Exemplars: Medieval Manuscripts in Montreal and the McGill University Library Collection of Books of Hours

Contributor(s): Richard Virr

The Books of Hours held by the McGill University Library were mostly acquired as exemplars of medieval books for the Library Museum begun by the university librarian, Dr. Gerhard R. Lomer, in 1920. This study documents their acquisitions in the context of the acquisition of other materials for...

Les complexités hagiographiques, liturgiques et iconographiques d'un livre d'Heures régional (McGill, MS 156)

Contributor(s): Helena Kogen

Le livre d’Heures McGill, MS 156 n’a jamais fait objet d’une étude scientifique exhaustive, hormis quelques notices plaçant son élaboration en Franche-Comté ou en Bourgogne après 1450. En effet, ce manuscrit offre plusieurs difficultés d’identification et d’interprétation. Ainsi, le caractère...

Le livre de raison de Guillaume Tabourot et Jeanne Bernard, notables bourguignons (Heures à l’usage de Rome, Université McGill, MS 154)

Contributor(s): Ariane Bergeron-Foote

Ouvrages précieux pour leurs propriétaires successifs, les livres d’Heures sont parfois riches en renseignements sur les premières familles qui les ont conservés. Certains livres d’Heures sont ainsi augmentés d’un livre de raison, offrant mémoires, évènements marquants et chronologie des temps...

Les reliures des livres d’Heures manuscrits de l’Université McGill et la reliure gothique d’origine du McGill, MS 101

Contributor(s): Geneviève Samson

Une reliure sert avant tout à protéger l’ouvrage qu’elle recouvre. Elle doit aussi être considérée comme un élément autonome qui a son esthétique, ses techniques et son histoire propres. Cet article présentera d’abord, de manière générale, les reliures des neuf livres d’Heures manuscrits...

Les Horae à l’usage d’Autun imprimées pour Simon Vostre (v. 1507) : examen de l’exemplaire conservé à McGill

Contributor(s): Sarah Cameron-Pesant

L’étude des livres d’Heures imprimés destinés à un usage liturgique régional est d’un grand intérêt, puisque, dans le contexte de leur standardisation progressive, l’usage régional dans les Heures imprimées se fait de plus en plus rare à la Renaissance. L’objet de cet article est un livre...

The Musical Encart of the Royal Printers Le Roy & Ballard in the 1583 Hours of Jamet Mettayer Held in the Musée de l’Amérique francophone in Quebec City

Contributor(s): Geneviève B. Bazinet

The Heures de Nostre Dame, a l’usage de Rome: selon la Reformation de Nostre S. Pere pape Pie VI pour la Congregation roiale des penitens de l’Annonciation de Nostre Dame, printed at the request of King Henri III by Royal Printer Jamet Mettayer (Paris, 1583) and held at the Musée de l’Amérique...

Comedy, Satire, Paradox, and the Plurality of Discourses in Cinquecento Italy: Introduction

Contributor(s): Stefano Jossa, Ambra Moroncini

Sex and Marriage in Machiavelli’s Mandragola: A Close(t) Reading

Contributor(s): Konrad Eisenbichler

This article carries out a close reading of Niccolò Machiavelli’s play Mandragola (The mandrake root) from the perspective of sex and gender studies. In so doing, it takes into consideration what the play says or suggests about sexual desire, sexual practices, and conjugal life. This somewhat...

Ariosto’s Astute Arrogance: The Construction of the Comic City in La Lena

Contributor(s): Daragh O’Connell

This essay interrogates Ludovico Ariosto’s theatrical poetics by charting his developing sense of the theatrical space and his embrace of the contemporary. From an initial appropriation of Roman stage models to a more nuanced appreciation of the comic possibilities afforded through a modernizing...

