Although the Este family had traditionally supported numerous monastic foundations, Borso d'Este's patronage of the Carthusian order is notable in that it introduced a new religious community into Ferrara. The history of the establishment, development, and decoration of the Charterhouse of Ferrara is indicative of the taste, artistic and religious views, and political exigencies which shaped the religious patronage of Borso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio. At the same time, the specific examples of Borso's monastic patronage are illustrative of the fundamental assumptions underlying fifteenth-century aristocratic support of religious foundations.

On April 23,1452, Borso d'Este laid the cornerstone for the Certosa on a site not far from the Este villa of Belfiore and the Dominican Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli. By spring 1461, the Monastery was habitable, though not yet complete.

What do we know about the education of boys and young men in Venice in this period? Who dispensed instruction, who received it, and who paid for it? What intellectual baggage did the élite of the young Venetian patricians take with them to the Studium of Padua, the sole center of advanced learning sanctioned by the Serenissima? No comprehensive answer to these questions exists, and most of the scholarly essays concerning Venetian education appeared in the learned journals of Italy many decades ago. For the benefit of future inquirers into this obscure and confusing subject it may be useful to survey the major contributions of Italian scholars from the notes of Bartolomeo Cecchetti in 1886 to the essays of the late Bruno Nardi, and to include some current additions to the subject made by Italian and American scholars incidental to more specialized studies.

The six thousand and more incunabula of the Bodleian Library and the two thousand six hundred in my recently finished catalogue covering all the other libraries of Oxford make a total of some nine thousand books (not editions, for I include duplicates) in the possession of the University as a whole. It is hoped that a complete catalogue will be published, probably in three volumes; but there is a difference between Mr. Sheppard's catalogue of the Bodleian and mine in that his is arranged in ‘Proctor-order,’ i.e., by countries, towns, and presses, while mine is in ‘Goff-order,’ i.e., a straightforward alphabetical order under authors. For technical reasons they cannot be arranged in any other way; but while Mr. Sheppard's catalogue will have complete author indexes, my own will have indexes by printers and publishers as well as by libraries (since some of my libraries are not colleges).

This article has two purposes: first, to correct the common misconception that Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) brought more than fifty Greek codices with him from Constantinople to Italy in 1408; second, to discuss his collection of Platonica.

Nowhere in Guarino's own writings nor, so far as I know, in those of any of his humanist contemporaries is there mention of his having returned to Italy with a large collection of Greek manuscripts. The story first appears in the brief biography of Manuel Chrysoloras which Pontico Virunio wrote for inclusion in his edition of Chrysoloras' Erotemata at Reggio Emilia in 1501. Virunio says that Guarino on his way home from Constantinople, where he had studied under Chrysoloras, had two chests of Greek codices, but one was lost overboard, and this caused him to go gray overnight.

Enrique IV is commonly acknowledged to be Spain's worst king; in the frequently picturesque words of Menéndez Pelayo, ‘son, sin duda, los veinte años de aquel reinado … uno de los más tristes y calamitosos períodos de nuestra historia.’ We can find favorable points about him, and there are many favorable comments in the early sources. We can point out that the contemporary opinion was much influenced by the comparison with his father, Juan II, whose reign was all show and little substance, and with his successor, Isabel la Católica, who with her husband concluded the reconquest of Granada, seen as the glorious culmination of eight centuries of struggle. Certain hard facts, however, remain.

A general doubt survives as to Shakespeare's knowledge and use of Italian. In spite of some admissions, there is a tendency to follow Richard Farmer's argument that Shakespeare got such knowledge from English textbooks or translations. For example, it is suggested that the Hero-Claudio story in Much Ado About Nothing comes not from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso but from the English translation by Sir John Harington or from one of the many English versions of the story.

Shakespeare's knowledge and use of Italian, however, can be illustrated and established by reference to cantos IV-VI of Orlando Furioso. These cantos provided Shakespeare with material not only for the Hero-Claudio theme in Much Ado, but also for King Lear and Othello. It was typical of him to conflate several sources in one play. Thus he combined the Hero-Claudio (Genevra-Ariodante) theme with other sources, such as Bandello, Whetstone, or Spenser.

