Janus Pannonius (1434-72), Hungary's foremost Renaissance poet, has been the subject of continuous work by Hungarian students of the period engaged in identifying and describing his oeuvre and its European reception. This endeavor, of course, also includes searching for any and all contacts Pannonius had with his humanist contemporaries. Each time a new Janus MS is discovered (and it still happens), new titles are added to his ‘bibliography’ and new names to the roster of his many foreign friends. Here and there among his famous acquaintances an unknown name appears which in turn triggers new research and speculations, often yielding new insights into the varied activities of Pannonius, and, as a by-product, reveals additional information regarding the dynamism of fifteenth-century Europe.

In my catalogue of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and his school in the Royal Library at Turin, I transcribe the mysterious marginal note on fol. 14 of the Codex on the Flight of Birds as follows:

While Luigi Firpo in his admirable introduction to the catalogue interprets this note as implying an industrial application of the airplane, I now propose to connect it to the well-known series of so-called profetie. Unfortunately, the catalogue was already printed when the solution of this little mystery came to me.

Historians have long been fascinated by the ‘myth of Venice’: the phenomenon of a single state acquiring and sustaining a reputation, often at obvious variance with reality, that would serve not only the propaganda goals of the state itself but even as an influential political model for others. Although there are several aspects to this myth, they all focus on the perfection of the Venetian Republic, its uniqueness and virtù. The official epithet, la Serenissima, epitomized the image of this splendid city, founded miraculously upon the waters, unwalled yet unconquered for more than a millennium, remarkably undisturbed by internal strife. Petrarch's wellknown panegyric expresses a generally held view of Venice: ‘a city rich in gold but richer in renown, mighty in works but mightier in virtue, founded on solid marble but established on the more solid foundations of civic concord, surrounded by the salty waves but secure through her saltier councils.’

The importance of Marsilio Ficino, and the paucity of documentation regarding his early life and intellectual influences, gives special value to a brief but suggestive reference to him, made in October 1451. The reference is in the Libro creditori e debitori of Maestro Giovanni Chellini now owned by the Istituto di Storia Economica of the Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Milan. During a search of the volume for indications of Chellini's ownership and use of books I came upon this entry:

The Italian humanists of the fourteenth century did more than reintegrate the pursuit of eloquence with the concern for ethics, two interests united in the discipline of rhetoric since the time of Cicero but separated in practice by thirteenth-century specialists of ars dictaminis in Italy. Rather their achievement lay in nothing less than Christianizing the European medieval rhetorical tradition. They accomplished this by expressing in terms of those central fields of rhetoric, ethics, and history an appreciation of the distinction between the culture of the ancient world based on human reason and Christian society founded on revealed truth. While not denying the ultimate influence of God upon human history, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati (at least in his later life) tended to emphasize the natural character of ancient society and thus to secularize its history and achievements.

Diogenes Laertius has Plato reading the Phaedo and Lysis aloud to his students, but the only true lecture or series of lectures attributed to him by ancient sources was entitled On the Good, Aristotle's disciple the musical theorist Aristoxenus records that Aristotle attended the Lecture or Lectures (I shall henceforth refer to it in the singular); and Simplicius, writing in the sixth century A.D., notes first that the Lecture was also attended by Speusippus, Xenocrates, and others and later that Hestiaios and Heraclides Ponticus were there too. According to both Aristoxenus and Simplicius, Aristotle maintained the Lecture was delivered relatively late in Plato's career.

In April of 1463 Marsilio Ficino put the final touches on what was to be one of his most important and influential writings, his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum undertaken at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici. Revered as the work of the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, an authority mentioned with respect by Saint Augustine and Lactantius, the Hermetic texts came to occupy a position of preeminence in philosophical, literary, and artistic circles during the next one hundred and fifty years, principally in the form into which they were cast by Ficino. The status of Hermes as a philosophical source and as a link in the chain of ‘ancient theologians’ who foretold the truths of Christian revelation continued well into the seventeenth century.

