When reviewing collections of essays one is often confronted with the problem of choosing between simply surveying the contents of the volumes being discussed or having to choose to focus in particular on a number of specific chapters. This problem is significantly worse in the case of the two books under review because of the high standard of the essays contained in these volumes.

Power, gender, and ritual is a fascinating collection including a number of essays on Renaissance Florence, early modern Europe and Latin America. It concludes with an interesting essay by Mahnaz Yousefzadeh on the Dante centenary of 1865 and a meditative piece by Anthony Molho entitled ‘Exile and the values of western civilisation: German Jewish historians and American studies on the Renaissance’. What unites the various essays that comprise Power, gender, and ritual is a commitment to rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship that brings together church, urban, political, sexual and art history.

Masculinity in the Reformation era shares the interdisciplinary ethos of Power, gender, and ritual but is a far more focused volume. Running though many of the essays that comprise this volume is a critique, sometimes implicit, of the historiographic assumption that the Reformation was ‘good for men and bad for women’. Certainly, as a number of contributors demonstrate, early modern Europe was profoundly patriarchal. In ‘The masculinity of Martin Luther: theory, practicality, and humour’, Susan C. Karant-Nunn details Martin Luther's persistent emphasis on female weakness and male superiority. At the same time, as Karant-Nunn demonstrates in relation to Luther, early modern men often found the demands placed upon them by patriarchy onerous and oppressive. One of the great strengths of Masculinity in the Reformation era is that it contains a number of essays that move beyond the elite world of learned men to examine the lives of ordinary people. For example, in ‘A married man is a woman: negotiating masculinity in early modern north-western Spain’, Allyson M. Poska argues persuasively that ‘Galician men could not or did not meet traditional elite notions of masculinity. Economically disadvantaged and socially disenfranchised, peasant men had to search for new mechanisms to assert their manliness. Galician men proved their masculinity by choosing to migrate’ (p. 17). The different ways in which early modern men coped with the pressures of patriarchy is a theme that runs through Masculinity in the Reformation era. Overall the volume illustrates the wisdom of Helmut Puff's suggestion in his essay that,

Masculinity in the Reformation era certainly provides more than a crack into the trials and tribulations of being a man in the early modern period.

Reading these volumes I was, however, struck by a discontinuity between the rigorous scholarship and the tentativeness with which the authors are prepared to apply their findings beyond their immediate area of expertise. In particular, there are a number of essays in Power, gender, and ritual that are rather restricted in scope. There are, however, far more essays in this volume that illustrate the strength and potential of interdisciplinary research. Klaus Schreiner's ‘Our Lady of Victory: images of Mary within military contexts in the late Middle Ages and early modernity’, is a fascinating, and corrective, study of the importance of Mary as a potential aide in battle to those who venerated her (p. 232). Joëlle Rollo-Koster's work on ritual pillaging of papal and episcopal goods after a pope's or bishop's death in the medieval and early modern periods is an excellent piece of work. Power, gender, and ritual also includes a number of important chapters on masculinity and male sexuality in the Renaissance. Michael Rocke's work on ‘whoorish boys’ is particularly outstanding as is Peter J. Arnade's work on the Spanish Furies. Konrad Eisenbichler's ‘Adolescence and damnation: sin and youth in Florentine confraternities’, is reminder of how much importance was attached to the reform of youth in early modern Europe.

Masculinity in the Reformation era and Power, gender, and ritual are both valuable contributions to the study of early modern culture. Reading these volumes does, however, bring into sharp relief the relative paucity of similar work on early modern English culture, particularly in relation to the English Reformation. Issues like sexuality and gender cannot be seen as subsidiary to the story of religious change in early modern England. And studying them, exploring how Tudor men coped with what it meant to be a man and the ways in which women in sixteenth-century England negotiated their status in a deeply patriarchal society, is essential to arriving at a proper understanding of the forces that drove religious change in early modern England.