In 1572, Mechelen was the first city to be sacked by a Habsburg army during the Dutch Revolt. The Duke of Alba punished its citizens for having opened the gates to rebels. In 1580, the city was sacked again, this time by a Protestant rebel army. Being sacked acutely raised the question of what it meant to be part of a civic community. In both cases, however, political circumstances made it ...
Between Remembrance and Oblivion: Negotiating Civic Identity after the Sacks of Mechelen (1572,1580)
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Dinner with the Greatest Man on Earth, or, Erasmus’s Sword and d’Alviano’s Pen
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Late in his life, Desiderius Erasmus recalled a dinner invitation that he once received from the mercenary captain Bartolomeo d’Alviano (1455–1515). At the time, Erasmus was in Venice working with Aldus Manutius on the 1508 edition of his Adages, and d’Alviano was captain general of Venice’s army. Although Erasmus dismissed d’Alviano as a man of war, this article proposes that the men shared a...
English Publications of German Protestantism during the Reign of Elizabeth I
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This article examines a wide range of theological writings by Germans and theologians trained in Germany published in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). It looks beyond Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Bullinger to acknowledge the variety of German Protestant authors who found an audience among Elizabethans. The relative breadth of works published and republished in...
Preposterous Glossing: Queer Editing and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender
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This article examines the paratexts of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) to discuss the queer potential of textual editing in early modern literary culture. The verse of The Shepheardes Calender is framed by an elaborate set of glosses, compiled by an editor called “E. K.” As an anti-normative editorial presence, E. K. reframes the meaning of the text and exposes the...
Anno Domini-Dated Coins in Europe, 1450–1600: Numismatics and Early Modern Political Culture
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Urging early modernists to make better use of the era’s preserved high-prestige coins, this essay is centered around their permanent adoption of Anno Domini dates, normally written in Arabic numerals, throughout early modern Latin Christendom, primarily from 1450 to 1600. Drawn mainly from electronic catalogs of a few major numismatic collections, especially the American Numismatic Society in...
The Dais and the Artistic Objects in the Proxy Marriage of Infanta Beatrice of Portugal, Duchess ...
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In 1521, Infanta Beatriz of Portugal married Charles II of Savoy, leaving Lisbon for good with her dowry, retinue, dynastic image of power, and her own agenda. This paper focus on the dais and textiles as devices of Beatrice self-empowerment by analyzing the different perceptions of its symbolic use in two descriptions of the party that followed the wedding and in four episodes of ceremonies ...