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In 1563 Johan Wier's protest against the criminal prosecution of presumed witches, caused much upheaval. He attempted to exonerate these defendants by arguing that human beings are incapable of doing the things they were accused of. It was demons and not humans who were the real offenders. Until now, Wier's religious convictions have remained indistinct. It is argued here that he refused to choose sides in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century. His correspondence and other writings show that he was a spiritualist who felt inspired by men like David Joris, Hendrick Niclaes, his brother Matthias Wier, and Sebastian Castellio. It is also argued here that he did not really believe that demons had any real power to influence the course of nature, but that he had to furnish the judges with other possible suspects in order to exculpate the people who were accused of witchcraft.

When post-Reformation English authors sought to describe pre-Reformation Catholicism, they turned to the writings of Desiderius Erasmus for historical evidence to back up their arguments justifying the break from Rome. For many later English schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the only Catholic authors they read and the depictions of Catholicism found in the Praise of Folly and, especially, in the Colloquies, became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well as foundational imprints for their mental image of relics, pilgrimages, and other Catholic practices. References to Erasmus as a historical authority for his times appear in dozens, if not hundreds, of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ignoring the literary and fictitious nature of Erasmus's satirical texts, they used Erasmus to justify their depictions of Catholic corruption, superstition, and irrationality. Over time, these descriptions became an almost uncritically accepted portrayal of the Catholic world prior to the rise of Protestantism. This constructed reality thus became the worldview of English speaking Protestants from the mid-sixteenth century up to nearly the present. Examining how later English authors used Erasmus helps us understand the subsequent nature of English historical consciousness and the development of English and Protestant narratives of Church history.

The Judaeo-Christian belief in the general resurrection has long been troubled by the issue of personal identity, but prior to the advent of such concerns there existed a cognate concern about the identity not of the resurrected person, but of the resurrected person's body. Although this latter issue has exercised scholars of various ages, concern with it was particularly keen in early modern times. In this paper I chart the various ways bodily identity was conceived by early modern thinkers in connection with the resurrection, as well as the key objections their contemporaries developed in response.

Abstract When the Portuguese arrived in Japan around 1543, it was the first time in the history of the archipelago that Western foreigners had entered the country and settled there. These \"barbarians from the south\" (namban-jin) were considered strangers and viewed with curiosity and suspicion. In Tokugawa Japan (c. 1615-1868), politically marked by territorial unification and the centralization of power, the image of the Europeans that was created and visually registered on folding screens and lacquer-ware was used as a model to frame this presence by both the Japanese political and economic elites and those considered marginal to the existing social order. Namban art, especially paintings, can be seen as a visual display of Japan's self-knowledge and its knowledge of distant \"neighbours.\"

In late October 1515, the government authorities of Siena were busy preparing the city for the visit of Pope Leo X de' Medici, expected in the middle of the following month. Palaces were requisitioned to house the pontiff and his entourage, while artists set to work to create the ephemeral architectural elements for a grand all'antica triumph through the streets. Under the supervision of Vannoccio di Paolo Biringucci, artists of the caliber of Domenico Beccafumi and Sodoma worked on arches and other accessories. On the eve of the visit, the pope altered his itinerary and bypassed the city. Tapping a series of unpublished documents, this article discusses the preparations for the visit and explores the reasons for its failure, which were ultimately political, as the de facto signore of Siena, Borghese Petrucci, failed to reach a diplomatic agreement with the Medici pope.

One sometimes has the experience of knowing two apparently unrelated bits of information—sometimes for years—until suddenly it occurs to one that they are in fact related and indeed illuminate each other in quite startling ways. I have had the good fortune to teach some of the Scots ballads for the last decade or so and have taught “Thomas Rhymer (A)” and ‘Tam Lin (A)” as exemplars of Scots Other World balladry. It is a truism (and the first piece of information) that the worldview of these ballads differs quite markedly from the medieval Catholic worldview that was current when these ballads may have originated and the Scots Presbyterian one that was the dominant ideology in the time and place when they were collected. Few ballad scholars would dispute this claim.