David Lederer

Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 1300–1630 (review)

how fragments both carry the body to many places and become defined by practices, beliefs, and resonances specific to their own locus.As a whole, the volume brings home the clumsiness of “secularization” as a thesis, which in its broad sweep cannot comprehend the many ways that matter locates sanctity. In its consciously structured and narratively embedded interplay of specificity, materiality, devotional practice, and sanctity, this book is exemplary.

Dragged to Hell: Family Annihilation and Brotherly Love in the Age of the Apocalypse

For modern criminologists, the relationship between perpetrator and victim is a social fact. Although relatively rare, family annihilations (the murder of a family by a member followed by their suicide) are particularly sensational because the affective relationship between murderer and victim traditionally presupposes an individual duty of care. While also true for the early modern period, media representations of family annihilations mitigated individual responsibility through reference to famine during the Little Ice Age. A genre of hardheartedness ballads appeared as broadsheets and pamphlets. Invariably, the ballads accused a wealthy local nobleman or burgher of refusing bread, thereby neglecting their communal duty of love for one’s neighbors. In punishment, they were dragged to hell, condemned by moralist authors (presumably Lutheran) for their failure of brotherly love.

Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. Jahrhundert und in der ersten Halfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (review)

Traditionally, historiography represented early modern Ireland in two ways. The “faith and fatherland” tradition viewed the island as an essential historical category, unfathomable in terms of the Renaissance and Reformation.A “unionist tradition”located Ireland in three kingdoms of the British Isles.Both traditions relegated early modern Ireland to insular status,beyond the Pale of European affairs. Lotz-Heumann’s study is a concerted effort to integrate Ireland into the mainstream of European historiography.