In a long letter written from London on May 19, 1517, to Alvise Foscari in Venice, Nicolo Sagudino describes a number of incidents showing how Italian musicians were faring at the court of Henry VIII. Among those he mentions were the Venetian organist, Dionisio Memo; and a lutenist, Zuan Piero. Memo had composed a vocal quartet for the king with a Latin title beginning:

He had also brought to the court ‘a lad, so excellent a performer on the lute, that his majesty never wearied of listening to him’. The lad's identity is unknown, but the king's delight at his skill on the lute was the despair of Zuan Piero, who thought of returning to Italy because of it.

Mathematical education was part of the encyclopedic program of Baïf's Academy and its ofishoot the Palace Academy, as Miss Frances Yates has aptly shown. But who were the teachers? She has speculated that the classical archeologist Louis de Montjusieu taught mathematics to the Duc de Joyeuse at the Academies rather than privately. An analysis of the interests and contacts of a number of mathematicians in the Paris area during the 1570's and 1580's adds to her speculation several masters of mathematics, three of whom will be discussed here.

By twentieth-century American standards, or fourteenth-century Florentine standards, Filippo Villani, nephew of the more famous Giovanni Villani, was a successful man. As early as 1361 he held a chair of jurisprudence in the Studio at Florence, was appointed chancellor of the Commune of Perugia in 1377, which position he held for five or six years, and in the latter years of his life spent a very pleasant old age as public reader of Dante at Florence.

In addition to his public duties, he wrote in Latin and published in 1381-82 a work in two books on the history of Florence and the lives of her famous citizens, which gained the approval as well as the corrections and comments of the learned Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the Commune of Florence. We may well imagine that Filippo, as a chronicler, following in the footsteps of his uncle Giovanni and his father Matteo, was infected by the brilliant revival of Latin letters set in motion by Petrarch and spurred on by Salutati.

In an appendix to his biography of Francesco Guicciardini published in 1862, Eugène Benoist printed a brief piece by Guicciardini which the editors of Guicciardini's Opere Inedite had overlooked. The piece is a ‘Portrait of Lorenzo Magnifico de' Medici’. About its authenticity there can be no doubt; the manuscript on which Benoist's publication was based, was written in Guicciardini's own hand. Thus Palmarocchi, the editor of the most recent critical edition of Guicciardini's works, printed it in the volume containing Guicciardini's Saitti Politici e Ricordi. In an explanatory note Palmarocchi tried to date the manuscript and suggested that it was written in Spain during the last months of the year 1512 and the first of 1513.

The ‘gentle’ Dametas, on seeing the Bear, thrust himself into a bush as far as he could go and, on Dorus' pushing him and bidding him be of good courage, thought Doras was the Bear and was with difficulty persuaded that the Bear was indeed dead. Then, like ‘a man of Revengefull spirite, hee gave the deade body many a wounde, swearing by muche yt was pitty, suche Beastes shoulde bee suffered in a Comon Welthe’. Finally, with immoderate joy ‘as before with feare (for his harte was framed never to bee withoute a passyon) hee went by his fayre charge, daunsing, pyping, and singing, till they all come to the presence of the carefull Company’, so near ‘as hee might bee hearde of the Duke’.

The marks and annotations with which sixteenth-century readers littered the vacant spaces in their printed books are not often of much interest to the twentieth-century scholar, who knows how unlikely it is that he has Shakespeare's copy before him, or that he will discover another body of marginalia as large and significant as Gabriel Harvey's. Yet a certain real if narrow interest may be found, I think, in two sixteenth-century books of mine which were annotated by British antiquarians of the period.

A distinctive feature of early Tudor humanism, with St. Thomas More, Erasmus, John Colet, and John Lewis Vives, was a trenchant critique of war's place in the social pattern, coupled with sustained efforts to effect peaceful reforms in England. This criticism of society not only marks their kind of humanism but was indeed destined to help shape the modern mind. On the English record, Colet appears as the pioneer, beginning with his Oxford lectures on St. Paul (1496), in which he broke with the main traditional concept of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ war, reaching a conclusion that it is impossible for evil and war to produce good or to be a Christian thing. The means Colet used to reach this view is itself notable.

In his now classic study of Italian vernacular and Latin pastoral Enrico Carrara briefly mentions the only eclogue of Naldo Naldi (1436-ca. 1513) known to him, a panegyric of Cosimo de' Medici expressed as a dialogue between two shepherds, Alpheus and Gnomon, stigmatizing it as pretty mediocre stuff; Vittorio Rossi is a great deal kinder, describing it as‘un’ egloga di temperato sapore classico, la migliore delle sue poesie’. Carrara based his opinion of Naldi's ability as a Latin eclogist on this single effort (one that the poet himself may have regretted), and might well have revised his estimate had he seen Naldi's best pastoral work, the ten other eclogues that appear in a manuscript (BN anc. fonds lat. 8389) rediscovered over twenty years ago in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Alice Hulubei and subsequently examined by her in a lengthy article.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry is at once a pleasure and a problem for the source hunter. Wyatt often translates direcdy from his source, but frequently he borrows no more than opening lines or stanzas, as in ‘O goodely hand’, where only the first three stanzas derive from Petrarch's sonnet ‘O bella man’, and the rest of the poem is either original or drawn from another source.

The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (abbreviated as CNRS) has so far published four books on the Renaissance, namely, Musique et Poésie au XVIe siècle, La Musique Instrumentale de la Renaissance, Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, and La Renaissance dans les Provinces du Nord (cf. RN ix, 211 f., and xi, 19 f. and 141 f). The editoris now preparing a fifth volume, dedicated to lute music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As in the case of the earlier publications the symposium on lute music will, in part, present to a wider public the papers read before a congress of scholars convened at Paris in September 1957. A list of these papers will be found at the end of this report, but it would be a mistake to file away the lute volume as another Kongressbericht, for it represents an effort to co-ordinate the work of individual scholars in a field of research where teamwork is sadly needed.