Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles
Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles

Author: Trevor Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 502

ISBN-13: 1351920987

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In 1621, in one of the earliest campaigns of the Thirty Years' War, the South German principality of the Upper Palatinate was invaded and annexed by Maximilian of Bavaria, director of the Catholic League. In the subsequent years the eyes of Europe looked to the fate of this erstwhile hub of the 'Calvinist international', as Maximilian steadily moved to convert its population to Catholicism. This study is the first account in English to focus on this important instance of forced conversion and the first account in any language to place the political impact of the Thirty Years' War into the broader context of the Upper-Palatinate's religious culture examined over the longue durée, from the later sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. The book analyses the rich unpublished sources of church and state from Bavarian and Roman archives, as well as printed texts in varied genres to reconstruct the region's sacred system and to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign of conversion. This allows the study to address questions of how the re-catholicisation was achieved, how a religious culture infused with the spirit of the Counter Reformation developed and how this change shaped the identity of its people. More than this, however, the book also uses the Upper Palatinate case-study to draw broader conclusions about the strengths and limitations of the Confessional model, and suggests other ways of looking at religious change and identity formation in early modern Europe which embraces popular religious culture and voluntary religion, as well coercion. As such the book offers much, not only to scholars of early modern Germany, but to all with an interest in the formation, adoption and imposition of religious identity during this period.

The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation
The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation

Author: Alexandra Bamji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 597

ISBN-13: 1317041615

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'In the last two decades, the history of the Counter-Reformation has been stretched and re-shaped in numerous directions. Reflecting the variety and innovation that characterize studies of early modern Catholicism today, this volume incorporates topics as diverse as life cycle and community, science and the senses, the performing and visual arts, material objects and print culture, war and the state, sacred landscapes and urban structures. Moreover, it challenges the conventional chronological parameters of the Counter-Reformation and introduces the reader to the latest research on global Catholicism. The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation presents a comprehensive examination of recent scholarship on early modern Catholicism in its many guises. It examines how the Tridentine reforms inspired conflict and conversion, and evaluates lives and identities, spirituality, culture and religious change. This wide-ranging and original research guide is a unique resource for scholars and students of European and transnational history.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Author: Alexandra Walsham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 1317169239

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The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

Brethren in Christ
Brethren in Christ

Author: Ole Peter Grell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-08-11

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1107378370

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This groundbreaking book explores the migration of Calvinist refugees in Europe during the Reformation, across a century of persecution, exile and minority existence. Ole Peter Grell follows the fortunes of some of the earliest Reformed merchant families, forced to flee from the Tuscan city of Lucca during the 1560s, through their journey to France during the Wars of Religion to the St Bartholomew Day Massacre and their search for refuge in Sedan. He traces the lives of these interconnected families over three generations as they settled in European cities from Geneva to London, marrying into the diaspora of Reformed merchants. Based on a potent combination of religion, commerce and family networks, these often wealthy merchants and highly skilled craftsmen were amongst the most successful of early modern capitalists. Brethren in Christ shows how this interconnected network, reinforced through marriage and enterprise, forged the backbone of international Calvinism in Reformation Europe.

Reformations Compared
Reformations Compared

Author: Henry A. Jefferies

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-03-31

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1009468596

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Offers comparative perspectives and fresh insights into the unfolding of the Reformation across the whole of Europe.

Music, Piety, and Propaganda
Music, Piety, and Propaganda

Author: Alexander J. Fisher

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-02

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0199764646

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Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound—including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony—not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe
Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author: Jennifer Spinks

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 9004299017

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This volume brings together some of the most exciting new scholarship on these themes, and thus pays tribute to the ground-breaking work of Charles Zika. Seventeen interdisciplinary essays offer new insights into the materiality and belief systems of early modern religious cultures as found in artworks, books, fragmentary texts and even in Protestant ‘relics’. Some contributions reassess communal and individual responses to cases of possession, others focus on witchcraft and manifestations of the disordered natural world. Canonical figures and events, from Martin Luther to the Salem witch trials, are looked at afresh. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how cultural and interdisciplinary trends in religious history illuminate the experiences of early modern Europeans. Contributors: Susan Broomhall, Heather Dalton, Dagmar Eichberger, Peter Howard, E. J. Kent, Brian P. Levack, Dolly MacKinnon, Louise Marshall, Donna Merwick, Leigh T.I. Penman, Shelley Perlove, Lyndal Roper, Peter Sherlock, Larry Silver, Patricia Simons, Jennifer Spinks, Hans de Waardt and Alexandra Walsham.

