In The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe, Mario Biagioni presents an account of the lives and thoughts of some radical reformers of the sixteenth century (Bernardino Ochino, Francesco Pucci, Fausto Sozzini, and Christian Francken), showing that the Radical Reformation was not merely a subplot of heretical history within the larger narrative of the Magisterial Reformation. Religious radicalism was primarily an extraordinary laboratory of ideas, which played a pivotal role in the rise of modern Europe: it influenced the intellectual process leading to the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. Secularism, toleration, and rationalism ― three basic principles of Western civilization ― are part of its cultural heritage.
In The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe, Mario Biagioni presents an account of the lives and thoughts of some radical reformers of the sixteenth century (Bernardino Ochino, Francesco Pucci, Fausto Sozzini, and Christian Francken), showing that the Radical Reformation was not merely a subplot of heretical history within the larger narrative of the Magisterial Reformation. Religious radicalism was primarily an extraordinary laboratory of ideas, which played a pivotal role in the rise of modern Europe: it influenced the intellectual process leading to the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. Secularism, toleration, and rationalism ― three basic principles of Western civilization ― are part of its cultural heritage.
George Williams' monumental The Radical Reformation has been an essential reference work for historians of early modern Europe, narrating in rich, interpretative detail the interconnected stories of radical groups operating at the margins of the mainline Reformation. In its scope--spanning all of Europe from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy--and its erudition, The Radical Reformation is without peer. Now in paperback format, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for any university-level course on the Reformation.
This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.
The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.
An up-to-date portrait of a defining moment in the Christian story—its beginnings, worldview, and cultural significance. Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award of the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College An Introduction to German Pietism provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualism. Taking into account new discoveries in the field, Douglas H. Shantz focuses on features of Pietism that made it religiously and culturally significant. He discusses the social and religious roots of Pietism in earlier German Radicalism and situates Pietist beginnings in three cities: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle. Shantz also examines the cultural worlds of the Pietists, including Pietism and gender, Pietists as readers and translators of the Bible, and Pietists as missionaries to the far reaches of the world. He not only considers Pietism's role in shaping modern western religion and culture but also reflects on the relevance of the Pietist religious paradigm of today. The first survey of German Pietism in English in forty years, An Introduction to German Pietism provides a narrative interpretation of the movement as a whole. The book's accessible tone and concise portrayal of an extensive and complex subject make it ideal for courses on early modern Christianity and German history. The book includes appendices with translations of German primary sources and discussion questions.
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.
In the pre-industrial societies of early modern Europe, religion was a vessel of fundamental importance in making sense of personal and collective social, cultural and spiritual exercises. This text presents Kaspar von Greyerz's important overview and interpretation of the religions and cultures of Early Modern Europe.
The Republic of Venice was the only Catholic territory in which an Anabaptist community formed in the 16th century. The history of Venetian Anabaptism, hitherto little known in Reformation Studies, is the focus of this book. Using a large quantity of archival material and rare printed sources Riccarda Suitner reconstructs the lives of the Republic's Anabaptists and the inquisitorial repression they suffered, and analyses the doctrinal specificities of the Radical Reformation in this area. This story represents a fundamental stage in the relations between German, central-European and Italian culture in the early modern period. Events in Venice are presented within a broader comparative framework, paying particular attention to the German states, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, Moravia, Tyrol, and the Kingdom of Naples. It will emerge that its Venetian history cannot be ignored if we are to gain a true understanding of the European Reformation.
Transylvanian Sabbatarianism emerged from the aspirations of the Reformation, without direct contact with the Jews. Although the most frequently asked question about them concerns their identity – were they Christians or Jews – the answers of the literature are superficial, biased, and take only an external point of view. The aim of this book, therefore, is to move closer to the 16—17th century Sabbatarian manuscripts and to examine how much they were still connected to Christianity in their biblical interpretations, doctrines and religious practices, how they adapted to Judaism, and how they saw themselves in relation to the two world religions. The analysis of Réka Tímea Újlaki-Nagy shows that although they still held some Christian beliefs, these were considered to be incidental and unnecessary to salvation. Sabbatarians followed the ideal of an age preceding Christ, consequently the Reformation effort to restitute apostolic Christianity disappeared from their religious thought.
