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GeneralAncient worldMedieval Europe and ByzantiumReformation and Counter–Reformation EuropeModern EuropeAfrica, Asia and AustralasiaThe AmericasGeneral : Modern world [Extracted from the article]

This book review discusses "Strange brethren: Refugees, religious bonds, and reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608" by Maximilian Miguel Scholz. The author examines the impact of refugees on Frankfurt during the early modern period, focusing on their religious influence and the resulting changes. Despite limited archival records due to World War II bombings, Scholz utilizes available sources such as refugee petitions, edicts, and letters to provide a comprehensive historical account. The book highlights Frankfurt's initial acceptance of refugees, followed by growing unease and conflict between the refugees and the city's leaders. It also explores the spread of religious beliefs and practices through the exodus of refugees to neighboring territories. The reviewer raises concerns about the book's use of naming conventions and suggests that certain statements may be anachronistic and misleading. [Extracted from the article]

"England's Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625-1662" by Anthony Milton is a comprehensive and scholarly work that explores the diverse approaches to reforming the Church of England during the mid-seventeenth century. The author argues that the revolutionary period of the 1640s and 1650s should not be seen as a deviation from the Church's history, but rather as its climax. Milton examines various reformations, including the Laudian Reformation, the Westminster Reformation, and the Cromwellian Church, highlighting the complexity and nuance of different positions. The book offers a rich discussion of the intellectual debates and rhetoric surrounding the Church of England during this period. [Extracted from the article]

Ancient world Medieval Europe and Byzantium Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe Modern Europe Africa, Asia and Australasia The Americas General: Modern world. [Extracted from the article]

Ancient world Medieval Europe and Byzantium Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe Modern Europe Africa, Asia and Australasia The Americas General: Modern world. [Extracted from the article]

This article unearths the little-remembered history of British fundamentalist organisations of the Cold War era. These bodies constituted the last embers of an organised movement in Britain: the British Evangelical Council after 1953; the English Consultative Committee and the British Council of Protestant Christian Churches from the mid-1950s; the Christian Bible Unity Fellowship in the 1960s; and the British and European Reformation Fellowship in the 1980s. Based on archival and published material, the article argues that these organisations tried to render US-style fundamentalism into a new Anglicised version, but that each failed due to confessional disagreements and personal rivalries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the Reformation to the political, social and cultural history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century certainly justifies the appearance of Kooi's book, which is the first English-language synthesis of its kind. Kooi demonstrates that before the onset of the Reformation, the Low Countries was a distinctly devout region, and not one necessarily more disturbed by calls for religious renewal than elsewhere in Europe. As Christine Kooi points out in her admirable new synthesis of religious change in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, the early Netherlandish Reformation was marked by violent state repression. [Extracted from the article]

Ancient world Medieval Europe and Byzantium Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe Modern Europe Africa, Asia and Australasia The Americas. [Extracted from the article]

This paper addresses a major historical lacuna by highlighting some of the ways through which women helped to shape Irish responses to the English Reformation in Ireland. It reveals that women were often key to a web of contacts linking English resistance to the Tudors' reformations to Irish resistance. It affirms that women played a significant role in the Reformation in Tudor Ireland, not least of all in its ultimate failure. Because virtually no Irish women became Protestants in the sixteenth century, though a small number of Irish men was converted, no self-perpetuating indigenous community of Irish Protestants was generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indeed, just as there was a spectrum of belief among Protestants on the dependence or independence of the State and the Church, so too Catholics disagreed among themselves. Political theorists in Europe were often concerned predominantly with the political situations in their own countries, but by the end of the sixteenth century some Protestants became increasingly concerned with international causes in the wars of religion, thus bringing a universalist vocabulary hitherto used by Catholic apologists to a Protestant audience and for political purposes. Early reformers became dependent upon political authority for their survival and protection, but the winds of change could come quickly, such that Protestants and Catholics alike could generate theories of resistance against political powers. [Extracted from the article]

