Results by title
436 books match the query 'Renaissance' and 113 start with t
The Lion's Ear
Pope Leo X, the Renaissance Papacy, and MusicAnthony M. Cummings
University of Michigan Press, 2022
For centuries, the Renaissance papacy has been celebrated for its generous patronage of the arts. Pope Leo X, son of the legendary Lorenzo "the Magnificent" de'Medici, is widely understood to be one of the greatest patrons of music in European history, and one of the emblematic figures of the Italian Renaissance.
The Lion's Ear is the first full-length scholarly treatment of the musical patronage of a Renaissance pope and provides an evocative picture of the musical life of the pre-Reformation papacy. The various uses of music in early modern Rome---music for public festivals, such as carnival; for the liturgical ceremonies of the Sistine Chapel; to accompany daily dining and festive banqueting; for the celebration of saints' feast days; and for theatrical performances---are vividly described and analyzed and give a detailed understanding of the place of music in the life of one of its most important early modern benefactors.
Anthony M. Cummings takes an interdisciplinary approach to his subject matter, bringing together the history of music, art, philosophy, and ecclesiastical history to locate the music in its broadest and deepest contexts. Through materials such as diplomatic correspondence, the book aims to reconstruct the atmosphere of the musical life in Leo X's court, presenting the subject matter in a way that will appeal to scholars and students of musicology and early modern history.
Art historians, ecclesiastical historians, and specialists from many other disciplines have long produced scholarly findings useful for understanding the pre-Reformation papacy, its alliance with the Italian Renaissance, and the extraordinary artistic legacy of that alliance. Anthony M. Cummings complements that scholarship with his thorough and imaginative account of music's relationship with that vibrant and fascinating culture, the first by a specialist in the musical life of early modern Europe.
The Lisle Letters
Edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne
University of Chicago Press, 1981
The Lord, the Slave, and the Tailor’s Son
Andrea Casali and Identity Theft in Renaissance ItalyCraig A. Monson
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Andrea Casali might well have been forgotten. A handsome, young Bolognese nobleman, heir to fabulous wealth, palaces, and artistic treasures, known as a poet and artist, in 1604 he was reported killed at age nineteen during the epic Siege of Ostend. Thirty years later, however, a grizzled, former galley slave appeared in Rome, claiming to be the dead Casali and demanding his inheritance. Was he a noble survivor of captivity under the Ottoman Turks or a cunning impostor, masquerading under an illustrious name?
His claim ignited scandal, vehement public argument, even physical assaults and rioting in the streets. A three-year trial ended with judges convicting him of impersonation but declining to rule on who he really was. Across seventeenth-century Italy and even beyond, writers offered claims and counterclaims as to his identity. The Lord, the Slave, and the Tailor’s Son offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Casali affair, drawing upon extensive documentary evidence, much of it newly discovered: trial records, suppressed witness testimony, autograph letters of both Casali and the alleged impostor, wills, and inventories, as well as poetry and polemical tracts. The book reveals an extraordinary, true story of stolen identity, fake news, elite collusion, and manipulation of popular belief in Renaissance Italy, a story that feels strikingly modern today.
The Modernist Nation
Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American LiteratureMichael Soto
University of Alabama Press, 2007
The Modernist Nation examines why America's modern literary movements have come to be characterized as "generations" and "renaissances," such as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation or the Harlem, Southern, and San Francisco Renaissances. The metaphor of rebirth, Michael Soto argues, offered and continues to offer American writers a kind of shorthand for imagining American cultural history, especially as a departure from Old World (English) trappings.
Soto highlights the interracial dynamics of American literary movements, touching on authors as varied as James Weldon Johnson, Malcolm Cowley, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jack Kerouac. After assessing the origins of the Lost Generation and the Harlem Renaissance, Soto traces the rise of the "bohemian artist" narrative, and demonstrates how a polyethnic cast of writers and critics constructed American literary production in terms of symbolic rebirth.
The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps
Benjamin B. Olshin
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin’s own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps, all but one of which are in the possession of Rossi’s great-grandson Jeffrey Pendergraft. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies? Did Marco Polo’s daughters—whose names appear on several of the artifacts—preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? Did Marco Polo entrust the maps to Admiral Ruggero Sanseverino, who has links to Rossi’s family line? Or, if the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why?
