Due attention has long been given to philosophia moralis , claimed as the fifth studia humanitatis by Italian humanists from the early fifteenth century, and as such subject properly theirs. Scholars have been interested in 'The Moral Thought of Renaissance Humanism' (as Professor Kristeller entitled his recent survey) primarily for the special attitudes of humanists toward ‘man', toward 'nobility', toward ‘wisdom', toward ‘happiness', toward ‘civic' activity and good citizenship. They have paid attention to attempts the humanists made to reconcile ancient philosophies with Christianity, principally those stemming from Florentine Neoplatonism.

It is believable that Zambeccari was born in Venice, for he reports that his father, Giovanni, spent his whole life there. Both parents died while he was in early childhood ('infantia’). His birth year is a matter of conjecture, but it could be about 1443, for in 1473 he refers to himself as ‘iuvenis'. The Zambeccari line was known especially for its lawyers. Their fortunes were generally connected with those of the Bentivoglio house. Specifically remembered were Pellegrino, Cambio, and Tommaso. Our Francesco says his father was a lawyer ('iuris scientissimus’); likely he belonged to a branch of the Zambeccaris exiled for politics. As will appear, there were member of the clan enjoying citizenship in Bologna in our Francesco's time.

Machiavelli's first Decennale is an historical poem in terza rima dealing with events that were of concern to the Florentine Republic in the years 1494-1504. Two slightly different forms exist: an earlier one, preserved in the Mediceo-Laurentian MS. Plut. XLIV, 41, which contains a dedication dated 8 November 1504, and a later one first printed in February 1506. At least three early editions of this text were printed, although no copy of one of them, a pirated edition, is known to exist.

The Laurentian MS. contains two forms of a dedication addressed to Alamanno Salviati, one in Latin and one in Italian (here printed as Appendix A), neither of which occurs in the printed editions, which have instead a prefatory letter by Agostino Vespucci. The Salviati dedication, in the Latin version, states that the poem had been written at his suggestion and, in both the Latin and Italian versions, that it was written in fifteen days, which, even if the boast were only approximate, would indicate, from the contents of the poem and the date of those dedications, that the poem was written in the autumn of 1504.

Among the philosophers of the sixteenth century who deserve wider attention than they have hitherto received is Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469- 1533).x As nephew and near contemporary of the more famous member of the Pico family, Giovanni (1463-1494), he has often been obscured by his uncle's brilliance and originality in the eyes of later scholars. His own work as a philosopher, however, is not without interest, both for its content and for its historical importance.

Gianfrancesco Pico was a man of many interests and his personal life was filled with enough exciting episodes to make it sometimes seem more like fiction than fact. Widely praised by his contemporaries as a poet, humanist, and scholar, he was friend and correspondent to some of the foremost figures of his time.2 It will be my purpose here to determine what, if any, philosophical influence his works had on thinkers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

The history of Tudor and early Stuart England', Professor Mark Curtis writes at the beginning of his book Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558-1642, ‘defies all attempts to characterize it briefly. In the life of the period the old and new were almost inextricably intertwined. They can now be separated only at the risk of sacrificing truth to misleading over-simplification.'1 Indeed, of the Renaissance in general the same can be said, and must be said as a primary assumption by one undertaking the study of the development of the period's ideas. For, as again Curtis observes, ‘Though the revisionists who have attempted to make the Renaissance a part of the Middle Ages may have failed to prove their case, they have demonstrated first that some phenomena, once thought uniquely characteristic of Renaissance culture, were present by more than coincidence in medieval civilization and second that important features of medieval thought and attitudes persisted as fundamental, constituent parts of the Renaissance mind'.

Je. Spingarn was the first to observe the considerable influence exercised by Francesco De Sanctis (1818-1883), the Italian critic and literary historian, upon the work of John Addington Symonds. Reviewing in 1908 the new edition of De Sanctis’ study of Petrarch published by Benedetto Croce in 1907, Spingarn said:

The name of Francesco de Sanctis is virtually unknown to English readers. A few casual phrases in Symonds's ‘Renaissance in Italy,’ and a friendly but wholly inadequate notice in Saintsbury's ‘History of Criticism,’ are almost the sole references to his work in our language. But with his ideas English-speaking people are more familiar than they suspect; for from his pages much that is illuminating in Symonds's treatment of Italian literature (including many of the most personal ‘impressions’) seems to have been directly transferred.

Jacques Peletier and Theodore Beza were the best of friends the winter of 1547-1548. They and their circle spent hours together every day in the rue Saint Jacques in Paris. Then Beza abruptly departed for Geneva in October 1548, and the humanist Peletier remained behind in France. There ensued the following peculiar events, whose incongruity suggested to me that behind them lay a relation of great emotional and symbolic significance.

In February 1550, the first edition of Peletier's Arithmetic appeared with four dedicatory proems to Beza, whom he specifically identified as 'Prieur de Villeserve et Loniumeau'.2 This was more than a year after Beza had got rid of his benefices and left France.

The line of wit, I would contend, includes Spenser as well as Donne. But that statement is meaningless until some sort of significance is attached to the word 'wit’ that would make it apply to poets now felt to be very different. I do not propose to summarize Rosemond Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, or repeat in brief her attempt to show that the Elizabethan and metaphysical poets were operating under the same poetic theory. Rather, I should like to take a little semantic excursion to find what uses of the word 'wit’ make it as applicable to Spenser as to Donne. It is curious that the metaphysical poets, even inferior ones such as Cleveland and Cowley, may still be described as witty. To the extent that we apply this word to poets who may be singularly unamusing but who are ingenious, we have accepted its seventeenth-century use. But Spenser witty? No, indeed. Yet in his own day his reputation for ‘fine Poeticall inuention, and most exquisit wit’ was unrivaled.

The figure Genius in English literature has received attention from scholars from the eighteenth century to the present day, especially with reference to Spenser, Jonson, and Milton. Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the subject is that by Professor E. C. Knowlton, in a series of articles in the 1920s, tracing the appearance and literary use of the figure from antiquity, through the middle ages, to the end of the sixteenth century. As the substance of much of Knowlton's investigation is in his study of 'The Genii of Spenser' (1928), this article merits a statement of the author's purpose and procedure.

Near the end of Agrippa d'Aubigne's poem, Discours par stances avec l'esprit du feu roy Henry quatriesme, die poet describes the knife thrusts of Henry's assassin, Ravaillac:

The murderer appears as an instrument of divine condemnation: the king's death, affirms d'Aubigne, was deserved. Yet this same author concludes a long appendix to his Histoire Universelle with the words: Je n'ai plus qu'a laisser quatre vers pour le renom d'un roi sans pareil; que, si la defaveur de leur autheur les fait refuser au tombeau de Sainct-Denis, ils ne le fcront pas en celui qui est pose et sacre dans le marbre permanent, qui est l'eternelle memoire de la posterite.