The immediate occasion for the hostilities which broke out in 1375 between Florence and the church was the plundering activity of the English mercenary company under John Hawkwood. This ‘santa compagnia’, employed by the church during its struggle with the Visconti, was now without income and consequently moved into Tuscany, plundering and robbing. The costs of ransoming Florentine territory by a series of payments to Hawkwood were met by loans forced partly from the clergy of Florence and Fiesole.

To carry out this task of collecting taxes from reluctant citizens and clergy, the government appointed a balia, or commission, of eight men.

Although Richard Johnson (ca. 1573–1659) has received little critical or scholarly attention, his own output was quite large and various, and probably popular. He authored two chivalric romances; several volumes of poetry, including a collection of fast-moving ballads; some descriptive topographical verse; a satiric tract or two; a jest book; and several elegies.

To this list can now be added one more piece. That is the recently recovered elegy of 234 lines entitled Musarum Plangores, a memorial on the death of Sir Christopher Hatton. What is probably the unique copy of this work now lies in the Folger Shakespeare Library. It lacks a title page and bears no colophon. The date of publication, however, was probably 1591, the year in which Hatton died, although there is no record of its being printed. The author is ‘R. Johnson’, for that name, followed by the letters Sa., occurs at the end of the poem.

Satan's fall from heaven to hell is an external or physical reflection of his moral degeneration from Lucifer to Adversary. Yet Satan himself understandably rejects this parallel, insisting that his is

That is Satan's conclusion; the major premise upon which his argument depends is this:

As Isabel MacCaffrcy notes, Satan's boast is at odds with the action of the epic as a whole; and, as D. C. Allen's scholarship has shown, it perhaps is based on heresy. I nevertheless suggest that to reject Satan's speech out of hand is in one way wrong, for the premise of his argument—if not the conclusion—is partially true. And fully to appreciate the way in which Satan's logic goes awry requires, I think, an understanding of the philosophic background from which Satan's words arise.

A real event in Renaissance scholarship was the publication of Bernard Weinberg's monumental History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, already reviewed in Renaissance News [xv, 215-217], Manuscripta, Italica, and elsewhere as a work that will stand for many a long year as the definitive treatment of the subject. Of the more than 400 documents studied, not less than 89 are in unpublished manuscripts, the vast majority being in humanistic Latin and all awaiting further research.

Most of the authors discussed by Weinberg are men who were also of the first importance in the history of classical scholarship. In that particular field, by far the most important production of the year is Deno John Geanakoplos' Greek Scholars in Venice (Harvard, 1962) [RN xv, 305–306]; this is not a rehash of old material but an independent investigation of the unfamiliar.

After years in which several important contributions on the drama of the Renaissance appeared, it is disappointing to have to record that 1962 was a poor year for new works on the literature of the period. No new book of full length has conic to my notice. A revised version of the second volume of the Annalen der deutschen Literatur provides a useful work of reference for those seeking the names of authors and works written during the sixteenth century but it can scarcely claim new interpretations. Such editions of texts as have appeared are either reprints of the Neudrucke deutscher Literaturwerke, e.g., Luther's Fables, or popular versions such as the Stiasny paperbacks of Rebhhun's Susanna. One important series should be mentioned. The Realienbücher für Germainisten being produced by the Metzler Verlag plans volumes in the field of sixteenth-century literature, and if all are of the same high standard as Bert Nagel's Meistersang they will indeed be useful.

Scholars in the field of French literature of the Renaissance have been quite active during the past year, in keeping with a rising trend of interest that has been obvious for more than a decade. The various bibliographies—the Studies in Philology bibliography, the bibliography of the Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, Professor Robert Taylor's listing of books in Renaissance News, etc.—all confirm, I believe, a healthy and growing concern for the sixteenth century in France. The SP bibliography, for example, included in 1949 some 202 items that related to the French Renaissance; the SP bibliography for 1962 contained 423 entries of books and articles involving the Renaissance in France, a pleasing statistical detail for seizièmistes on both sides of the Atlantic. As for journals, the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance— in keeping with its ancestral connection with Abel Lefranc's Revue des études Rabelaisiennes and the later Revue du seizième siècle—continues to be the publication devoted primarily to the French Renaissance.

First of all, in the way of texts, our period lags behind the medieval period in production of modern editions. There have been few recent editions of Renaissance philosophical texts, moreover, to equal the high standard set by Richard LeMay with Pomponazzi's De Fato. But there have been facsimile reproductions, such as those of the Opera of Ficino and Valla, very useful for scholars who do not have access to the larger libraries. And we have the promise of editions of Valla's Dialectica (Zippel) and of his De voluptate, or rather De vero bono (De Panizza Lorch). The Campanella edition continues to come out in Italy. Dozens of interesting Renaissance philosophical texts are reproduced in the Manuscripta series of microfilms (cf. List No. 39, for example): these represent a very worth-while investment for smaller libraries willing to support Renaissance research.