Whatever the poem's ambiguities, the Orlando Furioso's ending has always seemed allusively unproblematic: in the words of Ariosto's sixteenth-century English translator, Sir John Harington, “in the death of Rodomont, to shew himself a perfect imitator of Virgill, [Ariosto] endeth just as Virgil ends his Aeneads with the death of Turnus.”

In a recent essay on new historicism Louis Montrose is concerned that “the terms in which the problem of ideology has been posed and is now circulating in Renaissance literary studies—namely as an opposition between ‘containment’ and ‘subversion’—are so reductive, polarized, and undynamic as to be of little or no conceptual value. A closed and static, singular and homogeneous notion of ideology must be succeeded by one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual.“ Montrose's critique and recommended solution seem both valid and commonsensical, yet they are infrequently practiced, perhaps nowhere more hegemonically than in discussions of Renaissance elite ceremonies.

Like Youth and Age or Reason and Passion, War and Peace was one of those polarities that Renaissance writers persistently thought about as well as with. Reflection upon war and peace was at the heart of the Humanist movement, just as the conduct of war and peace was at the foundation of the European state system during the early modern period. This concern with war and peace arose from Humanism's defining traits: its exaltation of fame, its fascination with the military cultures of Greece and Rome, its emphasis on human dignity and freedom, its pursuit of secular knowledge in history and psychology, and its political commitment to improving the quality of institutional and personal life.’

Because rationalism and logocentrism have no eternal political essences, … they can be put to different political uses in different historical contexts. This is not to say that epistemological claims (or literary styles, or any other symbolic structures) are ideology-free and impervious to ideological analysis, only that the relation between the epistemological claim or other symbolic structure and the interests it serves is a contextual one that can change as the historical context changes.

Bacon's Only Piece of fictional writing, in addition to the masques he wrote for a Christmas entertainment at Gray'sjnn in 1594, was published posthumously by Rawley. Most commentators assume that he wrote New Atlantis at the time he hoped to become provost of Eton in 1623. Bacon's death in 1626 meant that, apart from the last edition of the Essays in 1625, this was his last major work written in English. Many critics have discussed Bacon's stylistic methods, and several have speculated that his view and practice of linguistic representation in the 1620s had become rigorously non-metaphoric for the purpose of imparting scientific knowledge.