It is hard to believe that Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-94) stopped writing letters when, after he was ejected from his governorship of Foligno (1461-64), he reluctantly, one imagines, took up residence in his diocese of Gaeta. His letters, after he left Foligno, do not seem to have been preserved, so that, as I have pointed out in a previous article, his Epigrams are the most fertile and practically the only source for his activities in the last thirty years of his life.

His Letters, all from the Foligno period, deal overwhelmingly with his duties as Papal Governor, which he seems to have fulfilled most faithfully, but there are enough private letters mingled with them to throw light on the lives of his own family and those of some friends. The present article will be limited to his family.

The depiction of celestial harmony (fig. 1) used as title page for the first edition of the Practica Musicae has been a great favorite among art historians of iconographic bent; Warburg, Panofsky, Seznec, and Wind have all reproduced and commented on this woodcut at some length. The frontispiece has nothing really to do with the contents of the Practica—no more, say, than the Boethian frontispiece of the thirteenth-century Pluteus manuscript has to do with Notre Dame polyphony. But the illustration was surely Gafori's idea rather than that of his printer, Le Signerre. Gafori as a devout Boethian was enamored of myths about cosmic harmony; he expounded Boethius’ doctrine of musica mundana in the first edition of the Theorica Musicae in 1480, expanded upon this treatment in the second edition of that work (1492), and returned to the subject armed with much newly acquired humanistic lore in the De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum Opus, published in 1518 though certainly written some years earlier.

In August 1520, Pierre Vidoue printed at Paris, for Galliot du Pré, a French translation of Desiderius Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium: De la declamation des louenges de follie. Critical comment about this translation has been limited to identifying its author and citing Erasmus’ attitude towards it. Since no French translation contemporary to Erasmus other than that of 1520 is known, Vidoue's book has been attributed to Georges Haloin, whose translation is mentioned in four of Erasmus' letters written in 1517. Criticism of Haloin's translation seems inspired less by examination of his work than by these letters. Rachel Giese, for example, mentions the ‘lively interest’ which Erasmus had in the French version and his request for a copy—facts which are recorded in a letter from Erasmus to Haloin on August 29, 1517.