Janus Pannonius (1434-72), Hungary's foremost Renaissance poet, has been the subject of continuous work by Hungarian students of the period engaged in identifying and describing his oeuvre and its European reception. This endeavor, of course, also includes searching for any and all contacts Pannonius had with his humanist contemporaries. Each time a new Janus MS is discovered (and it still happens), new titles are added to his ‘bibliography’ and new names to the roster of his many foreign friends. Here and there among his famous acquaintances an unknown name appears which in turn triggers new research and speculations, often yielding new insights into the varied activities of Pannonius, and, as a by-product, reveals additional information regarding the dynamism of fifteenth-century Europe.

Engravings designed by Maerten van Heemskerck were used often enough by sixteenth-century painters of stained-glass panels, but the subject of Daniel and the Priests of Bel and the Dragon is preserved in only two panels known to me. The apocryphal story (Dan. 14:2-21) states that the Babylonians worshipped Bel, whose statue was given large quantities of edible offerings daily. The nightly disappearance of the food convinced King Cyrus that Bel was a living god, but the prophet Daniel proved that the priests of Bel in fact ate the offerings secretly. Daniel covered the temple floor with ashes and Cyrus sealed the doors. The next morning Daniel showed the king that the priests and their families had a secret passage under the altar because footprints led to it, and they and not Bel, therefore, had eaten the food.

If, as Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus instructed the schoolboys of Europe, names are indices of reality, what truth of nature or character did he perceive in his own name? The inventive author who invested the act of naming with gravity and wit, punning Folly from More, dubbing his colloquial characters aptly as ‘Cocles’ or ‘Eusebius', reviewed and revised his own name with humanist concern for the alignment of verba with res. As a student he dutifully signed himself ‘Herasmus,’ later dropping the initial consonant, and still later regretting that he had not adopted the more liquid ‘Erasmius.’ ‘Who ever heard of anyone being called “Love“?’ he protested. Rather than the adjectival form i.e., ‘amiable,'would have been more courteous and agreeable he thought.

Among the Latin epigrams of Thomas More, several are highly interesting for musical reasons. Two bear the caption ‘Poem Translated from an English Song.’ The first of these (63), beginning ‘O cor triste,’ reads in literal English translation,

Break, sad heart, pitiably engulfed in deepest woe. Let this be the end of your punishment. Show your mistress your bloody wounds. In short, it is she, only she, who will keep us two apart. Alas, how long shall I in my misery thus weep and complain? Come, dreaded death, and release me from monstrous woes.

The song on which this is based has apparently not yet been found.

In his essay ‘De la ressemblance des enfants aux peres’ (II, 37) Montaigne tells two stories, the second of which is the curious account of how, after hearing that goat's blood was good for one's health, he raised a billy goat and had it slaughtered in the hope of procuring for himself some of this marvelous elixir. Only after the animal had been killed did he begin to have doubts about the medicinal virtues of goat's blood. Amused by his earlier credulousness, Montaigne relates this anecdote in a tone so personal, so affable and self-deprecatory that the reader, won over by the amiability of the speaker, is likely to be sensitive to the human quality of the narrator but unlikely to be attentive to the subtle way in which the text determines his responses or to the author's ulterior motives for eliciting those very responses.

In 1870 H. Huth printed for the first time a poem evidently written in the early seventeenth century and bearing the title ‘To the Queene of Bohemia.’ The only sign of its authorship was the ‘G.H.’ printed after it. Aside from these initials no support was offered for the editor's statement that the poem was ‘probably from the pen of George Herbert.’ Four years later A. B. Grosart, apparently ignorant of Huth's book, printed the same poem from a different manuscript and ascribed the poem to George Herbert, not only because his manuscript too was initialed ‘G.H.’ but also because, as he argued, the poem's rhythm, form, and use of metaphors were like those found in The Temple? Further evidence for Herbert's authorship was supplied by the next two major editors of Herbert's works.