Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions

This intellectual history of the dissident Hussite reform movement in early 15th century Bohemia explains the process of Hussite radicalization, which led to their overthrow of secular and religious structures in the so-called "first European revolution". It does this by discovering the political relevance of diverse heterodox leaders and the discourses they adapted into mobilizing calls to conflict. As such, the work represents a reimagining of the Hussite revolution which emphasizes the symbolic worldview of its agents. This includes an appreciation of the Hussite debt to unexpected traditions of thought, and of the movement's participation in innovative visions of theo-political order.

Diese Studie liefert die erste umfängliche Untersuchung der „Republiken“, den ersten und einflussreichsten frühneuzeitlichen Staatsbeschreibungen, die als Buchreihe publiziert wurden. Die Republiken wurden in den 1620er und 1630er Jahren in Leiden und Amsterdam gedruckt und avancierten zu Grundlagentexten der frühneuzeitlichen Staatenkunde. Zunächst verfolgt die Untersuchung die Verbreitung der Bände in Buchsammlungen und Bibliotheken des 17. Jahrhunderts und liefert so neue Erkenntnisse zu verschiedenen Leser- und Nutzergruppen der Republiken sowie ihrer prominenten Rolle auf dem frühneuzeitlichen Buchmarkt. Weiter verfolgt die Studie anhand dreier Fallstudien – der Republik der Niederlande, des spanischen Weltreichs sowie des safawidischen Persien – die Funktionen der Bände im Wissenschaftsbetrieb sowie die Text-, Ideen- und politischen Traditionen, in denen sie stehen.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of the earliest and most notable early modern book series of state descriptions, the ‘Republics’. Printed in Leiden and Amsterdam in the 1620s and 1630s, the Republics evolved into foundational works of early modern political studies. By first tracing the volumes’ circulation and presence in book collections and libraries in the seventeenth century, this study provides fresh insights into their diverse readerships as well as their prominent role in the early modern book market. It then delves into their various academic purposes and their textual, intellectual, and political traditions through selected case studies on the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Empire, and Safavid Persia.

The twenty-first century has demonstrated that radicalism remains a vital analytical concept in the study of modern religion and politics. However, its application to earlier periods has been met with more ambivalence. This volume challenges that trend by examining religio-political subversives near the close of the Middle Ages as radical within their historical and intellectual contexts, spanning several centuries and cultures, with a focus on Central Europe. In doing so, it seeks to bridge entrenched geographical, chronological, and methodological divides, fostering broader discussions on the comparative relevance of radicalism in pre-modernity.

Medieval Matters: Europe’s Premodern Religious Cultures offers innovative perspectives on Europe's medieval religious landscapes through diverse case studies spanning Livonia to Iberia. This interdisciplinary collection examines the complex interplay of ritual, community, memory, and identity across medieval religious practices, with particular attention to Jewish–Christian relations, gender dynamics, and devotional materiality. Honouring Miri Rubin’s transformative scholarship, the volume brings together emerging scholarly voices who engage with her insights on ritual, narrative, emotion, gender, and devotion. The collection concludes with a roundtable of eminent medievalists reflecting on Rubin’s influence and future directions for studying the premodern past.

This volume sheds new light on the intellectual history of the Renaissance by focusing on the neglected paradigm of scholasticism. Its chapters aim to recast our present understanding of familiar features of Renaissance thought by showing that many of the assumed innovations of the period took place as a result of a dialogue between plural traditions of scholasticism and the emerging methods of humanism. Written by a team of internationally recognized experts, the volume seeks to further enfranchise scholasticism as an integral aspect of Renaissance intellectual history and explain its value to the study of humanism and early modern philosophy.

English Irena Backus' scholarship has been characterised by profound historical learning and philological acumen, extraordinary mastery of a wide range of languages, and broad-ranging interests. From the history of historiography to the story of Biblical exegesis and the reception of the Church Fathers, her research on the long sixteenth century stands as a point of reference for both historians of ideas and church historians alike. She also explored late medieval theology before turning her attention to the interplay of religion and philosophy in the seventeenth century, the focus of her late research. This volume assembles contributions from 35 international specialists that reflect the breadth of her interests and both illustrate and extend her path-breaking legacy as a scholar, teacher and colleague.

Français La recherche d’Irena Backus témoigne d’une culture historique et philologique étendue, de son impeccable maîtrise des instruments linguistiques et de la multiplicité de ses centres d’intérêt. Ses études sont aujourd’hui une référence essentielle pour les spécialistes de l’histoire intellectuelle, de l’histoire de l’exégèse biblique et de la réception des Pères de l’Eglise pendant le long XVIe siècle. Seiziémiste de formation, elle s’est également aventurée dans d’autres chronologies, en s’intéressant à l’Église de la fin du moyen âge et à la philosophie de ce XVIIe siècle qui l’a de plus en plus passionnée et qui constitue aujourd’hui son centre d’intérêt majeur. Ce recueil célèbre son long et original enseignement et ses grandes qualités de chercheuses et de collègue.

English In Eine wahrhaft königliche Stadt, Daniela Kah describes how contemporary residents and visitors were able to experience and perceive the presence of the Holy Roman Empire (or its representatives, e.g., the king) in three late medieval cities -- Augsburg, Nürnberg and Lübeck. After receiving privileges from the king, these cities initiated large construction projects designed to assert their imperial status. These projects had a major impact on everyday life and made the Empire visible and graspable within the city. However, in the 13th century the cities increasingly deployed symbols and signs to represent their self-understanding as 'imperial'. ‘Being immediate to the Empire’ or ‘being privileged’ provided important political, economic, and social benefits. Therefore it became very important to the cities to represent their status in visible form. For this reason, the Empire achieved a permanent and lasting presence in free imperial cities.

Deutsch In Eine wahrhaft königliche Stadt beschreibt Daniela Kah, wie das mittelalterliche Reich oder seine Repräsentanten, wie zum Beispiel der König, in den Reichsstädten Augsburg, Nürnberg und Lübeck für die zeitgenössischen Bewohner und Besucher erfahrbar war und wahrgenommen wurde. Zunächst führte die Vergabe von königlichen Privilegien zu großangelegten repräsentativen Bauprojekten in den Städten, die das Reich so im städtischen Alltag erkennbar werden ließen. Ab dem 13. Jahrhundert kam es dazu, dass die Stäte vermehrt Symbole und Zeichen im Stadtraum anbrachten, die ihr Selbstverständnis visualieren. Der Status ‚unmittelbar dem Reich zugehörig“ beziehungsweise ‚vom Reich privilegiert’ zu sein, wurde aufgrund seiner politischen, wirtschaftlichen und prestigesteigernden Bedeutung ein wichtiger Bezugspunkt, der zur dauerhaften Präsenz des Reichs in den Reichsstädten führte.

Jason Lavery examines the Reformation in the Diocese of Turku during the reign of King Gustav Vasa (r. 1523-1560). This diocese, covering a territory better known then and now as Finland, encompassed the Swedish kingdom east of the Gulf of Bothnia.
The Reformation in Finland was driven by King Gustav Vasa’s state-building program, sometimes referred to as “royal reform” in respect to the church, as well as the spread of Lutheran theology and practice. Both royal and Lutheran reform were mutually reinforcing and dependent upon one another.

Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature brings together a full score of essays by established and rising American-based scholars of the early modern. Arranged according to five themes or genres: Tales and their Tellers, Poets and Poetry, Religious Controversy, Montaigne, and Knowledge Networks, they offer both fresh perspectives on canonical authors such as Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, Montaigne, Marot, Labé, and Hélisenne de Crenne, as well as original interpretations of less familiar works of sixteenth-century moment: confessional polemics, emblems, cartography, geomancy, epigraphy, bibliophilism and even ichthyology. Inspired by and gathered together here to honor the eclectic career of Mary B. McKinley, this anthology integrates many of the most pertinent topics and contemporary approaches of early modern French scholarly inquiry.

Contributors are: Pascale Barthe, Leah L. Chang, Edwin M. Duval, Gary Ferguson, George Hoffmann, Robert J. Hudson, Karen Simroth James, Scott D. Juall, Virginia Krause, Kathleen Long, Stephen Murphy, Corinne Noirot, Jeff Persels, Bernd Renner, Nicolas Russell, Nicholas Shangler, Cynthia Skenazi, Kendall Tarte, Cara Welch, and Cathy Yandell.

In his portrait of Duke George of Saxony (1471–1539) Christoph Volkmar offers a fresh perspective on the early Reformation in Germany. Long before the Council of Trent, this book traces the origins of Catholic Reform to the very neighborhood of Wittenberg. The Dresden duke, cousin of Frederick the Wise, was one of Luther's most prominent opponents. Not only did he fight the Reformation, he also promoted ideas for renewal of the church. Based on thousands of archival records, many of them considered for the first time, Christoph Volkmar is mapping the church politics of a German prince who used the power of the territorial state to boost Catholic Reform, marking a third way apart from both Luther and Trent.

This book was orginally published in German as Reform statt Reformation. Die Kirchenpolitik Herzog Georgs von Sachsen, 1488-1525.

Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe puts Reformation in a daily life context using lived religion as a conceptual and methodological tool: exploring how people "lived out" their religion in their mundane toils and how religion created a performative space for them. This collection reinvestigates the character of the Reformation in an area that later became the heartlands of Lutheranism. The way people lived their religion was intricately linked with questions of the value of individual experience, communal cohesion and interaction. During the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era religious certainty was replaced by the experience of doubt and hesitation. Negotiations on and between various social levels manifest the needs, aspirations and resistance behind the religious change.

