It is well known that Sir Philip Sidney modeled eight of his thirty-two 'Certaine Sonnets’ upon existing ‘tunes,’ as he called them. To date, only one, relatively unimportant, musical model is known—the current Dutch National Anthem, to which Sidney wrote CS 23, ‘Who hath his fancy pleased.’ The result of this association of the sister arts is a simple, metrically precise, stylistically dull lyric whose numbers are directly proportioned to the regularity of its musical model. Of his other models, one, ‘The Smokes of Melancholy,’ appears to have been an English consort song; the others (five Italian, one Spanish) are probably variant forms of the villanella, a type of sixteenth-century art-song written for three or four voices and distinguished by its rhythmic lightness, its homophonic (chordal) structure, and its mildly satirical or openly vulgar text.

Erasmus’ attitudes towards Italy and the Italians and the extent of his dependence on Italian sources have been the subject of several competent studies. The prevalent view, however, tends to minimize Erasmus’ debt to Italy. The great representative of Northern humanism, it is argued, surpassed in scholarly stature his Italian contemporaries and hence had nothing to learn from them. As a moral and religious thinker deeply rooted in the traditions of the Devotio Moderna, he was far removed from the secular and even pagan tendencies of Italian humanism. He spent most of his life, apart from his native Holland, in Paris and Louvain, London, Oxford and Cambridge, Basel and Freiburg, all of them important intellectual centers in their own right and with their own traditions. The three years of his Italian journey, undertaken when he was around forty years of age, do not seem to occupy a very large place in his intellectual biography.

Cino rinuccini's Risponsiva is said to be one of the earliest Florentine works to present a republican interpretation of Roman and Florentine history. While the official correspondence of the Florentine State had been articulating such a concept since the 1370's, Rinuccini's Risponsiva would appear to be one of the first writings by a private citizen to do so. Interestingly enough, this Florentine citizen, who wrote so eloquently of his city, had a very modest public career. Although a member of an old and extremely wealthy Florentine family, his public life did not begin until he was already in late middle age and then it was insignificant. He never attained a major post in the communal government either within the city or in the provincial administration.

Machiavelli's controversial reputation secured an easy, though ambiguous, success to the Discours … Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin. While the author, the Huguenot jurisconsult Innocent Gentillet, remained virtually unknown outside of Geneva and the Dauphiné even to his contemporaries, his work, first published anonymously in 1576, was for a long time widely read and discussed in the light of the controversy stirred up by Machiavelli's doctrines. As early as 1580, Montaigne very likely alludes to Gentillet's work and puts it alongside Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy.

The texts of the early sixteenth-century madrigal are markedly uniform in their content. Love is the main theme, treated in as many variations as issue from the vagaries of the amorous condition (longing, despair, concupiscence, hate, disenchantment, etc.). So uniform, in fact, is the subject matter that when a poem departs from convention, it warrants attention as something of a rara avis. This is the case with the sonnet Trist’ Amarilli mia set to music by Philippe Verdelot, a French (or Netherlandish?) composer residing in Italy during the second and third decades, or more, of the century. Its (anonymous) poet delineates the sort of bucolic scene one happens upon more often in the later madrigal, and peoples it with Amaryllis, Tityrus, Atalanta, and a company of shepherds and flocks.

Volume XVI of the Renaissance News (pp. 11-14) contained a brief description of the Gondi-Medici business records in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, since then listed as Lea Mss. 212-355 in the University's Catalogue of Manuscripts… (Philadelphia, 1965). In the meantime another larger and more important collection has been acquired. This second archive has the same provenience as the first. The many members of the Medici family appearing in these pages belong largely to the branch of Salvestro (Litta, Tavola VI), while in the case of the Gondi we know for certain only that the ultimate owners of the 'archive’ were Caterina and Elisabetta Gondi, who left it to the Ritiro della Quiete in Florence.

Six generations of students of Magnyfycence have accepted 1515-16 as the date of its composition. Largely as the result of William O. Harris's recent serious questioning of Robert Lee Ramsay's political interpretation of Magnyfycence there is sufficient cause for re-examining the date traditionally assigned the play. I shall review the reasons for the date and then propose, tentatively, that Magnyfycence was conceived, perhaps actually composed, before 1504 during Skelton's first experience at the Tudor court.

In Skelton's ‘Magnyfycence’ and the Cardinal Virtue Tradition Harris has demonstrated that Magnyfycence is probably not what Ramsay thought it was—a personal attack upon Cardinal Wolsey, his rise to power and his abuse of authority.

Domenico di Leonardo Buoninsegni's Istoria Fiorentina has served numerous historians of Renaissance Florence as a source for the political events which occurred in that city in the Trecento and Quattrocento. Being a narration of Florentine history from the Creation to the autumn of 1460 it has provided modern scholars with numerous details which, seemingly, offered fresh and original insights into the evolution of Florentine history, particularly for the later portion of the Istoria in which the events described coincided with the life of the author himself (b. 1384—d. 1465).

