First of all, may I express my pleasure at having been invited to participate in this twentieth anniversary of the New England Renaissance Conference. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Professor Bradner and his colleagues on the part they played in originating the idea of a regional conference on the Renaissance—an idea that has since spread from coast to coast and has in no small degree been responsible for the growing interest in Renaissance studies in this country during the past two decades. Few of us who took part in the first conference here could have realized that we were assisting at the birth of a movement with such a brilliant future.

Twenty years have passed since the Surveys of Recent Scholarship in the Period of the Renaissance were planned for the Committee on Renaissance Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, offprints of which were grouped in a brochure circulated under the date of 1945. Any review of progress in these fields ought to start with these useful compendia, even though several important areas were not explored at that time. Science was abundantly documented by Francis Johnson and Sanford Larkey, whose critical evaluations afforded a guide to the physical sciences and mathematics, including astronomy, geography, and cartography, as well as the principal parts of biology.

Whatever chronological limits be determined for the French Renaissance, its history, scholarship, and literature are at least characterized by a clearly discernible attitude which distinguishes them from the work of preceding centuries. This atmosphere is perhaps best expressed by Rabelais in the letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel. Gargantua writes: ‘Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restitutes, les langues instaurées…'. He claims with enthusiasm that ‘Tout le monde est plein de gens savants, de precepteurs très doctes … . Je voy les brigans, les boureaulx, les avanturiers, les palefreniers de maintenant plus doctes que les docteurs et prescheurs de mon temps’, and concludes: ‘Somme queje voy un abysme de science.’

The splendid collection of Italian Renaissance books and manuscripts assembled by Mr. Harold C. Bodman of Santa Barbara, California, destined to find a home in the Honold Library of the Claremont Colleges (which have had the benefit of other benefactions from Mr. Bodman), includes nine autograph letters of the Medici family and other prominent Renaissance figures. Of these letters, eight are published here for the first time. These letters range in time from 1426 to 1521 and thus cover the most important century in Medici history, a crucial period for Florence and for Italy.

The first of these letters was written by Palla Strozzi in 1426. It is in the nature of a report from the scene of a sea and land skirmish on the coast near Genoa, between the forces of Florence and Venice and those of Milan and Genoa.

One of the most vital questions in present studies of English drama is the nature and provenance of the Elizabethan chronicle play. At the mid-century of our era, it was quite clear that Felix Schelling's survey of the history play, now fifty years old, should be rewritten to include the discoveries of a half-century's scholarship. Such was the announced purpose of Professor Irving Ribner's book, which appeared in 1957 as The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare. The origins of this distinct kind of Elizabethan drama underwent a close scrutiny in the new book, especially in relationship to Renaissance nondramatic historiography and to the medieval morality play. I still think, however, that the problem of origins has not been settled.

Professor Kristeller in his ‘Humanism and Scholasticism in the Italian Renaissance’ as well as in his lecture on ‘The Humanist Movement’ in The Classics and Renaissance Thought emphasizes the professional nature of humanism, assigning to it the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy at the universities of Italy under the designation of the studia humanitatis. While he would not, I am sure, deny the wide cultural significance of the writings and activities of the humanists within the Renaissance, he does take a more restricted view of them than those philosophers and commentators who look upon the Italian humanists as simply one phase of a broadly humanitarian philosophical and religious outlook stretching from the ancient world to modern times, be it Jacques Maritain or Corliss Lamont.

Not Far from the majestic Santa Croce in Florence, there is a small street known as Isola delle Stinche. Students of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance have long neglected the meaning and significance of this street, and many well-informed residents of the city, including historians, have only vague notions about the name Stinche.

The present analysis is part of a larger study of crime and punishment in the early Renaissance. The original study focuses on Le Stinche, a Florentine prison that reflected changing currents of legal and penal thought from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the fall of the republic in 1530. I shall not here attempt to trace the development of criminal law and penal treatment that was manifested in the administration of the prison or in records of commitments of prisoners to the institution.

Professor F. J. Fisher wrote in 1940 that the twentieth century has been ‘busily recreating the sixteenth century in its own image’. Historical re-evaluation is always in part narcissistic. Two world wars have left their scars on our view of history and, if nothing else, have given us insights into the Tudor age which, like our own, faced ideological wars of survival. The quest for economic and military security and the dream of the welfare state have led the twentieth century to forsake not only the ethical and institutional standards of the nineteenth century but also to deny its interpretation of history. The ancient shibboleths, the familiar landmarks of Tudor history, and the comfortable generalizations about despotism, mercantilism, and ‘new monarchy’ are all being swept aside by a generation of historians who claim greater understanding of the past.

Interest in Gavin Douglas has bloomed, attending reappraisal of that group of poets designated as the Scottish Chaucerians. Admirers of Douglas, Henry son, Barbour, Dunbar, and the rest now have as their ally C. S. Lewis and the authority of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. In this work, Lewis devotes ten pages to a detailed examination of Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid, and he is propitious in his final evaluation of it: ‘Here a great story is greatly told and set off with original embellishments which are all to the good—all either delightful or interesting—in their diverse ways.’

On 7 March 1528, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, sent a letter to Thomas More asking him to write against heresy. Tunstall pointed out that heretical literature of both German and English authorship was coming into England in such quantities that, unless good and learned men could be found to confute these heretical books in English, the Catholic faith in England would be in grave danger. He was entrusting More with this task, the bishop concluded, because More was a master of eloquence in English as well as in Latin.

When More decided to carry out Tunstall's commission in dialogue form, he was not satisfying the predilections for the dramatic he had already evinced in his Richard the Thirde and Utopia but was availing himself of a weapon proven potent in the art of religious and secular controversy.

On the fourth book of The Faerie Queene, Scudamour passes a restless night in the house of Care,

The smith is assisted by ‘sixe strong groomes’ who keep the visitor awake most of the evening with the din of their

When the knight finally falls asleep, Care awakens him with a pair of red-hot tongs.

That this episode ‘symbolizes Scudamour's jealous wretchedness’ is, as Lemmi observed, perfectly obvious. Indeed Spenser has made the meaning of his ‘darke conceit’ extremely clear.

Shakespearean details of rather minor intrinsic significance sometimes can be worth the most careful examination not only because they previously have been ignored or misinterpreted, but also because such study may serve to indicate neglected resources of the playwright's dramatic language and the methods of historical criticism requisite to master them. The concern of this article is to demonstrate that Shakespeare's references to the strawberry, appearing in quite different dramatic contexts in three plays widely spaced through his career, are examples of such details. Of course the most memorable of these references (and the one to which our main attention will be drawn) occurs in Othello (III.iii.433—4.35) where mention of the strawberry ‘spots’ on the fatal handkerchief helps to vivify Iago's climactic flourish of evidence in the temptation of the Moor.