Contributors include: Kaarlo Arffman, Jussi Hanska, Miia Ijäs, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Jenni Kuuliala, Marko Lamberg, Jason Lavery, Maija Ojala, Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, Raisa Maria Toivo

Scholarship on the moral and political philosophy of the ‘School of Salamanca’ has either long been emphasizing the discontinuity between medieval and modern philosophy and the way this discontinuity is represented in the works of these authors or discussing issues of moral justification that are often seen as the heart of early modern practical philosophy.
This volume offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the concept of law. This allows for an in-depth analysis of a variety of normative issues in the authors’ moral and political thought. It also suggest a more continuous picture of the transition from medieval to modern philosophy and proposes a more nuanced view of the importance of political concepts in the authors’s practical philosophy.

Diocesan Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Carpentras uses notarial records from the 1480s to reconstruct the procedures, caseload, and sanctions of the bishop’s court of Carpentras and compare them to other secular and ecclesiastical courts. The court provided a robust forum for debt litigation utilized by a wide variety of people. Its criminal proceedings focused on recidivist clerics who engaged in fights, disobedience, anti-Jewish activities, and sexual transgressions. Its justice varied depending on whether cases involved violence, sex, or contracts. The judge applied sanctions gingerly and protected litigants’ rights carefully, in ways we might not expect: his role was to intervene in, explore, and document conflicts, and to elicit confessions and mediate disputes. Participants exploited this narrative and archival space well.

In From Princes to Pages, Gavin Schwartz-Leeper provides a wide-ranging assessment of early modern literary characterizations of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister from 1515-1529. Called the ‘other king’, Wolsey became a contested symbol of the English Reformation through diverse literary depictions that demonstrate the transformative pressures of this complex period.

The author traces the development of these characterizations from the satires of John Skelton to Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, and offers new considerations of canonical and lesser-known texts by George Cavendish, John Foxe, and Raphael Holinshed. This study brings together multidisciplinary analyses to demonstrate how Wolsey’s literary lives reveal much about the contemporary shaping of this period, and argues for new ways to understand uses of the past in early modern England.

The Dutch Revolt (ca. 1572-1648) led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people. In Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt, Johannes Müller shows how migrants and their descendants in the Dutch Republic, England and Germany cultivated their Netherlandish heritage for more than 200 years. Memories of war and persecution shaped new religious and political identities that combined images of suffering and heroism and served as foundational narratives of newcomers.

Exposing the underlying narrative structures of early modern exile memories, this volume shows how stories about the Dutch Revolt allowed migrants to participate in their host societies rather than producing a closed and exclusive diaspora. While narratives of religious persecution attracted non-migrants as well, exile networks were able to connect newcomers and established residents.

In The Vacant See in Early Modern Rome John M. Hunt offers a social history of the papal interregnum from 1559 to 1655. The study concentrates on the Roman people’s relationship with their sacred ruler. Using criminal sources from the Archivio di Stato di Roma and Vatican sources, Hunt emphasizes the violent and tumultuous nature of the lapse in papal authority that followed the pope’s death. The vacant see was a time in which Romans of modest social backgrounds claimed unprecedented power. From personal acts of revenge to collective protests staged at the Capitol Hill and citywide discussions of the papal election the vacant see provided Romans with a unique opportunity for political involvement in an age of omnipresent hierarchy.

La singularité de la criminalité des gouvernants ou de leurs actes peccamineux réside dans la rareté des condamnations qu’ils ont subies. En examinant sur la longue durée, les formes de dénonciation de ces délits des hommes de pouvoir, le livre essaie de comprendre les raisons qui aboutissent à la rupture du consensus et à la remise en cause de l’acceptation sociale des traditions jusqu’alors tolérées (corruption, extorsion, abus en tout genre). Les différentes contributions examinent les conditions de ces condamnations, morales et politiques, et dessinent un tableau nuancé de ces pathologies du pouvoir qui loin d’être invariables dans le temps sont articulées aux paradigmes moraux de chaque société historique.

Les contributeurs sont: Nathalie Barrandon, Anne-Catherine Baudoin, Franck Collard, Kathleen Crowther, Angela De Benedictis, Silvia Di Paolo, Julien Dubouloz, Patrick Gilli, Cedric Giraud, Thomas Granier, Laurent Guitton, Charles Guerin, Corinne Manchio, Nancy McLoughin, Hélène Ménard, Richard Newhauser, Flocel Sabaté, Armand Strubel, Julien Théry et Silvana Vecchio


English: What is singular about the criminality of rulers or their sinful acts is how rarely they are convicted. Through a long-term study of the forms of denunciation of crimes committed by those who hold power, this book tries to understand the reasons that lead to breaking the consensus and calling into question the social acceptance of traditions which had hitherto been tolerated (corruption, extortion, different types of abuse). The various contributions investigate the moral and political conditions of these convictions, and give a well-balanced account of these pathologies of power: far from being invariable over time, they are consistent with the moral paradigms of each society in history.

Deutsch
Niemand ist mehr verantwortlich für die Entstehung jenes Denksystems, das auf Ignatius von Loyola (1491-1556) und seinen Exerzitien basiert, als Jerónimo Nadal. Ignacio Ramos legt in seiner Studie Jerónimo Nadal (1507-1580) und der „verschriftlichte“ Ignatius: Die Konstruktion einer individuellen und kollektiven Identität die ursprünglichen Konturen der sogenannten „ignatianischen“ Spiritualität dar. Es wird deutlich, wieviel Einfluss Nadal auf die Herausbildung des „Ignatianischen“ hatte.

Anhand Nadals lange verkannten Selbstzeugnisses (Chronicon Natalis) wird hermeneutisch herausgearbeitet, wie der gequälte Reifeprozess von Nadal originales Denken erzeugte – insbesondere in Bezug auf Ignatius.

An diese europäische Schlüsselgestalt des jungen Jesuitenordens heranzutreten, gewährt einen existentiell vermittelten Einblick in manche der gesellschaftlichen und philosophischen Spannungen (converso-Frage, Rolle der Vermittlungen...) z. Zt. des Humanismus und der großen Reformen.

English
Jerónimo Nadal plays a key role in the creation of the tradition of thought based on the person of Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) and his Spiritual Exercises. Ignacio Ramos’ book Jerónimo Nadal (1507-1580) und der „verschriftlichte“ Ignatius unveils the large percentage of too often overlooked “Nadalian” moments in the origins of “Ignatian” Spirituality.

Leaning on Nadal’s autobiographical account (Chronicon Natalis, fully translated) the author deploys a hermeneutical method to show how Nadal´s stressful maturation process became a source of original thought, especially regarding Ignatius.

The reader will gain an existentially mediated insight into some of the social and philosophical hot spots (converso question, role of mediations...) of Humanism and the reformation era.

In Defining Heresy, Irene Bueno investigates the theories and practices of anti-heretical repression in the first half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the figure of Jacques Fournier/Benedict XII (c.1284-1342). Throughout his career as a bishop-inquisitor in Languedoc, theologian, and, eventually, pope at Avignon, Fournier made a multi-faceted contribution to the fight against religious dissent. Making use of judicial, theological, and diplomatic sources, the book sheds light on the multiplicity of methods, discourses, and textual practices mobilized to define the bounds of heresy at the end of the Middle Ages. The integration of these commonly unrelated areas of evidence reveals the intellectual and political pressures that inflected the repression of heretics and dissidents in the peculiar context of the Avignon papacy.

Focusing on the theory and practice of Cistercian persuasion, the articles gathered in this volume offer historical, literary critical and anthropological perspectives on Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum (thirteenth century), the context of its production and other texts directly or indirectly inspired by it. The exempla inserted by Caesarius into a didactic dialogue between a monk and a novice survived for many centuries and travelled across the seas thanks to rewritings and translations into vernacular languages. An accomplished example of the art of persuasion —medieval and early modern— the Dialogus Miraculorum establishes a link not only between the monasteries, the mendicant circles and other religious congregations but also between the Middle Ages and Modernity, the Old and the New World.

Contributors are: Jacques Berlioz, Elisa Brilli, Danièle Dehouve, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Marie Formarier, Jasmin Margarete Hlatky, Elena Koroleva, Nathalie Luca, Brian Patrick McGuire, Stefano Mula, Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Victoria Smirnova, and Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk.

Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100-1800 investigates how emotions were conceptualised and practised in the medieval and early modern period, as they ordered systems of thought and practice—from philosophy and theology, music and literature, to science and medicine.

Analysing discursive, psychic and bodily dimensions of emotions as they were experienced, performed and narrated, authors explore how emotions were understood to interact with more abstract intellectual capacities in producing systems of thought, and how these key frameworks of the medieval and early modern period were enacted by individuals as social and emotional practices, acts and experiences of everyday life.

Contributors are: Han Baltussen, Susan Broomhall, Louis C. Charland, Louise D’Arcens, Raphaële Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, Danijela Kambaskovic, Clare Monagle, Juanita Feros Ruys, François Soyer, Robert Weston, Carol J. Williams, R.S. White, and Spencer E. Young.

In Poetry and Censorship Jennifer Helm offers insight into motives and strategies of Counter-Reformation censorship of poetry in Italy. Materials of Roman censorial authorities reveal why the control of poetry and of its reception was crucial to Counter-Reformation cultural politics.
Censorship of poetry should enable the church to influence human inner life that ---from thought and belief to fantasy and feeling--- was evolving considerably at that time. The control of poetic genres and modes of writing played an important part here. Yet, to what extent censorship could affect poetic creation emerges from a manuscript of the Venetian poet Domenico Venier. The materials suggest the impact of Counter-Reformation censorship on poetry began earlier and was more extensive than has yet been propagated.

