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And the trees are as different from ours as day from night; and also the fruits, and grasses and stones and everything. EUROPE The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the maximum extension of that episode of glacial expansion we call the Little Ice Age, when growing seasons were shortened by several weeks and altitudes at which crops could grow were reduced. At the same time Europeans, having recovered from the devastation of the Black Plague, were once more increasing in numbers and in need of extra calories. It was at this point that the American foods, whose earlier adoptions had been scattered and spasmodic, began to achieve widespread acceptance. A good question is why it took Europeans so long to embrace the American crops. They promised more calories and some, like maize and potatoes, had significant advantages over Old World counterparts. Illustrative are potatoes. In that swath from the North Sea to the Ural Mountains, rye, although temperamental in the face of cold winters and rainy summers, was the only Old World grain that did at all well. But potatoes thrived in such a climate – very like their native environment – and could produce some four times more calories per acre than rye. Moreover, potato crops matured in three or four months, whereas rye and other grains required ten months. Potatoes could be planted on fields fallowed for future rye cultivation, and left in the ground to be dug up when needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature of the period 1520–59 was disseminated almost entirely by the printed page, and the general influences of the new process discussed in the previous volume must be borne in mind. It is, however, far less easy to generalise about sixteenth-century printed books than about incunables, for the simple reason that, while books printed prior to 1500 have been more or less exhaustively listed by scientific bibliographers, our knowledge of subsequent publications is by no means as comprehensive. There is a systematic list of publications in England covering the sixteenth century in the Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1475–1640; this takes in also books printed in English abroad, but (apart from Latin service books) not books printed abroad in other languages designed for the English market or by English authors, of which there were a considerable number. With this invaluable work as a basis, knowledge of both the quantity and the quality of English literary works in the sixteenth century is more securely established than is the case with the output of continental writers. With the exception of the recently (1981) completed author-catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, none of the great continental libraries has a printed catalogue of books and the student who seeks an overall view of sixteenth-century literature must perforce consult the printed catalogues of the British Library. The dangers of this are evident if one recalls that it has been reckoned that the Library's holding of French books before 1600 ‘represents not much more than a fifth of the editions known to have been printed at Paris, and less than a sixth of the output of the French provinces’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When rebuked for her recusancy by judges at Oxford in 1581, Cecily Stonor retorted: I was born in such a time when holy mass was in great reverence, and brought up in the same faith. In King Edward's time this reverence was neglected and reproved by such as governed. In Queen Mary's time, it was restored with much applause; and now in this time it pleaseth the state to question them, as now they do me, who continue in this Catholic profession. The state would have these several changes, which I have seen with mine eyes, good and laudable. Whether it can be so, I refer it to your Lordships' consideration. I hold me still to that wherein I was born and bred; and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it. Cecily Stonor was one of the large number of Catholics who claimed consistency in the religion, who claimed continuity in their own persons with an earlier Catholic tradition, and who accused the Protestants of mutability and dangerous innovation. But such a view of post-Reformation English Catholicism as a survival through the sixteenth century of traditional religion has been ably challenged by modern historians. The evidence of Elizabethan visitations prompted A. G. Dickens to formulate an influential distinction between ‘survivalism’ and ‘seminarism’: conservative attachment to old traditions soon declined, and later there arrived a new brand of post-Reformation Catholicism, a dynamic foreign importation brought by missionary priests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]