In 1538 when Sir Thomas Elyot printed his Dictionary, he included the following entry for Pythagoras: ‘An excellente Phylosopher, whose Phylosophye was in mystycalle sentences, and alsoo in the Scyence of noumbers.’ The ‘mystycalle sentences’ were the Carolina aurea and Symbola, collections of spurious precepts with hidden meanings which had received extensive explication; and ‘the Scyence of noumbers’ recalled Pythagoras’ fundamental postulate that all things have innate numerical relationships. Elyot's entry indicates concisely what facets of the Pythagorean doctrine appealed to the Renaissance and how Pythagoras could appear as the fountainhead of both mysticism and physical science. Reuchlin cited Pythagoras as source of the mystical wisdom contained in De arte cabalistica, while Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium claimed support from the ancient Pythagoreans for his belief that the earth moved.

Whenever Petrarch's significance for the history of European thought and sentiment is assessed, a great deal of attention is given to his ‘melancholy'. Apart from his poetry it is the Secretum which presents most clearly this aspect of Petrarch's inner life. In this work Petrarch analyzed his sentiment under the name of accidia. Literary critics since Sainte-Beuve have seen behind this concept the same psychic malady that beset Werther or René and, more recently, Baudelaire. Scholars, on the other hand, have tried to locate Petrarch's accidia in a more or less linear development from acedia, the medieval sin of spiritual negligence, to modern melancholy, Weltschmerz, or ennui.

Despite many an earnest effort to preserve the Burckhardtian idea of the Renaissance in the course of a full century of historical research (1960 was the centennial year of Burckhardt's masterpiece), the picture of this cultural unit has undoubtedly been more sharply focused in detail, but it has also grown so much more vague in its general lines as to cause a certain amount of despair with regard to the possibility of defining this period in precise distinction from the middle ages. A global ‘definition’ of the period (as of any other period) has been proved to be impossible. The ‘idea’ of the age, the positive formulation of its spirit and essential characteristics must be the result of a view of the ensemble of its various elements, many of which, taken in isolation, can find sources and even relative parallels in preceding centuries.

Hitherto, when one intended to evaluate humanistic jurisprudence and to assess its significance for the development of legal science, especially for the history of legal dogmatics, one merely indulged in general considerations. With respect to the attitude of its representatives towards the principal ideas of the mos italicus and the mos gallicus, reaction was merely intuitive. A central problem, such as that of the history of the ideas of aequitas and epieikeia from antiquity through the medieval and Renaissance periods and further, beyond the era of the reception of Roman law in Europe, to my knowledge was never posed.

In the years following Charles VIII's inglorious retreat from Naples, Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, was Italy's busiest diplomat. Though the brief visit of the French king and his knights had brought Lodovico little except prestige (more concrete advantage came from the fortuitous death of the young Milanese pretender), it certainly provided him a broader field on which he could play his diplomatic game. Dispatches by the score went out from his chancery. To all the courts and princes they went, and many, perhaps most, of them concerned the affairs of Tuscany. For Lodovico had his calculating eye turned south. With Venice, he was supporting the desperate struggle of the Pisans to free themselves from Florence. He sent off money and cavalry and capped his gifts with another of his famous invitations, this one to Maximilian of Austria.

The reputation of Erasmus in the period after his death has been the object of considerable interest in recent years following the impression made by Marcel Bataillon's Érasme et l'Espagne (Paris, 1937) and, more recently, by Andreas Flitner's essay Erasmus im Urteil seiner Nachwelt (Tübingen, 1952). The vicissitudes of an influence felt to be important, yet at the same time widely suspect, is something of a critical index to European moral sentiment. It is clear also that the reception of this influence has differed with the climate of opinion from country to country as well as from time to time, and it would seem desirable to fill up the outline, so admirably sketched by Flitner, at points where our present information is relatively thin. One such point is to be found in France in the latter part of the sixteenth century.

Passionate pursuit of humanistic scholarship, religious controversy, and princely ambition conspired to create impressive book collections at numerous sixteenth-century German courts. Whether conceived as utilitarian repositories for scholars or polemicists, or as treasure to enhance the splendor of a prince's court in competition with his peers, most of these late Renaissance collections were to form the great territorial and national, public and university libraries of modern Germany. The present-day Bavarian State Library, in many respects a typical example, owes its origin to the magnificent book collection amassed by Duke Albrecht v during his reign (1550-1579). Outnumbered only by the imperial library in Vienna, Albrecht's collection of about 11,000 volumes was considered at the time of his death the second largest library in Germany.

