Ever since Della Torre posited in 1902 that Ficino had undergone a religious crisis that led him to abandon the pagan beliefs of his youth and take holy orders, scholars have wrestled with how to explain the seeming inconsistencies in his thought. Though they downplayed Della Torre's notion of a specific crisis of faith, the next generation of scholars, including Thorndike, Sarton, Kristeller, Garin, Walker, and Yates, still labeled Ficino inconsistent, or at best, melancholic, wavering, and anxious.

The episode of the Sibylle de Panzoust, most often brushed aside as merely farcical, scatological and obscene, remaiijs to be examined seriously and at length. My reading of the sibylline episode will begin by placing the Sibylle in the context of Rabelais' general treatment of women; I shall attempt to determine her place among all the other means of divining the future; further, I shall examine the attitudes of the Pantagruelistes (Epistémon, Pantagruel, Panurge) towards her before the consultation, and, of course, thoroughly investigate the consultation itself.

Among the holdings of the Royal Library at Copenhagen are three codices containing rough drafts of letters and treatises, some in Erasmus' hand. In 1966 C. Reedijk published a detailed description of the contents of the manuscripts, identifying all of the pieces except for one short section entitled Manifesta mendacia. Speculating about the contents of this autograph, which is written in a hurried manner and difficult to decipher in places, he suggested that it might be an apologia addressed to Jacobus Stunica.

Composers working during the last quarter of the fifteenth century wrote many more motets than previous composers had done. At any rate, far more have come down to us. This apparent explosion of activity coincided with the founding, reorganization, or revitalization of a number of cathedral or princely chapel choirs. Moreover, the character of the motet as a musical genre also seems to have changed at about the same time. By far the largest number of motets composed before 1475 set texts celebrating the Virgin Mary, or else they were compositions written to celebrate particular political or social occasions.

Renaissance boys and girls attended a variety of different kinds of pre-university schools in England, France, Italy, and Spain. Renaissance Europe inherited from the Middle Ages a large educational establishment that was not a "school system" in a modern sense. Instead, there were different kinds of schools which complemented or overlapped each other. The many and confusing names for pre-university schools, such as song school, grammar school, and collège, further confuse matters.

Three major themes either have or ought to have affected the recent study of pre-university education in Germany between about 1400 and 1700. These are the Reformation and schooling; the so-called "new history" of education; and the current wave of research on literacy in Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter- Reformation Europe. The works cited should be considered illustrative of investigation carried out and issues debated during approximately the last twenty years.

Let me begin with a quotation: "The history of the universities was terra incognita until the early 1950s, inhabited only by pious hagiographers, myopic chroniclers, and that most dangerous of pre-historic animals, the historian of education. This latter creature . . . only seems to be concerned with gathering historical justifications for contemporary educational nostrums, or identifying the earliest instance of a pedagogic practice that meets with modern approbation" (Morgan, 142).

Let me pursue for a moment the question that Professor Nauert raised at the end of his paper: how successful were the new classical schools of the Renaissance in achieving the highest goal of the humanist educational program, that of inspiring their students to seek wisdom and virtue?

This is a difficult question for us to answer for two reasons. First, as a result of the deterioration of the tradition of moral philosophy in the west after the Enlightenment, the kind of deterioration that Alasdair Maclntyre describes in his well-known book After Virtue, our society is deeply confused about the meaning, purpose and possibility of moral education.