In an article on the date of Machiavelli's Mandragola published recently in this journal, Sergio Bertelli makes reference to an unpublished document concerning Leonardo da Vinci as a military architect. This is a letter that the field commissary Pier Francesco Tosinghi wrote to the Florentine Republic on June 21,1503, reporting Leonardo's visit to the fortress of ‘La Verruca’ on the summit of the Verrucano mountain, about three miles from Pisa. ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ writes Tosinghi, 'himself and company, came here and we showed him everything, and we think that he likes La Verruca very much, being well fitted to his taste. Afterwards, he said that he was thinking of having it made inexpugnable. But this is something to be set apart for the time being, for the main need is at Librafatta, which is not a small undertaking, nor one to be underestimated.

The titles in an individual's library should be an excellent indicator of his interests. In the case of the extensive and remarkably varied collection of annotated volumes belonging to the Renaissance scholar Gabriel Harvey, knowledge of the contents of his library can reveal much not only about the man but about his era as well.

Harvey, eldest of a family of four brothers and two sisters, was born about 1550 in Essex at Saffron Walden, an important town of that period, situated about fifteen miles southeast of Cambridge. A person of considerable intellectual attainments he became a Cambridge don and by 1578 had published several original works in Latin prose and poetry. Although highly esteemed by his close friend the poet Edmund Spenser and by a number of eminent Cambridge scholars, Harvey was undoubtedly resented by others, perhaps because of his espousal of such antitraditional notions as Ramus’ reforms of Aristotelian logic, his awareness of his own intellectual superiority, and his fellow students' disdain for his middle-class background.

The aim of both Sperone Speroni's unfinished Dialogo della vita attiva e contemplativa and of Book I of Alessandro Piccolomini's Institutione Morale is to determine whether man's real happiness lies in action or in contemplation. In both works the issue is settled in favor of action. The authors were contemporaries and friends, and they happened to live in Padua in the period immediately preceding 1541, the year of the crucial Diet of Ratisbon. At that time there developed all over Europe an eager interest in the problem of justification by faith and by works. This trend is apparent in both works, since allusions to the religious question occur in the course of the discussion dealing with the advantages and disadvantages of the two types of life.

Until recently one of the most neglected aspects of Western European history in the modern period has been the role of ceremonial in forming and reflecting the development of political thought and institutions. Medieval historians have long used the coronation ceremony extensively as source material, but Ernst H. Kantorowicz was really the first to show scholars how to use ceremonial in understanding the early modern age. The extent to which ceremonial is a significant source of political ideology was clearly demonstrated by Ralph E. Giesey in his The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, a study which shows how the French acted out crucial political conceptions in the period when the modern state was being born, and which elucidates some of the ways in which the development of ceremonial embraces political thought and acts.

Despite the prominence given by Shakespeare to the ‘healing of the king’ in All's Well That Ends Well, criticism of the episode has been both sketchy and unenlightening. Writers intent on demonstrating its failure point to the incredibility of the king's cure or to the inconsistency of the heroine's motives. Those arguing for its success speak of the simple sympathetic response that an appeal to romantic source materials would likely have evoked. Either way, preoccupation with questions of literary modes and standards, the critical legacy of W. W. Lawrence's influential pioneer interpretation, has obscured the extent to which the meaning turns not so much on subtleties of literary perception as on matters of contemporary medical interest.

Our knowledge of the life of Francesco Zambeccari, the noted translator and fabricator of the letters of Libanius, is sketchy at best, and the course of his later years is shrouded in mystery. In 1474 he is known to have taught Greek and Latin literature in Perugia, and in the following year to have obtained a position with King Ferdinand I of Naples.

But when Zambeccari left Perugia, probably in April 1475, he went to Rome and not to Naples, for Ferdinand had already come to Rome to take part in the celebration of the seventh jubilee year of that city. While in Rome Zambeccari worked on his translations of the Libanian letters and consulted with Johannes Argyropoulos concerning them. Here every trace of Zambeccari ends. It is not known whether he ever went to Naples; Foerster's investigations of the archives at Naples and of contemporary letters of prominent Neapolitans have produced only negative results.

None of the many studies on Montaigne appears to have pursued in a consequential manner the attitudes which the author of the Essais assumes towards his own work in the course of his twentyone years of literary production. For the most part, Montaigne's allusions to his book have been related to the moment when he made them (as facilitated by Pierre Villey's fine work on the chronology of the various chapters), or to whatever major theme the commentator has been developing. The aim of this essay is to assemble in chronological order Montaigne's observations concerning his book in order not only to compare one phase with another, but also to demonstrate the progressive manner in which the book becomes an integral, organic function of the essayist's introspective odyssey.

In 1968 at the Bodleian Library in Oxford I discovered Joseph Scaliger's copy of the Roman cookbook of Apicius, which provided several new pieces of evidence for the continuation of my studies of the fortuna of that author into the seventeenth century.

The Scaliger Apicius bears a note on its flyleaf in an early hand quoting from Struvius; from this reference, I discovered that at the beginning of the seventeenth century Lorenzo Pignoria of Padua (1571-1631) had offered his manuscript of Apicius, of which I have written elsewhere, to Marcus Welser of Augsburg for the use of the Wechel press.

Two difficult passages in the second act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar can be illuminated if each is interpreted as an emblem. Brutus’ troublesome first soliloquy and the strange dialogue among three conspirators about where the sun rises are both moments of great moral intensity; Brutus meditates on the necessity of assassinating Caesar in the first passage and commits himself to the conspiracy during the second. We might plausibly look to iconography as a perspective on such morally intense moments; emblems, certainly, are in keeping with the pageantry, symbolic statuary, ritual, and solemn moral utterance which permeate this play.

No one seems yet to have appreciated that what is the earliest Latin verse of the New World is also its earliest extant verse by any visitor from the Old World. Furthermore, no one has paid any attention to the very poems themselves.

The poet was Alessandro Geraldini (ca. 1455-1524), Italian humanist, diplomat, and churchman. A native of Umbria, Geraldini went to school in Italy, but later left for Spain with his older brother, Antonio, the two bringing with them, like their famous contemporaries Peter Martyr and Marineus Siculus, the influence of the new learning of the Renaissance. At the age of twenty-one, Alessandro served under Ferdinand and Isabella as the Castilians defeated the Portuguese at Toro. He became cupbearer to Isabella, and traveled with Antonio, when the latter was secretary to John II of Aragon, on visits to Francis II, Duke of Brittany, and to Edward IV of England.