This volume brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship on these themes, and thus pays tribute to the ground-breaking work of Charles Zika. Seventeen interdisciplinary essays offer new insights into the materiality and belief systems of early modern religious cultures as found in artworks, books, fragmentary texts and even in Protestant ‘relics’. Some contributions reassess communal and individual responses to cases of possession, others focus on witchcraft and manifestations of the disordered natural world. Canonical figures and events, from Martin Luther to the Salem witch trials, are looked at afresh. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how cultural and interdisciplinary trends in religious history illuminate the experiences of early modern Europeans.

Contributors: Susan Broomhall, Heather Dalton, Dagmar Eichberger, Peter Howard, E. J. Kent, Brian P. Levack, Dolly MacKinnon, Louise Marshall, Donna Merwick, Leigh T.I. Penman, Shelley Perlove, Lyndal Roper, Peter Sherlock, Larry Silver, Patricia Simons, Jennifer Spinks, Hans de Waardt and Alexandra Walsham.

The Revolt in the Netherlands erupted in 1566 and tore apart the Low Countries. In Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700 Jasper van der Steen explains how public memories of the Revolt in the Habsburg Netherlands in the South and the Dutch Republic in the North diverged and became the objects of fierce contestation in domestic political struggles, on both sides of the border and throughout the seventeenth century.

Against widespread assumptions about the supposed modernity of cultural memory Memory Wars argues that early modern public memory did not require the presence of state actors, nationalism and modern mass media in order to play a role of political importance in both North and South.

Die marmorne Liegestatue der frühchristlichen Jungfrau und Märtyrerin Cäcilie, die sich seit ihrer Entstehung zum Jubeljahr 1600 an ihrem ursprünglichen Aufstellungsort in Rom befindet, gilt aufgrund innovativer Rahmung und Formensprache als bahnbrechend in der westlichen Kunst. Im Hinblick auf ihren kulturellen, religiösen, sozialen und politischen Hintergrund wurde sie aber bislang noch nie umfassend untersucht. Die vorliegende, interdisziplinäre Studie widmet sich genau diesem Kraftfeld. Es bestimmt die Genese, Bedeutung und frühe Rezeption des Grabbildes Cäciliens wie auch des Stifters, Kardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrato. Die Figur wirkt nicht nur im gesamten Kircheninnenraum der der Heiligen geweihten Basilika, sondern strahlt in eine wegweisende, frühmoderne Welt aus. Zugleich reflektiert sie Zeitströmungen derart, dass sie als künstlerische Summe ihrer Epoche gelten kann.

The reclining marble statue of the early Christian virgin martyr Cecilia, completed by the Holy Year of 1600 and still in its original setting in the Roman basilica bearing the saint’s name, has long been recognised as a seminal work in Western art. Yet its cultural, religious, social and political background has never been comprehensively investigated. This interdisciplinary analysis explores the constellation of forces that shaped the genesis, meaning and early reception of the sculpture – a funeral image for both its donor, Cardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrato, and Cecilia – as well as its impact on the church interior and the contemporary viewer. The cult image emerges as a synthesis of an epoch that is fundamental to our understanding of early modern culture.

Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist’s process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.

This collection of essays explores the complex relations between Christians and Muslims at the dawn of the modern age. It begins by examining two seminal works by Nicholas of Cusa: De pace fidei, a dialogue seeking peace among world religions written after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and Cribratio Alkorani (1460-61), an attempt to confirm Gospel truths through a critical reading of the Qur’an. After considering Nicholas, his sources, and his context, the book explores a wider range of late medieval texts on Christian-Muslim relations—not only Christian writings about Islam but also Muslim responses to Christianity. The book’s focus is historical, but it can also contribute to efforts at increasing Muslim-Christian understanding today.

The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.

Die Studie eröffnet einen neuen Blick auf den Entstehungsprozess kommunaler Schriftkultur in einer europäischen Großstadt des Spätmittelalters. Dabei zeigt die Geschichte der umfangreichen Überlieferung Augsburgs, wie mehrere Generationen städtischer Autoritäten im Zuge wachsender Emanzipation zunehmend auf Schriftlichkeit angewiesen waren und eigene Bedürfnisse der Archivierung ausprägten. Die Verschriftlichung war ein komplexer Prozess, der wichtige Lebensbereiche und Teile der städtischen Gesellschaft in unterschiedlicher Zeit und Intensität erfasste. Weniger als bisher angenommen ging es dabei um die pragmatische Effektivierung des Regierungshandelns. Die Antriebskraft der Verschriftlichung im Spätmittelalter entsprang einem wachsenden Bedürfnis nach Kontrolle und Überprüfbarkeit.

This book is an intellectual biography of the Venetian historian and theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). It analyses Sarpi's natural philosophy, religious ideas and political thought. Kainulainen argues that Sarpi was influenced by Neostoicism, Neoepicureanism and the sixteenth-century scientific revolution; that Sarpi was a fideist and Christian mortalist who, while critical of the contemporary Church of Rome, admired the purity of the early church. Focusing on Sarpi’s separation between church and state, his use of absolutism, divine right of kings and reason of state, the book offers a fresh perspective on medieval and reformation traditions. It will be of interest to those interested in early-modern intellectual history and the interplay between science, religion and politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political discourse.

The Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio (1556-1605) devoted his life to writing about saints. The thread running through his hagiographical oeuvre was renunciation of this world: humility, subservience and endurance. Yet he engaged with the expertise of lay people, jurists, physicians and engineers, so as to appeal to their interests and convert them. In order to emphasize how saints endured torture, healed disease and exercised piety rather than ingenuity, Gallonio ventured into those secular disciplines, even if he did not endorse them. This book surveys Gallonio’s published and unpublished works and his position in Roman society, to expose the tensions between a theocratic clergy and the self-assertion of skilled and scholarly professionals in the Italian Counter-Reformation.

The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took a passionate interest in Livy’s History of Rome. No one studied the text more intensively than the Swiss scholar Henricus Glareanus, who not only held lectures on different Roman historians at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, but also drew up chronological tables for ancient history, which were printed several times in Basle, sometimes together with Livy’s History. Glareanus annotated his personal copy of the chronological tables and invited his students to copy his marginal notes into their own copies of the book. Three of these copies survived, and give new insight into Glareanus’s practices as a scholar and teacher. The notes they contain—and the way in which Glareanus used them as a teacher—are distinctive, and neither has had much attention in the past from historians of reading. This volume presents facsimile reproductions of the tables from one of the surviving copies, now kept in Princeton University Library. The high-quality reproductions include transcriptions of the handwritten notes, unlocking Glareanus’s teachings for a new generation of students and researchers.

This book gives an analytical review of the history of witch-hunt historiography. So far not much attention has been paid to how the European witch-hunts have been studied and explained in some 150 years of academic research on the issue. The history of the approaches and explanations in witch-hunt research fundamentally contributes not only to our understanding of the bizarre phenomenon in European history but also contributes to understanding of cultural as well as academic trends which heavily direct any research even when scholars are not cognisant of their underlying premises. How and why the picture of witch-hunts has been changing in scholarly works and text books is as illuminating an issue as the proper explanations offered by the research works.

Contributors include: Rune Blix Hagen, Ronald Hutton, Gunnar W. Knutsen, Marianna G. Muravyeva, Marko Nenonen, Raisa Maria Toivo, Charles Zika

Many students of memory assume that the practice of memory changed dramatically around 1800; this volume shows that there was much continuity as well as change. Premodern ways of negotiating memories of pain and loss, for instance, were indeed quite different to those in the modern West. Yet by examining memory practices and drawing on evidence from early modern England, France, Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Low Countries and Ukraine, the case studies in this volume highlight the extent to which early modern memory was already a multimedia affair, with many political uses, and affecting stakeholders at all levels of society.

Contributors include: Andreas Bähr, Philip Benedict, Susan Broomhall, Sarah Covington, Brecht Deseure, Sean Dunwoody, Marianne Eekhout, Gabriela Erdélyi, Dagmar Freist, Katharine Hodgkin, Jasmin Kilburn-Toppin, Erika Kuijpers, Johannes Müller, Ulrich Niggemann, Alexandr Osipian, Judith Pollmann, Benjamin Schmidt, Jasper van der Steen

Die Studie Johannes XXII., Avignon und Europa widmet sich mit einem innovativen Ansatz einem kontrovers diskutierten Pontifikat und ordnet hierbei anhand der in den päpstlichen Registerserien überlieferten kurialen Korrespondenz klassische Themen, wie die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Kaisertum und Papsttum, in einen europäischen Vergleichshorizont ein. Fallstudien, die von den Britischen Inseln bis zum Mittelmeer reichen, geben daneben den Mechanismen, Strukturen und Akteuren der päpstlichen Politik eine deutliche Kontur, wobei auch die grundsätzliche Rolle des Papsttums im spätmittelalterlichen Europa aus einem neuen Blickwinkel betrachtet wird.

By implementing a European approach, the study offers a new view on the controversial pontificate of John XXII. Through examination of the correspondence preserved in the papal registers, classic topics like the dispute between papacy and empire can be interpreted within a broader context while case studies ranging from the British Isles to the Mediterranean reveal the mechanisms and actors of papal politics in late medieval Europe.

