Of the six Latin eclogues of Giovanni Quatrario of Sulmona (1336-1402), the second is a pastoral dialogue between a boy and an old shepherd who on closer inspection prove to be Quatrario himself and Francesco Petrarca. The poem, ill-written though it is, has considerable intrinsic interest and even some importance for the history of humanism, showing as it does the veneration felt among younger men for the dean of Italian (and more especially neo-Latin) letters; but to explain both its odd tone and its position in neo-Latin literature it is necessary to deal briefly with some matters of background.

Scholars have generally given only passing attention to a 24-folio booklet in Gothic characters entitled Insignia pecularia christianissimi Francorum regni numero viginti …, the work of an early sixteenth-century French writer, Jean Ferrault. This oversight is partly due to the inelegance and obscurity of Ferrault's Latin and also to the fact that his treatise belongs to the vast ‘no man's land’ which too often separates medieval and Renaissance fields of research. Few books, however, are more important than Ferrault's for a clear understanding of the period of rising absolutism which extends from the first years of Francis I's reign to the beginning of the religious wars. Indeed, as Henri Hauser puts it, Insignia pecularia constitutes ‘the point of departure of Gallican and royalist doctrine in France'.

Amid reflections on time and motion and the evanescence of earthly things, the poet of Four Quartets brings forth out of the past a charming scene wherein men and women move together harmoniously to the strains of the country pipe and drum, ‘In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie’. These lines which Mr. Eliot has so effectively adapted are from a treatise on dancing contained in The Book Named the Governour (Book I, Chapters 19-25), by his sixteenth-century namesake, Sir Thomas Elyot. What is unusual about the treatise, and what must have been its principal attraction for Mr. Eliot, is the author's theory that the dancing together of a man and a woman ‘betokeneth Concorde’ and, further, symbolizes virtue.

It was the opinion of Sabbadini that the year 1528 was the year of decision with respect to the controversy over the imitation of Cicero as a writer. In that year Erasmus published his Ciceronianus. In this book the extreme Ciceronian is burlesqued in the person of Nosoponus. Scholars like Scaliger sputtered answers, but so great was Erasmus’ reputation as arbiter of letters and so laughable was Nosoponus that thenceforth there was a relaxation in the anxious imitation of Cicero's style. No major Ciceronian work was published subsequently, saving the Cicero-lexicon (1535) of Marius Nizolius, and even he became a moderate.

Shakespeare couples lunatic, lover, and poet as ‘of imagination all compact’ (Dream v.i.7-8); Spenser finds that Phantastes’ chamber is filled with ‘leasings, tales, and lies’ (F.Q. II.ix.51.9) and that his eyes seem ‘mad or foolish’ (F.Q. II.ix.52.7); Drayton speaks of the ‘doting trumperie’ of imagination; when men's minds become ‘inflamed', says Bacon, ‘it is all done by stimulating the imagination till it becomes ungovernable, and not only sets reason at nought, but offers violence to it’. These views of imagination and its activity, echoed in other important literature of the age of Elizabeth, hardly suggest a favorable view of the faculty assigned to the poet. The explanation of such derogatory views lies in the popular psychology of the period.

Those peculiarly Italian institutions, the Renaissance academies, left behind them a most varied heritage of erudition and polite literature. From city to city they differed according to the differing tastes of their members, and just as the academies of Florence won renown for their research in philology, so those of Siena gained a reputation for fostering the art of play-writing. Isidoro Ugurgieri Azzolini says in his Pompe sanesi, ‘De’ Comici poi ci diffidiamo raccorre il numero preciso per la gran moltitudine che Siena n'ha havuti'. He adds that the Accademia dei Rozzi alone had printed almost one hundred comedies, and in his catalogue of Sienese men of letters he mentions constantly that his subjects had left at their death unpublished comedies, often boschereccie or rusticali. It is not surprising, then, that many plays of this period survive only in manuscript form, and that a few have even found their way to the new world.

One of the most pressing tasks facing German humanist scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the exploration and description of their country. The national awakening of which they liked to speak and write, the quickening of energies under Maximilian and Charles which they thought they perceived, could have little political meaning until the German territories became known to the Germans themselves. The courses of rivers, the dimensions of forests, roads and passes and waterways, the size and location of towns and villages were familiar to local residents, but virtually unknown to Germans at large. The mental image which the German humanist had before his mind's eye, a vision of a spacious and flourishing country, well endowed with resources and populous enough to exploit them, no longer the land of vast swamps and impenetrable forests of which the ancients had written—this vision needed to be fixed.

