Volume 4, Issue 1 -

This article elucidates the rhetorical framework within which the new culture of popular sacred music flourished in both Protestant and Catholic Reformations, focusing on modulata recitatio , the ancient manner of ecclesiastical singing reconstructed by the humanists as an embodiment of musica divina . It discusses how metrical psalmody and oratorios, originating from the modulata recitatio and aimed at edifying the laity, paved the way for modern hymnody and church cantatas respectively – the new music which facilitated the promotion of Christian spirituality and virtue by appealing to emotion. Considering the cultural development of popular sacred music the article demonstrates that in combining moral education with Christian devotion the modulata recitatio lies at the heart of lay spiritual music shaped by the Reformation.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Hutterian Brethren of Moravia were a thriving religious movement, described by numerous visitors as an ideal of a sacred Christian congregation. The Hutterites themselves promoted a similar self-portrait, seeing their community as the embodiment of the apostolic Church described in the Acts of the Apostles, and of the Old Testament’s Chosen People. This image was challenged by another Reform Church, the Polish Brethren, or the Arians. Focusing on the example of those two communities, this essay discusses the process of Radical Reform identity formation. It examines the creation of the Moravian myth of a sacred community and the rebuttal of this myth produced in the milieu of the Polish Brethren. Different social makeup and political context of the Arians shaped their hermeneutics of the same sacred texts that served the Moravians and resulted in construing an alternative myth of a sacred community. The essay concludes that the latter narrative was instrumental for the Polish Brethren to establish their own, separate Christian identity.

The present study focuses on one aspect of Jean Gerson’s (1363–1429) judicial influence in England: the development of the concept of equity or epikeia . By analysing particularities of Gerson’s interpretation of epikeia , the study examines the reasons why his take on equity attracted attention in the socio-political context of 16 th century England. It also explores distinctions between various understandings of equity, which was gradually introduced into common law under Thomas More’s chancellorship and thanks to Christopher St. German’s writings. Making the reference to today’s interest in the concept of equity, article aims to serve as a link between scholarship and contemporary political and judicial thinking.

Anne Colladon, widow of Laurent de Normandie, financier of the mid-sixteenth century Genevan book trade, grappled with Laurent’s first wife’s estate and her adult stepsons’ claims on her estate. This case study of a famous family of French origin reveals complexities of early-modern systems of dowries and wills and problems for a second wife and her daughter. Normandie was a great hero of the Reformation because of his financing of Calvin’s publications and his dispatching of colporteurs carrying Bibles, catechisms, and Psalters into France. Anne was from a prominent family that fled France for Geneva (1550). She was an astute business woman and seemingly responsible mother but she inherited a complex situation after Normandie’s untimely death of the plague in 1569. She was left with financial problems and two stepsons in a blended family that included three children she had conceived with Laurent. It was not an easy mix.

This article analyses excerpts from letters sent by French Reformed congregations and politically-engaged Calvinist laymen in 1562. In these dispatches, the churches, lay notables, and local magistrates of Montpellier, Grenoble, Gap, Nîmes, Issoire and Rouen requested pastors to Geneva or thanked the town’s authorities for ministers previously sent there. However, these six letters were not addressed to the Venerable Company of Pastors, but specifically to the syndics and Small Council of Geneva. While the role of the Company in the sending of Geneva-trained pastors to France on the eve of the Wars of Religion is known, the participation of the Republic of Geneva’s political authorities in these activities needs more scholarly attention. This article seeks to offer a discussion of this topic through analysis of correspondence and other sources held in the Archives d’État de Genève .

This paper explores the attitude of sixteenth-century Protestant reformers towards Renaissance humanism and classical learning by examining an eclogue composed in Doric Greek by the Heidelberg arts professor Simon Stenius. Reading Stenius’ eclogue against his classical models, Theocritus ( Idylls 1 and 7) and Homer’s Phaeacian narrative ( Odyssey , Bks 5–7), it points out the meaning involved in the way Stenius characterizes the dismissal of the Calvinist faculty from Heidelberg upon the accession of the unsympathetic Ludwig VI. It notes how Stenius uses the pastoral genre to infuse his own work with an air of displacement and how he transposes the image of the shipwrecked Odysseus onto his own exiles in order to imply their loss of identity. When this loss of identity is soon given further definition by the ecphrasis of a rustic cup which inverts the cup described in Theocritus Idyll 1, Stenius’ attitude to classical learning is revealed: The cup not only signifies a silencing of the Muses, but – most importantly – it joins the Muses together with the Heidelberg Protestants in a mutual association of mourning. The sum total is the location of the voice and identity of the Heidelberg Calvinists within the highest registers of classical literature.

Danish reformer Niels Hemmingsen was a Lutheran, but owing to Pan-Protestant sentiments that became apparent in his later writings, he found an appreciative audience in non-Lutheran Western Europe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This article argues that the early modern European reception of Hemmingsen and his theology should be seen as an attempt to construct him as part of a Protestant memory. It also argues that in order to understand the dynamics behind the reception of Hemmingsen’s ideas, one has to consider the geopolitics of early modern Denmark. Due to her strategic setting in Northern Europe, Denmark played a vital role in controlling commerce and politics between the North and Baltic Seas. Arguing for a “Western” perspective, the article shows how Hemmingsen’s case substantiates that the Danish Reformation involved both importing Lutheranism from the South (Saxony), and exporting it to the West (The Low Countries, England).