Although our knowledge about the methods used to design and proportion large-scale works of art during the Trecento and early Quattrocento is gradually expanding, it still remains fragmentary. Paul Frankl was one of the earliest scholars to speculate on the subject. Based on his assumption that the masons in Europe from the late thirteenth through the early sixteenth century constituted an essentially homogeneous group, Frankl argued that the design and proportional methods of medieval Italian masons must be similar, if not identical, to the ‘secrets’ of the German masons published by men such as Matthäus Roriczer, Hans Schmuttermeyer, and Lorenz Lechler in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Indeed, the so-called Roriczer method, which utilizes irrational but geometrically related lengths generated by a series of inscribed or circumscribed squares, has remained a favored means of explaining Italian medieval and early Renaissance design and proportional procedures since Frankl's time.

The period between 1499 and 1516 witnessed an important revival of the doctrines of Ramón Lull at Paris, one that was to have important consequences for the history of European thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revival was primarily the work of three men, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, his pupil and friend Charles de Bovelles, and the Catalan theologian Bernardo de Lavinheta. Each man cultivated a different aspect of Lull's thought in his work. Lefèvre appreciated the mystical side of Lull, Bovelles his metaphysics and rational theology, and de Lavinheta his encyclopedism. Through the writings of each Lullism traveled the road from mysticism to metaphysics and encyclopedism and thus handed on to later generations an important foundation upon which to build.

Giovanni Caldiera (ca. 1400 - ca. 1474) was well known in his day as a secondary figure of the Venetian humanist circle. An examination of his three moral philosophical works—the De virtutibus moralibus et theologicis, the De iconomia veneta, and the De praestantia venetae politiae—will provide, it is hoped, an understanding of the fundamental nature of his intellectual activity. Committed as much to the scholastic and Aristotelian as to the humanist traditions, Caldiera draws on each of these to affirm the values of the Venetian patriciate he served as self-appointed spokesman. He merits attention, therefore, not only as a creative thinker, but also as a resourceful apologist for the ideals and objectives of a governing élite seeking to maintain its power at home and to extend it on land and sea abroad.

Writing in 1466, in his biography of Bartolommeo Valori, an eminent Florentine statesman of the early fifteenth century, Luca della Robbia was moved to remark of his native city that ‘come ch'ella sempre fiorisse, ciò fu massimamente dall'anno 1390 fino all'anno 1433,’ and that this was less ‘per lo favore di buona fortuna, come per consiglio de’ buoni cittadini allora preposti al reggimento; la cui virtù si scoperse oltre a modo maravigliosa, e tale che essi non dovriano dirsi inferiori a quei più savi Romani così celebrati dall'antichità’; certainly anyone considering their deeds and achievements ‘gli conterà agevolmente fra i primi uomini del mondo’.

On September 27, 1540, Paul III issued the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, formally recognizing the foundation of the Society of Jesus. The following May participants in the Regensburg Colloquy, a final effort at confessional reunion sponsored by Charles V, acknowledged their failure to agree on the definition of the Eucharist, and the compromises previously reached on other doctrinal issues were quickly disavowed in Rome, Wittenberg, and elsewhere. Six weeks later, in mid-July 1541, Juan de Valdés, the expatriate Spanish master of semimystical spirituality, died in Naples. On May 22, 1542, Initio nostri huius pontificatus, the bull convoking an ecumenical council at Trent, was read in the papal consistory. The reconstitution of the Roman Inquisition was officially announced in the promulgation of Licet ah initio on July 21 in the same year.