Regardless of the maps’ provenance, Olshin’s tale—stretching from the remote reaches of the northern Pacific to early Chinese legends—takes readers on a journey confounding yet fascinating, offering insights into Italian history, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.
The Mystic Fable, Volume Two
The Sixteenth And Seventeenth CenturiesMichel de Certeau
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Though the second volume remained in fragments at the time of his death, Michel de Certeau had the foresight to leave his literary executor detailed instructions for its completion, which formed the basis for the present work. Together, both volumes solidify Certeau’s place as a touchstone of twentieth-century literature and philosophy, and continue his exploration of the paradoxes of historiography; the construction of social reality through practice, testimony, and belief; the theorization of speech in angelology and glossolalia; and the interplay of prose and poetry in discourses of the ineffable. This book will be of vital interest to scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, and literature.
The Origins of Mexican Catholicism
Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century MexicoOsvaldo F. Pardo
University of Michigan Press, 2004
---Fernando Cervantes, Bristol University, UK
"Pardo does an excellent job of balancing and contrasting sixteenth-century Catholic theology with Nahua thought and belief."
---John F. Schwaller, University of Minnesota
At first glance, religious conversion may appear to be only a one-way street. When studying sixteenth-century Mexico, one might assume that colonial coercion was the driving force behind the religious conversion of the native population. But The Origins of Mexican Catholicism shows how Spanish missionaries instead drew on existing native ceremonies in order to make Christianity more accessible to the Nahua population whom they were trying to convert.
Osvaldo F. Pardo explains that religious figures not only shaped native thought, but that indigenous rituals had an impact on the religion itself. This work illustrates the complex negotiations that took place in the process of making the Christian sacraments available to the native peoples, and at the same time, forced the missionaries to reexamine the meaning of their sacraments through the eyes of an alien culture.
For Spanish missionaries, ritual not only became a focus of evangelical concern but also opened a window to the social world of the Nahuas. Missionaries were able to delve into the Nahua's notions of self, emotions, and social and cosmic order. By better understanding the sociological aspects of Nahua culture, Christians learned ways to adequately convey their religion through mutual understanding instead of merely colonial oppression.
Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest to specialists in Latin American intellectual and literary history, the history of religion, and anthropology, and to anyone interested in cross-cultural processes.
The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600
Edited by Julius Kirshner
University of Chicago Press, 1996
The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600 represents the best in American, British, and Italian scholarship and offers a valuable and critical overview of the key problems of the emergence of the state in Europe. Some of the topics covered include the political legitimacy of the aborning regional states, the changing legal culture, the conflict between church and state, the forces shaping public finances, and the creation of the Italian League.
The eight essays in this collection originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Roberto Bizzocchi, Giorgio Chittolini, Trevor Dean, Riccardo Fubini, Elena Fasano Guarini, Aldo Mazzacane, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera. This volume will appeal to historians, historical sociologists, and historians of political thought.
The Passionate Triangle
Rebecca Zorach
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Triangles abounded in the intellectual culture of early modern Europe—the Christian Trinity was often mapped as a triangle, for instance, and perspective, a characteristic artistic technique, is based on a triangular theory of vision. Renaissance artists, for their part, often used shapes and lines to arrange figures into a triangle on the surface of a painting—a practice modern scholars call triangular composition. But is there secret meaning in the triangular arrangements artists used, or just a pleasing symmetry? What do triangles really tell us about the European Renaissance and its most beguiling works of art?
In this book, Rebecca Zorach takes us on a lively hunt for the triangle’s embedded significance. From the leisure pursuits of Egyptian priests to Jacopo Tintoretto’s love triangles, Zorach explores how the visual and mathematical properties of triangles allowed them to express new ideas and to inspire surprisingly intense passions. Examining prints and paintings as well as literary, scientific, and philosophical texts, The Passionate Triangle opens up an array of new ideas, presenting unexpected stories of the irrational, passionate, melancholic, and often erotic potential of mathematical thinking before the Scientific Revolution.
