The dating of La Mandragola is one of the most difficult problems in Machiavelli scholarship. Roberto Ridolfi, first in his biography of Machiavelli (1954) and more recently in an essay in La Bibliofilia (1962), proposed a new and apparently definitive solution; the comedy must have been written between January and February 1518, for the marriage of Lorenzo de’ Medici the younger, in the short space of one month, and performed soon after, on February 16, 1518.

In fact, we have very few and very late records about the performance of La Mandragola and the text of the comedy has come down to us only through an anonymous edition and one manuscript.

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

Du Rondeau, Berdan a dit: ‘Before Clément Marot the rondeau … was a name loosely applied to a large number of forms having little more than the use of the refrain in common… . In the jardin de Plaisance, in rondeau form, L'Infortuné gives his directions:

Par et, pour, mats, donq, par, cart, quant
Ne se doibt rondeau commencer
Qui ne scait son fait despencer
A bien conclure et rimacer
Ou de plat fauldra ou de cant
Acteurs seront celuy mocquant
Qui rondeau cuidera passer
Sans bien rentrer et compasser.
Par et etc.
Plusiers s'abusent en pensant
Que rondeau soit bon pour rentrer
Mais non chascun couplet porter
Doibt sens parfaict et suspenser
Clos et ouuert non suspensant
Par et etc.'

Berdan indique, en note, qu'il cite ce texte d'aprés Fabri [Le Grand et Vrai Art de Pleine Rhétorique, introd.

The name of Pietro Bizari has been linked with that of Sir Philip Sidney since 1633, when a duodecimo volume published in Frankfort appeared with a fulsome title

These letters, written by the learned Huguenot Hubert Languet, senior diplomat in the service of August, Elector of Saxony, became renowned for reasons other than the eminence of Languet and his protégé, Sidney.