Most stimulating — for this Anglophone historian, at least — has been the reintegration of religious history into mainstream social and political history generally, and also the heightened sense of an international movement embracing an entire continent and beyond. We no longer make artificial distinctions between the Reformations of the Atlantic Isles and those on the mainland; we can see more clearly what is local and what is part of an international phenomenon; and we can also appreciate the artificiality of considering Protestantism in isolation from reform movements in both the Pre-Reformation Western Church and Post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. I commend the advantages of emancipating religious history from specific religious commitment. I also discuss the effect of the breaking down of barriers to travel and research in the wake of the 1989–90 revolutions in the recovery of our sense of the importance of Reformations in Eastern Europe, and also highlight our realization that a heritage of Southern European dissent shaped the heterodoxy that dissolved Reformation certainties.

While the Reformation has, from the very beginning, been seen as a drama which drew its cast from every sphere of society, the Counter-Reformation was until recently considered the project of elites. Even those who sought to write the social history of the Catholic reform movement allocated to “the people” the role of resisting the course of change rather than contributing to the transformation of early modern Catholicism. Swimming against this tide, a succession of local case studies, focusing in particular on rituals and objects, has demonstrated the manifold ways in which men and women of all social backgrounds participated in the reinvention of Roman Catholicism. This paper considers new emphases in the social and cultural history of the Counter-Reformation, and asks whether there remains a place for thinking about the age of reform in terms of discipline and confessionalization.

For a generation, writing about the English Reformation has been dominated by debates about the character, pace, and popularity of the transition from Catholic to Protestant belief and practice in England. These “revisionist” debates have had a regrettable tendency to produce artificial polarities from a complex set of processes, and some recent studies, such as Norman Jones’s The English Reformation, Eamon Duffy’s Voices of Morebath, and Ethan Shagan’s Popular Politics and the English Reformation, have attempted to move beyond these polarities to consider the processes by which England became Protestant. This paper surveys some of these studies and attempts an overview of the state of English Reformation historiography.

Hugues Salel’s translation of the Iliad was intended for noble, warrior readers, a conclusion based largely on internal evidence, both from the physical book (including its woodcuts) and from the French rendering of Homer’s epic. This article looks at the book’s verbal and visual texts to understand how Salel’s translation of the Iliad is shaped in anticipation of its contemporary reception. It examines a translation into the vernacular of one of antiquity’s masterpieces, as well as what noble readers knew and wanted to know, and questions the purposes and processes of the production of illustrations and marginalia in the period.

This article compares voyage narratives printed in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 Principall Navigations to contemporaneous travel histories in an effort to contextualize the epistemological status of each group of texts and debunk the former’s reputation for greater factuality. It critiques the use commonly made of Hakluyt’s narratives in literary studies, arguing that the privileging of these texts over other sources results in postcolonial studies that ironically valorize a type of writing which promoted the colonial mindset these studies seek to expose.

Francesco Primaticcio designed his celebrated Galerie d’Ulysse at Fontainebleau (now destroyed) at a time when the epic genre was being updated and redefined. One of the most popular scenes from the gallery, Ulysses and Penelope recounting their adventures to one another in bed (from book 23 of the Odyssey), was adapted and revised in an independent composition by Primaticcio himself: Ulysses and Penelope (Toledo Museum of Art, ca. 1560). In contrast to the Fontainebleau mural, the artist’s self-conscious, refined pictorial language for his canvas converts epic energy into lyric sentimentality. As a result, Penelope becomes the central focus of the new composition. Through the language of gesture the painting stresses such themes as beauty and desire, and further employs such prized poetic devices as reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis). By responding to the formal prescriptions of both the epic and romance genres, Primaticcio exploits the expressive and visual potential of the Homeric episode in an utterly novel way. The painting opens up questions into ways of reading, viewing, and interpreting mythic subject matter in sixteenth-century France.