Project MUSE®: Renaissance Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Renaissance Quarterly.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 58 (2005) through Vol. 61 (2008)Latest Articles: Renaissance QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Renaissance Quarterly1935-02360034-4338Latest articles in Renaissance Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Annibal Caro's After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius's Illustrator
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255830
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Titian is often regarded as the designer behind anatomical illustrations for Andreas Vesalius's renowned an opinion propounded by writers of medical history as well as art history. However, one early sixteenth-century source, a phritten by Annibal Caro (1507-66) in Rome, remains the only contemporary documentation of any putative link between the Venetian painter Titian (ca. 1485-1576) and the much younger Flemish surgeon-anatomist Vesalius (1514-64), who was teaching at the nearby University of Padua. This article will show that Caro's phrase has been misprinted, misdated, and misunderstood, and that, consequently, the supposed link between Titian and Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAnnibal Caro's After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius's Illustrator2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAnnibal Caro's After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius's Illustrator2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®1689462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557-70
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255831
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Recent scholarship has emphasized a growing association in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between technology and engineering on the one hand, and the humanist study of antiquity on the other.1 The ways in which humanists combined an examination of ancient objects, ruins, and inscriptions with the scrutiny of ancient texts is also a focus of substantial scholarship.2 Yet engineering practice, in which specific urban problems were approached through the investigation of ancient texts and artifacts, has received little attention. This article focuses on engineering and the study of antiquity in Rome during the decade that also saw the conclusion of the Council of Trent.3 It examines two areas of hydraulic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallHydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557-702008-12-24text/htmlen-USHydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557-702008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®2590932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Making the Irish European: Gaelic Honor Politics and Its Continental Contexts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255832
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The historiography of early modern Ireland rests largely upon two commonplaces: one, that the early seventeenth century saw the collapse of the Gaelic political order and, two, that encounters with Continental Europe allowed the people of Ireland to see themselves as Irish. The narrative goes roughly as follows. In the wake of the Battle of Kinsale (1601), in which crown forces defeated a confederacy of Gaelic lords, Ireland's Gaelic system went into precipitous decline.1 Around the same time, educational, ecclesiastical, and political opportunities traditionally available in England became off-limits because of religious and ethnic differences. Consequently, Irish elites, Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman alike, began
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMaking the Irish European: Gaelic Honor Politics and Its Continental Contexts2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMaking the Irish European: Gaelic Honor Politics and Its Continental Contexts2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®1171042026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Exercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255833
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Among the myriad remedies for melancholy enumerated by the English polymath and clergyman Robert Burton (1577-1640) in his Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621 are visits to the picture galleries of Roman cardinals, "richly stored with all modern paintings, old statues and antiquities."1 Within their confines those suffering from this affliction might take delight, Burton wrote, and greatly "ease their grief."2 Burton substantiates his view on the authority of the first-century philosopher Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40-after 112 CE), who had praised the works of the Greek sculptor Phidias for their powers to comfort the soul: "if any man be sickly, troubled in mind, or . . . cannot sleep for griefe, and shall but stand over
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallExercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century2008-12-24text/htmlen-USExercise for Mind and Body: Giulio Mancini, Collecting, and the Beholding of Landscape Painting in the Seventeenth Century2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®2015302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Paul Oskar Kristeller. Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections. Ergänzungsband 2006 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255834
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Among Paul Oskar Kristeller's many achievements in his far-reaching legacy was his Latin Manuscript Books before 1600, which he saw to its fourth revised and enlarged edition with the assistance of Dr. Sigrid Krämer. Now, fourteen years later, Krämer, with the assistance of the late Birgit Christine Arensmann, has completed a supplementary volume compiling those manuscript catalogues and unpublished manuscript inventories up to 2002. Thus the indispensable reference work that should be used by medieval and Renaissance scholars and students doing research involving manuscript sources has nearly been brought up-to-date. The book, Hilfsmittel 23 in the same Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, nicely matches
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPaul Oskar Kristeller. Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections. Ergänzungsband 2006 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPaul Oskar Kristeller. Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600: A List of the Printed Catalogues and Unpublished Inventories of Extant Collections. Ergänzungsband 2006 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®89752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies: Essays in Honour of Paul F. Grendler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255835
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Compiled by colleagues and former students of Paul Grendler, this volume of a dozen essays explores the intellectual, cultural, and social history of the Italian Renaissance. The specific topics —education, humanism, censorship, reform, and the definition of Renaissance, to name a few —represent those areas of inquiry to which Grendler has devoted his career. Readers of this journal will be familiar with Grendler's name from a variety of contexts: he was an editor of RQ (2000-06) and president of the RSA (1992-94), as well as editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999) and author of two well-known books on Italian education (1989, 2002).Readers who wish to know more about Grendler's intellectual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies: Essays in Honour of Paul F. Grendler (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Renaissance in the Streets, Schools, and Studies: Essays in Honour of Paul F. Grendler (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80862026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Commentaries (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255836
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There is no need to make a case for the Commentaries of Pope Pius II (1405-64) as part of The I Tatti Renaissance Library. Their author, né Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, stood a towering figure in the politics and culture of Renaissance Europe. As a work of history, moreover, the Commentaries remain unmatched: to this day, they are the only autobiography penned from the papal throne. Far more than a personal memoir, however, the text offers a rare eyewitness account of some of the most storied events of the fifteenth century. Among the many recent publications on Pius' s career and on his vast and varied corpus of writings are several modern editions of this twelve-book magnum opus (Totaro, 1984; van Heck, 1984;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallCommentaries (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USCommentaries (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®104632026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Rhetoricocum libri quinque (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255837
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We are long overdue for a critical edition of George of Trebizond's Rhetoricorum libri quinque (RLV), but while we wait for one, Luc Deitz has provided us with an excellent facsimile of Paris 1538 from the Wechel press (based on Paris 1532). This text differs from earlier editions, such as Venice 1523, in a number of minor ways. There are light editorial emendations correcting errors either in George's Latin or in printing. Some words printed earlier in Greek are now in Latin; conversely, some earlier in Latin are now in Greek. The major changes are the division of the text into sections and the addition of marginal notes that are codified in an index. The need for sections, notes, and index clearly was felt at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRhetoricocum libri quinque (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRhetoricocum libri quinque (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Sperimentalismo e dimensione europea della cultura di Paolo Giovio (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255838
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The articles in this collection were born at a convention in Como (2002) dedicated to discussing the most pressing issues surrounding the sixteenth-century Italian humanist Paolo Giovio. Taken together, these articles investigate the main interpretive issues concerning Giovio, both to provide a modern evaluation of the work of this important humanist, and to show how multidisciplinary his interests were.Carla Sodini's article particularly addresses modern scholarly interests. The treatise analyzed by Sodini (Il Commentario delle cose de' Turchi), dedicated to the Emperor Charles V, was written in 1532, a crucial time in the Ottoman-European relationship. Sodini notes that Giovio writes with a full understanding of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSperimentalismo e dimensione europea della cultura di Paolo Giovio (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSperimentalismo e dimensione europea della cultura di Paolo Giovio (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255839
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Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought is, as the author notes, "primarily a book about history writing" (6), and it is one of considerable significance. In the burgeoning scholarship on the Crusades, on Europe's relations with the Ottoman Turks, and on Western perceptions of the Islamic Other, Margaret Meserve's book takes up an important and little studied theme: humanist histories of Islam. At the same time, it offers a signal contribution to studies of Renaissance historiography more broadly, and especially to the methods and motives of its practitioners. Elegantly written, convincingly argued, and humbling in its expansive learning, Meserve's monograph will capture the attention of a wide range of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallEmpires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USEmpires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®71642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Opere storiche (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255840
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Antonio Ivani was one of those major-minor Italian humanists of the fifteenth century who are as important for what their careers tell us as for what is said in their formal writings. Ivani was born ca. 1430, the son of a notary in Sarzana, a town whose territory was frequently contested by Genoa, Lucca, Florence, and Milan. There was a strong tradition of Latin schooling at Sarzana, which was also the home of the humanist Pope Nicholas V (Tommaso Parentucelli). During his youth Ivani is likely in addition to have come into contact with the court of the deposed Genoese doge, Tommaso Fregoso, then situated above Sarzana in the fortress of Sarzanello. At the age of sixteen Ivani left his hometown to travel through
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallOpere storiche (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USOpere storiche (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®71402026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Il ritratto del vero governo del Prencipe (1552): Edizione critica a cura di Matteo Salvetti (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255841
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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the mirror of the prince became a prevalent form of political treatise. Most of these were inspired either by the model of Machiavelli's Prince or by Erasmus's Education of a Christian Prince. In this new edition of the hitherto obscure Ritratto del vero governo del prencipe of Lucio Paolo Rosello, Matteo Salvetti presents an example that appears to straddle and ultimately reconcile those two contrasting influences. Salvetti also suggests that a careful reading of the Ritratto yields evidence of Rosello's encouragement of his fellow Nicodemite travelers in Italy, thus rendering complex and even subversive what appears on the surface to be a rather uncomplicated encomium
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallIl ritratto del vero governo del Prencipe (1552): Edizione critica a cura di Matteo Salvetti (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USIl ritratto del vero governo del Prencipe (1552): Edizione critica a cura di Matteo Salvetti (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®79742026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Caro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255842
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In an important essay several times invoked in the course of this fine anthology, Vittore Branca asserts that no edition of a literary work can claim to be definitive and that any critical edition "worthy of the name should provide the possibility of being entirely redone according to different criteria" (228). Given Branca's pivotal role as a proponent and practitioner of this new philology, with its dynamic model of a textual tradition over the more static and artificial definitive edition, it seems entirely fitting that the portrait of Branca —both the man and his works —that emerges from these collected essays is itself multifaceted and evolving: not a definitive edition, but a dynamic tradizione.Almost all of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallCaro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USCaro Vitto: Essays in Memory of Vittore Branca (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255843
<p></p>
Of the many essay collections on Petrarch that originated in his seventh centenary in 2004, this volume offers the most unified vision and approach. It also fills a pressing need in Petrarchan scholarship by showing how philological and codicological research underpins interpretive criticism. Its thesis, according to the introduction by Teodolinda Barolini, is that "Petrarch's poetics constrains his interpreters to come to grips with the fundamentals of Petrarchan philology" (2). Its focus, according to an introductory note by H. Wayne Storey, is on issues of redaction, rearrangement, and transmission that demonstrate that "philological and editorial inquiry are not free of cultural and interpretive influence"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPetrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPetrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®76962026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Der weibliche Petrarkismus im Cinquecento: Transformationen des lyrischen Diskurses bei Vittoria Colonna und Gaspara Stampa (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255844
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This study of female Petrarchism in the Italian Renaissance, in particular in the works of Vittoria Colonna and Gaspara Stampa, is a Habilitationschrift supervised by Professor Klaus Hempfer and thus representative of the outstanding "Petrarkismus Forschung" that the latter and other German scholars have pursued and elicited for several decades. While Schneider's study does not offer groundbreaking new perspectives, the author conducts an extremely thorough, detailed, and methodical exploration of the complexities of female poetic writing in a Petrarchan vein, such as the recoding of Petrarchan narrative premises, the conception of a marital Petrarchism, the topoi of modesty and a reciprocal love experience, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDer weibliche Petrarkismus im Cinquecento: Transformationen des lyrischen Diskurses bei Vittoria Colonna und Gaspara Stampa (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDer weibliche Petrarkismus im Cinquecento: Transformationen des lyrischen Diskurses bei Vittoria Colonna und Gaspara Stampa (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®92242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Arcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255845
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This superb collection of essays on Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52), the most outspoken polemical Italian woman writer of the early modern period, will constitute the definitive study for years to come. A Benedictine nun, forced into claustration and pressured to take vows that constrained her to a life-long imprisonment in the convent of Sant' Anna in Venice, Tarabotti wrote early feminist denunciations of patriarchy. This slim, handsomely-produced volume of the twelve essays by both established and younger scholars will serve as an essential platform for future research on the subject.Weaver divides the book into two sections: The Venetian Context and Arcangela Tarabotti, Life and Works. In so doing, she avoids
