A number of passages in Cennino Cennini's early fifteenth-century craft handbook, the Libro dell'Arte, have captured the attentionof art historians — most particularly its spectacular first chapter, which defines painting in terms indebted to late medieval poetics and which praises artistic imagination in terms ultimately derived (though significantly transformed) from Horace's Ars poetica. I would like to focus critical attention on another section of the Libro that is equally rich and complex in both its sources and its transformations — Cennini's treatment of imitation and style, articulated most pointedly in chapter 27, “How to Strive to Copy and Draw from as Few Mastersas Possible.” Cennini's discussion of copying masters will be examined in relation to humanist ideas on literary imitation, and this particular aspect of the relation between painting and poetry in theLibrowill be explored in light of the author's residency in Padua during the last years of the Trecento.

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.

in his 1569 Epistola qua ad multas multorum amicorum respondet de suae typographiae statu nominatimque de suo thesauro linguae graecae, the Parisian printer Henri II Estienne decries the participation of women in the book trade: “But beyond all those evils which have now been brought on by the ignorance of printers, male and female (for this only remains to add to the disgrace of the art, that even the little ladies have been practicing it), who will doubt that new evils are daily to be expected?” As Estienne's comments testify, one of the most unusualfeatures of the Renaissance and Counter Reformation book trade was the existence of several women printers and publishers. While their contemporaries were well aware of the presence of women in the printing profession, bibliographers and historians have largely neglected the history of their labors.

Erasmian hermeneutics are notoriously difficult to describe clearly because Erasmus is always looking in two directions at once — both toward the ideal, perfectly expressive Word and toward the multitude of imperfect, human words caught in the tumult of history and transmission. In the Enchiridion(1503), a relatively early work, he argues that words inevitably fall short of their task of miming the Logos, that the smallness of the manna rained down on theIsraelites in Exodus 16 “signifies the lowliness of speech that conceals immense mysteries in almost crude language.” Erasmus believes in an essential connection of some kind between res and verbum, but it is clear that he holds as well to the Platonic view that this connection is always necessarily inadequate, that there can be an approach but never an arrival at complete meaning through human language.

In the prologue to Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Machiavelli appears on stage to announce his arrival in England after a sojourn through the Continent:

The impact of Machiavelli on sixteenth-century Europe was profound, and as this passage implies, his reception in England was complicated by an involved process of transmission. Reactions to his works mixed with demonic portrayals of him that had percolated through European political communities.