Giles of Viterbo (Egidio da Viterbo, 1469-1532) has been receiving increasing attention as his place in early sixteenth-century intellectual and religious history becomes clearer: he combined a central and effective position in ecclesiastical administration with an active role in the leading scholarly and literary circles of the late Italian Renaissance. As prior general of the Augustinian friars from 1508 until 1518 he undertook from Rome a vigorous reform of the order. He was a trusted adviser of Pope Julius II, under whose powerful patronage he had been elected head of the Augustinians, and he enjoyed a very cordial relationship with the two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, the former of whom created him a cardinal in 1517.

Scholars directly or indirectly interested in the history of Machiavelli's reputation tend now to regard as exaggerated the importance attributed, in the nineteenth century, to Gentillet's Discours... Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin. Nobody, for instance, would be prepared today to share Edward Meyer's view that Gentillet was, ‘beyond a doubt, the source of all Elizabethan misunderstanding’ of Machiavelli. 'The grotesque Machiavel-figure of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama' —to quote from one of the most recent works on the subject—'is firmly within the acceptance/rejection theme of reaction to Machiavelli, and not an external phenomenon generated by Gentillet's Contre-Machiavel. Gentillet, despite Simon Patericke's translation, was never of any importance in England.

In Thomas Heywood's drama, A Woman Killed with Kindness, John Frankford, an injured lover, causes his wife's death when he intensifies her remorse by his unexpected kindness to her; and when he has perhaps unwittingly killed her with his kindness, he promises ruefully to memorialize her by a gravestone marked with letters of gold. As far back as a study by J. A. Symonds in 1884 and as recently as an important article by W. F. McNeir in 1959, a number of scholars have offered possible sources for Hey wood's play: certain medieval miracle plays, a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, the works of Illicini, Sermini, Bandello, Belleforest, Painter, Fenton, Gascoigne, Whetstone, Greene, Shakespeare, the native homiletic tradition, and earlier English domestic tragedies, have each during the last three-quarters of a century found proponents with varying intensities of conviction who have offered one or the other of them as more or less important sources for Hey wood's drama.