The Past, Present, and Future of Early Modern Digital Studies
Iter at 25Edited by Laura Estill and Ray Siemens
Iter Press, 2025
Early modern digital studies is a thriving field that draws in strands from publishing, textual studies, digital humanities, and more. Yet it is also rapidly changing. This volume shows that early modern digital studies must be reconsidered from different perspectives as new projects and tools emerge, change, or disappear, and as we make advances into better understanding the past. The chapters in this volume explore how and what we publish (digitally and otherwise), how we value, evaluate, and sustain those publications and digital projects, and how these projects enable us to ask new research questions about early modern literature and culture. This collection does not seek to be a definitive or final state-of-the-field, but rather, a celebration of existing scholarship and an invitation to further scholarship about our ever-evolving practices.
The Pensive Image
Art as a Form of ThinkingHanneke Grootenboer
University of Chicago Press, 2020
While the philosophical dimension of painting has long been discussed, a clear case for painting as a form of visual thinking has yet to be made. Traditionally, vanitas still life paintings are considered to raise ontological issues while landscapes direct the mind toward introspection. Grootenboer moves beyond these considerations to focus on what remains unspoken in painting, the implicit and inexpressible that manifests in a quality she calls pensiveness. Different from self-aware or actively desiring images, pensive images are speculative, pointing beyond interpretation. An alternative pictorial category, pensive images stir us away from interpretation and toward a state of suspension where thinking through and with the image can start.
In fluid prose, Grootenboer explores various modalities of visual thinking— as the location where thought should be found, as a refuge enabling reflection, and as an encounter that provokes thought. Through these considerations, she demonstrates that artworks serve as models for thought as much as they act as instruments through which thinking can take place. Starting from the premise that painting is itself a type of thinking, The Pensive Image argues that art is capable of forming thoughts and shaping concepts in visual terms.
The Perfection of Nature
Animals, Breeding, and Race in the RenaissanceMackenzie Cooley
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.
Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.
Adding nuance and historical context to discussions of race and human and animal relations, The Perfection of Nature provides a close reading of undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world.
The Place of the Stage
License, Play, and Power in Renaissance EnglandSteven Mullaney
University of Michigan Press, 1995
The Poem, the Garden, and the World
Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan EnglandJim Ellis
Northwestern University Press, 2023
How an early modern understanding of place and movement are embedded in a performative theory of literature
How is a garden like a poem? Early modern writers frequently compared the two, and as Jim Ellis shows, the metaphor gained strength with the arrival of a spectacular new art form—the Renaissance pleasure garden—which immersed visitors in a political allegory to be read by their bodies’ movements. The Poem, the Garden, and the World traces the Renaissance-era relationship of place and movement from garden to poetry to a confluence of both. Starting with the Earl of Leicester’s pleasure garden for Queen Elizabeth’s 1575 progress visit, Ellis explores the political function of the entertainment landscape that plunged visitors into a fully realized golden world—a mythical new form to represent the nation. Next, he turns to one of that garden’s visitors: Philip Sidney, who would later contend that literature’s golden worlds work to move us as we move through them, reorienting readers toward a belief in English empire. This idea would later be illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen; as with the pleasure garden, both characters and readers are refashioned as they traverse the poem’s dreamlike space. Exploring the artistic creations of three of the era’s major figures, Ellis argues for a performative understanding of literature, in which readers are transformed as they navigate poetic worlds.
The Poison Trials
Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance ScienceAlisha Rankin
University of Chicago Press, 2021
At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.
The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.
The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England
Skiles Howard
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
Skiles Howard examines the social and semiotic complexities of dancing as it changed over time and performed different work in court, city, and playhouse. She shows how dancing reflected and shaped wider social changes: the performance of gender roles facilitated the formation of the patriarchal family, the execution of physical tropes of hierarchy supported the rise of a centralized state, and rehearsals of spatial mastery assisted the project of national expansion. As a visual and kinetic discourse by which social norms were circulated, dancing inevitably became a site of contestation; as elite and popular practices collided, interacted, and were transformed, countervailing social forces found expression through the medium of dancing.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, this study draws on court masque and popular drama, dancing manuals, Puritan pamphlets, and educational and medical treatises to explore issues of power and the body, gender and rank, popular culture and European expansion.
The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance
Ester Gilman Richey
University of Missouri Press, 1998
Recognizing that the seventeenth century's volatile debate over apocalyptic interpretation has since become a one-sided discussion, Esther Gilman Richey develops a context that recovers the dynamism so inherent in the writings of the period and provides illuminating details that enhance the prophetic continuum. The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance does not ignore the familiar prophetic verse of Spenser and Milton, but it significantly expands the scope of study by examining the interpretations of both men and women who represent a range of ecclesiastical and political perspectives.
