Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent. Peter Howard and Cecilia Hewlett, eds. Europa Sacra 20. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. xvi + 522 pp. €120.
and [Guillaume] Budé” (238). Neither of those philologists/antiquaries wrote anything that could remotely be described as a political history, though Pasquier did deal with political themes in his genre-breaking miscellany the Recherches de la France (brilliantly explored nearly half a century ago by George Huppert, who is uncited here; Donald R. Kelley’s related work is cited, but with his name misspelled). We all make such errors, but it is a great pity that the publisher’s peer-review process did not intercept some of these. This is not a bad book; it is well intentioned, and doubtless many of the essays will be found useful to a principally literary audience. But it could have been so very much better, and therein lies its major disappointment.