In the sixteenth century, papal anatomy and its depiction in the news became a matter of central importance to politics and religion in Rome. Although papal bodies had been imbued with symbolic meaning from the early Middle Ages and examined after death from the thirteenth century, the early modern period brought significant change in how the body was treated. In particular, twin developments...
Rubens’s Dying Seneca and Masculinity
Read more
This essay reconstructs the reception of Rubens’s moving painting of Seneca’s death (ca. 1615, Alte Pinakothek, Munich), based on Tacitus’s narrative in the Annals, by men who were its likely target audience: educated professionals influenced by Neostoicism and Justus Lipsius’s works. Although both art historians and classicists have discussed this work for its illumination of Rubens’...
Travails of the Widow in Law in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century: An Illustrative Case
Read more
Likely to outlive their typically older husbands, Florentine widows’ fate and that of their property were of abiding concern to husbands and their heirs. Widows’ dowries especially represented a “debt” for the husbands, which came due on the dissolution of marriage. A debt, however, in Florence and elsewhere, existed on the basis of trust, which for dowry arose at the point it was pledged by a...
Remembering the Revolt of the Low Countries: Historical Canon Formation in the Dutch Republic ...
Read more
The Revolt of the Netherlands broke out in 1566 and within two decades tore apart the Low Countries. Especially in the northern Dutch Republic, a relatively aconfessional national historical canon of the history of the Revolt emerged subsequently. Before the “memory boom” of the late twentieth century, historians have considered this interest in the rebellion’s history as a self-evident result...
Closing the Painful Book: John Bale among the Elizabethans
Read more
The subject of this essay is John Bale’s short-lived experience of the Elizabethan religious settlement and the reception of his work following his death in 1563. In particular, my focus is Bale’s apparent marginalization. Prior to Bale’s death, the poet Barnabe Googe appealed to his friend for quiet, urging him to close the painful book, and where it did survive through reprinting, Bale’s...