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Cultural and textual analysis of 300 German propaganda pamphlets reveals lay people responding to the Protestant Reformation. They urge changes based on the perceptions and aspirations of their social class, supporting their proposals by personal interpretations of the Bible.
A study of Protestant and Catholic pamphlets published in Strasbourg during the early years of the Reformation looks at Martin Luther's use of the recently invented printing press and his dominance of the new medium.
On 13 June 1525, Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in a private ceremony officiated by city preacher Johann Bugenhagen. Whilst Luther was not the first former monk or Reformer to marry, his marriage immediately became one of the iconic episodes of the Protestant Reformation. From that point on, the marital status of clergy would be a pivotal dividing line between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Tackling the early stages of this divide, this book provides a fresh assessment of clerical marriage in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the debates were undecided and the intellectual and institutional situation remained fluid and changeable. It investigates t...
Weathering the Reformation explores the role of the Little Ice Age in early modern Christian culture and considers climate as a contributing factor in the Protestant Reform. The book focuses on religious narratives from Strasbourg between 1509 and 1541, pivotal years during which the European cultural concept of nature splintered along confessional differences. Together with case studies from antagonistic religious communities, Linnéa Rowlatt draws on annual weather reports for a period during which the climate became less hospitable to human endeavours. Social uunrest and the cultural upheaval of Reform are examined in relation to deteriorating climactic conditions characteristic of the Spörer Minimum. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religious history and climate history.
Written c. 1567 (though unpublished until 1603), this is the work of an extraordinary scholar, a radical and polemicist, rival of many of the leading intellectual and political figures of his day. According to François Hotman’s distinguished biographer Donald Kelley the Antitribonian ‘is, or should be, a landmark in the history of social and historical thought’. It is also a landmark in the history of legal thought. The present edition is the first to evaluate Hotman’s text in the context of the history of Roman law from the time of the sixth-century Byzantine Emperor Justinian I to the Germany of the Enlightenment.
Numerous historical studies use the term community' to express or comment on social relationships within geographic, religious, political, social, or literary settings, yet this volume is the first systematic attempt to collect together important examples of this varied work in order to draw comparisons and conclusions about the definition of community across early modern Europe. The chapters demonstrate the complex and changeable nature of community in an era more often characterized as a time of stark certainties and inflexibility. As a result, the volume contributes a vital resource to the ongoing efforts of scholars to understand the creation and perpetuation of communities and the significance of community definition for early modern Europeans.
A companion volume to Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg, this book takes up the agency and individuality of the laboring poor and their children. It examines the economic lives of poor, distressed, or truncated families on the basis of 5,734 biographical descriptions of children who passed through the City, Catholic, and Lutheran orphanages of Augsburg between 1572 and 1806. Studied in conjunction with administrative, criminal, and fiscal records of various sorts, these “Orphan Books” reveal the laboring poor as flexible and adaptive. Their fates were determined neither by the poverty they suffered nor the charity they received. Rather, they responded to changing economic and social conditions by using Augsburg’s orphanages to extend their resources, care for their children, and create opportunities. The findings will interest historians of poverty, charity, labor, and the Reformation.
One of the major challenges faced by the emergent Protestant faith was how to establish itself in a hitherto Catholic world. A key way it found to achieve this was to create a common identity through the fashioning of history, emphasising Protestantism's legitimacy and authority. In this study, the life and works of one of the earliest and most influential Protestant historians, Johann Sleidan (1506-1556) are explored to reveal how history could be used to consolidate the new confession and the states which adopted it. Sleidan was commissioned by leading intellectuals from the Schmalkadic League to write the official history of the German Protestant movement, resulting in the publication in ...