Engravings designed by Maerten van Heemskerck were used often enough by sixteenth-century painters of stained-glass panels, but the subject of Daniel and the Priests of Bel and the Dragon is preserved in only two panels known to me. The apocryphal story (Dan. 14:2-21) states that the Babylonians worshipped Bel, whose statue was given large quantities of edible offerings daily. The nightly disappearance of the food convinced King Cyrus that Bel was a living god, but the prophet Daniel proved that the priests of Bel in fact ate the offerings secretly. Daniel covered the temple floor with ashes and Cyrus sealed the doors. The next morning Daniel showed the king that the priests and their families had a secret passage under the altar because footprints led to it, and they and not Bel, therefore, had eaten the food.

Filippo Strozzi's motives for building his great Florentine palace were described by his son Lorenzo in a well-known passage. Greedier for fame than possessions, interested in and well informed about building and not knowing a better means ‘of preserving his memory,’ Filippo resolved to construct ‘in the midst of his other Strozzi [relatives]’ a building ‘which should bring renown to himself and all his [kinsmen] in Italy and abroad.’ That Filippo's building activities caused an agreeable stir in Florence is common knowledge, but it is pleasant now to learn from the copious correspondence of the Strozzi family that the project did quickly bring him a wider renown—at the Estensi court in Ferrara, where the joys and advantages of monumental building were as well understood as anywhere in Renaissance Italy.

The early fifteenth century was the age of conciliarism, of a crisis in the church; it was a time of fragmentation. In such an age it may be difficult to tell the separate parties apart, to distinguish the defenders of the old order from its critics. Whatever the nature of the parties, each may claim to stand for its own particular version of reform. This paper deals with such a rivalry as it surfaces in On Avarice, one of the dialogues of a prominent curial humanist, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). Though the point has never been noted, it will be seen that the essence of this work is to be found in the conflict between curial humanists or secretaries and mendicant friars, two groups whose fortunes had traditionally been closely identified with those of the papacy.

If, as Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus instructed the schoolboys of Europe, names are indices of reality, what truth of nature or character did he perceive in his own name? The inventive author who invested the act of naming with gravity and wit, punning Folly from More, dubbing his colloquial characters aptly as ‘Cocles’ or ‘Eusebius', reviewed and revised his own name with humanist concern for the alignment of verba with res. As a student he dutifully signed himself ‘Herasmus,’ later dropping the initial consonant, and still later regretting that he had not adopted the more liquid ‘Erasmius.’ ‘Who ever heard of anyone being called “Love“?’ he protested. Rather than the adjectival form i.e., ‘amiable,'would have been more courteous and agreeable he thought.

One of the big problems in Montaigne studies is that the essayist slips away the minute he is pressed too closely. Careful collation of passages, meticulously chosen with a specific end in mind, can ‘prove’ a given thesis: Montaigne the Stoic, Montaigne the Skeptic, or Montaigne the Epicurean. It can be shown—and has been—that these three aspects were all true, simply superseding each other as Montaigne grew older. It has also been shown, however, that Montaigne the Stoic and Montaigne the Epicurean coexisted; and other combinations likewise. So pressing Montaigne too closely is likely to yield a series of pictures which, viewed individually, are true, but taken as a whole appear contradictory.

George B. Parks has recently argued, largely on the basis of internal evidence, that Reginald Pole could hardly have written the biographical sketch that was prefixed to the literary remains (epistles and orations) of the noted Ciceronian Christophe de Longueil (Longolius, ca. 1490-1522). Parks thus challenges the unanimous opinion of Pole's biographers. The young Englishman, he concedes, may yet have been responsible for the ‘Vita Longolii,’ but certain Italian friends (notably Bembo or Leonico Tomeo) and/or English compatriots (Thomas Lupset perhaps) must at least have had a hand in it. The purpose of the following discussion is to bring forth and evaluate additional evidence concerning the authorship of the ‘Vita,’ evidence that, without being conclusive, raises new doubts about the traditional attribution of the ‘Vita’ to Pole.

