Giles of Viterbo (Egidio da Viterbo, 1469-1532) has been receiving increasing attention as his place in early sixteenth-century intellectual and religious history becomes clearer: he combined a central and effective position in ecclesiastical administration with an active role in the leading scholarly and literary circles of the late Italian Renaissance. As prior general of the Augustinian friars from 1508 until 1518 he undertook from Rome a vigorous reform of the order. He was a trusted adviser of Pope Julius II, under whose powerful patronage he had been elected head of the Augustinians, and he enjoyed a very cordial relationship with the two Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, the former of whom created him a cardinal in 1517.

Historians dealing with the political and cultural history of the Florentine Commune during the Renaissance have been fortunate in having at their disposal the extensive resources of the local Archivio di Stato. One can find among its riches abundant evidence concerning many facets of private activity and public policy of the Trecento and Quattrocento. The great attention that Florence has received in the historical accounts of the Italian Renaissance reflects not only Florentine erninence during that epoch but also the survival of so much evidence not existing for many other cities. Yet one real difficulty which confronts historians of the early Renaissance has been the lack of extensive sources dealing with individual members of the Florentine society, particularly those who were active and prominent in the agitated arena of communal politics. Some diaries, of course, have survived, but the number is small and more often than not they were penned by men whose detachment from daily involvement in the formulation and implementation of policies allowed them the leisure to maintain a continuing record of their political views and commitments.

Despite the repeated use of the term ‘humanist’ by modern scholars, few references to the term have been located in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Campana has found nine Itahan uses of the term in manuscript and printed sources from 1512 to 1588. In addition he has noted two sixteenth-century French uses, one English reference, and four appearances in the Latin text of the Epistolae ohscurorum virorum. Paul O. Kristeller has located the word in a letter of 1490 by the rector of the University of Pisa, in sixteenth-century university documents of Bologna and Ferrara, in John Florio's Italian-English dictionary of 1598, and in a Spanish document of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Eugenio Garin adds an example from a document of the Studio di Pisa of 1525. This short article will contribute five additional vernacular uses oiumanista in Italy between 1540 and 1574.

The identity of the bicephalic servant holding the water utensils in the Judgment of Pilate (Fig. i) on Donatello's Gospel ambo in San Lorenzo has been a puzzling problem. Early writers did not identify the figure. Recently, H. W. Janson and Irving Lavin postulated that the strange bearer in this unique composition was merely an attribute of Pilate's, created to explicate the governor's character. Janson believes that the double face derives from Janus, or ‘rather, the personification of January’ carrying a jug, as portrayed in Romanesque calendar art. According to this theory, Donatello discarded or did not understand the meaning attached to a bicephalic January, and used the figure to show Pilate ‘torn between the pleas of his wife and the demands of expediency.' Lavin, who is in general agreement with this theory, carefully studied the literature on Pontius Pilate to support it. He divided the literary tradition into three parts—that which was favorable to the governor, against him, or merely neutral. Lavin concluded that Donatello's relief reflects an unfavorable view of Pilate, whom he sees as a man of ‘two minds,’ someone ‘akin to our idea of a hypocrite.'

In 1539 Sébastien Gryphius, noted humanist printer of Lyon, published a French translation of Sermon Fourteen of Gregory Nazianzen, περί ϕιƛοπτωχίαs or De amore pauperum. It was entitled De la cure, et nourrissement des Pauvres, Sermon du Benoist sainct Gregoire Nazanzene, surnommé par excellence Theologien and it was the first of Gregory's works to be printed in French. Though the edition is included in Baudrier's Bibliographie lyonnaise, it has so far escaped the notice of specialists working on Gregory Nazianzen. What is important about the edition, however, is not that it is a bibhographical ‘first,’ but that it reveals some new dimensions of humanist interest in the early Fathers of the Church.

Of the three known copies of La cure et nourrissement des Pauvres, one is in the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, where it is bound with another work printed by Gryphius in 1539, La Police de l’aulmosne de Lyon; a second belonged to Baudrier and was also bound with La Police de Vaulmosne; and the third is at the Archives de la Charité et de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon.

In early October 1526 Albrecht Dürer dedicated the greatest of his paintings, the two panels commonly known as the ‘Four Apostles,' to the city council of his native Nuernberg. Although the work was accompanied by a letter explaining the reasons for the gift, modern scholars nonetheless have continued to speculate as to the full intentions of the artist. The subject matter of the painting, as well as the Biblical passages incorporated as an inscription at the base of the work, has turned the attention of most commentators to the contemporary religious scene, i.e., the recent establishment of the Lutheran Reformation in the free imperial city. One can also, however, consider this problem profitably from a different perspective, taking as a point of departure the question of art patronage and the art market in the early sixteenth century. Existing evidence, when viewed in this manner, not only sheds new light on this particular donation but also serves as an interesting commentary on the economic situation of the artist of the period.

Scholars directly or indirectly interested in the history of Machiavelli's reputation tend now to regard as exaggerated the importance attributed, in the nineteenth century, to Gentillet's Discours... Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin. Nobody, for instance, would be prepared today to share Edward Meyer's view that Gentillet was, ‘beyond a doubt, the source of all Elizabethan misunderstanding’ of Machiavelli. 'The grotesque Machiavel-figure of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama' —to quote from one of the most recent works on the subject—'is firmly within the acceptance/rejection theme of reaction to Machiavelli, and not an external phenomenon generated by Gentillet's Contre-Machiavel. Gentillet, despite Simon Patericke's translation, was never of any importance in England.

