The fortunes and misfortunes of the Strozzi lineage in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have recently received considerable attention from historians. This has in general been focused on two men, Filippo di Matteo Strozzi (1428-1491) and his son, Filippo di Filippo (1489-1538). The career of Filippo il vecchio as man of business and Renaissance builder has been examined in considerable detail by Richard Goldthwaite, who has characterized him as independent, determined and ambitious, and as possessing a sense of grandeur “which went beyond the bounds to which most Florentine patricians confined themselves.” He considered that Filippo's absence from the “innumerable” offices with which most men of his status in Florence occupied themselves, should perhaps be attributed to the “lordly indifference of the returned exile,” and to the realism of a pragmatist not deluded by the republican facade maintained by the Medicean regime.

The first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, published in 1605, is, as is well known, a satire on chivalric novels. We must all the same take note that the purpose which is clearly assigned to the novel in the prologue: “to destroy the authority which chivalric books have in the world and among the vulgar,” is never directly assumed by the narrator. Not that the latter is trifling with the purpose which he has publicly assigned to his narration; quite the contrary. But he takes care not to present himself as other than the docile and modest instrument which happens to be at the service of this higher end.

Emblematic figures of godly and faithful women proliferate throughout the literature of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Characteristically they hold books in their hands symbolic of divine revelation, or they appear in books as representations of divine inspiration. While such representation of a pious feminine ideal was traditional in Christian art, Tudor reformers attempted to appropriate the devout emotionality linked to many female saints and to the Virgin Mary, both as the mother of Christ and as an allegorical figure for Holy Church, providing instead images of Protestant women as embodiments of pious intellectuality and divine wisdom. Long before the cult of the wise royal virgin grew up in celebration of Elizabeth I, Tudor Protestants began to praise learned women for applying knowledge of the scriptures to the cause of church reform.

The Antinomian controversy of 1636-1638, the earliest major theological conflict in colonial New England, has attracted much scholarly attention. For many, the central figure in the drama, Anne Hutchinson, is a heroine, a champion of religious freedom against the bigoted theocratic Puritan establishment of Massachusetts Bay captained by the elder John Winthrop, Governor of the colony. Others have interpreted the Puritan prosecution of the Antinomians as perhaps regrettable but absolutely necessary; theological splintering might well have led, as most contemporaries believed it would, to a fatal political weakening of the young colony at a critical moment. One feature of the Antinomian episode, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves: the occurrence of two monstrous births, one in the midst of the controversy (although belatedly discovered) and the other at its denouement.