The Renaissance humanists’ quest for the perfect Latin style formed the central element in their views of literature and history and contributed fundamentally to the genesis of their cultural values. In order to establish the ideal Latin, the humanists searched the treasures of Antiquity and formed the critical standards necessary to judge and use ancient writers. As a consequence Renaissance Latin prose was dynamic, although within definite limits. It changed according to the increased knowledge and sophistication of both its practitioners and their audience. This essay will describe the changes that Latin prose (Latin poetry will be discussed only in passing) experienced in Italy in the last decades of the Quattrocento and first years of the Cinquecento. It will review the major schools of Latin prose composition—the eclectic, the strict imitative, and the “archaizing“— and concentrate on the last of these in an attempt to explain why some Italian humanists followed certain ancient but uncommon Latin models in their writing and, thereby, rejected, at least implicitly, a number of basic elements in the view of the Latin language and its history that was accepted during the Quattrocento.

In choosing this title to address the topic of style change in music in the late sixteenth century, my intention is to suggest the apparent suddenness with which the early Baroque style appeared on the musical scene around the turn of the century. Furthermore, in its evocation of the dramatic, the title is suited to a style that burst on the scene in the new, essentially dramatic forms of monody (or solo song) and opera. If one observes the prospect from the brink of such a precipitous style change, however, one's retrospective view is complicated by entangled paths leading from various corners of the Renaissance landscape roughly to their convergence at the spot on which the viewer stands, at the entry into the Baroque. The purpose of this paper is not to chart new paths but to explore and describe some of those which have already been well traveled by music historians and others in search of explanations of style change. Certain signposts beckon more intriguingly than others—madrigal, monody, linguistics, mannerism—and these will mark the principal routes of our investigation.

Marsilio Ficino completed the third part of his De vita libri tres, titled De vita coelitus comparanda, in July of 1489; by the fall of that year he felt obliged to write an Apologia on behalf of his new book. Though it was destined to be the most popular of his original works, this analysis and defense of astrological magic and medicine caused Ficino worry from the moment of its composition. The Apology shows that he was particularly anxious about the religious orthodoxy of De vita III, among whose readers he expected to find many ignorant critics and some malignant:

During the years 1457-1465 Francesco Filelfo, the first important Western European professor of Greek after Guarino Veronese, composed a remarkable collection of poems in classical Greek. On April 9, 1458 Filelfo claimed in a letter to Girolamo Castelli, Duke Borso d'Este's court poet and personal physician, that he was the first Italian to write Greek poetry. In the same letter Filelfo announced that he fully intended to compose not merely a single verse epistle in Greek, but rather several books of Greek poems: “nec id una epistola quapiam sum facturus, sed libellis, ut spero, compluribus.“ In 1457 Filelfo had already written the distinguished scholar and philosopher from Constantinople, John Argyropulos, to ask for primers on Greek prosody and the Greek dialects, particularly the Aeolic. By July 27, 1465 Filelfo wrote to Cardinal Bessarion in Rome, then the leading figure in Greek emigré circles, informing him that he had just mailed three books of his own Greek poems, amounting to twenty-four hundred lines, to the Cardinal for his appraisal.

When, in the fifth act of Hamlet, Shakespeare's protagonist accepts the challenge to “play” with Laertes, newly returned from France, in a match contrived by the King, both the challenge and the resulting contest embody strains of significance largely inaccessible to a twentieth-century audience. Shakespeare's patrons at the Globe, however, would surely have distinguished in minute detail the differences between foreign and domestic codes of swordsmanship, might well have traced the actors’ skills to the pedagogical efforts of one or another master of defense then plying his talents in London, and, yeomen and aristocrats alike, would undoubtedly have felt themselves expert critics of an athletic ritual rich in historical association and accumulated lore. Today, however, the cultural context within which they reacted is difficult indeed to recover, for the history of the arts of defense remains a neglected area in Renaissance studies.

