Few books have been more successful than Erasmus’ Adagia, judged either by the author's intention or the readers’ satisfaction. In the preface to the modest first edition—Veterum maximeque insignium paroemiarum id est adagiorum collectanea (Paris, 1500)—Erasmus stressed the utility of the volume, saying that it provided a model for style and a storehouse of knowledge and morality. This was Erasmus’ first book-length publication; and generation after generation demanded fresh versions, so that he continued to enhance it throughout his life. There were four more editions of the Collectanea before Erasmus revised and greatly augmented the work for the Aldine press, printed under the title Adagiorum chiliades tres (Venice, 1508). After that, there were at least thirty reprints of the Collectanea by mid-century, and at least forty editions of the Adagiorum chiliades by the end of the century, not to mention great numbers of epitomes and extracts and translations. The Collectanea was a handsome start for a new sort of career: public education through print.

The Shepheardes Calender is the most avowedly eclectic masterpiece in English. Spenser acknowledges several borrowings in the names of the speakers and in the emblems, as well as in the lines of the poem themselves; and E. K. points to many more. The only really new ingredient is the form, a framework which links the separate eclogues into a connected series. Everything else is conscious imitation of a convention, or at least of a precedent. Therefore the implications of the form become salient in any attempt to assess the distinctive genius of the work.

In 1538 when Sir Thomas Elyot printed his Dictionary, he included the following entry for Pythagoras: ‘An excellente Phylosopher, whose Phylosophye was in mystycalle sentences, and alsoo in the Scyence of noumbers.’ The ‘mystycalle sentences’ were the Carolina aurea and Symbola, collections of spurious precepts with hidden meanings which had received extensive explication; and ‘the Scyence of noumbers’ recalled Pythagoras’ fundamental postulate that all things have innate numerical relationships. Elyot's entry indicates concisely what facets of the Pythagorean doctrine appealed to the Renaissance and how Pythagoras could appear as the fountainhead of both mysticism and physical science. Reuchlin cited Pythagoras as source of the mystical wisdom contained in De arte cabalistica, while Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium claimed support from the ancient Pythagoreans for his belief that the earth moved.

The Testament of Love is one of the most patently derivative works in English. It owes obvious debts to the homiletic prose of the period, to the flourishing courtly-love literature, and to the strong tradition surrounding the pearl-of-great-price. Moreover, its obligation to Chaucer, especially to his translation of Boethius, is so great that until sixty years ago it was generally attributed to him. But Usk was writing in a period when innovation was not a prime criterion of excellence. And the criteria for dullness, as instanced in the popularity of Gower and Lydgate, were other than our own.