Giuseppe Moletti (1531-1588) is now remembered only as one of the mathematicians to whom a young Galileo submitted some theorems on centers of gravity, and as Galileo's immediate predecessor in the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua. Yet in his day Moletti was well-known and highly regarded: he was, for instance, one of the mathematicians consulted by Pope Gregory on calendar reform, and his geographical and astronomical works went through several editions in his lifetime. Since his death, however, the only writing of Moletti's to be printed was a brief passage that caught the attention of Giambattista Venturi in the early nineteenth century. Venturi, searching for lost fragments of Galileo's works, came upon Moletti's otherwise unknown and unprinted “Dialogue on Mechanics” in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

Abraham Fraunce holds a conspicuous though somewhat anomalous place in Renaissance literary history. He is usually regarded as a minor poet, worth studying mainly for his close association with two major ones—Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney—and for his translations of Virgil, Heliodorus, and Tasso. He is also considered an important figure in Renaissance rhetorical history (insofar as that can and should be distinguished from literary history) for The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and, to a lesser extent, for The Sheapheardes Logike (?I585) and The Lawiers Logike (1588). Indeed, James J. Murphy has recently identified Fraunce as one of the twenty most frequently cited Renaissance rhetoricians—“the names most often seen in footnotes or heard in learned papers at meetings.”

Among terminally ill figures of speech, the cliché of rosy cheeks, ruby lips, and snow-white skin may be counted downright deceased. Even in medieval and Renaissance love poetry, roses in the cheeks, lips like cherries or rubies, skin like ivory, lilies, or snow were stiffly conventional: freshness of complexion prompted no freshness of metaphor. The mistress's red-and-white face was relentlessly emblazoned, “red and white” becoming a short-hand notation for feminine beauty: “With lilies white / And roses bright / Doth strive thy colour fair” (Wyatt 65); “Fair is my love … / A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her” (Passionate Pilgrim no. 7); “Thou art not fair for all thy red and white” (Campion 264). The mistress in Spenser's Amoretti has “ruddy cheekes” and “snowy browes” (no. 64); the bride in his Epithalamion is a vision in red and white—cheeks like sun-reddened apples, lips like cherries, forehead like ivory, “breast like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, / Her paps lyke lyllies budded, / Her snowie necke”; when she blushes, “the red roses flush up in her cheekes, / and the pure snow with goodly vermill [vermillion] stayne, / Like crimsin dyde” (Il. 172-7, 226-8).