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.

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.

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.