This article presents a methodology for identifying the influence of free Black women in a set of Spanish legal documents. In response to a 1574 decree imposing tribute on them, Panamá’s free men and women of African descent collectively petitioned for exemption on the basis of their poverty and decades of uncompensated military service. They presented sworn depositions from twenty of the city’s Spanish notables in support. This essay analyzes those depositions for patterns of grammatical and orthographic variances and interruptions that point to the influence of free Black women—who formed the majority of the city’s free Black population—in the preparation and performance of the successful legal case.

An accident at a young age left Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), an engraver, draftsman, and painter, with scar tissue that affected the mobility of his hand. During Goltzius’s lifetime, the artist and historian Karel van Mander published a biography that positioned Goltzius as a pinnacle of artistic excellence comparable to Michelangelo. A reevaluation of Goltzius’s career through the lens of critical disability theory reveals that his engagement with the theme of the hand in his artworks, as well as its significance in his biography, framed his disability as a source of unique embodied knowledge and pride.

While it is no longer tenable to simply oppose interest in the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to interest in Europe’s New Worlds, the task of assessing the interpretative lens provided by a humanistic education remains rather tangled. Taking as a starting point some examples from the conquest of Chile and elsewhere in Spanish America, the lecture examines critically how classical models of memorable behavior, and an idea of antiquity that often implied an enhanced sense of cultural distance, strengthened the principle of comparability, shaped imperial self-representation, and affected the interpretation of indigenous agency.

James I’s oldest son, Henry Frederick, died in 1612, at the age of eighteen. Dozens of poets, including several prominent ones, published elegies to the prince in the months after his death. This essay considers these printed laments as representative of a pessimistic turn in seventeenth-century printed poetry. Arguing that this streak of skepticism about the effectiveness of poetic publication is more than just an immediate reaction to a national catastrophe, the essay compares the elegies to a dedication to the prince from during his lifetime and examines their role in the development of the printed verse miscellany.

In 1584, Gian Andrea Doria took command of the Spanish Monarchy’s Mediterranean fleet, leading aboard the Real, a galley unmatched in size and symbolic significance. This royal galley, built at the Royal Shipyard of Barcelona, embodied Spain’s maritime hegemony and served as the Christian flagship in the Western Mediterranean. This article examines the challenges and technical complexities involved in its construction, shedding light on early modern shipbuilding practices. Drawing on rich historical sources, it offers fresh perspectives on these iconic Mediterranean vessels, emphasizing their symbolic and strategic roles beyond warfare during their golden age.

The famous Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (d. 1348), a basic source of information about his city and Europe, composed a detailed and overlooked account of a civil war among the Ḥafṣids, a North African Muslim dynasty, an event known primarily through the writings of Villani’s famous contemporary Ibn Khaldūn, an eyewitness. Villani’s account reveals a nuanced understanding of the social and cultural fabric of the Ḥafṣid Tunis that, paired with Ibn Khaldūn’s description, provides insight into Christian and Muslim Mediterranean perceptions. Villani viewed the conflict not as a faraway affair among nonbelievers but as emblematic of the universal effects of internecine family strife.

The Renaissance was pivotal in expanding, legislating, and transforming the meanings of the blush, as well as in construing it as a marker of racial difference. Tracking the blush across national and conceptual borders offers new perspectives on race-making in the early modern world, where an obsession with the dermal visibility of the blush indexed the construction of whiteness. Yet, by analyzing the use of cosmetic rouge and blushing Black Africans and Afro-diasporic people on stage, this essay also contends that the act of turning red could destabilize race-based hierarchies, even as the blush remains an embodied testament of racial trauma.

In 1592, a group of English Catholics living in Continental exile commemorated the feast of Thomas Becket with local authorities in the Spanish city of Seville. Though surviving information about the event is sparse, this article reconstructs the complex design behind one of the most extraordinary elements in the celebration: a “devise” or visual poem featuring a representation of Elizabeth I confronted with a political and moral dilemma. The poem’s messages, intended to reach a mixed Anglo-Spanish audience, were displayed through multiple symbolic and rhetorical strategies to resignify the past and make it relatable to them—and to Elizabeth.

A 1627 painting by the Spanish artist Juan Van der Hamen y León (1596–1631), known today as “Offering to Flora,” contains an overlooked visual joke. In its foreground, a depiction of a heliotropic sunflower appears in close proximity to a representation of iridescent shot fabric. Both were known in the period as tornasol, and both were associated variously with constancy and change. This article argues that by juxtaposing these homonyms, Van der Hamen’s painting prompted aristocratic viewers in Madrid to contemplate contradictory behavioral strategies for securing favor at court that were forged by debates about the values of mutability itself.

This article examines the cosmology of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in the context of the shift from a bright to a dark universe in the European cosmological imagination. While other comparable transformations—from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe—have been extensively studied, the turn from bright to dark space remains almost entirely neglected. Drawing on textual and visual evidence from antiquity to the present day, this article provides the first sustained exploration of the subject as well as a novel reading of Milton’s cosmology and the challenges it presents to the contemporary reader.

This article considers an underinvestigated aspect of Vesuvian iconography in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the use of artistic and realistic images to represent the appearance of a landscape before and after an eruption. This was done without any of the diagrammatic images that became increasingly popular with the development of the new earth sciences. My analysis reconstructs Vesuvian iconography from this specific perspective, beginning with its origins—through an analysis of five engravings by Nicolas Perrey depicting the dramatic eruption of Vesuvius in 1631—and tracing its later developments up to the eighteenth century and the work of William Hamilton.

Language skills could provide valuable professional and social opportunities for early modern migrants, but little is known of the actual linguistic strategies they employed. This article analyzes how sixteenth-century migrants from the southern Low Countries acted as linguistic brokers, leveraging their knowledge of French language and literature in their German host societies. Even though French was not their native language, members of the Netherlandish migrant community were responsible for the first French-German grammars and dictionaries, and played a pivotal role in introducing French Renaissance poetry to Germany.

This article argues that ancient and medieval Iberian legal tradition pertaining to buried treasure and non-Christian cemeteries influenced the development of a widespread phenomenon of licensed grave robbing in colonial Latin America. The disturbance of tombs had long been problematic, and ecclesiastical councils were still calling for the excommunication of grave robbers at the end of the sixteenth century. Scholars have often treated such tomb raiding in isolation from its medieval past, but this article explores how Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655) invoked authoritative precedents like Cassiodorus and the “Siete Partidas” to legally and morally justify the excavation of Indigenous American sepulchers.