Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante is notoriously unreliable as an historical biography of the poet. Much of what is doubtful in the Trattatello has been blamed on simple misinformation, the influence of literary convention, the misreading of Dante's works, or pure invention on the part of the author. Especially susceptible to objection has been the Trattatello's representation of Dante's personal character. Leonardo Bruni, the first to offer an assessment, found Boccaccio's portrayal of Dante distorted and inadequate, and Bruni's pronouncement established an interpretative commonplace from which critical opinion has never been entirely free: “It seemed to me that our Boccaccio … described the life and manners of so sublime a poet just as though he were writing the Filocolo, or the Filostrato, or the Fiammetta, for he is all full of love and sighs and burning tears, as though the man had been born into this world merely to turn up in those ten days … related in the Centonovelle [Decameron].“

In 1478, twenty-three years after Johann Gutenberg printed the 42- line Bible in Mainz, the town fathers of Cologne engaged in “the first censorship trial on record” as they sued to stop the distribution of a printed book which challenged their authority. The next year Pope Sixtus IV inaugurated papal legislation of press censorship by authorizing the University of Cologne to police virtually every aspect of the new industry. These actions of 1478 and 1479 are the earliest known instances of press censorship. They also reflect the political, moral, and religious concerns which would henceforth dominate press censorship. But as far as I can tell, the first call for press censorship had actually occurred nearly a decade earlier, and had absolutely nothing at all to do with religion, morals, or politics.

“A name,” Bernardine of Siena declares, “is a famosa notitia,“ a public statement.’ In this paper I review the stock of personal names, and, implicitly, the public statements, associated with the men of women of Florence and of Tuscany, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The justifications for this enterprise are two. The surviving sources give overwhelming attention to the rich and powerful; they pay little heed to the poor and lowly. Inevitably, they yield an unbalanced view of Tuscan society. But if in most respects the humble are voiceless, they do bear personal names; they do make, in Bernardine's phrase, public statements.

Moreover, as Bernardine implies, a name is far more than a bland identifier. It is rather a pointer, that directs our gaze in three directions. Its principal and unvarying function is to identify a particular man or woman. It bestows individuality; it ensouls. But names may also recall the past; often, they convert living persons into memorials to the dead.

In their magisterial work, Les Toscans et leurs families, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber examined in considerable detail a problem faced by many historians studying late medieval tax censuses such as the Florentine catasto: how much credence to give to the ages of individuals whose names are included in these documents? Following a lengthy investigation of the catasto of 1427-1429, they reached the wistful conclusion that “Tuscans in 1427 had only a vague knowledge of their own ages or were loath to report them accurately.“ In the course of their inquiry, Herlihy and Klapisch compared the ages of some individuals recorded in the catasto with the ages of the same individuals found in other documents.

Castiglione's Libro del cortegiano (1528) and Renaissance courtesy literature in general chart an uneven course between the description of an illustrious courtly ideal never fully incarnate and the establishment of a set of rules enabling courtly practice and prescription. These two intentions, one roughly Platonic and the other roughly Aristotelian, are in the end contradictory, for the more substantial the ideal becomes, the less can it accommodate varying experience and therefore practice. The impulse to set forth an ideal as something outside of variety through which experience is to be judged is incompatible with the production of that ideal through the experiential mean of varying extremes.

Literary forgeries and pseudepigrapha have played an important role in Western culture since antiquity. One thinks of the large influence exercised in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the Corpus Hermeticum, the Zohar, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de causis, the Pseudo- Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, the correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca, and the vast sea of pseudonymous hagiographical literature. However, in the Renaissance the situation changed somewhat because printing did more than merely provide a new medium for the diffusion of pseudonymous literary works; it increased greatly the possibility of financial profit for the publishers, printers, and, eventually, authors of such works.

Giotto's fresco cycles of the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention as the vast fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel. Scholars have analyzed the space depicted in the frescoes, the striking monumentality of the figures, and the depiction of architecture oblique to the picture plane; thematic content, however, has received less attention than form and space. In this essay, I will propose some religious and secular iconographic and thematic unities: themes of rebirth, resurrection, and communitas, which correlate with fourteenth-century Florentine attitudes toward wealth, historiography, and a belief in the spiritual role of the earthly city. The themes of the frescoes articulate the social and political structures of early fourteenth-century civic life, as Giotto transformed traditional subjects into images of contemporary significance in these frescoes.

The notion of music as a form of speech is a commonplace. Without arguing the difficult questions whether music is patterned after speech or itself constitutes its own language, it should be remembered that the main vocabulary for describing the structure and content of music has been drawn from the artes dicendi. The present report deals with a small, but significant part of this vocabulary: the term elegance along with various synonyms and antonyms borrowed from grammar and rhetoric and applied to music, in a number of writings, from classical times onwards.

