The Point frequently has been made by students of Renaissance English lyric poetry such as Evelyn Scholl, Edmund Fellowes, et al, that appreciation and comprehension of this literary form cannot be thorough without knowledge of the musical settings to which these lyrics were sung. For many years there has been, therefore, a continuing search for the music which originally accompanied the lyrics of such poets asWyatt, Surrey, Daniels, Sidney, Campion, and many others. Some musical settings, for the lute and other instruments, have been found—Fellowes’ The English School of Lutenist Song Writers is a notable example of such collections—but none of them have included the music for the lyric poem which so obviously was written to be sung to lute music, Wyatt's ‘Blame not my lute'.

Renaissance scholarship in America has flourished within- creasing tempo ever since the influx of materials for study began to accumulate in American libraries following the cessation of the first world war in 1918. Only in the nineteen-thirties, however, did Renaissance scholars begin to feel the need for a synthesis of departmentalized researches which the medievalists in this country felt in the early nineteen-twenties. In part this feeling was produced by the growing volume and significance of Renaissance studies in this country, but it certainly also owed its existence to the widespread efforts to redefine the nature and extent of the period itself. The popular myth that the Renaissance was the revival of light and joy after the bleak darkness of the Middle Ages was exploded by the better understanding of the great achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Most Students and many scholars seem to believe that for the Renaissance, as well as for other periods of Western history, the relevant source material is adequately known, and that all there remains to be done is to reinterpret and to correlate these wellknown sources and to fit them into a comprehensive picture. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this complacent view does not correspond to the actual state of affairs. In the field of humanist literature and thought, on which I have focused my attention for twenty years or so (that is, in the area of literary, scholarly and philosophical works in Latin produced in Italy between 1300 and 1600), many extant authors, and even many writings of well-known authors are not listed in the best available reference works, and even some of the most famous writings have not yet been published in critical editions, or adequately explored as to their chronology and textual history.

Ralph E. Giesey (Institute for Advanced Study) is at present revising for publication his doctoral dissertation entitled The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (University of California, 1954). Following is a summary of the study:

The funeral ceremony of the French kings during the Renaissance was compared by contemporary writers to that of the ancient Roman emperors, and modern historians have believed that the French were copying the Roman customs described by ancient historians. However, the history of French royal funerals from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries shows that the elaborate ceremonial which developed had its own rationale. Of primary importance was the rise of the abbey of Saint-Denis as the royal necropolis. In the thirteenth century it became the custom to display the body of the dead king during the funerary ceremony, which lasted only a few days, because the crude methods of embalming would not allow a longer display of the deceased.

On June 1952, the American Council of Learned Societies discontinued its Committee on Renaissance Studies, but before this Committee disbanded it voted to organize a new committee to take over its work. This new committee, the American Committee on Renaissance Studies (ACRS), consisted of representatives of national learned societies with interests in the Renaissance, together with representatives of the local Renaissance clubs and conferences which had been formed under the old ACLS Committee.

The first meeting of the ACRS was held by invitation of the Columbia University Seminar on the Renaissance in the Paterno Library of the Casa Italiana, on January 31, 1953.

This brief survey will of necessity be a highly personal one. It seemed to me advisable to list only those topics that have been thrown into relief by recent work undertaken by my colleagues, my pupils and myself, and I have not attempted to present these topics in any systematic way. In some instances the requirement is clear: future work will be hamstrung until this or that subject has been fully explored and the results of the research made available in a cheap and readable form. In other cases the projects are more Utopian. All of them, however, have forced their way into recent work of one kind or another so that, whatever their other faults or merits, they are at least up-to-date. I have classified them rather loosely into somewhat sprawling groups, having nevertheless some ground in common.

