If mental discipline and capacity for sustained thought are essential attributes of a formal philosopher, then Conrad Celtis, whom D. F. Strauss christened “the German arch-humanist,” was far from being one. On the big questions Celtis' thinking was protean and inconclusive. He showed a grand indifference to the need for consistency. In a remarkable way he combined Platonic mysticism with an Aristotelian view of nature. He savagely attacked the church, its clergy, and dogma, yet performed his religious duties as though no trace of doubt marred the serenity of a simple faith. He lead an openly immoral life, if not so successfully as he boasted, and at the end turned to the comforts of a pious death. In a very real way these contradictions were not his alone, but less obviously those of his whole generation.

Of all the writings of Machiavelli, none has been so much commented upon as The Prince, and of the various sections of The Prince, none has been discussed so much as the last chapter. The chapter is an “exhortation to liberate Italy from the Barbarians.” Machiavelli believes that the opportunity has come “to introduce a new system” in Italy. A new Prince should place himself at the head of the Italians, who are “ready and willing to follow any standard, if only there be someone to raise it.”

What doors would be closed against him? What people would refuse him obedience? What envy could oppose him? What Italian would withhold allegiance? This barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of every one.

Nizolius' Observationes is a lexicon of Latin based exclusively on the writings of Cicero. It was one of the best-known dictionaries from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Pagani has counted nearly seventy printings of various editions between 1535 to 1630. An edition was printed in England as late as 1820. Leibnitz wrote that the lexicon would last as long as Cicero. The historian Arnold Toynbee has remarked that he was brought up on Nizolius in the Latin school.

This work has today been all but forgotten. The light of recognition is now begining to fall upon Nizolius' De veris principiis… philosophandi (Parma, 1553); the notice given to it is deserved, but the continuing almost total neglect of the lexicon is not justified. The De veris principiis has substance to contribute to our understanding of Renaissance philosophy; the Observationes offers a thread for a history of Ciceronianism in modern times.

Professor Roy W. Battenhouse has recently presented us with a most stimulating and perceptive essay on “The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance Platonism.” In it he argued that the general mode of Calvin's thought about the states of man—innocent, fallen, and saved—conformed to the pattern of Renaissance neoplatonist ideas of the different levels of human existence. Although the specific conclusions and content of Calvin's thinking (e.g., predestination and the denial of free will) were on their face diametrically opposed to those of Pico della Mirandola and Ficino,

Calvin's rejection of humanism for theology, and of reason for revelation, seems to have been a rejection more often of conclusions than of basic definitions and assumptions… . Calvin's doctrine of man may have a subterranean dependence on the very Renaissance optimism and rationalism which Calvin sought to reprove and chasten.

When one thinks of the vast scholarship in the Christian world that has developed during the last four hundred years in the field of Semitic languages and culture, one may feel that it is highly proper to speak of a Hebrew Renaissance along with the Latin and Greek Renaissance. This term may not be taken to imply a very sudden awakening of interest and establishment of critical apparatus; it is nearer to the Latin revival than to the Greek, since Hebrew—though not so much on the surface as Latin—had been known to Christian scholars and studied by them, even if not in a formal grammatical sense, throughout the preceding centuries. Now however, men will work on the biblical and Hebrew materials with the objective freedom of intellectual inquiry and with an historical and philological exactitude hitherto unknown.

How to define humanism as a description of the intellectual activities of the Renaissance is a much vexed question. Whereas Italian humanism was dominated by the professional rhetoricians who imitated classical models and founded classical philology, French humanism, stimulated by the discovery of Greek learning, preoccupied by moral problems, attempted to achieve a fusion of Christian and classical erudition. The interests of the humanists, which included Greek fathers of the church and Byzantine authors as well as the traditional classic writers, were encyclopedic, as in Budé and Jacques Peletier, and philosophic, as in Montaigne and Charron.

Although humanists were to be found in all classes of society, from nobles, ecclesiastics, courtiers, professors, and doctors to printers and merchants, the legal profession appears to have had among its members more distinguished humanists than are to be found in any other one group.

The lieutenant general of the Spanish cavalry in the Low Countries at the Truce of 1609 was Frate Lodovico Melzo, a Knight of St. John of Jerusalem and a member of an important Milanese family. He represents the Italian professional soldier of the period.

In 1611 there appeared at Antwerp his Regole Militari sopra il Governo e Servitio della Cavalleria. This is a folio volume printed in large Italic type, with an engraved title page representing Pallas and Hercules and three typical cavalry soldiers [Plate I], and with a number of double-page folding plates to illustrate the text. Melzo explains in the dedication to his leader, the Archduke Albert, that as soon as the peace of 1609 was made, he judged it a good employment of his leisure to gather together those rules that in the experience of many years he had observed on the conduct and special service of cavalry.

This essay is no more than a first attempt at a tentative exploration of an astonishingly wide topic. Every reader will be able to detect omissions and inadequacies for himself, but I hope that in a study such as the present no apology will be required.

A number of years ago, quite by accident, I ran across Latin translations of Niccolò Machiavelli's Historie fiorentine (Florence, 1537) and Discorsi ([Rome], 1531). Later on, I was able to examine a large number of such Latin versions of European vernacular works in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. I hope eventually to be able to treat the topic in full; in the meantime, the following sketch will give some idea, however inadequate, of how much and what sort of material one can expect to find.