Download or read book Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany written by German Studies Association. Conference and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion." One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change- conversion-had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies. David M. Luebke is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His publications include His Majesty's Rebels: Factions, Communities, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest (Cornell University Press 1997) and many articles, most recently "Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation" (Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101: 2010). Jared Poley is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is the author of Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Peter Lang 2005). Daniel C. Ryan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston. He was awarded his PhD in 2008 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a study on conversion and peasant protest in Imperial Russia. David Warren Sabean is the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Professor of German History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1990) and Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1998). He recently edited, with Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu, Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development, 1300-1900 (Berghahn Books 2007).
Download or read book Crossing the Boundaries of Belief written by Duane J. Corpis and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history. In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.
Download or read book German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion written by Jonathan Strom and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.
Download or read book Mixed Matches written by David M. Luebke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significant changes in early modern German marriage practices included many unions that violated some taboo. That taboo could be theological and involve the marriage of monks and nuns, or refer to social misalliances as when commoners and princes (or princesses) wed. Equally transgressive were unions that crossed religious boundaries, such as marriages between Catholics and Protestants, those that violated ethnic or racial barriers, and those that broke kin-related rules. Taking as a point of departure Martin Luther’s redefinition of marriage, the contributors to this volume spin out the multiple ways that the Reformers’ attempts to simplify and clarify marriage affected education, philosophy, literature, high politics, diplomacy, and law. Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.
Download or read book Archeologies of Confession written by Carina L. Johnson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern religious identities are rooted in collective memories that are constantly made and remade across generations. How do these mutations of memory distort our picture of historical change and the ways that historical actors perceive it? Can one give voice to those whom history has forgotten? The essays collected here examine the formation of religious identities during the Reformation in Germany through case studies of remembering and forgetting—instances in which patterns and practices of religious plurality were excised from historical memory. By tracing their ramifications through the centuries, Archeologies of Confession carefully reconstructs the often surprising histories of plurality that have otherwise been lost or obscured.
Download or read book Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany written by Kathy Stuart and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.
Download or read book Print and Power in Early Modern Europe 1500 1800 written by Nina Lamal and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Print, in the early modern period, could make or break power. This volume addresses one of the most urgent and topical questions in early modern history: how did European authorities use a new medium with such tremendous potential? The eighteen contributors develop new perspectives on the relationship between the rise of print and the changing relationships between subjects and rulers by analysing print’s role in early modern bureaucracy, the techniques of printed propaganda, genres, and strategies of state communication. While print is often still thought of as an emancipating and disruptive force of change in early modern societies, the resulting picture shows how instrumental print was in strengthening existing power structures. Contributors: Renaud Adam, Martin Christ, Jamie Cumby, Arthur der Weduwen, Nora Epstein, Andreas Golob, Helmer Helmers, Jan Hillgärtner, Rindert Jagersma, Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, Nina Lamal, Margaret Meserve, Rachel Midura, Gautier Mingous, Ernesto E. Oyarbide Magaña, Caren Reimann, Chelsea Reutchke, Celyn David Richards, Paolo Sachet, Forrest Strickland, and Ramon Voges.
Download or read book Food Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe written by Christopher Kissane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a three-part structure focused on the major historical subjects of the Inquisition, the Reformation and witchcraft, Christopher Kissane examines the relationship between food and religion in early modern Europe. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe employs three key case studies in Castile, Zurich and Shetland to explore what food can reveal about the wider social and cultural history of early modern communities undergoing religious upheaval. Issues of identity, gender, cultural symbolism and community relations are analysed in a number of different contexts. The book also surveys the place of food in history and argues the need for historians not only to think more about food, but also with food in order to gain novel insights into historical issues. This is an important study for food historians and anyone seeking to understand the significant issues and events in early modern Europe from a fresh perspective.
Download or read book Theatres of Belief written by Marie-Alexis Colin and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These eleven essays, all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound, religion, and society in the early modern world, present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists, they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands, the pluri-religious Mediterranean, and the colonial Americas both North and South, this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape, so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories, to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai, a bastion of the Catholic Reformation, to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut, where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity, the intertwined religious, musical, and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life.