After all, as Overell asks in the following chapter 'could anyone ... live through these five decades of Tudor rule and never deceive? Overell's detailed analysis opens a window into theological fluidity and exchange in the early reformation, as identities crystallised and changed the context of a many-layered text. Following a prologue in which Overell lays out both the historiography and her guiding principles, I Nicodemites i is divided into two sections. [Extracted from the article]

Although Richard Hooker can be found speaking retrospectively of the "moderate" kind of Reformation that had occurred in England, a coherent positive paradigm of "reformation" did not crystallise until the mid-seventeenth century. The comments and queries above are a measure of how much Benjamin Guyer's book succeeds in making its readers think. Guyer develops this provocative argument over five chapters, which examine three discourses of reformation: reformation by church council, reformation by revolt and reformation as a past historical event. [Extracted from the article]

It is an outstanding work of history which will make a lasting mark on our understanding of medieval and Reformation religion in England. By being a book that elides "medieval religion" and "the Reformation", it warns against over-emphasising the Reformation division while reporting in its last chapter the radical changes that did occur. The parish mass was a cut-down version of cathedral liturgy and one question that the author raises is why did no one create a "parish missal" comparable to the priest's "ritual"?. [Extracted from the article]

Bruening details the culmination of this anti-Calvin network with the Bern council's decision in favour of Zébédée over Calvin. It is for this reason that Bruening's work can serve as a useful companion to historiography in Calvin studies and should be a necessary addition to comprehensive reading lists covering the French Reformation. This book is a wonderful counterbalance to a lopsided body of literature that features Calvin prominently but is, unfortunately, riddled with "hagiographic hogwash" and largely dismissive of Calvin's opponents (p. 122). [Extracted from the article]

Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies Robert Persons's understanding of the reforms of Mary i of England within the continental discursive context in which he worked. By describing his critiques of Marian reforms together with similar reformist discourses in France and Spain, it is argued that his ideas represent a common Counter-Reformation polemical stance and a set of normal Catholic assumptions about the 'political' and institutional reforms necessary to combat heresy. Persons's thoughts about the 'political' reforms within a broader field of spiritual imperatives serve as a reminder that the Counter-Reformation was necessarily about politics despite scholarly emphasis on issues of theology and religious practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In summary, Evener has produced an extremely helpful study on the intellectual history of the early Reformation, especially for a readership without any knowledge of German. Evener's main method of analysis is the meticulous study of annotations in the reformers' copies of books. Evener's primary aim is to demonstrate how Luther, his less well-known contemporary Andreas von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer read and developed late medieval mystical writing, in particular the works of Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, even if they reached different conclusions. [Extracted from the article]

Cathedrals are usually thought to have had little role in the English Reformation and the reasons for their very survival in the new Church of England have been questioned. Instead of being an irrelevant and closed-off institution, Durham Cathedral was intellectually close to its Reformation-era bishop, the conservative Cuthbert Tunstall, and was involved in diocesan matters throughout his episcopate. Tunstall's evangelical successors also appreciated its potential for reform and the need to use its staff and resources. Cathedrals thus could be a tool to be used in the reformation of the diocese on both sides of the emerging confessional divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at a common societal feature – the inheritance – examining how it became a prized source of income following the French Revolution and, therefore, a divisive element. The Restoration in the Papal States (1814–30) produced unexpected legal battles over the right of inheritances; family members as well as the monasteries of ex-religious, secularised during the Napoleonic period in Italy, contested the beneficiary status of wills. Such was the frequency and acrimony of the disputes that a special commission was created in 1827 to curb future debate. All told, these legal battles favoured ecclesiastical institutions over secular or family interests, and loosened the bonds between the Catholic Church and society during the Risorgimento. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such writing belongs to the subgenre called Menippean satire, and Andreae wrote a book with 100 satiric dialogues. I suspect the translation was made by the multilingual Christoph Besold, a member of the Tübingen group who mentored Andreae but dissociated himself from the manifestos (pp. 175-6). Andreae, who has emerged from recent studies as principal author of both manifestos, was devoted to the learned satires of Erasmus, of which I The praise of folly i is the best known. [Extracted from the article]

