bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dostoevskii, the Jewish Question, and The Brothers Karamazov
Authors: Shrayer Maxim D.
Published: April 2006

In this article, Maxim D. Shrayer offers a new perspective on Fedor Dostoevskii’s writings about the Jews. Following a trajectory initiated by Vladimir Solov'ev and Leonid Grossman, Shrayer argues that for Dostoevskii the Jewish question is primarily religious, rather than social or ethnic. Through close textual analysis, but also by placing the controversial blood libel episode fromThe Brothers Karamazovin the larger context of Dostoevskii’s fictional and discursive works, Shrayer links the anti-Semitic charges of ritual murder and host profanation with the story of Captain Snegirev and his son Iliusha. In the story of the Snegirevs, Shrayer identifies Dostoevskii’s keen understanding of (religious) intolerance and scapegoating. Shrayer demonstrates that the conclusion ofThe Brothers Karamazov(Iliusha Snegirev’s funeral) recalls “The Funeral of ‘The Universal Man’” from the March 1877 issue ofThe Diary of a Writerand thus points to Dostoevskii’s view of the Christian-Judaic reconciliation.
Comrades into Citizens? Russian Political Culture and Public Support for the Transition
Authors: Bahry Donna
Published: April 2006

Since 1989, the question of public values has been one of the most critical and the most controversial in the study of postcommunist politics. While there seems to be a consensus that people should accept democratic and market-based norms, there is little agreement on how much they actually do so—or on how much they need to, if markets and democracy are to survive.
Thinking about Democracy: Interviews with Russian Citizens
Authors: Carnaghan Ellen
Published: April 2006

Using new evidence from forty-seven formal in-depth interviews conducted with Russian citizens in 1998 and 2000, this article dissects Russian popular attitudes toward democracy. Rather than asking the usual question—are Russians democratic enough for their new institutions—Carnaghan examines what Russians find troubling or difficult about their new political institutions and what they would change. Listening to Russian voices makes it clear that much of what looks like flawed support for some aspects of democracy, particularly the operation of legislative institutions and the role of law in organizing society, can be better understood as a fairly nuanced critique of the flawed operation of those institutions. Carnaghan's respondents like democracy in the abstract better than they like the version they have at home. Yet their disillusionment regarding the ability of ordinary citizens to influence officials also means that they are unwilling to work very hard to improve those institutions or to deepen the democracy they have.
Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegit liubovnye and the Development of Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence
Authors: Vroon Ronald
Published: April 2006

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.
The Strange Relationship of Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich as Told by Anton Lavrent'evich G-v
Authors: Cravens Craig
Published: April 2006

The first-person narrative form is notoriously problematic. Throughout the history of the novel, it has both repelled authors due to the obvious limitations imposed by its restriction to a single consciousness and attracted them because of the apparent veracity it imparts to psychological portrayal. In the most conscientiously constructed examples of the type, the first-person narrator is able to portray directly the thoughts of a single character only, that is, himself. Of other characters, he can only report actions and surmise motives, and these characters to whom the reader does not have cognitive privilege may appear to be two-dimensional or even come off as caricatures.

Fedor Dostoevskii'sBesy(Demons, 1871-72) is a first-person memoir novel. My thesis is that the novel's narrative form itself involves the reader psychologically and morally in problems that occupied Dostoevskii throughout his life—problems of freedom, contingency, and eternity.
Who Was Tsar Dmitrii?
Authors: Dunning Chester
Published: April 2006

In this article, Dunning challenges traditional scholarship concerning the identity and character of Tsar Dmitrii (reigned 1605-06), better known as the “False Dmitrii“—the only tsar ever raised to the Russian throne by means of a military campaign and popular uprisings. Usually dismissed as a frivolous impostor who was despised by his subjects for being a tool of Polish intervention in Russia’s Time of Troubles, Tsar Dmitrii turns out to have been a charismatic, well-educated warrior-prince who was revered by many of his subjects. Furthermore, he truly believed that he was the youngest son of Ivan die Terrible. This article deconstructs the legends and scholarship identifying Tsar Dmitrii as the lascivious and bloodthirsty monk-sorcerer, Grishka Otrep’ev and demonstrates that the faulty image of Tsar Dmitrii has been shaped by historians’ overreliance on folklore and on the propaganda manufactured by Dmitrii’s enemies. Dunning calls for a new biography of this mysterious and controversial ruler.
Boundaries of Art in Nabokov'sThe Gift: Reading as Transcendence
Authors: Blackwell Stephen H.
Published: April 2006

The author's actual creative act always proceeds along the boundaries of the aesthetic world, along the boundaries of the reality of the given, along the boundary of the body and the boundary of the spirit.

—M. M. Bakhtin

The spirit finds loopholes, transluscences in the world's finest texture.

