Recent commentary on poetic imitation in the Renaissance has tended to emphasize competition, to value kinds of imitation that strive to surpass their models, and therefore to disregard or even deprecate modes of imitation that seem to consist of little more than respectful duplications. It has too readily assumed that imitative poets can only achieve originality by defying or somehow asserting their difference from their models. In the following essay I seek to challenge such assumptions by examining the practice of a major Renaissance poet who managed to assert his modern voice through imitatio while refusing to engage in competitive struggle. I do not mean to suggest that Renaissance poets were not given to competitive imitation. For purposes of subsequent contrast it is worth considering rapidly why emulation frequently did characterize the imitative practice of some of these poets.

The spread of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy was extraordinarily rapid and complete, so much so that it could instill an uncritical complacency in its adherents and practitioners. By midcentury, humanist Latin had become the language of the Roman Curia, and it soon became the language of peninsular diplomacy. Humanists filled positions in the bureaucracies of princely courts and city-republics, and they took jobs as teachers and secretaries in the houses of the powerful. While humanists kept alive the bogeyman of the unlettered scholastic, whose barbarous Latin threatened a return to an age of gothic ignorance, there were, in fact, few obstacles which might slow down their cultural and professional advancement. The way to a career in the clerisy now began in the grammarian's classroom, and the successful humanist rarely cared to question the assumptions of the literary and educational movement to which he owed his livelihood.

In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari had heard that Landino would lecture on Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares during the academic year 1465-6. “I am an eager student,” he wrote to Guidetti on 14 September, “and I would be grateful to know what Landino said when he explained the first letter. For in my view it is quite hard because of the historical questions involved, and few have the ability to tackle so great an enterprise.“

The fortunes and misfortunes of the Strozzi lineage in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have recently received considerable attention from historians. This has in general been focused on two men, Filippo di Matteo Strozzi (1428-1491) and his son, Filippo di Filippo (1489-1538). The career of Filippo il vecchio as man of business and Renaissance builder has been examined in considerable detail by Richard Goldthwaite, who has characterized him as independent, determined and ambitious, and as possessing a sense of grandeur “which went beyond the bounds to which most Florentine patricians confined themselves.” He considered that Filippo's absence from the “innumerable” offices with which most men of his status in Florence occupied themselves, should perhaps be attributed to the “lordly indifference of the returned exile,” and to the realism of a pragmatist not deluded by the republican facade maintained by the Medicean regime.

Dürer's portrait of Erasmus is an image so familiar that for most of us it has become the quintessence of the scholar portrait (Fig. 1). In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—few have thought about this famous engraving with any precision. It comes as a surprise, moreover, when one examines the literature, to find that the encounter between such a notable pair of personages has produced a strangely limited and unsatisfying body of commentary. What emerges is basically the critical dilemma summed up in one writer's assessment of Dürer's effort: “Il a fait une admirable gravure, mais un mauvais portrait.“ Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky found certain commendable traits in the Erasmus engraving. But these and other scholars reach consensus principally in their negative judgment of how Dürer's print functions as a likeness of Erasmus.

Renaissance humanism, it is generally agreed, emerged in the fourteenth century as an intellectual movement devoted to the study and imitation of ancient poetry and rhetoric. It was also dedicated to using literature to promulgate ethical values derived from a variety of classical schools and blended with Christian teachings in more or less convincing ways. Scholastic philosophy in its three branches of metaphysics, natural philosophy and logic was either avoided by and large by humanists or was subjected to an assortment of criticisms—especially dialectic and physics. Petrarch and Salutati are salient examples. There can thus be little ground today for confusing humanism and scholasticism, a tendency Paul Oskar Kristeller has so valiantly and persistently combatted.

Regimes and families: historians have recently enriched our understanding of the patrician regimes of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy by analyzing relations among their component social units. This essay will contribute to this literature by throwing some light on the social structure and practices of the ruling class of fifteenth-century Venice. For a long time, but with quickening rhythm in the last decade or so, historians of Venice have been charting various currents that ran through the Venetian patriciate. On the whole, though, they have preferred to concentrate on political and economic groupings, less on the family and kinship patterns that fascinate investigators of other cities, notably Florence.

The first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, published in 1605, is, as is well known, a satire on chivalric novels. We must all the same take note that the purpose which is clearly assigned to the novel in the prologue: “to destroy the authority which chivalric books have in the world and among the vulgar,” is never directly assumed by the narrator. Not that the latter is trifling with the purpose which he has publicly assigned to his narration; quite the contrary. But he takes care not to present himself as other than the docile and modest instrument which happens to be at the service of this higher end.

