Diographies of popes are somewhat uncommon, perhaps because a writer to whom a pope showed favor might be in trouble with his successor. Pius II has left us his own extensive Commentaries, and his interesting career and personality attracted a good deal of attention among his contemporaries. His successor Paul II was a less exotic figure, and it is fortunate that the documents relating to his reign can be supplemented by several literary biographies, among them the work of Gaspar of Verona, who held the chair of rhetoric at the Studio under Pius II and seems to have maintained it under Pope Paul.

The problem presented by Thomas Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie (London, 1602) has not yet been satisfactorily solved. The question is: since Campion's Ayres arouse unanimous praise for his sensitive ear and metrical skill, how is it that his treatise on adapting classical metrics to English verse evokes charges of an insensitive ear and of phonetic inconsistency? Why does Campion seem to hear his ayres but not all of his examples in Observations? The earlier critics tend to blame his poor understanding of phonetic quantity in Observations. He is accused of ‘hopeless confusion’ and of having failed in the task he set himself. His’ system must be wrong’ and his omission of needed examples shows ‘the apparently irresistible spirit of perversity’. His work is cited as evidence that ‘shows how difficult it was to attain English (and therefore phonetic) conception of quantity’.

One of the minor points raised by Raymond de Roover in his valuable study on The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank deals with a document which he was unable to retrieve in the Florentine Archivio di Stato. First referred to by Giuseppe Canestrini in his pioneering study of Florentine fiscal history published in 1862, and subsequently cited and partly edited by numerous other scholars, such as Alfred Doren and Armand Grunzweig, this document, which seemed to have been lost since the reorganization of the Florentine archives in the first decade of this century, listed the names of Florentine citizens engaged in commerce, the name of the company of which each was a partner, a figure representing a tax assessment on the company, and the share of this tax which each of the company's partners was liable to pay.

Behind the humanists’ battle cry ‘ad fontes’ lies a long and laborious endeavor to get at the original meaning of the ancient texts with all the admittedly limited philological tools at their disposal. In his work on the Bible Erasmus was spurred to this effort by a religious zeal which is too seldom associated with the author of the Praise of Folly. Yet one of his most important contributions to the history of thought was his use of a humanistic method for the interpretation of scripture.

William Gager, the leading writer of Academic Latin drama at Oxford in the late sixteenth century, celebrated on 6, 7, and 8 February 1591/2 the most sustained triumph of his dramatic career. On Sunday 6 February, his new play Ulysses Redux received its first performance at Christ Church. On the following day, Monday 7 February, his famous comedy Rivales, first performed in June 1583 before the Polish Prince Alasco, was revived for a second performance. On Tuesday 8 February (Shrove Tuesday) Seneca's tragedy Hippolytus was presented. Gager expanded the play for this occasion by writing some additional scenes, including a Prologue and Epilogue of his own. At the end of the performance of Hippolytus, Gager brought on to the stage first the figure of Momus, the carping critic, and then an ‘Epilogus Responsivus’ who refuted Momus’ objections one by one.

The discovery of letters of friendship written by ‘young great men’ in their period of conflict and self-discovery may enable us at last to see the shaping of their lives, in youth as in maturity. The momentous decisions and public commitments of their maturity, long regarded by posterity as sudden and inexplicable, may now appear as the natural outcome of early impulses and influences. In the case of Martin Luther such an unlikely find would probably illuminate a stage in his development now considered as crucial but obscured by lack of reliable evidence.

Renaissance emblem books constituted ‘manifestations of popularly accepted esoteric notions which vastly contributed to the formation of the great post-medieval styles, especially mannerism and baroque’. For some time the critical commonplace has prevailed that Chapman, particularly in Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595), is emblematic, with no explanation of precisely what that means. To understand Chapman's relation to the emblem writers one must compare their methods and their shared concerns of subject matter, as well as their individual images. The relevant question is how Chapman applies the individual emblematic elements and the method to a thematic concern with art and nature to create a poetic synthesis in Ovids Banquet of Sence.