Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1426-1503) was an important humanist and scholar of Renaissance Italy, the presiding spirit of the Accademia Pontaniana, and chief minister and tutor to the Aragonese Kings of Naples. He was also the most innovative and versatile Latin poet of Quattrocento Italy. His Two Books of Hendecasyllables, given the subtitle Baiae by their first editor Pietro Summonte, experiment brilliantly with the metrical form associated principally with the ancient Latin poet Catullus. The poems are the elegant offspring of Pontano's leisure, written to celebrate love,...

Rodney Dennis, the Curator of Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library for many years, has solicited 37 brief essays from a group of international scholars to illustrate the evidentiary usefulness of manuscripts as well as their complexities. Early and recent manuscripts from the collections of the Houghton Library illuminate the subject according to a four-fold arrangement: the establishment of text, the creation of text, the history of the manuscript, and the physical nature of the manuscript in relation to its contents.