This article questions the traditional reading of Pier Candido Decembrio's “Life of Filippo Maria Visconti” (1447) as a tyrant narrative, a reading first proposed by Jacob Burckhardt and highly influential ever since. An examination of the Milanese context and relevant collateral documentation establishes the unlikelihood that Decembrio wished to denounce his former master as a tyrant. Rather, his avowed aim was to spread his prince's fame and glory. In so doing, however, Decembrio avoided the encomiastic model of biography dear to most humanists, delivering instead an insider's account of the astute political practices that underpinned his master's grip on power.

In November 2020, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the New York Times film critics, published an article entitled “The Century's Greatest Actors,” in which they proclaimed, “We are in a golden age of acting—make that platinum.” Celebrating the fact that their list of the top twenty-five actors from the last twenty years “looked beyond Hollywood,” Dargis and Scott declared that while there are Oscar winners on their list, “there are also character actors and chameleons.” One of the “radical shape-shifting” actors on the list is Tilda Swinton, whom Dargis characterized in the following fashion:

Critics of the “Orlando furioso” have analyzed at length the poem's darker veins, lying just beneath its ostensibly sunny surface, where Ariosto comments on the violence and political, intellectual, and religious upheavals of the early sixteenth century, often through allegory and irony. Readers have also noted the text's meticulously curated geography that lends to the story world of the “Furioso” extraordinary breadth of scale and specificity of detail. This study identifies the poem's geography as an important locus of irony, both in service to larger allegorical programs and as a means of remarking on the contemporary revolution in geographic knowledge and cartographic practice.

The early modern Mediterranean was a space of expansive linguistic mixing, and multilingual discourse was a common response to the exigencies of communication within this context. There is a growing body of scholarship on male multilingualism; however, women have been largely overlooked. This article argues that far from marginalized outsiders, as they were often depicted, women were active participants in the Mediterranean linguistic ecology. They developed communication strategies and techniques to navigate language difference in trade, travel, work, diplomatic, and domestic settings. The numerous and varied spaces that they occupied were not barriers but doorways to their participation in the multilingual Mediterranean.

Recent scholarship has challenged the still-powerful claim that long-distance pilgrimage and the journey to Jerusalem dramatically declined in number and significance in the sixteenth century. This article seeks to explore the different ways in which pilgrimage was embedded in the culture of the period. We interpret pilgrimage as a field of shared cross-confessional practices, representational conventions, and contestation. The paper presents a series of interlinked case studies, based on printed sources, correspondence, family archives, and material evidence. Together they demonstrate that early modern pilgrimage perpetuated medieval practices and yet was in constant dialogue with contemporary, post-Reformation religious and intellectual trends.

René Descartes's “Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii” (Rules for the direction of the mind) is a satirical study manual concerned with invention in the humanist sense of the discovery of arguments in texts, not the discovery of novelties in nature. Descartes employed Jesuit pedagogical techniques and an extensive technical vocabulary shared by Aristotelian philosophy and classical rhetoric to criticize the shortcomings of Scholastic philosophy. Although it felt like philosophy to its practitioners, technical dialectic appeared from the outside as a classroom exercise of commonplacing, fueled by schoolroom rivalry and vanity. The interplay of play and seriousness in the “Regulae” challenges standard philosophical hermeneutics.

By their very nature writing manuals encourage viewer participation, as they illustrate how to form lines into letters. In Johann Neudörffer's “Gute Ordnung” (Good order, 1538–50s) this genesis of lines extends beyond pure pedagogy. By displaying etchings in mirror writing alongside true-sided counterproofs, Neudörffer invites viewers to consider methods of mechanical production of seemingly handwritten lines. His text-images share their self-aware attention to linear aesthetics and process with drawings and etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer. As Neudörffer's manual taught the formation of beautiful written lines, it also trained contemporaries to become sophisticated consumers of linear beauty in figurative art.

This article argues that early modern literary and visual texts from Shakespeare's “Comedy of Errors” to Spenser's “Faerie Queene” repeatedly represent and render womanhood as a specifically and singularly white construction; in so doing, they establish the co-constitution of gender and race and their conscription by the contingencies of class. As this formation of white womanhood is in turn mobilized to underwrite the operations of violence and enslavement, white women themselves—and white womanhood as a politically and socially disciplined and disciplining category—emerge as not only the mediators but also the authors of these global and transhistorical processes.

In 1662, the physician Christopher Merret presented his fellow members of the Royal Society with an English translation of Antonio Neri's “L'arte vetraria” (The art of glass, 1612). Central to the preparation and receipt of this book was a cache of objects relevant to glassmaking, now lost or dispersed. These materia vitraria served as a tangible appendix to Merret's written commentary. They also reified the society's interest in the development of domestic industry by offering a direct means by which fellows could appreciate the raw materials of contemporary glassmaking alongside evidence of the trade's longer history in the British Isles.

This article uses writings of the French traveler François Bernier (d. 1688) on race as an inroad into the question of locating race in Mughal India. I explore Mughal discourses of alterity through an examination of Persian writings from various genres composed during the long seventeenth century. In contrast to Bernier, these writings do not offer concepts equivalent to that of race. However, by invoking narratives of descent from Noah's son Ham, ideas of climatic and physiognomic humoralism, and the attribution of physical qualities or character traits to social groups, these works engage in practices of racialization while also at times undermining them.

