It was with something like a shock of revelation that I became aware many years ago that the issue in Don Quixote is not a willed opposition between idealism and realism as these were then understood, but rather between Aristotelian historic truth on the one hand and Aristotelian poetic truth on the other. Perhaps the first person to show this was Giuseppe Toffanin in La fine del umanesimo (1920). Five years later it was brilliantly demonstrated by Américo Castro in El pensamiento de Cervantes. Leo Spitzer, in the second essay of his book Linguistics and Literary History (1948), gave to the idea a new dimension by putting these words in Cervantes' mouth: ‘See, reader, this is not life, but a stage, a book: art; recognize the life-giving power of the artist’ (p. 70).

Few of you would deny that bibliography, palaeography, and printing often cut across the other disciplines represented here. I would not minimize their importance as separate disciplines. They began, however, in the service of the others, and for the Renaissance period they have closer relations, I believe, with each of the other disciplines than does any other single discipline with any other of its sisters. I would ask you to bear this in mind as I report on significant publications in them for the year 1962.

Remembering and regretting that some 1962 publications from abroad have not yet reached this country and that some which have are not yet fully processed and accessible in our libraries, I would begin for bibliography by paying tribute to the bibliographer Jacques-Charles Brunet. The 150th anniversary of the first edition of his Manuel and the 100th anniversary of the first volume of its last edition fell in 1960; subsequently Cesare Olschki edited, and published at Pisa in 1962, a series of contemporary accounts of Brunet's life and work.

The first volume of Helmut Osthoff's work on Josquin Desprez (ca. 1440–1521) dealing with the Netherlandish master's biography and his Mass compositions marks an epoch in Josquin research. It is the first monograph devoted to the greatest musical figure of the Renaissance.

Josquin's genius was mighty enough to encompass both old and new worlds of music, the old world of masterly contrapuntal construction and of mathematical symbolism of Netherlandish vintage, and the new world of euphonious harmony and of musical expression of Italian and of humanistic origin. As an artistic personality Josquin is a novelty in the world of music: he is the first composer in Western history of whom we can form some picture of personality and of whom we have a goodly number of anecdotes, all of which show him to be endowed with a penetrating sense of his artistic mission and a vast, almost condescending, yet at times melancholy, sense of humor toward the great patrons who commanded his services.