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This rich volume by an interdisciplinary group of American and European scholars offers an innovative portrait of the complex formation of clerical and confessional identities within the context of the radically changed religious and political situations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
Calvinism must be assigned a significant place among the forces that have shaped modern European culture. Even now, despite its history of religious fragmentation and secularization, Europe continues to bear the marks of a pervasive Calvinist ethos. The character of that ethos is, however, difficult to pin down. In this volume, many of the traditional scholarly conundrums about the relationship between Calvinism and the cultural history of Europe are revisited and re-investigated, to see what new light can be shed on them. For example, how has the ethos of Calvinism, or more broadly the Reformed tradition, affected economic thinking and practice, the development of the sciences, views on religious toleration, or the constitution of European polities? In general, what kind of transformations did Calvinism’s distinct spirituality bring about? Such questions demand painstaking and detailed scholarly work, a fine sample of which is published in this volume.
It is widely assumed that science represents the enemy of religious faith. The Soul of Doubt proposes an alternative cause of unbelief: the Christian conscience. Dominic Erdozain argues that the real solvents of orthodoxy in the modern period have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself.
Colonial government, Pilgrims, the New England town, Native land, the background of religious toleration, and the changing memory recalling the Pilgrims – all are examined and stereotypical assumptions overturned in 15 essays by the foremost authority on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. Thorough research revises the story of colonists and of the people they displaced. Bangs’ book is required reading for the history of New England, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Natives, the Mennonite contribution to religious toleration in Europe and New England, and the history of commemoration, from paintings and pageants to living history and internet memes. If Pilgrims were radical, so is this book.
Constraint on Trial examines the life and thought of Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (1522-1990). The self-made Coornhert was a notary, secretary, artist, poet, playwright, translator, theologian, but most of all, he was an intrepid controversialist, "born to contradict", indefatigable in his critique of the public church and sects. His main concern in polemics and disputations was the defense of freedom of conscience and advocacy of toleration. Coornhert's individualism made him eschew any restrictions on personal religious choice. His tolerationist writings, especially Synod on the Freedom of Conscience (1582) and Trial of the Killing of Heretics(1590), were rooted in his spiritualist belief system. He found inspiration in other protagonists of religious freedom, such as Sebastian Franck and Castellio, but his ideas were uniquely Coornhertian. He possessed an unrelenting drive to combat constraint, and regarded himself as "God's battering ram, meant to break down the prison of men's conscience".
Traditional historiography has always viewed Calvin's Geneva as the benchmark against which all other Reformed communities must inevitably be measured, judging those communities who did not follow Geneva's institutional and doctrinal example as somehow inferior and incomplete versions of the original. Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe builds upon recent scholarship that challenges this concept of the 'fragmentation' of Calvinism, and instead offers a more positive view of Reformed communities beyond Geneva. The essays in this volume highlight the different paths that Calvinism followed as it took root in Western Europe and which allowed it to develop within fifty years into the ...
Une bibliographie alphabétique, chronologique et descriptive des travaux de Pierre du Moulin, l'un des écrivains majeurs du protestantisme français.
In Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant’s Attempt to Reform Christianity, Francesco Quatrini offers an account of the life and thought of Adam Boreel, a leading member of the seventeenth-century Collegiant movement in Amsterdam.
Coolhaes was a Reformed preacher, a writer of theology, a critic of the churches of his day, and an advocate of religious diversity. Coolhaes opposed much of the building up of the organization of the Reformed Church in the Northern Netherlands and Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The struggle between Coolhaes and the Leiden magistrates on one side and the Leiden consistory and fellow-preacher Pieter Cornelisz on the other encapsulated the question of authority which was being asked by many. At the same time, Coolhaes' theology, especially his Spiritualistic understanding of the sacraments, his Erastianism, and his views on free will made him suspicious t...
"We see Calvin most clearly - as a person and as a theologian - against the backdrop of his late medieval context. Older portrayals of Calvin as a father of modern doctrinal systems - popularized in early nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of the reformer's life and thought - have been soundly rebuffed, and for good reason. Calvin was, as a point of fact, thoroughly unaware of certain dogmatic patterns that we now recognize as being "modern." He was no more the father of modern critical exegesis than he was the original visionary of modern liberal democratic societies. That is to say, Calvin could not have considered himself a forerunner of something that lay entirely outside his his...