Publisher's Synopsis
"This volume combines clarity of thinking, elegance of style, and exemplary scholarly attention to detail with intellectual sobriety and human compassion."-Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Journal
"Hsia has… succeeded in turning established knowledge to illuminatingly new purposes."-G.R. Elton, New York Review of Books
"This meticulously researched and unusually perceptive book is social and intellectual history at its best."-Library Journal
"A fresh perspective on an old problem by a major new talent."-Steven Ozment, Harvard University
R. Po-chia Hsia, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is also the author of Society and Religion in Münster, 1535-1618