Dated scholarship can obscure more than it describes a period like the Renaissance. Can such studies be productively read today? 

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book—it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

There is adjustment between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy. Balances are kept. --Emerson, Fate