... embassy secretary, Guy Miège. The article traces the afterlife of the embassy letters in print, arguing that Marvell and Miège became central agents in shaping how the embassy was perceived at home and further afield. The wider context of public diplomacy drew from the secretaries’ considerable skill...

...Katherine Zieman This essay explores the late medieval rhetoric of self-representation and conceptions of audience through an examination of the writings of the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Richard Methley. Methley is considered as a “public contemplative” — a writer who offers his own...

...Nicholas Terpstra The theatrical capital punishments of the early modern period blurred distinctions between private and public and between object and subject in their treatment of the prisoner’s body. Where did these rituals originate? Italian confraternities devised distinctive forms of offering...

...David Aers; Sarah Beckwith; Sonja Drimmer Chronicles of fifteenth-century England teem with severed heads. Frequently, these texts focus less on the event of decapitation than on its enduring result: namely, the modified and adorned head of the deceased, spiked and exhibited in a prominent public...

...Simone Waller This essay argues that Christopher St. German made tactical use of the dialogue form to cultivate a public in his print controversy with Thomas More on the subject of reform. Publishing in the early 1530s, More accused St. German of disseminating disgruntled speech in print absent...

... tertiaries or those who belonged to the so-called terzo stato , troubled the medieval distinctions between active and contemplative lives. Tornabuoni, Pulci, and their contemporaries found ways to contribute to the public sphere by combining features of active and contemplative lives into a form of vita...

... Romae (1494). Composed in the popular cantare verse form, which was strongly associated with public performance, these works are an unusual example of printed guides to Rome aimed specifically at an Italian audience. Situating Dati’s cantari within the broader culture of the Roman pilgrimage...

... demonstrates that James I's delegates at Dort, his European embassy's star preacher, and a popular London play present a richly nuanced yet harmonious public face on an international stage to an often contentious national conversation. King, church, and people speak together on the necessity of persevering...

...Thomas Robisheaux In November 2015, a group of practicing microhistorians was brought to the Duke University campus to engage in a public roundtable discussion on their craft of historical writing. The participants—Peter Arnade, Thomas V. Cohen, Paul Edward Dutton, Jonathan Gebhardt, Sara...

...Jessica A. Boon For thirteen years, the Clarissan Juana de la Cruz (1481 – 1534) gave public “sermones” during which Christ’s voice was reported to issue from her rapt body, expanding on the biblical record and describing festivities in heaven that feature considerable fluidity in gender...

... widely copied in manuscript long before their dissemination in print. It also discusses unique letters and passages that were omitted from the book and no longer survive in the State Papers. English diplomacy abroad built paper embassies at home, within England, well before the publication...

...D. J. Hopkins The royal entry of King James I into London in 1604 serves as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between public, urban performance and the primary sources that ostensibly document it. The author revisits his own past study of this occasion, revising and expanding previous...

..., Lincolnshire at Ashby Heath. In these instances, perambulators used the occasion of the public recognition of property boundaries as an opportunity to stage a complaint in an act of “performative law.” The complainants asserted their rights and liberties by means of a theatrical form that invited participants...

... consisted of more than sexual intromission or inhibiting anxiety, and visual metaphors presented manliness in ways that were often humorous, usually public, and always assertive. Duke University Press 2009 a Manliness and the Visual...

... of religious texts and their scribal and reading activities as expressions of devotion. Exposed to biblical translations and new vernacular spiritual guides, artisans were stimulated to combine the vita activa with religious activities and to find religious significance in their public and private lives. ©...

... seen, though, as postsecular rather than as individualist and subjectivist. It is a context within which many different communities (of sometimes overlapping and shifting membership) seek to articulate the public character of their faith and accompanying conceptions of human flourishing...

... and religious maxims, this article demonstrates how Herbert’s poems also attracted more nuanced literary engagements. The sale and acquisition of the book in private and public libraries in the late seventeenth century likewise suggest that The Temple held a dual role, sometimes positioned in relation to other...

...Ann Rosalind Jones In Cesare Vecellio's costume books, Degli Habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590) and Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il Mondo (1598), the basic premise of the costume book—that it recorded styles of dress being worn at the moment of publication in Europe...

... of this information was transmitted in correspondence, but the abbess also forwarded printed newsbooks and compiled manuscript newsletters for the royalists. This essay reveals how cloistered nuns engaged directly with the public sphere through their access to news, and how their receipt and transmission...

...Su Mei Kok Spanning a thirty-eight-mile canal, a walled reservoir, and a city-wide network of wooden mains, London’s New River altered terrain from Hertfordshire to the city. A vital shift in London’s spatial order attended these topographical changes, as public space became a private commodity...