Girolamo Fracastoro (?1478-1553) was a doctor and scientist, as well as a poet. He was born in the northern Italian city of Verona, into a prominent local family. Verona is at one of the crossroads of Europe, and although Fracastoro's whole life was spent in that vicinity, he maintained a wide circle of friends and correspondents, keeping up-to-date with what was going on elsewhere. Two cataclysmic events - the European voyages to the New World, and the sudden appearance and rapid spread of syphilis - are the combined themes of his greatest literary work. The Syphilis , dedicated to Pietro Bembo, became one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance. Soon after its publication (in 1530) Fracastoro was hailed as a major Latin poet, an equal of Virgil. In the first two books of Syphilis Fracastoro not only describes in vivid terms the symptoms and known cures for syphilis, but also presents for the first time his theory of 'contagion', a major breakthrough towards modern understanding of disease. He was later to write a scientific prose treatise De Contagione. The third and final book of the Syphilis gives a highly mythical narrative of the landing of Columbus in the New World. His reason for including this American material was not, as we might suppose, that syphilis was brought from the Americas to Europe, but rather that the New World provided Europe with one of the more useful remedies for syphilis, an extract from a native American wood, guaiacum. In spite of its poetic mode, Fracastoro's account draws in some detail on contemporary sources for the European discovery of the New World, as Eatough's notes show. This edition offers a 35-page introduction, text with facing English translation, notes elucidating literary, mythical, geographical and botanical topics, and a word-index of the poem.

Late Latin and Early Romance presents a theory of the relationship between Latin and Romance during the period 400-1250. The central hypothesis is that what we now call 'Medieval Latin' was invented around 800 AD when Carolingian scholars standardised the pronunciation of liturgical texts, and that otherwise what was spoken was simply the local variety of Old French, Old Spanish, etc. Thus, the view generally held before the publication of this work, that 'Latin' and 'Romance' existed alongside each other in earlier centuries, is anachronistic. Before 800, Late Latin was Early Romance. This hypothesis is examined first from the viewpoint of historical linguistics, with particular attention paid to the idea of lexical diffusion (ch. 1), and then (ch. 2) through detailed study of pre-Carolingian texts. Chapter 3 deals with the impact in France of the introduction of standardised Latin by Carolingian scholars, and shows how the earliest texts written in the vernacular resulted from it. The final two chapters turn to the situation in Spain from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Ch. 4 suggests, on the evidence of a large variety of texts, that before 1080 the new Latin pronunciation (i.e. Medieval Latin) was not used; Ch. 5 charts the slow spread, as a result of Europeanising reforms, of a distinction between Latin and vernacular Romance between 1080 and 1250. There is an extensive bibliography and full indexes. Wright's controversial book presents a wide range of detailed evidence, with extensive quotation of relevant texts and documents. When it was published in 1982 it challenged established ideas in the fields of Romance linguistics and Medieval Latin. The collectively established facts are however explained better by his theory that Medieval Latin was a revolutionary innovation consequent upon liturgical reform, than by the view that it was a miraculous conservative survival that lasted unchanged for a millennium. Late Latin and Early Romance draws on philological, historical and literary evidence from the medieval period, and on historical linguistics, and is a seminal work in these areas of scholarship.

The International Courtly Literature Society was founded in 1973 to foster the study of all aspects of courtly literature - an interest not limited to European medievalists, although they provide one of the society's main focuses. The ICLS holds triennial international conferences, the third in Liverpool, England in 1980. Professor Glyn Burgess has edited a volume containing about one-third of the papers presented there. He opens it with the three plenary speakers, Charles Muscatine, Alan Deyermond, and John Benton, who illuminate conflicting aspects of life and literature held in tension in the productions of medieval court poets. The remaining 29 contributions represent the principal national literatures discussed at the Congress - English, French, German, Provencal and Spanish - and offer a wide variety of perspectives and approaches to courtly literature, including comparisons between literary and artistic artefacts.