In August 1465 Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, mother of the art patron and builder Filippo Strozzi, arranged for an annual set of masses in the parish church of Santa Maria Ughi. Her purpose, as she said, was to commemorate the souls of “all our dead,” “tutti enostri passati” (sic). In her record of the commission, Alessandra carefully outlined the conditions of the bequest. She noted, for example, the location of the land donation whose proceeds subsidized the masses and the day the ten masses were to be performed, and made alternate arrangements should the priests of Santa Maria Ughi fail to uphold their obligations. Yet within this context of legal specifications and formulae, Alessandra remained curiously vague about one of the program's essential clauses: namely, the precise identity of “all our dead.“

In 1609 Gervase Markham, England's leading authority on horses, Sir John Harington's cousin, and not a truly bad poet, invited readers of The Famous Whore to give the prostitute “a kind welcome out of Italy.” According to the headnote of this long poem, the elderly woman who here makes her “lamentable complaint” was “Paulina the famous Roman Curtezan, sometimes M[istress] unto the great Cardinal Hypolito of Est.” Since Markham seems so confidently to direct our eyes to Rome, it is understandable both that the entry on him in the Dictionary of National Biography posits an unknown Italian model and that neither the modern bibliography of his works nor the revised Short Title Catalogue can identify his source. In fact, Markham's work is a fairly close imitation of Joachim Du Bellay's’ ‘Vieille courtisanne,'’ first published in 15 5 8 as part of a collection somewhat misleadingly entitled Divers jeux rustiques.

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.

A striking feature of fifteenth-century historiography is the manner in which accounts of political thought in this period have tended to follow two basically distinct courses. One group of historians has pursued the avenue of humanist political theory, primarily in Florence, running from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni at the beginning of the fifteenth century down to Machiavelli at its end, tracing the rise and decline of the republican ideal, or myth, in Florentine politics and from there into the mainstream of Western political theory. Another group has concerned itself with conciliar theory in the Church, pursuing its development through the councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel to its demise in the early sixteenth century. These historians, too, have connected conciliar thought to the broader course of Europe's political development.

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.

Characterized by Burckhardt as the father of modernjournalism, Pietro Aretino was the first vernacular writer to understand and exploit fully the resource of the printing press. But while some kinds of his writings anticipate now conventional varieties of journalism, such a label slights the more literary of his activities in drama, poetry, hagiography, and prose dialogue. The protean variety of Aretino's works made him both successor to Bembo as the leading man of letters in the 1530s and 40s and the model for the poligrafi who would succeed him. As with those poligrafi, a coherence to his activities can be seen in his posture as social critic; preeminently, in his secular compositions, Aretino writes as a satirist.

Against a system of gender ideologies that defined a woman's social position and intellectual pursuits as private, devoted to domestic concerns and the moral welfare of her family, the emergency of the cortigiana onesta, the intellectual courtesan, dramatically calls into question the humanists’ injunction against women's public status and speech. How did Veronica Franco, the foremost example of the cortigiana onesta in sixteenth-century Italy, succeed in infiltrating the “academy of learned men“? Were any restrictions placed upon her professional activities when she vied with men for public recognition and literary commissions? How did social forces contain or compel the courtesan's cultivation of a literary identity in Venetian society? And finally, what were the maneuvers, both personal and professional, that the cortigiana onesta adopted when she obtained entrance into an elite literary circle and allied herself with powerful male patrons and intellectuals?

To Elizabethan observers in many disciplines, feminine beauty and music offered parallel benefits and dangers that influenced prescriptions for the actual musical behavior of contemporary Englishwomen and also the development of stock literary situations in which female musicians either caused spiritual fulfillment or physical destruction. Conflicting ideologies, based on the most respected ancient authorities and contemporary observers, attributed similarly opposite aspects to women and music, which had both come to be regarded as earthly embodiments of the divine and the damning by the final part of the sixteenth century. Women, who possessed the natures of both Mary and Eve, were regarded as agents alternately of salvation and destruction even as music was perceived as an inspiration to both heavenly rapture and carnal lust.