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallArcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USArcangela Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Briefe zwischen Süd und Nord: Die Hochzeit und Ehe von Paula de Gonzaga und Leonhard von Görz im Spiegel der fürstlichen Kommunikation (1473-1500) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255846
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Christina Antenhofer presents us in a neatly-wrapped package a splendid gift from the archives: an intricate and thoroughly grounded account of a Renaissance marriage, based on documents found in Mantua's Archivio Gonzaga and the Tiroler Landesarchiv (Innsbruck, Austria). She focuses on the hundreds of letters exchanged by principals and functionaries at the two courts, which were linked by the marriage of Paula Gonzaga (1463-96)—youngest child (of ten, excluding one who died in infancy) and youngest daughter (of five) of marchese Ludovico and his wife Barbara (Hohenzollern) of Brandenburg —to Leonhard (1462-1500), the last Count of Görz. Her analysis of the letters and related documents provides a portrait of a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBriefe zwischen Süd und Nord: Die Hochzeit und Ehe von Paula de Gonzaga und Leonhard von Görz im Spiegel der fürstlichen Kommunikation (1473-1500) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBriefe zwischen Süd und Nord: Die Hochzeit und Ehe von Paula de Gonzaga und Leonhard von Görz im Spiegel der fürstlichen Kommunikation (1473-1500) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®71902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Murder of a Medici Princess (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255847
<p></p>
The fate of Renaissance princesses was a far cry from those in fairy tales who overcame obstacles, married prince charming, and lived happily ever after. Betrothed at a young age for political purposes to men they usually didn' t know, Renaissance princesses were sent to live in the foreign courts of their husbands, where they were often viewed with suspicion and discarded once they fulfilled their main function: to breed the next generation of male heirs.Caroline Murphy's lively account of the life of Isabella de' Medici sheds light on the tribulations endured and the privileges enjoyed by one such princess. Born in 1542 to Duke Cosimo de' Medici of Tuscany and Eleanor of Toledo, Isabella led a charmed and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMurder of a Medici Princess (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMurder of a Medici Princess (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®71812026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255848
<p></p>
Yale University Press has established itself as the premier publisher of beautiful academic books, and Iain Fenlon's new study of Venetian ceremonial life is indeed beautiful. Sumptuously illustrated, the book is nevertheless a serious work of scholarship by a well-known historian of music. The chronological and topical range is wide, from the founding of St. Mark's basilica sometime after 828/829 to the 1570s when four major events —the victory at Lepanto, the visit of King Henry III of France, plague, and fire in the Ducal Palace—transformed Venetian self-consciousness and, in particular, reshaped ceremonial life. In a final section Fenlon considers how these events "metabolized" (ix) Venetian historical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63362026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255849
<p></p>
Elizabeth Horodowich argues in Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice that the sixteenth century saw unprecedented attempts to regulate speech in Venice through new laws and institutions. Chapter 1, "Defining the Art of Conversation," highlights a paradox that marked early modern writing in Venice: conversation was regarded as a desirable good, one that could breed refinement in the courtier and cement relationships among the rich and powerful, but it was also dangerous, and excess or religiously subversive speech was discouraged. In her discussion of conversation, Horodowich leans on three works: the Courtier (1528) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), the Galateo (1558) by Giovanni della Casa (1503-56)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLanguage and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLanguage and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73012026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Commercio e cultura mercantile. Vol. 4 of Il Rinascimento italiano e l'Europa (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255850
<p></p>
Two anachronisms bookend the Italian Renaissance, one marking its mythic dawn and the other its supposed demise: the late-medieval crisis of the early fourteenth century and Italy's failure to maintain its primacy in the sixteenth. Both are scholarly phantoms produced by nineteenth-century social theorists. On closer inspection the assumption of the failure of Italy shows little justification. This volume attempts to shine light on the latter stale anachronism by reframing the debate with an empirically rather than theoretically driven analysis of the economy of Renaissance Italy.Richard A. Goldthwaite and Reinhold C. Mueller, the deans of Renaissance economic history, and Franco Franceschi, a scholar at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallCommercio e cultura mercantile. Vol. 4 of Il Rinascimento italiano e l'Europa (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USCommercio e cultura mercantile. Vol. 4 of Il Rinascimento italiano e l'Europa (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72062026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Writings on Church and Reform (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255851
<p></p>
Writings on Church and Reform marks a major advance in scholarship on Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). In the familiar I Tatti format of Latin texts with facing translations, it makes available a wide range of Nicholas's political and ecclesiastical works. Until now these have been represented in English mainly by The Catholic Concordance (1991), an early work (1433) that Cusanus wrote at the Council of Basel to defend conciliar authority. While Writings includes three selections from this early period, its main contribution is fourteen later works (1438- ) where Nicholas defends Pope Eugenius IV, and revises his ecclesiology and reform agenda to accent papal authority. The book thus dramatically broadens our view of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWritings on Church and Reform (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWritings on Church and Reform (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24L'Italia dell'Inquisitore: Storia e geografia dell'Italia del Cinquecento nella Descrittione di Leandro Alberti (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255852
<p></p>
This reviewer accepted this title for review from an interest in Leandro Alberti as an inquisitorial official in Bologna who straddled the change from the medieval to the post-1542 modern Inquisition, and from having just written about him for a book on the modern inquisitions. My awareness of Alberti's Descrittione di tutta Italia was hazy, from brief unappreciative acquaintance long ago. The arrival of the heavyweight tome was alarming; some thirty papers, most given at a 2004 conference in Bologna, plus three contributions from a seminar course in 2003-04 in Pisa under Adriano Prosperi. Shortage of word space and of time, and lack of knowledge and of expertise, preclude comment on all contributions. Many papers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallL'Italia dell'Inquisitore: Storia e geografia dell'Italia del Cinquecento nella Descrittione di Leandro Alberti (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USL'Italia dell'Inquisitore: Storia e geografia dell'Italia del Cinquecento nella Descrittione di Leandro Alberti (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®82672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Un santo alla battaglia di Anghiari: La "Vita" e il culto di Andrea Corsini nella Firenze del Rinascimento (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255853
<p></p>
Andrea Corsini (d. 1374) grew up with eleven siblings in the oltrarno neighborhood of San Frediano, nearby the Carmelite church of the Carmine. By his thirties, Andrea had joined the order. His brothers promoted him within the Florentine house; as lector he probably taught at the studium; he became Provincial of Tuscany; finally Clement VI named him Bishop of Fiesole (1349). Unusually for Fiesolan bishops, Andrea lived not at Florence but in his diocese. Archives there reveal a good manager, even a reformer: he improved the cathedral fabric and, with the help of his vicar-general (his brother, who would became Bishop of Fiesole in turn), pursued cases of clerical corruption. But Andrea's greatest triumph occurred
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallUn santo alla battaglia di Anghiari: La "Vita" e il culto di Andrea Corsini nella Firenze del Rinascimento (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USUn santo alla battaglia di Anghiari: La "Vita" e il culto di Andrea Corsini nella Firenze del Rinascimento (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Si Loin de Rome: Chronique d'un Renégat (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255854
<p></p>
Catholic authorities in the sixteenth century and beyond found the life of Bernardino Ochino (1487–1546) an alarming demonstration of the perils posed by unrestrained theological speculation. Protestant opinion was far more ambiguous. Within the Reformation camp he was an impressive, if unconventional and unpredictable, convert. The son of a Sienese barber, Ochino joined the observant Franciscans at an early age. He soon rose to prominence and in 1533 became vicar general of the order. Later he entered the newly formed Capuchins and within a short time was elected their general. Ochino was also a celebrated preacher throughout the Italian world from Naples to Venice. Suspicions eventually arose regarding the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSi Loin de Rome: Chronique d'un Renégat (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSi Loin de Rome: Chronique d'un Renégat (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62562026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255855
<p></p>
The Augustinian Hermits have not always received the same scholarly attention as the other mendicant orders. This is not to say that they have lacked a rich tradition of historical analysis. Since their relatively late institution in 1256 by Alexander IV, they have possessed this in abundance. From the beginning, the Hermits' chroniclers identified Augustine as their father and founder, often in polemical dialogue with the older Augustinian Canons, and they portrayed themselves, further, as a community who modeled the saint's paradigm of a life of faith conjoined to reason. Rudolph Arbesmann O.S.A., P. Damasus Trapp O.S.A., and, more recently, Eric Saak, among others, have given us a distinctive sense of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallArt and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USArt and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®70142026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Dominican Women and Renaissance Art: The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255856
<p></p>
For almost twenty years, there has been a steady upsurge of scholarly interest in female religious communities in Renaissance Italy. In comparison with surviving documentation of laywomen's lives, convent archives have offered a broader and deeper (though still fragmented) range of source material that has provided significant insights into women's diverse experiences in convents. Ann Roberts makes an important contribution to this growing body of research with her examination of life and art at the convent of San Domenico in Pisa, analyzing paintings that have until now been overlooked and situating them within the context of Dominican devotional practices as they were performed at San Domenico.While books and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDominican Women and Renaissance Art: The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDominican Women and Renaissance Art: The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®76782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255857
<p></p>
Dana Katz's examination of Christian images featuring Italian Jews is a welcome addition not only to Jewish studies but also to the reevaluation of Renaissance culture south of the Alps. In addition to exploring the attitudes toward Jewish communities in such cities as Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara, and Trent, it introduces and analyzes little known artworks from the northern part of the peninsula. The focus on these princely states is not arbitrary; according to the author, they were, among other things, home to "relatively prosperous Jewish populations."Two of Katz's most interesting analyses are those of the virtually unknown Norsa Madonna and Hans Klocker's Beato Simon of Trent, both presenting actual portraits of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®58642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255858
<p></p>
Andrew Ladis's Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives presents an account of "the downtrodden, the rebellious, the lazy, the half-defeated, the self-delusional, the victimized, and the villainous" (x) in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568). The Lives of such antiheroes as Buonamico Buffalmaco, Andrea del Castagno, and Baccio Bandinelli, as related by Vasari, offer a literary counterpoint —a narrative tension —necessary for highlighting the accomplishments of the heroes of Vasari's work, and Ladis focuses here on Giotto, Domenico Veneziano, and Michelangelo. These six artists, and numerous others, are paired by Ladis as a way of understanding Vasari's message about the production and appreciation of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallVictims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USVictims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Giovanni Bellini (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255859
<p></p>
Oskar Bätschmann's handsomely illustrated monograph offers an overview of Giovanni Bellini's career and problems associated with his oeuvre. In his synthesis of modern studies on Bellini's stylistic development, Bätschmann draws heavily upon the articles found in The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini, edited by Peter Humfrey (2004). In addition, Bätschmann reexamined the archival documents associated with Giovanni Bellini, as well as contemporary written accounts of Bellini, and cites these at the end in a useful chronological table.Bätschmann presents a chronology of major paintings from Bellini's career, grouping works under thematic chapter headings related to the artist's stylistic development. Chapters 1
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallGiovanni Bellini (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USGiovanni Bellini (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67142026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Zelotti's Epic Frescoes at Cataio: The Obizzi Saga (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255860
<p></p>
This book brings to readers many color images of the scenes depicting the saga of the Obizzi in Giambattista Zelotti's impressive paintings at the Castello del Cataio, and it sets the crafted history of the Obizzi family in its historic context. The program was developed by Giuseppe Betussi for Eneo Pico degli Obizzi and is explained at length in Betussi's Ragionamento sopra Cathaio, Padua, 1573. Betussi's preface says he wrote the Ragionamento as a dialogue to further insure the fame of the family. While the existence of the Cataio series and its painter were not as unknown as the press release for the book claims, the Castello was until recently only rarely open to visitors. These included both authorities of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallZelotti's Epic Frescoes at Cataio: The Obizzi Saga (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USZelotti's Epic Frescoes at Cataio: The Obizzi Saga (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Leon Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria" (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255861
<p></p>
Scholarly interest in Leon Battista Alberti has, in the past two decades, been prodigious: the foundation of the Centro di Studi sul Classicismo in 1992, with its project to publish critical editions of all Alberti's works; and after the international congress in Paris in 1995 of the Societé International Leon Battista Alberti (SILBA), which plans the publication of all his works and publishes the annual Albertiana, and was followed in 1998 by the establishment of the Fondazione Centro Studi Leon Battista Alberti in Mantua. The output of congresses and publications organized and sponsored by these three centers over the past ten years is substantial, yet a complete view of Alberti studies today would also need to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLeon Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria" (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLeon Battista Alberti: Teorico delle arti e gli impegni civili del "De re aedificatoria" (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®123762026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius's Educational Ideas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255862
<p></p>
Renaissance architecture is less a moment of stylistic change, than a new sensibility when the writings on architecture assumed a new importance for architects and patrons. Books on architecture as practical manuals and narrative accounts rapidly grew in numbers throughout the sixteenth century, and architecture was no longer a secret knowledge of artisans but a topic in the center of learned culture. Yet artists and architects were notoriously bad guides to their own buildings, though ready commentators on the architectural scene at large. In Liisa Kanerva's most recent book on Renaissance architectural theory, the curriculum for the architect is examined through a group of the canonical books of architectural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBetween Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius's Educational Ideas (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBetween Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius's Educational Ideas (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67802026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Il Sanmarino: Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatista del Cinquecento. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Vita e le opere. Vol. 2, Gli scritti (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255863
