Series
Acta S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Ecclesiam Catholicam Ucrainae et Bielorusijae spectan-tia. Ed. A. Welykyi. 4 vols. Rome, P. P. Basiliani, 1953- . Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica. Ed. Samuel Cramer and Fredrik Pijper. 10 vols. 's-Gravenhage M. Nijhoff, 1903-14 . Bibliotheca sanctorum, 12 vols. Rome Citta nuova editrice, 1961-9 , Index 1970 , 2 appendix vols. 1987, 2000 . Calvin, John, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia. Ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz et al. 59 vols. Braunschweig...
Gabriella Zarri
During the Renaissance and early modernperiod, female religious life emerged with extreme vivacity. Scholars agree that both the socio-economic and juridical condition of women's lives deteriorated during the Renaissance. They also agree that religion, on the other hand, provided a means for different forms of female affirmation to offset and even-out the misogynist cultural currents that were present and driven by churches.1 Socially, sanctity was valued and was pursued both by licit means,...
Info Ysy
Thirty Years' War gave rise to new and more intimate contexts for Lutheran sacred music. Performance contexts for the Lutheran chorale included not only the church, but also schools, streets, taverns, and private homes. Luther and his colleagues Philip Melanchthon andJohann Walter promoted the chorale repertory in Lutheran schools not only to train competent church choirs, but also as a means of spiritual edification. A distinct repertory of chorales such Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot the...
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one need honour an obligation with us or maintain the peace of the land -just because we don't want to believe what Martin Luther believes'.14 The Reformation did, in fact, usher in a new wave of local expulsions in Germany. But in the long run, the upheaval set off by Luther had the unintended consequence of weakening ecclesiastical power and influence. The fragmentation of ecclesiastical power proved to be an irreversible and continuing process. Clerical authority was further weakened in...
Info Uzo
provide an introduction to the practice of visitations in the Lutheran territorial churches in the Holy Roman Empire. The general Lutheran practice ofvisitations grewout ofthe first major Saxon visitation in 1528-9. For this visitation, Melanchthon wrote the Instruction of the Visitors to the Pastors in the Electorate of Saxony, and in his preface to this work Luther stressed that by taking up visitations the Reformation church was returningto the ancient apostolic custom of'visiting'. As...
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a world-affirming spirituality. God's creation remained fundamentally good even after original sin and humankind's later abuse of God's gifts. It also implied that the Christian could follow Christ in any career or state of life. More important still than Ignatius in this regard was the gentle but firm Bishop of Geneva, Francis de Sales. Francis carried on spiritual direction through a vast correspondence, especially with women whose aspirations for a more profound Christian life impressed him....
Info Wgm
The Roman policy towards all these 'schismatics' was shaped by certain imperatives predetermined by Tridentine decrees and by Catholic Reform in general.8 Pope Pius IV annulled the right of Greeks under Roman jurisdiction to keep non-Latin rites. One of the important aspects of this policy was missionary expansion to the Orthodox East. A 'Greek congregation' was founded in 1573 in Rome9 and four years later the 'Greek College' was established to educate missionaries. The Roman Catechism was...
Info Cvf
birth. Towards the end of the 1540s he, along with a group of followers, fled from Moscow to the north of Russia. Taking monastic vows, Feodosij and his partisans began to propagate their 'new teaching'. About 1554-5 he was arrested, conveyed to Moscow, and placed in one of Moscow's monasteries. He and a number of dissidents managed to flee to Belarus. They preached their ideas as they travelled, and this propaganda, as Russian polemicists stated, had great success with the Belarusan...
Nicolas Standaert
There are different ways of writing the history of the expansion of Christianity and its evangelization of the non-Christian world. The common approach is to write it from the perspective of the European missionary, whereby the process of Christianization is primarily perceived as the result of the missionary's action. Another approach is to take the receiving community as the starting point of discussion thereby emphasizing this community's role as an active participant in the conversion...
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Reformed faith almost always represented itself as a kind of improved Lutheran Reformation. Chancellor Krell of Saxony presented himself as neither Orthodox Lutheran nor Calvinist - thus, a Philippist - though his writings and policies reveal him to have been 'a late sixteenth-century German Reformed believer '.41 Krell's writings, however, prudently avoided reference to Calvinist texts. John Sigismund of Brandenburg observed a similar prudence, when he confessed his conversion to the Reformed...
