Sixteenth-century approaches to the world of nature remained resolutely bound to ancient texts. Hostility to the medieval past, new theories, new experiences, and new information were evidently abundantly present. But medieval predecessors were far more likely to be criticized for failure to understand ancient authority than for slavish dependence on it; dissatisfaction with intellectual tradition was apt to express itself in form of a call for return to the ideas of ancients who preceded the standard school authors in time; and in every branch of natural philosophy, natural history, and medicine, examination of the writings of ancient Greek authors was a major, perhaps the major, part of the task of the investigator. Innovators — some of them very bold and some very eccentric indeed — reworked, recombined, and criticized the ancients, or measured their teachings against modern experience; but they seldom ignored them.

Early on the morning of 6 May 1527, under cover of dense fog, an Imperial army led by Charles of Bourbon began its attack upon the city of Rome. When the Vatican was besieged, Pope Clement VII and several retainers fled by the Alexandrine corridor to the papal fortress, the Castel Sant' Angelo. Bourbon would die in one of the first assaults; but by sunset the entire city, with the exception of a few palaces and the papal fortress, would be at the mercy of his troops, which would occupy Rome for much of the following year. Thus began the Sack of Rome, an event of obvious political significance for papal autonomy, but also one which many historians have identified as a turning point for Roman humanistic culture.

In the summer of 1527, the Spanish Inquisition summoned some thirty-three of Iberia's most prominent theologians to the Castilian city of Valladolid in order to judge a variety of suspicious passages culled from Erasmus's works. The theologians met, argued, and disbanded without ever reaching a decision on the orthodoxy of the excerpts or even debating the whole inventory under review, for when plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique sent them home and never reconvened them. The place of the Valladolid assembly in the scholarly record is nearly minimal, for if a few academics have detailed Erasmus's response to it, no one has sufficiently explored its implications for Spanish history. The reason for such neglect lies not only in the conference's failure to pronounce, but in the modern argument that diagrams it in terms of Erasmus's impact on sixteenth-century Spanish culture.

Prior to the reformation, most sermons given in France were structured according to the “modern method” of division and subdivision, which proceeded in rather artificial fashion from theme to protheme, then to the elaboration of theological points and exempla. Those who deviated from this form, such as Jean Vitrier, were lavishly praised by humanists such as Erasmus, but were often sufficiently heterodox in other respects to attract the attention of the Paris Faculty of Theology. In the first decade after the outbreak of the Reformation in France, the modern method persisted, but by the 1530s it had been replaced almost completely by a much freer and more expressive rendering of theological and Biblical material. This was accompanied by an equally major change in the language of printing: by the mid-sixteenth century, almost all popular sermons were printed in French, whereas their earlier counterparts had been printed exclusively in Latin.

On 20 April 1534, a twenty-eight year-old Benedictine nun from the convent of St Sepulchre's in Canterbury was hanged at Tyburn alongside her confessor and a number of their associates. The nun was Elizabeth Barton, a former servant from the parish of Aldington in Kent. Barton and her companions were attainted of treason by a Parliamentary Act which asserts that they maliciously opposed Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and “‘traterously attempted many notable actes intendyng therbye the disturbaunce of the pease and tranquyllytie of this Realme.”

Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a, Christen Woman (hereafter ICW), the text Ruth Kelso has described as the most influential conduct book for women of the sixteenth century, was printed and reprinted in English over nine times during the course of the century: in 1529, 1531, 1541, 1547, 1557, and 1567 from the shop of the Erasmian printer Thomas Berthelet, in 1585 by Robert Waldegrave, and in 1592, by John Danter. In addition to the widely recognized significance of the often contradictory views of women expressed in ICW, these English editions are significant as an example of an early modern reconstituting of the historical record. Allusions to Catherine of Aragon within these editions reflect swings in Tudor court politics and trace the privatization of this once seemingly powerful woman as she was removed from court and public life.

It is somewhat surprising, given the nature of royal investment in various forms of political and religious iconography associated with Renaissance portraiture, that the well-known “Rainbow Portrait” (c. 1600-03; fig. 1) of Queen Elizabeth I, held by Robert Cecil, Lord of Salisbury at Hatfield House, but of unknown provenance, has not received sufficient attention to its political allegories. Much has been made of the religious symbolism associated with the portrait, especially by René Graziani, who argues, for example, that “Elizabeth wears the gauntlet on her ruff in right of her title, Fidei Defensor, official champion of the Christian religion” (255), and that the hair style of the Queen with its “Thessalonian bride allusion … [contributes] to the sponsa Dei theme” (259).

A sentimental domestic scene, François I and Marguerite of Navarre, was painted in 1804 by the Salon painter Fleury Richard (fig. 1). As he explained, it illustrates an anecdote from the legend of François I. The king's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, is shown discovering on the windowpane a graffito about the inconstancy of women. François — the great royal womanizer — has just scratched it there and looks very pleased with himself.

This painting signals not only the early nineteenth century's fascination with the Renaissance king, but reveals its attitudes about the Renaissance itself. For example, the setting and the costumes betray a confusion about the periodization of Gothic and Renaissance: the room in which the scene takes place is of Gothic revival design, while another room - in neo-classical style - opens beyond; the king's costume is historically correct, but Marguerite could be Maid Marian.