Five recently discovered documents reveal for the first time that eyeglasses with concave lenses for myopes were manufactured in Florence from at least the middle of the fifteenth century, about one hundred years before they were thought to be in use. This new evidence throws additional light on the development and early use of spectacles and on the early history of optical instruments and glass technology in general. These documents also reveal for the first time that Florence was the leading manufacturing center of high-quality eyeglasses and that spectacles had already become a prestigious item of personal adornment at least at the court of the dukes of Milan. This information should be of interest to historians of art and costume as well.

The relationship between classical philosophy and Christian piety in the thought of Renaissance humanists poses certain questions that are answered periodically but which perennially recur. In part, this may be because these questions arise out of issues that go beyond the historian's craft to the most fundamental choices facing the human understanding. In part too, the enormous complexity of humanist expression makes interpretation difficult and allows the currents of historical sensibility to manifest themselves in analysis.

In the text that follows, I will seek to give examples which indicate to me that the currently general understanding of humanist piety may have led to incorrect conclusions about the stature and clarity of thought of one figure in particular, the German humanist Mutianus Rufus. It seems to me unarguable that the greater appreciation of the difficult, ambiguous, and often idiosyncratic character of humanistic writings is a genuine triumph of modern historical scholarship.

Roger Ascham's dialogue Toxophilus is a book made of books. Ascham himself indicated the importance of classical sources to his ‘schole of shootinge’ by providing an apparatus of marginal references in Toxophilus. In its substance his dialogue of expert knowledge envisioned the old learning, drawing upon its forms in a new imaginative style. It is remarkable that for his use and conception of classical learning Ascham always had a model. He admired the great teachers Cheke and Sturm, and his writing abounds in judgments and appreciations of other classical scholars of his time. But his model for his relation to the literary past was Cicero. I do not mean Cicero the master orator but Cicero the student of the ancient Greeks.

The sixteenth-century Italian academies, in the judgment of modern scholars, played a role in the intellectual life of their time and had an impact on the culture of their age to an extent not yet fully assessed. In their own day they not only carried on and developed more fully many aspects of Quattrocento scholarship, but offered scholars a forum in which to distil and crystallize novel research which otherwise would have lacked an appropriate outlet. They spread the fruits of both tradition and innovation to a large audience, and they did so by adopting the volgare as their official language. They thereby gave living proof to the theories laid down by Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Sperone Speroni (1500-1588) that the vernacular was just as effective a medium of poetic and scholarly discourse as the classical Latin which had been the language of choice of the earlier humanists, and which continued to be the language of the universities.

Adaptability enables folktales to survive for long periods of time. What began as an oral tale may become the basis of later literary works. The tale retains its basic elements while undergoing alterations and embellishments to suit its different contexts, both social and literary. The ‘Inclusa’ is such an example. Stith Thompson reduces the tale to its bare essentials as ‘underground passage to paramour's house. Woman goes from one to the other. Her husband is made to believe that the woman next door is her sister.’ The setting, the characterization of the participants, and the actual mechanics of the action are not given; the individual storyteller supplies these elements, so that variants are produced. Although the origins of the Inclusa remain obscure, its written development can be traced.

The Julius exclusus has generated a good deal of attention on the part of twentieth-century scholarship, especially since the publication of Wallace K. Ferguson's critical edition in 1933. Primary interest has centered on the debate concerning the authorship of the dialogue, with the prevailing scholarly opinion assigning the work unequivocally to Erasmus. According to the present consensus, Erasmus composed the Julius at some point between the death of Pope Julius II in February 1513 and his departure from England for Basel in July 1514. The work was known to members of Erasmus’ circle by August 1516 and was first published in 1517. With the issue of authorship and dating settled to their general satisfaction, Erasmian scholars have recently begun to direct their attention to the substance of the Julius, particularly its ecclesiology. On the other hand, the investigation of Erasmus’ possible sources for die work has received comparatively sketchy treatment.

Too much discussion of George Gascoigne's ‘Adventures of Master F.J.’ has bogged down in the question of whether the story is fiction or autobiography. While it is impossible now to be sure to what degree the young Master F.J. is an autobiographical portrait of the younger Gascoigne, it is not only possible but inevitable to find Gascoigne the writer in the figure of G.T.

