Mark Davie has taught Italian at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter. He has published studies on various aspects of Italian literature, mainly in the period from Dante to the Renaissance, and has edited Tasso's The Liberation of Jerusalem, tr. Max Wickert, for Oxford World's Classics. He is particularly interested in the relations between learned and popular culture, and between Latin and the vernacular, in Italy in the Renaissance.
William R. Shea is the author of several books including Galileo's Intellectual Revolution (Macmillan, 1972), Galileo in Rome (OUP, 2003), and Galileo Observed (Science History, 2006), the last two co-authored with Mariano Artigas.