The Utopian custom of euthanasia used, quite rightly, to be discussed in terms of classical sources and generally turned on whether Sir Thomas More advocated it personally or not. The fruitfulness of such discussion has its limits, and I find that More scholars have largely dropped the subject. Some new evidence has come to light, however, which raises the question whether More's apparently speculative projection had not in fact some basis in actual practice. An Italian diplomat who visited England during the reign of Mary in 1554, that is twenty-eight years after Utopia was published, stated unequivocally that euthanasia (he does not use the term, of course) was customary among some people in England. He thought it a primitive survival.

I have found two main sources for the text of the report: (1) the various copies of an anonymous manuscript usually called ‘Ritratti del Regno d'lnghilterra’ (2) a book by the Ferrarese diplomat Giulio Raviglio Rosso, I Successi d'lnghilterra dopo la morte di Odoardo sestofno al giunta in quel Regno del Sereniss.

Accessions of primary source materials concerning Juan Luis Vives (1493-1540) continue to be made, increasing our need for a thorough restudy of his life and thought. Since Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín's authoritative biography was published in 1903, besides the obvious advances in supplementary scholarship, more than sixty letters by Vives himself, many letters addressed to him, one treatise which may have been his (which has yet to be analyzed and published), as well as the records of the Inquisitorial trials of members of his family, have been added to the evidence known to be extant.

The letter with which this article is concerned has been published in this century but has not explicitly been incorporated into any studies of Vives. Professor Kristeller recently described the manuscript used in the Paquier edition (P) and brought it to my attention. The letter is here republished, in closer fidelity to the manuscript, and with an expanded critical apparatus which suggests a new interpretation of its meaning.

L’enfer de Clément Marot a donné lieu à des interpretations vari- ées. Villey a signalé que ‘ Le premier livre de la Méamorphose d'Ovide translaté . . . par Clément Marot… item certaines oeuvres qu'ilfeit en prison non encore imprimez donne … Certaines oeuvres qu'ilfeit en la prison’: le rondeau Comme inconstante, la ballade Ung jour j’escrivy, l'épître à Boil chard et l'épître à Léon Jamet (1534). En 1544 Dolet a publié L'Enfer . . . Item aulcunes ballades et rondeaulx appartenant à l’argument. C'est ici que, pour la première fois L'Enfer a été publié en même temps que le rondeau Comme inconstante et la ballade Ung jour j’escrivy. On en a déduit que toutes ces pièces se rapportaient aux mêmes événements. Morley, puis O. Douen, ont pensé que Ysabeau—abréviation d'Elisabeth— désignait l'Eglise.

Among the letters of Savonarola listed as now lost is one to Fra Benedetto di Paolo. The existence of such a letter is known from an entry in the sixteenth-century catalog of Savonarola's letters compiled by Fra Bernardo Castiglione. This catalog has also disappeared but Vincenzo Marchese saw it in the San Marco archives in the mid-nineteenth century and noted Castiglione's seventh entry as follows: 'Scripsit cuidam F. Benedicto Pauli reprehensivam epistolam de quadam eius inobedientia, quae incipit: F. Benedetto. A Dio non è piaciuto questa vostra inobedientia, ec.’ Marchese identified the recipient as Fra Benedetto di Paolo of Florence, the miniaturist and author of Cedrus Libani, a life of Savonarola in verse, which Marchese had just published.The letter itself was lost.

The mystery of John Skelton's Howard connection has never been satisfactorily explained. Indeed, one usually thinks of the Tudor poet (1460?-1529) as a court poet and tutor to Henry VIII rather than as the protégé of the Howard Countess of Surrey who directed her daughters and gentlewomen to honor him with a laurel crown. Of course, the recitation of this apparently biographical incident in which eleven gentlewomen joyfully decked Skelton's brow with laurel, became the basis for Skelton's most autobiographical poem, The Garland of Laurel.

Published October 3, 1523, the usual assumption is that the Countess of Surrey is none other than Elizabeth Howard, née Stafford (d. 1558), the wife of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and in due course third Duke of Norfolk (d. 1554).

