Examines the sacred and the profane in the early modern period.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The theme of this year's volume is "sacred places, secular spaces." It begins with a "who is it" mystery, examining two portraits by Raphael that embody the sacred and the profane, respectively. The next essay engages both the sacred and pictorial innovationsin Holbein's predellaThe Dead Christ; while the following one views the sacred through the critical lens of race, arguing that Northern European churchmen normalized views on race by strategically placing racialized artifacts in their churches. The scene then shifts to 16th century Venice, where the Greek community contended with local authorities over the right to establish a sacred site for interring their dead. The next two essays swing the pendulum toward the secular: an essay on ecocriticism suggests that the early modern period expelled the sacred from nature and presents a Rabelaisian antidote, while an essay on Spenser'sThe Faerie Queene presents it as a blueprint for colonization. The volume concludes with

Contributors: Julie Fox-Horton, Lorenz A. Hindrichsen, Heather Hirschfeld, Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson, Jesse Russell, Victor Velázquez, John N. Wall, Jennifer Wu.
The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

The Space of Hell, the Place of Print in Early Modern London
Heather Hirschfeld
The Jewish Bride and Oriental Concubine: Raphael'sDonna Velata andLa Fornarina
Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson
Into the Abyss: Hans Holbein the Younger'sDead Christ
Jennifer Wu
Racialized Sacred Spaces: Narratives of Exclusion and Inclusion in Northern European Churches
Lorenz A. Hindrichsen
Place for Our Dead: Sacred Space and the Greek Community in Early Modern Venice
Julie Fox-Horton
Pantagruelion, Debt and Ecology: Ecocriticism and Early Modern French Literature in Conversation
Victor Velázquez
Race before Race in Edmund Spenser'sFaerie Queene
Jesse Russell
Materializing Lost Time and Space: Implications for a Transformed Scholarly Agenda
John N. Wall