One of the most promising trends in recent investigations into Quattrocento humanistic historiography has been the willingness to focus attention on the histories themselves, rather than on the sparse and often unsystematic theoretical statements formulated by the humanists in their prefaces, epistles and rhetorical treatises. By leaving aside for a moment what the humanists said about history, and concentrating on what they did, the latest efforts have exploded a number of idées reçues concerning the genesis, aims and forms of humanist historical writing in its various centers. Much work nevertheless remains to be done in this direction, especially in the area of textual analysis.

The recent publication by Armando Verde of a collection of documents on the Pisan Studio (1473-1503) has been recognized as a major contribution to the cultural history of Florence in the late Quattrocento. The yield from years of painstaking research in Florentine and Pisan libraries and archives is made available in four massive volumes, which document the history of the university after its transfer from Florence to Pisa in 1473. Verde has identified the professors who taught, and the 1600 students who were taught, at Pisa and Florence; he has also provided documentation, largely from archival sources, concerning the faculty and the student body: their background and education, their academic and professional careers. He has also collected information on more than one thousand young scholars who were identified in the Florentine tax records (catasto) of 1480 as having been enrolled in schools.

By the 1580s Andrea Alciati's reputation was firmly established in France, and for the French there was no doubt that he deserved an honored place among the greatest of the Renaissance humanists. In 1583, Jean de la Gessée placed Alciati between Dorat and Muret as a model to be imitated in Latin and translated into French by aspiring young poets. And hyperbole is too mild a word to describe André Thevet's feverish hymn of praise in his Vrais Pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). Thevet and most of his other biographers through the end of the seventeenth century remembered Alciati primarily as the jurist and teacher who attracted the attention of François Ier by his brilliant successes at the University of Bourges around 1530. Yet no biographer could entirely neglect his collection of emblems, for they exercised immense influence throughout Europe over a period of more than two hundred years.