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ban was crucial. But the rigorous application of discipline including shunning ofbanned members, sometimes even by their own families, split the movement 1556 . Those who rejected the ban, or at least its more stringent use, formed a separate branch - the Waterlanders or Doopgezinde baptist-oriented . Their tolerance produced a rich variety of groups, and their openness facilitated their influence upon English separatist Puritanism. General and particular baptists of the seventeenth century...
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to save them from themselves, as it were, in reclaiming them for orthodoxy. Notwithstanding his blatantly heretical views, for example, the religiously eccentric wool carder of Cardenete, Bartolome Sanchez, met dozens of times between 1553 and 1558 in Cuenca, Spain, with remarkably patient inquisitorial judges, who were keenly sensitized to questions about his mental stability and who reasoned and pleaded with him to change his views and be reconciled to the church.10 Despite the repeated...
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organization and retention of received knowledge.3 For them, human beings both remembered their learning and made sense of it through images in their minds, which themselves could be drawn from visual experience. Such a position provided powerful support for images, from illuminated prayer books for the laity through carved altar retables in churches in the use of contemplation and devotion. For Christians, whether one was Protestant or Catholic, Reformed or Lutheran, Roman or Orthodox,...
Theology and impact of reform
Martin Luther did not have a theology in the form of a coherent system that a professor would publish or deliver to students. The Reformation, however, made Luther a more comprehensive theologian than he would have become if his output had been limited to biblical lectures. For the most part, his theology was shaped by the course of reform and the opposition it provoked, and Luther realized it very well. In the preface to his German writings published in 1539, Luther boasted that the assaults...
Info Ieb
Heraclides tried to propagate Lutheranism in Moldavia aggressively, relying on the help of German Protestants.51 Hans von Ungnad established a printing press in Urach, Germany, in order to publish books destined for the Orthodox population of the Balkans. Other German Protestants also tried to convert Orthodox south-eastern Europe.52 All these attempts failed. Hungarian Calvin-ists who propagated their faith in Transylvania were more successful.53 Later, antitrinitarians and Judaizers obtained...
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accepted a violent, humiliating death in a stunning act of obedience to God the Father that righted the primordial disobedience of Adam. The early sixteenth century was the apex of a long, late medieval crescendo in which the passion and death of Christ by crucifixion was depicted, honoured, and employed as an aid to devotion. In late medieval Christianity the central image of the religion and the primary focus of every church and chapel was the crucifix, the depiction of the dead Christ on the...
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a few years.10 As with Kramer and Bodin, the hidden agenda was to make witch hunting easier. The Catholic zealot Binsfeld did not refrain from quoting the Calvinist Daneau whose demonological approach appeared to be congenial. During the reign of Duke Charles III of Lorraine 1543-1608, r. 1552-1608 the largest witch hunt in Francophone Europe by far took place. His procureur general Nicolas Remy c. 1528-1612 boasts of 900 witch burnings over fifteen years of office.11 Remy carried on burning...
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Jose de Acosta 1540-1600 , rector of the Jesuit College in Lima Historia Natural e Moral de las Indias Seville, 1590 , who both worked as ethnographers of their respective American territories. De Lancre drew his examples mainly from his own trials and those of three other French lawyers and demonologists - Bodin, Remy, and Boguet - adding a few stories from Delrio but completely dismissing the accounts of other theologians. As de Lancre admits, the lawyers he quoted considered witchcraft to be...
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reunion of the churches at the cost of reforming abuses and making more or less important concessions like discipline and ecclesiology on the sacraments and doctrine on the other, toleration per se, namely the acceptance of the very principle of religious pluralism and the diversity of worship, and civil concord that only contemplated the establishment of a legal framework for the coexistence of confessions without making any pronouncements on issues of dogma. This distinction is nothing more...
Info Uyt
they could confirm their belief in witchcraft as a rhetorical device, and argue against persecution, or even the existence of witches. Demonology was a dangerous subject that could result in physical harm not only by the demons but also the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Delrio claimed that the witches' patrons were worse than the witches themselves and they were the first that should be prosecuted. Heinrich Schultheis rightly suspected that Spee engaged in an entirely different...
