It is a commonly expressed belief that all thinkers, writers, and poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must be regarded as humanists. Such notable scholars as Walser, Pastor, and Anichini have lent considerable support to this opinion; in an effort to disprove the thesis (which has been dominant since the beginning of the century) that humanism is predominantly irreligious and individualistic, they have managed to distinguish between a Christian humanism and a pagan humanism.

On the basis of such a distinction, we should consider even Luigi Pulci and Lorenzo the Magnificent (and why not Machiavelli and Leonardo?) to be humanists of the same calibre as Ficino, Poliziano, Pico, and Erasmus, even though their humanism was more apparent than real.

‘A great age of literature’ remarked Ezra Pound in Make it New 'is perhaps always a great age of translation.’ In this article we will be examining a Latin translation of the twelfth Dialogue of the Dead of Lucian by the Italian humanist Giovanni Aurispa, and the influence that this translation, known generally as the Comparatio, had in Italy and in other countries of Europe, in France, in Germany, in England, in Spain, and in Bohemia. Such a translation was naturally important. Few educated people in Europe at the time we are concerned with, the fifteenth century, could, or would, read Greek. If they knew anything of a recently discovered writer like Lucian, it was precisely through Latin versions of his work produced by scholars like Aurispa.

It is hard to believe that Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-94) stopped writing letters when, after he was ejected from his governorship of Foligno (1461-64), he reluctantly, one imagines, took up residence in his diocese of Gaeta. His letters, after he left Foligno, do not seem to have been preserved, so that, as I have pointed out in a previous article, his Epigrams are the most fertile and practically the only source for his activities in the last thirty years of his life.

His Letters, all from the Foligno period, deal overwhelmingly with his duties as Papal Governor, which he seems to have fulfilled most faithfully, but there are enough private letters mingled with them to throw light on the lives of his own family and those of some friends. The present article will be limited to his family.

Few are the records in the Florentine archives which allow us to reconstruct the life and activities of the merchant and humanist Marco Parenti. Few documents have been found regarding his dealings in the silk business, and those touching on his interests in letters and philosophy are more laudatory than substantial. Marco was deeply interested in the intellectual movements of his time. He participated in Landino's Disputationes Camaldulenses as one of the Aristotelians, and also was a member of the Chorus Achademiae Florentinae established by Alamanno Rinuccini in the mid-1450's. He was known for his erudition by humanists much more illustrious than he. Leon Battista Alberti was Marco's close friend, even employing him as his business manager.

This year's commemoration of the seven-hundredth anniversary of the death of Aquinas in 1274 continues a tradition of veneration and panegyric which stretches far back into history and reaches considerably beyond the confines of the Dominican order to which the saint belonged. The most famous and provocative panegyric of St. Thomas is certainly that of Lorenzo Valla, delivered in the Dominican church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, on the saint's feast day, March 7, 1457. The fame, even notoriety, of this particular panegyric derives from the significant place in intellectual history which the panegyrist holds as well as from his curious treatment of his subject. As has frequently been observed, Valla's oration is almost an antipanegyric, an apologia for his own humanistic style of theology against the scholastic style of Thomas. It is a good illustration of the fundamental antagonisms between these two styles and an instance of the polemic which often marked their confrontation.

In the course of editing and annotating Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly for the forthcoming Amsterdam edition of his complete works, I have come to believe that the 461 years since its first publication have produced only two original commentaries on the Moria. In 1515 a fairly thorough commentary, almost as long as the work itself and of a sort usually reserved for ancient works, was published with The Praise ofFolly. Reprinted eleven times during Erasmus’ lifetime, it has retained some currency, though not much, because it was reprinted in the Leyden Opera omnia of 1703-06. Though it goes under the name of Girardus Listrius, we know from one of Erasmus’ letters that he himself wrote part of it—how much we do not know. The second major commentary was that by I. B. Kan, published at The Hague in 1898. In our own century some useful information and suggestions have been provided by Maurice Rat and Hoyt Hudson. The rest, alas, is not silence, but (as Douglas Bush once said about Shakespearean criticism) fearless repetition.