In chapter xxv of Il Principe, Machiavelli refers very briefly to men's goals, saying that ‘in the things that lead to the end that everyone has in view, namely glory and riches (cioè glorie e ricchezze), men proceed in different ways.’ L. Arthur Burd observes that ‘Machiavelli dispatches in this one short sentence a question which was usually discussed at length in the earlier political manuals: what is it, namely, that furnishes the motives of action?’ Glory was one of the most important ideas in Renaissance thought, and Machiavelli's thought can be understood only imperfectly if the part that gloria played in it is not grasped; yet inexplicably this theme has been almost entirely neglected.

Some recent interest in the writings of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) has focused on his use of classical and medieval sources. Another sphere of interest has been the extent to which Grotius knew Hebrew and was able to find and use Jewish source material himself, as distinct from being dependent on Latin translations that were becoming increasingly available at the time that he wrote. This article has a two-fold purpose: the first is to identify exactly the Jewish sources that Grotius cited in On the Law of War and Peace, an identification which has not yet been made with thoroughness and precision.

Among the Latin epigrams of Thomas More, several are highly interesting for musical reasons. Two bear the caption ‘Poem Translated from an English Song.’ The first of these (63), beginning ‘O cor triste,’ reads in literal English translation,

Break, sad heart, pitiably engulfed in deepest woe. Let this be the end of your punishment. Show your mistress your bloody wounds. In short, it is she, only she, who will keep us two apart. Alas, how long shall I in my misery thus weep and complain? Come, dreaded death, and release me from monstrous woes.

The song on which this is based has apparently not yet been found.

John Dee (1527-1608) has received increasing scholarly attention since the completion in 1952 of I. R. F. Calder's massive dissertation, ‘John Dee Studied as an English Neoplatonist,’ and with the publication of Peter French's John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus, Dee's career and works should be fairly familiar. Prior to Calder's study, John Dee's press had been none too good, and serious scholars have labored under the burden of demonstrating Dee's place within some important intellectual tradition, so that he might be rescued from the opinion, based upon his penchant for occult studies, that he was ‘… the sport, the laughing-stock and die pray of daemons,’ or, in more modern form, ‘a rather silly man.’

John Milton's description in Lycidas of the shipwreck that caused the death of Edward King has generally been interpreted along historical and naturalistic lines. In this essay I want to show that the image of the ship as Ecclesia or the Church, coming as it does in almost the exact center of Lycidas, sheds new light on Milton's use of the Christian and humanistic traditions, its single image identifying and being used to unify his twin aims of satire and elegy.

Merritt Y. Hughes, in his edition of Milton's poetry and major prose, refers to the example of ‘disastrous twilight’ in Paradise Lost (1.597) to explain the reference to ‘th’ eclipse’ (1. 101) as the time of the ship's construction.

Source study has generally been discredited as a useful critical tool because of the past simplistic conception of the relationship between the source and its adapted context. Generally, source hunters emphasized parallel passages as the major proof of similarities between texts, merely listing the parallels without investigating more important critical implications. If we are to continue to consider source study a valuable scholarly tool—and there are good reasons to do so—we need to establish its interpretational relevance through a method which compares the conventional ideas and symbols of the source with the motifs and themes of the adapted context. Thus, the contextual method of ascription, as it shall be termed for purposes of discussion, will require an understanding of the interaction between the source's original context, including subsequent intellectual history, and the themes of the new context.

In his essay ‘De la ressemblance des enfants aux peres’ (II, 37) Montaigne tells two stories, the second of which is the curious account of how, after hearing that goat's blood was good for one's health, he raised a billy goat and had it slaughtered in the hope of procuring for himself some of this marvelous elixir. Only after the animal had been killed did he begin to have doubts about the medicinal virtues of goat's blood. Amused by his earlier credulousness, Montaigne relates this anecdote in a tone so personal, so affable and self-deprecatory that the reader, won over by the amiability of the speaker, is likely to be sensitive to the human quality of the narrator but unlikely to be attentive to the subtle way in which the text determines his responses or to the author's ulterior motives for eliciting those very responses.