—V. V. Nabokov, "How I Love You"

Are boundaries real? This, to a certain extent, is the central question posed byThe Giftwhen Fyodor suggests that "definitions are always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet." Written in one of the most border-conscious eras of history (the Treaty of Versailles had just created nine new independent countries and changed the boundaries of many others), Vladimir Nabokov's last complete Russian novel addresses head-on the most pressing issues he and his fellow emigres faced. Cast beyond the edge of their homeland, the exiles were forced to accept unnaturally restricted movement within Europe as well, due to their lack of a valid nationality. So one might say that for Russian exiles of the 1920s and 1930s, boundaries constituted the single most unrelenting feature of reality.
Titus Andronicus and 'The Shearmen and Taylors' Play'
Authors: Harvey Nancy Lenz
Published: April 2006

Titus andronicus has long been recognized as a play wherein Shakespeare, as novice playwright, manipulated numerous plots and stage devices into an integrated whole. In an eighteenth-century chapbook, for instance, both R. M. Sargeant and J. C. Maxwell see the possible source of the main story in the prose rendition ‘The History of Titus Andronicus.’ From Kyd, Shakespeare borrowed the revenge play feigned madness of Hieronimo, the Senecan gore, the passive-to-active protagonist. From the morality plays, he borrowed the figures of Revenge, Rapine, and Murder. From Seneca's Thyestes, he borrowed the revenge of Atreus and the mad banquet; from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the rape of Philomela; from Bandello's Novella, the cruel Moor; from North's Plutarch, the revolt of Coriolanus; from the Appius and Virginia story, the sacrifice of the dishonored daughter; from Seneca's Troades, the sacrifice of the innocent captive to the honor of the dead warriors.
Leyden and the ‘fortuna’ of Apicius
Authors: Milham Mary Ella
Published: April 2006

In 1968 at the Bodleian Library in Oxford I discovered Joseph Scaliger's copy of the Roman cookbook of Apicius, which provided several new pieces of evidence for the continuation of my studiesof the fortunaof that author into the seventeenth century.

The Scaliger Apicius bears a note on its flyleaf in an early hand quoting from Struvius; from this reference, I discovered that at the beginning of the seventeenth century Lorenzo Pignoria of Padua (1571-1631) had offered his manuscript of Apicius, of which I have written elsewhere, to Marcus Welser of Augsburg for the use of the Wechel press.
Drayton's “To the Virginian Voyage”: From Heroic Pastoral to Mock-Heroic
Authors: West Michael D.
Published: April 2006

From their early appearance in Idea the Shepheards Garland to their luminous apotheosis in The Muses Elizium, visions of the idyllic world of pastoral haunted Drayton's thought, as they haunted the Elizabethan culture he typified. At the same time he shared the Renaissance's admiration for the martial glories of the epic. Although in its various versions The Barons Wanes is perhaps his most ambitious effort in this genre, the depth of his response is also evident in the exultant rhythms of his paean to true English hearts, the famous and deservedly beloved ‘Ballad of Agincourt.’ Of particular interest in ‘To the Virginian Voyage’ is the curious inconsistency that results when Drayton tries to combine the attractions of both pastoralism and heroism in the same poem.
Pythagorean Symhola in Erasmus’ Adagia
Authors: Heninger S. K.
Published: April 2006

Few books have been more successful than Erasmus’ Adagia,
judged either by the author's intention or the readers’ satisfaction. In the
preface to the modest first edition—Veterum maximeque insignium
paroemiarum id est adagiorum collectanea (Paris, 1500)—Erasmus
stressed the utility of the volume, saying that it provided a model for
style and a storehouse of knowledge and morality. This was Erasmus’ first
book-length publication; and generation after generation demanded fresh
versions, so that he continued to enhance it throughout his life. There were
four more editions of the Collectanea before Erasmus
revised and greatly augmented the work for the Aldine press, printed under
the title Adagiorum chiliades tres (Venice, 1508). After
that, there were at least thirty reprints of the
Collectanea by mid-century, and at least forty editions
of the Adagiorum chiliades by the end of the century, not
to mention great numbers of epitomes and extracts and translations. The
Collectanea was a handsome start for a new sort of
career: public education through print.
Duessa and Orgoglio: Red Crosse's Spiritual Fornication
Authors: Douglas Waters D.
Published: April 2006

The theological connotations of Duessa's whoredom with Red Crosse at the fountain and Orgoglio in the castle make it difficult not to see her as a symbolic strumpet in a sixteenth-century Protestant fashion. Stressing her flexible and dynamic traits through a careful modulation of the witch and whore symbols, Spenser consistently shows that she is much more than a one-dimensional symbol, operating in the somewhat static manner of the Renaissance tableau, a characteristic she does undoubtedly partake of in this section of the poem but without losing her inherent dynamism both in the literal story and in the moral and anagogical allegories. The artistic treatment of her role culminates in the dramatic unfolding of Red Crosse's spiritual fornication and its enervating results. As will become clear, there appears to be enough evidence in the poem itself to read ‘physical’ as a symbol of 'spiritual’ fornication.
The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli
Authors: Price Russell
Published: April 2006

