You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"A tour de force." - Vladimir Steffel, Ohio State University
Some of history's greatest dramas have unfolded in the stories of kings and their sons in early modern Europe; and their conflicts presaged in some ways today's tensions in family-run businesses. In several notorious cases, the kings despised their sons to the point of committing murder, thus killing their own heirs. Prof. Konnert shows that these tragic dramas actually represent an extreme of the normal state of affairs rather than unusual occurrences. They are different in degree, not kind. This book is the first to look at these episodes in a systematic and comparative fashion. The stories are moving in themselves, but viewed in their historical context, they illuminate aspects of a past ...
Drawing on the municipal archives of eleven French provincial towns as well as other related sources, this book explores the links between local and national politics during the Wars of Religion of the later sixteenth century. It argues that the response of the French towns to the challenge of heresy, and later the Catholic League, was conditioned by local circumstances. Whilst previous work has been published on the urban dimensions to the Wars of Religion, few studies provide a study of an entire province, allowing as this book does, the opportunity to explicitly compare several towns. After a detailed topographical introduction, placing in context the towns of the region and describing their differing urban constitutions, the following chapters deal with the crisis points of the Wars of Religion. This book sits squarely in the forefront of one of the dominant themes in the historiography of early modern France: the importance of the local community and local elites in political structures and political life. As such, it will prove fruitful reading for all scholars with an interest in early modern French urban and political culture.
Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia was an immensely influential book that attempted to describe the entire world across all of human history and analyse its constituent elements of geography, history, ethnography, zoology and botany. First published in 1544 it went through thirty-five editions and was published in five languages, making it one of the most important books of the Reformation period. Beginning with a biographical study of Sebastian Münster, his life and the range of his scholarly work, this book then moves on to discuss the genre of cosmography. The bulk of the book, however, deals with the Cosmographia itself, offering a close reading of the 1550 Latin edition (the last and de...
Antoine de Chandieu (1534-1591) was a key figure in the establishment and development of the French Protestant Church. Of all its indigenous leaders, he was perhaps closest to Calvin, and took a leading role in all the major debates about resistance, church order and doctrine of the Church. He was also a prodigious writer of political, religious and poetical works, whose output corresponds to a period of great turmoil in the progress of the French Church. Chandieu was uniquely placed not merely to engage and contribute to the great debates of the day, but also to record ongoing events. By illuminating his career, which meshed almost exactly with the French Wars of Religion, this book not onl...
'Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England' breaks new ground in the religious history of Elizabethan England, through a closely focused study of the relationship between the practice of religious music and the complex process of Protestant identity formation. Hearing was of vital importance in the early modern period, and music was one of the most prominent, powerful and emotive elements of religious worship. But in large part, traditional historical narratives of the English Reformation have been distinctly tone deaf. Recent scholarship has begun to take increasing notice of some elements of Reformed musical practice, such as the congregational singing of psalms in meter. ...
With a focus on England from the accession of Elizabeth I to the mid-1620s, this book examines the practice of direct, scholarly disputation between fundamentally opposing and oftentimes antagonistic Catholic, Protestant and nonconformist puritan divines. Introducing a form of discourse hitherto neglected in studies of religious controversy, the volume works to rehabilitate a body of material only previously examined as part of the great, subjective mass of polemic produced in the wake of the Reformation. In so doing, it argues that public religious disputation - debate between opposing clergymen, arranged according to strict academic formulae - can offer new insights into contemporary belie...
Examining the impact of the English and European Reformations on social interaction and community harmony, this volume simultaneously highlights the tension and degree of accommodation amongst ordinary people when faced with religious and social upheaval. Building on previous literature which has characterised the progress of the Reformation as 'slow' and 'piecemeal', this volume furthers our understanding of the process of negotiation at the most fundamental social and political levels - in the family, the household, and the parish. The essays further research in the field of religious toleration and social interaction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in both Britain an...
John Merbecke (c.1505-c.1585) is most famous as the composer of the first musical setting of the English liturgy, The Booke of Common Praier Noted (BCPN), published in 1550. Not only was Merbecke a pioneer in setting English prose to music but also the compiler of the first Concordance of the whole English Bible (1550) and of the first English encyclopaedia of biblical and theological studies, A Booke of Notes and Common Places (1581). By situating Merbecke and his work within a broader intellectual and religio-cultural context of Tudor England, this book challenges the existing studies of Merbecke based on the narrow theological approach to the Reformation. Furthermore, it suggests a re-thi...
The 'problem of authority' was not an invention of the Protestant Reformation, but, as the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, its discussion, in ever greater complexity, was one of the ramifications (if not causes) of the deepening divisions within the Christian church in the sixteenth century. Any optimism that the principle of sola scriptura might provide a vehicle for unity and concord in the post-Reformation church was soon to be dented by a growing uncertainty and division, evident even in early evangelical writing and preaching. Representing a new approach to an important subject this volume of essays widens the understanding and interpretation of authority in the debates of ...