Margaret of Parma: A Life presents a woman who had a vital part in the political dramas of Reformation Europe. A natural child of Charles V, she was educated in the courts of Brussels, Florence, Rome, and Parma, and then was thrust into religious and political tumult in the Netherlands, where she showed ability and character.
At eight she was moved to Italy to be educated and then married to Alessandro de’Medici. Alessandro’s murder enabled Charles to marry her to Ottavio Farnese, the grandson of Pope Pius III. The union gave her years of experience in Rome. Her father’s abdication took Margaret back to the Netherlands as regent for Philip II. His authoritarian rule and the Calvinist uprising rendered the position horrifying. When rebuked and replaced by the Duke of Alba, Margaret returned to Italy as ruler of Abruzzo.
The character of Margaret assured her importance as she dealt with essential issues of life and rule. This biography reveals a woman dedicated to compromise and conciliation in public affairs.

This book reveals the fundamental role rape played in promoting Dutch solidarity from 1609-1725. Through the identification of particular enemies, it directed attention away from competing regional, religious, and political loyalties. Patriotic Protestant authors highlighted atrocities committed by the Spanish and lower-class criminals. They conversely cast Dutch men as protectors of their wives and daughters – an appealing characterization that allowed the Dutch to take pride in a sense of moral superiority and justify the Dutch Revolt. After the conclusion of peace with Spain in 1648, marginalized authors, including Catholic priests and literary women, employed depictions of rape to subtly advance their own agendas without undermining political stability. Rape was thus essential in the development and preservation of a common identity that paved the way for the Dutch defeat of the mighty Spanish empire and their rise to economic pre-eminence in Europe.

Emotions and Health, 1200-1700 examines the Aristotelian and Galenic understandings of the ‘passions’ or ‘accidents of the soul’ as alterations of both mind and body across a wide range of medieval and early modern cultural discourses: Aquinas’s Summa, canonization inquests, medical and natural philosophical texts, drama, and the London Bills of Mortality. The essays in this collection focus on notions such as death from sorrow, physiological explanations of fear, physicians’ advice on the harmful and beneficial effects of anger and of sex, medical and philosophical constructions of the melancholic subject, and theological and medical discussions on the impact of music in moderating the passions and maintaining health.

Contributors include: Nicole Archambeau, Elena Carrera, Penelope Gouk, Angus Gowland, Nicholas E. Lombardo, William F. MacLehose, Michael R. Solomon and Erin Sullivan.

Social imagery during the Late Middle Ages was typically considered to be dominated by the three orders oratores, bellatores, laboratores as the most common way of describing social order, along with body metaphors and comprehensive lists of professions as known from the Danse macabre tradition. None of these actually dominates within the vast genre of lay didactical literature.
This book comprises the first systematic investigation of social imagery from a specific late medieval linguistic context. It methodically catalogues images of the social that were used in a particular cultural/literary sphere, and it separates late medieval efforts at catechization in print from the social and religious ruptures that are conventionally thought to have occurred after 1517. The investigation thus compliments recent scholarship on late medieval vernacular literature in Germany, most of which has concentrated on southern urban centres of production. The author fills a major lacuna in this field by concentrating for the first time on the entire extant corpus of vernacular print production in the northern region dominated by the Hanseatic cities and the Middle Low German dialect.

Witches of the North. Scotland and Finnmark is a comparative study of witchcraft persecution in Scotland and Finnmark, Norway. A wide range of quantitative and qualitative analyses based mainly on legal documents shed light on the witch-hunts in the two regions during the seventeenth century. Statistical analyses give information about tendencies in the source material in total. The qualitative chapters contain close-readings of trial documents, wherein the various voices heard during a trial are analysed: the voice of the scribe, the voice of the law, the voice of the accused person and the voices of the witnesses. The analyses combined provide a broad view of the historical phenomenon in question as well as in-depth studies of individual witchcraft cases.

"And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light." (2 Corinthians 11:14) Paul's warning of false apostles and false righteousness struck a special chord in the period of the European Reformations. At no other time was the need for the discernment of spirits felt as strongly as in this newly confessional age. More than ever, the ability to discern was a mark of holiness and failure the product of demonic temptation. The contributions to this volume chart individual responses to a problem at the heart of religious identity. They show that the problem of discernment was not solely a Catholic concern and was an issue for authors and artists as much as for prophets and visionaries.

William of Ockham's (ca. 1288-1347) Opus nonaginta dierum has long been of interest to historians for his theory of rights. Yet the results of this interest has been uneven because most studies do not take sufficient account of the defences of Franciscan poverty already articulated by his fellow Franciscans, Bonagratia of Bergamo, Michael of Cesena, and Francis of Marchia. This book therefore presents and analyzes Ockham's account of property rights alongside those of his confreres. This contextualization of Ockham’s theory corrects many misconceptions about his theory of property, natural law, and natural rights, and therefore also provides a new foundation for studies of his political oeuvre, intellectual development, and significance as a political theorist.

The time of the transition from the Middle Ages to the onset of early modernity (c. 1400-1550) is a very complex one. It brought what on first sight appear to be contradictory developments. Human creativity and freedom became much more important; yet, at the same time, the foundations were laid for systems that allowed control to be exercised over virtually every aspect of human social life. How can we put these two phenomena together? Which tendency is the stronger one? The contributions in this volume focus on the tension between creativity and norm-making from the perspective of different academic disciplines, so as to shed light on this fascinating period in our history.

This project examines the important implications of printed vernacular appeals to a nascent public by the reformer William Tyndale, by religious conservatives such as Thomas More, and by Henry VIII’s regime in the volatile early years of the English Reformation. The book explores the nature of this public (materially and as a discursive concept) and the various ways in which Tyndale provoked and justified public discussion of the central religious issues of his day. Tyndale’s writings raised important issues of authority and legitimacy and challenged many of the traditional notions of hierarchy at the heart of early modern European society. This study analyzes how this challenge manifested itself in Tyndale’s ecclesiology and his political theology.

The late seventeenth century Netherlands have traditionally been viewed as the intellectual entrepot of Europe in general, and for Scotland in particular. Scottish students flocked in large numbers to the Dutch universities, bringing back ideas and books which influenced Scottish learning well into the eighteenth century. This book is the first full-length study of Scots in the United Provinces between 1650 and 1750. It analyses their numbers at the Dutch universities, the education they received and the impact this had on Scottish learning, on the eve of the Enlightenment, showing that the Scottish-Dutch relationship provided the infrastructure, which allowed Scotland to take part in a wider Republic of Letters and that its culture was increasingly characterised by it.

In recent decades scholars have shown considerable and steadily increasing interest in medieval discussions of rights. This book aims to make a significant contribution to scholarship by providing a detailed and systematic account of Conrad Summenhart’s (c.1458-1502) language of individual rights. Starting from the view that Summenhart’s Opus septipartitum contains a carefully constructed and comprehensive theory of individual rights, this study analyses Summenhart’s theory in its historical context, treating it as a culmination of late medieval discourse on individual rights. This study is particularly useful to scholars interested in the origin of human rights language and modern political individualism, as well as to all those who work in the field of late medieval and early modern political and moral philosophy.

In recent years, historians have questioned the notion that belief was central to the Reformation’s success, arguing rather for a variety of social, political, economic, and psychological forces. This study examines one of the intra-Lutheran doctrinal debates, the Flacian controversy over original sin, as means to analyze lay religiosity in the late Reformation. It focuses on the German territory of Mansfeld, where the conflict had miners brawling in the streets, and where a wealth of sources from the laity have survived. This extraordinary evidence demonstrates that although diverse forces were at work, by the late sixteenth century many commoners had developed a complex understanding of Lutheran doctrines, and these beliefs had become informing factors in the laity’s lives.

Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church’s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional experiences. The authors included here study the provocation and the reactions associated with medieval and Renaissance art and architecture. These essays trace the impetus towards interactivity from the points of view of their creators and those who used them.

Contributors include: Mickey Abel, Alfred Acres, Kathleen Ashley, Viola Belghaus, Sarah Blick, Erika Boeckeler, Robert L.A. Clark, Lloyd DeWitt, Michelle Erhardt, Megan H. Foster-Campbell, Juan Luis González García, Laura D. Gelfand, Elina Gertsman, Walter S. Gibson, Margaret Goehring, Lex Hermans, Fredrika Jacobs, Annette LeZotte, Jane C. Long, Henry Luttikhuizen, Elizabeth Monroe, Scott B. Montgomery, Amy M. Morris, Vibeke Olson, Katherine Poole, Alexa Sand, Donna L. Sadler, Pamela Sheingorn, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Anne Rudloff Stanton, Janet Snyder, Rita Tekippe, Mark Trowbridge, Mark S. Tucker, Kristen Van Ausdall, Susan Ward.

The early modern system of brokerage as a widespread practice of transmission and dissemination of political, intellectual and cultural ideas and objects has, in recent years, received some scholarly attention. Agents from different professional backgrounds – diplomats, scholars, artists, priests, booksellers and merchants – have, however, been studied mostly from a single, disciplinary perspective. The chapters making up this present volume all focus on individuals and professional groups who, in the course of their careers, became involved in multiple modes of cultural and political transfer. Together they present an international and interdisciplinary examination of early modern brokerage, a phenomenon which was permeating early modern society – and possibly even one of the fundamental organizational principles of that society.