In chapter xxv of Il Principe, Machiavelli refers very briefly to men's goals, saying that ‘in the things that lead to the end that everyone has in view, namely glory and riches (cioè glorie e ricchezze), men proceed in different ways.’ L. Arthur Burd observes that ‘Machiavelli dispatches in this one short sentence a question which was usually discussed at length in the earlier political manuals: what is it, namely, that furnishes the motives of action?’ Glory was one of the most important ideas in Renaissance thought, and Machiavelli's thought can be understood only imperfectly if the part that gloria played in it is not grasped; yet inexplicably this theme has been almost entirely neglected.
Luigi Pulci and Late Fifteenth-Century Humanism in Florence
Authors: Lebano Edoardo A.
Published: April 2006

It is a commonly expressed belief that all thinkers, writers, and poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must be regarded as humanists. Such notable scholars as Walser, Pastor, and Anichini have lent considerable support to this opinion; in an effort to disprove the thesis (which has been dominant since the beginning of the century) that humanism is predominantly irreligious and individualistic, they have managed to distinguish between a Christian humanism and a pagan humanism.

On the basis of such a distinction, we should consider even Luigi Pulci and Lorenzo the Magnificent (and why not Machiavelli and Leonardo?) to be humanists of the same calibre as Ficino, Poliziano, Pico, and Erasmus, even though their humanism was more apparent than real.
Aristotle and Utopia
Authors: White Thomas I.
Published: April 2006

The obvious influence of Plato on Utopia and the antagonism of some humanists toward the medieval scholastics and their belief in the primacy of Aristotle seem to have resulted in the impression that Thomas More agreed with this anti-Aristotelianism and that Aristotle had little influence on Utopia. As a result, this matter has never been considered in depth, and important points about both Thomas More and Utopia have been overlooked. That More was an eclectic thinker who was a serious student of classical philosophy and that Utopia is a fine example of this eclecticism have been ignored. And in connection with this, More's knowledge of Aristotle and this philosopher's influence on Utopia have been slighted. Historians of philosophy, for example, ordinarily limit their treatment of More to pointing out the similarities between Utopia and Plato's Republic.
Ruggle's Ignoramus and Humanistic Criticism of the Language of the Common Law
Authors: Tucker E. F. J.
Published: April 2006

According to contemporary observers, George Ruggle's Ignoramus, first staged at Cambridge in March 1614, enjoyed an immense success, or notoriety, both at the university and at “Whitehall while it sent shockwaves through the Inns of Court and infuriated Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The comedy was apparently conceived as an attack upon Francis Brackyn, Recorder of Cambridge and constant adversary of the university, but because of its brilliant and merciless satire of legal jargon, the play achieved a universality which aided James I and the civilian lawyers in their jurisdictional struggles against Coke and the common law bench.
The Visconti-Sforza Regime of Milan: Recently Published Sources
Authors: Ilardi Vincent
Published: April 2006

Professor Caterina Santoro's latest edition of Lombard documents, La politica finanziaria dei Visconti. Documenti. Vol. I, Settembre 1329 - Agosto 1385 (Milan, 1976), offers a convenient opportunity to look back over the last three decades and attempt a brief assessment of similar editions pertaining to the political and administrative history of Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza. With the possible exception of Naples, Milan is the one of the five principal Renaissance states that has attracted the least attention outside Italy, particularly in the United States where one seldom encounters even a review of a book devoted to Lombard history. Yet Milan is not only far more ancient but has been more consistently on the forefront of Italian history than both Florence and Venice on whom non-Italian scholars have concentrated their research efforts.
A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino's First Lectures on Virgil, 1462-63 (Codex 1368, Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome)
Authors: Field Arthur
Published: April 2006

In a prefatory oration in the Florentine Studium in 1462 Cristoforo Landino indicated that his lectures for the coming academic year would be a commentary on Virgil. Hitherto considered lost, this commentary is extant in a complete draft of the lectures, Codex 1368 of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. The manuscript is an important, new source both for Landino's earlier years and for the revival of philosophical studies in Florence in the 1460's: hence this announcement and brief description.

