A visitor to Venice in 1513 wanted to see the galleys of the Arsenal, the treasury of San Marco, and the library of Marino Sanuto (1466-1536), thus nicely paying respect to the maritime, religious, and literary aspects of the city. In April 1530, Ferrante Sanseverino, the prince of Salerno and reportedly "a studious man," expressed a desire to meet three Venetians: Pietro Bembo, famous for his poetry; Giovanni Soro, the state secretary in charge of ciphers; and Sanuto, because, claims the diarist, "of the fame I have as a historian."

Readers in late medieval and early modern Europe had access to a lively and extensive literature on the nature of women. Philosophers, theologians, poets, physicians, and antiquarians of all kinds and degrees sought to describe and classify, analyze and dissect, justify or vilify the "second sex." As with other intense debates in those times, writers called upon the ancient sources of scientia and sapientia—factual knowledge and moral truth—to witness and buttress their arguments. The range of authorities was immense, both in time and substance, offering the diverse views of Aristotle and Augustine, of Ovid and Jerome, of Genesis and the Song of Solomon.

From Petrarch's sonnets to Milton's epics a major characteristic of Renaissance literature is the imitation of earlier texts, and the Renaissance contains a vast and perplexing array of writings on the theory and practice of imitation. Although these writings often exhaust themselves in vindictive and ferocious ad hominem polemics—one need only recall Julius Caesar Scaliger's Orationes against Erasmus—and dwell at length on what now appears to many a sterile and fruitless debate over whether or not Cicero should be the only model for Latin prose, these treatises on imitation can offer considerable guidance for the interpretation of Renaissance literature. The theories of imitation help structure one's expectations as to the types of relations between text and model which one is likely to find, although they also amount to a strong warning against the difficulties of discovering and analyzing these relations.

Acentral issue of Quattrocento cultural history is the reevaluation of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio by Florentine humanists. Yet whereas humanists could finally endorse the accomplishments of Dante and Petrarch, the third of the "three crowns," Boccaccio, seems to have presented a stumbling block to those concerned with affirming the continuity of humanistic studies with Trecento culture. Boccaccio's volgare works suffer from a comparison with Dante's linguistic and poetic achievement, while the Latin compendia of Boccaccio reveal none of the historical erudition of his mentor Petrarch.

The polemical use of secular and ecclesiastical history was introduced into Protestant English Reformation controversy by William Tyndale, popularized by Simon Fish, polished by Robert Barnes and George Joye, and perfected by John Bale. These Reformers developed a Protestant theory of English and European history which maintained that for centuries the affairs of the European states had been conducted for the benefit of the Pope and that secular rulers were merely the puppets of papal policy, retained in power only so long as they obeyed the dictates of Rome, to be removed, as was Kingjohn of England, the moment they proved recalcitrant.

In any discussion of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, the first printing of her stories, a volume prepared by Pierre Boaistuau and entitled Histoires des amans fortunez (Paris, 1558), tends to receive slight as well as negative treatment. Mention of the Boaistuau text figures in only ten of the 866 notes appended by Michel François to his edition of the Heptaméron in the Classiques Gamier series. Of the 1558 volume Jourda wrote, "L'édition Gruget remplaça . . . l'édition Boaistuau. Elle reste la seule qui, malgré les critiques que Ton peut lui faire, mérite d'être consultée."

While it is well known that castrati ruled the Italian operatic stage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very little scholarly work has been done on the first phase of their history. The little that can be gleaned from special studies, from general articles about musical life in the late sixteenth century, from various histories and biographies, and from two articles dealing specifically with the introduction of castrati into the papal chapel suggests that castrati entered Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century, and were needed to support (eventually supplant) boy sopranos and male falsettists employed by chapel and church choirs. The present study takes a further look at the early days of the castrato, concentrating on the court of Guglielmo Gonzaga, third Duke of Mantua (r. 1550—1587), a man who was apparently extremely interested in this type of singer.

The subject of this study is William Tyndale's 1530 translation of the Pentateuch. The historical and literary importance of Tyndale's Bible translation has been well established. In an England moving towards the Reformation he gave the greatest impulse to the use of the vernacular, and he laid the foundation for the "Biblical style" of the 1611 Authorized Version. What remains in dispute is the degree of Tyndale's independence: how far did he rely on his own resources, and how far was he dependent upon his predecessors, in particular Jerome's Vulgate, Luther's German Bible, the Latin translation of Pagninus, and the earlier English translation, the Wyclif Bible?

Les Antiquitez de Rome has long been praised as the first sonnet sequence in the Renaissance to have abandoned the subject matter of love, which Petrarch established as the almost exclusive concern of sonneteers. To be sure, Italian and French poets had occasionally written sonnets on other subjects—in fact, Petrarch's own Rime includes a small number of poems not concerned with love—but no sequence before Du Bellay's so radically departs from tradition as his seems to do.

The name Gian Vincenzo Pinelli is hardly known today, even among specialists in the Italian Renaissance. This was not always so. Four hundred years ago every Italian intellectual and most non- Italian intellectuals would have responded to the name Pinelli with enthusiasm and appreciation, since he possessed one of the best, perhaps the best private library in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. He not only collected books and manuscripts, he also put them at the disposal of serious readers. Moreover, he personally encouraged scholars in every imaginable field. Pinelli and his library deserve to be better known.

For Theatre audiences the central moment in The Tempest is more likely to be Prospero's revels than the "revels" speech long anthologized for readers as one of the beauties of Shakespeare. In performance die nuptial masque for Ferdinand and Miranda, suddenly resplendent and suddenly dissolved, displays Shakespeare's most elaborate stage spectacle, and it is on the force of that moment that the more famous speech reflects.