Thomas More's Utopia has long been regarded as the great Northern European expression of Italian civic humanist ideals. This article argues, in contrast, that More's treatise constitutes an emphatic rejection of those values. In support of this claim, the article chronicles the reception of Utopia in Italy; it demonstrates that More's text was taken up, not by the civic humanists, but by their fiercest critics. These early Italian readers recognized in Utopia a repudiation of active citizenship, an assault on private property, a rejection of the Roman cult of glory, and a polemic against Ciceronian humanism. As a result, the reception of Utopia is shown to have opened up a fissure in the republican tradition which would have profound consequences for the subsequent development of European political discourse.

In a provocative essay published in Renaissance Quarterly in 1999, Ullrich Langer investigated the critical positions of novellieri such as Boccaccio regarding the legal system, courts, and lawyers. This essay builds on his work, both by broadening the range of critiques of law to include those of the humanists, and by giving the lawyers their day in court, as it were, in an investigation of two representative case-deciding opinions. Then as now, these legal experts did not have the luxury of considering law and justice in the abstract, apart from the need to resolve the particular case before them: they had to resolve a case and follow the law as they understood it.

In September 1641 Joannes Stephanus Rittangel sent a Hebrew letter to John Selden, the prominent English jurist and Christian Hebraist, soliciting Selden’s assistance in publishing Karaite manuscripts. The letter’s publication here contributes both to our knowledge of the activities of Rittangel — expert in Karaism and Professor Extraordinary of Semitic languages at the University of Koenigsberg — and to the picture we have of Christian Hebraism in England. From this letter and from references to Rittangel in contemporary literature, we can reconstruct some of his activities from the time he was recorded to have been in Lithuania at the end of 1640 to his appearance in Amsterdam in late 1641. We can also appreciate how knowledge of Karaism was spread among English Christians such as John Selden and Ralph Cudworth, and also how that information contributed to the millenarianism of Samuel Hartlib and John Dury.

Medici patronage of the arts in the fourteenth century has gone largely unstudied. Yet there is a notable paper trail, backed by a small number of sculptural remnants of funerary monuments, indicating that prominent members of the family understood the power of visual imagery for establishing their patrilines as leading families, both within the social hierarchy of Florence and within the Medici consorteria. These sculptural remains give clear precedent for the early activity of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo de’ Medici as artistic patrons in the fifteenth century.