Masculinities are at once heterogeneous and multivalent, manifested according to cultural milieu and social status. In the premodern world, hegemonic masculinity served to reinforce patriarchal social structure and men’s domination of women and subordinate men.

Crossing premodern Europe, the essays in this volume examine how masculinity was constructed by external presentation, such as hair, musculature, sexual prowess, clothing, and honourable behaviour, or deconstructed through bodily defects such a virginity, impotence, castration, non-normative sexuality, or shameful behaviour. Together, they reveal the fluctuations that men experienced and explore how social and embodied masculinity intersected and could reconstruct or redefine masculinity as social and cultural values modified.

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth century, Italy was home to an animated debate on the role of women in society, history, and religion. Despite this open and fruitful dialogue, women were still idealized according to a strict model of female virtue based on a culture of honour and chastity that was reflected in the arts as well as in law and daily life. The volume analyses this process of idealization, the rhetorical, philosophical, or historical tools used, and how this vision differed from theory and practice.

Service permeated premodern Europe and was a key concept for defining relationships. This volume explores simultaneously the medieval and early modern periods, and considers service and servants through multiple discourses and in a wide variety of contexts. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars who study a highly diverse group of servants: male and female, young and old, lay and religious, of both high and low status, with few or great expectations for their future.

The essays in this volume, written over the span of five decades, are in most cases an exploration of the often unrecognized or poorly understood relationships among four reformers who were advocates of governmental responsibility for religious reform: Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Johannes Brenz.

Confraternity studies has been one of the most innovative and active fields of scholarly inquiry in the last several decades, yet few scholars have ventured beyond the traditional focus on northern Italian communities. This ambitious volume addresses the historical and historiographical origins of these scholarly biases, introduces the vibrant yet understudied world of southern Italian confraternities, and provides many suggestions for areas of future research and comparative analysis.

Using the North African diplomat Hasan al –Wazzan, known in Europe as Leo Africanus (c. 1488-after 1532), as its guide, this book offers a comparative journey through the worlds of Italian and Islamic theatre in the late medieval and early modern period.

The thirteen essays in this collection offer case studies that examine the philosophies and dynamics of hospitality in early modern Italy, England, Central Europe, and the Ottoman Empire.

Bathhouses and Riverbanks carries out, for the first time in English, a thorough examination of the criminal records dealing with sodomy in the Republic of Lucca from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

Playful pleasure or devout piety? Why did Florentines invest so much effort in the performance of sacre rappresentazioni, their dramatizations of the life of Christ and the saints? This study explores their motives, and the financing, staging, and reception of their plays.

Playful pleasure or devout piety? Why did Florentines invest so much effort in the performance of sacre rappresentazioni, their dramatizations of the life of Christ and the saints? This study explores their motives, and the financing, staging, and reception of their plays.

Under the aegis of discerning patrons such as Francis I, Henri II, and Catherine de’ Medici, France developed a rich artistic vocabulary dominated by elongated figures, inventive decorative motifs, and intriguing subject matter. The volume’s contributors explore different aspects of the extant material record and how it was shaped.

This is a book about Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) and the roles that letter writing played in her public and private life.

Eternal Ephemera is the first book dedicated to the visual culture and history of the possesso. In this collection, six essays symbiotically expose the long-lasting ramifications of possessi in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome.

This collection offers a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world.

This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices.

This volume celebrates the scholarship of Alison Brown, emeritus professor in the department of history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The information explosion of the last two decades has triggered an interest in the historical precursors of such a phenomenon.

Heresy is a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint, and certainly one that defies religious and political boundaries. The articles in this volume examine the varieties of perceptions and representations of heresy in early modern France.

This volume celebrates the considerable contributions of Edward Muir to the history of Renaissance Italy and early modern Europe.

This book carefully dissects and contextualizes a vast seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople that is not only an exceptional representation of the city, but also an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda.

The twelve essays in this volume identify mutually interactive developments in media and saints’ cults at a time and in a place when both underwent profound change. Focusing on the Italian peninsula between 1400 and 1600, authors analyze specific sites of intense cultural production and innovation.

The Medici grand ducal family and the court it created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have long fascinated historians and the general public.  It is only in the last decade or so that scholars have begun to reassess their roles and achievements. The aim of this book is to advance that reassessment.

The thirteen essays in this volume demonstrate the multiplicity of connections between learning and politics in Renaissance Italy.

For several decades James M. Estes has been pointing to the complexity of the problems facing sixteenth-century reformers and the practical solutions they were able to reach. The career of Johannes Brenz, the careful analytical thinking of Philip Melanchthon, and the incessant correspondence of Desiderius Erasmus, all serve as guideposts for Estes’ career as a scholar, but also for this collection of articles in his honour.

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization.

In their range and breadth, the essays in this collection illustrate the cultural force of Neo-Latin in Early Modern Europe.