According to Edmund Spenser, trivial art was merely “painted forgery,” no more than “th'aboundance of an idle braine.” Its antithesis, exemplified by The Faerie Queene, was “matter of just memory” (FQ II.Proem, i). In this distinction, the double sense of “just,” i.e. both “righteous” and “exact,” tellingly suggests the response he desired—demanded even—from readers of his epic. Other works aspiring to the status of high art similarly make demands upon their audience which implicitly continue into the memory of the reader or viewer. It was thus, Ben Jonson argued, that the text of a masque could be elevated above the mere physical spectacle of its performance: it was in the imagination of the audience that the “more removed mysteries,” only shadowed forth in the action of the show, could be fully subjected to the understanding (rather than simply experienced externally by the sense) of the beholders.

We are accustomed to thinking of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) as the great Renaissance champion of Plato from a Christian point of view and the leader of those who wished to effect an accommodation between Platonism (or more accurately Neoplatonism) and Christianity, as the most distinguished of Plato's several Medicean apologists. Many texts lend credibility to this interpretation of Ficino's goals, and it is essentially correct. However, it is important that we appreciate just where he traced the boundaries of accommodation between Catholic dogma and what he regarded as authentic Platonism; and in particular that we appreciate the care and circumspection with which he approached the problem of analyzing the relationship between the dogma of the Trinity and the various texts in Plato that lent themselves to a trinitarian interpretation that Plato himself could not have intended or even fully conceived.

Current methodological trends now influence the study of most literature, but as I shall argue, in the future they may alter radically the study of Elizabethan prose fiction. Some works of literature, especially the major ones, may be enjoyed by readers in any age, but many, perhaps now most, depend on literary criticism to be properly understood and fully appreciated. At one time Milton's Paradise Lost was a popular work, requiring of its readers only that their lives be grounded in the Bible to ensure their full response to it. For most readers today, an adequate response to Milton's poem is a product of the historical scholarship and the New Criticism practiced mostly in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

Montaigne scholarship has traditionally drawn its impetus from the identification of life and work and its sense of the overwhelming presence of Montaigne as the subject of his text. Bolstered by the essayist's own protestations of sincerity, of good faith and mutual trust between writer and reader, scholars have read the first-person discourse as affirming the truth of the “I” inside the writing and its unequivocal coincidence with its historical referent. The authorial voice announcing itself as self-portraiture, bearing its own name, has been taken to represent the man, his character and ideas, and to reflect the broader sixteenth-century intellectual and social context.

This long-standing reading practice, with its conviction of mimesis, has undoubtedly achieved useful biographical and historical results. Scholars interested in the evolution of Montaigne's thought have shed light on his mode of composition through textual accretion by studying the successive additions and emendations which are identified as strata in the body of the work: A(1580, 1582), B(1588), C(after 1588).

The existence of an Oxford dramatic piece of 1636 variously called Moore's Mask or The Moor's Mask has been known to scholars since 1891, when F. G. Fleay included it in a list of “University plays in English.” Fleay gave no source for his information, however, and the location of the manuscript has hitherto been unknown. G. E. Bentley wrote in 1956 that “I find no other record of this masque. Presumably Fleay's information was derived from the manuscript, but I do not know where it is.” Harbage and Schoenbaum's Annals of English Drama (1964) simply repeats Fleay's entry with the comment “Extant?” Fleay called the work Moore's Mask; Bentley The Moor's Mask; Harbage and Schoenbaum give both titles

The following brief reflections on the present state of scholarship in Renaissance medicine make no claim to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Medicine is of broad historical interest because a web of connections link it to the culture as a whole. Variously considered, medicine has a place in the history of science and technology, in social history, and in a wide sweep of cultural and intellectual history ranging from the history of philosophy to the study of popular mentalités. Moreover, although the field of the history of Renaissance medicine is one in which much, including fundamental work, remains to be done, it is also one that is now being vigorously developed in some widely diverse ways. Confronted with this breadth of topics and materials, I am seeking only to isolate a few major directions in current work