The past decade has seen a quickening of intellectual life among Italian Dominicans of the Roman Province, leading to certain initiatives and achievements which deserve to be better known than they are to Dominicans outside Italy and to others interested in the work of the Order. I refer to the activities of the group of friars, whose centre of operations is the splendid old “studium” of their Province at Pistoia, near Florence, who produce the excellent bi-monthly review Vita Sociale and have revived and wonderfully transformed the old historical journal of the Italian Dominicans, Memorie Domenicane. It is to this latter production that I want, in these brief notes, to draw attention; and along with it, to two important books from the same Pistoian workshop dealing-in; very different ways and in one case, it is true, only indirectly-with that same turning-point in the history of Catholicism, and indeed of western culture as a whole, on which the historical research that has gone into the new Memorie Domenicane (= M.D.) has tended to concentrate—the turning-point indicated in phrases like ‘the rise of humanism’, where this term is taken to signify a typically non-medieval outlook expressed in a new form of culture whose ‘rise’ coincided inter alia with the decline of medieval scholasticism. It need hardly be said that such a use of terms begs many questions, but that it answers to some historical reality needn’t be doubted; it being surely unquestionable that Petrarch and Erasmus, though separated by nearly two centuries, were ‘humanists’ in very much the same sense, and that this entailed in both of them a strongly critical attitude to the scholastic culture and mentality.