Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany

This volume offers a coherent and interdisciplinary approach to a wide variety of early modern subjects centered on onomastics, the study of names. Leading scholars in the field seek to explore the dynamics and impact of this naming (or renaming) process in a variety of contexts: social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific.

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant-Nunn Chair for Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. Her publications include From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012), She is co-editor of Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (2009), Archeologies of Reformation: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 (2017), and Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (2018).

Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He has published seven books on various social, legal, and religious aspects of pre-modern Germany, including Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within (2018), and The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (2013). He served as President of the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär from 2012-15 and hosted the society’s triennial conference at Vanderbilt in 2015.

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant-Nunn Chair for Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. Her publications include From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012), She is co-editor of Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (2009), Archeologies of Reformation: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 (2017), and Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (2018).

“The book offers unique insights into complex cultural processes, reframing some supposedly well-known areas of German history. Its wide topical scope allows it to explore a remarkable variety of naming processes in the early modern period.” • Johannes Dillinger, Oxford Brookes University

“These engaging and highly polished essays together speak to broader ways in which knowledge, political and religious movements, and other social arrangements came to define the history of early modern Europe.” • Philip M. Soergel, University of Maryland