Since humanism has been traditionally considered as one of the chief intellectual movements of the Renaissance period, it should probably not cause any surprise that humanism in recent years has had the dubious distinction of becoming as much of a historical problem as the Renaissance itself has been for some time. As a matter of fact, the concept of humanism is of comparable complexity, and if we choose to extend it beyond the chronological limits of the Renaissance period, it is almost equally broad. Humanism can be, and has been, defined in a variety of ways, and we might very well take the view that any definition is acceptable provided it is explicitly formulated, the range of its application is clearly indicated, and its original meaning is consistently maintained, especially if the definition seems to have some relevance or validity for the phenomena which it is intended to describe.

The primary object of this article is to give the text of six poems by Lodrisio Crivelli (Leodrisius Cribellus), only one of which, no. I, appears to have been printed before and that from a defective manuscript. Secondary objects are to determine what light the texts of the six poems throw on the life of Crivelli from January 1457 to February 1464 and to bring out, principally in notes, any evidence which may tend to add detail to our knowledge of the period.

Of these six poems only the first appears in the list of Crivelli's writings given by Dr. Giulio C. Zimolo in the account of Crivelli's life and works with which he prefaces his edition of one of them, De expeditione Pii papae II adversus Turcos.

The enormous mass of fifteenth-century diplomatic documents deposited in European archives and libraries, mostly in Italy, has never been explored and utilized systematically. Relatively small selections have been published in various collections and appendices of specialized monographs, but the over-all significance of these papers has never been assessed. By contrast sixteenth-century diplomatic documents have given rise to many printed collections and publications ever since the third decade of the last century when Leopold von Ranke first made extensive and effective use of the Venetian dispacci and relazioni in his History of the Popes.

The Estates General played but a small role in the development of the French monarchy. So little did it accomplish that at first glance a serious study of its history hardly seems necessary except to explain why it failed. This negative approach may be justified, but I think the greatest value to be achieved by the study of the French Estates General and other representative institutions during the Renaissance lies in the insight it gives into the nature of the monarchy of that great age. Just as Neale has used the English Parliament as a vehicle for studying Elizabethan government and society and Namier that of Georgian England, so the Estates General provides an opportunity to interpret the government of Renaissance France.

The major intellectual interests of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and his circle focused in the high ambition of ‘joining wisdom and piety with eloquence’. To this end the group worked to restore a ‘cleansed and purified Peripatetic philosophy’. They studied the Bible in a series of New Testament editions, commentaries, and translations. They printed the medieval mystics: the Victorines, Elizabeth of Schönau, Raymond Lull, Ruysbroeck. Finally, they devoted time, energy, and enthusiasm to the investigation of Christian antiquity and the editing of patristic texts. Lefèvre himself showed them how these separate enterprises meshed in a consistent program: ‘For knowledge of natural philosophy’, he wrote in 1506, ‘for knowledge of ethics, politics and economics, drink from the fountain of a purified Aristotle.

In early summer of the year 1509 Erasmus in Italy received the enthusiastic letter of his English friend and patron Lord Mountjoy, announcing the accession of the young Henry VIII to his father's throne and the beginning of an age of gold:

O my Erasmus [he wrote], if you could see how everyone here rejoices, how they delight in such a prince, how zealously they wish him well, you would not be able to refrain from tears of joy. The heavens laugh, earth rejoices, every-thing is filled with milk and honey and nectar! All avarice is banished utterly and liberality scatters its blessings with a generous hand.

In September 1511 Robert de Keyzere published five poems written by Erasmus in honor of the new school ‘quern nuper instituit Coletus’ and of its ‘president’, the Boy Jesus. These poems, which are usually grouped together under the title Carmina scholaria, were evidently intended to be sung as hymns by the boys of St. Paul's; they are still so classified in the 1896 edition of Preces hymni et catechismus Graece et Latine in usum antiquae et Celebris Scholae S. Pauli, etc.

The Elysium Atestinum of Julius Caesar Bordonius (or Bordonus) is a Latin poem of 411 hexameters, dedicated to Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua (1474-1539). The purpose of the poem is to flatter Isabella and her brothers, Alfonso I, duke of Ferrara (1486-1534), and Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (1479-1520), by inventing a myth showing the interest of the Olympian gods in the house of Este and by providing it with an eponymous ancestor, the Trojan Atestes.

