The Point frequently has been made by students of Renaissance English lyric poetry such as Evelyn Scholl, Edmund Fellowes, et al, that appreciation and comprehension of this literary form cannot be thorough without knowledge of the musical settings to which these lyrics were sung. For many years there has been, therefore, a continuing search for the music which originally accompanied the lyrics of such poets asWyatt, Surrey, Daniels, Sidney, Campion, and many others. Some musical settings, for the lute and other instruments, have been found—Fellowes’ The English School of Lutenist Song Writers is a notable example of such collections—but none of them have included the music for the lyric poem which so obviously was written to be sung to lute music, Wyatt's ‘Blame not my lute'.

Ralph E. Giesey (Institute for Advanced Study) is at present revising for publication his doctoral dissertation entitled The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (University of California, 1954). Following is a summary of the study:

The funeral ceremony of the French kings during the Renaissance was compared by contemporary writers to that of the ancient Roman emperors, and modern historians have believed that the French were copying the Roman customs described by ancient historians. However, the history of French royal funerals from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries shows that the elaborate ceremonial which developed had its own rationale. Of primary importance was the rise of the abbey of Saint-Denis as the royal necropolis. In the thirteenth century it became the custom to display the body of the dead king during the funerary ceremony, which lasted only a few days, because the crude methods of embalming would not allow a longer display of the deceased.