Christopher F. Black assesses the nature and extent of church reform demands within sixteenth-century Italy, then concentrates on religious society after the supposed watershed of the Council of Trent (1546-63), through the seventeenth century. Black considers structural reform through dioceses and parishes, changes in parish life, religious education, the pursuit of "good works," and attempts at enthusiastic persuasion via church environment, art, music and festivities. Two controversial issues, the Inquisition's role and the stricter enclosure of nuns, receive special attention.

This highly-illustrated book emphasizes above all the diversity of the Italian Renaissance in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries: the enormously varied forms of cultural achievement and the different circumstances that prevailed in various contexts, both urban and courtly. Richard MacKenney examines why the great revival did not touch the whole of Italy or the majority of its people. He argues that, while the wonder and joy of classical rebirth remained vivid, there was also a dimension of anxiety, especially in the challenge that ancient cultures posed to...

For many generations, the importance of the Italian Renaissance lay in its marking the beginning of modern times by means of a self-conscious break with the middle ages. This book seeks above all to convey the variety of cultural activity in Italy in the period between the fourteenth-century and the seventeenth: at different times within those three centuries, in different places in Italy, in association with different political ideologies. While this involves a measure of deconstruction, it also demands a synthesis that aims to communicate the richness of historical experience in the regions...

The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature discussed in this volume falls into two main categories: the work of the Galician novelist, short-story writer and critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, and the wider context of prose fiction and criticism during the period 1870 to 1935. These two areas represent the main spheres of interest of the distinguished scholar and critic Maurice Hemingway, to whose memory this volume is dedicated. Maurice Hemingway was associated with Hispanic scholarship of the highest quality, and this book exemplifies the appreciation of Hemingway's work...

The multi-national Habsburg empire has never lost its fascination since its fall in 1918. Robin Okey's book shows how the Habsburg peoples experienced the same social, economic and political processes as most other Europeans, in ways that cast interesting light on these processes from both the European and the Habsburg angle. Opposing views that the national problem was therefore subordinate to underlying socio-economic backwardness, Okey argues for the inextricable entanglement of the two themes, as nationalism emerged from a process of social mobilisation which threatened the position of...