Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600

This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary
collection of material from primary sources, illustrating the
relationship between cultural change and religious belief in
sixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extracts
drawn from a variety of genres including political, religious,
philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems and
fiction. Some have never previously been published, others have not
been reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenth
century, and a number are translated into modern English for the
first time.

`Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing from
such renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and Sir
Thomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works of
literature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes,
Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many others
are all to be found here.

A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - to
explore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics,
religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eight
thematic sections.

Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernized
throughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriate
explanatory annotation for each item.