Most Students and many scholars seem to believe that for the Renaissance, as well as for other periods of Western history, the relevant source material is adequately known, and that all there remains to be done is to reinterpret and to correlate these wellknown sources and to fit them into a comprehensive picture. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this complacent view does not correspond to the actual state of affairs. In the field of humanist literature and thought, on which I have focused my attention for twenty years or so (that is, in the area of literary, scholarly and philosophical works in Latin produced in Italy between 1300 and 1600), many extant authors, and even many writings of well-known authors are not listed in the best available reference works, and even some of the most famous writings have not yet been published in critical editions, or adequately explored as to their chronology and textual history.

This brief survey will of necessity be a highly personal one. It seemed to me advisable to list only those topics that have been thrown into relief by recent work undertaken by my colleagues, my pupils and myself, and I have not attempted to present these topics in any systematic way. In some instances the requirement is clear: future work will be hamstrung until this or that subject has been fully explored and the results of the research made available in a cheap and readable form. In other cases the projects are more Utopian. All of them, however, have forced their way into recent work of one kind or another so that, whatever their other faults or merits, they are at least up-to-date. I have classified them rather loosely into somewhat sprawling groups, having nevertheless some ground in common.

Critics have encountered considerable difficulty in explaining the setting of Leonardo's ‘Virgin of the Rocks'. Thus L. H. Heydenreich asserts, ‘Das Bild schildert kein Ereignis der biblischen Geschichte'. A background of apocryphal or legendary material has been postulated and denied. Although biblical history offers no explanation for the rocks, a very simple and obvious source appears in conventional biblical exegesis. A convention arose in the twelfth century where by the Sponsa in the Canticum could be taken as the Blessed Virgin as well as the Church, and this attitude persisted in Catholic countries well after the time of Leonardo. Thus Cant. 2: 13-14 was read as an injunction to the Virgin: Surge, arnica tnea, speciosa mea, et vent, columba mea, inforaminibuspetrce, in caverna maceriæ.

On the Eve of Palm Sunday, April 8, 1498, Florence witnessed a wholly disgraceful exhibition of primitive savagery and brutal instincts. The ordeal by fire, which Savonarola and his opponents had been scheduled to undergo, had failed to take place on the previous day; consequently the populace was in a particularly ugly frame of mind on being deprived of this ghastly spectacle. That Sunday night, the Florentines, and those citizens of the neighborhood who had nocked to the Tuscan capital in the hope of sharing in the promised looting, broke all bonds of restraint and the city endured a veritable ‘Walpurgisnacht’ of horror. Murder, brutal assault, arson, robbery and most other forms of violence were the order of the night; the events are recounted not only by contemporary chroniclers but by modern historians as well.

Mr.John H. Long's plea for more documentary evidence in ‘the case of “O Mistresse mine” ‘ has prompted me to supply some of that evidence which has come to my attention in connection with a study of John Gamble's Commonplace Book (New York Public Library MS Drexel 4257). I offer it as a postscript to Mr.Long's comments (RN VII, 15-16) and to Mr. Sidney Beck's stimulating paper on the subject (RN VI, 19-23). The Gamble MS contains a seventeenth-century setting of the ‘O Mistresse mine’ tune which has hitherto escaped the notice of investigators. This setting is, in fact, the only known contemporary source of the tune with an accompanying text. It will be recalled that the versions upon which all previous speculation has been based are instrumental versions, the first from Morley's Consort Lessons (1599), the second from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (ca. 161).