This article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Habsburg-Valois Italian Wars. It explores the ways that hat badges, round gold or bronze accessories worn on male headwear, were idiosyncratic examples of jewelry that partook in ritual acts of deference that characterized visual power plays between men during the period 1494 to 1559. Far from being mere...
Adorning Masculinities? The Commissioning and Wearing of Hat Badges during the Habsburg-Valois Itali
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Gender and Materiality in Early Modern English Gloves
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This article explores the complex interactions of gender with the materiality of the processes of becoming and being a glove in the early modern period. Through an investigation of gloves, glove parts, and their ephemeral presentation (through leather, embroidery, and perfume), we argue that gender and materiality act in dialogic ways to produce power relations, and that considerations of...
“But Who Can Assure Himselfe Not To Be Deceived in Matters Concerning Spirits?” Discernment as ...
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This article analyzes the relationship between demonology and discernment of spirits in sixteenth-century Europe. Discernment was a theoretical and practical device employed to distinguish between spirits (divine, demonic, human). More often than not, as it dealt with pneumatology (the ontology and action of spirits), it was closely coupled with demonological discourse. As the article suggests...
Untranslatable Huacas: The Languages of Cultural Appropriation in Early Modern Spanish Chronicles...
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This article examines a series of chronicles in Spanish written in the second half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries by focusing on the untranslatability of the Quechua term w’aka. I explore a corpus of texts that present different interpretations of the word, which is transcribed as huaca or guaca in Spanish sources. The article examines the untranslatability of the word in...
Bedding Agostino Chigi: Sodoma’s Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne in the Villa Farnesina
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A reconsideration of The Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne, completed ca. 1518 by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (il Sodoma) for the bedroom of Agostino Chigi (1466–1520) at the Villa Farnesina (Rome), reveals a new understanding of the fresco as a means for promoting the banker-patron’s nobility and legitimacy. The inclusion of a grand, four-poster bed in the final composition expresses the patron’s...
The Means to Rebuild the Church: Franco-Italian Networks, Lay Piety, and Religious Patronage in ...
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Catholic churches throughout southern France suffered the ravages of religious violence during the French Wars of Religion (1559–1629). Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the provinces of southern France became the focus of Catholic renewal within France, and one of the most important areas of Catholic Reformation in all of Europe. The Catholic revival in southern France involved a...