Around the mid-sixteenth century Humanist prelates were conflicted in their efforts to combine the conventions of their cultural heritage and the new religious requirements.
In the field of personal commemoration, the humanist praise of humankind—which led to magnificent Renaissance monuments—stood in contrast to the renewed emphasis on personal humbleness. This perplexing situation is...
This article examines a document in the Spanish National Archive at Simancas, which entails a list of urban reform projects for Madrid in its early years as both court and de facto capital of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. Herein, the document is dated to 1565 and attributed to Francisco de Sotomayor, a corregidor, or royal governor of the city appointed by Philip II. Sotomayor’s report on...
John Day is perhaps best known as the printer of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, usually referred to as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Other lucrative Elizabethan patents held by John Day, such as those for the Metrical Psalms, the ABC, and the Catechism, ensured considerable financial return and a revered, if not envied, status among Elizabethan printers. Only the Queen’s Printer, Christopher...
The Scot Thomas Dempster (ca.1574–1625) was an idiosyncratic classical scholar whose brief appointment as royal historian to James I has previously been overlooked. This article examines what Dempster wrote to explain why James chose to support him in 1615, and argues that by appointing Dempster, James reacted to recent debates about the political importance of historical research in England...
The historiography of early modern Netherlands is notably silent about one of the major figures involved in the Catholic Reformation in the region: Andrés de Soto,
Franciscan confessor of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, cosovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands. Between 1599 and 1625, Soto participated in many activities pertaining to the spiritual counseling of his princely penitent and...
Michelangelo signed only one work with his name, the Pietà in Saint Peter’s Basilica. As his first public commission in Rome, the sculpture gave the young artist an opportunity to establish his reputation and public image. The band across the Virgin’s chest serves no other function than to hold Michelangelo’s signature, which was not added as an afterthought as Vasari claimed in his 1568...
