This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinarycollection of material from primary sources, illustrating therelationship between cultural change and religious belief insixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extractsdrawn from a variety of genres including political, religious,philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems andfiction. Some have never previously been published, others have notbeen reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenthcentury, and a number are translated into modern English for thefirst time. `Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing fromsuch renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and SirThomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works ofliterature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes,Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many othersare all to be found here. A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - toexplore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics,religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eightthematic sections. Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernizedthroughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriateexplanatory annotation for each item.