This book, a collection of essays to honour Hilary Gatti, reflects her interest in the principles of cultural freedom and independent thinking. The essays focus on literature and epistemology and provide analyses of authority, innovation and epistemology in the early modern period in Europe.

Introduction Authority and Innovation in Renaissance Literature 1. Alberti's Musca: Humour, Ethics and the Challenge to Classical Models 2. The Orange and the Bay: Renaissance Symbols of Poetic Excellence 3. Shadows, Memory and Self-Improvement: The Renaissance in Celio Calcagnini's De profectu 4. Literary Texts and Michelangelo's 'Visible Speech' in Vasari's Lives 5. Critical Authorities, Canonical Traditions and Occasional Literature: The Case of the Early Modern Italian Academies 6. Measuring Verse, Measuring Value in English Renaissance Poetry Bruno, Campanella and Other Challenges to Religious Authority 7. Giordano Bruno: Portrait of a Philosopher Opposed to the Authority Principle 8. Bruno's Candelaio, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: Building on Hilary Gatti's Work 9. Bruno, Charlewood and Munday: Politics, Culture and Religion during Bruno's Time in England 10. Compassion and Cosmology: Caravaggio and Giordano Bruno 11. Maculae Galilei me perplexum habent.' Campanella, Sunspots and the Temptations of Pythagoreanism 12. Faxecura's Embassy to the Vatican (1615): Relations with Japan, from Documents in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 13. Catholic Censorship of Early Modern Psychology