Since the beginnings of its greatness, Florence was a town of merchants and of craftsmen where the arts, literature, and religious devotion were highly cultivated and where the vernacular tongue, probably after the French and Provençal model, was used as a literary language much earlier than in the rest of Italy, not only in lyrical poetry but also in all other branches of literature. The example of Dante alone is sufficient to show that the interest in philosophy and theology was very much alive in early Florence. Yet the university which was founded during the fourteenth century never occupied a predominant place in the intellectual life of the city, and hence the learned disciplines characteristic of the medieval universities were less strongly represented in Florence than in the old university centers.

The historian, most especially the historian of ideas, since he cannot undo the processes of time, is always in difficulties over problems of causation, transmission, and migration. Hume determined to leave speculation aside and observe only sequence. We cannot decide what the intellectual climate of Stuart England would have been like without the Advancement of Learning, or the Authorized Version, or of Western Europe without The Discourse on Method. Yet certain coincidences tempt investigation. Machiavelli, for two or three centuries a familiar name of both authority and reproach, was very widely read, if even more widely misrepresented and oversimplified. Scholarship has been occupied with his legend. Yet little attention has been focused on the identity of many of the ideas of the Discorsi with the commonplaces of political writers between the Renaissance and the French Revolution in England and France.

It has previously been supposed that Lodge rendered in English Des Portes’ sonnet 34 from Diane, Book 1, twice. In the present paper I shall show that the first of these renderings was based on a madrigal in Watson's The First Sett of Italian Madrigalls Englished and shall try to interpret this fact.

Des Portes’ sonnet reads as follows:

Celuy que l'Amour range à son commandement
Change de jour en jour de façon differente;
Helas! j'en ay bien fait mainte preuve apparente,
Ayant esté par luy changé diversement.

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, has long been recognized as the leading patron of the new learning in England in the fifteenth century. His collection has been called ‘ … the most important in England at his time. Other libraries, such as Christ Church, Canterbury, St. Albans, or Peterborough, may have exceeded it in numbers, but Duke Humphrey's books could display a greater variety of subjects, and included many works to be found nowhere else in the country.' Unfortunately, few MSS are still extant which can be identified as having belonged to him. We do have, however, a good indication of the scope of his library from the surviving lists of books which he gave to Oxford University.

Mr. A. D. S. Fowler's article in Modern Language Notes, of April 1960, ‘The River Guyon’, makes the interesting suggestion that the name of Guyon, Spenser's Knight of Temperance in Book Two of The Faerie Queene, may be derived from Gihon, one of the four rivers of Paradise mentioned in Genesis 2:13. Mr. Fowler cites the commentaries of Philo and Ambrose, which allegorize the rivers as the four cardinal virtues, to prove a definite relationship between Gihon, later written Geon or Gyon, and the virtue of temperance. Other authorities for this equation can be added: Bede's Commentary on the Pentateuch, the Glossa Ordinaria, and Alexander Neckham's De naturis rerum. It seems very likely that Spenser meant the name of Guyon to recall this traditional association.

From letters of Ambrosius Traversarius, edited by Cannetus and published with the Vita Ambrosii Traversarii of Mehus, it is known that Ambrosius Traversarius translated the Vita Gregorii Nazianzeni written by Gregorius Presbyter and also four orations of Gregory Nazianzene, numbers 18, De Obitu Patris, and 6, 23, and 22, the three orations De Pace. The Vita with its dedicatory letter is preserved in at least eight manuscripts, but no trace of the orations has been found. Our information concerning the translation of the orations comes from the letters written by Ambrosius in the year 1436.

Scholars interested in Ambrosius Traversarius have uncovered no further information on these Latin translations. Ludwig Bertalot found twelve additional letters not contained in the collection of Cannetus.

The letter is preserved in MS. w 340 of the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, a volume of collected writings of the author, which is probably autograph and which I found in 1955. I hope to discuss the author, and especially his letters, in another study, and wish to thank Dr. H. Gerig of the Historisches Archiv for his permission to publish this letter ahead of the others which I promised to contribute to the Mitteilungen published by the archive itself. The author begins his letter by stating that he had read a letter from Erasmus to Arnoldus Bostius, in which Erasmus complained about the bad treatment he had received from an Englishman. Rutgerus comforts Erasmus, combining pious admonitions with a quotation from Plato. Bostius had sent him Erasmus’ letter that he may know the latter's ‘hand', which I take to mean not only his handwriting, but also his literary style.

In his letter to Harvey from Leicester House on October 5, 1579, Spenser said he hoped to be employed by a ‘Lorde’, evidently the Earl of Leicester, and intended to devote his time ‘to his Honours service’; and he further reported that ‘gentle M. Sidney, I thanke his good Worship’, had asked for news of Harvey. In a second letter ten days later he said he would follow Harvey's advice to publish various of his writings but was in doubt about their dedication. One work, evidently the Shepheardes Calender, seemed to him ‘too base for his excellent Lordship’. He noted that Gosson had been scorned for dedicating his Schoole of Abuse to Master Sidney, from which he concluded: ‘Suche follie is it, not to regarde aforehand the inclination and qualitie of him, to whome wee dedicate oure Bookes.

A most intriguing problem in the history of the French theatre of the sixteenth century concerns Jodelle's lost comedy La Rencontre. In the eighteenth-century Histoire du théâtre français by Claude and François Parfaict, Jodelle's one extant comedy is listed as Eugène, ou La Rencontre. This double title, accepted also by the Chevalier de Mouhy and some later literary historians, does not square with a very explicit paragraph in Estienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France VII, vi:

Il [Jodelle] fit deux Tragedies… et deux comedies, la Rencontre et l'Eugene. La Rencontre ainsi appellée, parce qu'au gros de la meslange, tous les personnages s'estoient trouvez pesle-mesle casuellement dedans une maison; fuzeau qui fut fort bien par luy demeslé par la closture du jeu. Ceste Comedie, et la Cleopatre furent representées devant le Roy Henry à Paris en l'Hostel de Reims, avec un grand applaudissement de toute la compagnie: Et depuis encores au College de Boncourt, où toutes les fenestres estoient tapissées d'une infinité de personnages d'honneur, et la Cour si pleine d'escoliers que les portes du College en regorgeoeint. Je le dis comme celuy qui y estois present, avec le grand Tornebus en une mesme chambre.