Anna Pravdica recovers the veritable cartload of Ralph Wallis’ now largely forgotten 1668 pamphlet, Room For The Cobler of Gloucester. Well-known in its own time, and enjoying cultural currency well into the 18th-century, the pamphlet, as Pravdica demonstrates, has much to tell us about religion, politics, social status, community, and family from the Civil Wars through to the Restoration and beyond.

Madeleine Bracey studies the significance of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s foundational 1990 article on the English scholar Gabriel Harvey’s annotations of Livy. As Bracey shows us, Jardine and Grafton’s essay not only transformed understandings of Harvey’s work, but reshaped early modern book historiography, posing new questions about what it meant for scholars to read in the period.

Olivia Garro examines Barnabite friar Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum, first published in Milan in 1608. Garro argues that close attention to a much cited and yet often misunderstood text can not only offer us valuable insights into contemporary systems of belief, but help us to better understand the Italian Inquisition, its definition and treatment of witchcraft.

Anna-Rose Shack makes the case for the importance of a 1560 sonnet sequence, appended to a volume of sermon translations by Anne Lock. Shack shows us how attention to an ‘outstanding example of poetic innovation’ can further conversations about historical women’s writing, the development of Protestant poetics, and the interplay between poetic form and gendered voices.

Dr Julia Martins uncovers The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese, a bestselling sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recipe book. Still relatively unknown to wider historical scholarship, the text, as Martins observes, ‘was an editorial phenomenon’, and it ‘presents the historian with extra layers to peel’ in writing the histories of science, medicine, gender, craft, translation, amongst others.