Center for Early Modern History

AOM Section 15, The Proofs of Nobility, consist of 3349 genealogical records submitted by applicants to the
Order of the Hospital's tribunal of nobility between 1522 and 1798. Prospective Knights of Justice had to prove several generations of noble status. Serving Brothers and Knights of
Obedience were not required to prove noble descent and did not submit proof of nobility. Not all Proofs of Nobility made their way to the Central Convent in Malta. Many remained
within the priory in Europe.

The Proofs of Nobility are divided into four "nations": France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Within each
nation the knights are sorted according to their priory. The names are not in alphabetical or chronological order.

Also see: Preuves pour Malte, a genealogical research project that identifies the location of all the Proofs of Nobility submitted by French knights. (http://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php/Preuves_pour_Malte)

An article that re-interprets the traditional role of municipal militias on the medieval Iberian frontier in light of the available evidence. Published in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon. Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean. Edited by Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (E. J. Brill, 2003), pp. 389-416.

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, a theory and justification of dance as art, accompanied by transcription of dances, choreographies, and musical notations, was developed in Italy. Steps and dances that belonged to a repertoire drawn in part from the modes of celebration of court and town, which were to some extent open to new experiment and reworking, were written down and codified. Irreplaceable documentary material for the dance historians of this period consists essentially of ten manuscripts and some fragments, arising out of the theoretical and practical activities of the dancingmasters Domenico da Piacenza and Guglielmo Ebreo, and of the humanist Antonio Cornazano. In these texts we find set out the laws governing the art of dance, dances are described, one or more styles defined, the rules regulating the creation of new choreographies established, and in some cases the music is transcribed. These are the texts that register the codifying of the theoretical scheme that specialist criticism nowadays calls the fifteenth-century "Italian style" of dance.

In the fifteenth-century Italian courts, the imagery of song accompanied by the ‘lira’ expressed the modern symbol of ancient oral poetry. The ‘new’ humanist poet-singer, exemplified by the mythological figures of Apollo, Amphion, and Orpheus, became part of Aragonese court festivals and elite entertainments. Jacopo Sannazzaro's Arcadia was an extraordinary catalyst of this lyrical and performative tradition of poetry and a literary projection of theatrical vision. This article proposes a reading of Sannazaro's Arcadia as a ‘re-presentation’ in a literary poem of oral and performance poetry developed by humanists within the forms of court theatrical drama and festival culture.

Nella Napoli dei Re d’Aragona (1442–1504) le presenze
della poesia orale nei luoghi dell’intrattenimento umanistico e del
teatro aragonese giocano un ruolo determinante nel cerimoniale
cortigiano e nelle strategie di politica culturale del Regno Aragonese. Il
presente studio mira a rintracciare esempi di scritture, storie e materiali
legati a una recitazione estemporanea replicabile in diverse occasioni
di cerimoniali di corte o degli episodi politici. Una recitazione che
non può essere compresa se non messa in relazione con una visione
unitaria della festa di corte che qui si propone di investigare attraverso
le presenze della voce del ‘nuovo’ poeta umanista — diplomatico
e oratore, storico e cerimoniere, poeta e performer — e delle sue
pratiche dicitorie e recitative nella società di corte.

Serafino Ciminelli, known as l'Aquilano, was one of the most highly appreciated improvvisatori of the Renaissance, possessing undoubted poetical and musical talent and capable of practising all styles of vernacular poetry. his repertoire was built around singing accompanied by the lira da braccio and included strambotti, barzellette, sonnets, capitoli, eclogues, and short acti scenici. his art won over ladies and knights, court and street singers, educated and uneducated people. In light of the numerous studies and valuable critical editions of Serafino's verses, this essay focuses on Serafino's efforts in composing bucolic poetry – coinciding with his Roman period in the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and with the theatrical debut of the eclogue Tirinto e Menandro for the carnival of 1490 – as well as on his use of pastoral fiction to define his stage character and, through this, to set to music his harsh attack on the corruption of the papal curia in the private spaces of official Roman carnival festivities. We can start with the myth, that is, with the memory that contemporary poets and writers left of Serafino, projecting the values of humanis-tic culture onto his performances and transferring his image of sublime singer with the lira into the dimension of myth. As we shall see, this was a process of ennobling Serafino's artistic identity that began with the stage and, in my view, reached in the eclogue a particular moment of elaboration for the construction of his character, for his mask as poeta, and for a political use of his poetic song. In the eclogue and the pastoral tradition , Serafino found a tried and tested lyrical structure through which he could project his image as poet-singer with the lira, with obvious autobiographical references, interpreting himself, one could say, within the pastoral fiction. But the eclogue and his Arcadian shepherd-singer mask were also the poetic instruments of a denunciation of a political crisis in which Serafino castigated the corruption of the Roman curia, moving from autobiographical subject-matter to an attack on Roman society and at the same time on the value and function of poetry and its oral practice at court.