This essay argues that for William Tyndale, not only was scripture not sola, but it did not have to be read solely as scripture, that is, the salvific word of God. It could also be read with historical faith, a term that Tyndale borrowed from the German Reformer Philip Melanchthon and used to signify “believing in scripture as one would a non-scriptural history.” Tyndale did not exactly advocate this approach to scripture, but he recognized it as having at least some validity, given the role of human agency and authority in the transmission of God's word. More broadly, the notion of historical faith in scripture reflects the Reformation elevation of what John Foxe called the “truth of history” along with that of scripture. In the polemical writings of Tyndale and later English Protestant Reformers, scripture served both as a means of personal salvation and as a source of historical evidence against the Catholic Church. As a source for this kind of evidence, scripture was cited in conjunction with non-scriptural histories and in ways not discernibly different from those in which such histories were cited. Tyndale's historical faith is not, then, as his opponent Thomas More dubbed it, an “evasion” borrowed from Melanchthon, but rather a part of the complex and developing relationship between scripture and history during the English Reformation.

The sixteenth-century writer Ortensio Lando (ca. 1512–ca. 1553) wrote many of his works pseudonymously and borrowed liberally from the works of others. Part of a community of professional writers who experimented with collaborative modes of literary production, Lando was also deeply invested in the currents of religious reform that swept through sixteenth-century Italy. In his extensive literary recourse to female personas, Lando privileged contemporary women who shared his own heterodox religious views. This essay examines Lando's female impersonations with particular attention to his use of Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazzuolo (ca. 1521–76), whose complex literary relationship with Lando is illustrated by her presence throughout his literary corpus, and by his role in the book of Lettere published under her name. It argues that the relationship between these two figures can be best understood as a literary and spiritual partnership, one that meshed Lando's editorial expertise with Gonzaga's fame as a woman of extraordinary virtue and spiritual authority, a reputation that Lando himself helped to create. In an era when print publication by women was still far from common, such collaboration constituted an alternative path to literary expression.

The discovery of annotations to a copy of Vasari's Vite (1550) in the Beinecke Library at Yale University gives us a rare insight into how the book and contemporary art literature were read and how the information they provided circulated in the Veneto. This article traces the origin of the annotations to the circle of artists and amateurs around the painter Domenico Campagnola in Padua. In polemical reaction to the Florentinism of the Vite, the annotations repeat the major anti-Vasarian arguments elaborated by art writers, but also offer new information about Veneto art. There is also a biographical note on Titian, which precedes the publication of the artist's biography in the second edition of the Vite (1568).

This essay examines the didactic intent of historical works that modern critics, under the influence of a later, especially Victorian, view of English history, have construed as unalloyed propaganda for Protestant England in the pursuit of empire and in its rivalry with Catholic Spain. Careful analysis of the editorial practices of Richard Hakluyt (ca. 1552–1616) reveals that he and others of his generation instead employed patriotic conceits, such as the claim to God's Providence and protection, in a more complex and circumspect manner: as both encouragement and a corrective to national endeavor and as a yardstick against which to measure what was actually done.