A handful of specific episodes did more than legal texts to shape how blasphemy law has actually operated.
Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and theologian who denied the Trinity and infant baptism, was burned at Geneva in 1553 at the instigation of civic authorities in which John Calvin played a leading part; the case is regularly cited, including by later Protestant writers, as evidence that Reformation churches could prosecute blasphemy and heresy as severely as the Catholic authorities they had broken from.
In England, blasphemous libel prosecutions continued into the twentieth century; the last successful prosecution, Whitehouse v Lemon (1979), was brought by campaigner Mary Whitehouse over a poem in Gay News depicting a Roman centurion's sexual feelings for the crucified Christ, and it produced a conviction under a law widely regarded by then as anachronistic, contributing to the eventual abolition of the offence in 2008.
Artistic and satirical work has generated the most sustained modern controversy. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) and Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), banned by some jurisdictions on release, tested Christian-majority tolerance for irreverence without triggering prosecution comparable to Islamic-world reactions to similar material concerning Muhammad. The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, the 2005 Danish cartoons and the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo each pressed the same claim, that depicting the Prophet is impermissible regardless of the depicter's own religion, extending a domestic legal category into an international one that critics say no single authority can adjudicate.