Those who study the humanities are continually reminded that great events do not always find historians of commensurate stature to record and interpret them. In this respect, however, Spain's Golden Age was exceptionally privileged. Names such as Pulgar, López de Gómara, Zurita, Mariana, Sandoval, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza recall an era of diligent, conscientious historical scholarship combined with elegance and grace of expression. Publications in Spain once more have directed attention to this outstanding period of historiography. It will be recalled that in this field the pioneer investigations of Irving, Prescott, and Ticknor have been amply developed by Armstrong, H. Baumgarten, Konrad Häbler, Roger Bigelow Merriman, as well as other American and European scholars. A typical Golden Age historian is Pero (Pedro) de Mexía (1497?-1551), whose historical works are the object of new research.

The Disputationes Camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino constitute an important document. Composed in the manner of Ciceronian dialogues, they present us with a group of speakers famous in the history of Florentine thought: among others, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Alberti, and Ficino of the ‘Platonic Academy’ at Careggi to which Landino belonged; Alamanno Rinuccini, the Acciaiuoli, and Marco Parenti of the other ‘academy', presided over by Argyropoulos. The first dialogue deals with the relative merits of the active and contemplative life, the second with the problem of the highest good—two topics dear to the Renaissance. The third and fourth give an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid. It would be hard to find personages or themes more central to quattrocento intellectual history. Inevitably one looks to the Disputationes for the light they throw on these Florentine scholars and on their interests.

In September 1960 a hundred years will have passed since the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. No other work has had a comparable influence on the formation of the concept of die Renaissance, and during the last one or two generations it has become an historical classic read in all western countries. Since the re-publication of Burckhardt's original text by Walter Goetz in 1922, one German reprint has followed another. After the second World War the early Italian and English translations began to share in this ever-growing popularity (America has seen three new editions recendy), while the first Spanish translation came out in South America in 1942.

That More read and referred to Aulus Gellius has apparently escaped the attention of such More scholars as R. W. Chambers and J. H. Lupton, though there are at least two allusions to or citations of the Noctes Atticae in More's Correspondence; and at least once in his History of Richard HI (though in the Latin only) and more than once in his Debellation of Salem and Bizance More gives evidence of his familiarity with the Noctes Atticae.

Although Aulus Gellius was apparently not translated during More's lifetime, and indeed not until quite late in the story of English translations from the classics, there are numerous Latin editions after the editio princeps of 1469—and none can question the accessibility of such a Latin work to the humanists of More's day.

The widespread influence of Ovid's Amoves in the Renaissance is well known. In this note, I hope to show how, directly or indirectly, the fourth elegy of the second book brings together four poets not ordinarily associated. Ovid's elegy may well have served Marlowe, Donne, Suckling, and Herrick as a model for a pose that became a commonplace in Renaissance poetry, the stance of the indifferent lover.

In late summer, 1591, Sir Richard Grenville's ship The Revenge grappled, for hours, with from eight ships (Van Linschoten's estimate) to fifteen (Ralegh's) and struck her colors only after beginning to sink. Within days Sir Richard died of his wounds. Later, Sir Walter Ralegh (who although absent took depositions from survivors) expressed his contempt for those Spaniards who ‘fill the world with their vaine glorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories; when on the contrary, themselves are most commonly and shamefully beaten and dishonoured … In support of his accusation Ralegh recalled the recent defeat of 240 Spanish by 30 English warships (in which conflict the Revenge had been Drake's ship): ‘ … they were not ashamed in the year 1588, when they purposed the invasion of this land, to publish in sundrie languages in print, great victories in words….

At the turn of the century, a few years before the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) was printed, the reappearance of the choirboy troupes—the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's—at their own private theaters in London provided serious competition to the adult companies acting on the public stages, and among them the Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's company. In a topicality in this corrupt, ‘reported’ version of the play, Guildenstern alludes to the popularity of the child actors as he accounts for the visit of the traveling players:

Yfaith my Lord, noueltie carries it away,
For the principall publike audience that
Came to them, are turned to priuate playes,
And to the humour of children.

Printed anonymously in 1602, Blurt, Master Constable was attributed to Thomas Middleton by Francis Kirkman in his 1661 playlist. For almost three centuries the ascription went unchallenged. Dyce and Bullen included the play in their editions of Middleton; Chambers did not question its authenticity in The Elizabethan Stage. But in 1926 Oliphant suggested Thomas Dekker as the possible author, and his proposal has met with more favor than is usually accorded such conjectures. However, the argument for Dekker has consisted entirely of stylistic impressions—the kind of evidence which does not often persuade the skeptical reader—and as recently as 1948 the serious student of Middleton could accept without qualm the traditional attribution. It might, therefore, be useful if some external evidence, however slight, were forthcoming to support Dekker's claim to the play. Such evidence may be afforded by a possible contemporary allusion to Dekker's authorship of Blurt in the anonymous Wily Beguiled, printed in 1606 but probably acted ca. 1602.