<p></p>
In 1980 the Italian architectural historian Daniela Lamberini published a transcription of a remarkable manuscript, Il trattato delle fortificazioni in terra, a study of earthworks in military architecture by Giovan Battista Belluzzi (1506-54). The manuscript, prepared for Cosimo de'Medici, for whom Belluzzi worked from 1543 until his death at the siege of Siena, outlines how earthworks could be employed to defend the cities of the Grand Duchy. Belluzzi's manuscript documents a well-known practice about which architects, in their printed treatises, had generally been relatively silent. Lamberini clarified the complex authorship issues around Belluzzi's work and began the rehabilitation of this overlooked figure.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallIl Sanmarino: Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatista del Cinquecento. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Vita e le opere. Vol. 2, Gli scritti (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USIl Sanmarino: Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatista del Cinquecento. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Vita e le opere. Vol. 2, Gli scritti (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®70722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Bomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: Figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255864
<p></p>
This book is about the Sacro bosco at Bomarzo, an Italian mannerist garden located roughly twelve miles east of Viterbo. The garden was constructed in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Duke of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini. Unlike other Renaissance gardens the Sacro bosco does not follow the rules of symmetry and its main path is a sinuous one that unwinds through a forest scattered with gigantic sculptures, some of them monstrous, accompanied by inscriptions carved in stone, whose significance is puzzling. Scholars have often focused on the reconstruction of a coherent narrative that would help uncover the original meaning of the garden and its parts. By contrast, Anne Bélanger maintains that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: Figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: Figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66882026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255865
<p></p>
The year 2000 saw the foundation, as a research unit of the Scuola Normale in Pisa, of the Centro di Elaborazione Informatica di Testi e Immagini nella Tradizione Letteraria: created, and then directed, by Lina Bolzoni with the intention of furthering the study of the complex relationships between the literary word and the artistic image. Although not limited by its mandate to the study of Renaissance culture alone, the Centro has dedicated special attention to such typically Renaissance subjects as the emblem books, or the art of memory. Now Lina Bolzoni, in line with the interests pursued by the Centro, has published a book that takes as its territory the relationship between Italian Renaissance portraits and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPoesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPoesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66992026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255866
<p></p>
The introduction describes how, despite the fragmented and constantly perturbed political state of Italy in the centuries before unification, Italian imprese were born in an already unified artistic and literary tradition. They evolved from individuals' symbols, largely through the activities of academies, into the preferred form of symbolic expression of a wide variety of institutions, both lay and ecclesiastical. The consequent potential for use as symbols of truths of ethics and faith, and international circulation which could rely on a shared tradition of classical culture and often on a common language, led to contamination with other emblematic forms. The essays sample the variety of the resulting usages.In
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®78182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24A Bewitched Duchy: Lorraine and Its Dukes, 1477-1736 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255867
<p></p>
William Monter has written widely and authoritatively about the European witch-hunts, with special attention to the interplay between political power and trials for sorcery and witchcraft. Despite its title, the present book, however, concerns itself less with witchcraft per se than with the political history of the Duchy of Lorraine as a "Franco-German buffer state" during the early modern period. Monter provides an elegantly written narrative history in an almost chatty style that carries his painstaking archival work lightly. Monter's principal theme is the dynastic survival of Lorraine for over a century and a half, despite its precarious position wedged between France and the German Empire. This success he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallA Bewitched Duchy: Lorraine and Its Dukes, 1477-1736 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USA Bewitched Duchy: Lorraine and Its Dukes, 1477-1736 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®55242026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Les traités monarchomaques: Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560-1600) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255868
<p></p>
With the publication of the Les traités monarchomaques so soon after the appearance of his edited collection Et de sa bouche sortait un glaive (2006), Paul-Alexis Mellet has established himself as the preeminent current scholar of the so-called Monarchomaque approach to armed resistance to tyranny that emerged in the late sixteenth century. It is no easy task to achieve such status, given the large body of literature that has been devoted to the topic in recent times. But Mellet (in the present book as well as the previous one) has opened a rich new vein of inquiry concerning, in particular, the intellectual diversity of the Monarchomaques and the coherence of the various positions that have been grouped under that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLes traités monarchomaques: Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560-1600) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLes traités monarchomaques: Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560-1600) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24D'Encre et de sang: Simon Goulart et la Saint-Barthélemy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255869
<p></p>
Simon Goulart, the Genevan pastor, constructed the first narrative of the first three civil wars and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, in his Mémoires de l'Estat de France, published in three volumes, first in Germany, in 1576-77. Partial, full of lacunae, difficult to read, and often obscure, Goulart's narrative would frame interpretations of the French civil wars with conviction for Protestants and critical skepticism for Roman Catholics down into the twentieth century.Goulart's life and works have received scholarly attention. Leonard Chester Jones's study of 1917 still merits reading, for it establishes Goulart as the author of the anonymously published Mémoires and lays out with precision not only his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallD'Encre et de sang: Simon Goulart et la Saint-Barthélemy (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USD'Encre et de sang: Simon Goulart et la Saint-Barthélemy (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®85832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Les femmes et l'histoire familiale (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255870
<p></p>
This edition of the memoirs of René e Burlamacchi (1568-1644), Descrittione della Vita et Morte del Sigr Michele Burlamachi (1623), and Jeanne du Laurens (b. 1563), Genealogie de Messieurs du Laurens (1631), is a wonderful contribution to the fields of family history and early modern women. Burlamacchi focuses her account on the life of her father Michele (1532-90) and his family, and Laurens, on her immediate kin. Both women state that they were motivated by their religious faith and love of family; both were active in the advancement of their family's fortunes; both married twice: Burlamacchi's second husband was the Reformed warrior and poet Agrippa d' Aubign é . The differences between them are also noteworthy:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLes femmes et l'histoire familiale (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLes femmes et l'histoire familiale (XVIe-XVIIe siècle) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61532026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Performance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainbleau (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255871
<p></p>
The "Queen's Day" in question here is Shrove Sunday, 13 February 1564, when Catherine of Medici, Queen Mother of France, produced two lavish court spectacles at Fontainebleau: a Bergerie composed by Ronsard and published in revised form the following year in his Elégies, Mascarades et Bergerie, and a five-act dramatic adaptation of the Ginevra episode of Ariosto's Orlando furioso (4.51-6.16), of which nothing survives except brief mentions by contemporary witnesses like Castelnau and Brantôme and some incidental texts —two "triumphs" and an epilogue by Ronsard and four anonymous intermèdes preserved by Brantôme. These spectacles were part of a ten-day Carnival extravaganza designed to celebrate the reconciliation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPerformance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainbleau (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPerformance, Poetry and Politics on the Queen's Day: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainbleau (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67582026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255872
<p></p>
Sarah Beam's book treating farce during the French Renaissance is a well-researched addition to the corpus of drama studies. Combining a firm literary understanding of the plays themselves, she also brings the researcher's willingness to dig in the archives to unearth documentation that helps elucidate performance conditions, as well as the before and after effects of their practice. Further, Beam does not hesitate to dispute elements of commonly accepted theories. Norbert Elias's localization of absolutist development at Louis XIV's Versailles, and Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of sociopolitical opposition inherent in the carnivalesque, do not escape unscathed. At the heart of her vision are the various paradocuments
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLaughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLaughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®70412026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255873
<p></p>
As its title indicates, Paul J. Smith's study is devoted to a fundamental question in French Renaissance literature. Its introduction evokes the wealth of metaphors that both classical and Renaissance writers used to speak of dispositio, drawn from the culinary arts, architecture, sculpture, medicine, military art, and traveling. Smith wisely limits his subject matter to Rabelais on one end and Montaigne's Essais on the other, situating poetic dispositio in Du Bellay and Belleau in the middle, along with emblematic fable books. The first chapter opens with a useful comparison of Pantagruel and Gargantua to classical biography and epideictic rhetoric. It explains biography in terms of topoi (genus, genesis, natura
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67442026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Renaissance de l'Ode: L'Ode français au tournant des années 1550 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255874
<p></p>
This collection is offered as the first part of a history of the ode in French literature from the mid-sixteenth century to our own times. Around 1550, that pivotal moment for French verse, the ode gave rise to much debate: is this an ancient form renewed or simply a continuation of the medieval chanson? Do we look to Horace as the model, or to Marot and Saint-Gelais? What of the link with music? Is this free verse, or must it comply with strict rules of rhyme and strophe? Is it "high," or "low"? Should it be fundamentally profane or can it also be sacrée?Nathalie Dauvois shows in her introduction how the ground was prepared for this "forme lyrique par excellence" (7) by the French Neo-Latinists who set the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRenaissance de l'Ode: L'Ode français au tournant des années 1550 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRenaissance de l'Ode: L'Ode français au tournant des années 1550 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65072026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Voyager avec le Diable: Voyages réels, voyages imaginaires et discours démonologiques (XVe-XVIIe siècles) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255875
<p></p>
I must admit that my first response upon seeing this volume was: why do we need yet another French essay collection on demonology? The craze for these would seem to be surpassed only by the witch craze of the seventeenth century. In the pages of this same journal, not long ago, I reviewed the similar Fictions du diable, edited by Françoise Lavocat, Pierre Kapitaniak, and Marianne Closson, the last of whom is also a contributor to the current volume. This must be a booming industry! But on further reflection, this book does have a unique angle, one that could seem whimsical, but is in fact deadly serious. The saying goes, "don't judge a book by its cover." But you can (and in fact, should) judge this one by this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallVoyager avec le Diable: Voyages réels, voyages imaginaires et discours démonologiques (XVe-XVIIe siècles) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USVoyager avec le Diable: Voyages réels, voyages imaginaires et discours démonologiques (XVe-XVIIe siècles) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61842026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Les Amours romanesques de la fin des guerres de religion au temps de L'Astrée (1585-1628): Fictions narratives et représentations culturelles (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255876
<p></p>
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French novels are numerous, widely diverse, and full of surprises. Although Gustave Reynier and Henri Coulet have cleared the way, barely two-dozen titles are familiar to modern scholars. Vocabulary is the first difficulty modern critics may encounter: in French, the words roman and romancier, until the end of the seventeenth century, applied mainly to medieval texts and authors of chivalric novels. Novels were then "livres d'amour" (255). Giving the priority to love over war has been such an important step in the evolution of narrative fiction that les amours means "the story." The genre itself, called roman sentimental (sentimental novel), includes short novels considered, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLes Amours romanesques de la fin des guerres de religion au temps de L'Astrée (1585-1628): Fictions narratives et représentations culturelles (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLes Amours romanesques de la fin des guerres de religion au temps de L'Astrée (1585-1628): Fictions narratives et représentations culturelles (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67732026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255877
<p></p>
In 1540 Eobanus Hessus proclaimed Homer as the "poetarum omnium seculorum longe princeps" (138). Certainly, other humanists would have contested this sweeping statement. Nonetheless, as Philip Ford has masterfully demonstrated, the textual reconstitutions, Latin translations, and commentaries of Homer's epics affirm the pervasive breadth and unequivocal depth of his influence in sixteenth-century Europe. In analyzing and synthesizing this vast amount of material, Professor Ford sensibly divides this study into two sections: an examination of the problems, particularities, and traditions of textual criticism; and the literary reception of Homeric epic in France. A clearer picture of poetic principle and practice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDe Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDe Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255878
<p></p>
This volume of thirteen well-researched and engagingly written essays originated in a colloquium held at Queen's University, Belfast in 2004, entitled "The Protean Muse: Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque." The thirteen essays, some of which were written expressly for this collection while others are revised versions of papers from the colloquium, bring fresh perspectives and insight to two problematic concepts in literary studies in general, and seventeenth-century Hispanic studies in particular: the definition and idea of the Baroque and the definition and range of mythology. Editor Isabel Torres's introductory essay nicely encapsulates the problems associated with the historical use of the two
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67942026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Isabel la Católica en la producción teatral española del siglo XVII (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255879
<p></p>
Perhaps the most surprising revelation in Professor Caba's book is that no such book as hers has been published before. Given the importance of Isabel and her husband Ferdinand, the Catholic Kings, and other Spanish monarchs in Golden Age drama this is an oversight, and we owe Caba a debt of gratitude for this overdo study. Spanish kings and queens appear over and over again in plays of this period and often have a didactic function: they provide moral exempla and pronounce thematic messages. To reveal contemporary attitudes towards the queen, feminine power, and attitudes toward women in general, Caba analyzes seven plays and "certain aspects" (133) of an eighth by three seventeenth-century dramatists, Lope de
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallIsabel la Católica en la producción teatral española del siglo XVII (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USIsabel la Católica en la producción teatral española del siglo XVII (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66682026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255880