Contributors include: Robert Hill, Thomas Kirk, Bianca Chen, Maartje van Gelder, Maurits A. Ebben, Peter Hauge, Susanna Kubersky-Piredda, Salvador Salort Pons, Martin Dönike, Badeloch Vera Noldus, and Marika Keblusek.

This publication was financed by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) as part of the VIDI research project "Double Agents: Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe".

This book explores the dynamics of peaceful coexistence in the Dutch Republic by tracing the literary responses to one of the key controversies between Protestants and Catholics – the role of religious imagery in worship. Why and to what extent were people in the Republic willing to reconcile theological differences and combine elements from their own religious cultural practices with those of another?
The intermingling of practices, the author shows, was unexpectedly complicated in the Republic. Restraints were imposed on the use of images in religious literature of all denominations till 1650. Evidence of negotiations appears after 1650, however, as Dutch Protestants absorbed significant aspects of Catholic visual traditions into their own. Religious toleration had clearly become a matter of sharing rather than enduring for the Protestants, but retained features of a monologue since Dutch Catholics were then developing a new, idiosyncratic identity of their own.

The Sentences Commentary of Giles of Viterbo embodies the intellectual and spiritual vision of one of the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance and a reformer of his religious order. Giles strove to locate in ancient wisdom truths revealed in the Bible and Christian doctrine. He composed “according to Plato's mind,” but, influenced by Ficino and the revival of theologia Platonica, he integrates material from Greek myth and metaphysics with the Bible and Christian theology. Until now only a small portion of Giles's Commentary has been published, yet this major work contains some of the best examples of his interpretive method. The present edition contains the entire Commentary as far as Giles proceeded with his ambitious project.

Prevailing scholarly analysis of the public disputations between D.V. Coornhert (1522-1590) and Dutch Reformed ministers is firmly rooted in a principled view of early modern tolerance. This study proposes a new point of departure, which involves breaking away from a Coornhert-centred reading of the debates in Leiden and the Hague, while focusing on the formal status of these disputations instead. Government support of the Reformed Church proved the backbone of these illuminating ‘disputations by decree’. The public legitimization of the Reformed Church – a goal with both political and theological significance – was at stake. As a micro-history of two very unique occasions in Dutch history, this study sheds new light on the complex development of political and religious argument in the early phase of the Dutch Revolt.

This book is the only book-length monograph comparing the impact of confessional identity on both halves of the Wittelsbach dynasty which provided Bavarian dukes and German emperors as well as its implications for late Renaissance court culture. It demonstrates that religious conflict led to the development of distinctly confessional court cultures among the main Wittelsbach courts. Likewise, it illuminates how these confessional court cultures contributed significantly to the splintering of Renaissance humanism along religious lines in this era. Concomitantly, it sheds new light on the impact of late medieval dynastic competition on shaping the early modern Wittelsbach courts as well as the important role of Wittelsbach women in the creation and continuation of dynastic piety in their roles as wives, mothers, and patronesses of the arts.

Scholarship on the German Reformation has long equated preaching with Protestantism, just as many scholars have employed sermons but usually in supplemental and unsystematic ways. Based on an analysis of over 400 standard sermon collections (postils) produced by Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists (1520-1620), this study offers the first comprehensive, systematic presentation of these works from a cross-confessional perspective. It lays to rest the notion that preaching was somehow distinctively Protestant while tracing the creation, production, use, and censorship of postils. These sermon collections were nothing less than the applied distillation of Christianity delivered on a regular basis by the clergy to the laity, and as such the most important vehicle for the dissemination of ideas in early modern Germany.

This book recounts the first fifteen years, early education and marriage negotiations of the Habsburg Archduchess, Elizabeth, who grew up in the Royal and Imperial Courts of Vienna and Wiener Neustadt in the latter half of the sixteenth century. It portrays life at the court of Elizabeth's mother, the Empress Maria, and describes tournaments, coronations, plays, medals, chivalric literature, music, art, sewing, and saints' lives, as well as urban contexts. Ideas of political space and travel are discussed against the settings of Prague, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Bratislava, Munich and Augsburg. Elizabeth’s story reveals specific structures of the Habsburg Courts, featuring Spanish, Austrian, Hungarian, Low Country, Italian, and Bohemian courtiers, and sets her personal story against the background of larger international events, such as the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Ottoman Wars.

‘Nationalism’ may be a modern phenomenon, but national identities are not. The medieval and early modern Low Countries are a case in point. In this myriad of political and clerical territories, identities proved dynamic. Princes and rebels, soldiers and poets, all played a part in the shaping of new imagined communities. The essays in this volume show how regional and interregional identities developed, old ones survived, and novel ones came into being. They offer a fascinating insight into the continuities and discontinuities in the formation of (national) identities in the Low Countries and its neighbouring countries – and are an important contribution to the ongoing debates about national and other identities.

In The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews the author explains how Christians with Jewish family backgrounds went within less than forty years from having a leading role in the foundation of the Society of Jesus to being prohibited from membership in it. The author works at the intersection to two important historical topics, each of which attracts considerable scholarly attention but that have never received sustained and careful attention together, namely, the early modern histories of the Jesuit order and of Iberian “purity of blood” concerns.
An analysis of the pro- and anti-converso texts in this book (both in terms of what they are claiming and what their limits are) advance our understanding of early modern, institutional Catholicism at the intersection of early modern religious reform and the new racism developing in Spain and spreading outwards.

Between the middle of the eighth century and the late ninth century in western Europe, the course of legal history was shaped by interaction with religious ideas, especially with regard to the meaning of confession, suffering, and the balance of protections for an accused individual and the welfare of the community. This book traces those themes through a selection of Carolingian texts, such as archbishop Hincmar's legal analysis of a royal divorce, the decrees of church councils, the biography of a Saxon holy woman, anti-Judaic treatises, and Hrotswitha's dramatisation of the legend of Thaïs, in order to make audible the lively debates over the boundaries of clerical and lay authority, the nature and extent of permissible intervention in the spiritual condition of the empire's inhabitants, and distinctions between the private and public domains. This work thus reveals the profound relation between law and penitential ideologies promoted by the Carolingian imperial court.

This study reconstructs for the first time Marguerite of Navarre’s leadership of a broad circle of nobles, prelates, humanist authors, and commoners, who sought to advance the reform of the French church along evangelical (Protestant) lines. Hitherto misunderstood in scholarship, they are revealed to have pursued, despite persecution, a consistent reform program from the Meaux experiment to the end of Francis I’s reign through a variety of means: fostering local church reform, publishing a large corpus of religious literature, high-profile public preaching, and attempting to shape the direction of royal policy. Their distinctive doctrines, relations with major reformers – including their erstwhile colleague Calvin – involvement in major Reformation events, and the impact of their unsuccessful attempt are all explored.

Conceived as another chapter in the European history of religions (Europäische Religionsgeschichte), this book deals with the intense dynamics of the overlapping political, ethnic, and denominational constellations in Reformation and post-Reformation Transylvania. Navigating along multiple narrative tracks, and attempting to treat the religious history of an entire region – over a limited time period – in a differentiated, polyfocal way, the book represents a departure from the master narratives of any singularly oriented religious history. At the same time, the present work seeks to contribute to laying the groundwork at the micro- and meso-contextual level of East-Central European confessionalization processes, and to developing interpretive models for these processes in the region.

In historical research, Stephen Langton is primarily known as a Parisian master of theology. This biography is dedicated to Langton’s works as archbishop of Canterbury (1207-1228). His pontificate coincided with a period of political crisis in England, most notably the conflicts leading to the Magna Carta and its aftermath. This study sets out to show how Langton actively helped negotiate the Magna Carta: first, as an intercessor for the English barons and then by acting as a mediator between King John and the rebels. Furthermore, he was significantly involved in restoring the powers of kingship on the basis of the Magna Carta during the years of Henry III’s minority after the civil war. Langton's politics paint the picture of an archbishop whose policies were based on principles he had laid out in his theological writings before. Apart from Langton’s political role, this study also explores Langton’s pastoral and administrative commitments as bishop and baron.

Stephen Langton ist der historischen Forschung in erster Linie als Pariser Magister der Theologie bekannt. Die Biographie widmet sich nun seinem Wirken als Erzbischof von Canterbury (1207-1228). Sein Pontifikat fiel in eine krisenhafte Periode der englischen Geschichte, die insbesondere vom Kampf um die Magna Carta geprägt war. Die Studie zeigt anschaulich, wie der Erzbischof Langton zunächst als Fürsprecher der englischen Barone, später als Vermittler zwischen König Johann Ohneland und den Rebellen maßgeblich zur Entstehung der Magna Carta beitrug und während der Minderjährigkeit Heinrichs III. half, die Königsherrschaft nach dem Bürgerkrieg in den Grenzen der Magna Carta wiederzuerrichten. Seine Politikgestaltung war dabei geprägt von politischen Grundsätzen, die er zuvor als Theologe formuliert hatte. Neben seinem politischen Engagement nimmt die detaillierte Untersuchung auch seine pastoralen und administrativen Verpflichtungen als Bischof und Baron in den Blick.

The early modern era is often envisioned as one in which European genres, both narrative and visual, diverged indelibly from those of medieval times. This collection examines a disparate set of travel texts, dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, to question that divergence and to assess the modes, themes, and ethnologies of travel writing. It demonstrates the enduring nature of the itinerary, the variant forms of witnessing (including imaginary maps), the crafting of sacred space as a cautionary tale, and the use of the travel narrative to represent the transformation of the authorial self. Focusing on European travelers to the expansive East, from the soft architecture of Timur's tent palaces in Samarqand to the ambiguities of sexual identity at the Mughul court, these essays reveal the possibilities for cultural translation as travelers of varying experience and attitude confront remote and foreign (or not so foreign) space.