Info Gtu
bear. And this has been approved by the decrees of the councils, especially the second council of Nicaea, against the iconoclasts. Second, it affirmed the cognitive function of images in the complex of education in Christianity Bishops should teach with care that the faithful are instructed and strengthened by commemorating and frequently recalling the articles of our faith through the expression in pictures or other likenesses of the stories of the mysteries of our redemption and that great...
Info Elb
contacts with the West continued under the patriarchs Paysios 1614-1647 , Gabriel Raic 1648-1655 , and Maxim 1655-1674 , who supported contacts with Catholic missionaries.22 The most important event in the relationship between Rome and the Orthodox East in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries was the Union of Kiev Metropolitanate and the Roman curia, signed in 1595 in Rome and proclaimed in 1596 at the Council of Orthodox and Catholic clergy at Brest. The union resulted from the...
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led by Beza to a colloquy sponsored by the crown and held in 1560 in the village of Poissy near Paris, on the religious issues then threatening to tear the kingdom apart. That was followed by a royal edict in 1561 permitting Protestant worship in certain towns and other places under strict limitations. This edict of partial toleration so enraged conservative Catholics that it provoked the first of a series of religious civil wars. They tore France apart for the rest of the century.15 Never...
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world.36 Melanchthon had a particular interest in astronomy, notably as an aid to astrology his presence at Wittenberg was no doubt instrumental in fostering interest there in Copernicus.37 Wittenberg was the site of the first group of astronomers to master Copernicus's system and use it to draw up new astronomical tables, the Prutenic tables of 1551. The 'Wittenberg interpretation' of Copernicus, centred around Erasmus Reinhold, was a fictionalist one which used Copernicus's theory for...
Mikhail V Dmitriev
Throughout the Middle Ages, the relationships between Western and Eastern Christianity were characterized by two tendencies. On the one hand, there was estrangement, while on the other hand, there were the links between Rome and the Eastern churches, as well as between Catholics and Orthodox people in all European countries, that were never interrupted and sometimes even intensified. Both tendencies were reflected in the history of the Florentine Union 1438-9 , which was the last attempt in the...
Info Iwe
The conflict with Rome can be oversimplified because its outcome is well known and it wove together many strands - personal, political, religious, and theological - that are difficult to unravel. Nevertheless, the roots of the Reformation and of its significance for the history of Christianity lie buried in the fabric of that conflict and not simply in the head of Luther or in alleged deformities of the late medieval church. A different vision of Christianity, gradually articulated and accepted...
Info Oki
parents, but he was also the beneficiary of their desire to see him properly educated and religiously trained. We have few details about the relationship between Luther and his parents, but at the time of their deaths Hans in 1530 and Margarete in 1531 Luther was deeply moved and expressed his appreciation for both of them. When he learned that his father had died, Luther confessed that seldom had he ever despised death as he did at that moment and acknowledged that through his father God had...
Contributors
Wolfgang Behringer is Professor of Modern History at the University of Saarbr cken, Germany Philip Benedict is Professor of Church History at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Robert Bireley, SJ is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, USA. Ann Blair is Professor of History at Harvard University, USA. Peter Blickle is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Miriam Bodiam is Associate Professor ofJewish History at Touro College, USA. Thomas...
Conclusion
At root, the radicals' disagreement with the mainline reformers was a disagreement about what was wrong with medieval Catholicism, that is, what needed reforming. For Luther, the fundamental problem was works righteousness and the oppressed conscience. The Catholic demand that sinners should earn their own salvation exceeded the ability of fallen humanity. Because of the Fall, humans endured a bondage of the will that prevented any good work untainted by sin. The greater the effort to earn...
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perspectives of the Rhineland biblicists. Where Erasmus had dodged, Calvin did not flinch, hoping thereby as he saw it to recall the Catholic France from which he was now estranged to its real Christian roots. Throughout Calvin's theology, an 'antithetical structure' is woven into its logical fabric at every turn so that he can apply what one scholar has termed a 'calculus fidei', a logic of scripturally based distinctions until the boundaries have been defined.41 Predestination was the...
Lactatio Virginis
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both within the convents, where the institutional version prevailed, and without, where the charismatic aspect was rather more present, a particular form of female teaching, which we could define as spiritual maternity, was present and active as a recognized element of sanctity. It is well known, in fact, that a nun from the convent of Santa Croce in Brescia was considered mother by Gaetano da Thiene, one of the founders of the Order of the Clerics...