The reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin West poses some difficult and intricate problems which I would like to discuss here. I offer no apology for the desultory character of these remarks, because the present state of scholarship makes it impossible to give a coherent and comprehensive survey. Nor do I hesitate to use freely some earlier papers of mine on this topic, for they were published in Swedish and—Suecana non leguntur.

General criticism has considered the French novel of the sixteenth century as having followed an unpiloted course, and in the majority of cases it may seem as if the average author was inspired more by the trend of popular taste than by an aesthetic code or academic instruction regarding form and technique.

The literature of the Tudor age, like that of earlier and immediately subsequent ages, has some of its deepest roots in the rhetorical tradition. This tradition is represented by a massive accumulation of writings and patterns of behavior which fed Western education and culture from antiquity well into the eighteenth century, but which until a generation ago had grown increasingly unfamiliar even to most scholars, following the Romantic reluctance to take rhetoric seriously as a conscious art. Recent scholarship, particularly in the United States, has re-explored the tradition, but the results and implications are not always widely known. The theory and practice of rhetoric can still be excluded from consideration in histories of Tudor literature, although by now one meets sometimes with wry acknowledgment of the central importance of what is being excluded.

In spite of the thorough and detailed studies of humaism in fifteenth-century England by Walter Schirmer and especially by Roberto Weiss, die significant will of John Morer (or Moeer) has been overlooked. It is of considerable importance because it gives support to the tradition that Thomas Linacre began the study of Greek before he went to Italy, and also to the tradition that his studies were encouraged by Prior Sellyng of Christ Church, Canterbury, although it gives none to the often repeated statement that Sellyng was Linacre's teacher. But, in addition to its importance in the biography of Linacre, it adds one more name to the slender roll of fifteenth-century Englishmen known to have been active in humanistic studies; and it is perhaps unique in its suggestion of the personality of the author and of the intellectual milieu of a country vicar at the beginning of Henry VII's reign—certainly not a typical vicar, but probably not a unique one either.

The coming to light of a manuscript of the unpublished Epigrammata of Franciscus Patricius (Francesco Patrizi) of Siena (1413-1494) provides insights into the practical blank which was the history of this humanist from his settling in his diocese of Gaeta in 1465 until his death. For his life up to that point D. Bassi in an article, which is still fundamental, painstakingly gathered the facts. For the years 1461-1464, when Patrizi was governor of Foligno, his own Epistolae are a valuable and interesting source but only a few have ever been printed. Felice Battaglia recapitulated the known facts and added some documentation but, like Bassi, had little to say about the period 1465-1494.

Among the many poets who found popularity in Renaissance England none now seems an odder choice for as acclaim and translation than the French Huguenot Guillaume Salluste, Sieur du Bartas. In England Du Bartas was probably the most admired of contemporary European writers, if one excludes Erasmus and the chief figures of the Reformation, and his lengthy descriptions of the creation and history of the world received an adulation seldom given far better poetry. To most readers since the Restoration his poetry has seemed, as Dryden put it, abominable fustian. Yet to many Englishmen from the 1580s until the shift of taste in the 1660s Du Bartas was the very type of the ‘divine poet', whose lines were ‘sweet’ and delightful, and whose wealth of anecdote, description, and information provided a vivid reflection of the Maker's own fecundity.

In its most obvious aspect, Milton's ‘Mansus’ is a panegyric to Giovanni Battista Manso, the old Neapolitan nobleman and patron of poets whom Milton met on his Italian journey in 1638-1639. But ‘Mansus', like so many of Milton's mature poems, refuses to rest passively within its genre as a panegyric—it combines praise with the contemplation of death, it turns poetic conventions upside down, and in the end it creates not merely an encomium of Manso but a celebration of the harmony of things.

Around 1840 two French travelers returning from Journeys to Italy passed by Basle and reflected on Erasmus, who—so both believed—had helped form the city's modern character. One was Louis Veuillot, fresh from his Roman conversion and exercising for the first time the pen that was to make him the most formidable ultramontane publicist of the age. The other was Jules Michelet, historian of France, future apostle of the people's liberation, finding here already in the rapid flow of the Rhine an analogy for the irresistible progress of the human mind.