It is a misconception that Christianity and Humanism are in any way in conflict with each other. The present book shows that through many centuries, and especially in the Renaissance, the two stood in a relation that was mutually complementary. The contributions in this volume treat aspects and manifestations of this cultural symbiosis, and they throw new light on authors and texts both more and less familiar. The subject-areas discussed include: religion, history, philosophy, literature and education. The age of Renaissance and Reformation is the central focus, but earlier and later periods are also featured.
The contributions comprise a Festschrift for Professor Arjo Vanderjagt, whose work deals centrally with both Christianity and Humanism.

Contributors are Fokke Akkerman, István P. Bejczy, Alexander Broadie, Chris-toph Burger, Marcia L. Colish, Albrecht Diem, Stephen Gersh, Berndt Hamm, Volker Honemann, Adrie van der Laan, Alasdair A. MacDonald, Peter Mack, Zweder von Martels, Matthieu van der Meer, Hans Mooij, Simone Mooij-Valk, Just Niemeijer, John North, Willemien Otten, Jan Papy, Detlev Pätzold, Rob Pauls, Marc van der Poel, Burcht Pranger, Peter Raedts, Han van Ruler, Rudolf Suntrup, Jan R. Veenstra, and Ronald Witt.

This book explores women’s experiences of pilgrimage in Latin Christendom between 1300 and 1500 C.E. Later medieval authors harbored grave doubts about women’s mobility; literary images of mobile women commonly accused them of lust, pride, greed, and deceit. Yet real women commonly engaged in pilgrimage in a variety of forms, both physical and spiritual, voluntary and compulsory, and to locations nearby and distant. Acting within both practical and social constraints, such women helped to construct more positive interpretations of their desire to travel and of their experiences as pilgrims. Regardless of how their travel was interpreted, those women who succeeded in becoming pilgrims offer us a rare glimpse of ordinary women taking on extraordinary religious and social authority.

Starting in the nineteenth century the scholarly consensus has been to attribute the decline of the Spanish empire to structural rigidity, corrupt bureaucracy and repressive policies. In The Empire of the Cities, Aurelio Espinosa challenges these theories and offers groundbreaking insight into Spain’s political process and emphasizes early modern state formation. Spain’s empire should no longer be viewed simply as a symbol of royal absolutism and dominance. Rather it functioned as a collection of autonomous municipalities interconnected by a parliament that articulated domestic programs and foreign policy. Professor Espinosa also provides a more nuanced understanding of the monarchical government in revealing new insight into royal institutions and management procedures under Emperor Charles V. The Empire of the Cities offers a fascinating and penetrating look inside Spain’s political system that encouraged both expansionism and domestic stability.

Contrary to previous assumptions, magic remained an integral part of everyday life in Enlightenment Europe. This book demonstrates that the endurance of magical practices, both benevolent and malevolent, was grounded in early modern perceptions of an interconnected body, self and spiritual cosmos. Drawing on eighteenth-century Swedish witchcraft trials, which are exceptionally detailed, these notions of embodiment and selfhood are explored in depth. The nuanced analysis of healing magic, the role of emotions, the politics of evidence and proof and the very ambiguity of magical rituals reveals a surprising syncretism of Christian and pre-Christian elements. The book provides a unique insight to the history of magic and witchcraft, the study of eighteenth-century religion and culture, and to our understanding of body and self in the past.

This study examines the life and world of Conrad Bröske (1660-1713), Court Preacher in Offenbach/Mayn. His claim to fame lies in a ten year period between 1694 and 1704 in which this Marburg-trained pastor became a prolific author, polemicist and promoter of chiliastic writings, thanks to a meeting with Thomas Beverley in 1693 and the baptism of a Muslim convert in 1694. Bröske lived a complex existence “between Sardis and Philadelphia,” as a Reformed court preacher and Philadelphian chiliast. His two-sided experience was actually the norm among the Pietists, including so-called radicals. Life between paradigms was the German way of being radical in early modern times due to a lack of religious toleration compared to England and the Netherlands. Bröske’s story belongs to the rise of “Early Evangelicalism” that W.R. Ward has recently discussed.

The Serpent and the Rose examines the theological and liturgical context for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in the Middle Ages, from primary sources in Iberian archives. Its main focus is a study of Marian poetry from Alfonso the Wise and Gonzalo de Berceo through to the poetry collections of the late fifteenth century, showing how poets took themes from the Bible and apocryphal literature, combining them to defend and praise Mary’s conception without sin. Individual chapters assess how they depicted Mary’s prefiguration in the Old Testament by the Woman who defeated the serpent, the young bride of the Song of Songs, or the semi-deity, Wisdom, how they portray her as the mystic rose and as the new Eve.

The essays in this volume examine the relationship of the Jacobean Witchcraft Act to the culture and society of seventeenth-century England. The book explores the potential influence of King James’s works and person on the framing of the Act, including the relationship of Shakespeare's MacBeth to these events, as well as the impact of the Darrell controversy on the shaping of witchcraft beliefs before the Act. It also asseses the impact of the legislation on society in various parts of the country, as well as examining how drama reflected the ideas found in the legislation. The volume concludes with a look at the reasons for its repeal in 1736. This work provides new interpretations of the influence and application of the 1604 Witchcraft Act by some of the world’s leading scholars of witchcraft.

Contributors include: Jonathan Barry, Jo Bath, Roy Booth, Chris Brooks, Owen Davies, Malcolm Gaskill, Marion Gibson, Clive Holmes, P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, John Newton, and Tom Webster.

The unity of the early Lutheran reformation, even in the central themes such as justification, is still an open question. This study examines the development of the doctrine of justification in the works of the prominent first and second generation Lutheran reformers from the viewpoints of divine participation and effectivity of justification. Generally, Luther’s idea of Christ’s real presence in the believer as the central part of justification is maintained and taught by all Reformers while they simultaneously develop various theological frameworks to depict the nature of participation. However, in some cases these developed models are contradictory, which causes tension between theologians resulting in the invention of new doctrinal formulations.

This study is the first comprehensive treatment of the way Marsilius of Padua (1270/1290–1342), a seminal political thinker of the Late Middle Ages, elaborated on Aristotle’s political thought in articulating his political theory. Its main thesis is that Marsilius is committed to the view of a sharp disjunction between ethics and politics, thus deviating radically not only from Aristotle, but also from the majority of medieval Commentators of Aristotle such as Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Peter of Auvergne and John of Jandun. From a methodological viewpoint, it follows the model of “concentric circles”: its starting point is a detailed comparison of the main ideas of the Defensor pacis (Defender of Peace) (1324), Marsilius’ opus magnum, on the one hand, and Marsilius' quotations from William of Moerbeke’s Latin translations of Aristotle’s works focusing in particular on the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric and the Metaphysics as well as the Greek original, on the other. This method of exploring the use of classics in medieval political thought challenges the notion of “reception” as conceived of by recent research and brings out a number of crucial differences between Marsilius and Aristotle. Further, this study situates Marsilius’ ideas in the history of late medieval political thought (podestà literature etc.), the political realities that obtained in 14th-century Padua and late medieval debates on the fortunes of the communal regime and on the rise of the signoria (e.g. Albertino Mussato). It also argues against Marsilius’ so-called Averroism and identifies Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed as a potential source of the Defensor pacis.

This collection of twelve new essays explores the role of women and gender in a broad range of ‘radical’ religious movements of the post-Reformation. Organized into three themed divisions, the first examines the activism of female Quakers in their public performances as preachers and petitioners, in their global travels, and in their domestic lives; the second examines early modern prophetesses and their radical revisions of scripture, gender, body, and voice; and the third concerns women who, in diverse ways, crossed boundaries, including the confessional boundaries of Europe. A strength of this volume is its comparative re-examination of the term ‘radical’. German Anabaptists are discussed alongside unorthodox nuns with the aim of understanding how gender factors into innovative and oppositional religion.

Contributors include: Sarah Apetrei, Naomi Baker, Sylvia Brown, Ruth Connolly, Pamela Ellis, José Manuel González, Julie Hirst, Stephen A. Kent, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Bo Karen Lee, Kirilka Stavreva, and Sheila Wright.

These twenty-six essays, presented by students, colleagues, and friends to Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Peder Sather Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, examine urban, rural, national, and imperial histories in Early Modern Europe and abroad, and politics in Reformation Switzerland, Burgundy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Contributors include: C. Nathan Bartlett, Heidi Eberhard Bate, Ingrid Bátori, Katherine Brun, Luke Clossey, Laura Ford Cruz, Thomas Dandelet, Kathryn Edwards, Marc Forster, David Frick, Jeanne Grant, Sigrun Haude, Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Randolph C. Head, Beat Immenhauser, Steinar Imsen, Carina Johnson, David Luebke, Wolfgang Reinhard, Tom Safley, Heinz Schilling, Regula Schmid, Tom Scott, Narasingha Sil, James Tracy, Sabine von Heusinger, and Peter Wallace.

