Although twenty-first-century scholarship tends to see the connections between music and poetry in terms of mellifluousness, rhythm, meter, and the like, early modern poets understood those connections as a poetic discourse that interacts with, destabilizes, or undermines the social and literary contexts in which it appears. Lute poems provide fascinating opportunities to explore the...
Singers and Lutes, Lutes and Singers: Musical Performance and Poetic Discourse in Early Modern Songs
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Lorenzo “Spirito” Gualtieri’s Libro delle Sorti in Renaissance Perugia
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Renaissance lot books, sometimes called books of fortune or books of sorts, first attracted scholarly attention in the mid-1800s and have since then been discussed in general terms with reference to pagan and Christian divination and medieval astrological prophecy. Although most studies focus on the sixteenth-century printed lot books, an examination of the only hand-painted example known...
Marguerite de Navarre and Ambiguous Deceit
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This paper looks at deceit’s ambivalent nature in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. The first part of the article is made up of an overview of how legal commentators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries understood the notion of deceit as both good (dolus bonus) and bad (dolus malus). The second part turns to Marguerite de Navarre’s activities in the fall of 1525, when she was trying to...
Ministry in the Margins: Thomas Swalwell, OSB, and His Marginal Notes for Preaching on the Clergy
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Thomas Swalwell, OSB (d. 1539), monk of Durham, left significant marginalia in his many books. Well educated and reform minded, Swalwell’s notes indicate his high expectations for the clergy. In addition, these notes suggest how he might have preached on this topic, using both the homily and the scholastic sermon style. Prelates and curates were to be engaged with those in their charge, not...
Courtesy, Cultivation, and the Ethics of Discernment in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene
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Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene examines courtesy’s social and moral demands, reframing the conceptual parameters of courtesy by suggesting the courteous performance and aesthetic experience are mutually informing. Although Continental conduct books had long established courtesy as a social expedient, Spenser swerves away from the narrow field of the social by opening courtesy up to the...