ABSTRACT Seventeenth‐century virtuosi often figured themselves as epistemic weeders, grubbing up rank thickets of accumulated error. In this article, I argue that these metaphors were unnerved by the shifting status of weeds—ostensibly unwanted plants from the margins of cultivated space, unploughed land or the disturbed soils between growing crops—in and around the early Royal Society. I show how experimental uses were found for ruderal matter, and how plans were drawn up to repurpose neglected, truculent plants. These transmutations, cast as spiritualised redemptions of Fallen vegetation, often also comprised tacit appropriations of common practices of reuse. I then turn to the Society's short‐lived ‘Georgicall Committee’ and its attempt to produce a ‘perfect history’ of husbandry. As part of this, a farming questionnaire was fielded across England and Ireland, asking after, among other topics, the identification and removal of local weeds. In the plural worlds of cultivation it recorded, however, such plants were perceived, managed and transformed in various and regionally contingent ways. The article thus contributes not just to histories of weeds and weeding, but to burgeoning scholarly interest in tensions between thrift and waste, and the uncertain place of localised, working knowledge in the history of early modern science.
ABSTRACT This article examines the iconography of the Andromeda constellation as an intersex figure within medieval and early modern astrological traditions. It focuses on the origins of this imagery in the thirteenth‐century astrological writings of Scot and its reappearance nearly three centuries later in Ratdolt's illustrated 1482 edition of Hyginus' De astronomia . Tracing the transmission of Andromeda's intersex iconography from Scot's textual formulation through the illustrated manuscript tradition and into print, the article explores why this visual configuration persisted despite changes in textual authority and medium. It argues that questions of sex, sexuality and bodily difference became embedded within astronomical and astrological understandings of the cosmos, which were widely believed to shape human bodies and behaviours. While previous scholarship has explained Scot's interpretation as the result of linguistic confusion, visual misidentification, or etymological speculation, this study argues that the intersex depiction of Andromeda became intelligible within broader medieval and early modern discourses concerning the body, sexuality and celestial influence. By situating the iconography within contemporary theological, astrological and visual traditions, the article demonstrates how celestial imagery functioned as a site for negotiating bodily difference and cosmic order and highlights the epistemic role of images in transmitting astronomical and astrological knowledge.
ABSTRACT In a sermon published in Toledo in 1661, Pablo de la Peña y Lezcano described the Virgin Mary's ‘freedom’ from original sin as a resplendent whiteness. Sin, meanwhile, ‘called darkness and obscurity’, was a ‘stain’ never found in Mary, who was ‘born most free’ in her purity and lightness. Such chromatic, material and metaphorical descriptions of the Immaculate Conception frequently found their way into treatises published or drafted in Toledo in a period of increased concern over the perceived purity of blood of ‘Old Christians’ as compared to converted Muslims and Jews. By the seventeenth century, this discourse was increasingly applied to further differentiate between white Spanish Christians and enslaved Afro‐Hispanics. The Virgen del Sagrario— a Romanesque statue of the Virgin Mary with black skin that ecclesiastics recontextualised as a contact relic around 1584—stood in harsh contradiction to such textual descriptions of Mary's symbolic and racial whiteness. In this article, I examine a hitherto unstudied painting of the Virgen del Sagrario in light of shifting anxieties surrounding conversion and theological debates on the ‘stains’ of sin, slavery and race during the seventeenth century. I explore how sermons, religious tracts, theatrical sources and votive paintings disclose a concern for how sin and lineage appeared across the body chromatically, arguing that the newly popularised Virgen del Sagrario mediated local preoccupation with the appearance, durability and potential flexibility of religious and racial differences. In so doing, this article demonstrates how such ‘Black Madonnas’ participated in the discourses of race‐making in early modern Spain.
ABSTRACT The identity of the sitter in Titian's Falconer and the issue of its dating have been subject to a false, yet very influential assumption: that The Falconer should be dated to a point as late as 1537 in order to connect it to the identity of Zorzone Cornaro (1517–1571), son of Girolamo (1485–1551). This false premise has barred Girolamo's own candidacy as the sitter of The Falconer. Ultimately, disregarding the rather arbitrary ascription of the portrait to 1537, the form of the artist's signature, coupled with the painting's overall composition, leads us to an earlier dating of The Falconer, in the 1520s. Girolamo's role as a falcon trader, his meeting with Titian in 1520, the likely age of the sitter (more in line with a man in his 30s–40s, rather than a 20‐year‐old), and the facial similarities between the Falconer and Girolamo's portrait medal, all provide compelling evidence that Girolamo Cornaro is the true sitter of Titian's Man with a Falcon.
