This article concerns attitudes to melancholia and melancholic painters in the literature of the arts from sixteenth-century Italy, and focuses primarily on the writings of Giorgio Vasari, with some attention also to texts by Pino, Dolce, Lomazzo, and others. Remarks made by these authors are analyzed in relation to other sources of primary evidence, ranging from a carnival song to a treatise...

Many scholars have stressed the favor shown to the bastard sons of noblemen, particularly in the "golden age of noble bastards" in the fifteenth century This article examines the position of noble bastards in Southwest Germany, using the Zimmerische Chronik (written in the 1560s) and regional studies of counts and barons in Swabia and Franconia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The...

Henri Estienne (also Henricus Stephanus, called le Grand) is one of the most important printers, editors, dictionary writers, philologists, and religious controversialists of the sixteenth century. This essay argues that allegations of unmanliness and sodomy against (Catholic) Italians-in short, forms of "xenohomophobia" inform not only his writings that participate in the post-Reformational...