Lay Prophets in Lutheran Europe (c. 1550–1700)
Lay Prophets in Lutheran Europe (c. 1550–1700)

Author: Jürgen Beyer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 900431816X

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Lay prophets in Lutheran Europe (c. 1550–1700) is the first transnational study of the phenomenon of angelic apparitions in all Lutheran cultures of early modern Europe. Jürgen Beyer provides evidence for more than 350 cases and analyses the material in various ways: tracing the medieval origins, studying the spread of news about prophets, looking at the performances legitimising their calling, noting their comments on local politics, following the theological debates about prophets, and interpreting the early modern notions of holiness within which prophets operated. A full chronology and bibliography of all cases concludes the volume. Beyer demonstrates that lay prophets were an accepted part of Lutheran culture and places them in their social, political and confessional contexts.

Parish Churches in the Early Modern World
Parish Churches in the Early Modern World

Author: Andrew Spicer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1351912763

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Across Europe, the parish church has stood for centuries at the centre of local communities; it was the focal point of its religious life, the rituals performed there marked the stages of life from the cradle to the grave. Nonetheless the church itself artistically and architecturally stood apart from the parish community. It was often the largest and only stone-built building in a village; it was legally distinct being subject to canon law, as well as consecrated for the celebration of religious rites. The buildings associated with the "cure of souls" were sacred sites or holy places, where humanity interacted with the divine. In spite of the importance of the parish church, these buildings have generally not received the same attention from historians as non-parochial places of worship. This collection of essays redresses this balance and reflects on the parish church across a number of confessions - Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Anti-Trinitarian - during the early modern period. Rather than providing a series of case studies of individual buildings, each essay looks at the evolution of parish churches in response to religious reform as well as confessional change and upheaval. They examine aspects of their design and construction; furnishings and material culture; liturgy and the use of the parish church. While these essays range widely across Europe, the volume also considers how religious provision and the parish church were translated into a global context with colonial and commercial expansion in the Americas and Asia. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to identify what was distinctive about the parish church for the congregations that gathered in them for worship and for communities across the early modern world.

A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692
A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-02-04

Total Pages: 653

ISBN-13: 9004391967

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Winner of the 2020 Bainton Prize for Reference Works This volume, edited by Pamela M. Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield, focuses on Rome from 1492-1692, an era of striking renewal: demographic, architectural, intellectual, and artistic. Rome’s most distinctive aspects--including its twin governments (civic and papal), unique role as the seat of global Catholicism, disproportionately male population, and status as artistic capital of Europe--are examined from numerous perspectives. This book of 30 chapters, intended for scholars and students across the academy, fills a noteworthy gap in the literature. It is the only multidisciplinary study of 16th- and 17th-century Rome that synthesizes and critiques past and recent scholarship while offering innovative analyses of a wide range of topics and identifying new avenues for research. Committee's statement "The volume includes a multidisciplinary study of early modern Rome by focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries by re-examining traditional topics anew. This volume will be of tremendous use to scholars and students because its focus is very well conceptualized and organized, while still covering a breadth of topics. The authors celebrate Rome’s diversity by exploring its role not only as the seat of the Catholic church, but also as home to large communities of diplomats, printers, and working artisans, all of whom contributed to the city’s visual, material, and musical cultures". Roland H.Bainton Prizes Contributors are: Renata Ago, Elisa Andretta, Katherine Aron-Beller, Lisa Beaven, Eleonora Canepari, Christopher Carlsmith, Patrizia Cavazzini, Elizabeth S. Cohen, Thomas V. Cohen, Jeffrey Collins, Simon Ditchfield, Anna Esposito, Federica Favino, Daniele V. Filippi, Irene Fosi, Kenneth Gouwens, Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, John M. Hunt, Pamela M. Jones, Carla Keyvanian, Margaret A. Kuntz, Stephanie C. Leone, Evelyn Lincoln, Jessica Maier, Laurie Nussdorfer, Toby Osborne, Miles Pattenden, Denis Ribouillault, Katherine W. Rinne, Minou Schraven, John Beldon Scott, Barbara Wisch, Arnold A. Witte.