Sherlock Holmes Once Solved A mystery because a dog did not bark. Similarly, to understand the relatively wide freedom enjoyed by philosophers in pre-Reformation Italy, we have to understand as much what was there as what was not. The absent Ockhamists are critical to the tale. But more central are the Aristotelians, and, more specifically, Aristotelians of an Averroistic stamp, who were unquestionably there.

Despite their doctrine of the unicity of the intellect, their consequent rejection of personal immortality as philosophically tenable, their denial of creation, and their determination to divorce philosophical discourse from the requirements of faith which provoked several condemnations at Paris and Oxford in the later thirteenth century, Averroists thrived in Renaissance Italy.

In 1568 Giorgio Vasari Described (from already dim memories) a now-famous allegorical painting that had been painted by Bronzino (Agnolo Allori) for Cosimo I de’ Medici. Now usually known as The Exposure of Luxury, the picture in the National Gallery in London seems by general acknowledgement to have been done around 1545 (Fig. I). According to Vasari's recollection Bronzino had “made a picture of singular beauty” that was sent to the king of France, François I. As best as Vasari could recall, the particulars of its complicated iconographic program were all devoted to variations on an erotic theme inasmuch as the picture included figures of “a nude Venus with [her son] Cupid, who was [shown] kissing her, and alongside [them] there were [other representations of] ‘Pleasure - il Piacere’ and ‘Idle Sport - il Giuoco’ accompanied by other ‘Loves-Amori.’

On 30 March 1603 at the end of the Nine Years’ War Hugh O'Neill, the vanquished earl of Tyrone, appeared before Sir Charles Bount, Lord Mountjoy, at Mellifont Abbey to surrender. The moment of Tyrone's capitulation was recorded with interest by several English observers. After nearly a decade in dubious battle, an exhausted and subdued Tyrone astonished his conquerers by prostrating himself and grovelling before Mountjoy, who was so shocked by the abjectness of Tyrone's action that he nearly forgot the task of surrender. One observer remarked that “it was one of the deplorablest sights I ever saw: and to look upon such a person, the author of so much trouble, and so formerly glorious, so dejected, would have wrought many changes in the stoughtest heart, and did, no doubt at this instant raise a certain commiseration in his greatest adversary.”

Although Manuals Offering detailed instructions in private prayer are both a distinctive and highly popular form of post-Reformation English literature, relatively little critical attention has been paid to these texts, either by literary critics or historians of religion. Surveys of English devotional literature, such as Helen White's Tudor Books of Private Devotion and English Devotional Literature 1600-1640 and C.J. Stranks's Anglican Devotion, describe the more prominent of these prayer manuals, but no critical study of this large body of literature yet exists. The reasons for this critical neglect are several. As Sam D. Gill's essay on prayer in the recently published Encyclopedia of Religion suggests, the study of prayer itself is still “undeveloped and naive” (2.489).