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This article examines Germany's efforts to instrumentalize Islam in the Balkans during the Second World War. As German troops became more involved in the region from early 1943 onwards, German officials began to engage with the Muslim population, promoting Germany as the protector of Islam in south-eastern Europe. Focusing on Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, the article explores the relations between German authorities and religious leaders on the ground and enquires into the ways in which German propagandists sought to employ religious rhetoric, terminology, and iconography for political and military ends. Interweaving religious history with the history of military conflict, the article contributes more generally to our understanding of the politics of religion in the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early modern history of religion as stale, pedantic, and blandly ‘orthodox’ until it was swept aside by a critical and heterodox ‘enlightenment’ is being revised, first in new approaches to early modern histories of biblical Judaism and historicizations of the Old Testament, second in new readings of early modern scholarship on primitive Christianity. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of research which divorce narratives of intellectual change from the linear and inconclusive emphasis on ‘enlightenment’, favouring an approach that conversely emphasizes the impact of confessionalization in creating a newly critical scholarly culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of Europe's Enlightenment have been enriched by attending to its real and imagined impacts on indigenous peoples and of indigenous peoples on Europeans. Applying these methods to new — settled eighteenth-century societies offers ano titer standpoint on the Enlightenment. This study is a sample: a civic history of a relatively new — in European terms — place suggests the possibilities. In 1792, a bourgeois, Vasilii Krestinin, from Russia's White Sea shore, published a history of Archangel, founded in 1584. Krestinin's view from a new Arctic society is as far from Europe's elegant metropoles and eloquent lumières as the ship captains, Pacific Islanders, and cat killers in influential recent studies of the Enlightenment. just as these studies — and others on readers and reading — transformed studies of the Enlightenment, historians can use sources from new societies to observe answers and actions of people casting themselves as Enlighteners. This study of enlightened sensibility in an Arctic society suggests how the Enlightenment — viewed from settler societies — became anxious, how it fanned nationalisms, and how it was ensnared by naïve presuppositions that progress was a prerequisite of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the origins of the dissolution of the monasteries in Europe. Tracing back to the suppressions of smaller houses authorized in 1528; Desirability of partial dissolution; Anti-clerical agitation of 1529; Dissolution for financial reasons in 1529; Collection of damaging evidence monastic corruption during the visitations of 1535.

Discusses the books `Merchants and revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550--1653,' and `The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450--1700,' by David Harris. History of Atlantic port cities; Competition between the cities.