<p></p>
Adrienne Laskier Martin's contribution to our critical understanding of the erotic imagination's role in early modern Spanish literature has placed her among a selected group of scholars known for the consistency and quality of their publications. I doubt that anyone interested in Cervantes, for example, would skip her Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet (1991), a book that opened new vistas for recent generations of Cervantistas all over the world. This new book springs from the author's fundamental insight affirming the intrinsic worth and originality of a type of literary expression traditionally branded as merely burlesque, popular, or simply too plebeian to be ranked as material meriting serious and systematic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAn Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAn Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®46542026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255881
<p></p>
The study of armor, garnitures, helmets, and shields is a field largely ignored by art historians, researched primarily by specialists and curators of arms and armor collections. The recent exhibitions, Heroic Armor of the Renaissance (1998) and Parures triomphales (2003), redress notions regarding the rich symbolism of armor, as does Braden Frieder's Chivalry and the Perfect Prince, a thoroughly researched study of the context and meaning of Renaissance armor and weapons at the Spanish Habsburg court, set against the backdrop of chivalric tournaments, jousts, courtly festivals, entertainments, martial spectacles, and royal entries. Magnificently decorated armor was worn primarily as protection, but also as symbols
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallChivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USChivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580-1640 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255882
<p></p>
Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reap the financial rewards of direct trade with the Far East in the sixteenth century, by the time the Braganzas restored political autonomy to Portugal in 1640, the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company were well on their way to replacing Portuguese merchants in the India trade. The ascendancy of Northern Europeans and their joint stock companies seemed to indicate that royal monopoly of trade could not compete successfully against privately funded initiatives. James C. Boyajian's work, first published in 1993 and now out in paperback, challenges the notion of Northern European trading superiority by carefully documenting the actual practice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPortuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580-1640 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPortuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580-1640 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255883
<p></p>
This collection offers a sustained engagement with race in the Renaissance using the lens of the Black Legend —the twentieth-century neologism coined to protest widespread perception of colonial Spain's "unique brutality" in conquering the New World (1). As a whole, its essays propose that the distinctness of European colonialism and capitalism derives in large measure from "the drastic qualitative shift in the sixteenth century (which in the eighteenth century was universalized as race and racism)" (2), a shift integral to "the commodification of labour" (3) that attended Western expansion in the Americas.A number of contributors play on a (racialized) logic of double difference, which the introduction traces back
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®85022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255884
<p></p>
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's General and Natural History of the Indies (1535, 1850s), the earliest full account of Spanish exploration and conquest in the New World, with reports on America's natural phenomena and its inhabitants, owns a central place in the canon of colonial Spanish American history and literature. A humanist raised in the Spanish court, who spent his later years in Hispaniola as the crown's royal chronicler, Oviedo consulted official papers about the conquest, interviewed many of the principal actors involved, and used novel methods to describe a new reality overseas within the framework of what Europeans knew up to that time about divine and human history, and the natural world. The History is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallFernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USFernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®84482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255885
<p></p>
This book proposes that early modern imaginings of the Canary Islands are filtered not only through the prism of ancient models, but through the more immediate lens of New World experience. In an intelligently structured and well-argued study, the author focuses on three late Renaissance representations that present a variety of ideological and generic approaches to Spain's conquest of the islands.In four chapters, copious notes and bibliographies, Refracted Images reviews the substantial body of previous scholarship, three texts published around the turn of the seventeenth century, and their authors. Chapter 1 presents an overview of European interaction with the "Fortunate Islands" during four periods of medieval
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRefracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRefracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65412026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Missions Religieuses Modernes: "Notre Lieu Est Le Monde" (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255886
<p></p>
Taking its origins from a conference organized in 2000 by scholars from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, this collection of essays examines Catholic missions in Spain and in Portugal, and in their overseas empires, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A helpful introduction by coeditors Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Bernard Vincent places the fourteen essays that follow in a lively historiographical context. The essays published here, which give more attention to Jesuit missions than to others, even to all other missions put together, are divided into three parts: Formation, Vocation, Destination; Mission and Empire; Interior Missions, Distant Missions.Fabre and Vincent point out the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMissions Religieuses Modernes: "Notre Lieu Est Le Monde" (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMissions Religieuses Modernes: "Notre Lieu Est Le Monde" (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255887
<p></p>
In his article "Jesuit History: A New Hot Topic" in America (9 May 2005), John W. O'Malley highlighted the recent fascination of scholars coming from various backgrounds with the early modern phenomenon named the Society of Jesus. The publication of a companion to the Jesuits by the Cambridge University Press confirms this new historiographical trend.The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits examines the religious and cultural impact of the most dynamic and influential (for better or worse) Catholic religious order of men. The volume focuses on the early modern period —only the last part is dedicated to the suppression of the Society in the late eighteenth century and some aspects of its modern history after its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®82822026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255888
<p></p>
The third volume of Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels, recently published by St. Joseph's University Press, completes a series that should now become a centerpiece of their catalogue. Volume 2, The Passion Narratives, a larger and more theologically complex selection than its two predecessors, also includes "Another note about Translation," and an introductory study. Frederick Homann, in his note, discusses the Faustian challenge facing him when trying to capture the affective language of Nadal's meditations while avoiding the scandal of the anti Semitic attitudes in the text, a commonplace in sixteenth-century Christian writing. Homann, a mathematician by profession, has tried to approach these questions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAnnotations and Meditations on the Gospels (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAnnotations and Meditations on the Gospels (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255889
<p></p>
Analyses of intercultural interaction in the early modern period have multiplied in recent years. Scholars exploiting both European and non-Western sources have produced abundant studies of colonial and missionary efforts and indigenous responses in cultural settings around the world. Among the themes that have attracted most attention are religious doctrine, medicine, astronomy, technology, and the fine arts. Nicolas Standaert has written a valuable new study of a subject that has attracted surprisingly scant attention, that of religious ritual. Despite the fact that historians have long recognized the importance of religious conversion as a means for cultural transmission, and the dominant role of Roman
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255974">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450-1700 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255890
<p></p>
This book, evidently directed to a general or student audience, aims to provide a readable synthesis of current research on female monastic life in Catholic Western Europe and its colonies during the long sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on secondary sources, it offers a thorough overview of the current state of research for Italy, Spain, and the Catholic American colonies; it is spottier for Germany, the Netherlands, France, and England. The work's main conclusions are that nuns' experiences varied a great deal, and were always tied to local circumstances, networks, and institutions; that the Tridentine era's move toward uniform enclosure was less effective than previously thought, as there was a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallNuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450-1700 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USNuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450-1700 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®54702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255891
<p></p>
Those who imagine that the famously tolerant Dutch Republic was an oasis of religious peace would do well to read this informative and thoughtful study. Charles Parker shows that while Catholics in the republic were not outlawed, their religion was, and this resulted in some creative yet always inconvenient if not humiliating arrangements.The book makes two important contributions, one at the level of Netherlandish religious history, and the other in regard to wider trends in European Catholicism after the Reformation. Regarding the first, Parker shows convincingly and carefully how Catholicism revived in the republic after its demise in the 1570s —and this despite its outlawed priests, the confiscation of much of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallFaith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USFaith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73102026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Luther's Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255892
<p></p>
In 1936, Peter Meinhold in Die Genesisvorlesung Luthers und ihre Herausgeber challenged the veracity and reliability of the published editions of Martin Luther's lectures on Genesis. Luther remained, throughout all his controversies with Rome and others, a professor of the Old Testament at the University of Wittenberg. In 1535, he embarked on what would be a ten-year journey in the classroom through the book of Genesis. He completed the lecture series just three months before his own death. The lectures on Genesis dominated the last decade of his life. Meinhold argued that these lectures could not be trusted because they were edited by his students and were distorted by them in order to enlist Luther in the debates
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLuther's Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLuther's Lectures on Genesis and the Formation of Evangelical Identity (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®60322026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Justification and Participation in Christ: The Development of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255893
<p></p>
For a generation, Luther scholars and Lutheran theologians have fought over what Martin Luther meant by "justification by faith alone." Is the forgiveness and renewal of the sinner (justification) centered in being declared righteous —often called a "forensic" approach to justification because it is like a not guilty verdict in a court (in foro) —or does one become righteous by the indwelling of Christ in the human being? The former implies a more relational view of divine-human interaction, the latter a more ontological view. While the former is represented by a wide variety of historians and theologians (many from Germany), the latter view has been championed by Tuomo Mannermaa, a now retired theologian from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallJustification and Participation in Christ: The Development of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USJustification and Participation in Christ: The Development of Justification from Luther to the Formula of Concord (1580) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73222026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255894
<p></p>
In Germany, Thomas Kaufmann is the outstanding historian of the German Reformation of his generation. This volume does not prove as much: it merely convinces one further. Kaufmann's Konfession und Kultur brings together six previously published essays supplemented by four new ones intended to tie them all together. Unlike many collections of articles that masquerade under monographic titles, this one represents an articulated research trajectory bound by a cohesive thesis, and with it Kaufmann demonstrates that Lutheranism between ca. 1547 and 1600 represents the definitive formation of a specifically Lutheran culture that dominated for centuries, i.e., well beyond the limits of those pursuing the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallKonfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USKonfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255895
<p></p>
Professor Donald R. Kelley has lauded Johann Philippson von Sleidan (1506-56) as the "father of Reformation history" and numbered him among "the greatest of modern historians." In the shadow of this praise, Dr. Alexandra Kess's efforts in Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History at presenting "the first detailed description of Sleidan's life as a diplomat and historian" (3) are a welcome undertaking.Two aspects of Dr. Kess's work deserve to be singled out at once for praise: the first is her reliance on primary materials, especially the sixteenth-century correspondence by, to, or about Sleidan that she newly brings to light. As an appendix to the monograph, Dr. Kess has included a twenty-four-page index
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallJohann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USJohann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®69872026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255896
<p></p>
Randall C. Zachman's Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin constitutes a major revision of a longstanding assumption regarding Calvin's theology of divine self-manifestation. At the heart of Zachman's work is a reassessment of an important aspect of Calvin's theology. For long the consensus has been to assert the priority of proclamation over and above manifestation in Calvin's theology. In his introduction, Zachman cites scholars such as William Bouwsma, Edward Dowey, Carlos M. N. Eire, Brian Gerrish, Lucien Richard, and Thomas F. Torrance as typical of this consensus. Zachman does not dispute that there is abundant evidence in Calvin's writings to support the view that he favored hearing over seeing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallImage and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USImage and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Gemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht: Johannes a Lascos Kirchenordnung für London (1555) und die reformierte Konfessionsbildung (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255897
<p></p>
On the eve of the John Calvin Quincentennial, Judith Becker has directed attention to another luminary within the broader Reformed tradition, the Polish reformer, John a Lasco. Becker's study of a Lasco, and especially the immediate circle of congregations he influenced in London and in Emden, has appeared in the same year as Michael Springer's Restoring Christ's Church: John a Lasco and the Forma ac Ratio (2007). While Springer focuses rather exclusively on a Lasco's legacy by examining his foundational church order, the Forma ac Ratio, Becker probes the way in which his concepts about ecclesiastical structure, and especially church discipline, were actually implemented in the Emden Reformed congregation, and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallGemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht: Johannes a Lascos Kirchenordnung für London (1555) und die reformierte Konfessionsbildung (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USGemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht: Johannes a Lascos Kirchenordnung für London (1555) und die reformierte Konfessionsbildung (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®78782026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament, and: The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255898
<p></p>
The two books under review started as chapters of a doctoral dissertation of the University of the West of England in Bristol, "The Origin of Syriac Studies in the Sixteenth Century" (2004). The first book is now devoted to the first printing of the Syriac New Testament, the second one to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, the so-called Plantin's Polyglot Bible (1569-72). The captatio benevolentiæ of the reader is strange, because the author explains at the beginning of the first book: "The following pages seek first to recognize the specific features that characterize the first sixteenth-century edition of the Syriac New Testament. My description of this book, however, does not seek bibliographic precision and may, I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallOrientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament, and: The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USOrientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New Testament, and: The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®95172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Traicté de la Cabale (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255899
