This article explores the Aragonese Inquisition and its prosecution of homosexual sodomy in terms of the types of men tried and the attitudes of both local denouncers and inquisitorial magistrates, given the important separation of the judicial process into denunciation and trial. The diverging views regarding sexuality and deviance between Aragonese peoples and the judges manning the...
Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England
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This article treats book burning and censorship in England between the 1520s and the 1640s as part of the communications repertoire of the early modern state. Combating heresy, blasphemy, and sedition, Tudor and Stuart authorities subjected transgressive works to symbolic execution at key sites in London and the universities. The addition of the hangman to the ceremony in the 1630s reinforced...
Forty Hours Celebrations in the Duchy of Chablais, 1597–98
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This article explores Catholic missionaries’ use of emotions to promote conversions in the duchy of Chablais from 1597 to 1598, highlighting in particular three Forty Hours Devotions celebrated in the Alpine villages of Annemasse and Thonon. Evoking early Christianity through images of the Eucharist and the Crucifixion, a small band of missionaries, led by François de Sales and Capuchin...
Self-Representation in Della Porta’s “Della Fisonomia Dell’uomo”
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This article examines Giovan Battista Della Porta’s Della Fisonomia Dell’uomo as a public relations exercise, carried out on behalf of the author himself, other intellectuals, and potential noble patrons. Della Porta’s study of human physiognomy includes engravings of famous men and often documents their physical appearances. This article assesses the connections between Della Porta’s treatise...
Diplomacy, King, & Country in Wyatt’s Poetry
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This article reexamines the long-established connection between Thomas Wyatt’s poetry and his experience as a diplomat in France and Italy in 1526 and 1527 and at the court of Emperor Charles V between 1537 and 1540. Two diplomatic incidents— one from Wyatt’s experience and another from the period of Henry VIII’s divorce— are discussed in relation to the use of reported and ventriloquized...
Velázquez’s “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
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This essay offers a new reading of Diego Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1618) by relating it to religious discourse in the artist’s native Seville. Through an analysis of previously unstudied Sevillian writings, this article argues that the painting’s compositional structure entreats the beholder to use the corporeal register of the foreground as a means of entry into the...