It also describes an elaborate park and zoological garden on an island in the Po, which Alfonso is to make. This is presumably the park belonging to the Belvedere Palace built for Alfonso by Girolamo da Carpi between 1514 and 1516, which was celebrated not only by Bordonius, but also by Scipione Balbo in a Latin poem called Pulcher visus, by Celio Calcagnini in an epigram, and by Ariosto in the Orlando furioso.

John Bale is known chiefly as a dramatist and as a bibliographer. His considerable body of nondramatic polemical works has received little attention, probably because most scholars share the feelings of that biographer of Bale who says, ‘Of Bale's works as a controversialist, perhaps the less one says the better.’ However, Bale was an important propagandist for the extreme Protestant position, and a study of his nondramatic polemical works should add something to our knowledge of the art of religious controversy as exercised during the sixteenth century.

Bale's polemical works fall into two categories: those written against the bishops of the English church, accusing them of being no better than the Catholics, and those written against the Catholics themselves, although Bale does occasionally refer to the Enghsh bishops in his anti-Catholic works also.

The reputation of Denis Lambin as a scholarly commentator on the texts of Lucretius, Horace, and Cicero is well known to students of the French Renaissance, but his social activities, his relation to contemporary literary groups, and especially his critical opinions as expressed in his numerous orationes have not been adequately explored. As a Hellenist, Lambin was not the equal of Budè, Turnèbe, or Henri Estienne, but as a Latinist, his erudition was recognized by Joseph Scaliger and confirmed by the modern editor of Lucretius, Munro.

Like Postel, Lambin was of rather humble origin. His father, Nicolas Lambin, was a locksmith. After prehminary studies at Montreuil-surmer where he received the tonsure, he left for Paris at the age of fifteen. As he tells us himself, he began Greek at this time.

In his Heracles the Greek sophist Lucian described the curious picture of Hercules which he claimed to have seen in Gaul. In it the god was portrayed as aged, wizened, clad in a lion's skin, holding his club in his right hand and his bow in his left, and drawing his followers joyously after him by delicate chains of gold and amber, which were fastened to their ears and to the god's pierced tongue. Lucian's Gallic mentor explained the symbolism thus: ‘We do not agree with you Greeks in thinking that Hermes is Eloquence. We identify Heracles with it, because he is far more powerful than Hermes… . We consider that the real Heracles was a wise man who achieved everything by eloquence and applied persuasion as his principal force.’

The only serious study of the life of William Harrison, antiquarian and social historian, author of the much-quoted Description of England in Holinshed's Chronicles, was undertaken by Frederick J. Furnivall for his edition of the Description. All later biographies stem directly from Furnivall. I have recently uncovered new material which supplements the known facts of Harrison's life, corrects some inaccuracies in Furnivall's biography, and occasionally throws new light on Harrison's garrulous, anecdotal account of Elizabethan England.

A search for Harrison material leads, somewhat improbably, to the Diocesan Library of the Church of Ireland in Londonderry, a phenomenon which can only be explained by the marriage of Harrison's daughter, Anne, to George Downham, a noted teacher of Ramian logic at Cambridge and later bishop of Derry.

An investigation of the Latin motet in Elizabethan England involves the student from the start in a historical problem of some elegance. He is dealing here with a major art-form under peremptory death sentence—the main musical form of the Reformation period, indeed, and like all the arts of the Roman Catholic liturgy, now at the reformers’ mercy. Far from bowing to the sentence, the motet continued to exist; adapted itself with some tact; appeared for the first time in print; and in the work of William Byrd multiplied itself to an extent and in a quality unmatched in English music.

The Shepheardes Calender is the most avowedly eclectic masterpiece in English. Spenser acknowledges several borrowings in the names of the speakers and in the emblems, as well as in the lines of the poem themselves; and E. K. points to many more. The only really new ingredient is the form, a framework which links the separate eclogues into a connected series. Everything else is conscious imitation of a convention, or at least of a precedent. Therefore the implications of the form become salient in any attempt to assess the distinctive genius of the work.

We are accustomed to think of Nicolas Poussin as a man of profound intellect and impressive dignity who led, according to Bellori, an eminently rational, well-ordered, and even severe life in Rome. His serious personality is reflected in the stately grandeur of his history pictures, allegories, and religious scenes. Even his bacchanals are rather sober and restrained. He is, in short, the peintre philosophe. While Poussin's sense of the profound is well known, his sense of humor is rarely discussed. Yet there are humorous elements in his art which relieve his high seriousness and offer revealing insights into his personality.