchy with Caesar as its herald, in his Caesarea Laus. This startling letter, addressed to Leonardo Bruni, is profoundly different in conception from the previous contributions to the Scipio-Caesar controversy, and is as yet not fully studied. In order to explain Ciriaco's argument, the present article examines his narrative tropes, his self-presentation, and his literary models in the Caesarea Laus. Foremost among these is Virgil, but behind him, Ciriaco's ultimate source appears: Dante. In choosing these models, Ciriaco also takes issue with Poggio, and Bruni, concerning the use of poetical allegory as a means to attain truth, of which both had been critical. Comparison with an earlier letter, in which Ciriaco defends such interpretations of poetry, sheds further light not only on his method, but also on the contents of his argument in the Caesarea Laus, and the importance he attached to it. Both Ciriaco's appraisal of Caesar and his espousal of allegorical exegesis, which for him are intimately linked, bespeak the continuing vitality, in early Quattrocento humanism, of medieval approaches, which underlie the originality of the Caesarea Laus.

This article examines responses to the Heroides by the Scottish neo-Latin poet Mark Alexander Boyd, composed whilst in ‘exile’ in France during the 1580s and early 1590s. Boyd's engagements reflect the priorities of contemporary humanist interpretations of the Heroides, on the one hand positioning Ovid's poems as models for elegant Latin verse composition, and on the other reading them as guides to female sexual (mis)conduct. Such an approach tended to reinforce Renaissance prejudices about sex and gender, as Boyd's efforts amply reveal. Yet the exorbitance of female love elegy also permitted a limited critique of such norms, and this is demonstrated in Boyd's second set of responses, the Heroides et Hymni (1592), which suggestively collocate his personal political difficulties with women's sexual freedom.

In an early Quattrocento tract, the De tyranno, Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, defended Dante's damnation of the assassins of Caesar, and offered a thorough condemnation of the flaws of the Roman Republic and a spirited endorsement of the succeeding autocracy. Salutati's apparent conversion to Dante's Christian Monarchism has puzzled scholars and has led to his characterisation as a somewhat outmoded figure. But a more complex picture emerges from an analysis of an overlooked feature of the De tyranno: its extraordinary use of Lucan's historical epic, the De bello civili. While his contemporaries regarded the poem as an anti-Caesarian polemic, Salutati identified and exploited the ironies of this deeply ambivalent work toward the republican ideal it was taken to espouse. Through a strategy of quotation, allusion, and paraphrase, he expressed his own monarchist arguments in the language of the favourite literary authority of Renaissance republicanism. This strategy was apparently original and probably influential, and is detectable, too, in Salutati's other works. These borrowings demonstrate the degree of dexterity with which a Florentine humanist might apply the classical learning of the Trecento to the political debates of the Quattrocento, and also the undiminished powers of the ageing Chancellor as reader and rhetorician.

The paper examines the ambiguous relation of Thomas More's The History of Richard III to humanist thought. My central contention is that the work reproduces the presuppositions of humanist discourse but at the same time challenges and subverts them. First I analyse the content of the text – its argumentation and its moral and political lessons – to demonstrate that it may legitimately be read in two contradictory ways. Richard III can be read as an unequivocal condemnation of an ‘external’ evil that overturns the natural order of things. This reading neatly places the text in the mainstream of didactic and moralistic humanist history. When, on the other hand, Richard III's more sinister passages and equivocal moments are highlighted, the text's implied message is that human politics are irredeemably corrupt, a message that contradicts the basic assumptions of humanist ethical and political thought. Secondly, in order to account for this ambiguity, I examine the text against the background of the conventions of the humanist genre of history. I try to demonstrate that while Richard III usually obeys the technical rules of the genre, it defies the genre's more basic assumptions. In particular, it undermines the humanist notion of rhetoric – the presiding idea of humanist history – and thus subverts the basic epistemological presuppositions of humanist discourse.

