Of Erasmus’ six banquet pieces, the Convivium Profanum was the only one to appear in the earliest versions of the Colloquia. Unlike the others, therefore, it always retained much of the formulary quality that characterized the slender original collection, primarily a series of models after which schoolboys might fashion their conversational Latin. Yet even in Johannes Froben's unauthorized first printing of the pedagogical materials that Erasmus had composed twenty years earlier for use by his pupils at Paris, the purely formulaic matter is interspersed with considerable stretches of lively table talk, the full cast of participants in the convivium is introduced, and distinguishable personalities for the principal interlocutors have begun to be fashioned.

The authority of a Renaissance ruler seemed to depend in part on the divine protection afforded him during his life. The identity of his protectors was to some extent a matter of birth: the saint of the day on which he was born, the saint's name given him at baptism (often the same), and the saints of his homeland. As he matured, the ruler might choose as additional protectors saints he believed would help him, and their identity depended on the client's assessment of their efficacy. The protection of still other saints was thrust upon the ruler. In military victory, after successful business negotiations, and with the birth of an heir, an already powerful man found that some saints volunteered their services on their feast days; they were then gratefully incorporated into the client's pantheon.

Among the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence there is a copy of an extensive eyewitness account of Florentine politics in the 1460's which appears to have been overlooked by historians of Florentine politics and historiography. Catalogued as Magliabecchi xxv, 272, it is described as an anonymous sixteenth-century manuscript containing ‘Diverse notizie istoriche d'Italia, delle potenze che la dominavano nel 1464 e delle cose seguite in Firenze contro la fazione de’ Medici fino al 1467.’ Although the manuscript is not a fifteenth-century autograph, there can be little doubt as to the authenticity of its contents. Not only does it contain a considerable amount of specific information that could only come from a firsthand source, but several self-references make it apparent that it is the work of the silk merchant and humanist Marco Parenti.

One of the principal differences separating the Italian Renaissance from the Spanish has been the civic character of the Italian humanists’ professional lives. Intense involvement in urban politics, crucial to the development of rhetoric and historical perspective in the works of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini, has seemed to be missing in the careers of Spanish humanists. The careers of Spain's most renowned humanists, Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522) and ‘the Greek Commander’ Hernán Núñez de Toledo (1470?-1553), have been the best exemplars of the academic, rather than civic, context of Spanish humanism: their humanist translations and editions of Latin and Greek texts were published after Nebrija and Núñez were incorporated into the university community as faculty.

In a prefatory oration in the Florentine Studium in 1462 Cristoforo Landino indicated that his lectures for the coming academic year would be a commentary on Virgil. Hitherto considered lost, this commentary is extant in a complete draft of the lectures, Codex 1368 of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. The manuscript is an important, new source both for Landino's earlier years and for the revival of philosophical studies in Florence in the 1460's: hence this announcement and brief description.

The manuscript has the form of a word-by-word commentary on the first seven books of the Aeneid, although a title, added on the flyleaf by a later hand, promises a commentary on eight books.

Scholars of history have finally set to work on the history of scholarship. It is strange to report that they have neglected the history of their own intellectual tradition, but it is so. J. E. Sandys’ three-volume History of Classical Scholarship has of course long been available to serve as the basic source of information on the subject. But Sandys’ work presents chiefly a chronological overview of names, dates, titles, and anecdotes bearing on classical scholars and their work. What has been lacking is a survey of the development of scholarly thought and methods, based on an analysis of the principles employed by past scholars in their work. Synthetic studies are now available which suggest the broad outlines along which scholarship developed.

An encounter at Eltham palace between a wandering scholar and a prince prompted an engaging gift of verse from the visitor. ‘For the present I have dedicated these small gifts to you as toys for your boyish age, intending to bring richer offerings when virtuous manhood, increasing with your years, shall furnish me with richer themes for my verse.’ So wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam, anticipating that eight-year-old Henry would illuminate good literature with his distinction, protect it with his royal authority, and encourage it with his generosity. A quarter of a century later Erasmus was to reminisce about this visit with the royal child: how Thomas More had embarrassed and angered him by offering a composition to the prince while he lagged empty-handed; how the boy had passed him a note during dinner, challenging something from his pen; how he had promised to send a token and had hastened back to Lord Mountjoy's estate to compose one hundred fifty lines of verse in three harried days.

Giampietro Carafa was seventy-nine when he was elected pope, but he was no senile old man. Tall, skinny, all nerves and bones, he seemed not to touch the ground when he walked. He was well read—he knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Spanish—and possessed a remarkable memory. A temperate man at the table, he was equally moderate in his way of life; no one was ever able to attribute a scandal to him. His only indulgence was the wine he drank during his two daily meals, a wine so ‘powerful and fiery, black and thick, that you could cut it.’

La Pyrénée (1571) stands out in the very considerable corpus of writings of François de Belleforest. The work was long thought to be a translation, or at best an adaptation, of Sannazaro's Arcadia (1502-1504). While Jules Marsan in his study of the pastorale dramatique published at the beginning of this century suggested that Belleforest might have been familiar with Montemayor's Diana (1550), no one has yet undertaken a study of La Pyrénée. Unlike Vauquelin de la Fresnaye's Foresteries (1555) or Remy Belleau's Bergeries (1565), both of which employ prose passages as a mere framework for the inclusion of poems, Belleforest's La Pyrénée is the first work in prose in French literature to which the term ‘pastoral novel’ might accurately be applied.

Interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream have suffered from a hesitation or a downright refusal on the part of critics to consider the full significance of the ritual of Midsummer, or Saint John's Day, in Shakespeare's comedy. The play, like the ritual which informs its structure, maintains a dual frame of reference, Christian and pagan. Within this frame such seemingly unrelated subjects as the moon and dew imagery, the frequent reference to eyes, and the business of magic plants, particularly the peacemaking ‘Dians bud,’ become thematic components of the comic movement toward reconciliation of natural and lawful love. The lovers’ progression from the night of misrule to the light of the holy day parallels the pagan nature of the Midsummer festival and its Christian conclusion.

The cumulative results of over thirty-five years of research by historians of Renaissance thought have established the importance of the Hermetic tradition in the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe. The studies of Frances Yates especially have focused the attention of historians of science upon the problem of the relationship of Hermetic magic to the development of modern scientific attitudes. Others have regarded the Hermetic tradition as a foundation of religious toleration in late Renaissance Europe. The studies of Yates, Walker, and Dagens have suggested that acceptance of the Hermetica, together with the remaining texts of the prisca theologia, by Renaissance intellectuals was manifested in practical life in ‘eirenic, reunionist opinions’ and efforts to effect a reconciliation between warring Catholics and Protestants at the end of the sixteenth century.

When Thomas Stokesley, Bishop of London, ‘commaunded Barlowes dyaloges to be preached of the curates through out all hys dyocese,’ he was recommending one of the most interesting English accounts of the Reformation in Germany: William Barlow's A dyaloge descrybyng the orygynall ground of these Lutheran faccyons and many of theyr abusys (1531). The interlocutor William, recently returned from the Continent, names to his friend Nicholas the leading reformers he has met and outlines Luther's controversies with Henry VIII, Carlstadt, and Zwingli. He discusses the quarrel between the Lutheran and Zwinglian factions over the eucharist and their subsequent meeting at Marburg (1529). His account of the ‘third faccyon,’ the Anabaptists, constitutes an early source for England's knowledge of Anabaptist beliefs and many of their startling practices.

Professor Caterina Santoro's latest edition of Lombard documents, La politica finanziaria dei Visconti. Documenti. Vol. I, Settembre 1329 - Agosto 1385 (Milan, 1976), offers a convenient opportunity to look back over the last three decades and attempt a brief assessment of similar editions pertaining to the political and administrative history of Lombardy under the Visconti and the Sforza. With the possible exception of Naples, Milan is the one of the five principal Renaissance states that has attracted the least attention outside Italy, particularly in the United States where one seldom encounters even a review of a book devoted to Lombard history. Yet Milan is not only far more ancient but has been more consistently on the forefront of Italian history than both Florence and Venice on whom non-Italian scholars have concentrated their research efforts.

The Family of Love has become a subject of burgeoning interest in recent years among scholars concerned with various aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life. Frances Yates has suggested that the secret society may have been active in the spread of occult ideas on the Continent, and Jan van Dorsten has pointed out the linkage between intellectual circles in the Low Countries and England. The branch of Familism which flourished in England for more than a hundred years, apparently far outlasting the Continental variety, has stirred the interest of students of English history as well. Keith Thomas believes Familists propagated alchemical knowledge in England, while Christopher Hill finds they contributed to the development of radical thought of the English Revolution.

At the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621, the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the United Provinces opened another phase in the long struggle for mastery of the Low Countries. From the Spanish viewpoint, one of the most heartening events in the years immediately following was the capitulation of the city of Breda, of great strategic importance by reason of its location on the main route to Utrecht and Amsterdam. The Dutch resistance was vigorous, for it was only after a siege lasting many months that the city yielded to Ambrosio Spinola, military commander of the Spanish Netherlands, on June 5, 1625. Ten days later the news reached Madrid.

The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin has a painting of The Liberation of Jerusalem in its collection (fig. l). One enters the carefully arranged and brilliantly colored composition through the most prominent figure on a rearing horse who signals the onslaught enacted to the right. In sharp contrast is the relaxed and somewhat melancholy allegory of victory reclining in the foreground. By combining a keen historical accuracy with an allegorical figure to suggest the context and purpose of action, the painter reveals himself to be acutely sensitive to Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. Before pursuing this relationship, however, there is a question of authorship to resolve.

In the course of collecting manuscript copies of the Latin grammar of Guarino Veronese (1376-1460) I recently chanced to examine Codex Palatinus Latinus 1760, which according to the inventory in the Vatican Library contains a copy of Guarino's grammar. The inventory is correct: this manuscript does indeed contain the work in question, but as I quickly discovered, it also contains another grammatical work, unnoticed by the compiler of the inventory.

This is a manuscript of eighty-two leaves, of which the text of Guarino's grammar occupies the first thirty-two (fols. 1-32), and the second work the remainder (fols. 33-82), with a blank page (fol. 32v) between the two.