It is no novelty to stress the paradistic aspects of Rabelais's style. As early as 1915, Emile Besch had described Gargantua and Pantagruel as “une parodie des romans de chevalerie,” and this broad critical assessment has not really been seriously challenged ever since. Yet most of the studies devoted to Rabelais's comical imitations seem to concentrate either on what he owes to the ancient, medieval or humanistic tradition, or on the specific techniques through which he mocks or distorts various genres, modes or styles. More specifically, very little attention has been paid so far to Rabelais's attitude vis-à-vis art works of his time, although we know very well that, like many other contemporary writers, he had a keen interest in pictorial compositions.

Emblematic figures of godly and faithful women proliferate throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Characteristically they hold books in their hands symbolic of divine revelation, or they appear in books as representations of divine inspiration. While such representation of a pious feminine ideal was traditional in Christian art, Tudor reformers attempted to appropriate the devout emotionality linked to many female saints and to the Virgin Mary, both as the mother of Christ and as an allegorical figure for Holy Church, providing instead images of Protestant women as embodiments of pious intellectuality and divine wisdom. Long before the cult of the wise royal virgin grew up in celebration of Elizabeth I, Tudor Protestants began to praise learned women for applying knowledge of the scriptures to the cause of church reform.

In the period before Claude Paradin's Devises Héroïques (1551) and Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'Imprese (1555), our knowledge of the theory and use of devices is somewhat fragmentary. There are some well known cases: Maurice Scève's use of devices as a framework for his Délie, though he called them “emblesmes“; Rabelais’ device for Gargantua consisting of the Platonic androgyne with the motto “Charity seeketh not her own“; Erasmus's figure of Terminus and “Concedo nulli”. The author of the little known French version of the Penitencia de amor was probably concerned mainly with the religious and moral ideas which he develops at some length in his adaptation, but his second interest is clearly the fashion for devices, which he introduces and uses, together with some extensive colour symbolism, apparently to enhance the impact of his didactic additions.

The rich and important debate over tyrannicide, in which Julius Caesar figures centrally, engaged the best political minds of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and raged with particular intensity during Shakespeare's time. The tremendous upheaval of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation ignited fiery polemics on the rights of subjects and on the nature and foundations of civil order. At various times Protestants and Catholics arose to challenge the authority of the earthly crown and to claim the right of deposition and tyrannicide. Monarchomachs like Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, George Buchanan, François Hoffman, Théodore de Bèze, the author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, the Ligue, and the Jesuits Robert Persons, Francisco Suarez, and Juan de Mariana drew upon the classics (especially Aristotle), the Bible, and other works (especially those of Aquinas, Salutati, and Bartolus) to reexamine fundamental assumptions about political order.

For the study of early modern society, Renaissance art often provides an extraordinary means of exploring visually the values and assumptions, attitudes, and modes of perception of those who inhabited, mentally and materially, the world of traditional, preindustrial Europe. The work of Hans Baldung dit Grien (1484/85-1545), a Swabian painter, illustrator, and designer of stained glass, illuminates one of the most familiar and yet least understood aspects of this world, the mentality of those who believed that some women were capable of influencing a man's sexual nature by means of witchcraft.

In a series of prints and drawings executed between 1510 and 1544, Baldung portrayed various aspects of the alleged activities of witches. As contributions to the iconography of witchcraft, these Hexenbilder were without artistic precedent.

The Antinomian controversy of 1636-1638, the earliest major theological conflict in colonial New England, has attracted much scholarly attention. For many, the central figure in the drama, Anne Hutchinson, is a heroine, a champion of religious freedom against the bigoted theocratic Puritan establishment of Massachusetts Bay captained by the elder John Winthrop, Governor of the colony. Others have interpreted the Puritan prosecution of the Antinomians as perhaps regrettable but absolutely necessary; theological splintering might well have led, as most contemporaries believed it would, to a fatal political weakening of the young colony at a critical moment. One feature of the Antinomian episode, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves: the occurrence of two monstrous births, one in the midst of the controversy (although belatedly discovered) and the other at its denouement.

The Genius of Venice 1500-1600, the grand exhibition held at the Royal Academy of Arts from November 25, 1983, to March 11, 1984, transformed the London season, as one brochure announced, into “A Venetian Winter.” Notwithstanding the strong competition of the British Museum's exhibition of Raphael drawings, all London seemed filled with enthusiasm for the Queen of the Adriatic, an enthusiasm that manifested itself on every level of culture consumption and tourism: from gondolier shirts, carnival masks, and tins of baicoli to concerts of Venetian music, programs of films set in the lagoon, and public lecture series on topics such as “Venice: Art and Culture” and “Venice and the Victorians“; and, not least important in setting the tone of the occasion, special travel packages guaranteed the presence of large numbers of live Venetians in the British capital (the show was sponsored by the Sea Containers Group and Venice Simplon-Orient-Express Limited).