I begin with the acceptance of Laurence Nowell as the father of Anglo-Saxon studies in Renaissance England. His claim was recognized by his contemporary Camden, who bestowed upon him the title of ‘the first restorer of the Saxon language’, and the scholarship of Robin Flower and Albert H. Marckwardt has reminded us of the propriety, indeed the legality, of that claim. My purpose in this paper is to trace Anglo-Saxon studies among the legal scholars who came after Nowell and estabhshed a continuous tradition to carry forward Nowell's pioneer work. I want to comment on this tradition and to suggest reasons for it and some of the implications of it.

In the introduction to his valuable aid to research, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, Sears Jayne makes some helpful suggestions about how the evidence whose whereabouts he has discovered and revealed to us may enlarge our knowledge and improve our understanding of the English Renaissance. In one respect, however, he fails to do full justice to the potentialities of the sources he has opened up. For some reason, he permits an old myth about Tudor Oxford and Cambridge to color his opinion of what the lists of books contained in inventories of the personal effects of university students who died while they were in residence at Oxford and Cambridge prove about the character and intellectual life of the two institutions. He states categorically in one place that ‘the catalogues reflect beautifully the contrast between conservative, scholastic Oxford and reforming, humanist Cambridge’.

There appears in the Stationers’ Register for 26 July 1591 the following entry:

from which it has been generally assumed that a play by Peele called The Hunting of Cupid was licensed. Only E. K. Chambers seems to have expressed any doubt whatsoever about its being a play. Certainly W. W. Greg, who carefully collected the known fragments of The Hunting of Cupid, was definitely of the opinion that they represented parts of a ‘play of a pastoral or mythological nature’, and thought it natural for fragments, the only part of the work extant, to be printed by the Malone Society in close succession to the society's printing of Peele's Arraignment of Paris.

The recent publication of Diversas rimas by Vicente Espinel, based on the unique edition prepared by the poet himself and published in 1591, should rekindle interest in one of the most versatile talents and celebrated personalities of the late Renaissance in Spain. An Andalusian by birth—he was born in Ronda in 1550—Espinel displayed abundantly the ardent temperament and innate artistic gifts so frequent in the natives of this warm and sensuous yet strangely mysterious and ancient land. Furthermore a keen intellect directed these natural talents to make of him in his mature years one of the most respected critics as well as one of the most admired poets and musicians of his day.

Sophisticated song in the private theaters during the reign of Elizabeth—in contrast to the popular music characteristic of the public stage—implies at once compositions written especially for the drama, trained voices and instrumentalists to perform them, and a cultivated audience capable of appreciating the art of both composer and performer. In an often quoted description of a dramatic performance of the Children of the Chapel in 1602, a foreign visitor to London in the suite of Philipp Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, admired the skill of the boys as vocalists and instrumentahsts and called attention to the intensity of their training.

In 1878 A. J. Duffield, then preparing his translation of Don Quixote (1881), addressed a letter to Notes and Queries:

Apparently the risk of national disgrace was an ineffectual stimulus, for three years later H. E. Watts, whose own translation followed Duffield's in 1886, also sent a query to the same journal: ‘Who was Thomas Shelton, the first translator of Don Quixote, and where is any information to be got of him?’ These were the first occasions in the two and a half centuries since his translation appeared in London in 1612 that any one had publicly expressed any curiosity about Thomas Shelton.

The most frequently read book in the library that Samuel Pepys began to collect about 1660 was a volume he called ‘my dear “Faber Fortunae”, of my Lord Bacon's'. This book, which he apparently read through six times between 1661 and 1666, has been identified as an edition of Bacon's essays in Latin translation which was published and reprinted in duodecimo at Leyden in 1641, 1644, and 1659.

The question of the identity of this work by Bacon was first raised by correspondents of Notes & Queries in 1886, but it was not resolved. Despite the importance of this much read book to young Pepys and to our understanding of him, only three of his eight biographers have so much as mentioned the work. None has identified it sufficiently to discuss it.

Among the anomalies of the mind of Francis Mercury Van Helmont none is more striking than the deviation from contemporary medical theory which led him to formulate his ‘anatomy of pain’. Van Helmont's theory of the nature of pain is outlined in the British Museum MS. Sloane 530, variously referred to as ‘Observations’ and ‘Autobiographical Memoires'. A fuller statement and application of his theory appears in a Latin poem found among the papers of John Locke, a poem of special interest to students of the Cambridge Platonists because of its dedication to Lady Anne, Viscountess Conway, friend and correspondent of Henry More. The manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library, hsted as MS. Locke c. 32, fol. 47, contains 135 lines which are clearly legible, seven lines being illegible because of abrasion of the paper.