Visconti, and whom all believed dead, was instead 
     honorably liberated because he had the skill to convince 
     that gloomy and cruel tyrant that it would better serve 
     his turn to have the Aragonese at Naples than the 
     followers of Anjou. . . . In a revolution at Prato, got up by 
     Bernardo Nardi, this leader . . . had already thrown the 
     halter round the neck of the Florentine Podestà when the 
     latter’s fine reasoning persuaded him to spare his life. . .” 
     (pp. 86­7)

     Such was also the world which Huizinga portrays in The  
Waning of the Middle Ages . It was medievalism plus a visual 
slickness and pomp and opulence made possible by the new 
wealth and applied knowledge of the middle class. As we move 
into the Renaissance it is needful to understand that the new 
age of applied knowledge  is an age of translation not only of