The revival of the drama was not one of the accomplishments of the Renaissance. This revival had already taken place during the later Middle Ages, and by the twelfth century the plays connected with the festivals of the church had reached a considerable degree of complexity and dramatic effect. By the end of the fourteenth century the cycles of Biblical plays were well established, and in the fifteenth century they reached their greatest development. The rise of the moralities—those plays in which personified virtues and vices struggle for the possession of man's soul—also took place in the later Middle Ages, although the earliest references to them go back no further than the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

Thanks especially to the work of Professor Dámaso Alonso, the study of correlative poetry has made notable strides in recent years. He has concentrated mainly on Spanish and Italian poetry, but has made an excursus into Greek and Latin verse as well. It goes without saying that the phenomenon is universal in its scope.

In this paper I am concerned with only one of the aspects of this poetry, the disseminative-recapitulative type, because both chronologically and geographically information on it can be extended further than hitherto, and because the influences that have played a primary role in establishing its vogue are still in need of being traced with a greater degree of precision. I shall deal with this type chiefly in connection with its vogue in the Romance-speaking countries and England during the Renaissance and baroque periods.

In 1499 the Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano renewed an ancient debate on the subject of the relation between poetry and history. The circumstances in which he composed the dialogue Actius were sombre. After the French invasion of 1495 Pontano had lost his official position at court. Although he still composed some correspondence for the government he was no longer charged with important responsibilities and indeed his behavior during the crisis of the invasion had been such that Guicciardini could later accuse him of having shown ingratitude to the dynasty that had for so long furnished him with protection and patronage. At the same time he had been stricken with a series of private misfortunes the chief of which was the loss of his son Lucio.

Although the importance of Sir Thomas More's Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula in the development of the English biography has been noted, historians concerned with More's life and thought have singularly neglected the work. A study of it, however, reveals much of interest concerning More's psychological crisis of 1504, about his attitude towards the papacy, and about his desire to avoid public office.

More's Life of Pico, written in 1504, is not an original work. It is, rather, a translation of a biography written by Pico's nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico, as an introduction to Pico's collected works. More's translation is generally quite literal; he makes, however, a number of omissions and additions, and from these we can gain insight into certain of his own ideas.

Somewhere between 1510 and 1520, Niccolò Machiavelli composed the Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio. The second chapter of that work contains what for Machiavelli is a rather elaborate theoretical disquisition. It deals with such arcane matters as the origin of civil polities, the beginnings of law, the forms of political rule, and the succession that those forms naturally follow in their historical sequence. Never before and never again did Machiavelli concern himself in so concentrated a way with the higher and more ghostly issues of political theory. Never before and never again was Machiavelli literally so un-Machiavellian. In Chapter 2 of Book I of the Discorsi he was literally un-Machiavellian in the simple sense that he cribbed most of that chapter without acknowledgement from another writer. In so doing he initiated a minor literary mystery—the Mystery of the Missing Translation or the Puzzle of Polybius vi.

The danse macabre pleased the medieval sensibility. It was painted throughout western Europe in the fifteenth century, and the printing profession early took an interest in the theme. The most celebrated wall paintings of the dance of death in France were also the earliest—1424 at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris. In 1485, woodcut replicas of these paintings with the verses from the cemetery printed underneath the pictures were brought out by the Parisian printer and priest Guyot Marchant. Printers in Paris and elsewhere followed suit. In Lyons, Mathieu Huss printed a Grant Danse Macabre in February 1499 (o.s.), and fascination with the same cuts and verses extended there well into the sixteenth century. Claude Nourry brought out editions in 1501, 1519, and 1523; Pierre de Saint Lucie, the successor of Nourry and the husband of his widow, printed editions in 1537,1548, and 1555.

The present study extends a series of articles dealing with the history of the doctrine of Nature and Genius. From Greek times on the doctrine was illustrated—often allegorically—in literature and other arts, and manifested various phases of culture.

In the Detroit Institute of Arts hangs a magnificent sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry labeled “Hilly Landscape”. It has been provisionally described by Mrs. Ardèle Coulin Weibel, Curator Emeritus of Textiles and Islamic Art. The accompanying plate describes it as a landscape with staffage by Franz Geubels, Brussels. It is dated about 1560.

The main scene, which is framed by a border, is more than a landscape. In the foreground lies an area of undergrowth including bracken, blackberry brambles, clover, and other plants, as well as decaying remnants of former vegetation.

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.

One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.

“I vow to bee of no other side, then of Truth”, wrote Samuel Daniel in the first installment of his History of England, “or as neer truth-likelinesse as I possibly can get.” And in the Collection, or fuller version of the History, published the year before his death, he went on to indicate his method of attaining this truth, or truth-likeliness, in what he wrote: “For the Worke it selfe I can chalenge nothing therein but only the sowing it together, and the obseruation of those necessary circumstances, and inferences which the History naturally ministers”; and yet, “although the inquisition of Ancient times, written by others be prepared, yet the Collection and Disposition I finde most Laborious”.

Sir Thomas Browne has puzzled his critics. His high rank as one of the great writers of English prose is well established, but he has been read in different and sometimes incompatible ways. Professor Basil Willey, in his illuminating chapters on Browne in The Seventeenth Century Background, reminds us that “It is a romantic falsification to ‘relish’ Browne for his ‘quaintness’”. This was the nineteenth-century tendency from the time when Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge rediscovered him to the essays of Walter Pater (Macmillan's liv, 1886; Appreciations, 1889) and Sir Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, Second Series, 1876) at the close of the period. Pater uses the word quaint and also humourist, although he circumscribes each with definitions.