ABSTRACT Published in French in 1575 and translated into English in 1634, Ambroise Paré's collected works were a widely used and influential resource for early modern European surgeons. Focussing on two texts from Paré's collected works, in which he discusses monstrous births (congenital disability) and his groundbreaking designs for prosthetic devices, this article examines the evocation of themes of crafting and construction in Paré and his translator's descriptions of disabled bodies, which they depicted as communicative forms expressing divine judgement, warnings and identity according to the intentional shaping of the crafter. Disabled bodies were subject to constant interpretation, defined by processes of formation and reformation, and understood through an analogical framework in which materials such as fabric, metal and wax were proxies for flesh. This framework is apparent in the language and imagery used in Paré's descriptions of monstrous births as divine portents, his instructions for the production and application of prosthetic devices by physicians and in his accounts of faked injuries and disabilities by beggars. I propose Paré's work as a valuable resource for early modern disability studies and as a source of insight into the historical cultural contexts of disabled identities and their representation in medical writing.
This article examines the use of musical notation as a pedagogical tool in early modern language teaching, focusing on Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and briefly, Turkish. While musical notation is typically associated with performance and composition, the sources discussed here demonstrate its broader application as a visual and conceptual system for representing sound-specifically pronunciation, rhythm, accentuation and metre. Drawing on a wide range of printed grammar books, annotated texts and instructional manuals from the late fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, the study shows how notation was employed to guide vocal delivery, support mnemonic strategies and mediate between reading and oral performance. Central case studies include humanist Latin grammars with metrical examples and ode settings, Philipp Melanchthon's Greek grammar, Christian Hebrew grammars incorporating notated cantillation and instructional materials for liturgical recitation. Situating these sources within wider debates on orality, literacy and humanist education, the article argues that the inclusion of musical notation in language manuals presupposed a degree of musical literacy and reflects a pedagogical culture in which linguistic and musical competencies were closely intertwined. Ultimately, musical notation emerges not as an ancillary embellishment but as a structurally significant means of visualising and teaching the sound of language in early modern Europe.
Over the past half-century, scholars have offered various theories to explain when and how an aetiology for black skin became part of the reception history of the so-called Curse of Ham in Genesis 9-a text that does not include any reference to skin colour. This essay considers one potential piece of this complex history of interpretation in the relationship between the transgressions and transformations of Noah's son and Noah's raven in late medieval and early modern biblical interpretation. It also identifies suggestive points of confluence between the reception history of these two stories and that of the raven's transfiguration in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Building on previous reception histories of Ham's curse, this paper explores the symbolic traffic between Noah's raven, Noah's son and the bird cursed by a God in the Metamorphoses to advance an account of how early modern Christian interpreters may have merged an aetiology of natural slavery and an aetiology of blackness into a single story of divine punishment and permanent transfiguration.
This article examines a peculiar body of religious works from the late c.16 and early c.17, which interpreted human difference in admonitory terms. Drawing flexibly on classical accounts of human 'monstrosity' and contemporary reports of foreign societies, these texts identified differences from European Christian cultural and corporeal norms as providential disruptions of the natural order intended not to correct the 'monstrous' communities themselves but the communities who observed them. The result was to establish an eschatological hierarchy between admonished readers and the monstrous objects of their gaze, with the latter trapped in the status of signifiers. Over the course of the article, I introduce these works and their surprising hermeneutic claims, outlining one way in which the doctrine of providence could be mobilised to essentialise human difference and justify social hierarchies founded upon that difference, thereby participating in the making, legitimating and enacting of 'race' itself.
This article charts the figuration, both material and rhetorical, of mineral bodies in early modern natural philosophy, paying particular attention to the second book of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). It argues that concretions (stony calculi and crystals formed through the aggregation of physical matter) make manifest a mineral autopoesis in seventeenth-century natural philosophy whereby mineral matter, believed to be imbued with a divinely implanted impulse, coalesces into the complex structures that so fascinate Browne. As Browne probes the process and products of concretion, this article claims that the 'principle of concretion' he observes in lithic bodies also inflects his prose (Pseudodoxia, 76). Here, observing the mineral structures figured through concretion solicits in Pseudodoxia a poetics of concretion: rhetorical devices such as synathroesmus that have a similarly conjoining effect, or that emulate through the syntactical proportion of compar the formal coherence achieved in crystalline bodies. By highlighting how writers such as Robert Boyle likewise adopt a poetics of concretion in their depiction of lithic and crystalline bodies, this essay reconsiders the transparent plain style of the Royal Society as the product of a mineral ecopoetics.
