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This study offers a broad outline of the history of the eighteenth-century sermon. Thematically, it provides an overview of the research over the past three decades as well as suggesting new approaches to the history of preaching.
F. M van Helmont’s Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The “language debate,” as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.
In The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe, Mario Biagioni presents an account of the lives and thoughts of some radical reformers of the sixteenth century (Bernardino Ochino, Francesco Pucci, Fausto Sozzini, and Christian Francken), showing that the Radical Reformation was not merely a subplot of heretical history within the larger narrative of the Magisterial Reformation. Religious radicalism was primarily an extraordinary laboratory of ideas, which played a pivotal role in the rise of modern Europe: it influenced the intellectual process leading to the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. Secularism, toleration, and rationalism ― three basic principles of Western civilization ― are part of its cultural heritage.
Considered by many to be one of the most influential German Pietists, August Hermann Francke lived during a moment when an emphasis on conversion was beginning to produce small shifts in how the sacraments were defined—a harbinger of later, more dramatic changes to come in evangelical theology. In this book, Peter James Yoder uses Francke and his theology as a case study for the ecclesiological stirrings that led to the rise of evangelicalism and global Protestantism. Engaging extensively with Francke’s manuscript sermons and writings, Yoder approaches Francke’s life and religious thought through his theology of the sacraments. In doing so, Yoder delivers key insights into the structur...
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cantors of the St. Thomas School and Church in Leipzig could be counted among the most significant German composers of their times. But what attracted these artists - from Seth Calvisius to J.S. Bach to Johann Adam Hiller - to the music school and choir and inspired them to explore new repertoire of the highest standing? And how did the cantors influence the musical profile of the school - a profile that often became a bone of contention between school and city hall? The success of the St. Thomas School was not a foregone conclusion; its history is replete with challenges and setbacks as well as triumphs. The school was caught between the conf...