The true beginnings of Egyptology and the scientific collecting of Egyptian antiquities in the museums of Europe are properly assigned to the nineteenth century. However, the first signs of interest in the ancient land of the Pharaohs and its fabulous monuments were evident in the time of the Renaissance, for the humanistic regard for the material vestiges of the classical civilizations and the literature of Greece and Rome quite naturally led to an interest in the preclassical civilizations of the near east.

A number of recent publications by Jugoslavenska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti (the Yugoslav Academy of Science and Arts, in Zagreb) calls attention to an important literary renaissance in Croatia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Evidence of this renaissance is the considerable amount of writing done by Croatian poets, most of whom lived in the cities and islands of that narrow coastal strip in Dalmatia which had not been overrun by the Turks.

At present the Yugoslav Academy is engaged in printing the books of Neo-Latin humanist writers of Croatian origin. It is also making available photostatically reproduced texts of the most important authors who wrote in the national language.

The Renaissance man was as eager as any twentieth-century scientist to understand the universe and himself, the center of that universe, but he sought that knowledge in a different way. He relied heavily upon the Word of God. He accepted with little question the words of wise men of the past—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, St. Augustine. He was fascinated with the mysterious hieroglyphics and drawings left by the Chaldeans and Egyptians, untranslatable in his time but thought to be an esoteric language which might reveal hidden secrets of the universe. But his most accessible book was the ‘universal and publick Manuscript’ of nature, that great volume written in the language of God, sometimes in ‘Hieroglyphicall Characters’ difficult to decipher, again in figures and ‘letters’ easily understood by any one who would take time to observe them.

Fame is surely one of the key words of medieval and Renaissance thought, like Love, Nature, Fortune, Envy. Such terms had for centuries a life of their own which they no longer appear to have; it is as if the years of myth-making, allegorizing, personifying gave them a concrete reality that our more positivistic age cannot accept. In spite of the difficulties of isolating such a term as Fame in the welter of material available, I would like to discuss some uses of it in the English literature of the later middle ages and Renaissance.

The scholar or casual reader whose interest is drawn to Renaissance English literature discovers very early that, in the fantastic profusion of puns and punning allusions that delighted the hearts of Englishmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, second in frequency only to the cuckold's horns is a thin gold coin called the angel. The uses made of it range from the casual pun ‘There's a pair of angels to guide you to your lodgings’ to elaborate metaphors which mold a scene or provide the vehicle for an entire poem, as in Donne's Elegie XI, ‘The Bracelet’.

Some of the Neo-Latin poetry written in the fifteenth century attains real literary distinction, even though the authors may not follow all the rules of classical prosody as they are known to us today. There is also another class of poetry which is less distinguished as literature; but this attracts a certain amount of interest owing to the position of the author, the importance of the men to whom the poems are addressed, or the historical significance of the events to which they refer. The poems written by Galeazzo Pontico Faccino (Galeatius Ponticus Facinus) belong to this second class. The author was active in Padua during a famous period in the history of the university and had a personal relationship with several persons who are better known than he is himself.

The struggle of the Italian League against the Italian territorial ambitions of Charles VII of France has been little studied in all its ramifications. By necessity, the attention of historians has been drawn primarily to the belated energetic efforts of the ‘King of Bourges’ in the latter part of his reign which led to the final defeats of the English invaders in the last phases of the Hundred Years War. The continuation of the Franco-Italian struggle under the more capable and astute successor of Charles VII, Louis XI, has attracted more attention, and has tended to obscure the first phase of the conflict. The first phase, however, is important for the proper evaluation of Louis XI's Italian policy, and it is to this period that this study is devoted.

The migration of woodblocks and the copying of illustrations in the early period of printing comprise an interesting, but by no means novel, field of study. Today, when we point proudly and somewhat monotonously to our ‘shrinking world', it is amusing to ponder how far, how easily, and at times how rapidly, news and ideas and art work traveled from one part of Europe to another, even in periods of history when communications and transportation were still primitive. Although the travels of the particular woodblock which is the subject of this article did not cover great distances, the comparatively long time which elapsed between its last hitherto known use and its reappearance is one of its puzzling aspects.