Johann Ulrich Surgant (ca. 1450-1503) combined the ideals of medieval Christianity with elements of new learning, as did many of the early transalpine humanists. He belonged to the circle of Alsatian-Swiss ‘eruditi’ which included his one-time teacher and later colleague, Heynlein von Stein, and his friends Sebastian Brant, Jakob Wimpheling, and Johann Amerbach. Surgant was born in Altkirch (Alsace) and received his baccalaureate at the University of Basel in 1466 in the ‘via antiqua.’ From there he went to Paris, but returned to Basel as ‘magister parisiensis’ in 1470 to crown his academic efforts in 1479 when he obtained the degree of doctor of canon law. He was twice dean of the Faculty of Arts (1474 and 1478), thrice dean of the Law Faculty (1483, 1489, and 1496), and four times rector of the University of Basel (1482, 1487, 1494, and 1501). From 1479 until his death (September 20, 1503) he served as curate of St. Theodore.

The theological connotations of Duessa's whoredom with Red Crosse at the fountain and Orgoglio in the castle make it difficult not to see her as a symbolic strumpet in a sixteenth-century Protestant fashion. Stressing her flexible and dynamic traits through a careful modulation of the witch and whore symbols, Spenser consistently shows that she is much more than a one-dimensional symbol, operating in the somewhat static manner of the Renaissance tableau, a characteristic she does undoubtedly partake of in this section of the poem but without losing her inherent dynamism both in the literal story and in the moral and anagogical allegories. The artistic treatment of her role culminates in the dramatic unfolding of Red Crosse's spiritual fornication and its enervating results. As will become clear, there appears to be enough evidence in the poem itself to read ‘physical’ as a symbol of 'spiritual’ fornication.

In another place, I take for granted that Robert Burton was engaged, among other things, in shaping his Anatomy of Melancholy within the traditions of formal paradoxy. Internal evidence sufficiently supports that view, and Burton's reliance upon Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne, all three great practitioners within the paradoxical mode, is apparent in his choice of subject matter, style, and tone. One might even postulate a ‘Lucianic’ heritage for a tonal genre (in which belong, e.g., Erasmus, More, Alberti, Rabelais, Ariosto, Cervantes, Burton, Swift, Sterne, Diderot, Voltaire, and Joyce), a deliberate and demarcated tradition of irony in which paradoxy is naturally accommodated. In such a tradition, obviously, Burton has an important place. This note is not, unfortunately, concerned with speculations in literary systematics; here, I want merely to point out a pretty instance of Burton's uses of ‘official’ paradoxy, and to supply some hard evidence that he knew exactly what he was doing in his own paradoxical endeavor.

In Thomas Heywood's drama, A Woman Killed with Kindness, John Frankford, an injured lover, causes his wife's death when he intensifies her remorse by his unexpected kindness to her; and when he has perhaps unwittingly killed her with his kindness, he promises ruefully to memorialize her by a gravestone marked with letters of gold. As far back as a study by J. A. Symonds in 1884 and as recently as an important article by W. F. McNeir in 1959, a number of scholars have offered possible sources for Hey wood's play: certain medieval miracle plays, a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, the works of Illicini, Sermini, Bandello, Belleforest, Painter, Fenton, Gascoigne, Whetstone, Greene, Shakespeare, the native homiletic tradition, and earlier English domestic tragedies, have each during the last three-quarters of a century found proponents with varying intensities of conviction who have offered one or the other of them as more or less important sources for Hey wood's drama.

One of the works said to have been in Milton's mind when he wrote Paradise Regained is Book n of The Faerie Queene. According to Edwin Greenlaw, ‘the three days of temptation of Guyon concludes a series of incidents that pretty certainly influenced Paradise Regained— Mammon's proffer of riches, worldly power, fame; the three days without sleep or food, followed by exhaustion; the angel sent to care for Guyon after the trial is over; even the debates between Mammon and Guyon, which parallel Christ's rebukes of Satan.’ These likenesses seem real enough, and the evidence has support from the wellknown passage on Guyon in Areopagitica. Still I should like to suggest here—and I have not seen the idea mentioned elsewhere—that Milton's poem was also influenced, and more strongly perhaps, by the first book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's Legend of Holiness.

A good place to begin the argument is with the fact that Books i and n of The Faerie Queene themselves have many similarities of structure and episode—a fact which so admiring a reader of Spenser as John Milton would surely have noticed.

Some of Milton's classical allusions are stylistically supplemental, but more often than not they function with illuminating homology. Milton's description of Eve as Queen of the Graces is one example of what might appear a passing simple detail:

But on closer reading, one discovers that the allusion embraces large themes, especially when seen through the lenses of Neoplatonism. It is altogether apposite that Ficino regarded Venus, the symbol of love, as the mediatrix between God and man: ‘love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe: amor nodus perpetuus, et copula mundi.’ Following the precedent in Spenser of linking the Graces with flowers, the symbol of fruition, Milton identified the three Graces in L'Allegro (11-16) as the daughters of Venus.