A short dialogue in Angelo Decembrio's De politia litteraria (1462) describes the reception accorded by Leonello d'Este and his courtly literary circle to Ugolino Pisani, writer, comedian, and wellknown entertainer in the 1430s and ‘40s. The dialogue is a unique and valuable resource. It is perhaps the earliest document of its kind to disclose so vividly how an eager dramatist of the time hoped his work would find favor with a discriminating and influential audience, and it dramatizes an encounter that we know actually took place between the writer and an audience whose patronage he sought, showing the audience's ideas and tastes on the spot and in motion, so to speak.

The following list comprises eleven works which were perceived by their contemporaries as anthologies of facetiae and which heavily influenced laterjoke collections. From 1344, when Petrarch revived the Classical facetia tradition based on Cicero and Quintilian, to 1528 when Castiglione drew on Cicero's joke theory for his laughing courtier, each collection offacetiae (though never “original” in our sense of the term) had a different purpose and a different tone. From the 1530s on the joke-books were collective, drawing often literally on a mixture of sources and including the large and very popular compilations of Gast (1541) and Domenichi (1548).

Most of us who inhabit the western, post-Christian world are so accustomed to pictures of the Madonna and child or of the Holy Family that we hardly notice the details. When we encounter such images in museums, on posters, or on Christmas cards, we tend to respond sentimentally if at all. We note whether the baby looks like a baby or not. We are pleased if the figures appear happy and affectionate. Perhaps we even feel gratitude for the somewhat banal support of an institution—the human family—that seems worn a little thin in the modern world. But we are not shocked. Recognizing that the Incarnation is a central Christian tenet, we feel no surprise that Christian artists throughout the western tradition should have painted God as a male baby.

When Margaret of Anjou died at the Chateau of Dampierre, near Saumur, on August 25, 1482 it was as a woman not only retired from the world but almost forgotten by it. She who had been for a time the virtual ruler of Lancastrian England, who had raised armies and intrigued with princes, had not enough money to pay her debts except through the uncertain charity of her uncharitable cousin, the king of France. Crushed by misfortune, bereft of power by the death of her husband and son, picked clean of her remaining rights and possessions by Louis as the price of her ransom from English captivity, she seemed to be of no interest to anybody.

The Sistine Chapel (Fig. I) has been seen by millions and has been the subject of much scholarly attention. The most important and sustained study of The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo is L. D. Ettlinger's learned volume of that title. In this book, Ettlinger demonstrated that the typology of the murals, in which Moses is juxtaposed with Christ, represents the doctrine of papal primacy. There is still more to be learned about the Chapel, however, if we take into account the fact that the founder, Sixtus IV, was a Franciscan friar before he was pope.

In the dedicatory letter to the first printed edition of his Adulescentia, Baptista Mantuanus (“Mantuan” in England since the Renaissance) asks all readers holding manuscript copies of the earlier, unprinted version of his collection to destroy them—a request in effect so discouraging that, despite publication in the twentieth century of several important works by Mantuan, no manuscript copies of early versions of his eclogues have ever come to light. We are therefore indebted to Paul Oskar Kristeller for recording six manuscripts—five in Italian libraries and one at the Bodleian Library, Oxford—containing copies of what I have discovered to be early versions of Mantuan's ninth and tenth eclogues. Examination of these manuscript copies reveals new information as to the date and circumstances of composition and initial publication of the two eclogues.

The theory and practice of proffering consolation commanded a prominent place in humanist moral thought and literature. Reviving and furthering the tradition of the ancient consolatio, Renaissance writers formulated solace for such problems as bereavement, the fear of death, illness, despair, and misfortune. In the Trecento and Quattrocento there appeared many consolatory letters and funeral orations as well as numerous consolatory dialogues and treatises. The coherence and importance of this consolatory tradition in Renaissance culture have not been fully recognized. By studying this tradition more closely we can learn much about the psychological functions of rhetoric and philosophy in Renaissance thought. Equally important, we can begin to see more clearly how the history of ideas has sometimes been changed and enriched by its quiet counterpart, the “history of emotions.”

Like many humanists of the late fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino (1425-1498) came to consider himself not only a rhetorician but a speculative philosopher as well. Like many of these same humanists, Landino would not allow himself to peddle the merely fashionable: he pretended that he had been drinking from philosophical founts since his youth. In his dialogue De anima, completed about 1471, Landino suggested that from the early 1450s he not only was receiving systematic training in natural philosophy from Carlo Marsuppini but also was learning some Plato from the teenager Marsilio Ficino.

This is the continuation of a check-list whose first part included II compilations composed and/or published between 1343 and 1490 (RQ 39 [1986], 1—15). The time-span from 1343 to 1528 was chosen because during that period each collection of facetiae has its own individual flavor, a fact which has been insufficiently recognized because scholars studying facetiae have usually been collectors of plots or of folklore motifs. The same joke is often told, certainly, by a variety of compilers, but with a different purpose and in a different context. After 1530 the joke-books will be almost uniquely collective, and will thus lose their interesting individual character.

In accounts of Rome's “Golden Age of the Renaissance,” the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (1466-1520) has never quite faded from notoriety. His proverbial wealth and flamboyant personality survive in scattered anecdotes as a glittering sideshow to the grander enterprises of Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Indisputably the richest man in Rome between 1500 and 1520, he is best known today for three artistic commissions connected with Raphael: a chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, his mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the suburban villa known since 1579 as the Farnesina.

The Moriae Encomium and the Novum Instrumentum of Erasmus provoked remarkable storms. Even now the bitter sarcasm at the center of the Encomium shocks many as does the boldness of In principio erat Sermo, his alternative to the Vulgate's words that had a millennial sanction in theological discourse and in liturgy—In principio erat Verbum. Turbulence also radiates from the uniquely significant Romans 5:12 where he rendered eph hô by quatenus (in as much as), replacing in quo (in whom) of the Vulgate. Because of his translation and his annotations of the texts of Romans 5:12 and 14, Catholics and non-Catholics accused him of Pelagianism soon after the publication of the first edition of the Novum Instrumentum (1516).