Thomas Mayer is certainly correct in stating that very few scholars of the English Reformation are aware of developments on the Continent that bore historically and that bear historiographically on the subjects of their research. At the same time, one of the marks setting world-wide Anglophone studies of the Reformation apart from those in continental Europe is the integration of colleagues of Catholic persuasion and of Catholic investigations into our wide-ranging historical discipline, including the sub-field of early modern religion. One could almost call this progress, a Whiggish concept that Mayer decries. All depends upon one's vantage point regarding the field. From at least one point of view, we do not fall behind.

Still, it remains true, even among us English-speakers, that Catholic topics have a way to go to catch up in sheer number and variety to those of a Protestant emphasis. This collection as well as the series of which it is part are intended to promote a focus upon Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present ten essays grew out of a conference held in 2010 that brought together scholars from several disciplines working on England, Germany, Spain, and Italy—alas, France is excluded. A pervasive theme is the relationship between centers and peripheries, and where and what centers may actually be. Historiographic positions may even be regarded as intellectual centers, the representatives of which have colored the arrangement of past events in our minds. Brad S. Gregory calmly, incontestably asserts that subscription to the principle of sola scriptura did not produce doctrinal agreement but quite extreme doctrinal variety. Only Lutherans' and Calvinists' alliances with secular power determined their “orthodoxy” and the “heresy” of other, including Anabaptist, groups. Peter Marshall explores the applicability of confessionalization theory to England and detects a partial success under Henry, Edward, and Mary; but under Elizabeth the possibility of quiet nonconformist commitment. Even Catholicism did not fare badly despite the queen's disapproval of any extreme. State confessionalization was “patchy and incomplete” (56). Ronald Thiemann engages Charles Taylor's assertion of growing secularism, declaring, “we need to avoid exaggerating the differences among the pre-secular, secular, and post-secular” (76). Thiemann draws on artists' renderings of Christ's human life—Giotto, Bellini, Mantegna, Grünewald, and Cranach—to demonstrate the persistent intertwining of these two allegedly opposite spheres.

Part 2 shifts away from centers in modern theory to centers and peripheries located in the early modern past. Lu Ann Homza asserts a growing inductive reasoning among some inquisitors in their search for incriminating evidence. A main example is Alonso de Salazar Frías, who insisted on visiting the rural sites of witch accusations and questioning the people. As a result, “his thinking became more expansive and contextual” (85). Jodi Bilinkoff's essay takes up what to his contemporaries, too, were the less admirable (because more ascetic) qualities of John of the Cross, hidden even in texts of hagiographical intent, that may have kept him from being chosen as governor of his order. Anne Overell explores “soul talk” (ranging from confession through edification and consolation to consultation) in Reformation England and Scotland. These possibilities endured. They were intended for neither self-discovery nor catechistic training. John Edwards illuminates Bartolomé Carranza's controversial visit to England between 1554 and 1557 in Philip II's entourage. The Inquisition at home found much to criticize in his very Catholic Commentaries on the Christian Catechism, notwithstanding that much of the substance was adopted at Trent.

Part 3 concentrates on the Council of Trent as the new, obligatory Catholic center. According to John Frymire, only as its new centripetal weight was felt could one refer to the Church and to oneself as Roman Catholic. Frymire's essay undertakes two separate tasks: first, to trace in brief, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic accounts of the Church's early modern condition (from Johannes Janssen to Joseph Lortz); and secondly, to affirm the ubiquity of late medieval and sixteenth-century German Catholic sermonizing. Postils were published in “massive numbers” (194). Nonetheless, a relative pause in output occurred between the end of Trent and approximately 1590, when a broader array of authors issued from the presses.

Abigail Brundin notes that what got put on the Parma and early Roman indexes of prohibited books was inconsistent, even haphazard. Vernacular works made up just seven percent of the combined lists. Not even Vittoria Colonna's (condemned) writings were included. Literary production of a less-than-orthodox nature was vigorous, yet the inquisitors were not sensitized to examine this category of expression. Women, including some nuns, evidently felt free to express themselves. Marcia B. Hall takes up Catholic religious painting between the accession of the ascetic Pope Pius V (1566–1572) and the death of Gregory XIII (1585), a “less stringent” personality. If the censors watched closely inside Rome, in Venice they did not. Spiritually moving but also sensuous images flourished, from the brushes of, among others, Titian, Caravaggio, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Authors and painters often fared better in the peripheries, however defined.

All these essays meet a high standard of scholarship. They are united here by the readers' ability to construe them as treating centers of power or prominence in relation to those placed outward or lower in the prevalent hierarchies. But the collective effect is to inspire us to move on to the myriad Catholic topics that have not captured our attention. Despite their different subjects, these papers convey a far broader, indeed a prevalent vibrancy in early modern Catholic religious life.