Cornell University is fortunate to have as its historian a man of Morris Bishop's talents and devotion. As an accurate record and a work of art possessing form and personality, his book at once conveys the unique character of the early university reflected in its vigorous founder, its first scholarly president, a brilliant and eccentric faculty, the hardy student body, and, sometimes unfortunately, its early architecture and establishes Cornell's wider significance as a case history in the development of higher education. Cornell began in rebellion against the obscurantism of college...

Petrarch is an ideal subject for biography, and he has found the perfect biographer in Morris Bishop, whose scholarship is both authoritative and unobtrusive, and whose urbane prose sparkles with color and wit. Yet this is more than a biography, for Petrarch's story is told against the background of a pageant of daily life in the later Middle Ages--sometimes brilliant, sometimes squalid, sometimes merely human.

Many selections from Petrarch's poems and prose writings, in Mr. Bishop's deft translation, depict Petrarch's many-sided character in his own words, while twelve drawings by...

"Medieval men were great storytellers. In the long dark of winter evenings, there was not much to do but tell stories and sing songs. At country markets, professional narrators and ballad-singers profitably drew clusters of auditors, ready to pay with their farthings. The stories were mostly old and familiar, but each teller altered and localized his material to suit his hearers and his own taste. Thus a great body of oral literature existed. Most of it has disappeared, destroyed by printing and the enormous communications industry. Some remnants of the oral tradition are included in this...