Contents: Preface; Toleration and resistance: 'Heretics be not in all things heretics': Cardinal Pole, his circle, and the potential for toleration; Nursery of resistance: Reginald Pole and his friends; Tournai and tyranny: imperial kingship and critical humanism; The conclave of Julius III and the role of diplomacy: The war of the two saints: the conclave of Julius III and Cardinal Pole; An unknown diary of Julius III's conclave by Bartolomeo Stella, a servant of Cardinal Pole; If martyrs are exchanged for martyrs: the kidnappings of William Tyndale and Reginald Pole; A diet for Henry VIII: the failure of Reginald Pole's 1537 legation; The Italian religious context: Marco Mantova, a Bronze Age conciliarist; Marco Mantova and the Paduan religious crisis of the early sixteenth century; Ariosto anticlerical: epic poetry and the clergy in early cinquecento Italy; Renaissance collective identity and the creation of an icon: A fate worse than death: Reginald Pole and the Parisian theologians; A sticking-plaster saint? Autobiography and hagiography in the making of Reginald Pole; Reginald Pole in Paolo Giovio's Descriptio: a strategy for reconversion; When Maecenas was broke: Cardinal Pole's 'spiritual' patronage; Cardinal Pole's finances: the property of a reformer; Index.