Publications by Thomas A. Brady, Jr.:

• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. I: Structures and Assertions, ISBN: 9789004097605
• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. II: Visions, Programs, Outcomes, ISBN: 9789004097612
• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Katherine G. Brady, Susan Karant-Nunn and James D. Tracy, The Work of Heiko A. Oberman, ISBN: 9789004125698
• Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the German Reformation, ISBN: 9780391038233
• Edited by H.A. Oberman and T.A. Brady, Jr., Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations, ISBN: 9789004042599
• Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg 1520-1555, ISBN: 9789004052857
• Communities, Politics, and Reformation in Early Modern Europe, ISBN: 9789004110014

Editor of Studies in Central European Histories

These twenty-three essays, presented by students, colleagues, and friends to Thomas A. Brady, Jr., the Sather Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, explore the historiographies of the Reformation from the fifteenth century to the present and study the social and cultural history of religion from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, especially in Germany but also in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and colonial Mexico.

Contributors include: Dean Bell, Peter Blickle, Christoph Burger, Roger Chickering, Constantin Fasolt, Kaspar von Greyerz, Bernd Hamm, Craig Harline, Joel Harrington, Susan Karant-Nunn, Greta Kroeker, Amy Leonard, Marc Lienhard, Terence McIntosh, Erik Midelfort, Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Anne J.Schutte, Julie Tanaka, William B.Taylor, Elaine Tennant, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Ellen Yutzy Glebe.

Publications by Thomas A. Brady, Jr.:

• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. I: Structures and Assertions, ISBN: 9789004097605
• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. II: Visions, Programs, Outcomes, ISBN: 9789004097612
• Edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Katherine G. Brady, Susan Karant-Nunn and James D. Tracy, The Work of Heiko A. Oberman, ISBN: 9789004125698
• Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the German Reformation, ISBN: 9780391038233
• Edited by H.A. Oberman and T.A. Brady, Jr., Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations, ISBN: 9789004042599
• Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg 1520-1555, ISBN: 9789004052857
• Communities, Politics, and Reformation in Early Modern Europe, ISBN: 9789004110014

Editor of Studies in Central European Histories

This book explores philosophical theories which in the Renaissance provided an interpretation of nature, of its laws and exceptions and, lastly, of man’s capacity to dominate the cosmos by way of natural magic or by magical ceremonies. It does not concentrate on the Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophers (Ficino, Pico, Della Porta), or on the relationship between magic and the scientific revolution, but rather upon the interference of the ideas and practices of learned magicians with popular rites and also with witchcraft, a most important question for social and religious history. New definitions of magic put forward by certain unorthodox and “wandering scholastics” (Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Bruno) will interest readers of Renaissance and Reformation texts and history.

In the past years ideological elements that guaranteed cohesion and loyalties in early modern societies have become a key interest of scholarship. Revolving around the notion of amor patriae (love of country), this study shows how this classical idea with its civic humanist connotations was transferred into the context of monarchical theory of the (German) Empire. The book further explores how love of country fitted into European debates on the nature of commonwealth and the citizen's duties. Combined with an analysis of humanist images of the German fatherland and nation, this concept's application is examined in the German pamphlet literature from the conflicts of the late 16th century to the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The result is a refreshing portrait of the confessional era in Germany, which is often simply characterized by sectarian and political divide.

This study describes the origins of early Reformed confessional development using the example of those congregations of religious refugees most heavily influenced by John Laski: the congregation at Emden and the Dutch and French Strangers’ Churches in London. At its center are questions about the congregation as the location of ecclesiology. The outlines of Laski’s theology--which viewed the congregation as the communion of the body of Christ--are described in comparison to the approaches of other Reformers and in relationship to daily reality in the second half of the sixteenth century. Working from a rich base of source materials, the author discusses the development of teachings on church offices and the practice of church discipline, thus illuminating the self-understanding of the three congregations. Becker shows how reciprocal influences and attempts to conform led to the unification of doctrine and community life within these congregations.

Recent witchcraft historiography, particularly where it concerns the gender of the witch-suspect, has been dominated by theories of social conflict in which ordinary people colluded in the persecution of the witch sect. The reconstruction of the Eichstätt persecutions (1590-1631) in this book shows that many witchcraft episodes were imposed exclusively ‘from above’ as part of a programme of Catholic reform. The high proportion of female suspects in these cases resulted from the persecutors’ demonology and their interrogation procedures. The confession narratives forced from the suspects reveal a socially integrated, if gendered, community rather than one in crisis. The book is a reminder that an overemphasis on one interpretation cannot adequately account for the many contexts in which witchcraft episodes occurred.

This volume presents a selection of essays undertaken by participants in an NEH Summer Seminar in 2004 on the topic of the seven deadly sins, viewed individually and as a whole, as part of the Begriffsgeschichte of the Middle Ages and beyond in which concepts are constructed within the cultural milieus in which they function.
The essays in the first part study the political and social ethics of medieval communities. In the second part, the institutional imperatives within the Church of formulating and teaching about the capital vices are the focus of research. In the final section, the contributions deal with ways in which secular artists and authors (in particular, Dante) contribute to the cultural construction of the vices.

Contributors include: Dwight D. Allman, Bridget K. Balint, V. S. Benfell III, Dallas G. Denery II, Laura D. Gelfand, Susan E. Hill, Holly Johnson, Hilaire Kallendorf, John Kitchen, Rhonda L. McDaniel, Richard Newhauser, Thomas Parisi, and Derrick G. Pitard.

First inspired by Vaudes in around 1170, the Waldensians formed a religious dissent which survived into the sixteenth century. Respecting the Gospel to the letter, their rejection of oaths, falsehood, the death penalty, purgatory and the intercession of saints marginalized them in the society of the times. Their survival depended on their will to adapt. Organisation became necessary to withstand the pressures of time and space as their community extended across Europe (France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Bohemia, Poland). Preachers, called “barbes” in the diaspora’s Romance wing, embodied the ideal lifestyle and unity of their community. This is the story and history of those preachers – celibate, arduous, pious men whose itinerant mission it was to maintain a clandestine but vehement faith.

This study considers the medieval reception of Aristotle’s philosophy of marriage, which became known in the Medieval West through the thirteenth century rediscovery of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, then considered a genuine work of the Stagirite. The author shows in seven case studies how medieval readers interpreted the ideas on marriage contained in these Aristotelian texts, and how they used them to construct their own, mostly theological or philosophical, discourses on marriage. At the core stands a hitherto largely neglected, unedited commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics of Bartholomew of Bruges (1309). This study is an important contribution to research on the medieval reception of Aristotle, as well as on the history of marriage.

Was there such a thing as 'public opinion' before the age of newspapers and party politics? The essays in this collection show that in the Low Countries, at least, there certainly was. In this highly urbanised society, with high literacy rates and good connections, news and public debate could spread fast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enabling the growth of powerful opposition movements against the Crown, the creation of the Dutch Republic, and of the distinctive Netherlandish culture of the Golden Age.

Contributors include: Hugh Dunthorne, Raingard Esser, Jonathan Israel, Gustaaf Janssens, Henk van Nierop, Guido Marnef, M.E.H. Nicolette Mout, Andrew Pettegree, Judith Pollmann, Paul Regan*, Andrew Sawyer*, Jo Spaans, Andrew Spicer*, and Juliaan Woltjer. (* Supervised by Alastair Duke)

Urban histories have emphasized the rise of civic autonomy and proto-democracy. Based on chronicle and archival sources, this volume focuses on German bishops, former lords of the city and fierce opponents of civic freedom. The author investigates how bishops contested exclusion from political, economic, and religious dimensions of civic life (Episcopus exclusus), which culminated in the Protestant Reformation.
Four chapters are devoted to episcopal expulsion throughout Germany and the cities of Constance and Augsburg in particular. A remarkable section explores the puzzle of the bishop's civic survival in the later Middle Ages, made possible through episcopal ritual.
The emphasis on city, bishop, and ritual will be of special interest to urban historians as well as to scholars of medieval religion, the reformation, church history, church/state relations, and social history.

This is the story of Paris from the Reformation to the Religious Wars. Through the works of François Le Picart, the most popular preacher from 1530-1556, the book delineates the increasing tensions sparked by Reformation ideas. Targeted by Calvin and Beza, Le Picart was considered the reason Paris remained in the Catholic fold.
Exiled by Francis I for his incendiary preaching, he would later serve as a professor and lecturer coming into close contact with the first Jesuits. A fierce opponent of heresy, he helped compile the Articles of Faith, read heretical books, lectured on scripture, and presided at executions. His 270 sermons, the only substantial preaching source for this period, offer glimpses of life during these increasingly troubled times that challenge works by Denis Crouzet suggesting that France was in the grip of eschatological anguish.

From the Communal Reformation to the Revolution of the Common Man brings together important studies related to a coherent interpretation of the Reformation and the Peasants War of 1525 as a mass movement, rooted in the structures of the communities of towns and villages. The volume presents both detailed studies from the archives and conceptualized essays.

Senses of Touch anatomizes the uniquely human hand as a rhetorical figure for dignity and deformity in early modern culture. It concerns a valuational shift from the contemplative ideal, as signified by the sense of sight, to an active reality, as signified by the sense of touch. From posture to piety, from manicure to magic, the book discovers touch in a critical period of its historical development, in anatomy and society.
It features new interpretations of two landmarks of western civilization: Michelangelo's fresco of the Creation of Adam and Calvin's doctrine of election. It also accords special attention to the typing of women as sensual creatures by using their hands as a heuristic.
Its alternative interpretations explore in theory and in practice the sensuality, the creativity, and the plain utility of hands, thus integrating biology and culture.