In his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser presents a sympathetic view of what broadly could be called Catholic liturgical piety, especially in his depictions of altars. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser is indeed averse to some of the pomp and circumstance associated with late Medieval and Early Modern liturgy that would be readily identifiable to Protestants as 'Roman Catholic' or 'papist'. However, his condemnation of certain elements of Catholic liturgical piety is not a condemnation of traditional liturgical piety as such. Rather, it is a condemnation of those forms of liturgy practiced by those who are not part of one true English Church and who set themselves up as religious and political enemies of English Christianity.
This essay reconceives Titus Andronicus as a drama of media design under civic collapse. Rather than reading mutilation as a bare emblem or provocation to revenge, this article argues that the play builds an alternative infrastructure of truth upon Rome's manual and institutional channels of failure. I call this pattern manual substitution: as hands are severed, tools, bodies, books and rituals assume the hand's work, encoding, storing, circulating and seeking to compel uptake of knowledge the state refuses to hear. Lavinia's 'alphabet' becomes a deliberately redundant inscription; Marcus demonstrates handless writing; Titus moves from sand to metal and finally to the kitchen, where blood, bone, paste and oven function as a scriptorium whose outcome the court finds difficult to ignore. What can look like humanist ornamentation also functions, in my reading, as survival grammar: Ovid supplies a case template for naming, and Horace functions as a carrier that securely labels and moves accusation through perilous hands. The result is a handless public sphere improvised by a family when a forum is not possible. Weaving together media archaeology of the play's text, the essay reads Titus Andronicus as a sustained investigation of how truth can travel when the hand is missing.
The Spanish crown used sumptuary laws and dress to support the replication of its hierarchical social structure and culture in the Americas, but this strategy faced the challenges of distance and the absence of suitable locally produced textiles. This led the clothing industry to be dependent on textile imports, resulting in its domination by merchants. Analysing bills drawn up by tailors for making clothes for elites, the article examines the commissioning process and the styles, textiles, and decorations they employed. It shows how even though sumptuary laws were not strictly enforced in Lima and cheaper bright coloured silks from China were widely available, elites showed a preference for dark coloured clothing. Even so, their clothes were often highly decorated being encouraged by the availability of Chinese silk and precious metals, and the development of a vibrant haberdashery industry that used gold and silver threads for ribbons, motifs, and embroidery.
This article contributes to the history of material culture and intellectual biography by definitively identifying the Paduan scholar Matteo Macigni (ca. 1510-1582) as the author of the annotations found in a 1535 copy of Albrecht D & uuml;rer's Institutionum geometricarum currently preserved in Vicenza. The attribution rests on bibliographical and palaeographical sources. By analysing this discovery, this research recovers Macigni's identity as a key, though understudied, figure in the Republic of Letters, shedding light on the specific intellectual milieu of the late sixteenth-century Paduan Studio. Macigni's annotated copy-alongside his annotated copy of Daniele Barbaro's La pratica della perspettiva now in London-demonstrates his profound and systematic engagement with theoretical geometry and its applications in architecture and optics. This study illuminates how Macigni, a professor, private teacher and affiliate of the Accademia degli Infiammati, treated D & uuml;rer's theory not as a historical artefact, but as a living text to be mastered and integrated into the evolving Italian tradition. The rigorous, empirically focused environment Macigni championed ultimately served as a vital antecedent that would, towards the end of the century, favour the pivotal appointment of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) at the Paduan Studio.
Gabriel Grisley, a German physician, came to Portugal and founded a garden near the Xabregas River in Lisbon, during the 1610s under the Spanish kings' rule. In view of the utility a botanic garden represented for the kingdom, he was able to obtain a royal privilege from King Joao IV during the Restauration War against the Spanish (1640-1668). In this garden, plants were cultivated in abundance, both for medical use and study. This paper challenges the idea that Grisley's garden was purely medical and, consequently, that the Garden of Ajuda, founded in 1768, was the first botanic garden established in Portugal. In this article, I argue that Grisley founded the first botanic garden in Portugal.
This essay explores, through an analysis of representative declarations from the Florence tax census of 1427 (known as the Catasto) as well as extant account books, the organisation of the art of goldsmithing in fifteenth-century Italy. These written sources indicate that goldsmiths, in Florence and elsewhere in Italy, frequently hired each other to carry out specialised tasks and, moreover, purchased from each other tools and supplies as well as materials such as precious metals. Additionally, they relied on others to perform essential related jobs such as the purification of metals and the cutting and polishing of stones. In this period, goldsmiths, along with these additional artisans, thus comprised vast and interconnected networks that, collectively, facilitated the production of luxury items made of richly ornamented metals such as silver, gold and copper alloys. The essay calls attention to the profound importance of these networks for an artist like Donatello, who trained in goldsmithing and throughout his career-from Florence to Siena to Padua-consistently drew from goldsmithing networks as he hired goldsmiths, and those in related fields, to assist with the completion of his sculptures in copper alloys.
