On August 4, 1578, in an ill-conceived attempt to wrest Morocco back from the hands of the infidel Moors, King Sebastian of Portugal led his troops to slaughter and was himself slain. Sixteen years later, King Sebastian rose again. In one of the most famous of European impostures, Gabriel de Espinosa, an ex-soldier and baker by trade—and most likely under the guidance of a distinguished Portuguese friar—appeared in a Spanish convent town passing himself off as the lost monarch. The principals, along with a large cast of nuns, monks, and servants, were confined and questioned for nearly a year as a crew of judges tried to unravel the story, but the culprits went to their deaths with many questions left unanswered.
Like our own, early modern beliefs about race depended on metaphorical, selective, and contradictory understandings of how membership in groups is determined. Although race took distinctive forms in the past, the fallacies that underlie early modern racial experience generally are precisely-and surprisingly-the same as those in contemporary culture.
Exploring the similar underpinnings of early modern and contemporary ideas of difference, Barbarous Play examines English Renaissance understandings of race as depicted in drama. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton, Bovilsky offers case studies of how racial meanings are generated by narratives of boundary crossing-especially miscegenation, religious conversion, class transgression, and moral and physical degeneracy. In the process, she reveals deep parallels between the period’s conceptions of race and gender.
Barbarous Play contests the widely held view that race and racism depend on modern science for their existence and argues that understanding just what is false and figurative in past depictions of race, such as those found in Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The White Devil, and The Changeling, can clarify the illogic of present-day racism.
Lara Bovilsky is assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.
The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.
Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.
Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.
Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) put the connoisseurship of Renaissance art on a firm footing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His monument is the library and collection of Italian painting, Islamic miniatures, and Asian art at Villa I Tatti in Florence. The authors in this collection of essays explore the intellectual world in which Berenson was formed and to which he contributed. Some essays consider his friendship with William James and the background of perceptual psychology that underlay his concept of “tactile values.” Others examine Berenson’s relationships with a variety of cultural figures, ranging from the German-born connoisseur Jean Paul Richter, the German art historian Aby Warburg, the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the American medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter to the African-American dance icon Katherine Dunham, as well as with Kenneth Clark, Otto Gutekunst, Archer Huntington, Paul Sachs, and Umberto Morra.
Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage makes an important contribution to the rising interest in the historiography of the discipline of art history in the United States and Europe during its formative years.
Although largely unknown today, during his lifetime Mutio Oddi of Urbino (1569–1639) was a highly esteemed scholar, teacher, and practitioner of a wide range of disciplines related to mathematics. A prime example of the artisan-scholar so prevalent in the late Renaissance, Oddi was also accomplished in the fields of civil and military architecture and the design and retail of mathematical instruments, as well as writing and publishing.
In Between Raphael and Galileo, Alexander Marr resurrects the career and achievements of Oddi in order to examine the ways in which mathematics, material culture, and the book shaped knowledge, society, and the visual arts in late Renaissance Italy. Marr scrutinizes the extensive archive of Oddi papers, documenting Oddi’s collaboration with prominent intellectuals and officials and shedding new light on the practice of science and art during his day. What becomes clear is that Oddi, precisely because he was not spectacularly innovative and did not attain the status of a hero in modern science, is characteristic of the majority of scientific practitioners and educators active in this formative age, particularly those whose energetic popularization of mathematics laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution. Marr also demonstrates that scientific change in this era was multivalent and contested, governed as much by friendship as by principle and determined as much by places as by purpose.
Plunging the reader into Oddi’s world, Between Raphael and Galileo is a finely wrought and meticulously researched tale of science, art, commerce, and society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It will become required reading for any scholar interested in the history of science, visual art, and print culture of the Early Modern period.
Contributors. Irena Backus, Guy Bedouelle, Kalman P. Bland, Kenneth G. Hagen, Scott H. Hagen, Scott H. Hendrix, R. Gerald Hobbs, Jean-Claude Margolin, H. C. Erik Midelfort, Richard A. Muller, John B. Payne, David C. Steinmetz
A fresh English translation of five Alberti works that illuminate new aspects of the literary aims and development of the first “Renaissance man.”
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and even athlete earned him the controversial title of the first “Renaissance man.”
The works collected in Biographical and Autobiographical Writings reflect Alberti’s lived experiences and his interests in the genre. This volume includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, which partly reflects his experiences as a student in Bologna; The Life of St. Potitus, the biography of a Christian martyr, which also contains autobiographical projections and was to have been the first in a series of lives of saints; My Dog, a mock funeral oration for his dead dog; My Life, one of the first autobiographies of the early modern period and the main source for Jacob Burckhardt’s portrait of Alberti; and a comic encomium, The Fly. In particular, the last three works—My Dog, My Life, and The Fly—constitute a kind of trilogy, as the humanist finds one of his main themes, the portrait of the ideal life, with a strong emphasis on humor.
This edition presents the first collected English translations of these works alongside an authoritative Latin text.
In this illuminating work, surveying 300 years and two nations, Sarah Gwyneth Ross demonstrates how the expanding ranks of learned women in the Renaissance era presented the first significant challenge to the traditional definition of “woman” in the West.
An experiment in collective biography and intellectual history, The Birth of Feminism focuses on nineteen learned women from the middle ranks of society who rose to prominence in the world of Italian and English letters between 1400 and 1680. Drawing both on archival material—wills, letters, and manuscript compositions, some presented here for the first time—and on printed writings, Ross gives us an unprecedented sense of educated early modern women’s lives.
Sponsored and often educated by their learned fathers and other male relatives within a model that Ross terms “the intellectual family,” female authors publicized their works within the safety of family networks. These women, including Christine de Pizan, Laura Cereta, Margaret More Roper, Lucrezia Marinella, and Bathsua Makin, did not argue for women’s political equality, but they represented and often advocated women’s intellectual equality. Ross demonstrates that because of their education, these women had a renaissance during the Renaissance, and that in so doing they laid the foundation for the emancipation of womankind.
Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1431) has long been recognized as France’s first professional woman of letters, and interest in her voluminous and wide-ranging corpus has been steadily rising for decades. During the tumultuous later years of the Hundred Years’ War, Christine’s lone but strong feminine voice could be heard defending women, expounding the highest ideals for good governance, and lamenting France’s troubled times alongside her own personal trials. In The Mutability of Fortune, Christine fuses world history with autobiography to demonstrate mankind’s subjugation to the ceaselessly changing, and often cruel, whims of Fortune. Now, for the first time, this poem is accessible to an English-speaking audience, further expanding our appreciation of this ground-breaking woman author and her extraordinary body of work.
Ranging from alchemy to necromancy, "books of secrets" offered medieval readers an affordable and accessible collection of knowledge about the natural world. Allison Kavey's study traces the cultural relevance of these books and also charts their influence on the people who read them. Citing the importance of printers in choosing the books' contents, she points out how these books legitimized manipulating nature, thereby expanding cultural categories, such as masculinity, femininity, gentleman, lady, and midwife, to include the willful command of the natural world.
In a discussion of the Renaissance revival of classical culture, Piccolomini considers the period’s mythologizing of Brutus, Caesar’s assassin. He cites Dante as the initiator of an important literary, dramatic, political, and artistic theme and explains how the historical Brutus was changed by literature and theatre into a symbol of the just citizen rebelling against the unjust tyrant.
Piccolomini discusses several Renaissance political conspiracies modeled after Brutus’ act and explores how those conspiracies, in turn, formed the basis for the theme’s recurrence in Italian, French, and English theatre of the period.
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