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This lively overview of the papal justice system reaches a transatlantic readership and makes available the fruit of Fosi's decades-long research in unpublished archives in Rome and the Vatican.

How early modern Italian painting addressed the ways humans shape and are shaped by their environments.
 
In the sixteenth century, Italian artist Jacopo Bassano painted pictures of herdsmen and animals moving through dark and muddy landscapes. But he also participated in the agricultural development of the region in which he lived, producing topographical maps of local mountains and forests, inventing new methods of drainage and irrigation, and studying the latest techniques of crop rotation and fertilization. The relationship between Bassano’s rustic art and his participation in environmental transformation has, however, never been explored.
 
One of the first studies of Italian Renaissance art to grapple with the connections between visual culture and the environment, Pastoral’s End explores this crucial, formative relationship. James Pilgrim looks at Bassano’s career holistically, demonstrating how his involvement in a world marked by agricultural expansion, industrialization, resource extraction, environmental degradation, social transformation, and radical philosophical development informed his paintings of country life. Introducing new archival and visual evidence of Bassano’s knowledge of hydrology, agronomy, husbandry, and architecture, Pastoral’s End argues that he transformed the more placid rustic imagery of previous Renaissance artists into visions of dangerous ecological instability.
 

For more than two centuries the group of early modern English manuscripts presented in this volume sat mostly ignored on the shelves of the British Library, known only to the librarians who catalogued them. Six of them, for four different elaborate allegorical paintings, appear in the manuscript catalog of the Sloane Collection as “Instructions to painters.” A seventh, from the Harley collection in the same library, has more recently been added to the group. On art historical, iconographic, and historical grounds the manuscripts add significantly to our knowledge of Elizabethan visual allegory, and reveal a provocative new contribution to the evolution of English political thought. And the development across three of the programs of a warm personal relationship between the patron and the artist opens a unique window into early modern relationships of this kind. Unlike most other surviving artistic programs, this one reveals its author’s personality and interests in a rich and beguiling way, and although as a writer he is no Sidney or Nashe, the naïve yet widely informed enthusiasm with which he addresses his readers has considerable force and charm.

Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King’s bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet’s form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appeal to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by Molière and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy.

Philosophers of the Renaissance introduces readers to philosophical thinking from the end of the Middle Ages through the sixteenth century.

The Renaissance was a period of great intellectual change and innovation as philosophers rediscovered the philosophy of classical antiquity and passed it on to the modern age. Renaissance philosophy is distinct both from the medieval scholasticism, based on revelation and authority, and from philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who transformed it into new philosophical systems. Despite the importance of the Renaissance to the development of philosophy over time, it has remained largely understudied by historians of philosophy and professional philosophers. This anthology aims to correct this by providing scholars and students of philosophy with representative translations of the most important philosophers of the Renaissance. Its purpose is to help readers appreciate philosophy in the Renaissance and its importance in the history of philosophy. The anthology includes translations from philosophers from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it ranges from works on moral and political philosophy, to metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy, thereby providing historians and students of philosophy with a sense for the nature, breadth, and complexity of philosophy in the Renaissance. Each translation is accompanied by an introduction by a historian of Renaissance philosophy, as well as select secondary sources, in order to encourage further study. This anthology is a companion to Philosophers of the Renaissance, edited by Paul Richard Blum and published by Catholic University of America Press in 2010, which included essays on the writings of the same group of philosophers of the Renaissance: Raymond Llull, Gemistos Plethon, George of Trebizond, Basil Bessarion, Lorenzo Valla, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Pomponazzi, Niccolò Machiavelli, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Juan Luis Vives, Philipp Melanchthon, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Jacopo Zabarella, Michel de Montaigne, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Francisco Suàrez, Tommaso Campanella.

Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature.

Plague and Pleasure is a lively popular history that introduces a new hypothesis about the impetus behind the cultural change in Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance coincided with a period of chronic, constantly recurring plague, unremitting warfare and pervasive insecurity. Consequently, people felt a need for mental escape to alternative, idealized realities, distant in time or space from the unendurable present but made vivid to the imagination through literature, art, and spectacle.

Thomas Pavel has written extensively on poetics, linguistics, and narratology. In this book he proposes an original theory and methodology of plot analysis—a reading that draws upon the most fruitful aspects of literary structuralism and upon contemporary linguistic models (specifically generative grammar). Theorists have tended to use formal plot analysis to examine relatively simple literary artifacts, like folk tales and short stories; Pavel, however, applies his model to a group of English Renaissance tragedies and demonstrates that plot analysis can make a major contribution to the understanding of sophisticated literary texts.