The manuscript has the form of a word-by-word commentary on the first seven books of the Aeneid, although a title, added on the flyleaf by a later hand, promises a commentary on eight books.
The Eponyms of ‘Desiderius Erasmus’
Authors: Boyle Marjorie O'Rourke
Published: April 2006

If, as Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus instructed the schoolboys of Europe, names are indices of reality, what truth of nature or character did he perceive in his own name? The inventive author who invested the act of naming with gravity and wit, punning Folly from More, dubbing his colloquial characters aptly as ‘Cocles’ or ‘Eusebius', reviewed and revised his own name with humanist concern for the alignment of verba with res. As a student he dutifully signed himself ‘Herasmus,’ later dropping the initial consonant, and still later regretting that he had not adopted the more liquid ‘Erasmius.’ ‘Who ever heard of anyone being called “Love“?’ he protested. Rather than the adjectival form i.e., ‘amiable,'would have been more courteous and agreeable he thought.
Of Dialectics and Goat's Blood in an Anecdote by Montaigne
Authors: Cottrell Robert D.
Published: April 2006

In his essay ‘De la ressemblance des enfants aux peres’ (II, 37) Montaigne tells two stories, the second of which is the curious account of how, after hearing that goat's blood was good for one's health, he raised a billy goat and had it slaughtered in the hope of procuring for himself some of this marvelous elixir. Only after the animal had been killed did he begin to have doubts about the medicinal virtues of goat's blood. Amused by his earlier credulousness, Montaigne relates this anecdote in a tone so personal, so affable and self-deprecatory that the reader, won over by the amiability of the speaker, is likely to be sensitive to the human quality of the narrator but unlikely to be attentive to the subtle way in which the text determines his responses or to the author's ulterior motives for eliciting those very responses.
Aurispa, Petrarch, and Lucian: An Aspect of Renaissance Translation
Authors: Cast David
Published: April 2006

‘A great age of literature’ remarked Ezra Pound inMake it New'is perhaps always a great age of translation.’ In this article we will be examining a Latin translation of the twelfthDialogue of the Deadof Lucian by the Italian humanist Giovanni Aurispa, and the influence that this translation, known generally as theComparatio, had in Italy and in other countries of Europe, in France, in Germany, in England, in Spain, and in Bohemia. Such a translation was naturally important. Few educated people in Europe at the time we are concerned with, the fifteenth century, could, or would, read Greek. If they knew anything of a recently discovered writer like Lucian, it was precisely through Latin versions of his work produced by scholars like Aurispa.
’ That Fatal and Perfidious Bark’: A Key to the Double Design and Unity of Milton's Lycidas
Authors: Lautermilch Steven J.
Published: April 2006

John Milton's description in Lycidas of the shipwreck that caused the death of Edward King has generally been interpreted along historical and naturalistic lines. In this essay I want to show that the image of the ship as Ecclesia or the Church, coming as it does in almost the exact center of Lycidas, sheds new light on Milton's use of the Christian and humanistic traditions, its single image identifying and being used to unify his twin aims of satire and elegy.

Merritt Y. Hughes, in his edition of Milton's poetry and major prose, refers to the example of ‘disastrous twilight’ in Paradise Lost (1.597) to explain the reference to ‘th’ eclipse’ (1. 101) as the time of the ship's construction.
Politics and History in the Diary of Marino Sanuto
Authors: Finlay Robert
Published: April 2006

A visitor to Venice in 1513 wanted to see the galleys of the Arsenal, the treasury of San Marco, and the library of Marino Sanuto (1466-1536), thus nicely paying respect to the maritime, religious, and literary aspects of the city. In April 1530, Ferrante Sanseverino, the prince of Salerno and reportedly "a studious man," expressed a desire to meet three Venetians: Pietro Bembo, famous for his poetry; Giovanni Soro, the state secretary in charge of ciphers; and Sanuto, because, claims the diarist, "of the fame I have as a historian."
Robert Waldegrave: The Printer as Agent and Link Between Sixteenth-Century England and Scotland*
Authors: Van Eerde Katherine S.
Published: April 2006

One of the great religio-literary controversies has, for nearly four centuries, involved the question of authorship of the Martin Marprelate Tracts. The tracts themselves deliberately seek to obscure answers, and diverse asseverations on the matter extend from 1588 (the year of the first tracts) to the present.

The printing and publishing of such inflammatory writings as the Marprelate Tracts was, from the beginning, likewise a matter of controversy, although less extensive and less disputed than the authorship.
Alciati's Emblems in Renaissance France
Authors: Russell Daniel
Published: April 2006

By the 1580s Andrea Alciati's reputation was firmly established in France, and for the French there was no doubt that he deserved an honored place among the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. In 1583, Jean de la Gessée placed Alciati between Dorat and Muret as a model to be imitated in Latin and translated into French by aspiring young poets. And hyperbole is too mild a word to describe André Thevet's feverish hymn of praise in his Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). Thevet and most of his other biographers through the end of the seventeenth century remembered Alciati primarily as the jurist and teacher who attracted the attention of François Ier by his brilliant successes at the University of Bourges around 1530. Yet no biographer could entirely neglect his collection of emblems, for they exercised immense influence throughout Europe over a period of more than two hundred years.
Kinship Ties and Young Patricians in Fifteenth-Century Venice
Authors: Chojnacki Stanley
Published: April 2006

