This article examines Charles Butler’s beekeeping treatise The Feminine Monarchie (1609), the first to popularize the notion of the queen bee. Butler espouses firsthand scientific knowledge in the empirical tradition, yet he includes a bizarre story of plague-stricken bees that are miraculously cured after fashioning a wax chapel for a Catholic Host. By examining Butler’s source story, ...
Class, Humanism, and Neo-Latin Epitaphs in Early Modern England: The Funerary Inscriptions of ...
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Exploring the interplay between class and classical languages in early modern England, this essay examines the funerary inscriptions that Elizabeth Russell wrote for her male relatives. Most critical treatments of Russell’s funerary poetry have focused on her public self-representation as a grieving widow who used her classical education to evoke and circumvent early modern limitations on...
Patrick Finglas’s A Breviat of the Conquest of Ireland and of the Decay of the Same, ca. 1535 ...
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Anglophone historians are generally familiar with a handful of treatises on Tudor Ireland, notably Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. Yet it is less known that there were over six hundred of these treatises written on Ireland during the sixteenth century, and that there is substantial reason to believe that one of the most significant of these was A Breviat of the...
A Model Widow: The Portrait of Vittoria Orsini in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome
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The portrait bust of Vittoria della Tolfa Orsini (d. August/September 1586) occupies the central niche of her funerary monument, opposite that of her husband, in the chapel she erected in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome. Visual and documentary evidence challenges the assumption that the chapel’s ensemble, and the portrait in particular, realized the donor’s intentions. Indeed, the bust was...
The “Hairy War” (1640–50): Historicizing the Bible in the Dutch Republic on the Eve of Spinoza
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This article argues that the textual criticism and historicization of the Bible was not the prerogative of radical thinkers, but was developed within the boundaries of orthodox Calvinism and widely disseminated in the 1640s in the Dutch Republic. Since this biblical philology was of a high standard, it makes little sense to label the time before Spinoza as a “precritical” period. This appears ...