Summary This volume brings together medievalist and early modernist specialists, whose research fields are traditionally divided by the jubilee year of 1500, in order to concentrate on the role of the laity (and those in holy orders) in the religious transformations characterizing the 'long fifteenth century' from the flourishing of the Devotio Moderna to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Recent historiography has described the Christian church of the fifteenth century as a world of 'multiple options', in which the laity was engaged with the clergy in a process of communication and negotiation leading to the emergence of hybrid forms of religious life. The religious manifestations of such 'new communities of interpretation' appear in an array of biblical and religious texts which widely circulated in manuscript before benefiting from the new print media. This collection casts a spectrum of new yet profoundly historical light on themes of seminal relevance to present-day European society by analysing patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and examining shifts in hierarchic and non-hierarchic relations articulated through religious practices, texts, and other phenomena featuring in the lives of groups and individuals. The academic team assembled for this collection is internationally European as well as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in its methodology. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Contributors Introduction: Investigating and Reconsidering Medieval and Early Modern Divides and Connections ? IAN JOHNSON Lay and Clerical Cultures in Heaven and on Earth: Divides, Interactions, and Negotiations Gertrude More's 'Confessiones Amantis' and the Contemplative Identity of the Cambrai Benedictine Community? MARLEEN CR Helper Saints and their Critics in the Long Fifteenth Century? OTT GECSER Censoring Popular Devotion in French Protestant Propaganda: The Reformer Pierre Viret, the Rosary, and the Question of the Proper Honouring of the Virgin Mary? DANIELA SOLFAROLI CAMILLOCCI Lay Literacy and the Press: Forms and Transformations of Religious Writing and Rewriting Changes in the Grammar of Legibility: Influences on the Development of 'New Communities of Interpretation'? ? MARCO MOSTERT Biblical Genres through the Long Sixteenth Century: Italy as a Case Study? ERMINIA ARDISSINO Vernacular Culture and Ecclesiastical Censorship Printed Italian Vernacular Biblical Literature: Religious Transformation from the Beginnings of the Printing Press to the Mid-Seventeenth Century? LISE BOILLET Communities of Interpretation of the Bible along the European Margins: Hussite Teachings, the Hussite Bible, and the Bogomils, from the South of Hungary to the Periphery of Eastern Europe in the Long Fifteenth Century? MELINA ROKAI Political and Religious Cultures Language as a Weapon: Hilarius of Litom??ice and the Use of Latin and the Vernacular Language in Religious Polemics in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia? V CLAV ??REK The Legitimacy of Making Alliances between Christians and Infidels: Arguments of Polish Jurists in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century? WOJCIECH ?WIEBODA Confessional Coexistence, Conversion, and Confusion Peasants and 'Sectarians': On the Ineffectiveness of Evangelical Persuasion in Sixteenth-Century Poland? WALDEMAR KOWALSKI Religious Transformation on the Early Modern Periphery: Law and Gospel: Image, Place, and Communication in the Multi-Confessional Community of Sixteenth-Century Moravian Ostrava? DANIELA RYWIKOV Index of Persons and Places