Renaissance Painting and Expressions of Male Intimacy in a Seventeenth-Century Illustration from Mughal India

Contributor(s): Mika Natif

This article explores the artistic relationship between Western European Renaissance art and Mughal painting ca. 1630s at the ateliers in North India. A central theme is the employment of European painterly modes in the Mughal visual tradition that expressed male-male intimacy, carnal desire, and...

Reading and Viewing Sex in Early Modern French Vernacular Medicine

Contributor(s): Sarah E. Parker

Discussions of sex in early modern medical discourse did not simply legitimize a titillating topic. Medicine was engaged in a broader struggle to establish itself as a legitimate and professionally defined discipline; yet many practitioners marketed their ideas to a non-professional public...

Bestiality and Gluttony in Theory and Practice in the Comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta

Contributor(s): Sergius Kodera

Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), Neapolitan nobleman, scholar/scientist, and writer famed for books on natural magic and physiognomy, expressed quite explicit views on bestiality—that is, on human beings having sex with animals. Della Porta populated his plays with characters who allude...

Sex Acts in La Celestina: An Ars Combinatoria of Desire

Contributor(s): Marlen Bidwell-Steiner

This article investigates one of the most important and erotically explicit early modern Spanish texts: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499/1507). Highlighting the dynamics of the three sex acts depicted in the plot, it argues that intercourse can be read as a negotiation of the text’s main...

“Or whatever you be”: Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labour in John Lyly’s Gallathea

Contributor(s): Simone Chess

This article explores sociologist Jane Ward’s gender and sexuality theory: the notion of “gender labour,” in which a cisgender (not crossdressed or trans*) partner participates in co-creating his or her partner’s queer gender. While work on gender labour thus far has focused on contemporary...

Milton’s Paradise Lost: Previously Unrecognized Allusions to the Aurora Borealis, and a Solution to the Comet Conundrum in Book 2

Contributor(s): Clifford J. Cunningham

This article reveals that John Milton employed an allusion to the aurora borealis in book 6 (79–83) of Paradise Lost, unrecognized in more than three centuries of scholarly analysis. Two other likely allusions, and one certain, to the aurora have also been identified. This research casts doubt on...

Velázquez’s Democritus: Global Disillusion and the Critical Hermeneutics of a Smile

Contributor(s): Jimena Berzal de Dios

Velázquez’s Democritus (ca. 1630) presents a unique encounter: not only are there few depictions in which the Greek philosopher appears with a sphere that shows an actual map, but Velázquez used a court jester as a model for Democritus, thus placing the philosopher within a courtly space. When we...

Recasting Recantation in 1540s England: Thomas Becon, Robert Wisdom, and Robert Crowley

Contributor(s): Kate Roddy

The legacy of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments has urged scholars of the English Reformation to consider martyrdom the ultimate act of resistance, and recantation as an embarrassing lapse of faith. However, more recent criticism has drawn attention to the subversive potential of the false...

Tommaso Campanella in the Schulmetaphysik: The Doctrine of the Three Primalities and the Case of the Lutheran Liborius Capsius (1589–1654) in Erfurt

Contributor(s): Marco Lamanna

Following some recent findings, this essay presents the first known case of the reception of the doctrine of the primalities (power, knowledge, and love) by the Italian Tommaso Campanella within German scholastic philosophy, the so-called Schulmetaphysik. Here, the focus is on the Lutheran...

Monstrous Births and Imaginations: Authorship and Folklore in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Contributor(s): Lisa Walters

The amateur actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are compared several times with the fairies who inhabit a forest outside of Athens. This article will investigate the significance of the analogy by exploring commonalities between discursive elements in folklore, physiology, and philosophy that...

Preface

Contributor(s): Konrad Eisenbichler

Sixteenth-Century Polymaths in the Print and Publishing Business in Basel: An Intersection of Interests and Strategies (1472–1513)

Contributor(s): Valentina Sebastiani, Wendell Ricketts

In sixteenth-century Europe the business of printing created small intellectual communities that had the ability to manage the exigencies of the market and those of culture. In this process of continual negotiation between the interests of publishers, authors, and readers, how did men of letters...

Phaeton’s Flight, Adonis’s Trial, and Minerva in the House of Envy: 
Lodovico Dolce between Ovid and Ariosto

Contributor(s): Andrea Torre

Introducing Thyeste: Tragedia da Seneca (1547), the Venetian writer Lodovico Dolce (1508–68) defines the art of translating a book as an experience that lives in the “perspective of the becoming [...] because in order to translate, it is necessary for us to take another language or (if possible)...

Dialogic Construction and Interaction in Lodovico Domenichi’s La nobiltà delle donne

Contributor(s): Laura Prelipcean

Lodovico Domenichi (1515–64), one of the major polymaths of sixteenth-century Italy, is currently enjoying a marked revival in the critical literature. Although he has been studied in the context of his contemporary printing and publishing activities, the dissemination of works in the vernacular,...

Michael Servetus’s Britain: Anatomy of a Renaissance Geographer’s Writing

Contributor(s): Peter Hughes

Michael Servetus was a theologian, physician, astrologer, and editor. In the latter capacity he edited two editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia, to which he added some apparatus and several articles that described European countries and peoples. Following in the footsteps of medieval and Renaissance...

Erudite Cultural Mediators and the Making
 of the Renaissance Polymath: The Case of Giorgio Fondulo and Janello Torriani

Contributor(s): Cristiano Zanetti

Janello Torriani, also known by his Spanish name Juanelo Turriano (Cremona ca. 1500–Toledo 1585), was a blacksmith, locksmith, constructor of scientific instruments, famous inventor of mechanical devices, automata-maker, clockmaker to Emperor Charles V, hydraulic engineer, mathematician,...

The Inaudible Music of the Renaissance: From Marsilio Ficino to Robert Fludd

Contributor(s): Roseen H. Giles

This article revaluates the significance of musical treatises written by the Ficinian physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637). By reconsidering the implications of Fludd’s interpretation of Marsilio Ficino’s musical philosophy, I propose that his “reconstruction” of the Renaissance outlook in the...

Marguerite de Navarre, a Nicodemite? Adiaphora and Intention in Heptaméron 30, 65, and 72

Contributor(s): Scott Francis

This article situates Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron within the reformist debate over adiaphora, or theologically indifferent matters made righteous or sinful by the believer’s intentions and conscience. It discusses how adiaphora and their implications for Christian liberty and Catholic...

“Encores me frissonne et tremble le coeur dedans sa capsule”: Rabelais’s Anatomy of Emotion and the Soul

Contributor(s): Emmanuelle Lacore-Martin

This article examines the role of anatomical references in the representation of emotion and argues that they constitute textual markers of the Rabelaisian view of the relationship between the body and the soul, and the nature of the soul itself. By analyzing the ancient models of natural...

Aristotle and the People: Vernacular Philosophy in Renaissance Italy

Contributor(s): Marco Sgarbi

The essay focuses on vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, which began to gain currency in the 1540s, just as the vernacular was beginning to establish itself as a language of culture and the Counter-Reformation was getting underway. With over three hundred printed and manuscript...