IN recent decades historians have frequently questioned the appropriateness of the long-accepted term “Counter-Reformation” within a wider European and world context of Catholicism. Various shifts in terminology, away from “Counter-Reformation,” which originated in northern-European historiography, where it seemed apt for German religious history, and toward Hubert Jedin's “Catholic Reformation,” Eric Cochrane's “Tridentine Reformation,” John O’Malley's “Early Modern Catholicism,” all acknowledged late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholicism's greater diversity and more pluralistic character. In addition, Jean Delumeau has chronicled the process of religious reform back long before the Council of Trent, to the thirteenth century, and its continuation down even into the eighteenth century.

All these approaches broaden the field to admit the wide variety that characterized the Catholic tradition of this period. They also recognize that the activities of the Council of Trent followed no clear agenda and were not all directed toward Protestant heresy ; that much activity of the early modern Catholic Church was not simply a reaction to events in northern Europe, but focused on the south and the New World ; that many important aspects of renewal and reform occurred outside the institutional Church, which had represented the Council's focus almost exclusively, and took place within less familiar, unofficial, or informal contexts, apart from parochial structures, which remained the ecclesiastical hierarchy's chief preoccupation.

Such broader terminology also serves music more effectively, for post-Tridentine Catholic church music encompassed a remarkably wide variety of practices beyond the Palestrina style, often perceived as paradigmatic. Many of these practices continued older traditions from before the Council of Trent, whose particular impact on music was less restrictive than often perceived. The musical activities of the Council were also less clearly focused than sometimes imagined, and the implementation of its published decrees, which were less specific in their details than musician historians have commonly made them out to be, was inconsistent and frequently contradictory.