Regimes and families: historians have recently enriched our understanding of the patrician regimes of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy by analyzing relations among their component social units. This essay will contribute to this literature by throwing some light on the social structure and practices of the ruling class of fifteenth-century Venice. For a long time, but with quickening rhythm in the last decade or so, historians of Venice have been charting various currents that ran through the Venetian patriciate. On the whole, though, they have preferred to concentrate on political and economic groupings, less on the family and kinship patterns that fascinate investigators of other cities, notably Florence.
Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu*
Authors: Woodbridge Linda
Published: April 2006

Among terminally ill figures of speech, the cliché of rosy cheeks, ruby lips, and snow-white skin may be counted downright deceased. Even in medieval and Renaissance love poetry, roses in the cheeks, lips like cherries or rubies, skin like ivory, lilies, or snow were stiffly conventional: freshness of complexion prompted no freshness of metaphor. The mistress's red-and-white face was relentlessly emblazoned, “red and white” becoming a short-hand notation for feminine beauty: “With lilies white / And roses bright / Doth strive thy colour fair” (Wyatt 65); “Fair is my love … / A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her” (Passionate Pilgrim no. 7); “Thou art not fair for all thy red and white” (Campion 264). The mistress in Spenser's Amoretti has “ruddy cheekes” and “snowy browes” (no. 64); the bride in his Epithalamion is a vision in red and white—cheeks like sun-reddened apples, lips like cherries, forehead like ivory, “breast like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, / Her paps lyke lyllies budded, / Her snowie necke”; when she blushes, “the red roses flush up in her cheekes, / and the pure snow with goodly vermill [vermillion] stayne, / Like crimsin dyde” (Il. 172-7, 226-8).
Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen
Authors: King John N.
Published: April 2006

It is commonly acknowledged that although Elizabeth I vowed herself to a life of perpetual virginity, she entered into a symbolic marriage with England as her husband. In this way she could receive the" adulation of her subjects as the universal object of a Petrarchan religion of love, one that pervaded ballads, pageants, and dramatic entertainments. Scholars claim that she was able to convert her unprecedented weakness as a celibate queen into a powerful propagandistic claim that she sacrificed personal interests in the name of public service.
Spenser's Art of War: Chivalric Allegory, Military Technology, and the Elizabethan Mock-Heroic Sensibility
Authors: West Michael
Published: April 2006

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.
Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries
Authors: Grafton Anthony
Published: April 2006

In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari had heard that Landino would lecture on Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares during the academic year 1465-6. “I am an eager student,” he wrote to Guidetti on 14 September, “and I would be grateful to know what Landino said when he explained the first letter. For in my view it is quite hard because of the historical questions involved, and few have the ability to tackle so great an enterprise.“
The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg
Authors: Bynum Caroline Walker
Published: April 2006

Most of us who inhabit the western, post-Christian world are so accustomed to pictures of the Madonna and child or of the Holy Family that we hardly notice the details. When we encounter such images in museums, on posters, or on Christmas cards, we tend to respond sentimentally if at all. We note whether the baby looks like a baby or not. We are pleased if the figures appear happy and affectionate. Perhaps we even feel gratitude for the somewhat banal support of an institution—the human family—that seems worn a little thin in the modern world. But we are not shocked. Recognizing that the Incarnation is a central Christian tenet, we feel no surprise that Christian artists throughout the western tradition should have painted God as a male baby.
Reflecting Lesser Lights: The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissan*
Authors: DellaNeva JoAnn
Published: April 2006

In a probing article that appeared not very long ago in this journal, G. W. Pigman III called attention to the following passage from Petrarch's Familiares which deals with the Italian author's unconscious reminiscence from well-known and often-read authoritative works:

I have read Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, Tullius not once but countless times … . I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening, I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind. But sometimes I may forget the author, since through long usage and continual possession I may adopt them and for some time regard them as my own; and besieged by the mass of such writings, I may forget whose they are and whether they are mine or others'.
Embroidering with Saintly Threads: María de Zayas Challenges Cervantes and the Church
Authors: Grieve Patricia E.
Published: April 2006

When The Spanish Novella-Writer, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, challenged seventeenth-century male authorities, her challenge embraced both sacred and profane canons. Zayas invests her novellas with the formal properties of hagiography while subverting the ideology of that Church-sanctioned genre. At the same time, Zayas shows herself to be a subtle reader and interpreter of one of Spain's greatest writers, Cervantes, by challenging his attitude to and treatment of women.
Marian Politics in Quattrocento Florence: The Renewed Dedication of Santa Maria del Fiore in 1412
Authors: Bergstein Mary
Published: April 2006

