To the learned men of the classical period, of the middle ages and of the Renaissance, the name of Zoroaster was not unknown and many of the classical and medieval authors wrote descriptions of his life and writings. However, the picture of the ancient sage which writers such as Pliny, Porphyry, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Arnobius, Suidas, and many others presented was very short, incomplete, and often quite confusing and erroneous. Zoroaster was variously spoken of as an Assyrian, a Persian, a Mede, a Persomede, a Chaldean, and as a king of the Bactrians. He was also held to be the creator of magic, the founder of astrology, and the author of numerous works on philosophy, nature, magic, alchemy, and astrology.

The Latin drama of the Renaissance and Reformation has been studied mostly in Germany. Bahlmann and Bolte laid the bibliographical foundations in the 1890s, and at the same time Creizenach was publishing the volumes of his great Geschichte des neueren Dramas, which still contain the most comprehensive survey that we have of neo-Latin drama up to 1550. Rossi and Sanesi have dealt to some extent with the Latin drama in Italy, but their treatment is superficial compared with Creizenach's. In French there is no significant scholarly work in this field. In England J. A. Symonds gave a good account of the humanist drama in his Renaissance in Italy (1875) twenty years before Creizenach, but it was not until the appearance of Boas’ University Drama in the Tudor Age in 1907 that any work on Anglo-Latin dramatists was available.

In three earlier essays I examined the Latin epistolary and cryptic eclogues of fourteenth-century Italy and then (in more detail) a considerable number of the derivative and literary eclogues produced in various countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the present essay we shall be concerned with (A) new developments in literary pastoral, especially in Italy, and (B) the use of pastoral as a vehicle, both during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In A there are at least a dozen forms: piscatory eclogues, holitory, vinitory, domestic, mythological, rhetorical, Hebraistic, and humorous eclogues, the hunting-eclogue, the pastoral epyllion, the dream-eclogue, and the quasi-dramatic masque-pastoral.

The Vita anonyma of Leon Battista Alberti published in 1751 by Lorenzo Mehus is undoubtedly the finest source for the character as well as the life of this versatile thinker of the early Renaissance. It is a document of individualism, pride, and hope—so much so that Burckhardt merely had to restate its contents to make of Alberti's life a veritable paradeigma of Renaissance character as he saw it.

Students of Alberti have long discussed the question, who wrote this remarkable biography? Bonucci, in 1844, publishing it again as part of the Opere volgari of Alberti, claimed that the Vita was actually an autobiography, disguised, of course, by the use of the third person.

A scholar who has given much of his life to the study of Machiavelli and Machiavellianism, Prof. Giuseppe Prezzolini, recently observed that Machiavelli himself is partly responsible for the weird interpretations of which he has been victim, ‘because he did not take pains to express himself in a systematic form and with a coherent vocabulary. His way of writing is cited in the history of Itahan literature for its perspicuity, simplicity, absence of rhetoric. But it could not be cited for its precision … Machiavelli uses the same word for different concepts and expresses the same concepts with different words.' Prezzolini offers confirmation for his remarks from the corroborative reports of other explorers who wore themselves out slogging through the swamp of Machiavelli's vocabulary.

Recent scholarship dealing with Renaissance literary criticism has unduly neglected a very significant commentary on the Poetics, the Annotationi nel libro de la Poetica d'Aristotele by the Sienese humanist Alessandro Piccolomini. This commentary has, indeed, drawn the attention of Ebner, Saintsbury, Spingarn, Guerrieri-Crocetti, and Croce, but only in an incidental or fragmentary manner. Maria Rossi, in her monograph on Piccolomini, rehashed for the most part the comments made by Ebner in the nine pages she devoted to the Annotationi. Subsequently, Prof. Toffanin, in propounding his theory that Italian romanticism can be traced back to the sixteenth century, distorted the meaning of the Annotationi in order to make Piccolomini a precursor of Vico and Manzoni.

At the end of Pantagruel, when the conquest of the Dipsodes has been successfully completed and Pantagruel has recovered from his stomach trouble, thanks to the team of stalwarts who venture down his gullet and clean up the source of his indisposition, Rabelais takes leave of his readers, but only after whetting their appetites with this tantalizing hint of what is in store for them in his next volume:

First of all, a delimitation of the field: in this article I intend to discuss the vulgo, not the pobre, the villano, the labrador, or the pastor, eliminating in this way the entire theme of ‘contempt of court and praise of simple life’. It will be well to point out, however, that the ambivalent attitude of Golden Age Spaniards toward the villano, or peasant, is analogous to the ambivalence of their attitude toward the herd (necio-discreto) which will be our main concern