The Shroud of Turin experienced its most intense devotional enthusiasm in the century after its first public exhibition in Turin in 1578. During this period, the cloth and its mysterious imprint of Christ’s body transcended the static nature of an icon by becoming a performative image in the context of private devotional worship. Operating in consort with devotional texts, the figuration of...
The Piety of Female Friendship: Convent and Court in Sixteenth-Century Mantua
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This article analyzes friendship bonds in letters between the marchesa of Mantua, Isabella d’Este, and female religious in Mantua and Ferrara. The letters reveal significant and lifelong relationships between women that bridged the gap between spheres of activity and experience. Their content discloses a female community network that was based on, in, and through particular convents, the roles...
The Mémoire of the Advocate David and the Discrediting of the Guises
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In 1576, during the French Wars of Religion, the advocate Jean David died under mysterious circumstances while returning from Rome to Paris. Among his effects was allegedly an account of a meeting with the pope that outlined a plot to overthrow Henri III, king of France, and to replace him with the Duke of Guise in order to ensure France’s Catholic allegiance. Two versions of David’s Mémoire...
Noisy Soundscapes and Women’s Institutions in Early Modern Florence
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This study examines sonic legislation that was increasingly enacted in and around women’s institutions (convents, charity homes, and reform houses) in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Florence. Monitoring the sounds cloistered women made and heard was considered key to reform, the maintenance of social status, and the advancement of bodily/spiritual purity. Efforts to regulate urban sounds...
The Dispersal of Francis Walsingham’s Papers
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The papers of Francis Walsingham, being the first batch of secretarial documents deposited in the State Paper Office, initiated the whole business of archiving English State Papers and illustrated how the early State Papers were dispersed into private collections. This article aims to present the formation of the Tudor State Papers by explaining Walsingham’s secretarial procedures in ...