The importance of Marsilio Ficino, and the paucity of documentation regarding his early life and intellectual influences, gives special value to a brief but suggestive reference to him, made in October 1451. The reference is in the Libro creditori e debitori of Maestro Giovanni Chellini now owned by the Istituto di Storia Economica of the Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Milan. During a search of the volume for indications of Chellini's ownership and use of books I came upon this entry:

In April of 1463 Marsilio Ficino put the final touches on what was to be one of his most important and influential writings, his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum undertaken at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici. Revered as the work of the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, an authority mentioned with respect by Saint Augustine and Lactantius, the Hermetic texts came to occupy a position of preeminence in philosophical, literary, and artistic circles during the next one hundred and fifty years, principally in the form into which they were cast by Ficino. The status of Hermes as a philosophical source and as a link in the chain of ‘ancient theologians’ who foretold the truths of Christian revelation continued well into the seventeenth century.

Filippo Strozzi's motives for building his great Florentine palace were described by his son Lorenzo in a well-known passage. Greedier for fame than possessions, interested in and well informed about building and not knowing a better means ‘of preserving his memory,’ Filippo resolved to construct ‘in the midst of his other Strozzi [relatives]’ a building ‘which should bring renown to himself and all his [kinsmen] in Italy and abroad.’ That Filippo's building activities caused an agreeable stir in Florence is common knowledge, but it is pleasant now to learn from the copious correspondence of the Strozzi family that the project did quickly bring him a wider renown—at the Estensi court in Ferrara, where the joys and advantages of monumental building were as well understood as anywhere in Renaissance Italy.

George B. Parks has recently argued, largely on the basis of internal evidence, that Reginald Pole could hardly have written the biographical sketch that was prefixed to the literary remains (epistles and orations) of the noted Ciceronian Christophe de Longueil (Longolius, ca. 1490-1522). Parks thus challenges the unanimous opinion of Pole's biographers. The young Englishman, he concedes, may yet have been responsible for the ‘Vita Longolii,’ but certain Italian friends (notably Bembo or Leonico Tomeo) and/or English compatriots (Thomas Lupset perhaps) must at least have had a hand in it. The purpose of the following discussion is to bring forth and evaluate additional evidence concerning the authorship of the ‘Vita,’ evidence that, without being conclusive, raises new doubts about the traditional attribution of the ‘Vita’ to Pole.

Source study has generally been discredited as a useful critical tool because of the past simplistic conception of the relationship between the source and its adapted context. Generally, source hunters emphasized parallel passages as the major proof of similarities between texts, merely listing the parallels without investigating more important critical implications. If we are to continue to consider source study a valuable scholarly tool—and there are good reasons to do so—we need to establish its interpretational relevance through a method which compares the conventional ideas and symbols of the source with the motifs and themes of the adapted context. Thus, the contextual method of ascription, as it shall be termed for purposes of discussion, will require an understanding of the interaction between the source's original context, including subsequent intellectual history, and the themes of the new context.

According to contemporary observers, George Ruggle's Ignoramus, first staged at Cambridge in March 1614, enjoyed an immense success, or notoriety, both at the university and at “Whitehall while it sent shockwaves through the Inns of Court and infuriated Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The comedy was apparently conceived as an attack upon Francis Brackyn, Recorder of Cambridge and constant adversary of the university, but because of its brilliant and merciless satire of legal jargon, the play achieved a universality which aided James I and the civilian lawyers in their jurisdictional struggles against Coke and the common law bench.