When, during their controversy, Tyndale asks More why he has criticized the Tyndale translation of the New Testament but has said nothing against the translation of his ‘derelyng’ Erasmus, More answers:

I have not contended with Erasmus my derling, because I found no suche malicious entente with Erasmus my derlyng, as I fynde with Tyndall. For hadde I founde with Erasmus my derling the shrewde entente and purpose that I fynde in Tyndall: Erasmus my derlyng should be no more my derlyng….

An untitled and anonymous piscatory eclogue of 104 hexameters, published in Gilbert Cousin's Basel anthology, Bucolicorum autores (printed by Johannes Oporinus in 1546), is worth a page or two. Here the fisherman Cephylas asks Morson to repeat a famous and ancient prophecy of Venetian power. Morson agrees readily, and explains that the seer in question had lived centuries ago—during the reign of Saturn, in fact; he himself had learned of this while traveling with a friend from Padua to Venice: on coming in sight of Venice, the friend had narrated at length the prophecy, which Morson now proceeds to retail (16-96) to Cephylas. After the Trojan War, begins Morson, two Trojan princes (i.e., Aeneas and Antenor) had fled to Italy: one of them was to found the Roman race and a warlike, imperial city that would extend its power over Italians, Carthaginians, Britons, and others until a disastrous war between one man and his son-in-law (Caesar and Pompey) should bring on an empire that would eventually become no more than a shadow and a name (this phrase is not the only reminiscence of Lucan in the poem).

The lively Neo-Latin epigram appended to Thomas Watson's Amyntas merits more than passing mention as ‘an interesting set of verses'. It offers an illuminating case of Elizabethan literary criticism in action and one that involves a highly provocative problem in identification.

The poem is an imitation of an epigram of Martial. The Roman poet had satirized, in his usual uninhibited fashion, a certain meddlesome moralist who was too busy decrying the vices of other men to put his own house in order. Adapting Martial's format adroitly to his purposes, Watson makes it the vehicle for a sharp attack on a contemporary literary critic who has exasperated him by carping continually at his writings:

My brief note on Sir Thomas More's reading and use of Aulus Gellius did not pretend to be a complete survey of the fortunes of the Nodes Atticae in the Renaissance; nonetheless it should have made reference to Hans Baron's important essay on Aulus Gellius in the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. Echoing Professor Baron's statement that ‘the study of Gellius’ fortunes in the Renaissance has not made much headway beyond a modest start; we cannot point to any monograph on Gellius among the humanists, or in other Renaissance circles'—I would like to add this further note.

Besides More himself and Erasmus, others in the More circle knew their Attic Nights. For having disparaged Seneca, Gcllius was ‘passionately taken to task’ by Juan Luis Vivcs, yet Vivcs cited Gcllius with great frequency in his commentary on the City of God. Clearly, Gellius is one of those classical authors whose influence upon other members of the More-Erasmus circle (such as Bude and Pace) it would be most fruitful to explore further, and that influence will doubtless also be found in many minor writers of the earlier sixteenth century.

The strange and important figure of Giordano Bruno more and more draws our attention. With equal possibility of accuracy we may view him as charlatan and as martyr to learning; his colossal ego made him seem the first just as it made him become the latter. Particularly his residence in England in 1583-84 and his connections there with Sidney, Greville, Dyer, Dee, and Florio have drawn the attention of students of the English Renaissance. ‘Appare dunque manifesto', says Professor Ludovico Limentani, Tinteresse di qualsiasi informazione che possa illuminare anche del piu fioco barlume quel periodo della travagliata esistenza del grande pensatore.’

Milton's comprehensive ability to synthesize diverse elements from different traditions according to his artistic purpose is one of the most outstanding ways in which he manifested his originality. Even Manoa's attempt to ransom his son, one of the most remarkably original episodes in Samson Agonistes, has not only profoundly Christian overtones, but also, I should like to suggest, two classical analogues.

To the Christian reader the word ‘ransom’ inevitably suggests Christ's redemption of mankind, ‘Thy ransom paid, which Man from death redeems’. Just as surely as Job's declaration of faith, ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’, has been taken as an anticipation of Christ; the correspondences between Christ and Samson would have been evident to Milton's audience.