Erasmus’ attitudes towards Italy and the Italians and the extent of his dependence on Italian sources have been the subject of several competent studies. The prevalent view, however, tends to minimize Erasmus’ debt to Italy. The great representative of Northern humanism, it is argued, surpassed in scholarly stature his Italian contemporaries and hence had nothing to learn from them. As a moral and religious thinker deeply rooted in the traditions of the Devotio Moderna, he was far removed from the secular and even pagan tendencies of Italian humanism. He spent most of his life, apart from his native Holland, in Paris and Louvain, London, Oxford and Cambridge, Basel and Freiburg, all of them important intellectual centers in their own right and with their own traditions. The three years of his Italian journey, undertaken when he was around forty years of age, do not seem to occupy a very large place in his intellectual biography.

Six generations of students of Magnyfycence have accepted 1515-16 as the date of its composition. Largely as the result of William O. Harris's recent serious questioning of Robert Lee Ramsay's political interpretation of Magnyfycence there is sufficient cause for re-examining the date traditionally assigned the play. I shall review the reasons for the date and then propose, tentatively, that Magnyfycence was conceived, perhaps actually composed, before 1504 during Skelton's first experience at the Tudor court.

In Skelton's ‘Magnyfycence’ and the Cardinal Virtue Tradition Harris has demonstrated that Magnyfycence is probably not what Ramsay thought it was—a personal attack upon Cardinal Wolsey, his rise to power and his abuse of authority.

Mary Stuart was accused of many things, but never of being a theologian. Nevertheless, at the end of the summer of 1561, the recently widowed and star-crossed Queen, in an extraordinary interview with the intrepid Reformer, John Knox, put her finger on what was perhaps the fundamental question of the Reformation. Concerning the respective credentials of the Kirk of Scotland and the Kirk of Rome, she pleaded: ‘Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and they interpret in another. Whom shall I believe? And who shall be judge?’ Knox's reply was, au fond, an appeal to the Holy Spirit.

Attempting to recover what has been a largely ignored and vastly overlooked subject in theater history, Professor Glynne Wickham has demonstrated the importance of the study of civic pageantry as a natural part of the evolution of English drama. Wickham makes a most persuasive case for the significance of these dramatic entertainments as they contribute both technically and thematically to the regular stage of the English Renaissance, and he shows clearly that the whole subject is in need of further exploration in order to counter the neglect it has received at the hands of many scholars. Civic pageantry, as Wickham defines it and as I use the term, refers of course to planned dramatic entertainments, not just color or spectacle, designed to honor the sovereign or magistrate on special occasions. Generally, there are three kinds of pageants: royal entries of the sovereign, the sovereign's provincial progresses, and the annual Lord Mayor's Show in London.