Using the example of the Bohemian Franciscan Province, and its Olomouc convent in particular, this paper analyses mendicancy after the Reformation. In the early modern period mendicancy remained an important practice in the Franciscan Order. Apart from its economic function, begging was also an important means of interaction between the friars and the people. It was a complicated exchange of goods and services, which helped the friars to secure their position in society and export elements of their spirituality outside the walls of their convents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nimbly, Thaler takes the reader through the twists and turns of the timing, nature and progress of this competition across more than a century within the various territorial entities that made up Austria. For the dynasty, Austria was 'the Catholic, absolutist Habsburg Empire ... a political entity rooted in a princely family'; Protestant nobles, by contrast, 'anchored their patriotism in the individual territories and their customary laws and privileges' (p. 253). 978 0 367 42934 8 The long-standing acceptance of Habsburg as synonymous with Austria, even after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made any opposition to a Habsburg ruler or government inherently treacherous. [Extracted from the article]

978 1 4744 8429 9 This book offers a painstaking reconstruction of the Reformation's impact on the ecclesiastical element of Scotland's legal system during the key transitional years of 1558-72. The key new institution to emerge was the commissary court system, which from 1564 inherited the matrimonial jurisdiction from the pre-Reformation church courts, which the new Protestant kirk sessions and superintendents' courts had been undertaking in the early 1560s. The spiritual jurisdiction in Reformation Scotland. [Extracted from the article]

