In August 1465 Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, mother of the art patron and builder Filippo Strozzi, arranged for an annual set of masses in the parish church of Santa Maria Ughi. Her purpose, as she said, was to commemorate the souls of “all our dead,” “tutti enostri passati” (sic). In her record of the commission, Alessandra carefully outlined the conditions of the bequest. She noted, for example, the location of the land donation whose proceeds subsidized the masses and the day the ten masses were to be performed, and made alternate arrangements should the priests of Santa Maria Ughi fail to uphold their obligations. Yet within this context of legal specifications and formulae, Alessandra remained curiously vague about one of the program's essential clauses: namely, the precise identity of “all our dead.“

Characterized by Burckhardt as the father of modernjournalism, Pietro Aretino was the first vernacular writer to understand and exploit fully the resource of the printing press. But while some kinds of his writings anticipate now conventional varieties of journalism, such a label slights the more literary of his activities in drama, poetry, hagiography, and prose dialogue. The protean variety of Aretino's works made him both successor to Bembo as the leading man of letters in the 1530s and 40s and the model for the poligrafi who would succeed him. As with those poligrafi, a coherence to his activities can be seen in his posture as social critic; preeminently, in his secular compositions, Aretino writes as a satirist.

When Horatio tells Hamlet, “I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done” (V.ii. 156-57), we find ourselves amused and bemused trying to imagine what conceiveable edification could be gleaned from a marginal gloss on the courtly gabble of Osric's invitation to the duel. Yet while Horatio was having his little joke about edifying margents, Renaissance commentators, scholarly annotators, translators, editors, printers, and authors of all kinds were busily constructing elaborate scaffolds of printed marginalia around texts both ancient and modern, ranging from Holy Writ to handbooks for New World entrepreneurs and manuals on the courtly art of self-defense. The ostensible and frequently advertised purpose of this marginal material was to make texts more accessible to the “general reader,” to provide the non-specialist working on a difficult text a place to stand that was grounded on more familiar books, ideas, and experience.

At the time of the Revolution of 1688-89 in England, for the first time since the accession of Queen Elizabeth I one hundred and thirty years earlier, a woman had a claim to the crown of England in her own right—Princess Mary of Orange, wife of Prince William of Orange of the Netherlands and the elder daughter of James II, the Catholic king of England, by his first and Protestant wife. That claim was one possible solution to the question of who should head the new government, but it was finally decided to create a dual monarchy, a constitutional arrangement unique in the nation's history. Under it the prince and princess of Orange became King William III and Queen Mary II of England, with administrative power vested in William alone. Although regarded as a regnant queen, one of only six regnant queens in the nation's history, Mary, in fact, received no substantive regal power.

I'll begin with a couple of disclaimers. First, though it is a good many years since I had to present a birth certificate in order to get my senior citizen's discount, I was not present at the beginnings of the New England Renaissance Conference (N.E.R.C.) but was still at Harvard in the Society of Fellows with a very new Ph.D. More important, I was a card-carrying medievalist at a time when medievalists were far more detached from the Renaissance than they are now. If we regarded the Renaissance at all, it was as a kind of mopping- up operation of the Middle Ages; perhaps we remembered Gilson's remark: “The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction.” But I slowly learned wisdom and first spoke to the N.E.R.C. in 1951. I had discovered that, contrary to Gilson, joining the Renaissance was not a subtraction but very much an addition. Nevertheless anything I say about the earliest period of the Conference is based only on information received.

Thirty-five years ago Robert Lopez, by his own description, “narrowly escaped lynching” at the hands of non-economic historians for proposing that economic depression was a fundamental cause of the cultural outpouring of the Renaissance (Lopez, 1953). Several years later, Lopez took heart that, despite “their occasional retard,” cultural historians were coming round to his view (Lopez and Miskimin, 408-09). Today, the situation is nearly reversed. A growing number of economic historians no longer subscribe to the depression thesis while most non-economic historians do. I will not speculate about whose “retardation” is to blame, but would like to take stock of some issues raised by the depression debate—a debate that transcends economic issues and raises important questions about definitions, periodization, and the cultural implications of economic conditions.

“What does economic history have to do with Renaissance scholarship?” This is the question I asked myself when I was asked to participate in a panel with the title “Recent Trends in Renaissance Scholarship: Economic History.” Over a generation ago economic history escaped from the confines of conventional historical periodization, in which the Renaissance functions as the keystone, with its claim to being the origin of modernity. This conventional periodization, with its inconsistent mingling of political and cultural criteria for the organization of the narrative of modern history, makes whole categories of historical questions almost impossible to ask, let alone to answer. For many economic historians—and I count myself among them—it was a liberation to abandon all this in favor of a periodizing structure determined by long trends in population, price levels, relative prices, and other phenomena associated with these.

A product of the later Renaissance, a writer on behalf of the Counter Reformation but still “an inhabitant of Machiavelli's moral universe” (Skinner, 1; 249), Botero was remarkably precocious in observing and thinking about population issues and their relationship with economic conditions.

Sometime in the later 1590s Justus Lipsius and one of his Louvain students had a nice conversation about sewers. The student thought the topic comic and stifled a giggle, but Lipsius soon set him straight. The sewers of ancient Rome had been as physically imposing as any other great Roman artifact. Moreover—and more important to the student of history—they were directly linked with the other artifacts and institutions that had provided the material basis for Rome's uniquely splendid civilization, with its powerful armies, Stoic philosophy, and inimitable literature. Only a full study of the material life of ancient Rome could explain the continuous population growth that had enabled the city to expand so far and last so long. The two of them were off, happily embarked on a long inquiry into the secret and public means that Rome had used to enlarge its population, encourage trade, and avoid corruption over the many centuries between Romulus and the Antonines (Lipsius, 161-63).