The last work of English humanist Henry Parker, Lord Morley, “An Account of Miracles Performed by the Holy Eucharist,” contained valuable advice for the realm’s first ruling queen, Mary Tudor. Cognizant of the special challenges facing a female ruler, Morley delineated guidelines enabling the new queen to combine an active public life with traditional pious devotions to which Mary was...
Concerning Sex Changes: The Cultural Significance of a Renaissance Medical Polemic
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This article examines the medical literature of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries concerning the sexual transmutation of females into males. One explanation for the phenomenon, the so-called one-sex model attributed to Aristotle, does not figure prominently in the writings of the early physicians after 1575. That such a transformation was even possible was entirely discounted by...
“Our Particular Cloister”: Ursulines and Female Education in Seventeenth-Century Parma and Piacenza
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This article discusses the relationship between enclosure and female education for Ursuline religious women in seventeenth-century Parma and Piacenza. These women, under the protection and jurisdiction of the Farnese court, did not submit to the strict religious enclosure that confined most early modern religious women. Instead, they negotiated a particular form of cloister that permitted them...
Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World
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While Venetians were not the discoverers or explorers of the New World, Venice was the capital of early modern print culture and transmitted knowledge about the explorations to Europe. A close look at the work of a series of Venetian armchair travelers—editors, mapmakers, and designers of costume books—reveals the profound anxieties these authors expressed about Venice’s changing status in...
Private Confession and the Lutheranization of Sixteenth-Century Nördlingen
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This article seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature on confessionalization by showing how private confession served as an important marker of official confessional identity in the German Reformation. The discussion focuses on Nördlingen, a Swabian imperial city that has received very little attention from English-speaking Reformation scholars. The article begins with a discussion of...