This essay examines performances by singer Vittoria Archilei and actress Isabella Andreini at the 1589 wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici. It argues that, in the charged political context of the marriage festivities, Archilei and Andreini evoked for audiences the ancient Roman figure of the sibyl. Specifically, their performances underscored the symbolic Medici identification with Apollo and ...
Discharging Pistols at the Sky
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The anonymous tragedy Arden of Faversham has long been recognized as a play that explores the intersection of the public and private spheres of early modern English life, an intersection articulated through the use of violence as a means of political dissent against oppressive patriarchal and class structures. This essay reconsiders the efficacy of the play’s revolutionary violence, arguing...
Politics of Pedagogy
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Strained relations between the University of Padua and the nearby Jesuit college exploded in 1591: university students vandalized the Jesuit campus, shot muskets, and ran around naked. University professor Cesare Cremonini blamed the Jesuits and successfully lobbied the government to restrict the college to Jesuit novices. This article analyzes works by Paolo Sarpi, Cesare Cremonini, Antonio ...
Guyon’s Wolf-Boy of the Ardennes
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Feral children narratives have provided the opportunity for many authors to explore the boundary between civilization and nature and what gives some the special ability to cross it. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, interest in such stories grew and a cluster of related stories circulated in Western Europe. The most detailed account in this “first cluster” was the wolf-boy...
Religous Refugees and the Search for Public Worship
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In the late sixteenth century, the imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire hosted thousands of religious refugees from England, France, and the Low Countries. Accommodating these newcomers, who rarely spoke German and often practiced a different form of Protestantism, proved daunting. In the case of Frankfurt am Main, two minority worship arrangements emerged: private worship in houses and...
Infant Christ at the Spanish Court
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This essay examines the religious practice of Sor Margarita de la Cruz (1567–1633), a niece of Philip II who spent her adult life as a nun at the Descalzas Reales in Madrid. At the center of Margarita’s devotional practice were highly lifelike polychrome sculptures of the Christ child, which she cradled and clothed, imitating and reinforcing the dynastic rituals of motherhood performed by...