Historians have long been fascinated by the ‘myth of Venice’: the phenomenon of a single state acquiring and sustaining a reputation, often at obvious variance with reality, that would serve not only the propaganda goals of the state itself but even as an influential political model for others. Although there are several aspects to this myth, they all focus on the perfection of the Venetian Republic, its uniqueness and virtù. The official epithet, la Serenissima, epitomized the image of this splendid city, founded miraculously upon the waters, unwalled yet unconquered for more than a millennium, remarkably undisturbed by internal strife. Petrarch's wellknown panegyric expresses a generally held view of Venice: ‘a city rich in gold but richer in renown, mighty in works but mightier in virtue, founded on solid marble but established on the more solid foundations of civic concord, surrounded by the salty waves but secure through her saltier councils.’

The Italian humanists of the fourteenth century did more than reintegrate the pursuit of eloquence with the concern for ethics, two interests united in the discipline of rhetoric since the time of Cicero but separated in practice by thirteenth-century specialists of ars dictaminis in Italy. Rather their achievement lay in nothing less than Christianizing the European medieval rhetorical tradition. They accomplished this by expressing in terms of those central fields of rhetoric, ethics, and history an appreciation of the distinction between the culture of the ancient world based on human reason and Christian society founded on revealed truth. While not denying the ultimate influence of God upon human history, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati (at least in his later life) tended to emphasize the natural character of ancient society and thus to secularize its history and achievements.

The early fifteenth century was the age of conciliarism, of a crisis in the church; it was a time of fragmentation. In such an age it may be difficult to tell the separate parties apart, to distinguish the defenders of the old order from its critics. Whatever the nature of the parties, each may claim to stand for its own particular version of reform. This paper deals with such a rivalry as it surfaces in On Avarice, one of the dialogues of a prominent curial humanist, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Though the point has never been noted, it will be seen that the essence of this work is to be found in the conflict between curial humanists or secretaries and mendicant friars, two groups whose fortunes had traditionally been closely identified with those of the papacy.

In chapter xxv of Il Principe, Machiavelli refers very briefly to men's goals, saying that ‘in the things that lead to the end that everyone has in view, namely glory and riches (cioè glorie e ricchezze), men proceed in different ways.’ L. Arthur Burd observes that ‘Machiavelli dispatches in this one short sentence a question which was usually discussed at length in the earlier political manuals: what is it, namely, that furnishes the motives of action?’ Glory was one of the most important ideas in Renaissance thought, and Machiavelli's thought can be understood only imperfectly if the part that gloria played in it is not grasped; yet inexplicably this theme has been almost entirely neglected.

John Dee (1527-1608) has received increasing scholarly attention since the completion in 1952 of I. R. F. Calder's massive dissertation, ‘John Dee Studied as an English Neoplatonist,’ and with the publication of Peter French's John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus, Dee's career and works should be fairly familiar. Prior to Calder's study, John Dee's press had been none too good, and serious scholars have labored under the burden of demonstrating Dee's place within some important intellectual tradition, so that he might be rescued from the opinion, based upon his penchant for occult studies, that he was ‘… the sport, the laughing-stock and die pray of daemons,’ or, in more modern form, ‘a rather silly man.’