Renaissance humanism was not, and probably could never have been, permanently confined to the restricted company that had once created it. Even its most esoteric branches — Neoplatonism, magic, cabala, alchemy—had their practical side, for they had been conceived and continued to operate in a world of practical needs. By the first two decades of the early sixteenth century, fundamental concepts of Neoplatonism, though they may have retained their esoteric charm for self-conscious cognoscenti, had also become common coin, the imagery in which merchants, professionals, and technicians couched their own philosophical yearnings. At the same time, humanistic patterns of thought had come to govern actions in the political and financial sphere no less than they governed the progress of letters and art.

When Newton was planning a second edition of the Principia, he considered adding to the work some passages indicating his belief that the theory of inertia was known in antiquity. He intended to include several selections, ninety verses in all, from Lucretius's De rerum natura to illustrate that point. In the end, however, he decided against incorporating the material in the new edition, probably because Richard Bentley, the master of Trinity College Cambridge, considered Epicurean thought, of which Lucretius's work is the chief example, to be an attack on religion. Bentley had written to Newton that he planned to base a refutation of Epicurean atheism on Newton's Principia and asked him for clarification of several points.

About twenty-five years ago, in the lobby of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a friend introduced me to the already legendary Eugénie Droz. As kindly as her rather haughty manner permitted, she asked me what I was working on, and when I replied “Rabelais” she said condescendingly: “Oh, do you think there is any more work to be done on Rabelais?”

In the generation since that conversation a good deal of work has been done on Rabelais, much of it interesting and some of it new and exciting. M. A. Screech and his followers, most notably Jean Céard, Edwin Duval, and Florence Weinberg, have greatly expanded our understanding of Rabelais the Evangelical Christian humanist; Carol Clark and Samuel Kinser have corrected many of Bakhtin's outdated views on Rabelais and carnival; Walter Stephens has illuminated Renaissance attitudes to giants and their relevance to Rabelais.

Did the concept of style have gender? Were the styles of particular Renaissance painters considered to have gendered qualities by contemporary critics? Because gender permeated the rhetorical and philological foundations of art criticism, it can provide a useful interpretive lens to examine the critical arsenal of writers on art, their attitudes toward style and the subterranean bias of their language. Feminist art history has grappled with gender more in terms of iconography, biography, or patronage following a social agenda to analyze a misogynist past and to remedy the marginalization of women in modern art historiography. An exceptional study by Elizabeth Cropper in 1976 broached the question of gender in aesthetics by reconstituting a complex history of love and beauty that converged in treatises on beautiful women.

It has long been known that Bruno's fourth Italian dialogue, L0 spaccio della bestia trionfante, written and published in London in 1584, was used as a source by Thomas Carew for his masque Coelum Britannicum. This was Carew's only masque; but it was by no means a minor event within the Stuart calendar of court entertainments. However, in spite of general agreement on the quality of Coelum Britannicum as one of the major entertainments of the Stuart court, the use by Carew of Bruno's dialogue has never been extensively or satisfactorily commented on. Both Bruno and Carew scholars have clearly been ill at ease with the relationship and have tended to dismiss it with a few brief and evasive remarks.