The style and technical vocabulary of late-medieval music theory were reasonably settled; they owed little to ancient models, which did not furnish an adequate terminology, and the wider frame of intellectual reference was scholastic. This theoretical language came under challenge from humanistic pressure to write according to classical canons of diction. The first glimmerings of humanism appear in an early fifteenth-century treatise that uses Greek pitch-names, not without strain, in discussing plainchant; another response is that of Johannes Tinctoris, who reserved his classicism for non-technical writings and passages, but even there used technical language when he needed it; others attempt a classical style, but without eschewing unclassical technicalities such as the incorrectly formed verb imperficere. The aspirations and limitations of classicism are demonstrated through the pseudo-antique vocabulary created by Paulus Cortesius; its increasing power is traced over four decades through the writings of Franchinus Gaffurius. Nevertheless sixteenth-century theorists, even the humanist Glareanus, combine a classical style and frame of reference with traditional terminology, but introduce individual classicism such as commissura, which means three different things in three different authors. Progress from this dead end could be made only in the vernacular.

The Querelle des femmes was ultimately the victim of its own virulent antagonism. While humanism may have instilled a fresh vigour into the medieval polemic by uncovering new evidence culled from the Ancients and the Church Fathers, as well as from medical and legal sources, such arguments, far from convincing and converting, only strengthened uncompromising attitudes and soon lost the lustre of their novelty. Clearly the debate could not be resolved, if resolution were indeed to be sought, through the further accumulation of examples, but only by a re-examination and reinterpretation of the evidence. This process of re-evaluating historical and contemporary myth and fact suggests that the Renaissance version of the querelle is far from being merely a tedious repetition of familiar assertions. Jean de Marconville, for example, accepts the irrefutable arguments of both feminists and anti-feminists, but by examining them from a new perspective, he is able to marvel at both ‘la bonte’ and ‘la mauvaisete’ of women. At the end of the sixteenth century, Alexandre de Pontaymeri would offer another solution to the long-standing impasse by invalidating one of the principal methods of argumentation long utilized by the detractors of women. Through a revisionist view of history, Pontaymeri's Paradoxe apologique (1594) purports to resolve the querelle and to establish at last woman's rightful role. (pp. 246–256)

Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) is justly celebrated as a philosopher of education, language, and psychology. Unfortunately, posterity has largely overlooked Vives's historical thought. Notably in De disciplinis (1531), the most comprehensive of his writings, Vives unfolds a remarkable view of the meaning of the past which runs through his work like a continuous thread, giving a historical dimension to his ideas on culture and education. This article aims to demonstrate the importance of Vives as a historical theorist, examining his discussion of the nature of history in De disciplinis, his idea of progress, and his views on the study of history. In particular two diverging accounts of the origins of learning emerge, which have philosophical implications, as well as a number of important restrictions on the study of history. Comparison of his views with those of contemporary humanists, notably Erasmus, brings out clearly Vives's originality in this field. (pp. 69–83)

In 1549 the German Protestant Georg Fabricius (1516–71) edited the first short selection of Roman inscriptions specifically to focus on legal texts. This was a key moment in the history of classical epigraphy: for the first time in print a humanist explicitly demonstrated the value of such archaeological remains for the discipline of law, and implicitly accorded texts written on stone the same status of those recorded in manuscripts. This article situates Fabricius’ work within the antiquarian scholarship of his time. (pp. 96–107)

The paper investigates the intellectual background to the broadside Clagred der Neun Muse oder kunst vber Teutschlandt (Nuremberg, 1535) with its poem by Hans Sachs (1494–1572) in which the Nine Muses are depicted as returning to Greece, appalled by German materialism. The poem reflects a widespread malaise among German humanists, disturbed by the increasing disregard for humanistic values at German universities. This disenchantment is exemplified by the problems faced by successive teachers of Greek at Heidelberg around 1530, particularly Johannes Sinapius (1505–60). (pp. 84–95)

