In the published studies of European witchcraft ajid sorcery, Italy does not stand out as a fertile field for the practice of the diabolical arts. Both Hansen and Lea noted the higher incidence of sorcery cases in northern Europe, and particularly in the Alpine regions, where powerful and uncontrolled manifestations of natural phenomena strengthened belief in demons and devils and thus contributed to the practice of sorcery. From the printed evidence, it might be concluded that, in the more rational and skeptical milieu of Renaissance Italy, sorcery was neither practised extensively nor taken seriously by the authorities.It is true that Italy did not experience the extremes of fanaticism and terror which occurred in Germany and the Low Countries from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century.

In the sixteenth century the pseudo-science of hieroglyphics attracted many scholars for much the same reasons that the picture-puzzle game of imprese was appealing to an enlightened and leisured nobility. Like dianoetics and phrenology in more modern times, both pursuits belonged to that seemingly endless line of intellectual fads that enchant with idealistic and largely empty promises. But though they failed to become the improved means of written communication they were supposed to, they both possessed genuine intellectual qualities, in that they were wittily conceived and dependent upon a wide range of information, much of it obscure, and most of it classical.

S. Grey 3 c 12 is a miscellany of Latin poems in the South African Library, Cape Town. It is one item in a collection of manuscripts, and a much larger number of printed books, given to the library in 1861 by Sir George Grey, governor of the Cape. At the time of the gift, he had relinquished his office for a similar post in New Zealand, where he had been governor also before coming to South Africa. While in New Zealand for the second time, he formed another but smaller collection of manuscripts, now in the Public Library at Auckland. Both collections are the work of an amateur bibliophile, a gentleman of private means, who assembled with intelligence and good taste.

In the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century the revival of interest in classical civilization had a distinct effect on military theory and practice. The study of Roman military methods especially became a source of inspiration for reformers and Machiavelli's Arte della Guerra ranks only as the most famous in a long line of treatises which intended to revive the art of war as the ancients had understood it. During this era military theorists steeped themselves in classical lore, rediscovered the virtues of the Roman legion, became familiar once more with cohort and maniple.

Ludovicus Vives published his De disciplinis in \ 1531, in the fortieth year of his life. The work is a systematic review of the arts and sciences, in twenty-one books, proceeding from a history of the trivium and quadrivium to a proposal for a reformed university, a character test for teachers, and a set of improved textbooks in metaphysics and logic (to which Vives later added expositions of rhetoric and psychology). A work of this scope would probably have been begun a number of years before publication, especially if those years were full of other activities.

The letters and verses written for the early editions of Utopia by Sir Thomas More and his fellow humanists have had remarkably little influence on More's critics and in later editions have been reprinted (if at all) more as literary curiosities than as significant contributions to our understanding of the work. Yet the very extent and range of this appended material would suggest that it was meant to play an important rôle. The first edition, printed by Thierry Martens at Louvain in 1516, includes a Utopian quatrain 'translated’ by Peter Giles, the Hexastichon Anemolii or ‘shortc meter of Utopia', verses by Gerhard Noviomagus, Cornelius Grapheus, and John Paludanus, and the letters of Giles to Jerome Busleiden, Busleiden to More, Paludanus to Giles, and More to Giles.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever accused Rabelais of being a very businesslike storyteller. If he is to any extent, it can only be because ‘businesslike’ has a special meaning in storytelling. In other departments of life the term has to do with efficiency, conciseness, and directness of manner, qualities which we may associate with other narrative artists but hardly with the free style of Rabelais. What we rather like in his writings are his wanderings, his digressions, and his accumulations, whether of titles or games or words. We who admire Master Alcofribas relish his lack of restraint, his unbridled enthusiasm, and his disregard of proportion—his inability, in short, to stick to the point.

The purpose of God, it has been said, ‘is the meaning of history. History is the arena wherein that Divine purpose is being fulfilled and the Divine judgments are made manifest.’ This statement by William Temple is an adequate summary of the Jewish view of history, subsequently adopted by Christianity and developed further by St. Paul, Eusebius of Caesarea, St. Augustine, Paulus Orosius, and numerous others throughout the millennium until the Renaissance. The first significant links in the chain of tradition were the Hebrew prophets, whose ideas, destined to become commonplaces, were forged by their strict and often militant monotheism.

Persée voltigeant, le heros Lathmien,
Cephee, & sa familhe, & cil qu'á son lien
Une mute de chiens encor la haut promeine,
M'invitent á voler d'une plume hautaine
Par les dorés Lambris qui planchent ce grand Tout
Pour nous rendre du Ciel savans de bout en bout.

When in 1583 the young French poet and savant Jean- Edouard du Monin included these lines in introducing the second book of his Uranologie, he was but paraphrasing, with the same classical allusions, both the aspiration and the intention expressed at the corresponding point in the text of his model, a manuscript version of the Sphera of George Buchanan.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the most important study in the English grammar schools was Latin. The fact is well known, and so are the reasons for it. The pedagogical methods are, however, generally not easy to learn in detail. The writings of some educational theorists and the statutes of certain schools present a fragmentary picture of these methods, but an adequate account has yet to be written. This paper deals with the method called ‘double translation', an educational tool which some of the best teachers in England employed with great effect, but one which was quickly blunted in the hands of less able instructors. Double translation has received some attention from students of English Renaissance education, notably Foster Watson and T. W. Baldwin. Some misunderstanding of the method has arisen because of a confusion between double translation and ‘imitation'.

Tasso's dialogue Gianluca overo de le maschere,written in February 1585, opens with an extraordinary carnival scene. The ‘forestiero napoletano', as Tasso had the habit of calling himself, sits apart with two of his friends and finds himself overwhelmed by contradictory emotions as he witnesses the reveling around him. He is there because the spectacle attracted him, because he cannot bear to be alone, because even the suffocating modern masks the revelers wear remind him of the multicolored masked crowds of the court of his youth, which still commands his affection.

The statement has been repeated so often as to seem a truism, that science in the time of Galileo and Harvey suddenly came of age, dropping its juvenilities, most of them the heritage of Aristotle. In a word, the measurements which Galileo performed painstakingly and interpreted critically in the Dialogues concerning the Two New Sciences, and the arithmetical suppositions which assisted William Harvey in proving that the blood moves in a circuit through the body, have been taken as the ushers of a bold new age of mathematical method and scientific achievement and integrity. In this paper I hope to do nothing to dim the quite properly effulgent reputations of these men, and what I have to say about Harvey will carry with it high approval. But I shall endeavor to make clear that his advances have been of a different sort from those commonly attributed.