Machiavelli, like Christ, came into history only in his thirties. His youth is virtually unknown to us, until today. We find only a few facts in his father's Ricordi, which covers the period 1474-87; there we learn that at the age of seven Niccolò studied the ‘donatello’ (the short edition of the late-classical grammar of Donatus), first with Master Matteo, near S. Trinità bridge, then, from March 1477, with Battista di Filippo da Poppi, who taught in the church of St. Benedict. At ten, he went to live with Master Piero Maria, to study the Abacus (a short arithmetical treatise) and ‘librettine,’ the elementary calculating system. Lastly, in November 1481, Niccolò began to study Latin, under Pagolo da Ronciglione's direction. And that is all.

To anyone with an interest in the general question of Russian relations with the West during the pre-Petrine period of Russian history the so-called heresy of the Judaizers merits special attention. Although our sources for the study of the Judaizing movement are limited, extant materials do provide a unique opportunity to observe Russian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at a crucial moment of interaction with foreign elements that criticized, if not denied, traditional Russian beliefs and institutions. At a time of European history when criticism of the established order was rife, when traditions, attitudes, and creeds felt the sharp thrust of reasoned inquiry, Russia was not aloof from the ferment that threatened all dogmatism and rigorism of belief.

Historians have overlooked a significant aspect of Ferdinand and Isabella's Santa Hermandad. The canon of historical knowledge has long included the part played by the Hermandad army in royal efforts to establish control over Castile and to conquer Granada. However, the use made of these troops was equally important in the period after the victory over the Moors. After 1492 the record of the Hermandad army clearly demonstrates the continuing process of growing royal power and in so doing indicates the basic patterns of the reign. The key is found in the hitherto unappreciated participation of the Hermandad army in the Italian campaigns of 1495-98.

When we speak of ‘revenge tragedy,’ we are often unaware of the extent to which our approach to these important Renaissance plays has been conditioned by the name we have given them. Elizabethans themselves recognized no distinct dramatic type called revenge play. The term is a modern one, made current at the turn of the century by A. H. Thorndike, and first defined at length by Fredson Bowers more than thirty years ago. As a critical term, it depends upon the modern meaning of revenge, and it simultaneously reflects and shapes both modern assumptions about the subject matter of the plays and modern prejudices about the ethical principles upon which they are assumed to be predicated.