This neat title introduces a consistent theme: faith of all flavours is revealed in cultural forms of all kinds: texts, images, music and songs, and in subtler expressions, like friendships and academies. That subject is well suited to sixteenth-century Italy, where faith often had to be implicit or ‘told slant’. The editors of this collection say that they have avoided imposing uniformity of approach – and it shows. There is no muffling of the ‘voice’ of the several academic disciplines represented, resulting in variety, and a healthy suspicion of several orthodoxies. The Council of Trent tried to lay down the law about art, music and literature, albeit sometimes briefly and ineffectively: it did not stop Titian's erotic nudes and Tintoretto's bathetic mythologies, so long as they stayed outside churches, as Tom Nichols shows. Similarly Trent did not silence the laude spirituali and confraternity songs, studied here by Iain Fenlon and Noel O'Regan respectively. Both forms were influenced by Savonarolan piety, still animating Filippo Neri and much popular tradition. Chrysa Damianaki suggests that Jacopo Pontormo's lost frescoes not only took up Lutheran and Valdesian themes, but can also be associated with Lutheran iconography. Harald Hendrix explores a chamber of ‘delightful horror’, where Titian and Aretino both experimented with realistic portrayal of human agony and its power to shock, in sacred as well as secular contexts. Raymond Waddington's vivacious study of the Aretino-Titian circle shows how writers and artists focused on the humanity of Christ, manifest in works like Titian's Ecce Homo.

It is a more complex task to study friendships and academies as cultural forms, but one in which Stephen Bowd, Antonio Corsaro and Abigail Brundin are all convincing. They show sensitivity to the strangeness of this Renaissance world in which city dwellers relied on the friendship of hermits for the common good, spiritual poets preferred manuscript circulation to print, while the often heterodox Florentine Academy aided women writers and survived patchy censorship. Most essays in the collection focus on the expression of less-than-orthodox faith, but Matthew Treherne's concluding study engages with liturgical philosophy to unravel the opposite case. Tasso's late poem Il mondo creato is a meditation on the passing of time, with haunting echoes of the liturgy of the mass: here conformity inspired instead of stifling. The Nicodemite problem needs to be stated more clearly and more often in this volume, as in much relevant recent scholarship. Sixteenth-century people became expert at reserve, evading both their contemporaries and modern scholars. Linking hints in images to oblique textual allusions is entirely legitimate study but not certain proof. The veil once drawn over personal faith can be tweaked but not removed. Like most of Ashgate's volumes in the Catholic Christendom series, this one looks good, although rationing of illustrations is apparent and italics have been lost in a few footnotes. Variety of terminology is also evident, but does not intrude. These contributors bring life and balance, recognising that Trent, Index and Inquisition were powerful forces, yet not all-powerful everywhere. Challenges to faith resulted in formal changes rather than the suffocation and ‘mental stagnation’ once seen as marking late sixteenth-century Italian culture.