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.

Form and Function are Closely connected in books. The physical appearance of books indicates purpose and intended readership. A combination of size, type, and page layout offers visible signals informing the reader of the content before he begins to read a book. Books that look different are different. They have different subject matters, purposes, and readerships.

Anyone browsing in a bookstore in the late twentieth century knows this. Today an illustration on the cover provides the most obvious clue concerning the subject matter and purpose of a book. When the cover shows a handsome man with a scowl on his face and a gun in his hand along with a beautiful young woman in distress—and possibly some degree of undress—we know that the book is a “thriller.” When the cover shows a spaceship, we know that the book is science fiction.

Ottavio Vannini's Fresco, Lorenzo the Magnificent as a Patron of the Arts (Fig. I), forms part of a cycle painted around 1623 in the Palazzo Pitti to celebrate the marriage of Ferdinando II and Vittoria della Rovere. Lorenzo is seen surrounded by artists who proffer the fruits of their creative endeavor. Among them we immediately recognize the young Michelangelo, who presents a marble copy of an antique fawn's head, made, Vasari tells us, at Lorenzo's urging, and to the extreme left Giuliano da Sangallo, who holds under his arm a drawing from the façade of the Medici villa, Poggio a Caiano. The implication of Vannini's fresco is beyond doubt. By evoking the history of the early Medici, the Grand Dukes hoped to establish a framework within which their own glory might shine all the more brilliantly.

In February 1382 Franceschina Grimani took as her husband Giacobello Trevisan, son of Stefano. A few months later, in May, another young noble girl, Franceschina Querini, married Bernardo Giustinian, son of the prosperous nobleman Orsato Giustinian. Despite the similarities shared by these two Venetian brides, one important factor separated them. Franceschina Grimani's father was Nicolò Grimani of Santa Sofia parish. According to the estimo of 1379, Nicolò's real wealth totaled approximately 30,000 ducats, making him one of the wealthiest men in Venice. In contrast, Franceschina Querini's father Marco possessed only 2,000 ducats in real wealth according to the same estimo. Despite the huge disparity between the economic fortunes of these two fathers of the bride, both of their daughters brought equal dowries of 1,000 ducats to their marriages.

Michael Baxandall's Study Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy opens with the useful reminder that a “painting is the deposit of a social relationship,” that is, a relationship between patron and client. When Baxandall and other historians of Renaissance art use the term patronage, they generally do so in a restricted sense to indicate the relationship that existed when an individual or an institution such as a guild, confraternity, or monastic establishment commissioned a specific work of art from an artist or artisan. Often formalized through a contract, the relationship between patron and client was essentially a legal one in which the artist agreed to render a specific service in return for a preestablished or a negotiable sum of money. With the completion of the commission, the relationship essentially ended, unless succeeded by another commission.

Reformers and Reform Movements can be hard on their adherents. For a variety of reasons—dissent over doctrine, differences over organization, tactics and objectives, even incompatibility between personalities — disagreements arise and with disagreement recrimination, bitterness, and fragmentation. All these elements were present in the quarrel that erupted in 1506 among followers of Savonarola and tore apart the movement of reform he had initiated. On this occasion, however, the additional disruptive and embittering component of gender played a prominent part in the quarrel. There are no villains in the story, only victims, both active and passive, of a traditional system of religious values. Any attempt to alter this system was construed as harmful to the cause by the male leaders of the Savonarolan movement and resisted accordingly.

We are all Familiar with the traditional understanding of sources: a source is a previous text that shapes a present one through authorial reminiscence and manifests itself in verbal iteration. As the seminal works of Baldwin, Muir, and Bullough amply demonstrate, this definition has served us long and well, but every element in it has undergone intense scrutiny and reevaluation. Scholars now recognize the potential limitations of a linear, authorcentered, and largely verbal approach and have become attuned to the likelihood of intermediation, the encodings implicit in genre and language, the more oblique and more satisfying evidence of configuration—both rhetorical and dramatic. Within the spacious perspectives provided by scholars like Leo Salingar, Emrys Jones, Gordon Braden, Harry Levin, Alan Dessen, and Louise George Clubb (who has coined the term “theatergram” for certain kinds of configuration), we may well reexamine the sources of Shakespearean comedy.

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.’

The Following Essay is Presented as a sketch of some significant features of Christian humanism which relate to language and discourse in France during the first half of the seventeenth century. Its central intent is to testify to the early Jesuit conviction that the manifestation of God in the world is profound. And this belief and emphasis on the ability to discover and rediscover God in the world, in its past and present, both nourished and was nourished by the Society of Jesus's involvement in humanism.

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.”

Christopher Marlowe's two-part Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590) captures all of the spirit and something of the scope of legendary violence the historical Tamerlane levied against his enemies. In the course of ten acts Tamburlaine's armies roll over several nations and cultures, leaving thousands of civilians enslaved or worse. Marlowe's graphic representation of the trail of blood and brutality is itself notorious.

In the interest of founding his own legend as the hypermasculine “Generall of the world” (1:5.1.451), Tamburlaine practices virtual genocide against his enemies and ethnocide against their cities, religions, and ways of life. By no means does he work alone. The soldier-males who serve in his armies eagerly follow his lead.

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.

In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.

On the Opening Page of his penultimate essay, “Of physiognomy,” Montaigne noted that the human race is, by and large, myopic: “Nous n'apercevons les graces que pointues, bouffies et enflées d'artifice. Celles qui coulent soubs la nayfveté et la simplicité eschappent ayséement à une veue grossiere comme est la nostre: elles ont une beauté delicate et cachée; il faut la veue nette et bien purgée pour descouvrir cette secrette lumiere.“ (“We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.

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).

It is a Perennial Paradox of Erasmus studies that neither the wealth of autobiographical information that the Dutch humanist has left us nor the enormous mass of scholarly literature that has grown up around his life and works has ever given us a firm grip on the year of his birth and the chronology of his youth. We do not know with certainty, for example, how old Erasmus was when he entered Steyn monastery. If he were born in 1466, as he indicates at times, and became a postulant in the middle of 1487, as other information suggests, he would then have been twenty years of age. Yet in an appeal to Pope Leo X for a release from some of his monastic obligations in August 1516 Erasmus asserts that he was just sixteen when he was prevailed upon to enter the monastery. On the strength of this and other evidence R. L. DeMolen has argued with equal logic that Erasmus must have been born in 1469 and entered Steyn in 1485-86.

For What Reasons did Academicians select to use or not to use any given textbook for their own classroom instruction during the Renaissance? To what extent did ideological or pragmatic considerations influence such decisions? In this article these questions are posed to examine the use of the writings of Petrus Ramus (1515—1572) and Omer Talon (ca. 1510-1562) at schools and universities in Central Europe during the six decades between 1570 and 1630. Did “Ramist” academicians of this period make use in the classroom of writings by these two authors because of some fundamental agreement with their views? Or were these two authors preferred during these six decades because their writings could be used eclectically and/or they fit well into specific parts of the curriculum at certain academic institutions?