This tribute to the eminent Italian Renaissance historian Paul Grendler includes a series of essays by a distinguished collection of his colleagues and former students on subjects close to his own research: education, humanism, reform, Jesuits and press censorship. There is also an interesting, more personal, section on Grendler's career in the context of Renaissance studies in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with thought-provoking contributions by John O'Malley and William Callaghan. Also noteworthy in this collection is Margaret King's sensitive discussion of theories of gender roles in the education of small children, which maps changing Renaissance attitudes onto ancient ones, accounting for the emergence of the mother as a valued figure in the nurturing of her children; the story takes us up to the nineteenth century, when the mother's role was to be challenged by the new institution of the Kindergarten. Elsewhere in this book Mark Lewis traces the growing importance of the studia humanitatis in the Jesuit ministry by means of two case studies from Naples, Francesco Guerrieri and Niccolò Orlandini. Ronald Witt continues his important exploration of the origins of Renaissance humanism with a study of the early communal historians of Italy in the context of changing political and social conditions and in particular growing communal autonomy. Mary Hewlett reassesses the motives of the Luccese conspirator Francesco Burlamacchi, detaching him somewhat from the Lutheran context in which Simonetta Adorni Braccesi had placed him. Nicholas Terpstra explores the role of members of confraternities as comforters of convicts on the eve of their executions, with special reference to the case of Bologna. Thomas Deutscher questions the role of Tridentine ecclesiastical courts through the discovery that the episcopal tribunal of Novara was far more effective in controlling the clergy than in disciplining the laity. Paul Murphy explores the particular role of the shrine of Loreto in the Jesuit ministry. James Farge's discussion of press censorship in France focuses on the complex situation during the reign of Francis i, setting the scene for the emerging religious divisions in France later in the century. Konrad Eisenblichler challenges modern interpretations of Italian Renaissance plays through a consideration of audience response, noting that most contemporaries seem to have been more impressed by the total impact of the event itself rather than by any explicit or implicit message in its text. Antonio Santosuosso considers the poetic output of members of academies in Rome in the turbulent 1520s, 1530s and 1540s and their links to emerging Mannerism. And Erika Rummel considers the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reputation of Cardinal Cisneros through a consideration of two plays about him.