Pavel leads the reader through step-by-step analyses of increasingly complex plot structures as he explicates Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I, the Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward the Second; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy; The Arden Feversham; and, finally, Shakespeare’s King Lear. He has chosen these plays for their chronological proximity, yet their diversity allows for contrasts and typological considerations. The inclusion of most of Marlowe’s tragedies enables Pavel to gain new insights into a single writer’s strategies of plot construction.The Poetics of Plot moves beyond the establishment and application of a new theory of plot to address broader issues in cultural studies: the role of linguistic models in literary studies, the nature and function of agency in plot advancement and history, the universal features of plot organization, and the relation of plot patterns to period styles and dominant modes of organized knowledge. In his foreword to The Poetics of Plot, Wlad Godzich sketches the historical context in which Pavel’s discussion of plot appears and makes explicit the way that the study of plot challenges both the presuppositions of linguistic analysis and the status of action in philosophical thought.

A vivid exploration of how early modern literature transformed the law of the sea into a rich imaginative realm of maritime space and poetic possibility

Poetics of the Legal Sea in English Renaissance Literature is a richly layered study that traces how early modern writers imagined the sea as both a legal landscape and a site of narrative possibility. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book illuminates the ways literary forms conceptualized the maritime laws that governed the early modern world. Its narrative moves fluidly between legal frameworks and poetic language, revealing a dynamic exchange between artistic expression and the systems that regulated life at sea.

Hayley Cotter’s analysis charts a metaphorical voyage, guiding readers from the calm departure of genre and jurisdiction through turbulent encounters with piracy, shipwreck, and salvage. Plays and poems become vessels that carry ideas about authority, justice, and sovereignty, while rhetorical devices such as metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy deepen the imaginative pull of maritime experience. This journey foregrounds the cognitive effects of literary language, showing how early modern authors engaged with legal culture in ways that often moved beneath the surface of conscious thought.

As the chapters progress, literary texts become active participants in shaping understandings of law and maritime space. Shakespearean drama, Elizabethan pirate tales, sonneteering traditions, and anonymous sea poems all contribute to a vibrant conversation about how societies negotiated law and commerce on the open water. Bringing together readers interested in early modern literature, maritime history, and interdisciplinary inquiry, Poetics of the Legal Sea in English Renaissance Literature offers a compelling exploration of how the ocean’s vast, shifting expanse inspired new ways of thinking about power and the stories that give shape to legal life.

In the twentieth century, the pioneering work of such art historians as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind heightened our awareness of the relationship between Renaissance literature and the visual arts. By focusing on that relationship in the work of such poets as Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick, Norman K. Farmer, Jr., convincingly shows that they and other writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.

Farmer begins by describing the powerful visual matrix that underlies the narrative structure of Sidney's New Arcadia. He compares the role of the visual in the poetry of Donne and Ben Jonson, and demonstrates how works by both Thomas Carew and Lord Herbert exhibit poetic invention according to familiar Renaissance pictorial themes. Herrick's Hesperides is shown to be the major seventeenth-century poetic application of the Horatian idea ut pictura poesis.

A special feature of this gracefully written and enlightening volume is Farmer's discussion of Lady Drury's oratory at Hawstead Hall. Published here for the first time are photographs of this uniquely decorated oratory, in which themes from a variety of English and Continental emblem books were painted on the walls of a room apparently designed for private meditation.

Reading a range of Italian works, Rubini considers the active transmittal of traditions through generations of writers and thinkers.
 
Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a “tradition,” not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but instead as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at prominent humanists in between—including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce—Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an expanse of writings to uncover deeper transhistorical continuities that span six hundred years. Whether reading work from the fourteenth century, or from the 1930s, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and the reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions that connect thinkers across time. Building on his award-winning book, The Other Renaissance, this will prove a valuable contribution for intellectual historians, literary scholars, and those invested in the continuing humanist legacy.
 

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the “image of the Other” in the early modern period . They deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary-like historical accounts that express ethnographic sensitivities. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate digression of traditional scholars’ focus and the investigation of rarely examined regions and practices. This approach allows the contributors to spotlight their special areas of research and to share a fresh new look at “the Renaissance.”

A study of the survival of Sant'Elisabetta delle Convertite, the Florence monastery for repentant prostitutes, during the long Renaissance. 

From the fourteenth century, prostitutes in Florence were encouraged to leave their profession and spend their lives in repentance at the monastery of Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite. Many did over its five hundred years, and the monastery was soon one of the most populous in Florence. As the longest enduring monastery for repentant prostitutes, Sant’Elisabetta is an integral part of the history of nuns and of prostitution in the medieval and early modern periods, and it had an important place in municipal responses to social welfare and civic morality. It is only by uncovering successive governments’ involvement in Sant'Elisabetta that we can fully understand how the city attempted to manage both prostitution and welfare.

This is the first book-length study to put Sant’Elisabetta into its full historical context. It establishes the place of this often-overlooked nunnery in the wider world of medieval penitential piety, renaissance charity, and early modern social welfare, exploring the myriad ways in which the Florentine authorities attempted to stabilize Sant’Elisabetta’s finances and ensure its continued survival. Drawing on diverse archival sources, the book’s long chronological scope offers valuable insights into the broader histories of the relationship between the Florentine state and monastic institutions, public policy, welfare, and women in the long Renaissance.