This book offers a new explanation for the spread of urban reform during the sixteenth century, arguing that systems of communication between cities proved crucial for the Reformation's development. This hypothesis explains not only how the Reformation spread to almost every imperial city in southern Germany, but also how it survived attempts to repress religious reform.
Utilizing evidence from numerous imperial cities, this book offers an explanation for the spread and survival of urban reform during the sixteenth century. By analyzing the operation of regional political constellations, it reveals a common process of negotiation that shaped the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire. It reevaluates traditional models of reform that leave unexplored the religious implications of flexible systems of communication and support among cities. Such networks influenced urban reform in fundamental ways, affecting how Protestant preachers moved from city to city, as well as what versions of the Reformation city councils introduced. This fusion of religion and politics meant that with local variations, negotiation within a regional framework sat at the heart of urban reform. The Negotiated Reformation therefore explains not only how the Reformation spread to almost every imperial city in southern Germany, but also how it survived imperial attempts to repress religious reform.
This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.
This volume offers fifteen chapters written by leading specialists which explore the range of ways in which the book industry negotiated conflicts and controversies in the early modern European world.
