Recently a new theory of the structure of Spenser's Amoretti k has been put forward. It is based on the argument that Amoretti LXII refers, not to January 1 but to March 25, 'the day on which the year number is changed' [in Elizabethan times]. This revision of the day's date makes it possible to argue that the forty-seven sonnets from XXII through LXVIII correspond to the Lenten season in 1594, 'including Easter and the six Sundays before Easter.

Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Wyclif, and the author of Piers Plowman, all refer to the making, or holding, of “lovedays;” in fact, there are many references to this custom in the literary, legal, and historical records of mediaeval England. Yet by 1602 the word was so out of use that Thomas Speght, in “The hard words of Chaucer explained,” glosses “Louedaies” as “arbitrements.” In the nineteenth century the antiquarian, John Timbs, confused the loveday with two other mediaeval institutions, the “law day” and the “boon day,” misleading Skeat and others. His mistake is preserved today in such standard works as Wharton's Law-lexicon and Black's Law Dictionary. Meanwhile, in 1798, Thomas Tyrwhitt defined the loveday as “a day appointed for the amicable settlement of differences,” and the Oxford English Dictionary repeats this definition, adding “hence an agreement entered into at such a meeting.”

The weakest spot in the attempt to define, describe, and understand the Renaissance is our failure to consider causes. This failure is largely due to a failure of definition in time. The beginning has been placed anywhere between the Sixteenth and the Fourteenth Centuries. Most of the causes which have been suggested (the fall of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America) are Fifteenth Century phenomena. But it is generally agreed that humanism began with Petrarch. I think we must ask ourselves why the Latin classics, which had been lying about in neglected corners of libraries, should suddenly become the most valuable things in the world. It is not enough to attribute this new enthusiasm to “fashion.” Men turn eagerly to new ideas chiefly when they are dissatisfied with the old; and there were good reasons for dissatisfaction in Italy in Petrarch's day.

In estimating the culture of fifteenth-century England the fact has been too often overlooked that the educational heritage of the Tudor period was prepared in the fifteenth century through the foundation of schools and colleges, the collection of libraries and, above all, through the respect and desire for learning which educated men fostered so successfully that it did not perish in the wholesale destruction of libraries and the sweeping away of educational endowments in the religious upheaval of the next century.

It is curious, in view of the strange fascination which the seventeenth Earl of Oxford has exercised on a whole school of modern critics, that perhaps the most crucial episode in his life has been glossed over or ignored completely. Yet this episode, however discreditable to the Earl, is of some literary interest.

Spenser's conception of the organization of the universe, as it is set forth in the allegory of the garden of Adonis, and in the Mutability cantos, has recently been given considerable attention. Professor Edwin Greenlaw opened the subject with the suggestion that the poet owed part of the ideas developed in these two passages to Lucretius. Several objections have been made to his theory. M. Denis Saurat points out some inconsistencies in Professor Greenlaw's interpretation, and prefers to regard the passage on the garden of Adonis as lyrical and without serious or sustained philosophic content. Professor Ronald B. Levinson finds Spenser's theory of form and matter in Bruno's Spaccio. Miss Evelyn Albright draws attention to the inconsistency between the Platonic idealism of The Fowre Hymnes (together with certain passages in Colin Clout's Come Home A gaine) and any Lucretian materialism in The Faerie Queene. To these critics Professor Greenlaw replied, in effect, that no one had disproved his contention of Lucretian influence in the passage on the garden of Adonis, and that the well-known eclecticism of the Renaissance accounts for the mixture of Platonic and Lucretian philosophy in Spenser.