Among the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence there is a copy of an extensive eyewitness account of Florentine politics in the 1460's which appears to have been overlooked by historians of Florentine politics and historiography. Catalogued as Magliabecchi xxv, 272, it is described as an anonymous sixteenth-century manuscript containing ‘Diverse notizie istoriche d'Italia, delle potenze che la dominavano nel 1464 e delle cose seguite in Firenze contro la fazione de’ Medici fino al 1467.’ Although the manuscript is not a fifteenth-century autograph, there can be little doubt as to the authenticity of its contents. Not only does it contain a considerable amount of specific information that could only come from a firsthand source, but several self-references make it apparent that it is the work of the silk merchant and humanist Marco Parenti.

An encounter at Eltham palace between a wandering scholar and a prince prompted an engaging gift of verse from the visitor. ‘For the present I have dedicated these small gifts to you as toys for your boyish age, intending to bring richer offerings when virtuous manhood, increasing with your years, shall furnish me with richer themes for my verse.’ So wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam, anticipating that eight-year-old Henry would illuminate good literature with his distinction, protect it with his royal authority, and encourage it with his generosity. A quarter of a century later Erasmus was to reminisce about this visit with the royal child: how Thomas More had embarrassed and angered him by offering a composition to the prince while he lagged empty-handed; how the boy had passed him a note during dinner, challenging something from his pen; how he had promised to send a token and had hastened back to Lord Mountjoy's estate to compose one hundred fifty lines of verse in three harried days.

When Thomas Stokesley, Bishop of London, ‘commaunded Barlowes dyaloges to be preached of the curates through out all hys dyocese,’ he was recommending one of the most interesting English accounts of the Reformation in Germany: William Barlow's A dyaloge descrybyng the orygynall ground of these Lutheran faccyons and many of theyr abusys (1531). The interlocutor William, recently returned from the Continent, names to his friend Nicholas the leading reformers he has met and outlines Luther's controversies with Henry VIII, Carlstadt, and Zwingli. He discusses the quarrel between the Lutheran and Zwinglian factions over the eucharist and their subsequent meeting at Marburg (1529). His account of the ‘third faccyon,’ the Anabaptists, constitutes an early source for England's knowledge of Anabaptist beliefs and many of their startling practices.

The Family of Love has become a subject of burgeoning interest in recent years among scholars concerned with various aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life. Frances Yates has suggested that the secret society may have been active in the spread of occult ideas on the Continent, and Jan van Dorsten has pointed out the linkage between intellectual circles in the Low Countries and England. The branch of Familism which flourished in England for more than a hundred years, apparently far outlasting the Continental variety, has stirred the interest of students of English history as well. Keith Thomas believes Familists propagated alchemical knowledge in England, while Christopher Hill finds they contributed to the development of radical thought of the English Revolution.