Mystery and legend continue to cloud the events surrounding the trial and death of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican who advocated religious reform, prophesied doom for corrupt political and ecclesiastical leaders and, in spite of the considerable power he had gained in Florence; was hanged and burned at the stake in 1498 together with his faithful companions Fra Domenico Buonvicini of Pescia and Fra Silvestro Maruffi of Florence.

On a Thursday in June 1433 nine leaders of the Peruzzi family, one of Florence's biggest and most celebrated lineages, met in the house of Ridolfo di Bonifazio Peruzzi to discuss, as they had precisely four years earlier, how to prevent or if necessary how to deal with various offences—slanders, robberies, assaults or even murders—that might be committed by men of the Peruzzi against others. We know about these intriguing clan meetings, a response to the factional manoeuvring of the years 1426-34, from an unpublished document, formally recording the family's decision on 25 June 1433 to elect three of their number with “pieno e libero mandato da tutti gl'altri a potere procedere contro a qualunche persona facessi per l'innanzi alcuna villania, danno o dispiacere ad alcuna persona,” which survives in two seventeenth-century copies in the Archivio Peruzzi de' Medici, a private collection deposited in the Florentine State Archives in 1935.

Thomas More's long letter to Martin van Dorp, Louvain humanist turned theologian, has begun to distinguish itself in the minds of many Renaissance scholars as something more than indifferent episode in the long and inconclusive history of Erasmus' personal differences with Dorp. In fact, More's letter is one of the first systematic defenses of humanist method, encompassing a critique of Scholastic grammar, dialectic, and theology, as well as a tightly argued defense of the new philological theology. More's debt to Valla, long obscured by More's strategic unwillingness in this letter to make much of a figure whom Dorp so detests, has finally begun to receive due attention.

One of the most promising trends in recent investigations into Quattrocento humanistic historiography has been the willingness to focus attention on the histories themselves, rather than on the sparse and often unsystematic theoretical statements formulated by the humanists in their prefaces, epistles and rhetorical treatises. By leaving aside for a moment what the humanists said about history, and concentrating on what they did, the latest efforts have exploded a number of idées reçues concerning the genesis, aims and forms of humanist historical writing in its various centers. Much work nevertheless remains to be done in this direction, especially in the area of textual analysis.

One of the most attractive genres of educational literature consists of the sets of Latin and English prose passages written by English schoolmasters during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to exercise their pupils in Latin. Some of the exercises were in Latin alone, intended as examples or models of Latin grammar and syntax. Others, which contemporaries called "vulgars" (Latin vulgaria), comprised passages in English for the pupils to translate into Latin, with model Latin versions for comparison.

The recent publication by Armando Verde of a collection of documents on the Pisan Studio (1473-1503) has been recognized as a major contribution to the cultural history of Florence in the late Quattrocento. The yield from years of painstaking research in Florentine and Pisan libraries and archives is made available in four massive volumes, which document the history of the university after its transfer from Florence to Pisa in 1473. Verde has identified the professors who taught, and the 1600 students who were taught, at Pisa and Florence; he has also provided documentation, largely from archival sources, concerning the faculty and the student body: their background and education, their academic and professional careers. He has also collected information on more than one thousand young scholars who were identified in the Florentine tax records (catasto) of 1480 as having been enrolled in schools.

The final disposition of one's worldly possessions is the prelude to the ultimate act in the life cycle. It offers a rare view into the mind of the testator as well as insights into his social and cultural milieu. For historians of art and students of social, economic, or political history, the form and content of testaments can often supply important data for research. However, all scholars who have sought specific wills know the difficulties encountered in their search.

In the Florentine archives all notarized acts survive in two basic collections: the Notarile antecosimiano and the Archivio Diplomatico. The former consists of volumes of notarial protocols as written and recorded by individual notaries, while the latter consists of rolls of pergamena. The inventories for both collections are cross-referenced. The Notarile inventories are numbers 38 through 40, with an Appendice (No. 41).

One of the great religio-literary controversies has, for nearly four centuries, involved the question of authorship of the Martin Marprelate Tracts. The tracts themselves deliberately seek to obscure answers, and diverse asseverations on the matter extend from 1588 (the year of the first tracts) to the present.

The printing and publishing of such inflammatory writings as the Marprelate Tracts was, from the beginning, likewise a matter of controversy, although less extensive and less disputed than the authorship.

By the 1580s Andrea Alciati's reputation was firmly established in France, and for the French there was no doubt that he deserved an honored place among the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. In 1583, Jean de la Gessée placed Alciati between Dorat and Muret as a model to be imitated in Latin and translated into French by aspiring young poets. And hyperbole is too mild a word to describe André Thevet's feverish hymn of praise in his Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). Thevet and most of his other biographers through the end of the seventeenth century remembered Alciati primarily as the jurist and teacher who attracted the attention of François Ier by his brilliant successes at the University of Bourges around 1530. Yet no biographer could entirely neglect his collection of emblems, for they exercised immense influence throughout Europe over a period of more than two hundred years.

Miles Hogarde has been recognized, both by his Protestant antagonists in Queen Mary's reign and by modern historians,as the best of the Roman Catholic propagandists in the bitter pamphlet war of 1553-58. But there is more to Hogarde than the polemic brilliance of The displaying of the Protestantes, and little attention has been given to these other aspects—particularly that implicit in his characterization by Anthony Wood, the seventeenth-century Oxford antiquarian, as “the first trader or mechanic that appeared inprint for the catholic cause, I mean one that had not received any monastical or academic breeding.” Whether or not Hogarde was statistically the first, he was certainly regarded (both by his opponents and himself) as unusual in his role, though Protestant lay preachers had been unobtrusively present in England for years past. He is unusual in various ways: for one thing, instances of sixteenth-century London artisans expressing themselves in print are certainly not numerous.