<p></p>
The Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism have acquired an ever increasing authority in Renaissance studies since the pioneering work of Scholem, Blau, and Secret; the works of Moshe Idel, David Ruderman, and Chaim Wirszubski have contributed significantly, and also textural studies such as Saverio Campanini's noteworthy edition of Flavius Mithridates' translation of the Bahir. No less significant is the study under review.The Traicté de la Cabale of Jean Thenaud (ca. 1480-1542), carefully edited by Ian Christie-Miller with the collaboration of François Roudaut, makes accessible to scholars of the Renaissance another source for the understanding of the Kabbalah. Jean Thenaud, born near Poitiers, was a grateful member of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallTraicté de la Cabale (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USTraicté de la Cabale (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Reforming Saints: Saints' Lives and Their Authors in Germany 1470-1530 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255900
<p></p>
Recent years have seen an expanding scholarly interest in the cult of the saints, especially for the early modern period. We have now learned that Renaissance humanists produced a significant hagiographical literature. Alison Knowles Frazier showed this for Italy in her Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (2005). David Collins in this impressive and important book demonstrates the extent of humanist hagiography in Germany for the years from 1470 to 1530, an activity, he writes, that made them more rather than less similar to their Italian counterparts. The period, and their role in it, must be evaluated for itself, he argues sensibly, not merely as an anticipation of Erasmus and Luther. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallReforming Saints: Saints' Lives and Their Authors in Germany 1470-1530 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USReforming Saints: Saints' Lives and Their Authors in Germany 1470-1530 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Schreiben für Status und Herrschaft: Deutsche Autobiographik in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255901
<p></p>
Late medieval and early modern autobiography in the Holy Roman Empire has attracted much scholarly attention since the 1980s. Literary scholars such as Horst Wenzel, Gabriele Kees, and Hans Rudolf Velten have written extensively on texts from 1300-1600, one of the least-studied periods in the German canon, and their works have significantly broadened our understanding of the wide range of documents that fall under the autobiographical rubric. Barbara Schmid carefully positions her own contribution within this rich literary-historical context, demarcating her theoretical approach from previous work and underscoring her new empirical additions to the known corpus of texts. Building on the scholarship produced since
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSchreiben für Status und Herrschaft: Deutsche Autobiographik in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSchreiben für Status und Herrschaft: Deutsche Autobiographik in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255902
<p></p>
Many are the "ways of paradox" in Patrizia Pizzorno's penetrating and largely original study. Certainly connected to the fruitful, often disturbing, play of opposites, Renaissance paradox more often signified a break with received opinion, convention, belief, a movement contrary to (para-) accepted teaching (doxa). Pizzorno begins with three famous sixteenth-century paradox books: Ortensio Lando's Paradossi cioè sentenze fuori del comun parere (1543); Charles Estienne's Paradoxes (1553), a partial translation of Lando; and Anthony Munday's The Defence of Contraries (1593), a partial translation of Estienne. She charts a transformation of Lando's fideist, Erasmian use of paradox into Estienne's and Munday's manuals
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80472026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Le sentiment national dans l'Europe méridionale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (France, Espagne, Italie) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255903
<p></p>
Did national sentiment exist in early modern Europe? Some, such as Jean Frédéric Schaub, argue that nations did not exist in the modern sense of unified political and cultural entities before the nineteenth century. Yet, as Alain Tallon's compilation shows, there are nuanced examples of national sentiment throughout early modern intellectual and political culture. For anyone interested in the history of nationalism and in the ambiguity of both the origins and meaning of the nation, this book makes for informative and fascinating reading.National sentiment has roots in medieval laws, trade empires, regionalism, war, and the Renaissance quest to link both linguistic and national origins with a glorious classical or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLe sentiment national dans l'Europe méridionale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (France, Espagne, Italie) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLe sentiment national dans l'Europe méridionale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (France, Espagne, Italie) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior, Valentin Eck, and Leonard Cox (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255904
<p></p>
Jacqueline Glomski's new book provides a welcome and much-needed study on the Renaissance in Central Europe. The recent efforts to incorporate Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and other Central European nations into the European Union have not led to a reintegration of their histories into the broader scholarship on the Renaissance in Europe. Scholarship continues to be fragmented by national, ethnic, and linguistic divisions. Glomski hopes to show that these divisions obscure that patrons and humanists in southern Poland and Hungary recognized themselves to be part of a larger, transnational intellectual community. She wants to convince anglophone readers that the ideals and styles of Renaissance humanism
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPatronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior, Valentin Eck, and Leonard Cox (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPatronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in the Writings of Rudolf Agricola Junior, Valentin Eck, and Leonard Cox (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Denmark, 1513-1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255905
<p></p>
This book is well researched and well documented, using primary sources in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It is divided into two main parts, one about the end of the medieval monarchy (1513-36) and the rebirth of the Oldenburg monarchy (1536-96), and the second, the age of King Christian IV (1597-1660).It must be remembered that during this period of history the Kings of Denmark ruled over a vast European realm consisting not only of Denmark, but also southeastern Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, with voyages of discovery to Greenland. Thus this book is important for the early history of these countries. There are several maps of these lands and also portraits of Danish kings.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDenmark, 1513-1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDenmark, 1513-1660: The Rise and Decline of a Renaissance Monarchy (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®60122026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Conrad Laib: Ein spätgotischer Maler aus Schwaben in Salzburg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255906
<p></p>
"ALS ICH CHUN" reads part of the inscription on a painting made originally for a church in Salzburg and dated 1449. The text appears boldly on the saddle cloth of the horseman who points at the crucified Christ. The prominence of this cloth, which covers the rump of the foreshortened horse in the picture's central foreground, quickly attracts the eye. The motto ("as I can"), though literary in origin, is associated normally with Jan van Eyck. It is read as the artist's disclaimer and, therefore, proof of his exceptional skill. The Salzburg picture is not by one of van Eyck's wandering followers. Rather as Antje-Fee Köllermann and earlier scholars have shown, the author is Conrad Laib, a Swabian painter whose career
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallConrad Laib: Ein spätgotischer Maler aus Schwaben in Salzburg (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USConrad Laib: Ein spätgotischer Maler aus Schwaben in Salzburg (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62442026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255907
<p></p>
In April 2003 Walter Melion and Reindert Falkenburg organized Emory University's first Lovis Corinth Colloquium. The fifteen stimulating essays of the present volume are the polished products of this gathering. The impact of art on mind and spirit has been a popular subject for the past couple of decades. David Freedberg's The Power of Images (1989) foregrounded prevailing research on the relationship between images and imagination. The role of art in helping to define the religious self has been the subject of much of Falkenburg and Melion's personal research.Melion's lengthy introduction ("Meditative Images and the Psychology of Soul" ) nicely sets out the thesis and themes of the colloquium. He wants the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallImage and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USImage and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®74352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255908
<p></p>
Lyle Massey rejects the conventional assumption that Renaissance perspective produced a centralized, disembodied viewpoint and a subject position analogous to the Cartesian mind's eye. Building upon Jurgis Baltrusaitis's 1955 study of anamorphic perspective and Hubert Damisch's 1987 study of the origins of perspective, Massey argues that the history of perspective from its earliest employment until Lacan's anamorphic explication of the Gaze as radically split, demonstrates a fundamental, paradoxical contradiction between embodied viewpoint and representational field.On the basis of close readings of key texts by Alberti, Descartes, Panofsky, Damisch, Foucault, De Certeau, Nicolas of Cusa, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPicturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPicturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255909
<p></p>
I first learned about art history in Paul Arnold's Introduction to Design class at Oberlin College almost a half century ago. A history major, I quickly decided that art offered me a more immediate entrée into the past than had political documents. It turned out that I was good at "analyzing" works in "compare and contrast" essays and at identifying "unknowns," and I could write a quick paragraph summarizing "historical content" that pleased my professors. On this rather thin basis, I decided to go to graduate school in art history.Now, decades later, I seem to have survived the battles that raged in the discipline. At times I felt caught in the crossfire, or even that I was the target. These were difficult and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255910
<p></p>
Studies of post-medieval chant sources are still relatively few in number, but a great deal can be learned about the process of chant transmission and performance practice from these neglected sources. In the case of the manuscript at the heart of Lorenzo Candelaria's The Rosary Cantoral, some fascinating contextual issues that extend beyond purely musical considerations are revealed through the extraordinary diligence of the author. The subject of the study, Beinecke Library, Ms. 710, is a huge (96 x 62 cm) and elaborately decorated chant choirbook, or libro de cantoral, that preserves twenty-two troped parts of the Mass Ordinary and two fragments of Renaissance polyphony, including the "Et incarnatus est" of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62882026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Music in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255911
<p></p>
This is a pioneering work in the study of early Welsh music. One of its great achievements is responding to the widely held assumptions by musicologists working outside Wales that there is insufficient material to make serious study possible, and that what does survive pales in significance in comparison with that of other music cultures. It is true that much of Welsh music culture was passed on orally for a very long time, even down to the eighteenth century, but there is nonetheless a great deal of information about early Welsh music preserved in archival data of an astonishing variety, all of which is meticulously scrutinized by Dr. Harper. In addition, there is abundant reference in medieval and later Welsh
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMusic in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMusic in Welsh Culture before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Prosdocimo de' Beldomandi's Plana musica and Musica speculativa (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255912
<p></p>
Prosdocimo de' Beldomandi (d. 1428) was a professor of arts and medicine at the University of Padua who wrote treatises on all of the subjects in the traditional quadrivium. His eight writings on music cover both practical and speculative aspects of the field. The two works in the present edition deal with different topics, but both are responses to the influential Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua (1317-18), which covers plainchant from a combination of practical and speculative points of view. Prosdocimo objects to the inclusion of both of these perspectives in a single work. His Plana musica, which has not been published previously, discusses the medieval pitch system and the theory of mode. His Musica
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallProsdocimo de' Beldomandi's Plana musica and Musica speculativa (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USProsdocimo de' Beldomandi's Plana musica and Musica speculativa (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Scepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus; With a Facing Text of Pico's Quotations from Sextus (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255913
<p></p>
Gian Mario Cao's book insists on a strict definition of skepticism in order to distinguish it from other, related ways of thinking. He argues that the only means of obtaining a proper historical account of the subject consists in keeping a firm grasp of the main tenets of ancient skepticism —namely, isostheneia (equipollence or equal strength of contrasting arguments), epoché (suspension of judgement), and ataraxia (tranquillity) —as terms of comparison. Adopting these rigid criteria enables Cao to trace modern skepticism back to the ancient sources of skeptical thought. In the case of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533), this approach serves to challenge the thesis that one can correctly assign the term
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallScepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus; With a Facing Text of Pico's Quotations from Sextus (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USScepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus; With a Facing Text of Pico's Quotations from Sextus (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®79842026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Favole, metafore, storie: Seminario su Giordano Bruno (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255914
<p></p>
This large collection of essays originates from a seminar on Giordano Bruno's Spaccio della bestia trionfante (Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, London 1584) held at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2005-06. Introduced by M. Ciliberto, the volume is divided in three parts: the first one hosts contributions dealing directly with the topics of Bruno's Spaccio; the second one focuses on sources and concepts of Bruno's philosophy, including other works, such as the Cena de le ceneri (Ash Wednesday Supper) and the Eroici furori (Heroic Frenzies); the third and shortest one counts as a coda on philosophical historiography of Bruno and it presents contributions on Bayle, Hegel, and Giovanni Gentile. In the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallFavole, metafore, storie: Seminario su Giordano Bruno (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USFavole, metafore, storie: Seminario su Giordano Bruno (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®69552026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Sub specie hominis: Études sur le savior humain au XVIe siècle (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255915
<p></p>
Marie-Dominique Couzinet's Sub specie hominis is a challenging book on ways of human knowing through God, nature, occult arts, and history, with discussions of various works of leading sixteenth-century "humanist philosophers." The book is composed of fourteen chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. All the chapters have been published in various journals that Couzinet cites in her introduction.This book is divided into two parts, "Nature et arts" and "L'Histoire entre théorie et pratique." Each of these parts is divided into two sections: "Art naturel, art humain" and "Art humain, art divin," for part 1, and "Histoire pratique: L'Imitation " and "Histoire et théorie: La mémoire, " for part 2.Part 1
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSub specie hominis: Études sur le savior humain au XVIe siècle (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSub specie hominis: Études sur le savior humain au XVIe siècle (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255916
<p></p>
