In Summer 1550 King Henry II of France commissioned the renewal of a special military tax, the taillon. In his commission, chancery draftsmen asserted that this recently-introduced tax and associated military reforms had been so successful "que de tous costes s'en levent et rendent graces à Dieu." They added that provinces previously complaining of garrisons now clamored for them "pour en avoir le prouffit." Such assertions were patently ridiculous in an era when soldiers were about as welcome as a horde of locusts, yet the royal government did not scruple to offer them.

"The woman who has the prerogative of a goddess, who is authorized to be out of place, can best justify her authority by putting other women in their places": so concludes Louis Montrose with equal reference to Ralegh's vision of Elizabeth in the Discovery of Guiana and Spenser's reflection of her in Britomart in the Radigund episode in the fifth book of The Faerie Queene. In the case of Spenser at least that conclusion is an insightful one, suggesting that Britomart's actions can in part be explained in terms of the political and ideological constraints faced by the queen.

In his first published work, the Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (Naples, 1591), Tommaso Campanella evinced at the outset of his long intellectual career that abiding and most pronounced feature of his entire philosophical position, namely, an opposition to Aristotle. The product of a twenty-one year old man, this book conveys a fresh empiricism and is significantly untainted by the impact of astrology or the occultism of G. B. Delia Porta or the later political religious interests impelled by a personal messianism that would shape his thought.

A Useful Way of Establishing the historical significance of any perceptive text in the discourse arts is to explain the connection between the values embedded in its illustrative materials and the social and political interests it may have served and advanced among the persons who used it. Illustrative materials evidence and communicate lines of thought—substance as well as formal dimensions of technical interest to students of the history of the discourse arts.

A Special Place in Historical Studies belongs to those great events that everyone knows of, but few know—at least, know deeply and accurately. In such cases, received notions of sequence, character, causes and results continue to be passed on, unchallenged by any requirement that the explanation fit the facts and that the facts receive explanation. One such great event is the Revolt of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century.