This interdisciplinary and diverse collection of articles stems from a conference that centred on the idea of creating women. The verbal adjective in the title was meant to signal a dual meaning: women create and women are created by others.

This volume brings together new scholarship in Italian art and culture from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries first presented during April and May 2007 at two conferences celebrating Charles Dempsey on his retirement from teaching at The Johns Hopkins University.

Peter Howard carefully reconstructs the concept of magnificence by tracing its development through Archbishop Antoninus's texts and his mendicant career in 1420s Florence.

Treating the devil not as a reified theological entity but as a dynamic concept that was made and remade over the centuries according to cultural priorities and the exigencies of circumstance, the articles in this collection probe how the devil and demonism operated as explanatory categories that helped create and rationalise experience, thereby shaping the way people lived their lives and understood their place and role in premodern Europe.

The articles in this volume provide an overview of the issues and complexities that informed marriage in the premodern West. They provide a series of interdisciplinary and multicultural analyses of an institution that was fundamental across societies and cultures, but manifested in diverse practices and beliefs.

The twenty essays in this collection examine critical issues in Renaissance art. Written by students of Colin Eisler, professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University for fifty years, and dedicated to him, they serve as a tribute to this exceptional scholar.

This collection of essays shows the remarkable strides the study of gender has made in the decades since Barbara Todd helped reshape the field through her publications and teaching. In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, gender conventions are examined in regard to men as well as women.

Savonarola and Savonarolism retraces the history of the reformer's controversial Florentine period and examines his political, religious, and cultural legacy throughout the sixteenth century in Florence and beyond.

Through a close reading of rarely studied materials, Sergius Kodera examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, showing how abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of early modern political, cultural, and scientific practices.

The idea that masculinity has a history is fairly recent. This collection opens new paths in literary and theatre studies by addressing not only how literary texts represented masculinity but how different representational strategies in such texts produce masculinity.

A fundamental aspect of culture in all ages, religion was a particularly crucial issue in the Renaissance. Religion and imagination, or “faith and fantasy”, represent the theme of this volume. These essays explore the intersection between religion and the creative forces of the individuals who wrote about sacred matters, practised their religion, or fashioned religious themes in their artwork.

This volume deals with a wide range of sports from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth century, placing them within a variety of larger contexts.

Acknowledging new direction in scholarship, this volume seeks to trace the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural work throughout the English and Continental Renaissance.

The articles in this collection seek to contribute to the ongoing debate on the Renaissance and further our understanding of this brilliant period in European history and culture.

Richard C. Trexler (1932-2007) was one of our era’s most original historians. The seventeen articles in this collection are inspired by Trexler’s cholarly achievements and pay tribute to a scholar who never tired of pursuing new questions, overturning received assumptions, and sharing his enthusiasm for research with his colleagues and students.

This volume brings together essays on the intellectual, cultural and social history of the Italian Renaissance, areas of inquiry that Paul F. Grendler has done so much to develop through the decades.

This volume celebrates the many contributions of John M. Najemy to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history.

This collection presents eight articles by one of the most influential scholars of Florentine culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Michel Plaisance.

This collection of fifteen essays examines the literary influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.

Johannes Brenz affected church life and shaped the Reformation in German-speaking countries well into the 1560s.

The articles in this volume use a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine, each in its own way, the interpretation of texts and archival documents that record French ceremonial entries in the sixteenth century.

The collection includes interpretive essays, text editions of two of Wolfgang Capito’s works and documents of a lawsuit that affected his establishment in the city, as well as studies of the problems of producing modern editions of Capito himself and his contemporaries Erasmus, Bucer, Bullinger, and Beza.

The articles in this volume position Venice and her economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in relation to the larger European and Mediterranean context.

In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode.

The ten essays in this volume seek to gauge the impact of sexual disease on early modern society by exploring the rich variety of ways in which European culture reacted to the presence of a new deadly sexual infection.

This study examines the art patronage of the Sacchetti family in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Rome.

The fifteen essays in this volume offer compelling new treatments of these now-evaporated fantasies of Troy, which were central to the European social imaginary. The essays consider texts and performances of Troy across a wide generic range-from learned court poetry to burlesque, from treatises on linguistic history to public spectacles.

The papers in this volume highlight sites of social, political, and epistemological tension as Europe slowly moves from the medieval to the modern.

The essays in this collection study conflict and continuity across the spectrum of political, jurisdictional, and spiritual traditions from late medieval Umbria and Tuscany to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, Rome, and Castile.

This collection brings together an international collection of sixteen authors who examine the many Renaissances conceived by European novelists and poets, artists and composers, architects and city planners, political theorists and politicians, businessmen and advertisers.

Few scholars have focused on post-pubescent youth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The seventeen essays in this volume seek to redress this imbalance by offering a sampling of the research currently underway in this field and of the various questions and methodologies that could be useful in the study of teenagers in the 13th-17th centuries.