Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The present volume opens with an essay on early modern chess, arguing that it covertly upheld an Aristotelian concept of virtue against the destabilizing ethical views of writers such as Machiavelli. This provocative opening is followed by iconoclastic discussions of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Wroth's Urania, and Spenser's Fairie Queen. The next essay investigates the mystery surrounding editorship of the 1571 printing of The Mirror for Magistrates. The essays then pivot into the exotic world of Hermetic "statue magic" in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the even more exotic worlds of alchemy, Aztec war gods, and conversion in sixteenth-century Mexico. Two further essays remain in the New World, the first examining the representational connections between the twelve Caesars and the twelve Inca kings, the second taking stock of Thomas Harriot's contribution to the understanding of Amerindian languages. The penultimate essay looks at Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII's ailing body, and the volume concludes with a complex analysis of guilt and shame in Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. Contributors: Jean Marie Christensen, William Coulter, Christopher Crosbie, Shepherd Aaron Ellis, Scott Lucas, Fernando Martinez-Periset, Timothy Pyles, Rachel Roberts, Jesse Russell, Janet Stephens, Weiao Xing. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays on all aspects of the Renaissance submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, organized originally in the early 1950s by scholars at Duke University and the universities of North and South Carolina. This year's annual volume, the forty-sixth to be published by the Conference and the fourth by Camden House, is the most substantial ever, containing twelve articles. Five articles on Shakespeare range from alchemy and hermaphroditism in Sonnet 20 to Leontes and skepticism in The Winter's Tale. There are two pieces on Milton, one involving his feminine representation of himself as author, the other attempting a breakthrough in interpretation of Samson Agonistes. There are also literary studies of Mucedorus, the most popular play in the English Renaissance, and of Spenser's two female protagonists, Britomart and Amoret. There are also an examination of the power struggles in an Italian convent, a new assessment of Stephen Gardiner's role in the Counter-Reformation in England, and a study of the early characteristics of Cromwell in the press of the English Civil War.