Specialists in the Italian Renaissance know the importance of the great humanist Guarinus Veronensis (1374-1460) and are familiar with the salient points of his life. Still lacking is a series of up-to-date monographs on his more important students and the part they played in the spread of humanism in Europe. Recently, however, there have appeared in English several studies of Ianus Pannonius (1434-72), once described by Guarinus as "a studentboarder of mine, Pannonian by race but Italian in manners, an admirable, indeed a stupendous scholar.

When used to understand and combat the spread of bubonic plague, "contagion" is not a very helpful term. Plague is ecologically a complex disease transmitted from rodents to humans via fleas, and human-to-human passage of the disease is uncommon. Moreover, humans do not form lasting immunity to plague and cannot maintain the microorganism in human populations in the absence of infected rodents and their fleas. There can be no "Typhoid Mary" figure in the passage of plague.

Conspicuous irrelevance, the term adopted by Harry Berger to describe certain puzzling moments in the Spenserian narrative, might also serve to describe Spenser's allusions to the Orlando Furioso, which are pervasive and, for the most part, appear indifferent to their source—frequently the most indifferent just when they are the easiest to identify. One thinks, for example, of the Timias and Belphoebe episode of book III, canto v, which disregards the tenor of its source in the Furioso, canto xix, to the point where one wonders why Spenser took the trouble to summon recollections of Angelica and Medoro.

Architecture in England Remained a fledgling science until Inigo Jones's Italianate classicism burst forth in London in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His 1622 Banqueting House at Whitehall with its masterful double-cube interior astounded Londoners accustomed to the rabbit warren of Elizabethan apartments making up the surrounding Whitehall Palace; its rhythmic, subtly articulated marble façade clashed with the eclectic exteriors of neighboring buildings.