Tara Nummedal's Alchemy and Authority provides a reassessment of early modern alchemy and the figure of the alchemist. Her work joins a growing body of scholarship that has labored to extract alchemy from a problematic, Jungian-inspired historiography. Many histories of alchemy have portrayed it as a spiritual, occult activity. Alchemical transmutation was more about perfecting the human soul than about chemical reactions. Recently, historians of science such as Bruce Moran, William Newman, Lawrence Principe, and Pamela Smith have helped to relocate early modern alchemy back into concrete political contexts and laboratory practices. Although Nummedal draws consistently on these scholars' works, her Alchemy and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAlchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAlchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567-1625) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255918
<p></p>
Didier Kahn's magisterial study of Paracelsianism and alchemy at the turning point of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflects the rigorous scholarly standards emerging as the historiography of "chymistry" takes on new life. After being marginalized for generations in mainstream studies of the Scientific Revolution, alchemy is now being taken very seriously by historians of early modern science. Kahn brings a philological expertise and mastery of detail to the subject that distinguish his work from many earlier attempts, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, to describe the influence of and reaction to that bugbear of the early modern medical establishment, Paracelsus. The result is a tour de force, and yet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAlchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567-1625) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAlchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567-1625) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®71602026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255919
<p></p>
In Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, Stanton J. Linden has collected together sixteen essays exploring the varied and reciprocal exchanges between alchemical thought and the wider culture of the Renaissance. He takes the fortieth anniversary, in 2004, of Frances Yates's groundbreaking Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition as an appropriate "point of departure" for his collection, which he sees —rightly —as exemplifying the strides we have made in our collective understanding of the alchemical and hermetic traditions.The essays are strikingly interdisciplinary, and have been divided into five main sections. The first presents biographies of three English alchemists — Thomas
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24All'origine della scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e l'Accademia dei Lincei (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255920
<p></p>
Prince Federigo Cesi's Accademia dei Lincei is a revered icon of early modern science. In textbooks, it is the earliest scientific society (1603). Dedicated to testing knowledge experimentally, the Lyncean Academy boasted among its members Galileo Galilei and Giambattista della Porta. To readers familiar only with this sketch, this book offers a salutary shock by providing the contextual frame without which one cannot assess the significance of the Lyncean Academy. Thanks to its generous notes, this fascinating collection of 400th anniversary articles both contributes, and offers access, to the mushrooming scholarship on the academy. Not least, the volume also sheds an unexpected light on the social, cultural, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAll'origine della scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e l'Accademia dei Lincei (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAll'origine della scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e l'Accademia dei Lincei (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®69292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Bernhard Varenius (1622-1650) (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255921
<p></p>
The North German Bernhard Varenius, great-grandson of David Chrytaeus and student of Joachim Jungius, comes to us bearing the problem of geography's foundation and recognition as a distinct discipline. The present volume is largely the product of a symposium held at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, enlarged and edited with the commendable intent of providing an expanded context for the subject. In the brief period of Varenius's residence in Amsterdam, 1646 to 1650, the Dutch achieved formal political independence, effectively exercised a global commercial outreach, and advanced a free intellectual openness that manifested itself in a highly developed printing industry and the presence of the French
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBernhard Varenius (1622-1650) (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBernhard Varenius (1622-1650) (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®78932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255922
<p></p>
In the three centuries after Columbus, imperial aims motivated most of the countless voyages that linked Europeans, Africans, Creoles, and Native Americans. Scientists followed close behind the military and merchants. The thirteen contributors to James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew's volume look past the familiar narratives of heroic scientific discovery and exploration in search of other kinds of connections between science and empire. How did science, medicine, and technology serve—or undermine—the purposes of traders and colonial administrators? Who did the research, and who paid for it? What scientific information and ideas emerged from these transactions? Whose knowledge carried the most weight, who was allowed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallScience and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USScience and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72572026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255923
<p></p>
Those interested in the history of sexuality, theories about this history, early modern European scientific discourses, and perhaps the politics of identity as related to sexuality, will value this volume of well-focused and erudite essays. Those well versed in recent historiographical and theoretical debates about, specifically, the history of homosexuality in the West will find here a collection of well-researched and carefully argued essays that engage often overlooked scientific literatures in a fruitful attempt to render the complexity and range of early modern cultural perspectives and attitudes about same-sexual relations. For others, perhaps more generally curious, Kenneth Borris's introduction is alone
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®79382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255924
<p></p>
The role of affect, of the emotions, of emotional attachment and detachment, is not well understood in histories of medicine, anatomy, and science, or in broader histories of Western culture. On the latter, Barbara Rosenwein has recently provided some explanations for the oversight, highlighting the influence of Huizinga's depiction of the childlike emotional life of the Middle Ages and of Elias's characterization of emotions as irrational, primitive, and in need of regulation (or a civilizing process) (Review Essay, AHR 107 [2002], 821-45). Histories of medicine tend to treat emotions as they appear in anecdotes of patients' experiences, and histories of anatomy locate affect in the ghoulish episodes of grave
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWith Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWith Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66762026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255925
<p></p>
In an entry on the lodestone in his chapbook Cornucopiae, or Divers Secrets (1596), the London apothecary Thomas Johnson writes that, just as the lodestone imparts its magnetic force to iron that is rubbed on it, "in like manner the smock or other apparel of a strumpet being worn of others, giveth a certain impudencie and shameless boldness to those parties." For the same reason, women are warned against looking into a whore's mirror, lest it make them "not only impudent bold but also the more prompt to further offending."Such were the sort of "natural secrets" that were served up in abundance to sixteenth-century English and European readers by printers and compilers of the hugely popular "books of secrets."
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBooks of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBooks of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65052026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255926
<p></p>
William Sherman made his academic debut in 1995 with an innovative monograph on the Elizabethan scholar and "conjuror," Doctor John Dee, The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. This book tried to map the intellectual horizon as well as the scope of ambition and self-fashioning of the doctor, in Sherman's interpretation the central figure of the so-called Elizabethan "think tank." The research was primarily based on John Dee's magnificent library, his use of books not only as repositories of knowledge but also as means of connections and politics.Thirteen years later Sherman himself pinpoints the genesis of his new monograph, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, in his earlier
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallUsed Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USUsed Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68632026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Life and Career of William Paulet (c. 1475-1572): Lord Treasurer and First Marquis of Winchester (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255927
<p></p>
Biographical subjects often provoke passionate responses among contemporaries and modern readers, and shaped history. Instead, William Paulet, an "elusive" quarry avoided serious trouble and tried, as we might say, to get along (171). The man may not have been well-liked, but "he never inspired the kind of hatred which helped to destroy [Cardinal] Wolsey, [Thomas] Cromwell, Anne Boleyn or Edward Seymour" (176). Paulet was a "civil servant; politically a part of the furniture" (176). People caught up in explosive events inspire competing biographies, while the Nicodemites of the political and religious worlds pass quietly through our historical narratives. David Loades gives us a man repeatedly "glimpsed" (41) on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Life and Career of William Paulet (c. 1475-1572): Lord Treasurer and First Marquis of Winchester (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Life and Career of William Paulet (c. 1475-1572): Lord Treasurer and First Marquis of Winchester (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255928
<p></p>
In telling the story of the 1549 rebellions, Andy Wood utilizes an event that is oftentimes neglected in the already full and rich narrative of the Tudor period to address issues related to class, religion, and speech. Wood states at the outset that his book "aims to dispel the notion that 'the masses of the Tudor period' were 'inarticulate'" (xiii). Although Wood in no way romanticizes the 1549 rebellions, he points out that the defamation of the name of leader Robert Kett in the years subsequent to the event occurred in part as an attempt to restore order within society and brand the rebellions as traitorous acts of the lower class. The author stresses that local politics, court politics, and religion were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®58462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God's Will in Tudor England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255929
<p></p>
Daniel Eppley offers an in-depth examination of the various defenses for royal supremacy in Tudor England in light of the overwhelming drive to establish not only orthodoxy, but also order, unity, and accord among English Christians. His book focuses on two "ideologists" (2): Christopher St. German, a legal writer and barrister of the Middle Temple writing in the 1530s, and Richard Hooker, a theologian of the Elizabethan period who wrote Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.The threads that run throughout Eppley's discussion question the justification for legitimate disobedience to worldly authorities, when an individual Christian's prior obedience is to God; the locus of hermeneutical authority; and the nature of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDefending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God's Will in Tudor England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDefending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God's Will in Tudor England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68982026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255930
<p></p>
This title might seem to promise a sweeping anthropological study of the economical, social, moral, and aesthetic context of writing as literature during the time of Elizabeth I, a manic mosquito's-eye view of the full-blooded body of cultural data. The book is less and more. These essays zoom in on writing in the literal sense of Elizabethan handwriting, and how rich that corpus is.Incomplete evidence, absent or unreliable dating, difficulty of access, disparity between copies, and partial illegibility of Elizabeth's hand at its most gnarled or Lord Burghley's multilayered afterthoughts on the order for execution of Mary Queen of Scots (182), challenged these admirably tenacious researchers. Their comprehensive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallElizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USElizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63302026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255931
<p></p>
Sharon Jansen is a historian who has published a number of fine books, including Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII and, of particular interest to this review, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, a book that examined the strong women who ruled in a variety of fashions, as regnant or regent. She begins her current book, Debating Women, describing being in the British Library in 1996 doing research on her Monstrous Regiment book. For background she read widely on the debate about nature and ability in the early modern period. More than a decade later, as Hillary Clinton began her run for the presidency and people today
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallDebating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USDebating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24William Camden: A Life in Context (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255932
<p></p>
William Camden (1551-1623) was an English scholar of formidable attainments and enormous influence. His Britannia, first published in 1586, affected how generations of subsequent British writers examined their country. His Annales of Elizabeth I's rule established what were to be seen as the central issues of that queen's reign for centuries, and, at least in the hands of his translators, laid the foundations for the legend of Good Queen Bess. Camden also edited various medieval historical documents, and wrote a Greek grammar, a guide to funerary monuments in Westminster abbey, and many letters and poems. In a 1948 article on Camden, Sir Maurice Powicke determined that "A great book might be written about Camden
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWilliam Camden: A Life in Context (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWilliam Camden: A Life in Context (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255933
<p></p>
"We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left," Pierre Nora once wrote in his seminal Realms of Memory, which ushered in a wealth of scholarship that studied how societies remember when the past no longer belongs, in quite so living a form, to them. The work of James Young, Jay Winter, and others has contributed greatly to an understanding of monuments as one form of memorialization in the twentieth century, but the centrality of memory and commemoration has also entered into the historiography of other periods, even if memory was construed in an entirely different form. Peter Sherlock's Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England represents a further contribution to this literature, as it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMonuments and Memory in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMonuments and Memory in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®80702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255934
<p></p>
In 1570 the pope excommunicated Elizabeth I. This is the starting point for Stefania Tutino's study of Catholic thought and identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. With the excommunication, the Elizabethan settlement could no longer function as intended and the English government had to reassess its approach to Catholics while English Catholics had to ask themselves some difficult questions. Was outright opposition to Elizabeth now required or were there ways to remain both loyal and Catholic? As Tutino illustrates, there was no single answer to such questions, but rather a fluid and evolving diversity of answers that were shaped not only by the shifting realities of Protestant England and the Roman Church
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLaw and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLaw and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255935
<p></p>
Despite the numerous writings about Oliver Cromwell and about Parliament in the seventeenth century, the Parliaments of the protectorate have received little scholarly attention. The present volume effectively fills this gap. Its authors are Patrick Little, a senior research fellow at the History of Parliament Trust in London, and David L. Smith, fellow and director of studies in history at Selwyn College, Cambridge. After planning the book together they divided up its chapters, each author writing half of them. They also collaborated on the research, which was extensive, including numerous manuscript sources in Scotland and Ireland as well as England and rare early printed materials. They are in close agreement
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallParliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USParliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63982026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24"Gold Tried in the Fire": The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255936
<p></p>