The standard opinion about poetic images involving money is that they are conventional devices to depict the crass, prosaic details of existence. Robert B. Heilman, for instance, in ‘The Economics of Iago and Others', writes of such words as riches, gold, buy, and gain that these economic terms ‘constitute a precise, unsentimental vocabulary for keeping before us the problem of values, especially in terms of an always possible gain and loss’.

W. L. Clemen, another student of Shakespeare's imagery who examines the figures of speech used by Iago, makes this observation: ‘lago's imagery teems with repulsive animals of a low order; with references to eating and drinking and bodily functions and with technical and commercial terms.’ Here we see the language of commerce placed in a vocabulary of metaphors that shouts of earthy things.

One of the persistent puzzles concerning Peter Ramus and his followers is the extraordinary diffusion of their works during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The general pathway of this diffusion has been well known since Waddington's Ramus in 1855. It proceeds chiefly through bourgeois Protestant groups of merchants and artisans more or less tinged with Calvinism. These groups are found not only in Ramus’ native France, but especially in Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and New England. Perry Miller's work, The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century, is the most detailed study of Ramism in any such group. Such groups were moving into more openly influential positions socially and were improving themselves intellectually, and Ramism appeals to them as they move up.

Among the authors of pamphlets in the sixteenth century there are many who achieved their reputation through works of larger dimensions but who nevertheless reveal interesting facets of their thought in their less ambitious writings. In most instances these tracts were the medium for news or for partisan comment upon die issues of the day. On other occasions these little books contained a rough draft of ideas which subsequently were given a modified or fuller expression. In either case the writer was likely to be spontaneous and rather casual about the manner of presentation, thus affording us an opportunity to witness the germination of his ideas.

Though the Italianate Englishman is a well-known figure in the Elizabethan literary scene, our picture of him is drawn generally from plays and satires after 1590. a generation after Roger Ascham introduced the epithet. Moreover, each portraitist in turn strove to outdo the other in vehemence, as we judge from the broadening range of Greene, Lodge, Marston, Jonson, for example, who had themselves not traveled to Italy and might not therefore be able to judge whether their victim, the ‘affectate traveller’, had learned his vice or folly in Italy or France or Spain, or only at home. Presumably the Elizabethans did not care how far out of bounds the term went in describing extremes of cruelty or baseness.

Few Letters of any age have proved so useful as those of Rowland Whyte in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth and the first of that of James I. From their first appearance in 1746 in the Letters and Memorials of State edited by Arthur Collins, no contemporary, unless it be John Chamberlain, has so often been quoted for succinct, apposite information regarding the personages and events of the era. Yet Whyte himself has been noticed only in brief footnotes: one by Collins, and a later and largely inaccurate one by Edmund Lodge.

Whilst musical imagery is to some extent resorted to in attempts by Elizabethan writers to define madness, the efficacy of music as sound is also sought for resolving the discord in man's microcosmos. Music's power over the emotions has been praised throughout all civilized ages. The best known example is, perhaps, Alexander who ‘was sometimes excited by it so passionately, that he was forced almost against his will to leave the banquet table and rush to arms; and when the musician changed the temper of the tune, he grew calm again, lay aside his arms, and returned to the banquet table'. Another stirring example is that of King Saul whose madness is spoken of as the result of possession by an evil spirit for his sins before God.

Some conceptions held by Herbert and his predecessors of the relations between sacred and profane love poetry are the matter at issue in this essay—yet it is particularly directed to the attention of two kinds of special students not likely to be especially interested in that issue. I wish it might be read by those who know unpublished Renaissance music, and those who work with semantics and early dictionaries in various European languages. It is written with the hope that some one else may run across an unfound musical setting, and that some one else may adduce earlier uses of a puzzling word. Its main concern, however, is to present certain materials and ideas of rather broader interest to students of Renaissance poetry.

One brief section of Marvell's ‘Upon Appleton House’ describes the flooding of a nearby meadow. The inundation is clearly literal, but beneath the surface of these waters lurks a submerged meaning. An examination of it yields a fuller understanding of Marvell's retreat to the higher and safer ground of a wooded hill, for the flood is perceived to be the final scene in a symbohc enactment of England's civil wars. The meadow had seemed ‘A Camp of Battail newly fought’, a plain ‘quilted ore with Bodies slain’ (stanza LIII). When the waters appear ‘to conclude’ what—with fine irony—Marvell calls ‘these pleasant Acts’, and to make ‘the Meadow truly be (What it but seem'd before) a Sea’ (LX), then truly is the time for thoughtful men to meditate upon what they and their revolutionary world have become.