The Warburg Institute reports the following activities since its last account to the readers of this newsletter, RN IV, 40. Three books by the late Professor Saxl, to appear shortly:

(1) Volume III of the Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Late Middle Ages, which Saxl compiled before his death, contains manuscripts in the libraries of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It has been seen through the press by Professor Harry Bober of Harvard University. Its main interest for readers of this paper, if the term Renaissance be taken to denote a recurring phenomenon rather than a particular period, lies in the survival of the illustrations to Aratus’ poem on the star images, and the transformations which they have undergone from classical to mediaeval times.

Critics have encountered considerable difficulty in explaining the setting of Leonardo's ‘Virgin of the Rocks'. Thus L. H. Heydenreich asserts, ‘Das Bild schildert kein Ereignis der biblischen Geschichte'. A background of apocryphal or legendary material has been postulated and denied. Although biblical history offers no explanation for the rocks, a very simple and obvious source appears in conventional biblical exegesis. A convention arose in the twelfth century where by the Sponsa in the Canticum could be taken as the Blessed Virgin as well as the Church, and this attitude persisted in Catholic countries well after the time of Leonardo. Thus Cant. 2: 13-14 was read as an injunction to the Virgin: Surge, arnica tnea, speciosa mea, et vent, columba mea, inforaminibuspetrce, in caverna maceriæ.

On the Eve of Palm Sunday, April 8, 1498, Florence witnessed a wholly disgraceful exhibition of primitive savagery and brutal instincts. The ordeal by fire, which Savonarola and his opponents had been scheduled to undergo, had failed to take place on the previous day; consequently the populace was in a particularly ugly frame of mind on being deprived of this ghastly spectacle. That Sunday night, the Florentines, and those citizens of the neighborhood who had nocked to the Tuscan capital in the hope of sharing in the promised looting, broke all bonds of restraint and the city endured a veritable ‘Walpurgisnacht’ of horror. Murder, brutal assault, arson, robbery and most other forms of violence were the order of the night; the events are recounted not only by contemporary chroniclers but by modern historians as well.

Before a modern edition of Monteverdi is issued, the musical text should be clarified and interpreted. To carry out these two fundamental editorial demands is less easy than it sounds. There are no autographs on which a truly critical edition could be based—only first prints, many of which are studded with misprints despite the fact that they had been supervised by the composer himself. These first prints (of which only very few copies have survived completely) present the music—beginning with the publication of Il quinto libro dei Madrigali in 1605—not as it was actually sung or played but in an abridged version only, i.e. in the summarizing notation of the ‘Basso continuo’ period which cuts right across Monteverdi's life.Any music, backed by a figured bass, needs realization of that part in harmonies and the working-out of a playable part for a ‘fundamental-instrument’ (keyboard- instrument or lute).

Mr.John H. Long's plea for more documentary evidence in ‘the case of “O Mistresse mine” ‘ has prompted me to supply some of that evidence which has come to my attention in connection with a study of John Gamble's Commonplace Book (New York Public Library MS Drexel 4257). I offer it as a postscript to Mr.Long's comments (RN VII, 15-16) and to Mr. Sidney Beck's stimulating paper on the subject (RN VI, 19-23). The Gamble MS contains a seventeenth-century setting of the ‘O Mistresse mine’ tune which has hitherto escaped the notice of investigators. This setting is, in fact, the only known contemporary source of the tune with an accompanying text. It will be recalled that the versions upon which all previous speculation has been based are instrumental versions, the first from Morley's Consort Lessons (1599), the second from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (ca. 161).

The use of lettering in Renaissance painting has yet to be investigated systematically. I believe, however, that at this point a few general observations can be made. From a more or less systematic survey of the letter forms occurring in inscriptions in Quattrocento painting, we learn, as we might expect, that painted letters reflect changes which take place in the development of lettering in general. In the course of the 15th century reforms in lettering led from the Gothic to the humanistica script and to Roman capitals. Both the new script and the capitals assert themselves in painting. At the same time, painters do not oust Gothic letters. The process of assimilation leads to important observations inasmuch as palaeographical as well as epigraphical forms are treated by the Quattrocento painters aesthetically as well as iconographically.