In a probing article that appeared not very long ago in this journal, G. W. Pigman III called attention to the following passage from Petrarch's Familiares which deals with the Italian author's unconscious reminiscence from well-known and often-read authoritative works:

Architectural patronage in the late Quattrocento was a way of demonstrating status. In spite of the republican and unaristocratic rhetoric espoused by the Florentine ruling class, powerful families, like the Medici or Strozzi, sought to impress their compatriots with conspicuous displays of wealth. In the course of the fifteenth century, the attitude towards the manifestation of riches passed from a medieval and Christian contempt to a distinct appreciation of magnificence as a virtue and duty of the rich. This need to impress is nowhere more apparent than in the patronage of architecture—especially palace building.

When Horatio tells Hamlet, “I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done” (V.ii. 156-57), we find ourselves amused and bemused trying to imagine what conceiveable edification could be gleaned from a marginal gloss on the courtly gabble of Osric's invitation to the duel. Yet while Horatio was having his little joke about edifying margents, Renaissance commentators, scholarly annotators, translators, editors, printers, and authors of all kinds were busily constructing elaborate scaffolds of printed marginalia around texts both ancient and modern, ranging from Holy Writ to handbooks for New World entrepreneurs and manuals on the courtly art of self-defense. The ostensible and frequently advertised purpose of this marginal material was to make texts more accessible to the “general reader,” to provide the non-specialist working on a difficult text a place to stand that was grounded on more familiar books, ideas, and experience.

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.

At the time of the Revolution of 1688-89 in England, for the first time since the accession of Queen Elizabeth I one hundred and thirty years earlier, a woman had a claim to the crown of England in her own right—Princess Mary of Orange, wife of Prince William of Orange of the Netherlands and the elder daughter of James II, the Catholic king of England, by his first and Protestant wife. That claim was one possible solution to the question of who should head the new government, but it was finally decided to create a dual monarchy, a constitutional arrangement unique in the nation's history. Under it the prince and princess of Orange became King William III and Queen Mary II of England, with administrative power vested in William alone. Although regarded as a regnant queen, one of only six regnant queens in the nation's history, Mary, in fact, received no substantive regal power.

Hermann von dem Busche typifies the younger, more aggressive generation of humanists who became embroiled in the literary feuds and controversies of pre-Reformation Germany.' While Peter Luder and Conrad Celtis had preceded him as "apostles of humanism" in Germany, Busche carried the tradition of the "wandering poet" into the early sixteenth century. His major prose work, the Vallum humanitatis, exemplifies an important literary genre of the humanists, the "defense of poetry," usually approached as a defense of humanistic learning against scholastic opponents. Several recent studies need to be taken into account when assessing the literary and historical significance of Busche's Vallum humanitatis. Concetta Greenfield's analysis of Italian "defenses of poetry" between 1250 and 1500 lends further credence to Kristeller's wellknown thesis regarding the simultaneous development of scholasticism and humanism in Renaissance Italy.

In his Dessein de l'histoire nouvelle des françois, Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière offered a blueprint for a French history of broader range and deeper reach than any previous effort. He divided his proposed work into three parts: pre-Roman Gaul, Roman Gaul, and the kingdom of France from the Merovingians to the present. Part one would concern “the form of government, public and private, of the Gauls living in liberty before the Romans had envied, undermined, and eventually seized their dominion.” It would detail their religion (its priests and rituals), their nobility (its composition, privileges, and lifestyle), the lesser social orders (merchants, artisans, and commoners), and their public institutions (laws, magistrates, and other officials) — “in brief, everything notable about so little-known a state.” Part two would follow the same pattern but in even greater detail, examining the changes introduced by the Romans in “religion, administration, justice, military discipline, finances, and business, ” as well as social changes.

I'll begin with a couple of disclaimers. First, though it is a good many years since I had to present a birth certificate in order to get my senior citizen's discount, I was not present at the beginnings of the New England Renaissance Conference (N.E.R.C.) but was still at Harvard in the Society of Fellows with a very new Ph.D. More important, I was a card-carrying medievalist at a time when medievalists were far more detached from the Renaissance than they are now. If we regarded the Renaissance at all, it was as a kind of mopping- up operation of the Middle Ages; perhaps we remembered Gilson's remark: “The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction.” But I slowly learned wisdom and first spoke to the N.E.R.C. in 1951. I had discovered that, contrary to Gilson, joining the Renaissance was not a subtraction but very much an addition. Nevertheless anything I say about the earliest period of the Conference is based only on information received.