Elyot's Defence of Good Women, published in 1540 and dedicated to Anne of Cleves, is one of many treatises on the nature and status of women which appeared during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These works were of various kinds: some were written for a popular audience, others for scholars; some were composed for wives and husbands, others were intended for teachers or the clergy.’ Within this large body of writing, Elyot's Defence belongs to a special class that is particularly easy to identify. Like such works as Boccaccio's De clans mulieribus (1361) and Bruni's De studiis et litteris (1409), Elyot's Defence is humanist in character and apologetic in purpose. Treatises of this class argue that the cardinal virtues, celebrated in antiquity and represented in classical philosophy and history, have been (and can be) as well exemplified by women as men.

The Archivio Caetani, now owned by the Fondazione Camillo Caetani, is one of the most important and interesting family archives that have been preserved in Rome. In addition to numerous old documents, it also contains many letters and papers of writers and scholars of the sixteenth century, and a certain number of valuable literary manuscripts. The most famous among them is the Caetani Codex of Dante's Divine Comedy, which has been well known to Dante scholars since the last century and which was made available, along with the numerous Latin glosses accompanying the text, through a beautiful and accurate edition published by Don Gelasio Caetani in 1930. The manuscript is written on parchment in a beautiful calligraphic hand of the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century and contains in its margin numerous Latin glosses.

In sixteenth-century Paris, businesses and crafts were still regulated by the guild system, which allowed women to take over the direction of the businesses after the deaths of their husbands, even in those businesses which were normally closed to women. One result of this was that many Parisian women led active and varied economic lives. A little noticed aspect is that some women became book publishers and printers. These women publishers and printers had to possess both scholarly training and managerial and business skills, in order to compete and survive in the publishing world. One such printer/publisher was Charlotte Guillard, who was active in Paris in the second quarter of the century, and whose life is instructive in that it illustrates what women could accomplish in business in sixteenth-century Paris.

There is little question that the Virgil criticism of early Italian humanism reached its zenith in the Disputationes Camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino. Professor of rhetoric and poetry at the Florentine Studium from 1457 to 1497, Landino was active in the circle of philosophers, poets, and scholars associated with Marsilio Ficino and often referred to now as the “Platonic Academy of Florence.” The dialogue, written in 1472 and set a few years earlier in the monastery at Camaldoli, begins as an examination of the active and contemplative lives and the nature of the summum bonum (Books I and II). Since Landino believed that Virgil also described the summum bonum and the path by which we reach it, Books III and IV of the Disputationes turn to the Aeneid as a parallel source of philosophical truth.

Francesco Filelfo's stature as the first important Western European professor of Greek after Guarino Veronese has long been recognized. At thirty-six Filelfo had already held academic posts at Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence, and Siena. He spent the last four decades of his life, for the most part, in the service of the Visconti-Sforza Dukes of Milan. But even during these years the Este of Ferrara, the Gonzaga of Mantua, and the Malatesta of Rimini had entertained him too, and three successive popes had called him to Rome. At the same time his brush with death at the hands of an assassin in Florence and his battles with the Medici had made Filelfo the most notorious of the early humanists.

The year 1982 marked the 350th anniversary of the publication of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a work that was to have a tragic impact on the astronomer's life, and also on the relations between science and religion. It was the publication of the Dialogue that precipitated the trial of Galileo before the Inquisition on charges of teaching the Copernican system, which had been condemned in 1616. The book sets forth the inadequacies of the Ptolemaic system and the superiority of the Copernican for “saving the appearances” of celestial motion, but it does not press openly for acceptance of the theory. An earlier writing of Galileo, the Letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, referred to in short as the Letter to Christina, does just that. It was written in 1615 before the opinion on Copernicanism was delivered, and written, moreover, to dissuade the Church from condemning Copernicus's De revolutionibus of 1543.

El scholástico, written by Cristóbal de Villalón in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, is a typical philosophical treatise of the Renaissance, the most striking evidence of which is its very extensive employment of figures and learning from Classical literature. All but a handful of the 57I different names which appear in El scholástico, and a large majority of all materials used therein, originated in the period before A.D. 500.

A complex treatise, approximately two-thirds the length of the New Testament, El scholástico reflects at once a Renaissance ideal and a classical tradition in its setting, literary form, and format. The dialogue, which is essentially Ciceronian in style (although Villalón states that his models for the dialogue were Plato and Macrobius), represents a lengthy interchange between illustrious contemporary scholars of the University of Salamanca.

In 1470 the fifteen year old Angelo Poliziano published his first major work, a Latin hexameter translation of Iliad 2 dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici. Poliziano was motivated to write this translation not only by a sincere and enduring interest in Homeric poetry, but also by a desire to display his extraordinary poetic and linguistic talent and thereby to win the attention and perhaps the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici. The translation of Iliad 2 was received with lavish praise, and Poliziano was soon invited into the Medici household where, under Lorenzo's official patronage, he continued to work on the translation. In 1472, he completed Iliad 3; in 1474, Iliad 4; and in 1475, at age 20, Iliad 5, the last book he was to do. What is most interesting is that the style of books 2 and 3 differs substantially from the style of books 4 and 5.