This collection of ten essays, originating in a conference held at Leeds (March 30–31, 2007), seeks to reassess the ways in which religious experience and reform were intertwined with literary, artistic, and musical expression in sixteenth-century Italy. In their introduction, the editors question the traditional dichotomy between a failed Reformation assumed to have characterized the first half of the century and a repressive Counter Reformation marking the second half. Instead, they posit a process of “slow evolution and renegotiations of cultural and religious practices” (2) that amounted to a more continuous, varied and “distinct, Italian experience of reform” (3). Thus, Brundin suggests, mid-century Medicean Florence left room for reform-minded debate at the Florentine Academy; around that time R. B. Waddington detects Nicodemite beliefs in Aretino and Titian; Oratorian musical invention, according to I. Fenlon, largely bypassed Tridentine reforms of church music; mythological painting survived in Counter-Reformation Venice, albeit in greater segregation from sacred art (T. Nichols); and Tasso's late religious poetry (according to Treherne) displayed as equally an “authentic poetic voice” (233) as his previous work. Overall, the volume presents a necessarily fragmentary, and not always convincing, picture of Italian high culture of the Cinquecento, but it offers a range of stimulating contributions to a timely debate.