Unfortunately, since its first partial publication by Giorgio Marescotti in 1580 (reissued in 1581), Buoninsegni's Istoria has been subject to a series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations on one of which, ironically, has rested its reputation among scholars.

Mary Stuart was accused of many things, but never of being a theologian. Nevertheless, at the end of the summer of 1561, the recently widowed and star-crossed Queen, in an extraordinary interview with the intrepid Reformer, John Knox, put her finger on what was perhaps the fundamental question of the Reformation. Concerning the respective credentials of the Kirk of Scotland and the Kirk of Rome, she pleaded: ‘Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and they interpret in another. Whom shall I believe? And who shall be judge?’ Knox's reply was, au fond, an appeal to the Holy Spirit.

The celebrated opening of T. S. Eliot's ‘Journey of the Magi' adapts a passage from Lancelot Andrewes’ fifteenth sermon on the Nativity (1622). This is well known, but less familiar may be the fact that Andrews himself was making free use of St. John Chrysostom's Homily vi on Matt. 2:1,2—the scriptural text which describes the coming of the ‘wise men’ from the east to Jerusalem to worship Jesus. The number of wise men (once thought to be twelve), their station in life, their origin, and the nature and meaning of their journey were questions which gave rise to a long tradition of patristic and later commentary on the Epiphany, as the manifestation of Christ to the world and the commemorative feast of the Church came to be called.

It is of course now obvious that the execution of More and Fisher did not bring about the collapse of the humanist movement in England during the middle third of the sixteenth century. Little attention, however, has been given to the fact that the loss of the two outstanding leaders of the older generation of humanists was followed by a decline of Catholic and the substantial growth of Protestant humanism. The primary aim of recent studies has been, rather, to establish the continuity of English humanism in the period that was not long ago widely believed to be its dark age. These recent works, to be sure, have persuasively traced its continuity in the analytical and realistic discussion of social and economic problems, the ideological bases of Henrician policy, and the interaction of Erasmian religious thought and the political Reformation.

While greatness could not be claimed for Daniel's ‘Rosamond,' it is a moderately complex poem, better and more unified than has been thought. The difficulty is that critics have overlooked the meaning of the celebrated casket. The central section of'Rosamond,’ as indicated by the picture on the casket, is a retelling of the myth of Io in terms of English history in order to inculcate the moral that the sin of lustful prostitution, particularly when adulterous, results in self-metamorphosis into a beast. This transformation occurs despite assurances by a procuress that a god or king can make his own morality and absolve any sin. The central allegorical myth is supported by other moralized myths of lust—those of Neptune and Amymone, Danae and Jove, Atalanta and Hippomenes, and Pasiphae and the bull.

Attempting to recover what has been a largely ignored and vastly overlooked subject in theater history, Professor Glynne Wickham has demonstrated the importance of the study of civic pageantry as a natural part of the evolution of English drama. Wickham makes a most persuasive case for the significance of these dramatic entertainments as they contribute both technically and thematically to the regular stage of the English Renaissance, and he shows clearly that the whole subject is in need of further exploration in order to counter the neglect it has received at the hands of many scholars. Civic pageantry, as Wickham defines it and as I use the term, refers of course to planned dramatic entertainments, not just color or spectacle, designed to honor the sovereign or magistrate on special occasions. Generally, there are three kinds of pageants: royal entries of the sovereign, the sovereign's provincial progresses, and the annual Lord Mayor's Show in London.

On lit, dans A Literary History of England, un passage qui prétend traduire le latin d'Erasme: ‘Who does not admire in Grocyn the perfection of his training?’

F. M. Nichols traduisit ainsi: ‘In Grocin who does not marvel at such a perfect round of learning.'

Voici le texte original: ‘In Grocino quis ilium absolutum disciplinarum orbem non miretur?'

La traduction de l'ouvrage de Baugh est trop éloignée du texte latin, et ne permet pas de comprendre ce que Erasme a voulu dire: je crois, en effet, qu'Erasme voulait désigner ce que le mot Encyclopédie, signifie, pour Budé, ‘une perfection des arts liberaux et sciences politicques, qu'on appelle en Grec Encyclopediaqui veult autant a dire (pour le declarer briefvement) comme erudition circulaire.'

It Is a commonplace of criticism that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor is an altogether different comic from the ready and resourceful, the irrepressible Sir John of Henry IV. Could it have been otherwise? If the Queen wished to see Falstaff'in love,’ that would mean unsuccessfully in love, and nothing would do but to make Falstaff an amorous buffoon taken in repeatedly by transparent devices and exposed to the ridicule of ordinary minds. The tradition of the Queen's command aside, making Falstaff the dupe in a domestic comedy would require a radical change in character. And had not the real, the original knight died babbling of green fields and gone to Arthur's bosom? Finally, if Shakespeare had in mind Ralph Doister (or some other strictly thrasonical figure) while he was making Merry Wives, as it seems possible he did, would not the lusterless Sir John wooing citizens’ wives be more fully accounted for?