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A Companion to Medieval Rules and Customaries offers an introduction to the rules and customaries of the main religious orders in medieval Europe: Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite. As well as introducing the early history and spirituality of the orders, scholars survey the central topics – organization, doctrine, morality, liturgy, and culture, as documented by these primary sources. Contributors are: James Clark, Tom Gaens, Jean-François Godet-Calogeras, Holly Grieco, Emilia Jamroziak, Gert Melville, Stephen Molvarec, Carol Neel, Krijn Pansters, Matthew Ponesse, Bert Roest, Kristjan Toomaspoeg, Paul van Geest, Ursula Vones-Liebenstein, and Coralie Zermatten.
Pilgrim and Preacher seeks to understand the numerous pilgrimage writings of the Dominican Felix Fabri (1437/8-1502), not only as rich descriptions of the Holy Land, Egypt, and Palestine, but also as sources for the religious attitudes and social assumptions that went into their creation. Fabri, an Observant reformer and talented preacher, as well as a two-time Holy Land pilgrim, adapted his pilgrimage experiences for four different audiences. He produced the rhymed Swabian-German Pilgerbuchlein for those who sponsored his first voyage; the encyclopaedic Latin Evagatorium for his Dominican brethren; the vernacular Pilgerbuch for the noble patrons of his second voyage and their households; an...
The Scientification of the "Jewish Question" in Nazi Germany describes the attempt of a considerable number of German scholars to counter the vanishing influence of religious prejudices against the Jews with a new antisemitic rationale. As anti-Jewish stereotypes of an old-fashioned soteriological kind had become dysfunctional under the pressure of secularization, a new, more objective explanation was needed to justify the age-old danger of Judaism in the present. In the 1930s a new research field called “Judenforschung” (Jew research) emerged. Its leading figures amalgamated racial and religious features to verify the existence of an everlasting “Jewish problem”. Along with that they offered scholarly concepts for its solution.
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons. Narrowing his focus to two specific regions—Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier—he provides a nuanced explanation of how the tensions between state power and communalism determined the course of witch hunts that claimed over 1,300 lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Dillinger finds that, far from representing the centralizing aggression of emerging early states against local cultures, witch hunts were almost always driven by members of the middling and lower classes in cities and villages, and the...
What was an “advocate” (Latin: advocatus; German: Vogt) in the Middle Ages? What responsibilities came with the position and how did they change over time? With this groundbreaking study, Jonathan R. Lyon challenges the standard narrative of a “medieval” Europe of feudalism and lordship being replaced by a “modern” Europe of government, bureaucracy and the state. By focusing on the position of advocate, he argues for continuity in corrupt practices of justice and protection between 750 and 1800. This book traces the development of the role of church advocate from the Carolingian period onward and explains why this position became associated with the violent abuse of power on churches' estates. When other types of advocates became common in and around Germany after 1250, including territorial and urban advocates, they were not officeholders in developing bureaucracies. Instead, they used similar practices to church advocates to profit illicitly from their positions, which calls into question scholarly arguments about the decline of violent lordship and the rise of governmental accountability in European history.
The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma. This volume features contributions by Reimund Leicht, Gitit Holzman, Jonathan Garb, Anna Lissa, Gianni Paganini, Adi Louria Hayon, Mark Marion Gondelman, and Jürgen Sarnowsky. This volume features contributions by Jeremy Phillip Brown, Libera Pisano, Jeffrey G. Amshalem, Maria Vittoria Comacchi, Jonatan Meir, Rebecca Kneller-Rowe, Isaac Slater, Michela Torbidoni, Guido Bartolucci, and Tamir Karkason.
Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (1511) was a radical political publication aimed to preserve Jewish books from destruction and the consequent loss of irreplaceable knowledge. This first complete and extensively annotated translation provides an insight into the authorities’ attitude to Judaism in Early Modern Germany.
Estate Landscapes in Northern Europe is the first study of the role of the landed estate as an agent in the shaping of landscapes and societies across northern Europe over the past five centuries. Leading us into the fascinating variations of manorial worlds, the present volume seeks to open the field to include a broader perspective on estate landscapes. Estate - or manorial - landscapes were distinctive elements within the historic landscape and created their own character. Marked by larger scale fields associated with the home or demesne farm as well as a higher proportion of woodland and timber trees the landscapes reflected the scale of the resources available to the landowner and the c...
Over the last twenty years research on the Reformation in Germany has shifted both chronologically and thematically toward an interest in the ’long’ or ’delayed’ Reformations, and the structure and operation of the Holy Roman Empire. Whilst this focus has resulted in many fascinating new insights, it has also led to the relative neglect of the early Reformation movement. Put together with the explicit purpose of encouraging scholars to reengage with the early ’storm years’ of the German Reformation, this collection of eleven essays by Tom Scott, explores several issues in the historiography of the early Reformation which have not been adequately addressed. The debate over the nat...
For centuries, the relation between lay piety and academic theology has determined the faith of lay people as well as developments in theology, and influenced daily life as well as scholarly discussions. In this book an international and multidisciplinary panel of specialists, covering the fields of church history, history of literature, music history, book history, and art history reflects on a broad range of research topics, providing a fascinating and refreshing view on what this relation has been throughout the centuries. Christoph Burger has given a major impulse to the research into the history of theology, notably the issue of adapting academic theology for lay people. The contributions to this Festschrift reflect this broad spectrum of correlations between learned theology and lay piety from the Early Church period until modern times. The book contains contributions to the research on lay piety as well as academic theology in the Middle Ages, Reformation, and the modern period, as well as their representations in such media as printed books and woodcuts. The result is a truly epoch-transcending and interdisciplinary volume.