At one point in the development of this paper I contemplated calling it ‘Sir John Fortescue in another context'. I abandoned the title as too cryptic; but my intention remains the same, namely, to place Fortescue's thought in a less familiar but, I hope, a none the less revealing context. For the benefit of those who may well feel that the dominium politicum et regale in any other context would smell no fresher, let me hasten to add that I am not here primarily concerned with that famous formula, nor for that matter with Fortescue considered primarily as a political or legal theorist.

The curious northerner who had been attracted by the culture of Renaissance Italy and who sooner or later managed to fulfill his desire to visit that land in person was certainly one of the most interesting and most significant types of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have found his type interesting and significant partly because they desire to understand the spread of intellectual influences from one region to another, and notably from Italy to northern Europe, and partly because these visitors from the north through their writings give insights into intellectual conditions in Italy itself. The type of the humanistic visitor from the north was already well established by the time that Erasmus began his three-year residence in the peninsula in 1506, for Erasmus was only following the example of many of his humanistic acquaintances, especially his English friends, the Oxford reformers.

In examining a number of books of hours for the use of Sarum printed on the continent for sale in England, the writer noted with some amazement the peculiar English often to be found in these volumes. It therefore seemed worth while to record, in this journal and thus for the benefit of a wider audience, some of the choicer specimens found in these printings, together with other poems which came into English religious books as translations from foreign sources. The title of this study, a typical example of the cruder continental spelling (for ‘At thy going first out of the house bless thee saying thus’), is to be found on folio 8 (signature A8) of the Horae ad usum Sarum printed in Rouen about the year 1506 by Richard Goupil for Wilham Candos.

Sixteenth-Century mural painting in Mexican monasteries constitutes the richest body of frescoes of that period anywhere in the Hispanic world. I shall attempt to suggest broad dates, agreeing with those proposed by George Kubler. A tentative list is given, arranged by religious orders and states. It is slightly more complete than previous lists. The themes represented are enlarged by a few classical subjects. Finally, a discussion of the sources suggests frequent dependence on European models.

The phrase ‘Ovidian poetry’ or sometimes ‘mythological poetry’ is commonly used to denote a group of English poems written in the manner of Ovid during the 1590s and thereafter. Most importandy the group includes Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla (1589), Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1593), Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), T. H.'s Œnone and Paris (1594), Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe (1595), Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus (1595). All the poems recast, or rather amplify, myths from Ovid and other classical writers; all treat a love story, usually with that precious combination of sensuality and sentiment for which Ovid is famous; all are highly ornate, employing rhetorically worked up love arguments, rich descriptions of clothing, buildings, tapestries, and the like, and minor embellishing myths like that of Neptune trying to embrace Leander in Marlowe's poem.

On May Day 1602 Queen Elizabeth went a-maying to Sir Richard Buckley's at Lewisham. The occasion was probably graced by a show of horsemen and the song Of Cinthia, the lyrics of which represent the quintessence of the cult of the queen in the last years of her reign:

Lands and Seas shee rules below,
Where things change, and ebbe and flowe,
Spring, wax olde, and perish;
Only Time which all doth mowe,
Her alone doth cherish.

The doctrine of Milton's Comus is elaborately Platonic, but the introduction of the idea of chastity at the center of the Platonic argument is generally supposed to be Milton's innovation. That virtue, by that name, is not commonly recognized as a subject of Plato's thought though his speculation on divine love necessarily includes comparable notions. But in Milton the idea stands out, not only as the subject of the masque, but for the difficulty of understanding what he means by it. He distinguishes explicitly, but without explanation, between chastity and virginity; at times he uses chastity to signify temperance, and at other times continence; at one or two places, as in the epilogue, he implies its identification with virtue generally, and as a primary means of attaining immortality.