Renaissance scholarship in America has flourished within- creasing tempo ever since the influx of materials for study began to accumulate in American libraries following the cessation of the first world war in 1918. Only in the nineteen-thirties, however, did Renaissance scholars begin to feel the need for a synthesis of departmentalized researches which the medievalists in this country felt in the early nineteen-twenties. In part this feeling was produced by the growing volume and significance of Renaissance studies in this country, but it certainly also owed its existence to the widespread efforts to redefine the nature and extent of the period itself. The popular myth that the Renaissance was the revival of light and joy after the bleak darkness of the Middle Ages was exploded by the better understanding of the great achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

On June 1952, the American Council of Learned Societies discontinued its Committee on Renaissance Studies, but before this Committee disbanded it voted to organize a new committee to take over its work. This new committee, the American Committee on Renaissance Studies (ACRS), consisted of representatives of national learned societies with interests in the Renaissance, together with representatives of the local Renaissance clubs and conferences which had been formed under the old ACLS Committee.

The first meeting of the ACRS was held by invitation of the Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance in the Paterno Library of the Casa Italiana, on January 31, 1953.

The Warburg Institute reports the following activities since its last account to the readers of this newsletter, RN IV, 40. Three books by the late Professor Saxl, to appear shortly:

(1) Volume III of the Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Late Middle Ages, which Saxl compiled before his death, contains manuscripts in the libraries of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It has been seen through the press by Professor Harry Bober of Harvard University. Its main interest for readers of this paper, if the term Renaissance be taken to denote a recurring phenomenon rather than a particular period, lies in the survival of the illustrations to Aratus’ poem on the star images, and the transformations which they have undergone from classical to mediaeval times.

Before a modern edition of Monteverdi is issued, the musical text should be clarified and interpreted. To carry out these two fundamental editorial demands is less easy than it sounds. There are no autographs on which a truly critical edition could be based—only first prints, many of which are studded with misprints despite the fact that they had been supervised by the composer himself. These first prints (of which only very few copies have survived completely) present the music—beginning with the publication of Il quinto libro dei Madrigali in 1605—not as it was actually sung or played but in an abridged version only, i.e. in the summarizing notation of the ‘Basso continuo’ period which cuts right across Monteverdi's life.Any music, backed by a figured bass, needs realization of that part in harmonies and the working-out of a playable part for a ‘fundamental-instrument’ (keyboard- instrument or lute).

In the introduction to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson says that the Queen commanded him to ‘thinke on some Daunce, or shew, that might praecede hers, and have the place of a foyle, or false-Masque.’ In complying, he presents twelve witches, ‘not as a Masque, but as a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicitie of Gesture, and not vnaptly sorting with the current, and whole fall of the Deuise,’ and he refers to his earlier ‘foyle’ in the Haddington Masque (1608) as an 'Anti-Masque of Boyes.’ Over a period of twenty-six years Jonson gave his royal masters many such spectacles of strangeness. The differences among the several kinds of antimasque which Jonson produced in his career have often been pointed out but the similarities have never been satisfactorily explained.