European universities had great intellectual and religious influence in the Renaissance and Reformation and exhibited considerable variety. Italian universities taught law and medicine to doctoral students. Their loose organization made it possible for professors to produce original research in law, medicine, philosophy, and the humanities. Northern European universities concentrated on teaching arts to undergraduates, while theology was the most important graduate faculty. Their stronger structure enabled Martin Luther and other professors of theology in German, Dutch, Swiss, and English universities to create and lead the Protestant Reformation. By the early seventeenth century universities everywhere were in decline.

This article examines the problem of canon-making in the Italian Renaissance. How did one store works to be read, how did one read them, and what did one exclude from a proper library: these concerns represent the general conceptual questions which the specifics of the article address. The article begins with a discussion of fifteenth-century library formation, then moves on to the specific case of Ferrara, using as a point of departure a dialogue set at the court of Leonello d'Este. The article presents an analysis of a section of that work on the constitution of a library, and then examines part 10. There, the interlocutors are concerned with authenticity, as they address how one determined whether a work was genuine or a forgery. Along the way, they offer literary and philological arguments, which, precisely because they are not in the front rank of humanist achievements, allow us to peer deeply into the social aspects of Renaissance reading practice. There is an edition and English translation of the text as an appendix.

Although often ignored in studies of nationalism, beauty is a central feature of every imagined nation. The conflicts surrounding the dissolution of the monasteries can be read as hinging on the question of what makes a nation beautiful. For the traditionalist rebel Robert Aske, "the beauties of this realm" were the abbeys themselves. For John Bale, by contrast, the books ransacked from monastic libraries were the true "beauty of our nation." Whereas Aske offers a vision of timeless feudal harmony, Bale's idea of national beauty, rooted in Petrarchan motifs of loss and nostalgia, inaugurates new ways of imagining the nation.

According to a popular legend in the Middle Ages, toads were used as the arms of the king of France before Clovis's conversion to Christianity. This paper follows the evolution of these symbolic toads in literary, juridical, and historical texts, as they adapt to changing political environments in the Renaissance. In general, the toads were used to compare negatively with the virtuous lilies during the Middle Ages in France. As monarchical power became more absolute, writers tried to adapt the toads to this new political context, but the toads tended to disappear in France while they flourished in other countries, such as the Spanish Netherlands, where they were sometimes exploited as part of a polemic against the French.