Ever since Della Torre posited in 1902 that Ficino had undergone a religious crisis that led him to abandon the pagan beliefs of his youth and take holy orders, scholars have wrestled with how to explain the seeming inconsistencies in his thought. Though they downplayed Della Torre's notion of a specific crisis of faith, the next generation of scholars, including Thorndike, Sarton, Kristeller, Garin, Walker, and Yates, still labeled Ficino inconsistent, or at best, melancholic, wavering, and anxious.

In 1553, six years before Tasso first began to sketch the poem that was to become the Gerusalemme liberata, the Catholic monarchs Philip II and Mary Tudor acceded to the throne of England, after the Protestant reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The event was celebrated in an encomiastic oration, De restituta in Anglia religione ("On the restoration of religion in England"), by the minor Modenese humanist, Antonio Fiordibello. In one passage Fiordibello searches for a precedent to the achievement of the new English rulers.

In its Visual Acuity, the Arnolfini double portrait (fig. 1) is so beguiling that few have been able to resist its spell: "a simple corner of the real world has suddenly been fixed on to a panel as by magic." But in what ways can we speak of this portrait as a realistic image? How closely, for instance, does it portray a single moment or specific event in these people's lives? Was it meant to be viewed as a marriage document or contract? The Arnolfini double portrait is unique. It is the only fifteenth–century Northern panel to survive showing presumably identifiable contemporaries engaged in some sort of dialogue in a carefully rendered contemporary interior

In Summer 1550 King Henry II of France commissioned the renewal of a special military tax, the taillon. In his commission, chancery draftsmen asserted that this recently-introduced tax and associated military reforms had been so successful "que de tous costes s'en levent et rendent graces à Dieu." They added that provinces previously complaining of garrisons now clamored for them "pour en avoir le prouffit." Such assertions were patently ridiculous in an era when soldiers were about as welcome as a horde of locusts, yet the royal government did not scruple to offer them.

It is commonly acknowledged that although Elizabeth I vowed herself to a life of perpetual virginity, she entered into a symbolic marriage with England as her husband. In this way she could receive the" adulation of her subjects as the universal object of a Petrarchan religion of love, one that pervaded ballads, pageants, and dramatic entertainments. Scholars claim that she was able to convert her unprecedented weakness as a celibate queen into a powerful propagandistic claim that she sacrificed personal interests in the name of public service.

During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean the lusus naturae, or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science.

"The woman who has the prerogative of a goddess, who is authorized to be out of place, can best justify her authority by putting other women in their places": so concludes Louis Montrose with equal reference to Ralegh's vision of Elizabeth in the Discovery of Guiana and Spenser's reflection of her in Britomart in the Radigund episode in the fifth book of The Faerie Queene. In the case of Spenser at least that conclusion is an insightful one, suggesting that Britomart's actions can in part be explained in terms of the political and ideological constraints faced by the queen.

The episode of the Sibylle de Panzoust, most often brushed aside as merely farcical, scatological and obscene, remaiijs to be examined seriously and at length. My reading of the sibylline episode will begin by placing the Sibylle in the context of Rabelais' general treatment of women; I shall attempt to determine her place among all the other means of divining the future; further, I shall examine the attitudes of the Pantagruelistes (Epistémon, Pantagruel, Panurge) towards her before the consultation, and, of course, thoroughly investigate the consultation itself.

New paths into the vast and intricate forest of ways in which Renaissance texts use or respond to their literary antecedents have emerged from numbers of recent studies such as those of Thomas Greene and David Quint. Here I should like to suggest an extension of that concern with the originary beyond the strictly literary relations of text to subtext or imitation to authorizing model. A sense of the living presence of the source is manifest in the Renaissance treatment of words, things, individuals, and institutions.

In his first published work, the Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses (Naples, 1591), Tommaso Campanella evinced at the outset of his long intellectual career that abiding and most pronounced feature of his entire philosophical position, namely, an opposition to Aristotle. The product of a twenty-one year old man, this book conveys a fresh empiricism and is significantly untainted by the impact of astrology or the occultism of G. B. Delia Porta or the later political religious interests impelled by a personal messianism that would shape his thought.

Among the holdings of the Royal Library at Copenhagen are three codices containing rough drafts of letters and treatises, some in Erasmus' hand. In 1966 C. Reedijk published a detailed description of the contents of the manuscripts, identifying all of the pieces except for one short section entitled Manifesta mendacia. Speculating about the contents of this autograph, which is written in a hurried manner and difficult to decipher in places, he suggested that it might be an apologia addressed to Jacobus Stunica.

In his hagiographic treatment of the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville presents the last events in his hero's existence as constituting a particularly exemplary "tragedy"; he celebrates Sidney's generosity towards a common soldier in need of water, his endurance in suffering pain, and his careful "fashioning" of his soul to meet death when the end appeared inevitable.

A Useful Way of Establishing the historical significance of any perceptive text in the discourse arts is to explain the connection between the values embedded in its illustrative materials and the social and political interests it may have served and advanced among the persons who used it. Illustrative materials evidence and communicate lines of thought—substance as well as formal dimensions of technical interest to students of the history of the discourse arts.

References to the Magi whose veneration of the infant Christ is recorded in the second chapter of the gospel of Matthew are frequent in the writings of Marsilio Ficino, especially his letters. The clearest expressions of his interest and faith in the Magi can be found in the Apologia, accounting for the more magical elements in the De vita, and in a praedicatio on the topic of the star that guided the Wise Men.

Composers working during the last quarter of the fifteenth century wrote many more motets than previous composers had done. At any rate, far more have come down to us. This apparent explosion of activity coincided with the founding, reorganization, or revitalization of a number of cathedral or princely chapel choirs. Moreover, the character of the motet as a musical genre also seems to have changed at about the same time. By far the largest number of motets composed before 1475 set texts celebrating the Virgin Mary, or else they were compositions written to celebrate particular political or social occasions.

The modern arrangement of the texts of plays evolved from the confluence of two distinct methods of setting out plays for readers and theatrical use. The earliest, which I shall call the native tradition, had its seeds in the European liturgical drama and is most clearly manifested in the manuscripts of the early moral plays and of guild plays associated with Corpus Christi from the fourteenth century to the cessation of the performances late in the sixteenth century. The second is the classical method, exemplified by the early printings of the plays of Terence, Plautus, and Seneca from 1470 onwards and adopted by the university educated writers of secular plays in the sixteenth century.

The Sala delle Arti Liberali of the Vatican Borgia apartment has never been the subject of comprehensive research. The sala is one of the private rooms of Alexander VI Borgia which were decorated between 1492 and 1494 by Bernardino Pinturicchio and his school. The frescoes in this particular room, of the allegories of the Liberal Arts, are not by the master himself but were executed by minor Umbrian painters; they have never, therefore, attracted great art-historical attention.

Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-98), whose busy bookstore brought together most of the great minds of Florence, was a life-long friend of Donato di Neri Acciaiuoli. This essay will examine their relationship. It was in his capacity as merchant that Vespasiano's association with Donato began, but over time it developed into a true friendship. Their correspondence covers the period from 1446 to 1463 with the bulk of the surviving letters dating from the year 1448-49.

A Special Place in Historical Studies belongs to those great events that everyone knows of, but few know—at least, know deeply and accurately. In such cases, received notions of sequence, character, causes and results continue to be passed on, unchallenged by any requirement that the explanation fit the facts and that the facts receive explanation. One such great event is the Revolt of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century.