An exploration of the interaction between art and politics in early modern Germany, this work focuses on art, political in content, produced by the Augsburg artist Jörg Breu the Elder during the second and third decodes of the sixteenth century. The book argues for the function of the art as fashioning political identities.
The artist Jörg Breu is first introduced. His work for the city of Augsburg and for Habsburg and Wittelsbach rulers are examined. These works are placed within their historical context and analyzed according to how they articulate themes of warfare, ceremony, and history in order to construct political identity.
The analysis of Breu's city chronicle and of the response of his art to political contest is particularly useful for historians of art and of politics.

This study examines expectations of imminent judgment that energized reform movements in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. It probes the apocalyptic vision of the Lollards, followers of the Oxford professor John Wycliff (1384). The Lollards repudiated the medieval church and established conventicles despite officially sanctioned prosecution.
While exploring the full spectrum of late medieval apocalypticism, this work focuses on the diverse range of Wycliffite literature, political and religious treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, including trial records, to reveal a dynamic strain of apocalyptic discourse. It shows that sixteenth-century English apocalypticism was fed by vibrant, indigenous Wycliffite well springs.
The rhetoric of Lollard apocalypticism is analyzed and its effect on carriers and audiences is investigated, illuminating the rise of evil in church and society as perceived by the Lollards and their radical reform program.

This important volume presents the first comprehensive history of early modern La Rochelle, a port town whose fractious residents became embroiled in the French Reformations.
Opening chapters situate the Rochelais within the geopolitics of an oceanic frontier, where urbanites created a strong, heavily armed civic government, in part because they perceived themselves as isolated civilizing agents surrounded by the savage inhabitants of a lawless environment.
Analysis of the city's Reformation proceeds within this context of place and politics, showing how various ranks of the citizenry idiosyncratically adopted the tenets of Calvinism, amalgamating these salvific doctrines with traditional civic rites and values - to the consternation of more orthodox pastors.
Juxtaposing serial sources from multiple archives, Robbins shows with innovative detail how local political and religious struggles intermeshed, setting the city and its Reformed congregations on a fatal collision course with the Bourbon monarchy. Concluding chapters examine how great aristocratic families, churchmen, and Catholic magistrates joined in a local Counter-Reformation, remaking urban power politics from the ground up.

Who is Jesus Christ? The question is one of the central problems of Christian theology. This publication deals with the reflections, the Dominican theologian and Luther-Inquisitor Thomas de Vio Cajetan (†1534) has given as an answer in the early modern conflicting of scholasticism, humanism and reformation.
After clarifying the most important philosophical notions, Cajetan's understanding of the incarnation, the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, Christ's human nature and the biblical dates of Christ's life are investigated.
This volume gives a significant theological view of the state of christological theory-building at that time. The sections on the concept of persona and Christ's being are of interest to the historian of philosophy as well.

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the patriarchal ideology of reform in early modern Germany by revealing its roots in a pan-European catechetical program that had endured a cyclical process of growth and decline since the twelfth century, with each new phase sparked by crises in Church and society. Based on sermons, reform ordinances, devotional treatises and especially catechisms, the book explores the programs developed by reformers and codified in works of religious indoctrination designed to fashion godly fathers (real and metaphorical) in home, church, and body politic. The chief product of this program, argues the author, was an ethos of social discipline that permeated the institutions of each major confession, with government gradually empowered to reach more deeply than ever before into the lives of its subjects.

This volume is the first comprehensive study of the work of the Society of Jesus in the British Isles during the sixteenth century. Beginning with an account of brief papal missions to Ireland (1541) and Scotland (1562), it goes on to cover the foundation of a permanent mission to England (1580) and the frustration of Catholic hopes with the failure of the Spanish Armada (1588).
Throughout the book, the activities of the Jesuits - preaching, propaganda, prayer and politics - are set within a wider European context, and within the framework of the Society's Constitutions.
In particular, the sections on religious life and involvement in diplomacy show how flexibly the Jesuits adapted their "way of proceeding" to the religious and political circumstances of the British Isles, and to the demands of the Counter-Reformation.

The Uses of Reform is a study of the Reformation as a movement for behavioral reform, concentrating on Scotland during the first fifty years (1560-1610) of its Reformation as a primary example.
The opening chapters trace the development of "Godly Discipline" as part of the European-wide reform movement. Graham follows this general narrative with a study of the creation and implementation of a disciplinary system in Scotland. Finally, he compares disciplinary practices in the Scottish Church with those of the Huguenot communities of France.
Looking closely at the proceedings of church courts which enforced regulations concerning behavior, Graham paints a picture of the Reformation as a social process. This book, the first of its kind in the historiography of the Scottish Reformation, explores how Reformed protestantism affected local communities and redefined relationships.

This work comprises a detailed study of Bucer's thinking on ecclesiastical office. The Strasbourg reformer exercised a great influence on Calvin, among others. This exploration does not only contribute to the knowledge of the body of thoughts and views of this often ignored reformer, whose importance is increasingly being recognised. It also contains a large amount of material which is extremely valuable for current discussion - theological and practical - on office and structure within the Church.
The author has based his research on various rare editions found in libraries all over Europe. He also used many unpublished sources from the abundant archives in Strasbourg.

Erasmus - Der Humanist als Theologe und Kirchenreformer deals with Erasmus' person and work: his development, the main themes of his world of thought, some of his important works and his influence on contemporaries.
The twenty articles in this book together draw a coherent picture of the man from Rotterdam. Erasmus is placed in the context of the intellectual movements of his time. Special attention is given to the attitude he adopts in the tension between Renaissance Humanism and Reformation. The relationship between Erasmus and Luther is the subject of several articles. Seven of the articles in this volume appear in German for the first time. The thirteen others have been published before, but have not been readily accessible. The book is important for historians and theologians interested in the era of Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation.

This book is the history of an imaginary people — the Red Jews — in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.

Traditionally anticlericalism has been regarded as a significant historical factor, by some historians even as the unifying focal point for the host of movements known as the Reformation of the sixteenth century.
In forty-one essays eminent historians of culture, religion, and society redefine and redirect the debate regarding the scope and impact of European anticlericalism during the period 1300-1700. The meaning of reform and resentment is here clearly articulated and the sentiments are analyzed which were directed first against all levels of the Roman hierarchy and later as well against the evangelical pastor.
Using sources drawn from a wide variety of city and village archives, of literary genres and theological tracts, the articles presented here uncover the clusters of reform hope and bitter resentment directed toward parish priest, monk, bishop and pope, in addition to the early Protestant clergy. The volume highlights the continuity and discontinuity of anticlerical passion, language, goals and actions between the late medieval and Reformation periods.

Clément Marot (1496-1544), a poet of distinction, is a unique witness to the effect of the Bible on French-speaking courts. He was admired by Francis I, protected by Margaret of Navarre, and by Renée, the French Duchess of Ferrara. His translations of the psalms came to dominate Huguenot worship, inspiring many imitators, not least in English. His commitment to Lutheran theology shines through his personal poetry—once his Scriptural allusions are recognised and interpreted.
Clément Marot: A Renaissance Poet Discovers the Gospel is a fundamental expansion and recasting for an English-reading public of Marot Évangélique, Michael Screech's study which brings out the appeal to this court poet of Lutheranism and martyrdom. Chapters also examine aspects of Marot's cult of the Virgin and a possible shift from Lutheranism to Calvinism.

Based primarily on Inquisition trial records from all parts of the Italian peninsula, this study vividly illustrates the broad diffusion of Erasmus's ideas in Italy. Silvana Seidel Menchi's protagonists are not the sophisticated intellectuals previously linked to the "prince of humanists," but rather the shoemakers and druggists, goldsmiths and carpenters, weavers and soldiers, notaries and schoolmasters, priests and friars, physicians and students whose reading of Erasmus's works and acceptance of his message both enriched and complicated their lives. Italian Erasmians, like all Italian philo-Protestants, confronted an implacable adversary, the Roman Church and its Inquisition. Hence theirs was a destiny of marginalization and persecution.
This innovative study makes a major contribution to our understanding of sixteenth-century Italian and European history in two important areas: the reception of Erasmus and the social dimensions of the Reformation.

For forty years Damasus Trapp has been the foremost scholar of late medieval Augustinianism. His work has made a major contribution to our understanding of Augustine's influence on intellectual life of Europe from the 14th to the 16th century.
In the present volume the heritage of Augustine in the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation is illustrated by contributions from leading scholars in the field, which range from academic disputation at Oxford in the early 14th century, to the world of John Calvin in the 16th century. It is the diversity of the Augustinian tradition that is documented here.
The authors of the articles collected in this volume have investigated anew such well known sources as Gregory of Rimini's Sentences Commentary and Johannes von Staupitz's sermons. In addition, they have brought to light previously unknown works such as Antonius Rampegolus' Figurae Bibliorum and an anonymous Sermo de Antichristo. In this collection the richness of the Augustinian tradition in the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation appears, a broad via Augustini, which Damasus Trapp has done so much to illuminate. This Festschrift is a testimony to the continuous influence and inspiration of his contribution.

This book presents the life and thought of Hans Denck (1550-1527), the contemplative genius of the Anabaptist movement. The author examines the medieval context, mystic content, and Jewish roots of Denck's spirituality and translates into English his theological treatises, the original German of which is reprinted on facing pages.
These texts convey with unmatched brilliance rare depths of mystic insight on many facets of faith and life, good and evil, truth and love, perfection and depravity. they explore knowledge of God within his and beyond creation, explain how Christ through us fulfils God's Law, and indicate why true love compels Oneness in Gelassenheit. The author presents conceptually precise equivalents for various technical terms representative of the medieval mystical tradition.