On the Feastday of the Nativity of the Virgin, September 8, 1296, the papal legate of Boniface VIII, Pietro Valeriano di Piperno, blessed the rebuilding of the church of S. Reparata in Florence. In the ceremonial presence of the podestà, the Standard-Bearer of Justice, and the priors of the Signoria, he named the new cathedral “Santa Maria del Fiore.” Arnolfo di Cambio was made chief architect in charge of the renewal; and it was he who began a program of monumental sculpture devoted to the life of the Virgin (fig. 1). Giovanni Villani, who recorded the benediction ceremony in his chronicle, admitted that notwithstanding the rededication of the church to the Virgin and the invention of the poetic name “Santa Maria del Fiore,” most Florentines continued to call the cathedral S. Reparata.
"To Know, To Fly, To Conjure": Situating Baconian Science at the Juncture of Early Modern Modes of Reading
Authors: Solomon Julie Robin
Published: April 2006

This is an Essay About Reading. Though my central texts are visual ones, with what we might now regard as journalistic or anthropologic aims, the thrust of my argument extends beyond any one medium of communication, specific subject, or genre of inquiry. My framing concern here is to examine a historically specific structure, one that Tony Bennett has called a "reading formation": "a set of discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers and reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be read in particular ways.
Machiavellian Foundlings: Castruccio Castracani and the Aphorism
Authors: Schnapp Jeffrey T.
Published: April 2006

Life is short, art is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgment is difficult.

Aphorism I, Hippocrates

In book one, chapter two of his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio Machiavelli's rehearsal of the commonplace that every city must undergo a natural cycle of political permutations is interrupted by the specter of inexorable decline: “This is the cycle [cerchio] within which all states that have governed themselves and now govern themselves revolve; but only rarely do they revert to the same form of government because almost no state can repeatedly undergo these mutations and remain afoot.” The circle—figure of sameness, continuity, and conservation in Plato's ontology and Aristotle's politics—will nearly always be broken and spun out into a descending line—figure of difference, discontinuity, and loss. And this near certainty, as is revealed by the anthropomorphism of the closing metaphor (“rimanere in piede“), is in turn rooted in the deeper human reality of death and intergenerational flux.
The Composition of Giorgio Vasari'sRicordanze: Evidence from an Unknown Draft
Authors: Jacks Philip J.
Published: April 2006

The fame of Giorgio Vasari'sVite de’ eccellcnti pittori satltori ed architettori,both as a masterpiece of Italian literature and the model of modern biography, has perhaps slighted our awareness of the degree to which this author was also a publicist of his own artistic persona. Actually the documentation Vasari left of his professional and domestic affairs is probably more copious than the research he compiled for the lives of his fellow artists. Yet Vasari must have come to the idea of an autobiography relatively late in life. At the end of the second edition of theVitepublished in 1568, he devoted “alcune cose degli artefici della nostra Accademia di Firenze,” followed by a “descrizione” of his own career up to the present. Rather than an expression of self-effacement, here the distinction between description and biography seems to be a question of genre. Why Vasari found the scheme of thevitasuitable for some contemporaries and not for others is difficult to explain. As for his own life, the prospect of writing the definitive version at this stage no doubt would have seemed a bit premature.
The End of the Old World
Authors: Nader Helen
Published: April 2006

We are now, in 1992, searching to find the meaning of an event 500 years distant in time. For us as Americans the importance of the Columbian voyages is obvious. In the past ten years the great wealth of research, publication, and debate on ancient American cultures has made the impact on the Americas abundantly clear.

For Europe the impact is much less clear. We say that the old world ended almost immediately, that a new world came into being when Europe ended its isolation from America. By this we mean that European perceptions of world geography began to change as early as 1498 —not just dotting the map of the Ocean Sea with more islands, but perceiving that South America was a continent whose existence was never imagined by the ancients. We also mean that the natural world began changing from the old world of two separate ecologies into a new world-wide environment.
Le feu caché: Homosocial Bonds Between Women in a Renaissance Romance
Authors: Schleiner Winfried
Published: April 2006

With all the insights recent works on the history of homosexuality and culture have given us, the best, Alan Bray'sHomosexuality in Renaissance Englandand Eve K. Sedgwick'sBetween Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, have also made us aware of what we do not know of earlier periods. While some areas of the tabooed subject will forever be closed to us, others are still amenable to patient labor in the vineyard of scholarship. My present focus is on the three final volumes of what in its French edition has come to be called theAmadis de Gaule, probably the most monumental (twenty-one volumes) and popular romance in the Renaissance. Strictly speaking, only the first four volumes, the ones Don Quixote's curate agreed to preserve for their literary merit, are theAmadis de Gaule;the other volumes are continuations by other hands.
Shakespeare's Pacifism
Authors: Marx Steven
Published: April 2006

