You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The late Bob Scribner was one of the most original and provocative historians of the German Reformation. His truly pioneering spirit comes to light in this collection of his most recent essays. In the years before his death, Scribner explored the role of the senses in late medieval devotional culture, and wondered how the Reformation changed sensual attitudes. Further essays examine the nature of popular culture and the way the Reformation was institutionalised, considering Anabaptist ideals of the community of goods, literacy and heterodoxy, and the dynamics of power as they unfold in a case of witchcraft. The final section of the book consists of three iconoclastic essays, which, together, form a sustained assault on the argument first advanced by Max Weber that the Reformation created a rational, modern religion. Scribner shows that, far from being rationalist and anti-magical, Protestants had their own brand of magic. These fine essays are certain to spark off debate, not only among historians of the Reformation, but also among art historians and anyone interested in the nature of culture.
The Reformation has traditionally been explained in terms of theology, the corruption of the church and the role of princes. R.W. Scribner, while not denying the importance of these, shifts the context of study of the German Reformation to an examination of popular beliefs and behaviour, and of the reactions of local authorities to the problems and opportunities for social as well as religious reform. This book brings together a coherent body of work that has appeared since 1975, including two entirely new essays and two previously published only in German.
The first detailed analysis of the forms of popular propaganda which were aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate during the Reformation in Germany.
The collection of essays by prominent historians of the Reformation explores the experience of religious reform in 'national context', discussing similarities and differences between the reform movements in a dozen different countries of sixteenth-century Europe. Each author provides an interpretative essay emphasising local peculiarities and national variants on the broader theme of the Reformation as a European phenomenon. The individual essays thus emphasise the local preconditions and limitations which encountered the Reformation as it spread from Germany into most of the countries of western and central Europe. Together they present a picture of the many-sided nature of the Reformation ...
The German Peasants' War of 1524-26 was the greatest popular uprising in European history before the French Revolution. Its significance is heightened by the contemporary struggle for religious renewal in the Reformation, which had a decisive influence on its course. Yet very little writing in English has discussed the Peasants' War in detail. This volume traces the war through contemporary documents, both published and original, for the English-speaking reader in translation. It gives generous coverage to the causes and course of the revolt, and to its ideological mainsprings and forms of organization. At the same time it illustrates the authorities' response, the role of towns in the revol...
An expert re-interpretation of how religious toleration and conflict developed in early modern Europe.
The business of making an American literary icon The Lousy Racket is a thorough examination of Ernest Hemingway's working relationship with his American publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, and with his editors there: Maxwell Perkins, Wallace Meyer, and Charles Scribner III. This first critical study of Hemingway's professional collaboration with Scribners also details the editing, promotion, and sales of the books he published with the firm from 1926 to 1952 and provides a fascinating look into the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century. This painstakingly researched study reveals the working relationship between Hemingway and his editors, with special emphasis on the fr...
A biography of a young African-American man who escaped the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets when he returned home.
From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part ...
These most recent essays of the late Bob Scribner show his original and provocative views as a historian on the German Reformation. Subjects covered include popular culture, art, literacy, Anabaptism, witchcraft, Protestantism and magic.