Richey rejects Barbara Lewalski's claim that the radical, prophetic writers and metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century drew inspiration from distinct biblical models, the former from the Apocalypse and the latter from the Psalms. Instead she contends that even writers such as Donne and Herbert, whom we have long considered "literary," were in reality using their poetry to participate in the hottest debates of the time.
While the radical writers, such as Spenser and Milton, were immediately responsive to ecclesiastical and political controversies, the conservative, metaphysical poets—Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan—were posing equally politically charged questions: Is the pope Antichrist? Is the Bride of Christ pure? Is the Temple a model of ecclesiastical reform? The writers of the period did not move in divided and distinguished worlds, but in fact constantly responded to one another through poetic and politically charged dialogue.
By drawing from the writings of various individuals, both radical and conformist, male and female, Richey traces the shifting representations of the apocalyptic Bride and Temple over time. Organized chronologically, the chapters of The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance reveal the escalating debate among the pacifists, conformists, militants, and feminists. Not only does Richey uncover the prophetic dimension of conformist writers usually described as apolitical and devotional, but she also explores the writings of lesser-known women prophets: Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Fell. In such biblical passages as the apocalyptic "woman clothed with the sun," these early feminists find the authority for their own prophetic speech.
This provocative analysis—at once far-reaching and tightly focused—reveals the complexity of the apocalyptic discourse that transpired among Renaissance writers and poets.
The Portable Queen
Elizabeth I and the Politics of CeremonyMary Hill Cole
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
In this book, Mary Hill Cole provides a detailed analysis of the progresses. Drawing on royal household accounts, ministerial correspondence, county archives, corporation records, and family papers, she examines the effects of the visits on the queen's household and government, the individual and civic hosts, and the monarchy of the Virgin Queen.
Cole places the progresses in the sixteenth-century world of politics and images, where the queen and her hosts exchanged ceremonial messages that advanced their own agendas. The heart of the progresses was the blend of politics, socializing, and ceremony that enabled the queen to accomplish royal business on the move while satisfying the needs of those courtiers, townspeople, and country residents who welcomed her into their communities.
While all Renaissance monarchs engaged in occasional travel, in Elizabeth's case the progresses provided the settings in which she crafted her royal authority. Although the trips inconvenienced the government and strained her treasury, Elizabeth found power in the turmoil of an itinerant court and in a continuing ceremonial dialogue with her subjects.
The Preacher's Demons
Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance ItalyFranco Mormando
University of Chicago Press, 1999
His story of the Parisian vigilante was a recommendation. Sexual deviants were the objects of relentless, unconditional persecution in Bernardino's sermons. Other targets of the preacher's venom were witches, Jews, and heretics. Mormando takes us into the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy to discover how one enormously influential figure helped to dramatically increase fear, hatred, and intolerance for those on society's margins.
This book is the first on Bernardino to appear in thirty-five years, and the first ever to consider the preacher's inflammatory role in Renaissance social issues.
The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare
Steven Mullaney
University of Chicago Press, 2015
As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy
Kathy Eden
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch’s encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write.
The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden’s important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.
The Renaissance Restored
Paintings Conservation and the Birth of Modern Art History in Nineteenth-Century EuropeMatthew Hayes
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021
Repairing works of art and writing about them—the practices that became art conservation and art history—share a common ancestry. By the nineteenth century the two fields had become inseparably linked. While the art historical scholarship of this period has been widely studied, its restoration practices have received less scrutiny—until now.
This book charts the intersections between art history and conservation in the treatment of Italian Renaissance paintings in nineteenth-century Europe. Initial chapters discuss the restoration of works by Giotto and Titian, framed by the contemporary scholarship of art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Joseph Crowe that was redefining the earlier age. Subsequent chapters recount how paintings conservation was integrated into museum settings. The narrative uses period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs in probing how paintings looked at a time when scholars were writing the foundational texts of art history, and how contemporary restorers were negotiating the appearances of these works. The book proposes a model for a new conservation history, object focused yet enriched by consideration of a wider cultural horizon.