Like Youth and Age or Reason and Passion, War and Peace was one of those polarities that Renaissance writers persistently thought about as well as with. Reflection upon war and peace was at the heart of the Humanist movement, just as the conduct of war and peace was at the foundation of the European state system during the early modern period. This concern with war and peace arose from Humanism's defining traits: its exaltation of fame, its fascination with the military cultures of Greece and Rome, its emphasis on human dignity and freedom, its pursuit of secular knowledge in history and psychology, and its political commitment to improving the quality of institutional and personal life.’
“The Waking Vision“: Reference in theNew Atlantis
Authors: Aughterson Kate
Published: April 2006

Bacon's Only Piece of fictional writing, in addition to the masques he wrote for a Christmas entertainment at Gray'sjnn in 1594, was published posthumously by Rawley. Most commentators assume that he wroteNew Atlantisat the time he hoped to become provost of Eton in 1623. Bacon's death in 1626 meant that, apart from the last edition of theEssaysin 1625, this was his last major work written in English. Many critics have discussed Bacon's stylistic methods, and several have speculated that his view and practice of linguistic representation in the 1620s had become rigorously non-metaphoric for the purpose of imparting scientific knowledge.
Here's Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist*
Authors: Garrard Mary D.
Published: April 2006

An Unusual Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola has gained new prominence from its illustration in color in a recent publication. In herWomen, Art, and Society(1990), Whitney Chadwick claims of the portrait in question,Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola(fig. 1), that in presenting herself in the guise of a portrait being painted by her teacher, Anguissola produced “the first historical example of the woman artist consciously collapsing the subject-object position.” Chadwick's succinct observation opens up the possibility of understanding the painting in a new way, for she points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object that uniquely befell women artists in the Renaissance and complicates their art, especially their self-portraits. From this starting point, I will here explore the form of self-presentation offered by Anguissola in the Siena portrait and several other works in the context of what was a fundamental problem for the Renaissance female artist: the differentiation of herself as artist (the subject position) from her self as trope and theme for the male artist (the object position).
Georgette de Montenay: A Different Voice in Sixteenth-Century Emblematics*
Authors: Matthews Grieco Sara F.
Published: April 2006

The feminists of thequerelle[des fewines] were reacting to changes they seemed to have no control over, or to a Puritan revolution that served mainly to confirm their subjection to men. Lacking a vision of social movement to change events, their concern lay with consciousness. By their pens, they could at least counteract the psychological consequences of what they felt was a recent, steady decline in the position of women.

Joan Kelley, “Early Feminist Theory and theQuerelle des Fannies,”inWomen, History and Theory

Georgette de Montenay has been the object of enduring scholarly interest, not only as the first woman author of an emblem book, but also as the creator of a new literary and artistic genre: the religious emblem. Most probably converted to Protestantism under the influence of Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre (to whose court she was attached after her marriage to Guyon de Gout, c. 1562), de Montenay composed a series of one hundred militant Christian octets in the mid-i56os and closely supervised their illustration by a gifted Lyonnais etcher, Pierre Woeiriot, who was also of the reformed persuasion.
The Rise and Fall of Goritz's Feasts*
Authors: Gaisser Julia Haig
Published: April 2006

At his festival in 1513 the talking statue Pasquino took the character of Apollo to celebrate the election of Leo X and to predict a golden age of patronage and poetry. “I used to be an exile,“ Pasquino/Apollo remarks, “But I'm back in Leo's reign. / So burn your midnight oil, boys, / And follow in my train, / For no one leaves my Leo / Without a handsome gain. / Bards will sing for prizes, / And they'll not sing in vain.“ The new era lived up to Pasquino's expectations, for the Roman humanists were rewarded and entertained not only in the papal court but also, less formally, in thevigneof numerous Maecenases and fellow poets, where they came together in literary groups, or sodalities, to dine, exchange their poetry, and celebrate the shared ideals of the humanist community.
Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference inLa Puce de Madame Des-Roches(1582)*
Authors: Jones Ann Rosalind
Published: April 2006

Recent Research into Early modern social groups in which women gained access to literary language has focused on the coteries in which they learned to perform alongside men, improvising poems later printed in books.1 The typical coterie in Italy, through which women such as Veronica Franco made their way into print, was the humanist academy centered around a court or a group of urban noblemen, such as the Venier academy in Venice. In sixteenth-century France such groups took two forms: the provincial salon attended by professional men—humanist lawyers, diplomats, doctors, publishers—as in Lyon and Poitiers, and the aristocratic salons linked to the court.
Erasmus and the Hermeneutics of Linguistic Praxis
Authors: Barnett Mary Jane
Published: April 2006

