Of the several faces identified as self-portraits in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, only the one on the skin held by St. Bartholomew has been widely accepted as such. This essay does not dispute that identification, but does argue against the interpretation of it as a representation of the artist’s psychological torment. Other self-references within the fresco, including one made visible only...
Trust & Enforcement in Brignole Family Business Correspondence
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This study examines the role of trust in Genoese merchant enterprises in the sixteenth century. While great merchants and international financiers could rely on the state and its bank, smaller traders were left to their own devices. With no durable centralized state institutions to regulate and bolster long-distance trade, Genoese merchants relied on informal networks consisting of a...
A Tuscan Feudal Court in the Medici Era (1619–66)
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Expectations of justice in a Tuscan fief were not much different from those of today, because they were deeply rooted in universal emotions governing exchange and reciprocity. Where villagers had easy access to a magistrate (both civil and criminal), they availed themselves of the tribunal whose mechanisms they understood and accepted. The relative efficiency of the feudal tribunal encouraged...
John Foxe & Disorderly Women
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John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments is a formative text of English Protestantism, the martyrs described within it generally thought to have been intended to serve as prototype English Protestants. However, Foxe’s female martyrs, by defying their husbands, frequently subvert expectations for female virtue, which did not go unnoticed by Catholic polemicists. While failing explicitly to defend his...
Providence, Fortune, & Combat in Battlefield Reports, 1570–1637
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Printed English-language battlefield news reports between 1570 and 1637 conveyed to English newsreaders a genre-distinctive discourse of war, whose emphasis on the precise means of battlefield providence conveyed a degree of experimental providentialism considerably beyond the norms of England’s consensually providential culture. This article examines closely the relationship of the news genre...
Women, Honor, & Violence in a Castilian Town, 1600–50
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Honor in early modern Castile has been seen as a code that determined social behavior, notably by defining women’s identities in terms of sexuality and by limiting their behavior. Examining criminal cases that feature nonelite women from Yébenes, a small town near Toledo in Castile, shows that in practice honor was a rhetoric that women used to make their way through the social relations of...