Scattered among various series of registers preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Venice are found a considerable number of legislative acts dealing with ambassadors. A few of them are well known, some of those restricting the freedom of the doge in his relations with foreign ambassadors, for example, but most are completely unknown. Only one attempt, as far as I know, has been made to study and describe them, and that covered inadequately only the thirteenth century. Probably no study of Venetian legislation on ambassadors can succeed in being completely exhaustive, for there exists no easy way of discovering these acts. They must be sought singly and at random among the other records of the various governmental organs concerned with diplomacy.

Penser's moving description of the Redcrosse Knight's encounter with Despaire in Book One of The Faerie Queene is the culmination of a long and rich movement of thought and imagery. Here, as so often in his great Renaissance epic, Spenser looks back to the middle ages, drawing on a still-vital tradition to present the ugly, sinister figure with its knives and ropes and its soulpiercing arguments.

In spite of the tides of secularism, despair in its theological sense—loss of hope of salvation—figures significantly in Renaissance literature. Examining England alone, one notes its place in the traditional morality play pattern as the turning point of the hero's downward movement: Skelton's Magnyfycence is a prominent example. Despair episodes have a somewhat similar place in the prodigal son dramas which were popular during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, such plays as Lusty Juventus, Misogonus, and Nice Wanton.

The anti-Aristotelian movement which grew from the humanist critique of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and culminated in the new philosophical and scientific outlook of the seventeenth century based many of its objections to the Stagirite on sound philosophical and scientific principles. It brought with it, however, also much rhetorical bombast which was meant to cast aspersions on Aristotle's doctrine. We read time and again, in the writings of Valla, Agricola, or Ramus on logic or of Bruno, Patrizi, or Bacon on natural philosophy, critical judgments of Aristotle and of the Aristotelians which are not so much soundphilosophy and science as clever oratory. To attempt to separate the two strands of the critique would be by no means an easy task, though it may well be worth while and interesting. Let me hasten to add that I do not intend to do so here.

The Text of this collection often poems, 978 lines written in elegiac couplets, is preserved in a single manuscript (169) in the Biblioteca Augusta at Perugia (ff. 2r-33r). It is listed by Mazzatinti, who gives its date as s.xv ex. and adds a full description, and by Tammaro de Marinis. Internal evidence suggests that the poems may have been written between 1492 and 1494. Although the author, C. Aurelius Cambinius, is not mentioned by Bottiglioni or other literary historians, the Cambini family is well known. Andrea and Bernardo Cambini appear both in historical documents of the period and as authors. Bernardo Cambini wrote sonnets and Andrea Cambini wrote historical works and Tuscan translations of works written in classical and humanist Latin.

No religious issue in the Reformation was debated more bitterly than the theory of the forgiveness of sins. To Roman Catholics forgiveness meant the sacrament of penance, and its necessity was so evident to John Eck that he called auricular confession ‘the nerves of our religion and of Catholic discipline'. To Luther forgiveness meant personal certitude and salvation by faith—it meant the destruction of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance. So important were these doctrines to Lutheranism that Melanchthon could completely summarize Luther's contribution to the church as his teaching of'the correct manner of penance and the correct use of the sacraments'. Significantly, Melanchthon adds this proof that Luther's greatness lies in these reforms: ‘many consciences testify this to me'.

Philippo Oriolo da Bassano's poem, Monte Parnaso, is an imitation of Dante which, however, in no way reflects the glories of the great Florentine's verse. It has rightly been accorded little attention beyond a few nods in its direction by literary historians. The excerpts from die poem published in 1899 have slumbered on library shelves within the pages of the Giornale Dantesco. The complete poem is preserved in a late sixteenth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena. On the concluding folio a note records that the poem was read through in 1586 by one Zuanne Cozza, a notary (who perhaps copied it), it having come by chance into the hands of a worthy notary and citizen of Treviso, one Iseppo Cozza, whose monogram appears at the top of the same folio. No other copies are known.

Although historians of the Turks and Turkishwestern relations have long known and used the works of fifteenth-century Latin writers dealing with the Ottoman menace, students of Renaissance intellectual history have until recently paid them scant attention. Paul Oskar Kristeller wrote in 1956 that 'compositions in prose and in verse against the Turks represent a considerable body of literary production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that has never been listed, let alone studied'.The explanation for this neglect lies largely in the history of the last hundred years of historiography but involves, among other considerations, the reactions of historians to the peculiar requirements of Quattrocento style.

Among Renaissance commentators on Aristotle, an honorable place must be given to Francesco Vimercato of Milan, whose translations and commentaries cover almost the entire corpus of Aristotelian writings. During his lifetime, this hard-working sixteenth-century scholar achieved a solid reputation for his erudition and unrivaled grasp of Aristotelian philosophy. He was honored by the King of France and by the Duke of Savoy, and his works found their way into the libraries of many lands. But he belongs to that tribe of pedants whose indispensable merits tend to be appreciated today only by editors of Aristotle who must struggle with textual details. The casual reader or sweeping philosophical critic has no patience for the sort of word-by-word examination of the text that editors still find useful.

Conventional criticism of the Homeric translations of George Chapman has generally limited itself either to invidious comparisons between the English of Chapman and the original Greek of Homer or to enthusiastic pronouncements on the beauty and the poetic value of Chapman's translation as an independent poem. A more sophisticated criticism, however, has been the objective of such modern Chapman scholars as George deF. Lord and Allardyce Nicoll, and the success, for instance, of Mr. Nicoll's labors may easily be judged from a comparison of his recent Pantheon edition of Chapman's Homer with the florid Victorian edition to which Swinburne wrote an introduction. Meritorious as their researches have been, however, both Mr. Lord and Mr. Nicoll have often obfuscated the understanding of Chapman's text by underestimating the influence of continental humanism upon his methods of translation.

The heroes of the Trojan war who figured so prominently in the pedigrees of ancient nations continued to perform the function of mythical sires for the new nations of medieval Europe. The Franks especially, from the time of the Merovingian kings, filled the darkest recesses of their forgotten past with elaborate fictions of ancient Trojan splendor. In a seventh-century chronicle, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks. After the fall of Troy, according to the Merovingian chronicler, some Trojans escaped the disaster and elected a man named Francio king. Francio's people, after a long and warlike exodus, eventually materialized over the Rhine as the Franks who invaded Gaul.