In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers of The Famous Whore to give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in the Dictionary of National Biography posits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revised Short Title Catalogue can identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitled Divers jeux rustiques.

To Elizabethan observers in many disciplines, feminine beauty and music offered parallel benefits and dangers that influenced prescriptions for the actual musical behavior of contemporary Englishwomen and also the development of stock literary situations in which female musicians either caused spiritual fulfillment or physical destruction. Conflicting ideologies, based on the most respected ancient authorities and contemporary observers, attributed similarly opposite aspects to women and music, which had both come to be regarded as earthly embodiments of the divine and the damning by the final part of the sixteenth century. Women, who possessed the natures of both Mary and Eve, were regarded as agents alternately of salvation and destruction even as music was perceived as an inspiration to both heavenly rapture and carnal lust.

In a probing article that appeared not very long ago in this journal, G. W. Pigman III called attention to the following passage from Petrarch's Familiares which deals with the Italian author's unconscious reminiscence from well-known and often-read authoritative works:

Hermann von dem Busche typifies the younger, more aggressive generation of humanists who became embroiled in the literary feuds and controversies of pre-Reformation Germany.' While Peter Luder and Conrad Celtis had preceded him as "apostles of humanism" in Germany, Busche carried the tradition of the "wandering poet" into the early sixteenth century. His major prose work, the Vallum humanitatis, exemplifies an important literary genre of the humanists, the "defense of poetry," usually approached as a defense of humanistic learning against scholastic opponents. Several recent studies need to be taken into account when assessing the literary and historical significance of Busche's Vallum humanitatis. Concetta Greenfield's analysis of Italian "defenses of poetry" between 1250 and 1500 lends further credence to Kristeller's wellknown thesis regarding the simultaneous development of scholasticism and humanism in Renaissance Italy.

In his Dessein de l'histoire nouvelle des françois, Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière offered a blueprint for a French history of broader range and deeper reach than any previous effort. He divided his proposed work into three parts: pre-Roman Gaul, Roman Gaul, and the kingdom of France from the Merovingians to the present. Part one would concern “the form of government, public and private, of the Gauls living in liberty before the Romans had envied, undermined, and eventually seized their dominion.” It would detail their religion (its priests and rituals), their nobility (its composition, privileges, and lifestyle), the lesser social orders (merchants, artisans, and commoners), and their public institutions (laws, magistrates, and other officials) — “in brief, everything notable about so little-known a state.” Part two would follow the same pattern but in even greater detail, examining the changes introduced by the Romans in “religion, administration, justice, military discipline, finances, and business, ” as well as social changes.