The Rule of Art
Literature and Painting in the RenaissanceClark Hulse
University of Chicago Press, 1990
These are the questions Clark Hulse takes up in this sophisticated interdisciplinary study of Renaissance aesthetics. Proposing an archeology of artistic knowledge, Hulse examines the theoretical language through which the poets, painters, and patrons of the Renaissance conceived of the relationship between the arts. That language is embedded in what he calls a "rule of art," a specific set of categories, assumptions, and practices that defined the two art forms and the relationship between them. Hulse charts the rise of both forms to the status of liberal arts requiring special intellectual training for artist and patron alike. In the process, he uncovers the history of the practice of theory in the Renaissance, revealing how artistic discourse lived in the world.
The Scientific Revolution
Steven Shapin
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“An excellent book.”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
“Timely and highly readable. . . . A book which every scientist curious about our predecessors should read.”—Trevor Pinch, New Scientist
“Shapin's account is informed, nuanced, and articulated with clarity. . . . This is not to attack or devalue science but to reveal its richness as the human endeavor that it most surely is. . . . Shapin's book is an impressive achievement.”—David C. Lindberg, Science
“It's hard to believe that there could be a more accessible, informed or concise account. . . . The Scientific Revolution should be a set text in all the disciplines. And in all the indisciplines, too.”—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books
The Second Part of the Popular Errors
Laurent Joubert
University of Alabama Press, 1995
English translation of the second volume of Laurent Joubert’s 1578 French work Erreurs Populaires
Joubert proposed to dispel folk remedies and folklore still relied on by doctors and care-givers in France. It also challenged medical theories and advice from classical Greek and Latin writers that French doctors followed uncritically.
The Shapes of Fancy
Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern LiteratureChristine Varnado
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality
What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance.
Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed.
This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.
The Single Life
Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance LiteratureJordan Windholz
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Exploring the Varied Roles of Bachelors during the Renaissance
What if the Renaissance bachelor wasn’t just a social outlier but a literary lens through which early modern masculinity reveals its cracks? In The Single Life: Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance Literature, Jordan Windholz examines the overlooked and often subversive roles played by never-married men in shaping gender, sexuality, and social order.
Windholz challenges conventional views on gender and sexuality, identifying five archetypes of bachelorhood that complicate our understanding of patriarchal success: the chaste youth, the journeyman bachelor, the true gallant, the incel scholar, and the unmarried eunuch. These figures don’t conform to ideals of marriage, legacy, or economic productivity, but they also weren’t merely left behind. Instead, they served to define what early modern society valued by embodying what it resisted. Windholz shows how Renaissance texts constructed, contained, and occasionally celebrated these “unpatriarchal manhoods.”
By examining the intersections of sexuality, labor, gentility, emotion, and gender, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how single men both upheld and resisted patriarchal norms. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of literary texts, blending historical and literary analysis with feminist and queer theory. The first study of its kind, Windholz’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance literature, gender studies, or those looking to understand the margins of masculinity and the meanings of singledom—then and now.
The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 54 number 1-2 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 54 number 3-4 (Fall 2023)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 55 number 1-2 (Spring 2024)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 55 number 3-4 (Fall 2024)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 56 number 1 (Spring 2025)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 56 number 2 (Summer 2025)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 56 number 3 (Fall 2025)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 57 number 1 (Spring 2026)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 57 number 2 (Summer 2026)
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, volume 57 number 3 (Fall 2026)
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The Spanish Disquiet
The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias MontanoMaría M. Portuondo
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Foremost among them was Benito Arias Montano—Spain’s most prominent biblical scholar and exegete of the sixteenth century. He was also a widely read member of the European intellectual community, and his motivation to reform natural philosophy shows that the Spanish Disquiet was a local manifestation of greater concerns about Aristotelian natural philosophy that were overtaking Europe on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. His approach to the study of nature framed the natural world as unfolding from a series of events described in the Book of Genesis, ultimately resulting in a new metaphysics, cosmology, physics, and even a natural history of the world. By bringing Arias Montano’s intellectual and personal biography into conversation with broader themes that inform histories of science of the era, The Spanish Disquiet ensures an appreciation of the variety and richness of Arias Montano’s thought and his influence on early modern science.
