Some years ago, Felix Gilbert observed that alone among Machiavelli's writings the Florentine Histories had not yet found a defined place in the interpretations of their author's intellectual development. This is less true today than it was then, owing in part to the work of Gilbert himself but also to that of other interpreters of Machiavelli storico, such as Carlo Dionisotti, Marina Marietti, Gian Mario Anselmi, and still others. Whereas Gilbert then rightly claimed that “the case of the Istorie Fiorentine is peculiar because the judgments about this work vary so fundamentally that they cannot even be narrowed down to issues on which a dispute could focus,” the very paper in which this observation was made proceeded admirably to identify several important issues on which future discussions of the Florentine Histories would have to turn.

The advent of the great autocrats of the sixteenth century—Francis I, Charles V, and Henry VIII—was a source of concern and perplexity to many sensitive observers of that age, a reaction that was more than the mere aversion to magnificence that Hans Baron saw motivating an earlier civic humanism. The sixteenth century brought with it a series of disastrous wars and an expansion of monarchies the likes of which the preceding century had not known. The Holy Roman Empire came to include, at least nominally, a vast area of Europe from Austria to the Netherlands; the ambitious Francis I had designs on Italy and the Netherlands; Henry VIII was pursuing the reconquest of France.

Despite a good deal of excellent work on Rabelais's Tiers Livre in the last thirty years, some of the most fundamental issues of the book have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. The character of Panurge, for example, has been explained in a variety of mutually exclusive ways, all of which are plausible but none of them absolutely compelling. Panurge has been understood as a positive character whose noble quest for an absolute Answer serves to reveal the limits of existing human knowledge, and to expose the vain pretensions of the learned. He has also been understood as precisely the opposite: a negative character whose self-love blinds him to the Evangelical wisdom of characters like Pantagruel and Hippothadée. And most recently he has been understood as neither of these, but rather as a pretext for, and an agent of, Rabelais's own verbal virtuosity, or of a ludic inquiry into the nature of language.

In the almost forty years since he first enunciated his thesis, Paul O. Kristeller's view that the Italian humanists were essentially rhetoricians has found wide acceptance. His analysis of the humanist movement, however, indicates that he includes among the humanists' interests the four other disciplines comprising, along with rhetoric, the studia humanitatis: grammar, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. His decision to characterize the humanists as rhetoricians rather than as grammarians, poets, historians, or moral philosophers derives from his interpretation of the professional role played by the humanists in their society. For Kristeller the humanists performed the same professional functions in their world as the medieval dictatores did in theirs. Both groups were primarily teachers of rhetoric and chancery officials, and both devoted a substantial portion of their creative efforts to composing in two literary genres, the epistle and the oration.

The account of an elaborate theatrical entertainment which appears in Canto V of Marino's Adone (1623), like so many features of the poem, presents a glorified portrayal of the life style of royalty in the Baroque age, its splendor, its extravagance, its ingenuity. Though the passage may strike the modern reader as being largely fanciful, almost every detail of it can be duplicated in the extant records of festivals and masques of the European courts from Rome to London between 1550 and 1625. There is one feature of Marino's theatrical presentation, however, which represents a striking departure from the familiar practices of the scenographers of the period: namely, the rapid changing of scenes through the use of a revolving stage.

These pages conclude the inventory of Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries published in Studies in the Renaissance, XXI (1974), 228-289; Renaissance Quarterly, XXVIII (1975), 689-741; XXIX (1976), 714-745; XXX (1977), 681-741; XXXI (1978), 532-603; XXXII (1979), 529-580; XXXIII (1980), 623-734. The commentaries have been arranged alphabetically according to the author's family name, with a brief biobibliographical note and indication of the manuscripts and printed editions.

On the completion of this inventory I should like to express my gratitude for the tireless cooperation of Gerlinde Danzeisen and Marlen Wronka.

Despite the attention that has been devoted in the last fifty years to Sir Thomas More's account of Richard III, both in terms of texts and interpretation, the difficulties that surround that baffling work continue to perplex and tease the reader—at least this reader. As A. F. Pollard observed in 1933, the problems relating to it are manifold: its authorship, its sources, the date of its composition, the circumstances of its publication, the relation of the English to the Latin versions, the absence of any original autograph, the variations in the printed texts, the motive of its conception, and the reason for its unfinished state and abrupt termination.

The theory and practice of imitation have been explored in both ancient and modern times. Ancient and Renaissance writers focused on theoretical problems; recent studies have tended to examine imitation as practiced by specific authors, including Petrarch, Erasmus, Ben Jonson, and others. Another author who might profitably be studied from the point of view of his relationship to classical models is Joannes Secundus, the Renaissance poet best known for his Basia—“kiss poems” after Catullus—and Elegiae, three books of Latin love elegies. In these elegies, Secundus draws heavily upon the Roman elegiac poets, especially Propertius and Ovid, for themes, figures, and turns of phrase. In his work we find such Propertian and Ovidian topics as the poet's refusal to write epic verse, the intervention of a god to turn the poet from epic to elegy, and the power of carmina as both songs and magic charms.