Even at the height of Florentine prosperity, the total income of the commune was barely sufficient to cover half of the republic's ever-mounting expenditures. This circumstance stemmed from the costly wars that Florence was compelled to wage throughout the fourteenth century. Earlier, the armies of Florence had been drawn from the populace, and the budget had reflected this fact. In 1303 the communal debt was a trifling sum, but within a generation it had increased to the grand total of 450,000 florins, and this was in excess of the amount that the city could hope to raise from all revenue sources over a sixteen-month period.

Some time between the summer of 1490 and the spring of 1492 the late fifteenth-century humanist Bartolommeo della Fonte (or, as he is frequently called, Fontius) wrote his De poetice ad Laurentium Medicem libri III. In 1960, as an appendix to my study of the inaugural orations of Fontius, I published the hst of his works compiled by his student Francesco Pandolfini shortly after the death of Fontius in 1513. To this I added a list of all the locations of these works, both manuscript and printed, that I could discover, including some not listed by Pandolfini. Shortly thereafter (in January 1961) I received a note from Professor E. H. Gombrich, director of the Warburg Institute, telling me that he had seen a manuscript of one of the unlocated items on the Pandolfini list (my number 33), namely Fontius' Poetics.

Antonio Geraldini is well known for his eclogues, which have been reprinted in modern times. But there is another group of his poems which illustrates an early phase of his life. Since these poems have been previously unknown, it seems worth while to print them now. There are thirteen of them (531 lines) and they are contained in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Lat. misc. e 81, ff. 85r-96v. They are written in nine different metres; four are in Sapphics (1, 3, 6, 11), two are in elegiacs (12,13), and there is one poem in each of the following metres: lesser Asclepiad (2), first Asclepiad (8), second Asclepiad (4), third Asclepiad (10), Alcmanian (5), fourth Archilochian (9), and Phalaecean (7).

Irony plagued the career of Reginald Pecock and has pursued his memory. One of the most vigorous and original minds of his generation, he squandered his vast energies in the cause of a decadent orthodoxy which thanked him by bringing him to trial for heresy. And he resorted with the utmost confidence to the traditional weaponry of the medieval schools which, however, he used at times in ways as disconcerting to his scholastic contemporaries as they have proved tantalizing to historians. Small wonder that he remains an isolated figure, his place in history equivocal. If, in addition, it now turns out that his writings can be made to shed as much light on the origins of the English Renaissance as they ever did on the culture of medieval Christendom in which he gloried, it would be but one more thread in this skein of ironies.

Saynt Bede tellis in ‘Gestis Anglorum’ how, when Englond was oute of be belefe, be pope sente in-to it to preche a bisshop pat was a passyng sutell clerk, and a well-letterd; and he vsid so mekull soteltie and strange saying in his sermons, pat his prechyng owder litle profettid or noght. And pan ber was sent a noder bat was les of connyng of literatur pan he was, and he vsid talis and gude exsample in his sermon; and he within a while conuertyd nere-hand all Englond.

It seems to be a commonplace that our modern ‘sense of history’ is largely a creation of Renaissance humanism, but the precise debts of modern historical thought to humanist scholarship are still insufficiently understood. The purpose of this paper is to indicate a little more concretely the historical attitudes and ideas which informed one of the major scholarly enterprises of the Renaissance, that is, legal humanism, and so to throw further light upon the significance of humanist philology for historical thought. It is natural to begin the discussion with Lorenzo Valla, arch-grammarian and one of the founding fathers of legal humanism, since, in addition to his work on Roman law, he contributed perhaps more than any other humanist to the alliance of philology and history, and in the process provided perhaps the first philosophic justification of historical scholarship.

The period we are living in is perhaps the first in which the historian is well situated for understanding the sixteenth century. On the one hand, the various literary, political, and religious movements arising from the great historical crisis of the Renaissance all seem to have run their course, while the goals aimed at perhaps still lie ahead of us. On the other hand, the urgency of having cultural institutions better adapted to our world, both present and future, makes us better understand the rhythms of decomposition and creation which direct every age of widespread reform, and particularly that one.

Make some supplementary remarks to my ‘rapport'. By supplementation I understand less an expansion in subject matter than in method, as follows. It is relatively easy to set up programmatic demands. It is much more difficult to show by examples how these demands are to be met. With what ease it is said, for example, that research has yet been too little concerned with the reception of Isocrates in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But how is this to be done? How to get beyond mere bibliography, beyond establishment of printings to a penetration of the ideas and an evaluation of the facts?

In the years 1535-1555 a group of Italian authors rejected much of Italian Renaissance learning. Humanists in the Quattrocento had wished to educate man for the active life. During the sixteenth century humanist education became a broad pattern of learning stressing grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, history, and literature, based on both the Latin classics and vernacular models like Petrarch. Its purpose was the training of the young patrician to serve his family, city, or prince in the affairs of the world. But a group of critics mocked liberal studies, spurned the classical heritage, rejected authorities like Cicero and Pietro Bembo, ridiculed humanists, thought that history was widely misused, denied the utility of knowledge, and argued that man should withdraw into solitude. Nicolò Franco of Benevento (1515-1570), Lodovico Domenichi of Piacenza (1515-1564), Ortensio Lando of Milan (c. 1512-c. 1553), Giulio Landi of Piacenza (1500-1579), and Anton Francesco Doni of Florence (1513-1574) reached maturity in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century and expressed these critical themes in their many books published from 1533 to the early years of the 1550s.

In the course of defending the rather unpopular Edict of Nantes, one apologist deemed it necessary to calm the fears of his fellow Catholics: ‘The so-called reformed religion', he wrote, referring to the Calvinist faith, ‘is not to be approved in France, but only tolerated; thus it is that the exercise of this religion alone, along with the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion, is permitted.' The writer then assured his readers that the edict would not permit other sectarians ‘to live in full license', nor would it ‘open the door to Anabaptists, Lutherans, Adiaphorists, Puritans, Antinomians, Enthusiasts and others, who, after being separated from and having abandoned their true mother, the Church, introduced diverse sects'. These were the words of the arch-royalist Pierre de Belloy, whose Conference des edicts de pacification (1600) has the distinction of being the longest and perhaps the most tedious tract to issue from the toleration controversy of the sixteenth century.

Letter which Donne wrote to Sir Henry Wotton in 1600 accompanying a copy of his early Paradoxes reads in part: Sr. Only in obedience I send y° some of my paradoxes; I loue y° & myself & them to well to send them willingly for they carry wth them a confession of there lightnes. & yr trouble & my shame, but indeed they were made rather to deceaue tyme then her daughthr truth: although they haue beene written in an age when any thing is strong enough to overthrow her: if they make y° to find better reasons against them they do there office: for they are but swaggerers: quiet enough if y° resist them, if pchaunce they be pretyly guilt, yt is there best for they are not hatcht: they are rather alarūs to truth to arme her then enemies: & they haue only this advantadg to scape frö being caled ill things yt they are nothings: therfore take heed of allowing any of them least y° make another.