Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante is notoriously unreliable as an historical biography of the poet. Much of what is doubtful in the Trattatello has been blamed on simple misinformation, the influence of literary convention, the misreading of Dante's works, or pure invention on the part of the author. Especially susceptible to objection has been the Trattatello's representation of Dante's personal character. Leonardo Bruni, the first to offer an assessment, found Boccaccio's portrayal of Dante distorted and inadequate, and Bruni's pronouncement established an interpretative commonplace from which critical opinion has never been entirely free: “It seemed to me that our Boccaccio … described the life and manners of so sublime a poet just as though he were writing the Filocolo, or the Filostrato, or the Fiammetta, for he is all full of love and sighs and burning tears, as though the man had been born into this world merely to turn up in those ten days … related in the Centonovelle [Decameron].“

The notion of music as a form of speech is a commonplace. Without arguing the difficult questions whether music is patterned after speech or itself constitutes its own language, it should be remembered that the main vocabulary for describing the structure and content of music has been drawn from the artes dicendi. The present report deals with a small, but significant part of this vocabulary: the term elegance along with various synonyms and antonyms borrowed from grammar and rhetoric and applied to music, in a number of writings, from classical times onwards.

In 1610, the plague hit London with unusual force. Ever since the Black Death more than a century earlier, bubonic plague had been endemic to Britain, and city dwellers were accustomed to the loss often or fifteen lives each year. But when the number of plague deaths exceeded thirty or forty, panic threatened. Then public gathering-places, such as theaters, were closed, since the disease was thought to spread directly through human contact. A predictable exodus from the city began: anyone with money and access to a country house fled for the duration of the epidemic, leaving the less fortunate in the grip of “the Poor's Plague.“’ When members of the dominant social classes decamped, they delegated household authority to their servants. These temporary aristocrats shared the city with quack doctors who sold unicorn's horn and patent nostrums guaranteed to cure the disease. The city took on a macabre carnival atmosphere of license, at least for those who were still healthy.

Despite the extensive work by recent historians on the “Myth of Venice,“ there has never been a thorough study of Lewis Lewkenor's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), one of the central documents through which the myth was transmitted to England—and England, after all, was the country in northern Europe in which the myth had its most profound effects. Lewkenor's book is interesting not only because of its importance in the history of political thought but also because it was probably used as a minor source by Shakespeare for Othello and by Benjonson for Volpone.