Érasme, l’Arétin et Boccace dans l’invention du discours comique-burlesque d’Annibal Caro

Contributor(s): Ambra Moroncini

This article considers Annibal Caro’s religious sentiments during the years of his most intense comic and paradoxical production: the pre-Tridentine period from 1536 to 1543, a time of tense expectation in Rome for significant Church reform. Although Caro’s religious beliefs never raised...

The Reception of Fernando de Roja’s Celestina in Italy: A Polyphonic Discourse

Contributor(s): Enrica Maria Ferrara

La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas was published in Spain for the first time in 1499 as a comedy, and as a tragicomedy in 1502. The first Italian translation of the play was published in Rome in 1506 and gave birth to a parallel and complementary textual tradition on which the reception and...

Bodily Passions: Physiognomy and Drama in Giovan Battista Della Porta

Contributor(s): Eugenio Refini

This article explores the intersections of physiognomic knowledge and drama in the works of Neapolitan naturalist and playwright Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1616). It first looks at references to theatre—classical drama in particular—in Della Porta’s writings on physiognomy, thus showing...

Self-Portraits of a Truthful Liar: Satire, Truth-Telling, and Courtliness in Ludovico Ariosto’s Satire and Orlando Furioso

Contributor(s): Paola Ugolini

Composed during the most difficult years of Ludovico Ariosto’s relationship with the Este court, the Satire are known for presenting a picture of their author as a simple, quiet-loving man, and also as a man who can speak only the truth. However, the self-portrait offered by the Satire of the...

“E poi in Roma ognuno è Aretino”: Pasquino, Aretino, and the Concealed Self

Contributor(s): Marco Faini

This article explores Pietro Aretino’s pasquinade production as a crucial phase in the construction of his public and literary persona that is characterized by a peculiar effacement of the author’s voice. The article then focuses on issues of anonymity and authorship in the fifteenth and...

“Il ridervi de la goffezza del dire”: Niccolò Franco et la satire napolitaine du pétrarquisme

Contributor(s): Roland Béhar

This essay explores the Neapolitan background of Niccolò Franco and argues that although the main purpose of his Il Petrarchista (Venice, 1539) was certainly a kind of Erasmian and Aretinian satire of the Petrarchist mode which grounded Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525), still not...

Burlesque Connotations in the Pictorial Language in Bronzino’s Poetry

Contributor(s): Carla Chiummo

Agnolo di Cosimo, better known as Bronzino, was not only one of the most celebrated painters at the court of Cosimo I in Florence; he was also a dazzling poet, as Vasari reminds us in his Vite. Bronzino was the author of a Petrarchan canzoniere, as well as of burlesque poems. In his sonetti...

The Question of Esoteric Writing in Machiavelli’s Works

Contributor(s): Rasoul Namazi

The question addressed by this article is whether esotericism or secret teachings exist in Machiavelli’s writings. This question has been a major point of contention between the commentators of Machiavelli, with many denying the existence of esoteric teaching in the Machiavellian corpus. This...

“Of rose and pomegarnet the redolent pryncesse”: Fashioning Princess Mary in 1525

Contributor(s): Stephen Hamrick

While a more accurate appraisal of Mary Tudor’s life and reign is underway, historians of literature continue either to ignore or to misinterpret surviving representations of Princess Mary. To begin correcting this failure, the article analyzes a complex 1525 verse portrait of Mary, setting that...

“No chronicle records his fellow”: Reading Perkin Warbeck in the Early Seventeenth Century

Contributor(s): Igor Djordjevic

This article argues that John Ford’s play Perkin Warbeck should be read in the context of “new” Jacobean readings of the historiography of Henry VII’s reign. After tracing the origins and dissemination of Warbeck’s scaffold confession of imposture, and exposing the sixteenth-century chroniclers’...

Thomas Browne and the Silent Text

Contributor(s): Jessica Wolfe

Throughout his writings, the physician and essayist Thomas Browne (1605–82) grapples with the problem of how and whether to interpret the silence of texts. His innovative solutions to the problem of “negative authority,” the term used in early modern theological debates over the significance, or...