The Loci Communes is Melanchthon's best known and most important work, the first systematic handbook of reformed theology, first published in 1521 and in numerous other editions since.

In 1949 Professor Carlos Moseley of the University of Oklahoma acquired a copy of the 1548 edition of this book from Germany, which is distinguished not only by the personage of its first owner but also by some autograph entries of prominent leaders of the Protestant Reformation. The copy is bound in a sixteen-century leather binding, brown, with the stamped portraits of Melanchthon on the front and Luther on the back side, each of them accompanied by a distich:

Ingenium referunt clari monumenta Philippi,
Corporis effigiem talis imago refert
Ista representat faciem pictura Lutheri,
Qui puro Christi dogmata corde doce(t).

The Vita S. Potiti presents us with a rather strange situation. We have one of the greatest humanists writing a life of a saint, in which he narrates events which he obviously disbelieves. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) had been asked to write a series of lives of the saints, and the one we are discussing was the first. It was also the last, for Alberti abandoned the project. He never gave a reason. It seems that he must have found this type of work too foreign to his way of thought and humanistic ideals. There is an indication of this in his letter to Leonardo Dati, in which he expressed the fear that learned men would find his work not to their taste since it could not be documented and was too much like a fable.

The Palais de Justice, on the He de la Cité in Paris, was the hub of the universe for the officers of the crown, the upper segment of the French bourgeoisie, which really formed a separate class, the noblesse de la robe. They ranked well above the rest of the middle class in dignity and influence, yet clearly below the ancient noblesse de l'épée, whose position rested on their ancient titles and lands. The hierarchy of the royal courts was crowned by the Parlement de Paris itself, whose présidents often held important executive offices from the king as well. Parlement's traditional right to protest before the registration of royal edicts gave it frequent opportunities to modify national policy, a privilege which it sometimes carried to the point of outright refusal to register.

The moral character of Lady Macbeth has been thoroughly castigated and there is no need to restate an established case. In regard to her ethical and spiritual situation, no one can question the cardinal importance of the inhumanity of the ‘fiend-like queen', and of the crimes plotted and committed after her great soliloquy-prayer 'invoking the Powers of Hell to take possession of her'. Granting the pre-eminence of these sins in Lady Macbeth, I should like to develop here a lesser theme of a lesser evil which Shakespeare has carefully incorporated into her character. This evil consists in Lady Macbeth's usurping, as a wife, that conjugal authority which Shakespeare's age regarded as naturally and irrevocably assigned to the husband.

The range of the practical and esthetic reform of sacred music in the second half of the sixteenth century can no longer be equated solely with the achievement of Palestrina. Musical scholarship, in quest of a truer picture of the musical aspects of the Counter-Reformation, has revealed other factors and other figures, intrinsically as well as historically interesting. Among these is the Italian composer Vincenzo Ruffo (ca. 1520-87).

Ruffo's most important post, after leaving his native Verona, was as chapelmaster at the Duomo in Milan (1563-72), where he worked under the direct supervision of one of the most powerful leaders of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Carlo Borromco. The Cardinal had played an important role in the final sessions of the Council of Trent and in the Commission of Cardinals for the study of sacred music (1564) before assuming active control of liturgical affairs at Milan in 1565.