In his illuminating chapter on The Alchemist in The Broken Compass, Edward B. Partridge discusses the central role of the parody of religion. But he adds the surprising comment that Jonson ‘only sketches it in outline lest the impiety neutralize the comic tone’ (The Broken- Compass, Chatto & Windus, London, 1957). I wish to argue that the caricature of religion in the figure of Sir Epicure Mammon is strong and would have been recognized and condemned as such by the contemporary audience.

The insane hyperbole of Mammon's language is evident immediately on his arrival at Lovewit's house. To him, the den of thieves and prostitutes in which we have just seen Dapper and Drugger pettily deluded and swindled, is ‘the novo orbe,’ ‘the rich Peru.'

Sometime about 1603, Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) reflected on fame and reputation and on references and allusions that had been made to him personally by contemporary authors. On the back of the final folio of his nearly finished work ‘The Doctrine of Nauticall Triangles Compendious,’ Hariot jotted down a series of references to books which, on examination, seem surely to refer to Hariot or his beliefs. Such a list could have been compiled from curiosity or vanity or for use in conversations with his friends. But it may have had a more specific purpose, since Hariot was a controversial figure frequently called on to account for his ideas or his associations. The making of such a list could therefore have been to forearm himself against the kind of evidence which might be adduced against him from printed sources.

In 1960 the noted Spanish bibliographer Don José Simón Díaz reprinted a number of Mira de Amescua's uncollected poems under the title ‘Textos dispersos’ (Revista de Literatura, XVIII, 169-180). Not included in that group is Mira's little-known homage to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of the latter's visit to Madrid in 1623. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, in his still fundamental Mira de Amescua y su teatro: Estudio biográfico y crítico (Madrid, 1931), was able to describe this work only as follows: ‘En el Índice de la Biblioteca que fue del señor Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros constan unas Octavas al Príncipe de Gales, por el Doctor Mira de Amescua. Quizá se trate de las compuestas por él con Alarcón y otros poetas’ (p. 32, n. 1).

The inclusion of ‘A Letter Written by Fulke Greville to His Cousin Greville Varney Residing in France’ in the first collected edition of Greville's works in 1633 generated controversy from the beginning. Even before the book could be distributed, John Varney (Greville Varney's brother) wrote to Sir John Coke, who evidently supervised publication of the 1633 folio, and bitterly protested the publication of the letter. His objections rested on his belief that the letter wrongly implied the Varneys’ dependency upon their affluent kinsman, Fulke Greville. And John Varney hotly charged that the late Lord Brooke had somehow contrived by means of this letter, left among his papers, to clear himself posthumously of accusations that he had once used the Varneys harshly. Finally, Varney claimed to Coke that this letter was never written to his brother at all. The real recipient, he declared, was John Harris, a cousin to the Varneys who was then living in France.

Marvell’ s ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ is one of those idiosyncratic poems which when read nowadays without a proper awareness of the tradition, both in prose and verse, upon which it plays tempts to an over-biographical interpretation and to an assorted variety of philosophical explanations. Indeed, quite contrary conclusions have been drawn from the inconclusiveness of the debate between soul and body—that Marvell is, at least for the space of the poem, dangerous cynic; Pyrrhonist in his suspension of a verdict; Cartesian in his dualism; Puritan idealist coming to terms with historical exigency;

Among the wives of Henry VIII, only his first and last, Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Parr, possessed both the education and the intelligence to exemplify the Renaissance ideal for a woman born to gentle life. Both Katherines took their religion seriously, and in spite of the papal loyalties of the one and the Protestant proclivities of the other, they belonged to the same tradition of Renaissance religion which J. K. McConica has most recently traced in his study of English humanists. If Katherine of Aragon far surpassed her English namesake by the thoroughness of her education in the Spanish humanism of Isabella's court, Katherine Parr actually wrote and had published two books which proved surprisingly popular. If the breadth of the first Katherine's patronage of Renaissance writers was far more extensive than that of the second, the patronage of the second was more closely related to the course of English religion and politics.

