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Sacred Webs
In Sacred Webs, historian Chris White demonstrates how Chinese Protestants in Minnan, or the southern half of Fujian Province, fractured social ties and constructed and utilized new networks through churches, which served as nodes linking individuals into larger Protestant communities. Through analyzing missionary archives, local church reports, and available Chinese records, Sacred Webs depicts Christianity as a Chinese religion and Minnan Protestants as laying claim to both a Christian faith and a Chinese cultural heritage.
Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice
In early modern Europe, ideas about nature, God, demons and occult forces were inextricably connected and much ink and blood was spilled in arguments over the characteristics and boundaries of nature and the supernatural. Seitz uses records of Inquisition witchcraft trials in Venice to uncover how individuals across society, from servants to aristocrats, understood these two fundamental categories. Others have examined this issue from the points of view of religious history, the history of science and medicine, or the history of witchcraft alone, but this work brings these sub-fields together to illuminate comprehensively the complex forces shaping early modern beliefs.
Asia in the Making of Christianity
Drawing on first person accounts, Asia in the Making of Christianity studies conversion in the lives of Christians throughout Asia, past and present. Fifteen contributors treat perennial questions about conversion: continuity and discontinuity, conversion and communal conflict, and the politics of conversion. Some study individuals (An Chunggŭn of Korea, Liang Fa of China, Nehemiah Goreh of India), while others treat ethnolinguistic groups or large-scale movements. Converts sometimes appear as proto-nationalists, while others are suspected of cultural treason. Some transition effortlessly from leadership in one religious community into Christian ministry, while others re-convert to new forms of Christianity. The accounts collected here underscore the complexity of conversion, balancing individual agency with broader social trends and combining micro- with macrocontextual approaches.
Liang A-Fa
Liang Fa holds a unique place in the history of Christianity in China. Baptized and ordained by the first Protestant missionaries to China, Liang aided the first two generations of missionaries and conducted his own work as an evangelist and writer. Liang alone in the first generation wrote and published under his name, and his most famous tract is believed to have influenced the Taiping Rebellion. While George McNeur's biography of Liang has been republished regularly in Chinese, this is the first republication in English since the 1930s. It remains the best work on an influential but little-studied figure. Annotated and with a critical introduction, this work seeks to revive scholarship on Liang as we approach the two-hundredth anniversary of his baptism.
The Roman Inquisition
In The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, two inquisitorial scholars, Black who has published on the institutional history of the Italian Inquisitions and Aron-Beller whose area of expertise are trials against Jews before the peripheral Modenese inquisition, jointly edit an essay collection that studies the relationship between the Sacred Congregation in Rome and its peripheral inquisitorial tribunals. The book analyses inquisitorial collaborations in Rome, correspondence between the Centre and its peripheries, as well as the actions of these sub-central tribunals. It discusses the extent to which the controlling tendencies of the Centre filtered down and affected the peripheries, and how the tribunals were in fact prevented by local political considerations from achieving the homogenizing effect desired by Rome.
The Renaissance Discovery of Violence, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare
Many have wondered why the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers are so filled with violence, with murder and mayhem. This work explains how and why, putting the literature of the European Renaissance in the context of the history of violence. Personal violence was on the decline in Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, but warfare became much deadlier and the stakes of war became much higher as the new nation-states vied for hegemony and the New World became a target of a shattering invasion. There are times when Renaissance writers seem to celebrate violence, but more commonly they anatomized it and were inclined to focus on victims as well as warriors on the horrors of violence as well as the need for force to protect national security and justice. In Renaissance writing, violence has lost its innocence.
Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800-2000
Calvinism’s influence and reputation have received ample scholarly attention. But how John Calvin himself – his person, character, and deeds – was remembered, commemorated, and memorialized, is a question few historians have addressed. Focussing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this volume aims to open up the subject with chapters on Calvin’s monumentalization in statues and museums, his appearance in novels, children’s books, and travel writing, his iconic function for Hungarian nationalists and Presbyterian missionaries to China, his reputation among Mormons and freethinkers, and his rivalry with Michael Servetus in French Protestant memory. The result is a fresh contribution to the field of religious memory studies and an invitation to further comparative research. Contributors include: R. Bryan Bademan, Patrick Cabanel, R. Scott Clark, Thomas J. Davis, Stephen S. Francis, Joe B. Fulton, Botond Gaál, Stefan Laube, Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, James Rigney, Michèle Sacquin, Jonathan Seitz, Robert Vosloo, Bart Wallet, and Valentine Zuber.
On Their Own Terms
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
Defining Nature's Limits
A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These ...
Engineering Manhood
It is not an accident that American engineering is so disproportionately male and white; it took and takes work to create and sustain this situation. Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute examines the process by which engineers of the antebellum Virginia Military Institute cultivated whiteness, manhood, and other intersecting identities as essential to an engineering professional identity. VMI opened in 1839 to provide one of the earliest and most thorough engineering educations available in antebellum America. The officers of the school saw engineering work as intimately linked to being a particular type of person, one that excluded women or black men. This particular white manhood they crafted drew upon a growing middle-class culture. These precedents impacted engineering education broadly in this country and we continue to see their legacy today.
