Few illnesses in the early modern period carried the impact of the dreaded pox, a lethal sexually transmitted disease usually thought to be syphilis. In the early sixteenth century the disease quickly emerged as a powerful cultural force. Just as powerful were the responses of doctors, bureaucrats, moralists, playwrights, and satirists. These ten essays gauge the impact of sexual disease on early modern society by exploring the ways in which European culture reacted to the presence of a new deadly sexual infection. Articles about scientific and medical responses analyze how physicians incorporated the disease within existing intellectual frameworks. Studies in literary and metaphoric responses examine how early modern writers put images of sexual infection and the diseased body to a range of rhetorical and political uses. Finally, essays about institutional and policing responses chronicle how authorities responded to the crisis and how these public health responses linked up with wider campaigns to police sexuality.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's historical essays, published over many years in many different forms, are now difficult to find. This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance. Covering a wide range of topics, these writings reflect the many facets of Trevor-Roper's interest in intellectual and cultural history. Included are discussions of Renaissance Venice; the arts as patronized by that "universal man," the Emperor Maximilian I; the court of Henry VIII and the ideas of Sir Thomas More; the Lisle Letters and the formidable Cromwellian revolution; the historiography and the historical philosophy of the Elizabethans John Stow and William Camden; religion and the "judicious Hooker," the great doctor of the Anglican Church; medicine and medical philosophy, shaken out of its orthodoxy by Paracelsus and his disciples; literature and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and the ideology of the Renaissance courts. Trevor-Roper sets his intellectual and cultural history in a context of society and politics: in realization of ideas, the patronage of the arts, the interpretation of history, the social challenge of science, the social application of religion. This volume of essays confirms his reputation as a spectacular writer of history and master essayist.

Despite its popular association today with magic, astrology was once a complex and sophisticated practice, grounded in technical training provided by a university education. The Crown and the Cosmos examines the complex ways that political practice and astrological discourse interacted at the Habsburg court, a key center of political and cultural power in early modern Europe. Like other monarchs, Maximilian I used astrology to help guide political actions, turning to astrologers and their predictions to find the most propitious times to sign treaties or arrange marriage contracts. Perhaps more significantly, the emperor employed astrology as a political tool to gain support for his reforms and to reinforce his own legitimacy as well as that of the Habsburg dynasty. Darin Hayton analyzes the various rhetorical tools astrologers used to argue for the nobility, antiquity, and utility of their discipline, and how they strove to justify their "science" on the grounds that through its rigorous interpretation of the natural world, astrology could offer more reliable predictions. This book draws on extensive printed and manuscript sources from archives across northern and central Europe, including Poland, Germany, France, and England.

Long before the photo op, political rulers were manipulating visual imagery to cultivate their authority and spread their ideology. Born just decades after Gutenberg, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) was, Larry Silver argues, the first ruler to exploit the propaganda power of printed images and text. Marketing Maximilian explores how Maximilian used illustrations and other visual arts to shape his image, achieve what Max Weber calls "the routinization of charisma," strengthen the power of the Hapsburg dynasty, and help establish the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A fascinating study of the self-fashioning of an early modern ruler who was as much image-maker as emperor, Marketing Maximilian shows why Maximilian remains one of the most remarkable, innovative, and self-aggrandizing royal art patrons in European history. Silver describes how Maximilian--lacking a real capital or court center, the ability to tax, and an easily manageable territory--undertook a vast and expensive visual-media campaign to forward his extravagant claims to imperial rank, noble blood, perfect virtues, and military success. To press these claims, Maximilian patronized and often personally supervised and collaborated with the best printers, craftsmen, and artists of his time (among them no less than Albrecht Dürer) to plan and produce illustrated books, medals, heralds, armor, and an ambitious tomb monument.