The depiction of celestial harmony (fig. 1) used as title page for the first edition of the Practica Musicae has been a great favorite among art historians of iconographic bent; Warburg, Panofsky, Seznec, and Wind have all reproduced and commented on this woodcut at some length. The frontispiece has nothing really to do with the contents of the Practica—no more, say, than the Boethian frontispiece of the thirteenth-century Pluteus manuscript has to do with Notre Dame polyphony. But the illustration was surely Gafori's idea rather than that of his printer, Le Signerre. Gafori as a devout Boethian was enamored of myths about cosmic harmony; he expounded Boethius’ doctrine of musica mundana in the first edition of the Theorica Musicae in 1480, expanded upon this treatment in the second edition of that work (1492), and returned to the subject armed with much newly acquired humanistic lore in the De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum Opus, published in 1518 though certainly written some years earlier.

The private letters of Annibal Caro (1507-66) collectively offer numerous insights into the literary, scholarly, artistic, and political life of mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Even if it were not for the sheer bulk of Caro's correspondence, and its even distribution throughout the years of his maturity, it would constitute an important historical source simply because he had such a broad range of interests and such a wide circle of friends. As a personal secretary, first to Monsignor Giovanni Gaddi, then to Alessandro and Pier Luigi Farnese, and as a friend of both Marcello Cervini (Marcellus II) and Giovanni Antonio Fachinetti (Innocent IX), Caro had extensive inside knowledge of the political and ecclesiastical activities of the Roman curia at its highest levels.

One of the troublesome problems in King Lear concerns the parting between the kings of England and France in the first scene of the first act. When France espouses the dowerless Cordelia, Lear turns on him angrily:

To the insulting ‘be gone’ he adds a brutal snub, ‘Come, noble Burgundy,' and walks off without giving France the opportunity to reply. Commentators on the play ask us to believe that a few minutes later the two kings meet again for a formal leave-taking.

The terms of Jonson's quarrel with Inigo Jones about the rival claims of poet and architect have been clear ever since D. J. Gordon's discussion of the matter in 1949. The problem, as Professor Gordon explains, was far more significant than a temperamental clash between two ambitious artists vying for royal favor. Unfortunately, while they could probably agree about the inevitably intellectual origins of all artistic invention and about the important distinctions to be made between invention and expression, they could not help but come into conflict over the relative importance of poetry, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. A passage from Vives translated in The Discoveries (160-167) indicates that Jonson knew and probably endorsed those divisions between the liberal and mechanical arts which placed architecture in the inferior group.

The Editorial Board of Renaissance Quarterly is most kindly continuing its tradition in Renaissance News by allowing me to publish the third supplement to the Catalogue of Italian Plays 1500-1700 in theUniversity of Toronto Library (University of Toronto Press, 1961). Previous supplements appeared in RN16 (1963), 298-307, and 19 (1966), 219-228. The plays listed below illustrate a wide range of theatrical tastes, from Latin and Italian passion plays, medieval in tradition, to the later dominant vogue for musical dramas. In editions of the latter it became customary early in the seventeenth century to record architects, costumers, and performers, so that the printed plays are a valuable source for stage history. Scenery for four of these dramas was designed by Ferdinando and Francesco Galli di Bibbiena, then at the outset of their careers.

In August 1520, Pierre Vidoue printed at Paris, for Galliot du Pré, a French translation of Desiderius Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium: De la declamation des louenges de follie. Critical comment about this translation has been limited to identifying its author and citing Erasmus’ attitude towards it. Since no French translation contemporary to Erasmus other than that of 1520 is known, Vidoue's book has been attributed to Georges Haloin, whose translation is mentioned in four of Erasmus' letters written in 1517. Criticism of Haloin's translation seems inspired less by examination of his work than by these letters. Rachel Giese, for example, mentions the ‘lively interest’ which Erasmus had in the French version and his request for a copy—facts which are recorded in a letter from Erasmus to Haloin on August 29, 1517.

Mutabilitie's claim to sovereignty over gods and men alike, as she lays it before Jove in Book VII of the Faerie Queene, is supported first of all by a genealogical argument:

As a ‘Titanesse,’ Mutabilitie is older by one generation than any inhabitant of Olympus. Her first assault on Jove's dominion is based on the simple equation of priority in time with priority to power: because she came first, she deserves first place. Of all her arguments, however, this turns out to be the weakest, and Jove disposes of it handily.