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Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548–1648 offers an in-depth history of the Reformed Churches in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in their first hundred years. Kazimierz Bem analyses church polity, liturgy, the practices of Calvinist church discipline and piety, and the reasons for conversion to and from Calvinism in all strata of the society. Drawing on extensive research in primary sources, Bem challenges the dominant narrative of Protestant decline after 1570 and argues for a continued flourishing of Calvinism in the Commonwealth until the 1630s.
This is an extensive study, supplemented by an edition of relevant sources, of the diplomatic contacts between Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate between the early 15th and the late 18th century. It contains a chronology of mutual relations, a formal analysis of various types of documents, and a glimpse into the working of the Crimean chancery, where Genghisid and Islamic forms mixed with those borrowed from Christian Europe. The book provides a fascinating insight into the intercultural exchange between Catholic Poland (with Latin and then Polish as the main chancery language) and predominantly Orthodox Lithuania (with Ruthenian as the main chancery language) on the one hand, and the Muslim Crimean Khanate (with Khwarezmian Turkic and then Ottoman Turkish as the main chancery language) on the other. It depicts Eastern Europe as a zone of contact, where the relations between Slavs and Tatars were by no means always hostile.
From 1505 to 1689, Russia's tsars chose their wives through an elaborate ritual: the bride-show. The realm's most beautiful young maidens—provided they hailed from the aristocracy—gathered in Moscow, where the tsar's trusted boyars reviewed their medical histories, evaluated their spiritual qualities, noted their physical appearances, and confirmed their virtue. Those who passed muster were presented to the tsar, who inspected the candidates one by one—usually without speaking to any of them—and chose one to be immediately escorted to the Kremlin to prepare for her wedding and new life as the tsar's consort. Alongside accounts of sordid boyar plots against brides, the multiple marria...
Liturgy migrates. That is, liturgical practices, forms, and materials have migrated and continue to migrate across geographic, ethnic, ecclesial, and chronological boundaries. Liturgy in Migration offers the contributions of scholars who took part in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music's 2011 international liturgy conference on this topic. Presenters explored the nature of liturgical migrations and flows, their patterns, directions, and characteristics. Such migrations are always wrapped in their social and cultural contexts. With this in mind, these essays recalibrate, for the twenty-first century, older work on liturgical inculturation. They allow readers to better understand contemporary liturgical flows in the light of important and fascinating migrations of the past.
This volume, first published in 2007, examines the role of religion as a vehicle for cultural exchange.
Focused on the formative force of national identity for the Poles the transmission of values the book offers a tour of a huge set of primary sources from the period 966-1138 in search of the traditions of the Piasts the ruling dynasty of Poland.
The volume edited by the historian Aleksandra Skrzypietz presents seven queens from the early modern era in Europe. Seven contributions highlight the respective queen's role within the complex web of court and family arrangements. Individual agency as well as the social structures of the courtly world of intrigue and shifting coalitions determined whether a queen was able to retain her position of power or lost it. Often enough, they became the victims of their own kind, new and old, in these struggles for power. "Queens within Networks of Family and Court Connections" is ideal for students and scholars of royal history and early modern European history.
In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte created the Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish lands that had been ceded to France by Prussia. His Civil Code was enforced in the new Duchy too and, unlike the Catholic Church, it allowed the dissolution of marriage by divorce. This book sheds new light on the application of Napoleonic divorce regulations in the Polish lands between 1808-1852. Unlike what has been argued so far, this book demonstrates that divorces were happening frequently in 19th century Poland and even with the same rate as in France. In addition to the analysis of the Napoleonic divorce law, the reader is provided with a fully comprehensive description of parties as well as courts and officials involved in divorce proceedings, their course and the grounds for divorce.