This book is a treasure house of information for the study of the English Revolution in general and of the strange career of TheaurauJohn Tany, the self-styled "prophet" who saw himself as the High Priest and King of the Jews. Hessayon's book treats all known aspects of Tany's writings and life with a plethora of detail gleaned from a great many different sources. The author does his best "to establish some kind of certainty about minute details so as to speak with authority about the bigger picture" (18). This includes accounts of Tany's family history, the known facts about his life and works, and a great many up-to-date summaries of recent scholarship about the intellectual, cultural, and historical milieu in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmall"Gold Tried in the Fire": The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-US"Gold Tried in the Fire": The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®76572026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Ireland in the Renaissance, c. 1540-1660 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255937
<p></p>
Ireland and the Renaissance have not always sat together so easily in the historiography. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars claimed that the Renaissance, perceived harbinger of the modern world, had failed to corrupt the shores of the pristine Gael. Whereas England had succumbed to the imperial might of Rome and, later, to the cultural imperialism of Florence and Venice, Ireland remained in an untarnished state of essentialized Irishness. It was an island of saints and scholars: Catholic, indeed, but otherwise untouched by Italian influence.Recently the trend has been to place Ireland more into the orbit of Continental Europe, and thus to reconsider its place in the Renaissance.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallIreland in the Renaissance, c. 1540-1660 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USIreland in the Renaissance, c. 1540-1660 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63852026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Spenser's Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255938
<p></p>
Spenser's Ireland was a cruel world in an iron century, revealing a darker side of the earthiness and spontaneity that many find attractive in Elizabethan culture. When I first studied Spenser, in 1964, no one would have said that every book of The Faerie Queene was focused "in some regard" on Ireland (2); today that's at least arguable. Back then a job-searching friend, a Belfast Catholic, was told that his dissertation on Spenser and Ireland could not reveal anything new. Thomas Herron's Spenser's Irish Work, seething with footnotes on Canny, Hadfield, McCabe, Maley, and others, now enters a crowded field on the subject, arguing for the omnipresence of the colonial within the literary project. Herron can read
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSpenser's Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSpenser's Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64872026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255939
<p></p>
This rigorously evidentiary and theoretically informed study of "black lives" in the British Isles from the turn of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth century focuses on those persons, most of African descent, written out of the history of early modern England prior to its official monopoly over the transatlantic slave trade. This erasure has occurred, Habib argues, because narrowly positivist, even persistently colonialist, methodologies have failed to acknowledge the imprints of these lives in the archives or to recognize their voices in its inscriptions. His sources include lists of royal expenditures, private household accounts, parish records, tax rolls, travel narratives, philosophical treatises
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBlack Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBlack Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Locating Privacy in Tudor London (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255940
<p></p>
The title Locating Privacy in Tudor London, like everything within Lena Orlin's imaginatively planned and lucidly executed history, is significant, indicating the spatial, temporal, and otherwise material grounding of her subject. By location, Orlin means material culture, especially architecture and household ob-jects, and institutional archives of all sorts, especially written records from churches, courts, charities, and livery companies. By personal privacy, she understands "interiority, atomization, spatial control, intimacy, urban anonymity, secrecy, withholding, solitude" (1). She is more than willing to speculate about the grounded silences and manifest absences in a painting of her focal subject Alice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLocating Privacy in Tudor London (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLocating Privacy in Tudor London (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®70682026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255941
<p></p>
Jennifer Vaught presents a finely-researched study of masculinity and emotion in early modern England, one that she places in context of current critical debates while clarifying particular areas that she builds on and expands. Whereas previous studies have focused on grief or ways in which excessive mourning reinforces reductive views of female identity (i.e., women as "leaky vessels"), Vaught concentrates on a variety of powerful male emotions (sadness, despair, joy) that correlate with a shift in values from a warrior culture to a culture that encourages virtue through feeling and intellectual enhancement, the self-fashioning of the courtier as well the man of sensibility. Vaught identifies her study as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMasculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMasculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72482026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255942
<p></p>
Catherine Bates's book is a theoretically nuanced and engaging study that takes as its focal point the pervasive early modern trope, in male-authored poetry, of the male lover or poet who is portrayed not as ultimately masterful and invincible, but rather as defeated and abandoned. Renaissance lyric poetry is replete with male figures who are obsessed with their own sense of suffering, failure, and powerlessness, an obsession expressed in the voice of feminine abjection. Bates approaches the lyric tradition through the lens of psychoanalytic and feminist theories of subjectivity, deftly arguing that through a systematically "gendered discontent" the poems counter the early modern ideal of "a phallic, masterly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMasculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMasculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®84662026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255943
<p></p>
This broad study of story-telling and gender is an exciting contribution to the discussion of the cross-fertilization of oral and literary creative expressions. Complementary to Adam Foxe's groundbreaking work in this field, the focus of inquiry in Lamb and Bamford's collection is cognitive, rather than genealogical. The authors are less interested in recovering oral narratives or exploring their transformations in and out of literate culture; rather, they explore the cultural meanings that the early moderns associated with the oral imaginary. What sense did fictional and historical audiences make of the oral medium of narrative transmission? How did this medium affect emotional memory? What was the relationship
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallOral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USOral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62912026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255944
<p></p>
While this volume does not provide the broad overview the title suggests, it presents three strong clusters of essays on the writings and activism of seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Quaker Englishwomen, the influence of mysticism on three late seventeenth-century women writers, and the writings and activism of two women dedicated to restoring early seventeenth-century England to Catholicism. The overwhelming emphasis in the collection is on the activism and writing of Englishwomen: only three of the collection's twelve essays address the work and lives of women from the Continent (although even one of these women spends her active adult years in England). Adding to the lopsided quality of the volume is the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWomen, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWomen, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63662026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255945
<p></p>
Catharine Gray takes up a range of genres and topics in her analysis of seventeenth-century women's written engagement in public debate. Opening with Dorothy Leigh's 1616 advice book The Mothers Blessing, Gray goes on to consider, in turn, the mediated writing of mid-century radical prophet Sarah Wight, the verse of Royalist Katherine Philips, and the poetry of American Puritan Anne Bradstreet; the book concludes with a brief discussion of Quaker preachers Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers's 1663 account of their imprisonment in Malta. Gray's aim in treating such diverse authors is to confirm women's active role in an emerging "counterpublic" (Nancy Fraser's term, invoked over against a Habermassian definition of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWomen Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWomen Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61672026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255946
<p></p>
The expanding critical interest in reassessing England's relationship with the Islamic world in the early modern period must begin, reasons Bernadette Andrea, with acknowledgment and scrutiny of the literary productions by women that record encounters, actual and imagined, with Ottoman culture. Doing so both corrects misrepresentations (of women Eastern and Western, and of those encounters) culturally-inculcated by male-authored narratives, and counters the tendency in postcolonial analysis to anticipate the development of England's imperialist enterprise when discussing the nation's interaction with the Mughal and Ottoman empires prior to the eighteenth century. Recognizing that scholars have often examined the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallWomen and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USWomen and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255947
<p></p>
A momentous change occurred in early modern Western Europe, beyond the well-studied history of the birth and development of nation-states: people began to see themselves as Europeans rather than Christians, as they had during the Middle Ages. This book tells and analyzes the fascinating story of this transformation. It participates in several important trends in recent work on early modern Europe: by studying the ways in which this transformation is linked to the representations of Islam, it contributes to the postcolonial revision of our understanding of the Renaissance. By focusing on the issue of identity beyond the nation (in this case the English nation), it participates in the timely work on transnational
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallIslam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USIslam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®62222026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255948
<p></p>
In the century and a half after 1550, England experienced a variety of economic and cultural changes in the wake of its expanding international trade. This period saw developments as diverse as joint stock companies, advanced map-making techniques, and the creation of maritime insurance to protect investors. But, as this volume makes clear, the changes in the period were more broadly cultural than technological. Building on recent work exploring the place of England within developing systems of global exchange, Global Traffic illuminates the myriad ways that trade became increasingly central not just to the economy but to the changing self-imagination of the English nation. In its varied explorations of travel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallGlobal Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USGlobal Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®75002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255949
<p></p>
In this monograph, as in the recent essay collection he edited (Caxton's Trace:: Studies in the History of English Printing, 2006), William Kuskin aims, laudably, to refocus critical attention on the history of texts and text-making in the underloved English fifteenth century. The incunable period should be understood, Kuskin argues, not merely as a transitional or introductory phase, but as central to larger patterns in book history: not as "the beginning of a linear movement toward print culture" but as "part of an enduring culture of the vernacular book" (18). Taking as his primary material the output of Caxton's printshop, from the middle 1470s to the early 1490s —a catalog that includes Chaucer, Boethius
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallSymbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USSymbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66562026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255950
<p></p>
This volume is an in-depth exploration of the Carthusian Miscellany (British Library MS Additional 37049), a fifteenth-century English manuscript of texts and drawings known to medieval scholars mainly through its facsimile produced by James Hogg in 1981. Unique in style, the Additional manuscript presents many conundrums concerning its making and early provenance, along with difficulties of interpretation. Initially, this reviewer hoped for a subtle reading of linked texts and pictures in the style of the great Avril Henry, who clarified the complex text and image relationships of the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in her editions of the 1980s, but this did not quite turn out to be the case.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallReading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USReading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67802026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255951
<p></p>
Timothy Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England is an ambitious, innovative, and rewarding study of the liturgical underpinnings of English literary and national culture in the early modern era. It convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the influential (and, among literary critics, understudied) Book of Common Prayer to an emerging national culture. If the English vernacular Bible, which first appeared in print in 1526, legitimized the individual's encounter with the sacred text, the Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549, allowed the government to control individual participation within public worship. Rosendale's book argues that this liturgical synthesis between
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLiturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLiturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®75202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255952
<p></p>
Ellinghausen's book focuses on a category of writers she calls "laboring authors," writers who highlight their social position as workers, often both as authors and also in another trade. This study first took shape as a dissertation under the direction of Richard Helgerson and Patricia Fumerton at the University of California at Santa Barbara. One could perhaps see it as a response to Helgerson's epochal Self-Crowned Laureates, in that it traces an alternative path to the role of professional author, one that renounces the self-conscious emulation of great national poets. Instead, many of the authors that Ellinghausen examines adopt the humble persona of the hardworking author who writes for profit; she argues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallLabor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USLabor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667 (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255953
<p></p>
Naomi Conn Liebler's collection of essays on the study of early modern prose fiction in English is not quite as "new" as its editor suggests, yet the authors do provide some novel insights into rereading these important texts. The collection is uneven, though many of the essays offer solid scholarship, rhetorically engaging criticism, and revelations about previously overlooked texts. The list of contributors includes many of the usual suspects in the study of prose narrative of the period, which could provide a useful reader for advanced students.Liebler opens the collection with a revolutionary take on the impact of prose fiction on the early modern English reading public. She points out that a new kind of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallEarly Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USEarly Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255954
<p></p>
Thomas Rist's Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England offers a focused reevaluation of English revenge tragedy in light of Reformation challenges to traditional observances for the dead. Well versed in recent scholarship on the complexity of religious change in early modern England, Rist demonstrates the centrality of commemorative ritual in shaping the concerns of revenge tragedy as well as the genre's unique ability to dramatize contemporary controversies surrounding that ritual. In so doing he contests standard critical assumptions about the genre's Protestant bias (according to which heroic, Reform-minded revengers triumph over Catholic villains).Such a realignment is salutary, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRevenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRevenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®73552026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24A Politics of the Scene (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255955
<p></p>
The brilliance and originality of this book consists specifically in its radical recasting of the metaphorical, figural uses of "theater" and "drama." The theatrum mundi trope, with which Kottman begins the book as he addresses Jacques's famous "All the world's a stage" speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, carries far less weight in contemporary visual and digital culture than it did from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. But in a careful, convincing, and radically humanistic manner, following Hannah Arendt and Adriana Caverero, Kottman resuscitates the metaphor by repoliticizing it.In the first half of the book, Kottman shows how the political theories of Plato and Hobbes depend on the figural use of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallA Politics of the Scene (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USA Politics of the Scene (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67552026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255956