Clerical exorcists occupied an unstable place among healers in early modern Italy. Although recognized by their patients for their skills and knowledge, they were also a potentially disruptive group, given their interactions with malevolent powers and work that transgressed the normal boundaries of clerical activities. Consequently, clerical exorcists had to defend the legitimacy of their activities to skeptical ecclesiastical authorities. The examination of several such defenses by Venetian clerical exorcists reveals how they understood their profession and advocated for its legitimacy using arguments that resonated with discussions in contemporary medicine and natural philosophy.

This article explores Renaissance news maps and their cultural impact, focusing on works produced during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, a media event of unprecedented scope that became a laboratory for the genre's development. News maps were a key early form of reporting—a visual form—that, much like their textual counterparts, aimed to shape public views about conflict. Ultimately, these relatively modest items even influenced commemorative battle murals in halls of state. This study of news maps suggests an emerging media landscape that was highly pluralistic and experimental, going well beyond the written word.

This article reexamines the life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, a Spanish noblewoman who traveled to London in 1605 hoping to be martyred in service of the Catholic faith. By placing her at the intersection of a series of international, intra- and interconfessional tensions created by the sustained religious division of post-Reformation England, Carvajal emerges as a sophisticated political actor. She offers not only a unique account of female Catholic agency and opposition in early Stuart England, but also a lens through which to view the nature of religious identity and division in a period of Anglo-Spanish peace.

Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī visited and described the Roman ruins of Baalbek twice, in 1689 and 1700. He interpreted the site, however, not as a temple but as a palace built by jinns for Solomon. Nābulusī was very likely aware of the site's Roman past but purposefully played with its historicity to highlight Syria's innate sanctity. His interpretation of Baalbek reveals an antiquarian project in the Ottoman Empire that was constructed along variant but parallel lines to the better known one in Renaissance Europe.

This article relocates John Milton's Latin poem to his father (“Ad Patrem”) in the contexts of the young Milton's literary self-fashioning and the changing patterns of early modern Virgil reception. Here and in his prose epistles, Milton establishes the persona of a scholarly, questing filial figure, grounded in a reading of book 6 of the “Aeneid” and its drama of fathers and sons. He makes a case for poetry and scholarship as shared practices. This article reflects on a new archival turn in Milton studies and, in turn, how Milton himself invites the reader to become a questing scholar.

This article considers a corpus of images created between 1650 and 1750 within Italian Capuchin missions to Kongo and Angola. It demonstrates how these visual creations, though European in form, craftsmanship, and intended audience, were in fact penned by encounter and the products of cross-cultural interactions. Contrasting the Central African images with two well-known and oft-studied Franciscan visual projects from early colonial Mexico, the article further reflects on the stakes of making visible the mixings present, but often overlooked or silenced, in early modern images born from encounters between Europeans and the people they considered their Others.

This essay brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth-century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of critical Romani studies. By close reading Molière's “Les fourberies de Scapin” (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft, among other objects, through the lens of critical race theory, this essay shows how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy.

This article explores the epistemic value of touch in Italian Renaissance anatomy. Using archival and printed postmortem records from canonization processes and anatomical writings, it shows that haptic expertise (Greek ἅπτομαι [haptomai]: to touch) entailed not only the acquisition of practical skills but also the ability to discern, experience, and fully describe organic substances. Looking at the practices, languages, and theories underpinning medical and holy anatomies, I propose that haptic epistemologies lay at the heart of the understanding of the body in the early modern period, a time largely recognized to have transformed people's understanding and experience of visuality in the sciences and the arts.

Leonardo da Vinci studies are in effect two different—almost antagonistic—domains: a narrowly defined field that is so specialized that it scares scholars away (it takes years of dedicated work to learn how to deal with Leonardo's legacy), and a phenomenon of popular culture that is so massive that news about the artist's works makes headlines worldwide. Both aspects of Leonardo studies—the specialized scholarship and the vast public interest—grew exponentially in the past few decades and exploded in 2019, the year that marked the 500th anniversary of the artist's death. Although they only rarely come together, their convergence may offer the best hope for the future of Leonardo studies. Indeed, the recent anniversary provided a reminder that Leonardo da Vinci still touches the imagination of scholars and the general public in ways that force us to ask what is it that connects to our current age. Why is the study of this master of visualization, who made visible what could not be seen—vessels, muscles, water vortexes, wind, the intentions of people's minds—in diagrams, maps, sketches, figurative images, and paintings, significant for the current historical moment? Can we learn something from Leonardo studies—and, more broadly, from Renaissance studies, of which Leonardo studies are a part—as we struggle to find new frameworks to teach, research, innovate, and communicate with one another, or, to quote the mission statement of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive”?

Peter Paul Rubens's Rockox Triptych is generally thought to represent the incredulity of Saint Thomas, even though the side wound that presented Christ's famously distrustful disciple with proof of the resurrection is nowhere to be seen. This article explores the significance of the missing side wound. Drawing attention to the circulation of skeptical philosophy within the artist's milieu, it argues that he conceived of the painting as an epistemic dilemma that would both elicit doubt and suggest how it might be set aside.