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Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.
In this 2005 book, leading historians examine sanctity and sacred space in Europe during and after the religious upheavals of the early modern period.
The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion." One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious bounda...
Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In this book, Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world. Luther, Conflict, and Christendom includes a detailed chronological chart.
In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Confessional Mobility explores their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as well as their impact beyond that initial moment of change.
Surely, Christian history in Germany principally followed the outlines of a Catholic and Protestant narrative, right? On the contrary, for Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda this dominant framework largely obscures the historical experience of most Christians, specifically rural Christians. The rural Christian narrative, animated for more than a millennium by agricultural and communal forces, principally followed an indigenous path characterized by long-term surges and setbacks. This path eventually bifurcated not in the 1517-1648 period but rather in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it did so not into Catholic and Protestant storylines but rather into those Christian corpora (Gemeinden) which maintained their local civil-sacred unity into the twentieth century and those which lost that unity after succumbing to Westphalia's divisive effects.
An in-depth study of the nineteenth-century London ballad-singer, a central figure in British cultural, social and political life.
In this first in-depth and wide-ranging history of Christian conversion, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach and engaging recent methods and theories in conversion studies, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Although conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming), when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest.
In 1621, in one of the earliest campaigns of the Thirty Years' War, the South German principality of the Upper Palatinate was invaded and annexed by Maximilian of Bavaria, director of the Catholic League. In the subsequent years the eyes of Europe looked to the fate of this erstwhile hub of the 'Calvinist international', as Maximilian steadily moved to convert its population to Catholicism. This study is the first account in English to focus on this important instance of forced conversion and the first account in any language to place the political impact of the Thirty Years' War into the broader context of the Upper-Palatinate's religious culture examined over the longue durée, from the la...
This is a ground breaking comparative study of the fascinating connections between African Americans and the Welsh, beginning in the era of slavery and concluding with the experiences of African American GIs in wartime Wales.