This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of material from primary sources, illustrating the relationship between cultural change and religious belief in sixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extracts drawn from a variety of genres including political, religious, philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems and fiction. Some have never previously been published, others have not been reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenth century, and a number are translated into modern English for the first time. `Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing from such renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and Sir Thomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works of literature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many others are all to be found here. A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - to explore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics, religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eight thematic sections. Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernized throughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriate explanatory annotation for each item.

A collection of documents and of excerpts from books, with brief comments. Pp. 91-94 contain documents showing evidence of antisemitic sentiments in London's East End vaunted against Jewish landlords. Ch. 8 (pp. 247-312), "The Jewish Question", deals with antisemitism and anti-alienism in Britain in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Pp. 261-271 present excerpts from Arnold White's antisemitic book "The Modern Jew". Pp. 281-297 deal with the anti-Jewish disturbances in Limerick (Ireland) in 1904, in Tredegar (Wales) in 1911, in Leeds and in Bethnal Green (London) in 1917, and with press reactions to them. Pp. 347-349 give an example of antisemitism in the British Army in 1919 in Palestine.