The book that everyone in musicology is talking about this year—not just those of us working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; called simply Musicology in the English edition). In it, Kerman argues against what he calls positivism, which he defines as a rigid and non-judgmental pursuit of dry facts, and in favor of the higher criticism, by which he seems to mean analysis—or at least some penetrating discussion of the way individual pieces work and what makes them great—informed by a sense of history and written in a humanistic style, with a personal commitment on the part of the author to the quality of the music with which he is concerned.

It has become a commonplace that Tudor and early Stuart historical authors recognized a formal distinction between “antiquities” and “history,” yet neither the grounds nor the extent of the distinction has been explored in depth. Because some Tudor historical writers could and, on occasion, did ignore it in practice, the distinction has sometimes been deemed a technicality of only minor interest. Nearly twenty-five years ago, F. Smith Fussner described what he termed an English “historical revolution” between 1580 and 1640, a revolution which witnessed the rise of historical writing in something like its modern form. From Fussner's point of view, it mattered only that men were bringing new sources and innovative, critical research methods to the study of the past; whether they called themselves historians, scholars, philologists or antiquaries was of little importance.

In accounts of Rome's “Golden Age of the Renaissance,” the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (1466-1520) has never quite faded from notoriety. His proverbial wealth and flamboyant personality survive in scattered anecdotes as a glittering sideshow to the grander enterprises of Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Indisputably the richest man in Rome between 1500 and 1520, he is best known today for three artistic commissions connected with Raphael: a chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, his mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the suburban villa known since 1579 as the Farnesina.

A short dialogue in Angelo Decembrio's De politia litteraria (1462) describes the reception accorded by Leonello d'Este and his courtly literary circle to Ugolino Pisani, writer, comedian, and wellknown entertainer in the 1430s and ‘40s. The dialogue is a unique and valuable resource. It is perhaps the earliest document of its kind to disclose so vividly how an eager dramatist of the time hoped his work would find favor with a discriminating and influential audience, and it dramatizes an encounter that we know actually took place between the writer and an audience whose patronage he sought, showing the audience's ideas and tastes on the spot and in motion, so to speak.

In the dedicatory letter to the first printed edition of his Adulescentia, Baptista Mantuanus (“Mantuan” in England since the Renaissance) asks all readers holding manuscript copies of the earlier, unprinted version of his collection to destroy them—a request in effect so discouraging that, despite publication in the twentieth century of several important works by Mantuan, no manuscript copies of early versions of his eclogues have ever come to light. We are therefore indebted to Paul Oskar Kristeller for recording six manuscripts—five in Italian libraries and one at the Bodleian Library, Oxford—containing copies of what I have discovered to be early versions of Mantuan's ninth and tenth eclogues. Examination of these manuscript copies reveals new information as to the date and circumstances of composition and initial publication of the two eclogues.

The Moriae Encomium and the Novum Instrumentum of Erasmus provoked remarkable storms. Even now the bitter sarcasm at the center of the Encomium shocks many as does the boldness of In principio erat Sermo, his alternative to the Vulgate's words that had a millennial sanction in theological discourse and in liturgy—In principio erat Verbum. Turbulence also radiates from the uniquely significant Romans 5:12 where he rendered eph hô by quatenus (in as much as), replacing in quo (in whom) of the Vulgate. Because of his translation and his annotations of the texts of Romans 5:12 and 14, Catholics and non-Catholics accused him of Pelagianism soon after the publication of the first edition of the Novum Instrumentum (1516).

Most of us who inhabit the western, post-Christian world are so accustomed to pictures of the Madonna and child or of the Holy Family that we hardly notice the details. When we encounter such images in museums, on posters, or on Christmas cards, we tend to respond sentimentally if at all. We note whether the baby looks like a baby or not. We are pleased if the figures appear happy and affectionate. Perhaps we even feel gratitude for the somewhat banal support of an institution—the human family—that seems worn a little thin in the modern world. But we are not shocked. Recognizing that the Incarnation is a central Christian tenet, we feel no surprise that Christian artists throughout the western tradition should have painted God as a male baby.

The theory and practice of proffering consolation commanded a prominent place in humanist moral thought and literature. Reviving and furthering the tradition of the ancient consolatio, Renaissance writers formulated solace for such problems as bereavement, the fear of death, illness, despair, and misfortune. In the Trecento and Quattrocento there appeared many consolatory letters and funeral orations as well as numerous consolatory dialogues and treatises. The coherence and importance of this consolatory tradition in Renaissance culture have not been fully recognized. By studying this tradition more closely we can learn much about the psychological functions of rhetoric and philosophy in Renaissance thought. Equally important, we can begin to see more clearly how the history of ideas has sometimes been changed and enriched by its quiet counterpart, the “history of emotions.”

When Margaret of Anjou died at the Chateau of Dampierre, near Saumur, on August 25, 1482 it was as a woman not only retired from the world but almost forgotten by it. She who had been for a time the virtual ruler of Lancastrian England, who had raised armies and intrigued with princes, had not enough money to pay her debts except through the uncertain charity of her uncharitable cousin, the king of France. Crushed by misfortune, bereft of power by the death of her husband and son, picked clean of her remaining rights and possessions by Louis as the price of her ransom from English captivity, she seemed to be of no interest to anybody.

