In 1415, Francesco Barbaro produced a marriage manual intended at once for his friend, a scion of the Florentine Medici family, and for the whole set of his peers, the young nobility of Venice. Countering the trends of the day toward dowry chasing and dowry inflation, Barbaro insisted that the real wealth of wives was their capacity to conceive, birth, and rear children worthy of their heritage. The success of the patriciate depended, ironically, on women: for they alone could ensure the biological, cultural, and spiritual reproduction of their marital lineage. The Wealth of Wives...

In 1654, Anna Trapnel -- a Baptist, Fifth Monarchist, millenarian, and visionary from London -- fell into a trance during which she prophesied passionately and at length against Oliver Cromwell and his government. The prophecies attracted widespread public attention, and resulted in an invitation to travel to Cornwall. Her Report and Plea, republished here for the first time, is a lively and engaging firsthand account of the visit, which concluded in her arrest, a court hearing, and imprisonment. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part impassioned defense of her beliefs and actions, the...

When Maria Vela y Cueto (1561-1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, "rose up in wrath." Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela's experience, told in...

Studies in John Gower is a translation of Maria Wickert's Studien zu John Gower, the book that began the modern study of the Vox Clamantis. It is a monograph in six chapters, the first five on various aspects of the Vox -- textual development, the vision of the Peasants' Revolt, influence of the medieval sermon, the open letter to Richard II, world view -- and the sixth a penetrating study of Gower's narrative technique in the Confessio Amantis.

Sir Paul Rycaut (1629-1700) was a diplomat, poet, translator and administrator. His Present State of the Ottoman Empire was the most important and influential work on its topic produced by an Englishman in the seventeenth century, and it served as a reference point for others writing on the same subject for nearly two hundred years. Rycaut's book was considered the most informative and accurate text on its subject, and was widely-read in Europe as well as in England. It contains extensive discussions of Ottoman government, religion, and military matters, and may also be read as a...

The Poetry of Burchiello: Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense is the first complete English translation of the poetry of Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed il Burchiello (ca. 1404-1449). A highly influential Florentine poet of the fifteenth century, and a barber by trade, Burchiello composed poetry that inspired numerous imitators and influenced writers for centuries afterwards. Ironically, however, he specialized in a nonsensical style that destabilized semantic meaning and that continues to baffle readers. In this bilingual edition of Burchiello's...