In a letter to the monk Patricius, Philoxenus told a cautionary tale about the downfall of the monk Adelphius. He was said to have accepted a Satanic vision of the Holy Spirit, abandoned ascetic labour and become the founder of the heresy of the ‘Messalians’. This article places Philoxenus’ account against the longer background of the invention of ‘Messaliainism’, and in particular of Adelphius as Messalian heresiarch. It shows how Philoxenus drew on traditions about monks receiving Satanic visions found in ascetic literature. It also demonstrates that Philoxenus’ story reflected polemical claims that the Messalians, like other heretics, were inspired by demons and Satan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the use and promotion of contact relics in medieval England. It argues that by the late eleventh and early twelfth century, large English monastic houses were uncomfortable with unauthorised individuals touching high status corporeal relics and so re-introduced and promoted contact relics as alternative objects of veneration. It argues that contact relics were an important aspect of English saints' cults until the Reformation, in a similar manner to Celtic and Brittonic cults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinction is often made between magisterial and radical reformers in the early modern period, Luther and Thomas Müntzer being frequently taken as representatives of two quite different reformations, especially in regard to the understanding of Scripture and of the political realm. It can, however, be argued that the Reformation as a whole was radical, and that it is misleading to characterise one aspect of it as mainstream, another peripheral. The comparison between Müntzer and the Scottish reformer, John Knox, appears to support the contention that the chasm between the two camps is not unbridgeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on Elizabeth's Reformation in the Irish Pale around Dublin, the key religious battleground in Tudor Ireland. It highlights the strength of opposition to Elizabeth's religious settlement from the start of her reign. It shows in stark terms that Ireland experienced a Reformation virtually without reformers, and suggests that that was a major reason for its failure. The contrasting experiences of England and the Pale suggest, in turn, that revisionist historians have underestimated the progress of Protestantism in England before Elizabeth's reign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Calvinistic Confession of Faith written by the patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Loukaris, is considered to be the most important product and at the same time the manifesto of the attempted union of the Protestant and Orthodox Churches. Presenting evidence which has been neglected in previous research, this article aims to revise this communis opinio by demonstrating that the book that was actually meant to become the theological foundation for the envisaged union was in fact the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio, a bilingual (Latin and Greek) publication (1623, 1627, 1648) containing the Βelgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and several canons of the Synod of Dordrecht. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this examination of the piety and devotional books of Reginald Pole and his friends, three booklists are compared: Pole's own, and those of Marcantonio Flaminio and Michael Throckmorton. The article also probes their comments and choices about reading and prayer, sacrament and preaching, as well as the observations of contemporaries. Piety in Pole's household was nourished principally by the Bible, the Fathers and the Imitation of Christ, but scriptural commentaries by suspect reformers also became part of their devotional reading, moulding religious identities which were unusual and became dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses the strikingly different rhetoric used in pamphlets published in 1530 by the Strasbourg Spiritualists Christian Entfelder and Johannes Bünderlin. Whilst these texts are most commonly read in light of their shared critique of Anabaptism, this article argues that Bünderlin's work also reveals his rejection of Entfelder's Spiritualist alternative, characterised by the term 'standing still' (Stillstand). By exploring these pamphlets, and other texts associated with the Strasbourg Anabaptist-Spiritualist debates, this article seeks to demonstrate the importance not only of fully contextualising such sources, but also of understanding the divisive and potentially destabilising nature of Spiritualist rhetoric itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an important but hitherto neglected factor that helps to account for the early divergence between Richard Baxter (1615-91) and John Owen (1616-83). Theological differences alone cannot account for that divergence, since in the early 1640s Baxter and Owen would have agreed on the issues that later separated them. Their starkly contrasting experiences of the First Civil War helped to set them apart. For Baxter, personally caught up in the upheaval, the war was a disaster that corrupted the Gospel. For Owen, untouched by the fighting, the war was a blessing from God that liberated the Gospel from Arminian captivity. All this helps to illuminate some of the ways in which the civil wars continued to shape religious developments and divisions long after the battles had ceased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luther's hermeneutical principles labelled 'the theology of the cross', developed in his 'Heidelberg theses' of 1518, continued to guide his formulation of biblical teaching throughout his career. In lectures on the Psalms of ascent (1532-3), under quite different circumstances, Luther claimed again that 'Our theology is a theology of the cross'. Five elements of his Heidelberg theologia crucis guided his interpretation in these lectures. The distinction of the hidden and the revealed God, the focus on Christ's atoning sacrifice for sin, the reliance on faith in God's Word rather than human reason, God's working 'under the appearance of opposites' and the suffering involved in battling Satan shape his treatment of many passages in the lectures on Psalms cxx-cxxxiv. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sets the history of a friendship in the context of religious reform in Italy in the 1530s. Richard Morison and Michael Throckmorton were friends at the University of Padua but gradually became foes. In 1536 Morison returned to England to become Cromwell's propagandist and later Throckmorton began his dramatic career as Pole's agent. In Italy, however, both these young humanists had links with a group of reformers later called 'spirituali'. Morison met them through contacts with Edmund Harvel and Bishop Cosimo Gheri. The discovery of Throckmorton's inventory shows that he owned books associated with Italian reform, including banned publications containing writings of the Northern Reformers. The rift between them was caused by political reformation in England, not religion in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the SPCK, has been much discussed as the epitome of Anglican evangelistic zeal and is well known for its dedicated work in the distribution of Christian literature. Whereas the fact that continental Protestants were in regular contact with the SPCK has been noted, few attempts have so far been made to examine SPCK relations with continental Protestants. In fact, the SPCK emerges as more and more concerned with its responsibilities towards its persecuted foreign brethren. Thus it is important to place the SPCK in the context of the Europe-wide Protestant Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profiles scholar Robert Barnes of the English Reformation. List of evangelical wills which contained his name; Issues contested in his theology; Sermons for which Barnes was criticized by a conservative priest in London, England in 1537.

Hans Denck is commonly cited as a universalist. Probably he was not, but there are several reasons why it was easy for his opponents to claim the opposite: his theology admitted the possibility that all people will be saved; his broadly Origenistic conceptions of freedom, divinisation and punishment tempted opponents to attribute Origen's idea of universalism to him; and he so challenged the core beliefs of mainstream Reformation theology that his opponents may have found it difficult to understand how he could claim that God wills all to be saved, Christ died for all and all are free,, without being universalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the significance of the paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person in connection with philosopher Martin Luther's redefinition of the relationship between theology and philosophy. Background on his first biography that was written by Johannes Cochlaeus; Alternative views of Luther's Reformation; Information on several Catholic scholars of Luther.

Discusses the perceptions of the parish of Saint Andrew Hubbard in London, England by its parishioners after the Reformation. Information on the attitudes of parishioners before the Reformation; Effect of the Reformation on the parish; Impact of the Reformation on the attitudes of testators.