Of these scholars' numerous works, I will only mention the most influential: Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts, and Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters; Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance and From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni; Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento, L'educazione in Europa, L'età nuova, Dal rinascimento all'illuminismo, La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano, and Rinascite e revoluzion; Simone, Il rinascimento francese and La coscienza della rinascita negli umanisti francesi; Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, The Spread of Italian Humanism, and Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century; Maravall, Antiguos y modernos, Carlos V y el pensamiento político del renacimiento, and Estado moderno y mentalidad social.

Gil Fernández's views on humanism had already been anticipated in his 1967 article, «El humanismo español del siglo XVI».

Judging by the letters reproduced by Birkenmajer, it is very likely that this manuscript is what is left of the Declamationum libri six that Decembrio dedicated to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. Both copies sent to the Duke of Gloucester and to Cartagena are now lost. For the manuscript sent to the Duke, see Alfonso Sammut, Unfredo Duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani, 42, 81. The manuscript transcribed by Birkenmajer, now housed in Krakow, must have been copied either from the lost manuscript that Decembrio sent to the Duke of Gloucester or from an intermediate witness. It seems, moreover, that the manuscript may not be a complete copy of the original, for it might have contained many more letters. We know for certain that even in the original version it did not have all the letters concerning the epistolary exchanges of various humanists who were at one time or another involved in the controversy. We learn of this gap from one of those long letters that Cartagena used to write to Decembrio, a kind of private, 'familiar' epistle in the Petrarchean sense, which is in striking contrast to the short missives of the Italian humanist that are rather close to the model of the medieval ars dictaminis (González Rolán, Moreno Hernández and Saquero Suárez-Somonte, ref. no. XV). In it he thanks the Milanese humanist for having sent him the translation of Plato's Republic (a work, by the way, that Cartagena already owned in the old version of Uberto Decembrio, Pier Candido's and Angelo's father), and expresses his gratitude for having dedicated the sixth book to him; in the same letter, he also informs his Italian friend of receiving the Declamationes he had sent with Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo. Evidently even this codex in six books assembled by Decembrio was not enough to contain all the letters that the controversy generated. In fact, Cartagena laments that a number of missing letters which he would have liked to add to his copy had either been misplaced or lost forever by his secretaries during his travels through Central Europe. A much-needed bilingual edition, carefully prepared, of the text of the Krakow manuscript and of all the extant letters exchanged between Cartagena and Decembrio has finally been made available in print by the tireless team of Tomás González Rolán, Antonio Moreno Hernández and Pilar Saquero Suárez-Somonte in their Humanismo y teoría de la traducción en España e Italia en la primera mitad del siglo XV.

Jerrold E. Seigel's Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism is a defense of humanism as a rhetorical movement and is based in part on views held by Kristeller. His aim was to disprove Baron's thesis that the origins of the movement were to be found in specific sociopolitical concerns, namely the defense of Florentine republicanism and civic liberties.

The conflictive relationship between philosophy and eloquence, which had persisted since Cartagena's judicious criticism of Bruni, resurfaced again with stronger tones toward the last quarter of the fifteenth century in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's epistolary exchange with Hermolao Barbaro. In a letter that Pico wrote concerning de generi dicendi philosophurum, the views he expressed are not much different from those of Cartagena regarding the style one should use in philosophical writings. For the texts of this debate, see Pico della Mirandola and Barbaro, and Letizia Panizza.

This view of a well-defined chronological period begins to circulate with Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo at the end of the nineteenth century; in his Poetas de la corte de don Juan II, he refers to this century as the «pórtico de nuestro Renacimiento». The vagueness of the concept is later repeated by María Rosa Lida in the title of her work, Juan de Mena, poeta del prerrenacimiento español, and is transferred to humanism by Jeremy Lawrance in Un episodio del proto-humanismo español.

That the disciplines of the studia humanitatis varied in terms (studia humaniora, litterae humaniores, bonae litterae, etc.) and meaning among the learned of the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance is made clear by the fact that the canon from which the term humanista was to be formed was first established by Tommaso Parentucelli, the future pope Nicholas V, in 1440 when he drew up for Cosimo de' Medici a list of indispensible works that an outstanding personal library should have. After citing works of various branches of philosophy, he lists «de studiis autem humanitatis quantum ad grammaticam, rhetoricam, historicam, et poeticam spectat ac morale, que auctoritate digna sunt, [...] Ego autem, si bibliothecam conditurus essem, cum omnia a me haberi non possent, vellem ista precipue non deesse» (Gargan, «Gli umanisti e la biblioteca publica» 174). See also Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters; and Christopher Celenza, «Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara». For the first occurrence of the syntagm studia humanitatis in Castile and for the first mention of the cluster of disciplines, with the exception of history -possibly an oversight- that comprised the studia humanitatis, see Di Camillo, El humanismo castellano 39-40n.

For the forgeries of the Dominican friar Giovanni Nanni, better known as Annius of Viterbo, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics; equally informative is his recent What Was History? Robert B. Tate, in his Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV, justifies Nebrija's unwillingness to apply his philological expertise regarding these forgeries to an excess of patriotic loyalty toward his kings and country when he edited the Opuscula, a selection of Annius' historical writings, in Burgos in 1512 (190-91).

Though the term retórica does not appear in Nebrija's Vocabulario, most likely for being such an obvious entry, very common in both languages, his Artis rhetoricae, written in his old age in 1515, is a compendium of essential rhetorical points based on the teaching of the three eminent authors of antiquity; see James J. Murphy. For a historical account of the revisions and speculation surrounding the art of rhetoric at this time, see Cesare Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell'umanesimo. For a more recent study centering on the dialectic innovations of Agricola, see Peter Mack.

See Carmen Codoñer, «El comentario gramatical de Nebrija».