It has long been recognized that the literary revolution precipitated by humanists in the fifteenth and six-teenth centuries was paralleled by profound pedagogical innovations in the traditional, scholastic educational structure. In addition to new literary norms, the hussmanist pedagogues evolved linguistic structures and usages fundamentally foreign to those of their scholastic predecessors and prescribed rhetorical methods for the presentation of material which undermined medieval dialectic. Walter Ong, in his study of Pierre Ramus, says of the developments in dialectics at the turn of the sixteenth century:

Historians often assert that the origins of modern science lay in a conscious revolt against the authority of Aristotle, a revolt that was openly proclaimed by Pierre de la Ramée, Francis Bacon, William Gilbert, and Galileo Galilei in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There is little agreement about the reasons for the revolt. Some hold that the essential characteristic of the new science was an increased attention to observation and experiment; others, that an emphasis on mathematics transformed the character of scientific inquiry. Those who emphasize the rôle of experiment have generally tended to favor what may be called social explanations of the rise of science, including technological, economic, religious, and political developments. In contrast, the rise of mathematical inquiries has been customarily linked with philosophical explanations of the new science, primarily in terms of Renaissance currents of orthodox Platonism and of esoteric Pythagoreanism.

A good deal has been said, and much of it negative, about the influence of Neoplatonism on the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's early biographer Serassi believed that it was at best a juvenile interest which gave place to a mature Aristotelianism, and this view survived into the early-twentieth-century study by Donadoni, along with the accusation that Tasso managed to platonize ‘senza sentire la forza del pensiero platonico’. More recently, B. T. Sozzi reexamined Tasso's Dialogues and works of literary criticism, and came to the conclusion that Tasso's interest in Neoplatonism was neither superficial nor transient, and became if anything more explicit in the later works; for Sozzi, however, Tasso's Neoplatonism is primarily a matter of temperament, a ‘segreta predilezione’ for the magical and the mystical, which has to fight for survival with the more rigorous structures of Aristotelian critical principles.

In two articles, dated 1958 and 1960, A.J. Sabol discussed a setting of Hedon's song ‘The Kisse’ in Cynthia's Revels (IV.iii.242) which occurs in Christ Church MS. Mus 439 and suggested convincingly that this setting was that intended for the first performance of the play at court in 1600. So far as is known the version of Hedon's song in the Christ Church manuscript does not occur elsewhere. The Christ Church manuscript was further brought to the attention of musicologists by J. P. Cutts in his discussion of the songs in Everie Woman in her Humor, for the manuscript contains the only known setting of a song which is referred to twice in that play: ‘Here's none but only I’.

The Christ Church manuscript was further brought to the attention of musicologists by J. P. Cutts in his discussion of the songs in Everie Woman in her Humor, for the manuscript contains the only known setting of a song which is referred to twice in that play: 'Here's none but only I'. It now seems profitable to look more closely at this Christ Church manuscript as a possible source for even more music in children's drama in particular, and more generally, as representing children's music at court. If we are to suggest that the collection may even represent the repertoire of the Children of the Chapel Royal then the ambiguities surrounding the performance of Everie Woman in her Humor are also highlighted.

It should be said at once that whatever his accomplishments as chief poet at the court of François I Clément Marot was never an important figure in Renaissance England. In his own country he was a popular and influential author, and although in La Deffence Du Bellay was to write of him in a tone verging on scorn Marot had in fact done a great deal to liberate French poetry from the Rhétoriqueur tradition and to ‘illustrate’ it with new grace, flexibility, and wit. To be sure, his early work owes much to the Rhétoriqueurs and to the Roman de la Rose, but some years before the Pléiade began its well-publicized program to improve French letters he had already experimented with such forms as the elegy and sonnet and had on occasion attempted intriguing combinations of Petrarchan themes and diction with older French forms.

The study of late-cinquecento Florence might well commence by repeating the plaint voiced by Professor J. H. Elliott with reference to seventeenth-century Spain: ‘… in most of its aspects, our picture of the reigns of Philip III and IV remains very much as it was drawn by Martin Hume in the old Cambridge Modern History over fifty years ago’. Indeed, we might go further by saying that our subject remains pretty much today where Riguccio Galluzzi left it in 1781: a terra incognita even the contours of which are hazy. This essay seeks to adumbrate the shape and texture of this society, to isolate some of its prominent and especially revealing features, to suggest that it retained some of the vitality and tension it had known in the past and, hopefully, to encourage others to turn their attention to this neglected area of Florentine studies.