Notice biographique sur Franȯis de Laval de Montmorency Book

I cannot even describe the ways in which I love this book. A collection of essays that more or less demolish the idiotic historical commonplace that the Catholic Church was anything like a monolithic institution in the early modern period, and that the Council of Trent and/or Counter-Reformation inaugurated an era of clerical repression that destroyed the vibrant civilization of the Italian Renaissance. Jacob Burckhardt has a lot to answer for, but these essays do a lot to make up for it.