The Sistine Chapel (Fig. I) has been seen by millions and has been the subject of much scholarly attention. The most important and sustained study of The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo is L. D. Ettlinger's learned volume of that title. In this book, Ettlinger demonstrated that the typology of the murals, in which Moses is juxtaposed with Christ, represents the doctrine of papal primacy. There is still more to be learned about the Chapel, however, if we take into account the fact that the founder, Sixtus IV, was a Franciscan friar before he was pope.

This is the continuation of a check-list whose first part included II compilations composed and/or published between 1343 and 1490 (RQ 39 [1986], 1—15). The time-span from 1343 to 1528 was chosen because during that period each collection of facetiae has its own individual flavor, a fact which has been insufficiently recognized because scholars studying facetiae have usually been collectors of plots or of folklore motifs. The same joke is often told, certainly, by a variety of compilers, but with a different purpose and in a different context. After 1530 the joke-books will be almost uniquely collective, and will thus lose their interesting individual character.

The following list comprises eleven works which were perceived by their contemporaries as anthologies of facetiae and which heavily influenced laterjoke collections. From 1344, when Petrarch revived the Classical facetia tradition based on Cicero and Quintilian, to 1528 when Castiglione drew on Cicero's joke theory for his laughing courtier, each collection offacetiae (though never “original” in our sense of the term) had a different purpose and a different tone. From the 1530s on the joke-books were collective, drawing often literally on a mixture of sources and including the large and very popular compilations of Gast (1541) and Domenichi (1548).

Like many humanists of the late fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino (1425-1498) came to consider himself not only a rhetorician but a speculative philosopher as well. Like many of these same humanists, Landino would not allow himself to peddle the merely fashionable: he pretended that he had been drinking from philosophical founts since his youth. In his dialogue De anima, completed about 1471, Landino suggested that from the early 1450s he not only was receiving systematic training in natural philosophy from Carlo Marsuppini but also was learning some Plato from the teenager Marsilio Ficino.

Dürer's portrait of Erasmus is an image so familiar that for most of us it has become the quintessence of the scholar portrait (Fig. 1). In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—few have thought about this famous engraving with any precision. It comes as a surprise, moreover, when one examines the literature, to find that the encounter between such a notable pair of personages has produced a strangely limited and unsatisfying body of commentary. What emerges is basically the critical dilemma summed up in one writer's assessment of Dürer's effort: “Il a fait une admirable gravure, mais un mauvais portrait.“ Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky found certain commendable traits in the Erasmus engraving. But these and other scholars reach consensus principally in their negative judgment of how Dürer's print functions as a likeness of Erasmus.

It is no novelty to stress the paradistic aspects of Rabelais's style. As early as 1915, Emile Besch had described Gargantua and Pantagruel as “une parodie des romans de chevalerie,” and this broad critical assessment has not really been seriously challenged ever since. Yet most of the studies devoted to Rabelais's comical imitations seem to concentrate either on what he owes to the ancient, medieval or humanistic tradition, or on the specific techniques through which he mocks or distorts various genres, modes or styles. More specifically, very little attention has been paid so far to Rabelais's attitude vis-à-vis art works of his time, although we know very well that, like many other contemporary writers, he had a keen interest in pictorial compositions.

In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari had heard that Landino would lecture on Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares during the academic year 1465-6. “I am an eager student,” he wrote to Guidetti on 14 September, “and I would be grateful to know what Landino said when he explained the first letter. For in my view it is quite hard because of the historical questions involved, and few have the ability to tackle so great an enterprise.“

The spread of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy was extraordinarily rapid and complete, so much so that it could instill an uncritical complacency in its adherents and practitioners. By midcentury, humanist Latin had become the language of the Roman Curia, and it soon became the language of peninsular diplomacy. Humanists filled positions in the bureaucracies of princely courts and city-republics, and they took jobs as teachers and secretaries in the houses of the powerful. While humanists kept alive the bogeyman of the unlettered scholastic, whose barbarous Latin threatened a return to an age of gothic ignorance, there were, in fact, few obstacles which might slow down their cultural and professional advancement. The way to a career in the clerisy now began in the grammarian's classroom, and the successful humanist rarely cared to question the assumptions of the literary and educational movement to which he owed his livelihood.

For the study of early modern society, Renaissance art often provides an extraordinary means of exploring visually the values and assumptions, attitudes, and modes of perception of those who inhabited, mentally and materially, the world of traditional, preindustrial Europe. The work of Hans Baldung dit Grien (1484/85-1545), a Swabian painter, illustrator, and designer of stained glass, illuminates one of the most familiar and yet least understood aspects of this world, the mentality of those who believed that some women were capable of influencing a man's sexual nature by means of witchcraft.

In a series of prints and drawings executed between 1510 and 1544, Baldung portrayed various aspects of the alleged activities of witches. As contributions to the iconography of witchcraft, these Hexenbilder were without artistic precedent.

In the period before Claude Paradin's Devises Héroïques (1551) and Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'Imprese (1555), our knowledge of the theory and use of devices is somewhat fragmentary. There are some well known cases: Maurice Scève's use of devices as a framework for his Délie, though he called them “emblesmes“; Rabelais’ device for Gargantua consisting of the Platonic androgyne with the motto “Charity seeketh not her own“; Erasmus's figure of Terminus and “Concedo nulli”. The author of the little known French version of the Penitencia de amor was probably concerned mainly with the religious and moral ideas which he develops at some length in his adaptation, but his second interest is clearly the fashion for devices, which he introduces and uses, together with some extensive colour symbolism, apparently to enhance the impact of his didactic additions.