‘The Adventures’ as it first appears in the Hundreth Sundrie Flowres of 1573 is an older man's account of the misadventures of a younger man in love. The raconteur, one G.T., reports what happened to his young friend, Master F.J. Following much negative reaction, the story is transformed in the revised Posies of 1575 into ‘The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valesco, translated out of the Italian riding tales of Bartello.’ This pseudo-translation becomes an anonymous omniscient narrator's account of the misadventures of a young man in love. The loss of G.T. as narrator entails with it the loss of a multitude of subtleties of attitude and tone.

The obvious influence of Plato on Utopia and the antagonism of some humanists toward the medieval scholastics and their belief in the primacy of Aristotle seem to have resulted in the impression that Thomas More agreed with this anti-Aristotelianism and that Aristotle had little influence on Utopia. As a result, this matter has never been considered in depth, and important points about both Thomas More and Utopia have been overlooked. That More was an eclectic thinker who was a serious student of classical philosophy and that Utopia is a fine example of this eclecticism have been ignored. And in connection with this, More's knowledge of Aristotle and this philosopher's influence on Utopia have been slighted. Historians of philosophy, for example, ordinarily limit their treatment of More to pointing out the similarities between Utopia and Plato's Republic.

Few sources or targets of allusion have been adduced for the complex and tragic episode of the Nymph's Well early in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene; hence we lack that check on our interpretations and that isolation of the individual author's emphases which literary history can provide. Perhaps the only characterization of the episode which all Spenser critics would accept is that it is about acrasia and that it is extraordinarily rich in meanings—one of those which stand out, as Kermode remarked of the Mammon's Cave episode, from the generally thinner allegorical texture of its surroundings. Its resulting complexity and difficulty have divided its many recent critics into two main camps, the secular and the theological.

Although many scholars have cited Marin Mersenne's Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim for his critical remarks about the life of Julius Caesar Vanini, none of them has realised the extent to which Mersenne dealt with Vanini's works. They have found in Mersenne only a story about Vanini's intention to teach atheism, his execution, and one or two criticisms of his ideas. Far from making here and there a few comments about Vanini, however, Mersenne devoted a large portion of the volume to a critical analysis of the view of nature and religion which Vanini presents in his two books. The purpose of this article is, first, to explain why no one has hitherto discovered the extent of Mersenne's preoccupation with Vanini and, secondly, to examine briefly his basic attitude to Vanini's life and works.

I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy… . I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my malus genius [evil genius]? and for that cause, … make an antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.

Such teasingly self-referential passages as that quoted above have long led scholars to speculate as to the real physical and mental condition of Robert Burton. Did he suffer, as he claimed, the ravages of melancholy, or was he as a scholar simply assuming the fashionable scholars’ disease as a peg upon which to hang his encyclopedic treatise? Much of this uncertainty arises from gaps in our knowledge of Burton's biography.

In a recent issue of this Quarterly, Gustav Ungerer called attention to several hitherto unnoticed documents concerning the English sojourn of the French lutenist and composer Charles Tessier and on the basis of this evidence concluded that the musician was for a time admitted to the ‘Essex Circle.’ The conclusion should rather be a conjecture, I believe.

The documents published by Ungerer include three letters written by Tessier to Anthony Bacon, the brother of Francis, in the spring of 1597. In the first, Tessier asks to be taken into Bacon's service or, failing this, to be recommended to another gentleman for service. In the second, written some weeks later, he describes some newly composed airs which he intends to present to Bacon, but illness has prevented his doing so, and he begs for money.

The following essay will address itself both to the content and the motivation of Renaissance historiography in the last decade and will be confined primarily to the work that has been done in the English language. History, as other scholarly disciplines, tends always to look inward at its own work and the publications within its particular national and language boundaries. But at the same time more inventive minds within the discipline constantly feel a dissatisfaction with provincialisms of various sorts and seek to open their thinking and their work to wider influences. Yet this may happen very slowly. For example the famous essay of Lucien Febvre, ‘Une question mal posée,’ first appeared in 1929 (Revue historique, 161), found an Italian counterpart in Delio Cantimori's Prospettive di storia ereticale italiana of 1960, and was cited for its parallels with Pre-Reformation German piety in Berndt Moellers’ ‘Frommigkeit in Deutschland um 1500’ of 1965.