<p></p>
"No issue was more central to the dissemination of natural philosophy as a mode of inquiry," write Juliet Cummins and David Burchell in their introduction, "than the relationship between words and things" (1). This interplay between natural philosophy and rhetoric —and, specifically, the "problem of establishing 'certain' knowledge in linguistic terms" —the editors state, "is the territory upon which the current collection stakes its claim to originality" (1-2). While readers may desire a more cohesive sense of where the nine essays that follow leave us at the end, this volume nonetheless succeeds in assembling wide-ranging and frequently provocative studies that, individually and collectively, mark a welcome
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallScience, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USScience, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®72632026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255957
<p></p>
Jonathan Sawday's Engines of the Imagination attempts to document an "imaginative history" (xv), a transactional relationship between texts of many kinds (poems, plays, paintings, treatises, engineering documents, machine books, etc.) and an important if neglected aspect of European cultural history between 1450 and 1700: the development, invention, and creative embellishment within that time-frame and geographical scope of machines and mechanical devices. As befits its subject, the study is workmanlike. Organized for the most part around thematic topics (e.g., nature vs. artifice or gendered perceptions of machine usage) and types of machines (e.g., clocks, the printing press, water pumps, the spinning wheel)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallEngines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USEngines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67432026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255958
<p></p>
This book is for neither the faint of heart nor the dabbler. Angus Fletcher has distilled a vast number of early modern English texts and subsequent criticism into a complex and compelling argument about the intersections of "time, space, and motion," as of course clearly referenced in the title. The second part of the title, "the Age of Shakespeare," however, must be understood carefully to mark an ample era rather than to indicate the flourishing years of the authorial namesake. Through clear prose and with few (but important) endnotes, the introductory and eight primary chapters chronicle the changing representations and stakes of time, space, and motion in such influential works as Galileo's Sidereal Messenger
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallTime, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USTime, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®61422026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255959
<p></p>
Hamlet's gratuitous observation to Horatio in the graveyard scene about "Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay" is but one place in the vast Shakespearean canon where the poet-playwright can be seen to be taking up the discourse of governance and warning against the growing political dangers posed by the caesaro-papist aspirations of English and Continental monarchs. Hopkin's book views Shakespeare as deeply engaged with this profoundest of early modern British political problems regarding the power and body of the monarch as well as highly conscious of the traditions and limits of literary representation and genre. This double concern leads Shakespeare to design his works as interventions in, as well as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®75552026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24"Think on my Words": Exploring Shakespeare's Language (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255960
<p></p>
David Crystal represents "Think on My Words": Exploring Shakespeare's Language as using a "nuts-and-bolts" approach to Shakespeare's language (ix) that asks of each linguistic feature: "What does it do?" This simple question has, in turn, two parts: How does a particular linguistic feature "help us understand the meaning of what is said," which involves a "semantic" approach; and "how does it help us appreciate the dramatic or poetic effect of what is said," a "pragmatic" approach (ix). Chapter 1 sets the scene by dispelling a number of myths about Shakespeare's language —for instance, the notion that Shakespeare's vocabulary was prestigiously large. Crystal not only shows that a contemporary American uses 50,000
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmall"Think on my Words": Exploring Shakespeare's Language (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-US"Think on my Words": Exploring Shakespeare's Language (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68272026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255961
<p></p>
"The attribution of a late phase and a late style," Gordon McMullan writes, "is a way to distinguish a certain elite of artists from the merely productive, to provide a way to make key individuals stand apart from others" (248). For him, the understanding of periods in Shakespeare's development and style can be traced back to Edward Dowden's Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), prompted by F. J. Furnivall, who had recently formed the Shakspere Society and felt a biography could transform the study of Shakespeare.Dowden established four periods in the playwright's life, the last characterized by "a certain abandonment of the common joy of the word, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255974">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallShakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USShakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64112026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255962
<p></p>
Lorna Hutson ascribes the growing sophistication of late sixteenth-century drama in England to the growth of "evidential awareness" (45) in an increasingly wider segment of the English population. Any familiarity with medieval legal records will show that criminal investigations were detailed and thorough, but the gathering and analysis of facts at the time was the province of a few. Hutson's point is that in the period under study, jurors were more and more being called upon by the criminal justice system to weigh facts and to draw inferences from them; and in fact they were better trained to decode rhetorical devices used by litigants and accused persons alike to create a sense of verisimilitude. As a result
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallThe Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®74392026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Shakespeare and the Nobility: The Negotiation of Lineage (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255963
<p></p>
Given the importance the privileged classes of Shakespeare's world placed on lineage, it would be understandable if they were anxious about a common play-wright appropriating their ancestors' lives as a source of popular entertainment. Furthermore, given the power and touchiness of early modern aristocrats, it would be understandable if a playwright of the era avoided depicting patricians' progenitors. Shakespeare, however, chose to depict the ancestors of a considerable number of Elizabethan aristocrats, often unflatteringly, but the only evidence we have that he got into any trouble doing so concerns the Oldcastle-Falstaff episode. Catherine Grace Canino attempts to explain this paradox in Shakespeare and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallShakespeare and the Nobility: The Negotiation of Lineage (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USShakespeare and the Nobility: The Negotiation of Lineage (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64182026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Shakespeare, Love and Service (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255964
<p></p>
Master/servant relationships represented a fundamental part of everyday life for people of all classes in early modern England. While this is hardly news to most scholars, literary critics have only recently begun to seriously examine service with respect to the period's drama. The late 1990s witnessed Mark Thornton Burnett's Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture, which treats popular literature and the non-Shakespearean canon; it was not until 2005 that critics such as Michael Neill, Linda Anderson, Judith Weil, and David Evett oriented the topic toward Shakespeare. Schalkwyk's study contributes to this conversation by introducing love —in all its maddening abstraction —as a concept
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallShakespeare, Love and Service (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USShakespeare, Love and Service (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Shakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255965
<p></p>
Despite the richness of the theatrical context and the range of critical views provided in this book, David Mann's argument about female characters and their enactment on the early modern stage seems oddly constructed. He begins by stating his intent for the book: it is "about the original performers of Shakespeare's female roles and how they, and the possibilities and limitations of the representational tradition in which they worked, may have influenced conception" (1). Then having critiqued modern feminist approaches, he maintains, "it becomes very questionable whether an all-male company would favor a sympathetic feminist heroine" (11). The implication from the start is that Shakespeare had "scant concern" (22)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallShakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USShakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®74332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255966
<p></p>
This book offers a profound consideration of the theological conundrum expressed in The Merchant of Venice that "the Jew is not the stranger outside Christianity but the original stranger within it" (3). In the play, this anxiety is activated by conversion, which dissolves distinctions between Christian and Jew, but also registers in what Adelman sees as Christianity's guilt at disavowing and displacing Judaism. Chapter 1 examines contemporary views of London conversos and aliens, parsing these categories in Sir Thomas More, Three Ladies of London, and John Foxe's Sermon preached at the Christening of a Certaine Iew. Conversos trouble categories of religious identity because of suspicions that they remain
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallBlood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USBlood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68522026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24George Gascoigne (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255967
<p></p>
Gillian Austen's new study of the work of George Gascoigne is the first monograph to appear on this Tudor courtier, poet, and soldier since C. T. Prouty's 1942 biography. In it, Austen pursues a number of parallel projects: the first is a detailed discussion of each of Gascoigne's literary works, with the secondary aim of making an argument for the importance of this relatively neglected figure. Certainly Gascoigne's numerous literary innovations, his influence on his contemporaries and his high reputation for a generation or more after his death all argue for this renewed attention, and Austen's enthusiasm for her subject matter is both commendable and persuasive. A third aim, consistently returned to throughout
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallGeorge Gascoigne (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USGeorge Gascoigne (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®67992026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255968
<p></p>
In her introduction to this new collection of essays deriving primarily from the Fifth International Marlowe Conference in 2003, Sara Munson Deats declares that it marks a movement away from the biographical scholarship that "has tended to steal the spotlight" in the past two decades towards a renewed focus on text and performance (2). While there were certainly many excellent examples of this focus in late twentieth-century Marlowe criticism, one sympathizes with the difficulties the editors must have experienced trying to find a unifying thread among their chapters. Other than a recurring interest in Faustus (acknowledged in both the cover illustration and the introduction) and secondarily in The Jew of Malta
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallPlacing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USPlacing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®68582026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255969
<p></p>
In both life and reputation Alexander Montgomerie mirrors all too closely the poetic fascination with the figures of Icarus and Phaethon demonstrated in Roderick J. Lyall's splendid new "cultural biography." In the early 1580s, Montgomerie, royally connected and probably even then Catholic, was styled by James VI "maister poete," a principal in the monarch-led poetic coterie known to posterity as the Castalian Band (the term derives from James's epitaph on the poet). His return in 1588 from campaigning in the Low Countries, however, saw him clearly out of favor, caught in a long and ultimately fruitless lawsuit over a pension drawn from a royal grant of cathedral revenues. He died in 1598 an outlaw, implicated in a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallAlexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USAlexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®64202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255970
<p></p>
Charles Cathcart's study of the intense rivalry between John Marston and Ben Jonson that became known as the Poet's War expands the scope of the two satirists' feud by identifying other texts that may have played a role in their mutual provocation. These texts —John Weever's epigram praising both writers in 1599, the "Vatum Chorus" verses appended to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr in 1601, among others —have been considered peripheral to the quarrel or overlooked altogether. Weever's epigram is, as poetry, undistinguished, but it is significant because it links Marston and Jonson's names together for the first time in print and compares their reputations early in their careers. Marston is praised as a Horatian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMarston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMarston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®60032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24John Donne: Body and Soul (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255971
<p></p>
The unifying preoccupation of all John Donne's writings, according to Brandeis University English professor Ramie Targoff, is his obsession with the mysterious relationship between his soul and body. As both poet and preacher, Donne urgently pursues complex, contradictory metaphysical speculations about his soul's origins, its separation from the body at his death, and its eagerly awaited reunion with his body on Doomsday. Though the Apostles' Creed has since the second century professed, "I believe in the resurrection of the body," with proof texts from both Testaments, Donne recognizes that a literal corporeal resurrection is the most difficult Christian mystery to believe, as Targoff's introduction admits, yet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallJohn Donne: Body and Soul (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USJohn Donne: Body and Soul (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®63432026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255972
<p></p>
This essay collection celebrates the work of Diane McColley, who years ago set out "to be a cultural ecologist —to consider how literature and the arts and the natural world fit together and affect each other" (284). McColley's focus on Milton made her a pioneer in approaching early modern literature from what is now termed an ecocritical perspective. As Ken Hiltner, her student, attests, the attention she has drawn to "the far-reaching ecological implications of Edenic thinking, both for the early modern period and our world today," informs the contributors' eleven essays (7). Fittingly, McColley herself has the final word in the volume, a personal paean to Milton scholarship as work Edenic in the beauty of its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallRenaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USRenaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton's England (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®74752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255973
<p></p>
Andrew Mattison joins a recent chorus of scholars to foreground disjunctions and uncertainties in Milton. But he does so in a very different way: through a consideration of place bearing no relation to either phenomenology or ecocriticism, but rather to postmodern philology. Most readers of Milton, he suggests —whether historicist or theological, feminist or ecological —have assumed that Paradise Lost is marked by some kind of ethical unity, however complex. Mattison argues that these critics, different in other ways, are alike in being essentially mistaken; for, as he aims to demonstrate, "the figural force of descriptions of place, and particularly of Eden, disrupt[s] the moral logic the poem superficially
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMilton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMilton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®66922026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24Milton and the Jews (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255974
<p></p>
This collection of essays richly captures the intersection of Milton's work with things Jewish, an intersection which moves suddenly between history and symbolism. Milton relates to imminently historical Jews, who are on the verge of readmission to England, and on the tongues of revolutionaries who identify England with the ancient Israelite nation. At the same time, Jews here are deeply symbolic. They are constructed by the Pauline view of the superseded Law, are read through Christian typology, and eventually come to inhabit Milton himself, who, we learn, has been the Jew of the English canon.Three fine essays by Achsah Guibbory, Elizabeth Sauer, and Nicholas von Maltzahn are the most historical. Guibbory surveys
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/374/image/coversmallMilton and the Jews (review)2008-12-24text/htmlen-USMilton and the Jews (review)2008-12-242008TWOProject MUSE®65342026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-12-24