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The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This book will appeal to historians with an interest in historical theory, historians of late medieval and early modern Europe, and students looking for the meaning of history.
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...
On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught.
History.
Long ago, on a spring morning in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate passed judgement on a mysterious preacher. Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to a cross shortly after and died in agony. The effects of this verdict have reverberated throughout the world and have shaped two millennia of history. Even so, the trial remains shrouded in mystery to this day. The New Testament Gospels are unclear about what charges Pontius Pilate judged. They portray Pilate as embracing Jesus' innocence despite having him killed. We are left with more questions than answers. Why did Pontius Pilate condemn a man he believed innocent? What was Jesus' crime? How should we understand Pilate's role in Jesus' execution? Killing the...
In From She-Wolf to Martyr, Elizabeth Casteen examines Johanna I of Naples's evolving, problematic reputation and uses it as a lens through which to analyze often-contradictory late-medieval conceptions of rulership, authority, and femininity.
Embodying the Soul explores the possibilities and limitations of human intervention in the body's health across the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Early medieval medicine has long been cast as a superstitious, degraded remnant of a vigorous, rational Greco-Roman tradition. Against such assumptions, Meg Leja argues that Carolingian scholars engaged in an active debate regarding the value of Hippocratic knowledge, a debate framed by the efforts to define Christian orthodoxy that were central to the reforms of Charlemagne and his successors. From a subject with pagan origins that had suspicious links with magic, medical knowledge gradually came to be classified as a sacred art. This developm...
This volume examines the practice of memory in early modern Europe, showing that this was already a multimedia affair with many political uses, and affecting people at all levels of society; many pre-modern memory practices persist until today.
This book represents a multi-disciplinary approach to the problem of the Jews and the German Reformation. The contributions come from both senior and emerging scholars, from North America, Israel, and Europe, to ensure a breadth in perspective. The essays in this volume are arranged under four broad headings: 1. The Road to the Reformation (late medieval theology and the humanists and the Jews), 2. The Reformers and the Jews (essays on Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin, Osiander, the Catholic Reformers, and the Radical Reformers), 3. Representations of Jews and Judaism (the portrayal of Judaism as a religion, images of the Jews in the visual arts, and in sixteenth-century German literature), and 4. Jewish Responses to the Reformation. Contributors include: Dean Phillip Bell, Jay Berkovitz, Robert Bireley, Stephen G. Burnett, Elisheva Carlebach, Achim Detmers, Yaacov Deutsch, Maria Diemling, Michael Driedger, R. Gerald Hobbs, Joy Kammerling, Thomas Kaufmann, Hans-Martin Kirn, Christopher Ocker, Erika Rummel, Petra Schöner, Timothy J. Wengert, and Edith Wenzel.
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.