The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church
Lawrence of Brindisi and Capuchin Missions in the Holy Roman Empire (1599-1613)Andrew J.G. Drenas
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
The Story of All Things
Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative PoetryMarshall Grossman
Duke University Press, 1998
Relating subjectivity to the nature of language, Grossman uses the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres. Beginning with the portrayals of the self inherited from Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, he describes the influence of historic developments such as innovations in agricultural technology, civil war and regicide, and the emergence of republican state institutions on the changing representation of characters in the works of Spenser, Donne, Marvell, and Milton. Furthering this psychoanalytic critique of literary history, Grossman probes the linguistic effects of social and personal factors such as Augustine’s strained relationship with his mother and the marital disharmony of Milton and Mary Powell. With its focus on these and other "literary historical events," The Story of All Things not only proposes a new structural theory of narrative but constitutes a significant challenge to New Historicist conceptions of the self.
The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn
A Poem by Lancelot de CarleEdited, Translated, and with Essays by JoAnn DellaNeva
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn is a critical edition and translation of a long narrative poem written by the secretary to the French ambassador in London within two weeks of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It was intended as a diplomatic dispatch, relating the astonishing news of the queen’s demise (along with that of five alleged lovers). Uniquely among diplomatic correspondence, this dispatch was written in verse form. It thus straddles the domains of literature and history, of chronicle and fiction.
The base text for this edition is a previously unstudied manuscript housed at the British Library. Variants are given from all other known manuscripts found in Europe, including several key verses that were previously unpublished and that shed new light on the interpretation of the poem. The book features a sense-for-sense translation into modern English in free verse form, along with extensive explanatory notes. It also provides a study focusing on the historical background to the poem, an essay on the poet and the reception of his work, and a literary analysis of the poem.
The Strozzi of Florence
Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the RenaissanceAnn Crabb
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The Strozzi correspondence tells the story of the decline and recovery of one Florentine patrician family. Eventually, the Strozzi brothers earned the greatest fortune of their era, and, after the repeal of their exile, Filippo, the eldest, most successful, and longest lived, spent the last years of his life in Florence as one of its foremost citizens. Set in the context of other documentary evidence and of modern historical and anthropological studies, Crabb's study illuminates the role of women, kinship, solidarity, honor, and profit. These letters provide nuanced insights into values and practices that more impersonal sources cannot rival.
As well as appealing to those interested in the Renaissance, Florence, and Italy, this book will attract those wanting to read about topics in social history that cross time periods: women, family and kinship, business, and honor. It confronts issues of Renaissance Florentine historiography by presenting a more positive view of the role of women than does current orthodoxy, by providing evidence of the impact of extended kinship ties, a controversial issue, and by illuminating further the value placed on honor and profit.
Ann Crabb teaches medieval history at James Madison University.
The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present
Aldo Scaglione
University of Minnesota Press, 1981
The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The uniquely systematic character of German word order and sentence structure has long been recognized as an important feature of the language and of its literary uses. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the way theorists and stylists have interpreted these features through the centuries. Aldo Scaglione contends that the story of this theoretical awareness is part of the emerging cultural and literary consciousness of the German nation, as well as a testing ground for contemporary linguistic typology.
German speculation on the nature of a national language is, to Scaglione, best understood as a dialogue with the prevailing models of Latin, Italian, French, and English. His account of the debates over German word order is thus grounded in the complex historical circumstances from which they emerge: Renaissance grammarians took stock of German divergencies from the Latin cultural model, and those in the seventeenth century faced the challenges of French rationalism, nineteenth-century Romanticism and the many linguistic movements of the twentieth century have all cast new light upon the peculiarities of German sentence structure. Readers interested in historical syntax, rhetorical traditions, and the history of the German language will value both Scaglione's wide-ranging knowledge and his lively style.
The Tragedy of the Sack of Cabrières
Translated by Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2022
April 1542 saw a massacre of epic proportions in the Luberon, in southeastern France, of its Waldensian population, who had been peacefully living there after they settled in a few centuries before. This massacre foreshadowed the wars of religion, which tore apart the kingdom for almost forty years. The Tragédie du Sac de Cabrières is the only play devoted to these events. This is a critical edition and English translation of the French play. Three critical editions of the play have been published in 1927, 1928, and 1998, and this new edition complements the previous works. This is the first English translation of the play and makes it available to an international audience of scholars and students of the early modern period.