A few years ago Conyers Read wrote that Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner merited more attention than it had received, and the comment could be justly extended to the Queen's religious convictions in general.

Titus andronicus has long been recognized as a play wherein Shakespeare, as novice playwright, manipulated numerous plots and stage devices into an integrated whole. In an eighteenth-century chapbook, for instance, both R. M. Sargeant and J. C. Maxwell see the possible source of the main story in the prose rendition ‘The History of Titus Andronicus.’ From Kyd, Shakespeare borrowed the revenge play feigned madness of Hieronimo, the Senecan gore, the passive-to-active protagonist. From the morality plays, he borrowed the figures of Revenge, Rapine, and Murder. From Seneca's Thyestes, he borrowed the revenge of Atreus and the mad banquet; from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the rape of Philomela; from Bandello's Novella, the cruel Moor; from North's Plutarch, the revolt of Coriolanus; from the Appius and Virginia story, the sacrifice of the dishonored daughter; from Seneca's Troades, the sacrifice of the innocent captive to the honor of the dead warriors.

As John D. Jump confirms in his recent edition of Tamburlaine, L. Francis Kirkman's 1671 play list has long been regarded as the earliest unambiguous attribution of Tamburlaine to Marlowe. Admittedly, the internal evidence supporting Marlowe's authorship is so strong that virtually no one has felt much need for external confirmation. It may be worthwhile, nevertheless, to move such confirmation back by sixty-two years, to a 1609 work by Joseph Wybarne (M.A., 1606; ordained deacon [Lincoln], May 31, 1607): ‘The New Age of Old Names. By Ios. Wib. Master of Artes of Trinitie Colledge in Cambridge.' On sig. D4V, with ‘Marloe.’ in the margin, Wybarne echoes verbatim I Tamburlaine I.ii.205 ('As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings’).

Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1314-57) was the greatestjurist of the fourteenth century. The critical methods which he developed to analyze legal cases and to interpret legal texts became standard procedure among later jurists and was known as Bartolismo. His commentaries range from glosses to the Corpus iuris civilis to minor works, which treated such diverse subjects as the legal foundations of falconry, the question of Franciscan poverty, and the political rule of cities. All these works carried his fame and influence beyond the borders of Italy into France, the Low Countries, Germany, and even Poland. In 1959 the University of Perugia, where Bartolus taught, celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary of his death with a series of lectures dedicated to his life, thought, and influence.

Professor Erwin Panofsky in Studies in Iconology points to a particular device, ‘common in late-mediaeval and Renaissance painting,’ that ‘of dividing the landscape background into halves of symbolically contrasting character.’ This technique, Panofsky says, was 'frequent in religious pictures where the “Aera sub lege” is contrasted with the “Aera suh gratia,” ’ but it was by no means confined to sacred pictures as Panofsky goes on to illustrate. In particular he discusses the picture, ‘Hercules at the Crossroads,’ generally attributed to Niccolò Soggi, in the light of this symbolic device. The purpose of this paper is to show how this technique common to Renaissance art also found expression in a dramatic form, that of civic pageantry, in late Tudor and early Stuart England.

In one of the recent volumes in the English Lute-Songs series, Ian Spink has assembled from manuscript sources fifteen songs by Alfonso Ferrabosco. The first is a setting of an anonymous poem, ‘All you forsaken lovers come,’ for a solo voice with bass, to which Spink has added inner parts. Spink's source is the ‘John Bull’ manuscript, MS. 52 D, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (c. 1620); another version—from which Spink takes two readings—is in British Museum MS. Additional 10337, the ‘Elizabeth Rogers Virginal Book,’ dated c. 1657. A third version of this song, but with a different and much more interesting set of words, Benjonson's “The Houre-glasse,’ is in a pair of manuscript part-books now in the Cathedral Library at Carlisle. These partbooks were compiled around 1637 by Thomas Smith, later bishop of Carlisle, and contain several songs not known elsewhere, such as the cycle of eleven songs about ‘John and Joan’ by Richard Nicholson. They also contain two Latin anthems by Ferrabosco (pp. 74, 75).