Rfoulché-delbosc was the first to point out that Luis del Mármol Carvajal committed extensive plagiarism in his Historia del rebelion y castigo de los Moriscos del Reyno de Granada. As the French hispanist showed, Mármol lifted large parts out of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's De la Guerra de Granada. At the time Mármol wrote his book—some time before 1580, according to Foulché-Delbosc— Mendoza's Guerra, unpublished until 1627 (about fifty-five years after it was written), was available in many manuscript copies. Unquestionably, the Guerra served Mármol as a major source, especially for reporting certain events at which he had not been present. Foulché-Delbosc, in 1894, expressed astonishment that no one seemed to have noticed this before him.

The only references by Reformers to More's Utopia listed in R. W. Gibson's St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography (New Haven, 1961) are two by Tyndale and two by Foxe. Actually Tyndale makes five direct references to Utopia and a large number of indirect references. At least two other Reformers besides the two listed who refer to Utopia are John Frith and William Roy. Each of the direct and indirect references to the Utopia made by Reformers is polemical. The usual point made is that since More has once passed off fiction as truth, he is quite capable of continuing to do so—especially in religious controversy.

Tyndale uses More's authorship of the Utopia to attack both More himself and the Catholic Church in general. For instance, he very conveniently dismisses an entire chapter of More's Dialogue by saying that it ‘is as true as his story of Utopia & all his other Poetrie….’ Here the reference serves as shorthand; it saves Tyndale from the necessity of entering into extended argument.

The Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani, takes time out from his spare narrative of the hectic events of the revolutionary year 1294 to devote a chapter to the commemoration of the death of that ‘worthy citizen whose name was Brunetto Latini,’ and who ‘was a great philosopher, and was a perfect master in rhetoric….’ No Florentine of his generation, opines Villani, could speak so eloquently or write so artfully as that ‘worthy citizen.’ It was the notary, Ser Brunetto Latini, who composed the justly renowned commentaries on Cicero's rhetoric, as well as compiling perhaps the best of all encyclopedias written by thirteenth-century Italians (Il Tresor). Moreover, he held the highest communal offices, repeatedly went on key diplomatic missions, and was longtime Chancellor of the Commune. In all things he was un' uomo civile. Above all others of his generation he ‘refined the Florentines,’ teaching them to counsel wisely, orate effectively, and to rule the republic according to the precepts of Aristotle's Politics.