Download or read book Themes of Polemical Theology Across Early Modern Literary Genres written by Lucy R Nicholas and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative volume spans the early modern period and ranges across literary genres, confessional divides and European borders. It brings together twenty-three scholars from thirteen different countries to explore the dynamic and profound ways in which polemical theology, its discourses and codes, interacted with non-theological literary genres in this era. Offering depth as well as breadth, the contributions chart a myriad of intersections between Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed polemics and a range of literary types composed in Latin and the vernacular across Europe. Individual essays discuss how genres such as history and poetry often represented a vehicle to promote and validate a particular confessional standpoint. Authors also address the complex relationship between humanism and polemical theology which tends to be radically oversimplified in early modern studies. A number of essays demonstrate the extent to which certain literary productions harnessed religious polemics in order to induce conversion or promote toleration, and might even engage with supranational issues, such as the divide between Eastern and Western churches. As such, this visionary book constructively bridges the world of religious controversy and the literary space.
Download or read book Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter Reformation Europe written by Liesbeth Corens and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Confessional Mobility explores their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as well as their impact beyond that initial moment of change.
Download or read book Being German Becoming Muslim written by Esra Özyürek and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-23 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today’s Europe. Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment. Being German, Becoming Muslim provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.
Download or read book Religious Conversion written by Ira Katznelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.
Download or read book The Early Modern Dutch Press in an Age of Religious Persecution written by David de Boer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat religiously inspired maltreatments, executions, and massacres. To affect and mobilize foreign audiences, confessional minorities and their advocates faced an acute dilemma, one that we still grapple with today: how to make people care about distant suffering? David de Boer argues that by answering this question, they laid the foundations of a humanitarian culture in Europe. As consuming news became an everyday practice for many Europeans, the Dutch Republic emerged as an international hub of printed protest against religious violence. De Boer traces how a diverse group of people, including Waldensians refugees, Huguenot ministers, Savoyard office holders, and many others, all sought access to the Dutch printing presses in their efforts to raise transnational solidarity for their cause. By generating public outrage, calling out rulers, and pressuring others to intervene, producers of printed opinion could have a profound impact on international relations. But crying out against persecution also meant navigating a fraught and dangerous political landscape, marked by confessional tension, volatile alliances, and incessant warfare. Opinion makers had to think carefully about the audiences they hoped to reach through pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers. But they also had to reckon with the risk of reaching less sympathetic readers outside their target groups. By examining early modern publicity strategies, de Boer deepens our understanding of how people tried to shake off the spectre of religious violence that had haunted them for generations, and create more tolerant societies, governed by the rule of law, reason, and a sense of common humanity.
Download or read book Contesting Inter Religious Conversion in the Medieval World written by Yosi Yisraeli and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.
Download or read book Pietism and the Sacraments written by Peter James Yoder and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be one of the most influential German Pietists, August Hermann Francke lived during a moment when an emphasis on conversion was beginning to produce small shifts in how the sacraments were defined—a harbinger of later, more dramatic changes to come in evangelical theology. In this book, Peter James Yoder uses Francke and his theology as a case study for the ecclesiological stirrings that led to the rise of evangelicalism and global Protestantism. Engaging extensively with Francke’s manuscript sermons and writings, Yoder approaches Francke’s life and religious thought through his theology of the sacraments. In doing so, Yoder delivers key insights into the structure of Francke's Pietist thought, providing a rich depiction of his conversion-driven theology and how it shaped his views of the sacraments and the church. The first in-depth study of Francke’s theology written for an English-speaking audience, this book supports recent scholarship in English that not only challenges long-held assumptions about Pietism but also argues for the role of Pietism’s influence on the changing religious landscape of the eighteenth century. Through his examination of Francke’s theology of the sacraments, Yoder presents a fresh view into the eighteenth-century ecclesiological developments that caused a rupture with the dogmas of the Reformation. Original and vital, this study recognizes Francke’s importance to the history of Pietism in Germany and beyond. It will become the standard reference on Francke for American audiences and will influence scholarship on Lutheranism, Pietism, early modern German studies, and eighteenth-century history and religion.
Download or read book Religion Politics and Social Protest written by Kaspar von Greyerz and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
