The Berkshire town of Wokingham, which lies…

Wu Ch'eng-en, a novelist and poet who dies in 1582, had received a traditional Confucian education and become known for his cleverness in the composition of poetry and prose in the classical style.

Throughout his life he has played a marked interest in bizarre stories, such as the set of oral and written folktales that form the basis of the folk novel Xiyouji (Journey to the West, also partially translated as Monkey).

In its one hundred chapters, Xiyouji details the adventures of a cunningly resourceful monkey who accompanies the Buddhist priest Xuanzang on a journey to India.

Like all novels of its time, Xiyouji is written in the vernacular, as opposed to the officially accepted classical style, and therefore had had to be published anonymously to protect the author's reputation.

As a result, the identity of the novelist has long been unknown outside of Wu's native district.

(Only two volumes of Wu's other writings have survived; these were discovered in the imperial palaces and were reprinted in 1930.)

Nobunaga, having conquered central Japan by the spring of 1582, is attempting to extend his hegemony over western Japan.

He has overthrown the old order of fractionized power held by the daimyo and has paved the way for the political and economic unification of a country rent for over a century by incessant civil warfare.

Having brought nearly half of the provinces of Japan under his control, he has nearly succeeded in unifying Japan when he is wounded in June 1582 at Honnoji Temple during the rebellion of discontented vassal Akechi Mitsuhide and commits suicide.

Hideyoshi, his most brilliant general, quickly avenges the death by defeating Mitsuhide at the Battle of Yamazaki and moves to assume Nobunaga's preeminent political position.

Mori Terumoto makes peace with Hideyoshi, whose trusted general he becomes.

Tokugawa Ieyasu has developed the small coastal town of Hamamatsu into the commercial and strategic center of a thriving domain.

Relying heavily on his alliance with the now-mighty Nobunaga, Ieyasu has survived the vicissitudes of endemic war and slowly extended his territory until, by the early 1580s, he has become an important daimyo (feudal baron), in control of the fertile and populous area stretching from Okazaki eastward to the mountain barrier at Hakone.

Lyon faience, a form of tin-glazed earthenware produced at Lyon, originally made by Italian potters, remains close to its Italian prototype, the so-called istoriato Urbino maiolica, the subjects of which are either historical, mythological, or biblical.

Such, for instance, is a large, circular dish (British Museum) inscribed “Lyon, 1582,” the overall decoration of which had obviously been inspired by an illustration in Jean de Tournes's Bible, published in Lyon in 1554.

The dish is possibly the work of an Italian, Giulio Gambini, who will later become a partner at Nevers.

A general lack of knowledge about the Pyrenees has for centuries permitted repetition of the errors and misconceptions about the mountains that had been propounded by such authors of antiquity as Diodorus Siculus of Sicily and the Greek geographer-historian Strabo (both first century BCE).

The first explorations are made in 1582, followed by botanical works from the academies at Montpellier.

The influences that had led to the European Renaissance were already at work in Italy, and as a result the first great collections had begun to form.

A reawakening of interest in Italy's classical heritage and the rise of new merchant and banking families at this northern Mediterranean gateway to the Continent have produced impressive collections of antiquities, as well as considerable patronage of the arts.

Outstanding among the collections was that formed by Cosimo de' Medici in Florence in the fifteenth century and developed by his descendants.

In order to display some of the Medici paintings, the upper floor of the Uffizi Palace (designed to hold offices, or uffizi) is converted and opened to the public in 1582.

Indeed, many of the palaces holding such collections are open to visitors and are listed in the tourist guides of the period.

Academies and societies, representing a multitude of interests, have proliferated in Italy.

Indeed, academies of the fine arts have their origins here; for example, the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence had been founded as the Academy of Arts of Design in 1563, and the academy of Perugia dates to 1573.

Rome's Academy of San Luca is a guild of painters, founded in 1577.

Five members of the Florentine Academy establish Crusca Academy, or Accademia della Crusca (“Academy of the Chaff”) in Florence in 1582 for the purpose of purifying Tuscan, the literary language of the Italian Renaissance, by sifting the impure language (crusca, literally, “bran” or “chaff”) from the pure.

Cruscans, setting themselves up immediately as the arbiter of contemporary literature, write many commentaries on Petrarch and Boccaccio, their models for linguistic usage; compile dictionaries and lists of acceptable phrases and images from these authors; and translate many works into what they judge to be pure Tuscan.

Florentine poet, playwright, and storyteller Anton Francesco Grazzini, apparently educated in vernacular literature, had in 1540 taken part in the founding of the Accademia degli Umidi (“Academy of the Humid”), the first literary society of the time.

A, contentious individual, he has become known as Il Lasca (“The Roach,” a fish well known to anglers for putting up a good fight).

He retains the name at seventy-nine, even after the establishment of the Crusca Academy, which he is instrumental in founding.

In his burlesque verses, written in the manner of Francesco Berni, whose works he has edited, Grazzini strongly opposes humanism and Petrarchism, but he defends pure Tuscan diction in the reform of Italian literary style.