Sabellico is known as the historian of Renaissance Venice, but there is much more to be understood about this ambitious humanist and his success in establishing a secure career for himself in his adopted city. This paper explores the ways in which Sabellico in the closing years of the Quattrocento took advantage of the established studia humanitatis to master a variety of its genres and disciplines. Sabellico was also a master of publicity through the new medium of the printing press, and the reader can be guided through his published works and work in progress in two important letters written in 1493 and intended for publication. The paper considers first the relation between his works and his appointments and civic duties in public employment in Udine and Vicenza, on to his twenty years in government service in Venice. Secondly it surveys the various genres that he explored, and shows how his works complied with contemporary expectations from the studia humanitatis. At the same time, the discussion reveals his own understanding of this cultural and intellectual programme. (pp. 27–38)

By the end of the fifteenth century, if not already by the middle of the thirteenth century, interpretation of the Bible and the practice of theology – though in theory still interrelated – sat uncomfortably with one another. The increasing sophistication of scholastic method after the twelfth century resulted in a theology in which exegesis (and by extension, scripture on its own terms) played a role of diminishing importance. The humanists, especially the biblical humanists of the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth centuries, identified this dichotomy as deeply problematic for sacred studies and decried this state of affairs in their conflict with scholastic theologians. This essay seeks to describe concisely the method of scholastic theologians in order to understand what the biblical humanists were reacting against. The key figures for this discussion are Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus, and attention is given both to their criticisms of scholastic method and to the alternative model they set forth. Central to the discussion of both theological models (scholastic and humanist) is the place of scripture, and the relationship between scripture and theology. The fundamental contention is that the biblical humanists were important not only for their development of the tools of grammatical-historical exegesis, but also of an alternative model of theological method. To the extent that the Protestant Reformers continued this critique and were influenced by it in their own practice, we witness a lesserrecognized connection between the Renaissance and the Reformation. (pp. 39–54)

As Quattrocento humanists rediscovered Aesop in Greek, they were inspired to compose original Latin apologues. Leon Battista Alberti's Centum apologi (1437) spawned numerous imitations: Bartolomeo Scala's Apologi centum (1481) and Apologorum liber secundus (1488–92), Leonardo da Vinci's scattered favole ( c. 1485–95), Lorenzo Astemio's two Hecatomythia (1495, 1505), and Bernardino Baldi's 1582 Cento apologhi (first published in 1590). Alberti's apologues are couched as philosophical apothegms which tend to be more personal and less political than ancient Aesopic fables. Scala composes elaborate Latin apologues whose allegorical mythologizing arouses the admiration and emulation of Marsilio Ficino. In the marginalia to his notebooks, Leonardo writes Italian favole about plants and inanimate objects with notable borrowing from Alberti. In a more popular vein, Astemio creates two collections of Latin fables that blend Aesopic fable and novellistic facetia . And the Urbinate polymath Baldi creates a set of 100 Italian apologues inspired by Cosimo Bartoli's 1568 translation of Alberti. (pp. 9–26)

This article seeks to show that a consideration of the use of Italy in Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570) is illuminated by a study of the structural progression of book 1 (from educational methodologies, to a declamation against courtly vices, to an objection to travel to Italy). Specifically, it argues that the final section on Italy is conceived as a threat to those pedagogical and moral ideals of order, discipline and discrimination outlined in earlier sections; and that this closing statement forcibly demonstrates, and gives particular expression to, Ascham's humanist commitment to maintaining such well-schooled qualities against pernicious contemporary influences. Attention directed to the range of concerns addressed in the text also points to Ascham's conflicted use of Italy. For whilst his humanist educative project accompanies a concern to privilege the moral and cultural influences of classical over contemporary Italy, his national project of literary acculturation (witnessed in such things as his objection to courtly versifying) involves an attempt to conflate, rather than to distinguish, specific Italian identities.

The painter Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665), a pivotal figure in promoting the prominence of women artists in her native city of Bologna, was innovative in her portrayals of heroines from classical antiquity. Avoiding the eroticism generally employed by male contemporaries like Guido Reni, Sirani characterized such figures as Portia, Timoclea, and Cleopatra by virtues more commonly associated with men than women during the early modern period in Italy. Sirani's unusual approaches to antique subjects, grounded in her knowledge of pertinent texts, mark the emergence of women's specialization in history painting in Bologna, a development that must be understood in the context of Bolognese humanism and contemporary advances by Bolognese women in the fields of music and literature.