Despite the repeated use of the term ‘humanist’ by modern scholars, few references to the term have been located in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Campana has found nine Itahan uses of the term in manuscript and printed sources from 1512 to 1588. In addition he has noted two sixteenth-century French uses, one English reference, and four appearances in the Latin text of the Epistolae ohscurorum virorum. Paul O. Kristeller has located the word in a letter of 1490 by the rector of the University of Pisa, in sixteenth-century university documents of Bologna and Ferrara, in John Florio's Italian-English dictionary of 1598, and in a Spanish document of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Eugenio Garin adds an example from a document of the Studio di Pisa of 1525. This short article will contribute five additional vernacular uses oiumanista in Italy between 1540 and 1574.

In early October 1526 Albrecht Dürer dedicated the greatest of his paintings, the two panels commonly known as the ‘Four Apostles,' to the city council of his native Nuernberg. Although the work was accompanied by a letter explaining the reasons for the gift, modern scholars nonetheless have continued to speculate as to the full intentions of the artist. The subject matter of the painting, as well as the Biblical passages incorporated as an inscription at the base of the work, has turned the attention of most commentators to the contemporary religious scene, i.e., the recent establishment of the Lutheran Reformation in the free imperial city. One can also, however, consider this problem profitably from a different perspective, taking as a point of departure the question of art patronage and the art market in the early sixteenth century. Existing evidence, when viewed in this manner, not only sheds new light on this particular donation but also serves as an interesting commentary on the economic situation of the artist of the period.

In another place, I take for granted that Robert Burton was engaged, among other things, in shaping his Anatomy of Melancholy within the traditions of formal paradoxy. Internal evidence sufficiently supports that view, and Burton's reliance upon Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne, all three great practitioners within the paradoxical mode, is apparent in his choice of subject matter, style, and tone. One might even postulate a ‘Lucianic’ heritage for a tonal genre (in which belong, e.g., Erasmus, More, Alberti, Rabelais, Ariosto, Cervantes, Burton, Swift, Sterne, Diderot, Voltaire, and Joyce), a deliberate and demarcated tradition of irony in which paradoxy is naturally accommodated. In such a tradition, obviously, Burton has an important place. This note is not, unfortunately, concerned with speculations in literary systematics; here, I want merely to point out a pretty instance of Burton's uses of ‘official’ paradoxy, and to supply some hard evidence that he knew exactly what he was doing in his own paradoxical endeavor.

Some of Milton's classical allusions are stylistically supplemental, but more often than not they function with illuminating homology. Milton's description of Eve as Queen of the Graces is one example of what might appear a passing simple detail:

But on closer reading, one discovers that the allusion embraces large themes, especially when seen through the lenses of Neoplatonism. It is altogether apposite that Ficino regarded Venus, the symbol of love, as the mediatrix between God and man: ‘love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe: amor nodus perpetuus, et copula mundi.’ Following the precedent in Spenser of linking the Graces with flowers, the symbol of fruition, Milton identified the three Graces in L'Allegro (11-16) as the daughters of Venus.