At first glance, Lorenzo Valla has much in common with William of Ockham. Both see language as the key to an understanding of the world, criticizing realist ontologies which admit of various abstract entities. Modern scholars have therefore often argued that Valla's transformation of medieval metaphysics and logic is nominalist in spirit and continues Ockhamist nominalism. The article criticizes this widely held interpretation. At closer inspection, Valla's views on ontology and semantics are very different from Ockham's. Apart from the obvious differences in cultural background, they show widely different approaches, methods, and arguments at a more philosophical level.

This essay examines the development of humanistic rhetoric in fifteenth-century Venice, taking as its starting point a remark of Ermolao Barbaro's on the inadequacy of academic rhetorical instruction as a preparation for the practical oratorical skills necessary to Venetian civic life. It is argued that the context of Barbaro's remark is a series of humanistic polemics on rhetoric that took place in Venice and Padua in the latter decades of the Quattrocento, culminating in the famous debate of the 1490s on the authenticity of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. As the essay shows, a consideration of these debates reveals the way in which local, contextual factors inflected the development of humanistic rhetorical culture in Italy, the key factor here being the continuing importance in republican Venice of a live tradition of deliberative debate.

Alciato's Parergon iuris libri duodecim belongs to the tradition of humanist notebooks which begins with Valla's Elegantiae and finds its most important representative in Poliziano's Miscellanea. It purports to provide explanations of difficulties found in the Corpus iuris civilis based on Alciato's reading in non-legal texts. However, it is apparent that he is also seeking to demonstrate his competence in the emendation and explication of these literary and historical texts. The remarks he is led to make about "grammatici" and "rhetores" are revealing of his personal attitudes and symptomatic of the evolution of attitudes in the world of education.

This essay explores Virgil's influence in Renaissance poetry through the literature's most common trope, that of ruin; specifically, it examines the complexity of Virgilian imitation in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender through an exploration of its introduction by his anonymous first critic, E.K. Through the topos of ruin, this essay reconsiders Virgil's legacy in the Calender, suggesting that critics have underestimated Spenser's criticism of Virgil's authorial pattern. Rather than reconstructing Virgil's model of cultural transmission — that of ruin and repair—Spenser presents the Ciceronian art of memory as a competing model for the architecture of immortality, for building upon the ruins of the past.