When in 1625 Gabriel Naudé wished to clear the name of Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) from the pious slanders of the demonologists of the intervening century, he argued that this learned man, “who was not only a new Trismegistus in the three higher faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine, but who desired to travel in body through every part of Europe, and to exercise his mind on all sciences and disciplines,” deserved better than to be abused with stories “which would be much more appropriate in the magical tales of Merlin, Maugis, and of Doctor Faust, than in writings which are (or rather should be) serious and well-examined… . “ Naudé's words provide an accurate anticipation of the three principal reasons for the interest of modern scholars in the writings of this enigmatic humanist and magician.

Sometime between 1502 and 1509 one of Antwerp's city clerks took time to pen a small drawing and inscription on the flyleaf of a document in his care (fig. 1). His depiction of a naked soul seen from the backside while ascending into the clouds of heaven, succinctly labeled “ascensio,” turns out to be only the first of several dozen doodles preserved in a special class of judicial manuscripts in the Antwerp city archives. Taken as a group, these pictorial and verbal jottings provide a unique opportunity to eavesdrop upon the spontaneous mental meanderings of several Antwerpians in the age of Metsys, Erasmus, Bruegel, and Plantin. The art of doodling is revealing by its very nature, and the possibility that one of the doodlers was the humanist Pieter Gillis provides an additional incentive for the discussion of this material, which is catalogued and translated in the accompanying appendix.

In 1610, the plague hit London with unusual force. Ever since the Black Death more than a century earlier, bubonic plague had been endemic to Britain, and city dwellers were accustomed to the loss often or fifteen lives each year. But when the number of plague deaths exceeded thirty or forty, panic threatened. Then public gathering-places, such as theaters, were closed, since the disease was thought to spread directly through human contact. A predictable exodus from the city began: anyone with money and access to a country house fled for the duration of the epidemic, leaving the less fortunate in the grip of “the Poor's Plague.“’ When members of the dominant social classes decamped, they delegated household authority to their servants. These temporary aristocrats shared the city with quack doctors who sold unicorn's horn and patent nostrums guaranteed to cure the disease. The city took on a macabre carnival atmosphere of license, at least for those who were still healthy.

The examination of the life and times of Julia Lombardo through the inventories of her possessions (Appendices I & II) enhances our understanding of the role of the courtesan in sixteenth-century Venetian society. Conserved in the archives of the Istituzioni di Rico vero e di Educazione, they are the only inventories of a Venetian courtesan from the Renaissance which have come to light. These documents afford an intimate glimpse into the interior of a prostitute's home in a city renowned for such services. Julia herself invites a closer look by what she reveals and conceals in her Condiccion(Appendix III). In composing this statement of her assets, written in her own hand, she puts to use the wiles needed for success in her mestiere. Other documents excluded from the appendices but utilized in the text aid in developing a picture of this woman. The comments of her contemporaries augment the image.

One of the intellectual advances achieved by what has been called “the Renaissance discovery of Time” was the realisation that the most interesting thing about the past is what makes it the past. A secularised historiography—involving recognition of anachronism, historical development and the relativity of truth—marks a decisive break with medieval thought. This paper seeks to explore one limited aspect of a vast topic, namely the effect of this revolution of thought on men's concept of the Roman past, which, I shall argue, was closely bound up with their perception of the English past. One result of the exploration will be to suggest a new perspective from which to consider Shakespeare's creative relationship with Roman, and also with English, history.

The relationship of the imagination to the realities of life, whether factual or moral, was not something that Sidney could take for granted. He is forever trying to make known its proper role; and for him, this means essentially the role of metaphor. Throughout the Apology, he not only identifies his metaphors but also tries to explain their workings; within the Arcadia, he exercises the utmost freedom in his use of them, but also signals them, so that they are clearly identified as metaphors. Finally, the whole of the Arcadia is a metaphor because it is fiction, a fiction set in pagan times and therefore needing from the Christian reader even more understanding of its relationship to higher truth. So, from small metaphors to large ones, he holds in his hands imagery to reflect the motions of the soul and the life of the affections as on a screen.

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.

Despite the extensive work by recent historians on the “Myth of Venice,“ there has never been a thorough study of Lewis Lewkenor's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), one of the central documents through which the myth was transmitted to England—and England, after all, was the country in northern Europe in which the myth had its most profound effects. Lewkenor's book is interesting not only because of its importance in the history of political thought but also because it was probably used as a minor source by Shakespeare for Othello and by Benjonson for Volpone.