The history of Henry VIII's first ‘divorce’, a topic of so many implications, naturally has mysteries to be solved. Further study of contemporary documents can be expected to clarify much that still tantalizes us. Yet there is another aspect of the subject of Henry's marital status which has hardly been investigated, namely the state of the law on Henry's capacity to act if he were really incestuously married. If it were a fact that he was incestuously married, it must needs follow that he lacked some of the powers he would have had if he were not subject to this disability: and this is a fact of which his advisers will have taken notice. To bring legal material bearing on this aspect of the problem back into light may help to clear up one of the mysteries, namely how we are to explain the king's ambiguous attitude towards his marriage between the years 1525 and 1527.

They bene ybrought into a comely bowre,
And seru'd of all things that mote needfull bee
Yet secretly their hoste did on them lowre,
And welcomde more for feare, then charitce;
But they dissembled, what they did not see,
And welcomed themselves. Supper was dight;
Then they Malbecco prayd of curtesy,
That of his Lady they might have the sight,
And company at meat, to do them more delight.

Any reader of Renaissance News will immediately identify this stanza as one of the thousands that make up The Faerie Queene; in fact, given the name Malbecco and the situation described, he cannot fail to spot it as occurring in the ninth canto of Book Three. In a sense, however, he will be in error. It is actually a spurious composite of two of Spenser's stanzas in that canto: the nineteenth, which supplies everything before the period in line 6, and the twenty-fifth, from which the remainder is taken.

This summary description of 143 recently acquired Italian Renaissance manuscripts is not a detailed list nor an evaluation of the collection. An evaluation would require considerably greater familiarity with the business history of Florence than this reporter possesses.

According to the limited information available, the entire group of these business records originally formed part of the Gondi archives, described by Roberto Ridolfi in Gli archivi delle famiglie fiorentine. More specifically it belonged to that part of the Gondi archives which was left by the sisters Caterina (b. 1694) and Elisabetta (b. 1693), descendants of Giuliano il Vecchio, to the Ritiro della Quiete in Florence. Ridolfi refers rather briefly to the commercial papers then in the Ritiro, but fails to explain how they came to include so few Gondi and so many Medici and Amadori volumes.