His own language is lively, at times approaching dialect, in his seven comedies written between 1540 and 1550 and in Le cene (“The Suppers”), a collection of twenty-two stories in the manner of Giovanni Boccaccio, purporting to be told by a group of young people at a carnival.

The plays, like the stories and poems, reflect his disenchanted, self-seeking age and exhibit the lustiness and vicious sting of his writings and the love he reveals for the ruthlessly cruel, whether in deeds of horror or pitiless jests.

Grazzini had also collected, in 1559, the Canti carnascialeschi (“Carnival Songs”) popular in Florence during the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Fernando de Herrera is one of the leading figures in the first School of Sevilla (Seville), a group of sixteenth-century Spanish neoclassic poets and humanists who are concerned with rhetoric and the form of language.

Herrera, although never ordained, he had taken took minor orders and been appointed to a benefice in Sevilla.

The income from this position has allowed him to spend his life studying and writing.

His aristocratic literary ideas had been clearly set forth in his Anotaciones a las obras de Garcilaso de la Vega (1580; “Notes on the Works of Garcilaso de la Vega”), which had praised the Italianate innovations of the poet Garcilaso de la Vega and several other poets of Sevilla.

In his own poetry, published as Algunas obras de Fernando de Herrera (1582; “Some Works of Fernando de Herrera”), he elaborates on the style of Garcilaso and begins to move toward culteranismo (an ornate and affected poetic style that flourishes in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finally develops, in its most extreme form, into gongorismo).

Although his love lyrics addressed to Luz, the countess of Gelves, are popular in his day, his most enduring poems are his patriotic odes, rich in Old Testament rhetoric and melodious eclogues.

He had also composed a history, Relación de la guerra de Chipre y batalla naval de Lepanto (1572; “Account of the War of Cyprus and the Naval Battle of Lepanto”).

The Corpus Juris Canonici, or Corpus of Canon Law, a set of six compilations of law in the Roman Catholic Church that provides the chief source of ecclesiastical legislation from the Middle Ages, includes four official collections: the Decretum Gratiani (“Decree of Gratian”), written between 1141 and 1150; the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (1234); the Liber Sextus (“Book Six”) of Pope Boniface VIII (1298); and the Clementinae of Pope Clement V (1317); and two private collections: the Extravagantes of Pope John XXII (1325) and the Extravagantes communes (“Decretals Commonly Circulating”)—the decretals, or replies of the pope to particular questions of church discipline, from Pope Boniface VIII to Pope Sixtus IV—both of which had been compiled at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Jean Chappuis, a canonist at the University of Paris.

The title Corpus Juris Canonici had first been applied to the six collections by Pope Gregory XIII in the document Cum pro munere (1580), which approved an edition of the works as textually authentic.

These collections do not form a closed body of ecclesiastical law, prohibiting any new laws from being added, but, in fact, no new official collections of church law had been promulgated between the Clementinae and the Council of Trent (1545–63).

The bishops at the Council of Trent had requested new critical editions of Sacred Scripture, of liturgical books, and of the Corpus Juris Canonici.

In response to this request, a commission of cardinals and canonists have prepared a scientific critical edition of the Corpus between 1560 and 1582.

In 1582, Gregory XIII issues the revised text of the Corpus and ordered its use in schools of canon law and in church courts.

The Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, in creating the Julian calendar as a reform of the Roman republican calendar, had overestimated the length of the year by eleven minutes fourteen seconds, and by the mid-1500s, the cumulative effect of this error had shifted the dates of the seasons by about 10 days from Caesar's time.

Pope Gregory's reform, proclaimed in 1582, restores the calendar to the seasonal dates of CE 325, an adjustment of ten days.

Gregory bases his reform on restoration of the vernal equinox, now falling on March 11, to the date (March 21) it had in CE 325, the time of the Council of Nicaea, and not on the date of the equinox at the time of the birth of Christ, when it fell on March 25.

The change is effected by advancing the calendar ten days after October 4, 1582, the day following being reckoned as October 15.

The Gregorian calendar does not, however, include a year 0 in the transition from BC (years before Christ) to AD (those since his birth): the Gregorian calendar differs from the Julian only in that no century year is a leap year unless it is exactly divisible by 400 (e.g., 1600, 2000).

From this time forward, the Julian calendar will gradually be abandoned in favor of the Gregorian.

Giambologna delights in solving the complex spatial problems of three intertwined figures in his famous Rape of the Sabine Women (1574-82).

The subject is not finally determined until after it has been set up in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria.

El Greco's connection with the court of Philip II has been brief and unsuccessful, consisting first of the Allegory of the Holy League (“Dream of Philip II”; 1578–79) and second of the Martyrdom of St. Maurice (1580–82).

The latter painting has not met with the approval of the king, who promptly orders another work of the same subject to replace it.

The king may have been troubled by the almost shocking brilliance of the yellows as contrasted to the ultramarine in the costumes of the main group of the painting, which includes St. Maurice in the center.

The brushwork remains Venetian in the way that the color suggests form and in the free illusionistic and atmospheric creation of space.