Italian maiolica has a long history extending back into the Middle Ages. That history recounts a slow evolutionary process, with its main themes being: first, the importation of tin-glazed pottery from the Islamic world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which has survived primarily as architectural decoration (the bacini inserted into church façades); secondly, the development of the local production of ceramics with lead glazes and then improved tin glazes and with modest painted and incised decoration; thirdly, the diffusion of that production, presumably from Sicily and southern Italy, throughout the rest of the peninsula; and, finally, beginning in the later fourteenth century, the elevation of the quality of production to the level of a veritable art form. Our knowledge of this history has been amply expanded in the last few years by an extraordinary amount of very solid research conducted into the subject by medieval archaeologists and by ceramic scholars—many of the latter talented amateurs who work on their own local traditions in Italy; and this lively interest has had reverberations in both the museum world and the art market.

Whatever scholars may think of its value as a work of poetic literature, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well is remarkably entertaining in the theater. Perhaps this is so because it fulfills the fundamental generic responsibility of comedy; it overcomes the death of the fathers through a bawdy emphasis on youthful sexuality and love, and it manipulates mythical plot elements that are subconsciously familiar to any audience in Western civilization. The play skillfully diverts our attention from death and burial to the “little death” of sexual orgasm, from age, illness, and the destruction of war to marriage and the joy of new life. Above all, it is not so much a “problem play” in the Shavian sense as it is a typical work of Renaissance comic art that attempts to unite both the physical and the spiritual elements of human existence within a single structure of the imagination.

Numerous interpretations have been given to the final episode of Rabelais's Third Book of Pantagruel—the last four chapters devoted to the famous plant called “Pantagruelion” (Tiers Livre, chaps. 49-52). For the great editors of the early twentieth-century critical edition of Rabelais's Works, the Pantagruelion was a “technical enigma” meant to be deciphered by scientists as the symbol of the Renaissance belief in human progress. For some of the supporters of Rabelais's Erasmian Evangelism, on the contrary, the enigmatic formulation of the episode was the key to Rabelais's thought: the magic plant had to be decoded as a veiled message of steadfast faith in the face of persecution. For obvious political reasons Rabelais had resorted to the ingenious device of enigmatic speech; yet his message had been understood by his contemporary Christian humanists.

In order to make good her claim to be of all divinities the most important and generous, Folly in Erasmus's Moriae encomium begins her argument, according to rhetorical theory and practice, with the strongest proofs in her arsenal. First of all, she argues, it is she who has given us life, the greatest gift of all. Who among us would have been born without our parents’ folly? Second, it is the spice of folly that makes life enjoyable. For what is life if you take away merriment, pleasure, andjoy? And third, it is folly that rules the best and happiest time of life—childhood and youth—and restores it to us in the second childhood of decrepit old age.