Abstract At least thirty‐five manuscript copies of Caxton's prints have been found so far. This article explores the implications of such manuscript copies of Caxton's prints and, interrupting the linear history of the book, considers Caxton's appeal beyond print in manuscript. It asks what persuaded scribes, and the patrons who commissioned these manuscripts, to produce identical or near‐identical hand copies of Caxton's books. It also explores how far Caxton was conscious of or anticipated his demand in manuscript, how he might have exploited the values associated with manuscripts to broaden his appeal not only as printer and publisher but also as book producer, and how, in turn, scribes exploited Caxton's appeal to extend the values associated with manuscripts produced after print. More broadly, it explores both Caxton's and scribes' careful thinking about the material and, moreover, immaterial qualities of manuscript and print and the values the book should represent.

Abstract This article sheds light on the role of women as procurators in Renaissance Florence, focusing on Ginevra Brancacci (1432–1499) and her legal and economic agency during her marriage to Francesco Caccini (1414–1465). Drawing on newly‐discovered archival documents, it explores Ginevra's ability and authority to manage Francesco's estate and finances while her husband was in exile, showing some of the strategies through which women could safeguard family wealth in challenging circumstances. Female procurators were in some ways exceptional, yet they also exemplified the financial and legal clout that women exercised in fifteenth‐century Florence. Francesco's will, account books, and correspondence, alongside Ginevra's private writings, offer a detailed portrait of their partnership, highlighting the collaborative dynamics between husband and wife, as well as between elite women and their kinsmen. Together, they illustrate how women's legal agency operated within a matrix of trust and collaboration among and within elite families and their kin networks.

Abstract This paper explores the changing attitudes towards Venice in late Byzantine texts. It argues that, along with the strengthening of political and cultural ties between Byzantium and Venice, the Byzantines' perspectives evolved from rejection to admiration. As scholars like Demetrios Kydones and Manuel Chrysoloras began to teach Greek in Venice, exchanges intensified and the Byzantines' views became more nuanced. The later Byzantine émigrés in Italy, George of Trebizond and Bessarion, not only fostered stronger intellectual links but also perceived the Republic as supporting their efforts to reinvent a Hellenic identity outside Byzantium. While court rhetoric collapsed Venice's representations into a generic image of Italy, historians like Laonikos Chalkokondyles idealized its political system whose roots, he emphasized, were to be found in the ancient political systems. Finally, after 1453, vernacular laments of the fall of Constantinople, portrayed Venice as inheritor and potential saviour of Byzantium's imperial glory, thereby signalling the connections between the cultivation of the Byzantine heritage and Venice's political ambitions.

Abstract This contribution looks at two iterations of Paolo Morosini's Letter to Cicco Simonetta (c.1470). The Letter was composed as a direct response to Milanese and papal critiques of Venetian expansion and was first part of a culture of diplomatic letter writing and persuasive rhetoric, intended to have an immediate political effect on hostile foreign views of Venice. Forty years later, Morosini's Letter had a second life as a humanist text when Giovanni Corner translated it into Latin and donated it to Marino Sanudo's library. This article argues that Corner's translation signals a kind of turning inward for Venetian defence of empire, now aimed at the city's own political class, which had significant reservations about the course of actions that led to the war of Cambrai. The Letter and its dual context allows an analysis of the way that two languages of power, humanism and diplomacy, intersected in the way that Venetian political elites defined and defended their empire in the changing systems of political communication in Renaissance Italy.

Abstract During the seventeenth century, thousands of English‐speaking Protestants went to the Maghreb as captives, diplomats, traders, and travellers. Distant from the guiding and controlling hands of monopoly trading companies and the established churches, and placed under various pressures by non‐Christian neighbours, colleagues, and captors, these Protestants faced the temptation (or opportunity) to compromise or abandon their Christianity and nationality to survive and thrive in their new circumstances. Most English‐speaking residents, whether free expatriates, captives, or converts, felt a tension between attraction to local norms and longing for their lives at home. Using a vast and little‐known collection of merchant correspondence and financial records, this article explores the tension of exile in the professional, material, religious, moral, and ethical lives and views of long‐term free English‐speaking residents (‘expatriates’) in the Maghreb. I argue that the biblical‐theological framework of exile, widespread in contemporary English culture and brought to mind by their circumstances, provided many expatriates with a way of understanding their lives and a set of ethical principles for conducting them appropriately. By considering the ways in which British Protestants made use of this framework, historians can better make sense of their experiences of living in the early modern Islamic world.