Ottavio Vannini's Fresco, Lorenzo the Magnificent as a Patron of the Arts (Fig. I), forms part of a cycle painted around 1623 in the Palazzo Pitti to celebrate the marriage of Ferdinando II and Vittoria della Rovere. Lorenzo is seen surrounded by artists who proffer the fruits of their creative endeavor. Among them we immediately recognize the young Michelangelo, who presents a marble copy of an antique fawn's head, made, Vasari tells us, at Lorenzo's urging, and to the extreme left Giuliano da Sangallo, who holds under his arm a drawing from the façade of the Medici villa, Poggio a Caiano. The implication of Vannini's fresco is beyond doubt. By evoking the history of the early Medici, the Grand Dukes hoped to establish a framework within which their own glory might shine all the more brilliantly.

We are all Familiar with the traditional understanding of sources: a source is a previous text that shapes a present one through authorial reminiscence and manifests itself in verbal iteration. As the seminal works of Baldwin, Muir, and Bullough amply demonstrate, this definition has served us long and well, but every element in it has undergone intense scrutiny and reevaluation. Scholars now recognize the potential limitations of a linear, authorcentered, and largely verbal approach and have become attuned to the likelihood of intermediation, the encodings implicit in genre and language, the more oblique and more satisfying evidence of configuration—both rhetorical and dramatic. Within the spacious perspectives provided by scholars like Leo Salingar, Emrys Jones, Gordon Braden, Harry Levin, Alan Dessen, and Louise George Clubb (who has coined the term “theatergram” for certain kinds of configuration), we may well reexamine the sources of Shakespearean comedy.

The Following Essay is Presented as a sketch of some significant features of Christian humanism which relate to language and discourse in France during the first half of the seventeenth century. Its central intent is to testify to the early Jesuit conviction that the manifestation of God in the world is profound. And this belief and emphasis on the ability to discover and rediscover God in the world, in its past and present, both nourished and was nourished by the Society of Jesus's involvement in humanism.

On the Opening Page of his penultimate essay, “Of physiognomy,” Montaigne noted that the human race is, by and large, myopic: “Nous n'apercevons les graces que pointues, bouffies et enflées d'artifice. Celles qui coulent soubs la nayfveté et la simplicité eschappent ayséement à une veue grossiere comme est la nostre: elles ont une beauté delicate et cachée; il faut la veue nette et bien purgée pour descouvrir cette secrette lumiere.“ (“We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.

For What Reasons did Academicians select to use or not to use any given textbook for their own classroom instruction during the Renaissance? To what extent did ideological or pragmatic considerations influence such decisions? In this article these questions are posed to examine the use of the writings of Petrus Ramus (1515—1572) and Omer Talon (ca. 1510-1562) at schools and universities in Central Europe during the six decades between 1570 and 1630. Did “Ramist” academicians of this period make use in the classroom of writings by these two authors because of some fundamental agreement with their views? Or were these two authors preferred during these six decades because their writings could be used eclectically and/or they fit well into specific parts of the curriculum at certain academic institutions?