Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet "Gioviano," was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity.

George Gascoigne has been called the most versatile author of the sixteenth century. His A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, published anonymously in 1573, contains the first adaptation of a Greek tragedy in English, the finest Elizabethan novella, and the play from which Shakespeare took the subplot for The Taming of the Shrew. This is the only modern edition to respect the integrity of the first edition. The critical apparatus allows the reader to reconstruct the changes Gascoigne later made in The Posies (1575), and all the works which appear there for the first time are included. The commentary studies Gascoigne's use of his sources and situates his works in their literary and social milieux.

For most of the sixteenth century, English poets were clearly anxious about the grief expressed in their funeral poems and often rebuked themselves for indulging in it, but towards the end of the century this defensiveness about mourning became less pressing and persistent. The shift is part of a wider cultural change which has escaped recognition: the emergence of a more compassionate attitude towards the process of mourning. In charting the development of elegy this book analyses poems by Surrey, Spenser, Jonson, Henry King and Milton, and also surveys a wide range of forgotten verse, both English and neo-Latin, as well as letter-writing handbooks and moral-theological tracts. The book culminates in a detailed study of the most famous elegy in the language, Milton's Lycidas.

For most of the sixteenth century, English poets were clearly anxious about the grief expressed in their funeral poems and often rebuked themselves for indulging in it, but towards the end of the century this defensiveness about mourning became less pressing and persistent. The shift is part of a wider cultural change which has escaped recognition: the emergence of a more compassionate attitude towards the process of mourning. In charting the development of elegy this book analyses poems by Surrey, Spenser, Jonson, Henry King and Milton, and also surveys a wide range of forgotten verse, both English and neo-Latin, as well as letter-writing handbooks and moral-theological tracts. The book culminates in a detailed study of the most famous elegy in the language, Milton's Lycidas.