It has become clear in recent years that rather than stifling the development of visual culture the Reformation, in many parts of Europe, acted as a catalyst to its production and use in both Catholic and Protestant milieux. It encouraged adaptation and restructuring and even sharing of materials to meet the demands of the reformed religious and social landscapes in which it now functioned. These two books present persuasive evidence of this.

The essays collected in Illustrated religious texts in the north of Europe examine the religious culture of Northern Europe in the early modern period through the lens of illustrated religious texts produced there. They argue that if the book is seen as the point at which the various agents of early modern society relevant to its production – theology, the book trade and the market – coalesce, then analysis of these influences and their interactions will provide fresh insight into how these visual texts fulfilled the needs of this new order. These collected papers demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. They show how, in the production and use of religious imagery, ‘crosscurrents of exchange’ occurred as illustrations, woodcuts, prints were exchanged and received across confessional, national boundaries in England, France, the Low Countries, the German Lands and Switzerland. In the process the literary and artistic traditions which made up those boundaries were often appropriated to generate new meanings for these images in different contexts.

However, while these illustrated texts were created and shaped by theological debate and confessional stance, they were also subject to the imperatives of the wider social and economic demands of the communities in which they were created. The livelihoods of authors, engravers, printers, publishers, agents, shippers and booksellers were dependent on them. Theological practice and polemic might provide the crucial context for their creation but in the final analysis the accountant's bottom line, the printer's knowledge and understanding of the market, and that of his agent and the booksellers were as critically important as the author's theological intentions.

The first part of the book considers the broader crosscurrents, ideologies and motives involved in the production and use of images. Alexandra Walsham's account and critical assessment of recent historiographical trends in the study of the impact of the Reformation on visual art sets the historical and methodological context for the collection. She provides an outline of the anomalies and problems which scholars encounter in the sources with regard to the production, diffusion and reception of such imagery. Lee Palmer Wandel's study of catechisms shows how Protestant visual practices were in many ways a subtle continuation of Catholic ones which, with some appropriate fine-tuning, could be used to create new confessional identities. Walter Melion's discussion of the use of a single print, Karel van Mander's The nativity broadcast by prophets of the incarnation, across a broad spectrum of confessional belief, Reformed, Mennonite and Catholic, demonstrates the intrinsic capacity of visual images to convey subtly different meanings which thus allowed them to be successfully deployed across confessional boundaries. Mia Mochizuki's study of the religious prints created in Antwerp for the Jesuits’ Japanese mission traces their journey via Lisbon, Goa and Macau to Nagasaki. Here they catalysed the creation of paintings, the construction of a printing press and the casting of bronzes for the mission. She draws attention to the need to take close and full account of the transmission and use of illustrated religious texts beyond European borders. Adam Morton examines the broader effect of Protestantism on European iconography through a detailed study of the satire The common weales canker wormes (c.1625) within the prevailing devotional, satirical and literary cultures. He argues that Protestant visual culture emerged through an engagement with existing iconography and popular culture in a post-Reformation landscape. The print's appeal rested upon its utilisation of this tradition, assimilating and adapting it to its own needs.

The six essays which follow are individual case studies by David J. Davis, Amanda Herrin, Dirk Imhof, Els Stronks, Fieke Dietz and Erin Lambert. They address the role of specific workshops and small presses, and the intentions of the creators and readers of these illustrated texts, taking into account the way in which they were designed to convey information and address confessional orientation. For example, Erin Lambert's study of an illustrated hymnal compiled by the German Catholic priest Johann Leisentrit for the bi-confessional community of Bautzen shows how the priest's need to negotiate the confessional boundaries of the Bautzen congregations were crucial factors in his choice and adaptation of Lutheran images. Dirk Imhof contributes a fascinating case study of the Jesuit Thomas Sailly's compilation of images for the prayer books that he was commissioned to produce for the duke of Parma's troops in the southern Netherlands.

Meanwhile the shifts of Reformation and Catholic renewal had a seminal influence on book production and trade throughout Catholic Christendom. The Council of Trent's requirements for standardised liturgical texts and catechisms, together with the increase in demand for books of spirituality, theology and polemical texts which refuted Protestant claims, created new and profitable markets. The financial incentives for those involved in the printing industry and book trade to engage not only with the new European Counter-Reformation markets which were opening up but with the newly established Catholic missionary markets of the New World were considerable. As a result the book trade flourished as it produced, shipped and marketed this body of approved texts which formed common readings for this geographically extended Catholic community.

The essays gathered in Books in the Catholic world, edited by Natalia Maillard, examine these multifaceted connections between Catholics and the printing press and its agents before and after the Reformations. They address the routes, networks and mechanisms of trade, circulation, control and reception of texts in Catholic communities in Europe, the New World and Africa. Adopting what the book defines as a ‘transnational’ approach, they analyse the similarities and differences in book consumption between these communities to show that these common readings were not only cultural links but they created what is defined here as the ‘true substratum of creativity’ in Catholic Christendom.

Innovative research by the contributors open up for scrutiny the financial accounts and trade catalogues of printing houses and their agents; catalogues of private libraries of collectors, and even post-mortem inventories. Diego Crance, for example, the successful Seville-based printer and book trader of Flemish origins, brought to life in the pages of Pedro Rueda Ramírez's case study of his catalogue of books – printed in Europe for sale in the New World – made the transatlantic journey from Seville to New Spain three times in nine years during the 1670s and ’80s. And it paid off. He identified a commercial opportunity and developed it to the mutual benefit of both his own business interests and the needs of the Catholic missionaries who needed texts for teaching and ministry. He took containers of religious books which, having passed the scrutiny of the Inquisition waiting at the docks when he arrived, he sold. Then, through an elaborate system of financial exchanges, the money received was shipped back to Spain in the form of gold and silver bullion.

Stijn Van Rossem shows how the Flemish printers, the Verdussens, successfully adapted to the changed religious landscape of post-Reformation continental Europe. They transformed themselves into specialist publishers of Counter-Reformation texts for the Spanish and Portuguese markets. Rafael Pérez García's discussion of the creation, distribution and reception of Castilian spiritual texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shows the influence that common readings had on spiritual and intellectual movements long before the Council of Trent. Natalie Maillard uses notarial documents to investigate the impact of Italian influences on Spanish culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an Atlantic perspective. Focusing on the audiences rather than the authors, she examines the shared readership in Seville and Mexico of a wide range of Italian works including poetry, prose, theological and spiritual works and medical texts. Bianca Lindorfer opens the private book collections of seventeenth-century Austrian aristocrats to examine the Spanish literature found there, tracing the patterns of distribution of foreign literature in aristocratic circles and the transnational networks which facilitated its spread. She shows that there was an intense cultural exchange between Vienna and Madrid in which books were often, as they are now, collected simply for their prestige value.

Idalia García Aguilar, using the protocols employed by the Inquisition to control readers in New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has analysed the inventories of libraries compiled by the Inquisition and the legal documents associated with them. This method of approach to hitherto closed collections has allowed her to scrutinise and analyse some of these private collections for the first time, with important results. Adrien Delmas contributes a fascinating essay on the use of and perception of books in the Catholic and Protestant worlds through an analysis of readers in the Cape Colony. The parallels between anti-Spanish propaganda at the end of the sixteenth century and anti-Dutch propaganda in the eighteenth century are well drawn.

These two fine collections of essays showcase some of the most important interdisciplinary research on Reformation and Counter-Reformation visual culture and the book trade in Europe and the New World being undertaken at present. Their meticulous scholarship and perceptive analysis form an invaluable source for everyone working on the history, literature, social history and theology of the period.