Though English supporters of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (d.1384)—known as “Lollards”—had been drawn from academic and noble/gentry circles during the later-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries, persecution, equation of heresy with sedition, and the failure of Sir John Oldcastle’s Rebellion (1414) ensured overt abandonment of Lollard i…[Read more]

Results of automatic language identification in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, Aleandro’s diaries, and a 1512 letter from Aleandro to Erasmus

This dissertation develops a methodology for understanding tonality and tonal structures in Renaissance polyphony by exploring the ways that the modern-day analyst and listener experience tonal phenomena in this music through a historically-informed lens. Regarded as one of the most important composers of the late-sixteenth century, Tomás Luis de…[Read more]

CFP – AIWAC 2nd edition Rome 2022

This study presents a reconstruction of the performance of the melancholic character in Golden Age theater. It argues that critics have overlooked the way this character type was acted on the original stage. Using Lope’s El Príncipe melancólico [The Melancholic Prince] as a case-study to speculate on the actor’s paralinguistic gestures and movem…[Read more]

The CNTC’s 2017 production of La dama duende presented the transition between the two main characters’ rooms in the third jornada using two illuminated windows at the rear wall of the stage. The comparison between this rendition and other modern productions reveals two problems in adaptation: the fidelity with the original and the und…[Read more]

This paleographic comparison serves to support my argument in the following publication:

Van Rooy, Raf. Accepted. “Ippolita Maria Sforza, student and patroness of Greek in Milan (ca. 1465).” Renaissance Quarterly.

GB Folengo Commentry on Psalm 51, translated into English with brief annotations

overview on the history of the card game “Höllfahren” or “in die Höll”

Musical celebrations of the feast of St Cecilia were common in Europe since the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century. Of the many composers who wrote music for this festivity we find four mid-sixteenth-century compositions by French composers. Two motets Cantantibus orgnis and Cecilia virgo gloriosa – by Pierre Certon which…[Read more]

The first section of the text of the unusual 1533 volume published by both Giovanni Battista and Teofilo Folengo: dialogues and prose pieces, inclduing the first of the Psalms commentaries published, together with a translation into English and annotations.

Surprising volume of what looks like biblical commentary but is parody and erotica

Oversized volume of biblical commentary published in 1543 (and again in 1549, 1557, 1585, 1594) that is actually a parody which features the erotic lexicon popular in its day

Glossary of approximately 11,800 Latin words with English translations from GB Folengo’s works (1543-1559)

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) wrote and published in an era in which a highly developed erotic code was adopted by dozens and dozens of writers in Italy, and presumably understood by tens of thousands of readers in Europe. A most helpful text for decoding the erotic lexicon was written by Jean Toscan: Le carnaval du langage: le lexique érotique des…[Read more]

In 1525, Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua published a condemnation of Dante’s Comedy that has often passed for linguistic and cultural criticism, yet might be better understood as satire.

Cuando Antonio Enríquez Gómez (AEG) escribió su comedia cidiana, El noble siempre es valiente, en la primavera de 1660, no podría sospechar el éxito que iba a gozar un siglo y medio más tarde, tanto en el teatro como en la imprenta. Entre el manuscrito (autógrafo, por lo menos en parte) de 5 abril 1660 y las primeras versiones del siglo XVIII…[Read more]