Erasmian hermeneutics are notoriously difficult to describe clearly because Erasmus is always looking in two directions at once — both toward the ideal, perfectly expressive Word and toward the multitude of imperfect, human words caught in the tumult of history and transmission. In the Enchiridion(1503), a relatively early work, he argues that words inevitably fall short of their task of miming the Logos, that the smallness of the manna rained down on theIsraelites in Exodus 16 “signifies the lowliness of speech that conceals immense mysteries in almost crude language.” Erasmus believes in an essential connection of some kind between res and verbum, but it is clear that he holds as well to the Platonic view that this connection is always necessarily inadequate, that there can be an approach but never an arrival at complete meaning through human language.
Early Modern Controversies about the One-Sex Model
Authors: Schleiner Winfried
Published: April 2006

This essay traces the opposition to the Galenic notion of a homology between male and female genitalia (the “one-sex model”) and identifies the French physician André Dulaurens as the first outspoken opponent. After Dulaurens, the German physician Johann Peter Lotichius makes the opposition to that model more clearly an argument that may be called “feminist.”
Women under Venetian Colonial Rule in the Early Renaissance: Observations on Their Economic Activities
Authors: McKee Sally
Published: April 2006

This article presents previously unpublished data from the Archives of the Duke of Candia (Crete) pertaining to the economic activities of Greek, Latin, and Jewish women in the Venetian colony of the fourteenth century. While trends over time are difficult to discern in the notarial registers examined for this study, they are none the less suggestive of a lively participation by women in moneylending, investment, and production, as well as in the local distribution of the island's products.
Gracious Laughter: Marsilio Ficino's Anthropology*
Authors: Boyle Marjorie O'Rourke
Published: April 2006

Marsilio Ficino's philosophy altered the canon of beauty to include gracious laughter. This significant detail invented a positive, spiritual reflection of the human joy of participation in the cosmic circuit, toward the love of God. It transcended the negative, moralistic denunciation of laughter in the classical and Christian traditions. His contemporaries virtually ignored this genius.
The Renaissance Novella as Justice*
Authors: Langer Ullrich
Published: April 2006

This essay examines short narrative (the Decameron, the Heptameion, the histoire tragique, and Till Eulenspiegel) as reflections of different models of justice within the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition. The exchanges among characters, and the conclusion of these exchanges, are patterned in ways that provide justice without requiring the virtuousness of any one character. The link between short narrative and justice illuminates the more general relationship between literature and more language in the Renaissance.
Touching Touchets: Perkin Warbeck and the Buggery Statute*
Authors: Hopkins Lisa
Published: April 2006

At first sight, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seems to be the only one of Ford's plays that is not pointedly and openly concerned with sexual deviation; in contrast to his other plays, it presents a cast of characters who are models of sexual rectitude. Sometimes, however, dogs that do not bark can be as significant as ones that do. This paper argues that Perkin Warbeck actually encodes a trangressive sexuality so subversive that its traces are hidden deep within the fabric of the play, visible only to a reading that historicizes Ford's work within very specific contexts and connects the play with the Buggery Statute.
Toward World Antitrust and Market Access
Authors: Fox Eleanor M.
Published: April 2006

The lowered national barriers to global trade reveal opportunities for a world without parochial frontiers. One of these opportunities lies in the area of competition law. Competition law is designed to enhance the economic welfare of people by,among other things, breaking down private barriers and preventing the creation and misuse of corporate power through combinations and monopolistic strategies.
The 1996 Judicial Activity of the International Court of Justice
Authors: Bekker Peter H. F.
Published: April 2006

This Note summarizes the judicial work of the International Court of Justice during 1996, using the updated General List, pleadings filed, Orders and Judgments given and hearings held at the Peace Palace in The Hague to describe the Court’s current record.

During the calendar year 1996, the Court was seized of one new contentious case: Kasikili/Sedudu Island (Botswana/Namibia). In 1996 a total of eleven cases appeared on the General List. Besides the new case referred to, the contentious proceedings before the full Court were Aerial Incident of 3 July 1988 (Iran v. United States), Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions between Qatar and Bahrain, Questions of Interpretation and Application of the 1971 Montreal Convention Arising from the Aerial Incident at Lockerbie (Libya v. United Kingdom) and (Libya v. United States), Oil Platforms (Iran v. United States), Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia), Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Project (Hungary/Slovakia), Fisheries Jurisdiction (Spain v. Canada), and Land and Maritime Boundary (Cameroon v. Nigeria). Advisory proceedings were concluded in Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear Weapons in Armed Conflict (request for an advisory opinion by the World Health Organization) and Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (request for an advisory opinion by the General Assembly of the United Nations).