This essay examines what Arabs knew about Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant-Catholic conflict in the early modern period. While there have been studies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impact of Protestant missions on the Arab East, there has been no study of the Protestant movement and its confrontation with Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the period between 1517 and 1698. Although Protestantism failed in gaining converts, the rivalry between Protestant England and Catholic France in co-opting converts to their military and ideological camps resulted in religio-social fissures that would have a lasting impact on Christians and Christianity in the Middle East.

This article discusses annotations to some eighty surviving copies of William Caxton's “Golden Legend.” It assesses reactions from male and female readers across the religious spectrum, exploring the varied ways in which early modern readers engaged with a book that quickly became—and has remained—a shorthand for medieval religion. It seeks to contribute to the history of the “Legend” itself, to historical understanding of annotation, and to the history of reading during the Reformation.

Following the first European voyages of exploration to the New World, several Ottoman authors debated whether Alexander the Great may have already known of the American continent in classical antiquity. By exploring the contours of this previously unstudied intra-Ottoman debate, the present article challenges the prevailing scholarly view that sixteenth-century Ottoman writings about the Americas were at best frivolous and at worst incoherent. Instead, these texts engaged with many of the same questions provoked by the discoveries in contemporary Europe, while at the same time intersecting with the most profound and contested concerns of Ottoman statecraft.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans writing about the ius gentium went from treating indigenous American rulers as the juridical equals of Europe's princes to depicting them as little more than savage brutes, incapable of bearing dominium and ineligible for the protections of the law of peoples. This essay examines the writings of Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili to show how this transformation in European perceptions of Native Americans resulted from fundamental changes in European society. The emergence of a novel conception of sovereignty amid the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation was central to this shift and provided a new foundation for Europe's continued imperial expansion into the Americas.

Galileo participated in exchanges of encrypted correspondence at key moments in his life. In 1610–11, following the publication of the “Sidereal Messenger,” ciphers helped Galileo to diplomatically reveal what he was observing through his telescope. After his Inquisition trial of 1633, Galileo and his closest allies relied on a substitution code (gergo) to protect the privacy of his conversations and to facilitate the removal of his library and manuscripts at Arcetri. Throughout this article, we position Galileo's use of codes within the rich contemporary literature about communicating securely and reflect on cryptic writing as a strategy of communication and dissimulation.