« Si je ne suis pas sans reproches, du moins suis-je sans peur »: la passion dévorante de Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard

Contributor(s): Hervé-Thomas Campangne

Descendant du chevalier Bayard, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard faisait partie de la compagnie de gentilshommes qui accompagnèrent Marie Stuart en Écosse après la mort de François II. Épris de la reine, il se cacha sous son lit en espérant peut-être séduire sa bien-aimée ; la souveraine...

A Fantastic Frenzy of Consumption in Early Modern France

Contributor(s): Kathleen M. Llewellyn

The enthusiastic (even excessive) consumerism of contemporary western society has its roots, according to some, in the expansion of the consumption of goods in Renaissance Europe. Early modern men and women were ardent, even “passionate” consumers. Such self-indulgence was regarded as decadent...

« Quant à ce beau discours du mespris du monde ... »: Foi calviniste et plaisirs mondains chez quatre grandes dames de la Réforme en France

Contributor(s): Jane Couchman

Le rejet des « vanités de ce monde » tient, on le sait, une place prépondérante dans la théologie calviniste. Cette étude explore le rôle de ces « plaisirs mondains » dans les lettres et les mémoires de quatre des grandes dames de la Réforme en France : Louise de Coligny (1555–1620),...

Playing with Fire: Narrating Angry Women and Men in the Heptaméron

Contributor(s): Emily E. Thompson

In De Ira, Seneca dedicates three books to the denunciation of anger, a passion he insists serves no necessary purpose and leads to countless ills. Certainly Marguerite de Navarre acknowledges the violent potential of this passion in the stories of the Heptaméron. Yet her devisants not only...

Laughing at Unbearable Urges: Reshaping the Male-Authored Script of Desire

Contributor(s): Dora E. Polachek

As Pierre Champion noted a half a century ago, “ The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles open a secret door into the house of men of that time.” The misogynous aspect of these novellas, designed to inspire laughter, is evident in most of the stories dealing with masculine drives and uncontrollable desires...

Preface

Contributor(s): Vanessa McCarthy, Amyrose McCue Gill

Introduction

Contributor(s): Ian Frederick Moulton

On Lesbian Acts and Female Pleasures in Juvenal Commentaries from Antiquity to 1500

Contributor(s): Marc D. Schachter

This article explores the representation of sex between women in an understudied archive: commentaries on Juvenal’s Satires from antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century. By tracking the changes in glosses to a passage in the Sixth Satire that refers to sex between women, it contributes to...

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...