Flavio Biondo, writing in 1443 to Alfonso of Naples, explained his purpose in composing a history. All interested in the humanities realized, said he, that in twelve hundred years Italy had produced poets and orators, but practically no historians. Scholars had prepared translations from the Greek and philosophical treatises, yet their duty to history they had avoided, or touched upon in superficial fashion. This judgment was echoed by Bruni, Bonfini, Sabellico, and others, who regretted the lack of accounts of their medieval past.

Church calendars had shaped the early recording of events. The language was Latin, the arrangement chronological, with no effort to group related occurrences or to indicate causation other than the will of God. The supernatural was readily accepted.

The two verse fragments edited in 1936 under the title Mum and the Sothsegger have already proved useful to the historian of ideas and institutions. In 1939, Helen M. Cam made very good use of them to illustrate the relation of English members of parliament to their constituencies. More recently, Ruth Mohl, who followed the editors in considering them parts of a single poem, placed them in relation to the more formal aspects of medieval political thought. The usefulness of Mum and the Sothsegger has not, however, been exhausted. Indeed it remains, as both Miss Cam and Miss Mohl found it, a curiously neglected text. And one reason is that it has not been studied for what the author undoubtedly intended it to be, namely a substantial (if not closely knit) and only partially satirical commentary on the problem of counsel.

A century and a quarter ago, there seemed to be no doubt concerning the chronological order of appearance of the earliest printed Juvenals. Dibdin had established this in his bibliographical account of the classics, and his decisions were accepted without question by his contemporaries. In the century following Dibdin's death in 1847, however, the chronology of the first printings of the great Roman satirist became, curiously enough, remarkably confused and beclouded. Not long ago, Professor Gilbert Highet, in his excellent book on Juvenal, set forth the present doubts as to the proper order of appearance of the earliest editions and expressed the opinion (p. 317) that “an expert typographical investigation of the earliest printed editions of Juvenal's satires remains to be made”.

The philological study of Arabic by Europeans was long delayed and slow in development, considering the number, strength, and importance of the Moslem peoples and the value of their cultural contributions to western civilization. The Moslem conquest of Spain in the early part of the eighth century did stimulate an early desire among the Christians of the Iberian peninsula to learn the language of the conquerors. In fact, the ardor of the interest among the Spanish Christians brought forth the complaint of Alvarus of Córdoba (IX century) that the Christian youths were abandoning the study of Latin for that of Arabic. Later the language of Islam, a religion branded a Christian heresy by the medieval church, fell into discredit, though interest was revived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the transmission to Europe of Arabic science and philosophy in Latin translation. Toledo, captured by Spanish Christians in 1085, was the outstanding center for the translators, most of whom were native Jews who had been Moslem subjects.

It is a result of our modern overspecialization in scholarship that, although every one knows of the excellence of Latin Renaissance poetry and of the reputation it enjoyed in its time, this poetry is not yet studied today as it deserves. The scholar in Romance, for example, while realizing that literary figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, DuBellay were bilingual and wrote in Latin as well as in the vernacular, that DuBellay drafted his sonnet Heureux qui comme Ulysse … first in Latin, that Petrarch appreciated his Africa more than his Canzoniere, is more apt to study the Latin works of the Renaissance poets for the light they may cast on their works in the vernacular than as works of art which have their meaning in themselves.

Modern scholars are well aware of the inexactitude and ambiguity of the terms “Renaissance” and “humanism”. We continue to find the words useful, but we have adopted the practice of employing them cautiously, with precisely stated qualifications. It is the purpose of this paper to point out, especially to students of the cultural history of England, that contradiction and ambiguity also lurk in the equally useful term “the new learning” and to urge a similar caution in employing it.

Historians of English literature commonly identify the New Learning (usually capitalized) with the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They may use the term narrowly to mean the revival of interest in the language and literature of ancient Greece, or somewhat more broadly to include the revival of “classical” Latin. Some writers will also include the Biblical scholarship of such men as Erasmus and Reuchlin.

Many of the old clichés about Puritanism have been dispelled by the researches of such eminent modern scholars as Haller, Knappen, and Miller, so that we are now more likely to understand the Puritans than were our less well-informed predecessors. Certain areas of misconception and uncertainty still remain, however, and the function of this paper is to explore one of these areas, namely, the teachings of classical Puritanism on physical love in marriage. Although judgments have already been pronounced by scholars on this subject—judgments which are both varied and conflicting—there has, as yet, been available no study which provides detailed and conclusive documentation of the Puritan teaching on the physical relations of marriage, for even the most useful studies usually skirt the sexual aspects of marriage, or dismiss these aspects with a sentence or two, and but little documentation.

In their attempts to define the poetic style of John Donne and his followers, twentieth-century critics have often considered its relationship to analogous movements in the continental literatures. They have seen in the common love of paradox and in the common use of far-fetched metaphors, or conceits, links which unite Donne and the other English metaphysical poets to Marino and his followers in Italy and to Góngora and his followers in Spain. Credit for the original insight connecting Donne and Marino, as is so often the case with original insights, must go to Dr. Johnson, who in the famous passage on the metaphysical poets in his “Life of Cowley” suggested that the metaphysical style was “borrowed from Marino and his followers”.

Ever since the Renaissance first invented itself some six hundred years ago, there has been no agreement as to what it is. Its definitions have been as many and varied as the legions of scholars who have dealt with it, and the more that is learned about the Renaissance, the less certainty there is as to its extent, nature, purposes, and results. I need not rehearse the labyrinthine story of the idea of the Renaissance; the study of studies of the Renaissance has become a scholarly field in itself; and Professor Ferguson has written the history of the idea of the Renaissance with just the proper mixture of authority, wonderment, and exasperation which it deserves.