This edition “translates” the moment of the play's creation, the representation of the event, and its importance in the narrative of religious persecutions in sixteenth-century France. It explains how history is dramatized through the creation of the scenic story and scenic play of Cabrières. and how the specific retelling of the events of Cabrières makes this a tool of historical narration, thus allowing the audience to participate in the unfolding of history before their eyes. Therefore, they become part of history, because it is played before their eyes so that they can not only witness it but also propagate the glory of the martyrs for future generations. This is not only a translation and a work of literary scholarship, it is an analysis of the literary, political, and religious production of this period, and a multidisciplinary analysis of Waldensianism in southeastern France.
The Transmutations of Chymistry
Wilhelm Homberg and the Académie Royale des SciencesLawrence M. Principe
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Principe, the leading authority on the subject, recounts how Homberg’s radical vision promoted chymistry as the most powerful and reliable means of understanding the natural world. Homberg’s work at the Académie and in collaboration with the future regent, Philippe II d’Orléans, as revealed by a wealth of newly uncovered documents, provides surprising new insights into the broader changes chymistry underwent during, and immediately after, Homberg. A human, disciplinary, and institutional biography, The Transmutations of Chymistry significantly revises what was previously known about the contours of chymistry and scientific institutions in the early eighteenth century.
The Traveling Eye
Retrospection, Vision, and Prophecy in the Portuguese RenaissanceFernando Gil
Tagus Press, 2009
The idea for The Traveling Eye came as a new departure in an old dialogue between the two authors, one a literary scholar, the other a philosopher. Our focus was initially centered on a philosophical hypothesis concerning evidence, with specific reference to the prophetic writings of Father António Vieira, but it occurred to us that this perspective could be applied to literary works, particularly those of the Portuguese Renaissance. The studies that one of us had dedicated to the initiatory aspects of The Lusiads and to the codification of esoteric meanings in the work of Bernardim Ribeiro suggested a possible convergence of our two lines of research. But there are other issues raised by the Portuguese Renaissance: voyages, the new, the encounter with difference and how to understand it. The most obvious and direct expression of these issues is found in the chronicles of voyage and empire, whose importance is duly noted in the study by Luís de Sousa Rebelo included in Chapter III of this book. The literary treatment of this material seems to us no less revealing. Seeing ("seeing clearly seen" as Camões says in The Lusiads) poses the problem of simultaneously seeing "what is there" and of how what is there could be seen. This questioning from the outside by "the traveling eye" went hand in hand with new ways of relating to oneself and to others. Three key Renaissance authors, Luís de Camões (1525?-1580), Francisco de Sá de Miranda (1481?-1558?) and Bernardim Ribeiro (b.1480s?), address the human subject's relationship as a perplexing issue. Their works transform the feeling of love into a multifaceted investigation that questions the identity of the individual. A recurring theme in this book is the metamorphoses of the self brought about by love.
The Two-Soul'd Animal
Early Modern Literatures of the Classical and Christian SoulsJames Jaehoon Lee
Northwestern University Press, 2019
The English writers studied in The Two-Soul’d Animal place two prevailing interpretations of the soul’s faculties—one rhetorical on the plane of aesthetics, the other theological on the plane of ethics—into contact as a way to construct a new mode of Christian agency.
The Unrepentant Renaissance
From Petrarch to Shakespeare to MiltonRichard Strier
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the revival of Stoicism and Platonism. This book is devoted to those who did dissent from them. Richard Strier reveals that many long-recognized major texts did question the most traditional values and belong to a Renaissance far more unconstrained and affirmative than much recent scholarship has allowed.
The Unrepentant Renaissance counters the prevalent view of the period as dominated by the regulation of bodies and passions; the book aims to reclaim the Renaissance as an era happily churning with surprising, worldly, and self-assertive energies. Reviving the perspective of Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Strier provides fresh and uninhibited readings of texts by Petrarch, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays), Loyola, Montaigne, Descartes, and Milton. Strier’s lively argument, expressed in lucid prose, is meant to stir debate throughout the field of Renaissance studies.
The Vanishing
Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern CultureChristopher Pye
Duke University Press, 2000
Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon—a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics—for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a “demonic” preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject.
Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, The Vanishing will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory.