To Elizabethan observers in many disciplines, feminine beauty and music offered parallel benefits and dangers that influenced prescriptions for the actual musical behavior of contemporary Englishwomen and also the development of stock literary situations in which female musicians either caused spiritual fulfillment or physical destruction. Conflicting ideologies, based on the most respected ancient authorities and contemporary observers, attributed similarly opposite aspects to women and music, which had both come to be regarded as earthly embodiments of the divine and the damning by the final part of the sixteenth century. Women, who possessed the natures of both Mary and Eve, were regarded as agents alternately of salvation and destruction even as music was perceived as an inspiration to both heavenly rapture and carnal lust.

In his Dessein de l'histoire nouvelle des françois, Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière offered a blueprint for a French history of broader range and deeper reach than any previous effort. He divided his proposed work into three parts: pre-Roman Gaul, Roman Gaul, and the kingdom of France from the Merovingians to the present. Part one would concern “the form of government, public and private, of the Gauls living in liberty before the Romans had envied, undermined, and eventually seized their dominion.” It would detail their religion (its priests and rituals), their nobility (its composition, privileges, and lifestyle), the lesser social orders (merchants, artisans, and commoners), and their public institutions (laws, magistrates, and other officials) — “in brief, everything notable about so little-known a state.” Part two would follow the same pattern but in even greater detail, examining the changes introduced by the Romans in “religion, administration, justice, military discipline, finances, and business, ” as well as social changes.

In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers of The Famous Whore to give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in the Dictionary of National Biography posits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revised Short Title Catalogue can identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitled Divers jeux rustiques.

Hermann von dem Busche typifies the younger, more aggressive generation of humanists who became embroiled in the literary feuds and controversies of pre-Reformation Germany.' While Peter Luder and Conrad Celtis had preceded him as "apostles of humanism" in Germany, Busche carried the tradition of the "wandering poet" into the early sixteenth century. His major prose work, the Vallum humanitatis, exemplifies an important literary genre of the humanists, the "defense of poetry," usually approached as a defense of humanistic learning against scholastic opponents. Several recent studies need to be taken into account when assessing the literary and historical significance of Busche's Vallum humanitatis. Concetta Greenfield's analysis of Italian "defenses of poetry" between 1250 and 1500 lends further credence to Kristeller's wellknown thesis regarding the simultaneous development of scholasticism and humanism in Renaissance Italy.

A striking feature of fifteenth-century historiography is the manner in which accounts of political thought in this period have tended to follow two basically distinct courses. One group of historians has pursued the avenue of humanist political theory, primarily in Florence, running from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni at the beginning of the fifteenth century down to Machiavelli at its end, tracing the rise and decline of the republican ideal, or myth, in Florentine politics and from there into the mainstream of Western political theory. Another group has concerned itself with conciliar theory in the Church, pursuing its development through the councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel to its demise in the early sixteenth century. These historians, too, have connected conciliar thought to the broader course of Europe's political development.

Architectural patronage in the late Quattrocento was a way of demonstrating status. In spite of the republican and unaristocratic rhetoric espoused by the Florentine ruling class, powerful families, like the Medici or Strozzi, sought to impress their compatriots with conspicuous displays of wealth. In the course of the fifteenth century, the attitude towards the manifestation of riches passed from a medieval and Christian contempt to a distinct appreciation of magnificence as a virtue and duty of the rich. This need to impress is nowhere more apparent than in the patronage of architecture—especially palace building.

Against a system of gender ideologies that defined a woman's social position and intellectual pursuits as private, devoted to domestic concerns and the moral welfare of her family, the emergency of the cortigiana onesta, the intellectual courtesan, dramatically calls into question the humanists’ injunction against women's public status and speech. How did Veronica Franco, the foremost example of the cortigiana onesta in sixteenth-century Italy, succeed in infiltrating the “academy of learned men“? Were any restrictions placed upon her professional activities when she vied with men for public recognition and literary commissions? How did social forces contain or compel the courtesan's cultivation of a literary identity in Venetian society? And finally, what were the maneuvers, both personal and professional, that the cortigiana onesta adopted when she obtained entrance into an elite literary circle and allied herself with powerful male patrons and intellectuals?

In order to make good her claim to be of all divinities the most important and generous, Folly in Erasmus's Moriae encomium begins her argument, according to rhetorical theory and practice, with the strongest proofs in her arsenal. First of all, she argues, it is she who has given us life, the greatest gift of all. Who among us would have been born without our parents’ folly? Second, it is the spice of folly that makes life enjoyable. For what is life if you take away merriment, pleasure, andjoy? And third, it is folly that rules the best and happiest time of life—childhood and youth—and restores it to us in the second childhood of decrepit old age.

Whatever scholars may think of its value as a work of poetic literature, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is remarkably entertaining in the theater. Perhaps this is so because it fulfills the fundamental generic responsibility of comedy; it overcomes the death of the fathers through a bawdy emphasis on youthful sexuality and love, and it manipulates mythical plot elements that are subconsciously familiar to any audience in Western civilization. The play skillfully diverts our attention from death and burial to the “little death” of sexual orgasm, from age, illness, and the destruction of war to marriage and the joy of new life. Above all, it is not so much a “problem play” in the Shavian sense as it is a typical work of Renaissance comic art that attempts to unite both the physical and the spiritual elements of human existence within a single structure of the imagination.

Italian maiolica has a long history extending back into the Middle Ages. That history recounts a slow evolutionary process, with its main themes being: first, the importation of tin-glazed pottery from the Islamic world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which has survived primarily as architectural decoration (the bacini inserted into church façades); secondly, the development of the local production of ceramics with lead glazes and then improved tin glazes and with modest painted and incised decoration; thirdly, the diffusion of that production, presumably from Sicily and southern Italy, throughout the rest of the peninsula; and, finally, beginning in the later fourteenth century, the elevation of the quality of production to the level of a veritable art form. Our knowledge of this history has been amply expanded in the last few years by an extraordinary amount of very solid research conducted into the subject by medieval archaeologists and by ceramic scholars—many of the latter talented amateurs who work on their own local traditions in Italy; and this lively interest has had reverberations in both the museum world and the art market.

Numerous interpretations have been given to the final episode of Rabelais's Third Book of Pantagruel—the last four chapters devoted to the famous plant called “Pantagruelion” (Tiers Livre, chaps. 49-52). For the great editors of the early twentieth-century critical edition of Rabelais's Works, the Pantagruelion was a “technical enigma” meant to be deciphered by scientists as the symbol of the Renaissance belief in human progress. For some of the supporters of Rabelais's Erasmian Evangelism, on the contrary, the enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key to Rabelais's thought: the magic plant had to be decoded as a veiled message of steadfast faith in the face of persecution. For obvious political reasons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious device of enigmatic speech; yet his message had been understood by his contemporary Christian humanists.

Giotto's fresco cycles of the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist in the Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention as the vast fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel. Scholars have analyzed the space depicted in the frescoes, the striking monumentality of the figures, and the depiction of architecture oblique to the picture plane; thematic content, however, has received less attention than form and space. In this essay, I will propose some religious and secular iconographic and thematic unities: themes of rebirth, resurrection, and communitas, which correlate with fourteenth-century Florentine attitudes toward wealth, historiography, and a belief in the spiritual role of the earthly city. The themes of the frescoes articulate the social and political structures of early fourteenth-century civic life, as Giotto transformed traditional subjects into images of contemporary significance in these frescoes.

When in 1625 Gabriel Naudé wished to clear the name of Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) from the pious slanders of the demonologists of the intervening century, he argued that this learned man, “who was not only a new Trismegistus in the three higher faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine, but who desired to travel in body through every part of Europe, and to exercise his mind on all sciences and disciplines,” deserved better than to be abused with stories “which would be much more appropriate in the magical tales of Merlin, Maugis, and of Doctor Faust, than in writings which are (or rather should be) serious and well-examined… . “ Naudé's words provide an accurate anticipation of the three principal reasons for the interest of modern scholars in the writings of this enigmatic humanist and magician.

“A name,” Bernardine of Siena declares, “is a famosa notitia,“ a public statement.’ In this paper I review the stock of personal names, and, implicitly, the public statements, associated with the men of women of Florence and of Tuscany, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The justifications for this enterprise are two. The surviving sources give overwhelming attention to the rich and powerful; they pay little heed to the poor and lowly. Inevitably, they yield an unbalanced view of Tuscan society. But if in most respects the humble are voiceless, they do bear personal names; they do make, in Bernardine's phrase, public statements.

Moreover, as Bernardine implies, a name is far more than a bland identifier. It is rather a pointer, that directs our gaze in three directions. Its principal and unvarying function is to identify a particular man or woman. It bestows individuality; it ensouls. But names may also recall the past; often, they convert living persons into memorials to the dead.

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.

Despite the extensive work by recent historians on the “Myth of Venice,“ there has never been a thorough study of Lewis Lewkenor's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), one of the central documents through which the myth was transmitted to England—and England, after all, was the country in northern Europe in which the myth had its most profound effects. Lewkenor's book is interesting not only because of its importance in the history of political thought but also because it was probably used as a minor source by Shakespeare for Othello and by Benjonson for Volpone.

Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante is notoriously unreliable as an historical biography of the poet. Much of what is doubtful in the Trattatello has been blamed on simple misinformation, the influence of literary convention, the misreading of Dante's works, or pure invention on the part of the author. Especially susceptible to objection has been the Trattatello's representation of Dante's personal character. Leonardo Bruni, the first to offer an assessment, found Boccaccio's portrayal of Dante distorted and inadequate, and Bruni's pronouncement established an interpretative commonplace from which critical opinion has never been entirely free: “It seemed to me that our Boccaccio … described the life and manners of so sublime a poet just as though he were writing the Filocolo, or the Filostrato, or the Fiammetta, for he is all full of love and sighs and burning tears, as though the man had been born into this world merely to turn up in those ten days … related in the Centonovelle [Decameron].“

In 1610, the plague hit London with unusual force. Ever since the Black Death more than a century earlier, bubonic plague had been endemic to Britain, and city dwellers were accustomed to the loss often or fifteen lives each year. But when the number of plague deaths exceeded thirty or forty, panic threatened. Then public gathering-places, such as theaters, were closed, since the disease was thought to spread directly through human contact. A predictable exodus from the city began: anyone with money and access to a country house fled for the duration of the epidemic, leaving the less fortunate in the grip of “the Poor's Plague.“’ When members of the dominant social classes decamped, they delegated household authority to their servants. These temporary aristocrats shared the city with quack doctors who sold unicorn's horn and patent nostrums guaranteed to cure the disease. The city took on a macabre carnival atmosphere of license, at least for those who were still healthy.

The notion of music as a form of speech is a commonplace. Without arguing the difficult questions whether music is patterned after speech or itself constitutes its own language, it should be remembered that the main vocabulary for describing the structure and content of music has been drawn from the artes dicendi. The present report deals with a small, but significant part of this vocabulary: the term elegance along with various synonyms and antonyms borrowed from grammar and rhetoric and applied to music, in a number of writings, from classical times onwards.

In their magisterial work, Les Toscans et leurs families, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber examined in considerable detail a problem faced by many historians studying late medieval tax censuses such as the Florentine catasto: how much credence to give to the ages of individuals whose names are included in these documents? Following a lengthy investigation of the catasto of 1427-1429, they reached the wistful conclusion that “Tuscans in 1427 had only a vague knowledge of their own ages or were loath to report them accurately.“ In the course of their inquiry, Herlihy and Klapisch compared the ages of some individuals recorded in the catasto with the ages of the same individuals found in other documents.