The aim of both Sperone Speroni's unfinished Dialogo della vita attiva e contemplativa and of Book I of Alessandro Piccolomini's Institutione Morale is to determine whether man's real happiness lies in action or in contemplation. In both works the issue is settled in favor of action. The authors were contemporaries and friends, and they happened to live in Padua in the period immediately preceding 1541, the year of the crucial Diet of Ratisbon. At that time there developed all over Europe an eager interest in the problem of justification by faith and by works. This trend is apparent in both works, since allusions to the religious question occur in the course of the discussion dealing with the advantages and disadvantages of the two types of life.

Despite the prominence given by Shakespeare to the ‘healing of the king’ in All's Well That Ends Well, criticism of the episode has been both sketchy and unenlightening. Writers intent on demonstrating its failure point to the incredibility of the king's cure or to the inconsistency of the heroine's motives. Those arguing for its success speak of the simple sympathetic response that an appeal to romantic source materials would likely have evoked. Either way, preoccupation with questions of literary modes and standards, the critical legacy of W. W. Lawrence's influential pioneer interpretation, has obscured the extent to which the meaning turns not so much on subtleties of literary perception as on matters of contemporary medical interest.

In 1968 at the Bodleian Library in Oxford I discovered Joseph Scaliger's copy of the Roman cookbook of Apicius, which provided several new pieces of evidence for the continuation of my studies of the fortuna of that author into the seventeenth century.

The Scaliger Apicius bears a note on its flyleaf in an early hand quoting from Struvius; from this reference, I discovered that at the beginning of the seventeenth century Lorenzo Pignoria of Padua (1571-1631) had offered his manuscript of Apicius, of which I have written elsewhere, to Marcus Welser of Augsburg for the use of the Wechel press.