R. Po-chia Hsia

Social discipline in the Reformation : Central Europe 1550-1750

Lutheran Germany Calvinist Germany catholic Germany the confessional state cities and confessionalization culture and confessionalism the moral police confessionalism and the people conclusion.

In and out of the ghetto : Jewish-gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany

Introduction R. Po-Chia Hsia Opening essay Jacob Katz Part I. Jewish Cultural Identity and the Price of Exclusiveness: The Legacy of the Middle Ages: 1. The Jewish quarters in German towns during the late Middle Ages Alfred Haverkamp 2. Organisational forms of Jewish popular culture since the Middle Ages Christoph Daxelmuller 3. Criminality and punishment of the Jews in the early modern period Otto Ulbricht 4. Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Roman Empire - a comment Theodore K. Rabb Part II. The Social and Economic Structure of German Jewry from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century: 5. Aspects of stratification of early modern German Jewry: population history and village Jews Michael Toch 6. The economic activity of the Jews in early modern times Stefi Jersch-Wenzel 7. Comparative perspectives on economy and society - a comment Gershon David Hundert Part III. Jewish-Gentile Contacts and Relations in the Pre-Emancipation Period: 8. Languages in contact: the case of Rotwelsch and the two Yiddisches Paul Wexler 9. Meeting on the road: encounters between German Jews and Christians on the margins of society Yacov Guggenheim 10. Contacts at the bedside: Jewish physicians and their Christian patients Robert Jutte 11. Contacts and relations in the pre-emancipation period - a comment Deborah Hertz Part IV. Representations of German Jewry: Images, Prejudices, and Ideas: 12. The usurious Jew: economic structure and religious representations in an anti Semitic discourse R. Po-Chia Hsia 13. Imagining the Jew: the late medieval eucharistic discourse Miri Rubin 14. Representations of German Jewry - a comment Carlo Ginzburg Part V. The Pattern of Authority and the Limits of Toleration: The Case of German Jewry: 15. German territorial princes and the Jews Rotraud Ries 16. Jews in ecclesiastical territories of the Holy Roman Empire J. Friedrich Battenberg 17. Jews in the imperial cities: a political perspective Christopher R. Friedrichs 18. Germans with a difference? The Holy Roman Empires Jews during the early modern era - a comment Thomas A. Brady, Jr Part VI. In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany: 19. Germany and its Jews: a changing relationship (1500-1800) Jonathan I. Israel 20. The Jewish minority and the Christian majority in early modern central Europe Hartmut Lehmann 21. Germans and Jews in late medieval and early modern Germany Richard H. Popkin 22. Jewish identity in a world of corporations and estates Mack Walker.

Persecutions and martyrdom

Christian martyrdom was dramatically reborn in the sixteenth century, as devout men and women proved willing to die for their respective, divergent views of God’s truth. Depending upon national and local contingencies, Anabaptists, magisterial Protestants, and Roman Catholics were subjected to judicial trials for their violation of laws that prescribed correct religious belief and practice. Those who refused to recant were often executed. From the 1520s into the seventeenth century, this basic confrontation between capital judicial procedure and committed religious belief resulted in some 5,000 deaths for religion in Europe, the majority of which occurred in the Low Countries, France, and England. The extensive memorialization of these deaths by martyrologists and the communities of faith to which they belonged played an important role in the shaping of distinct, separate Christian traditions in early modern Europe and beyond. Viewed broadly, the thrust of executions for religion during the era shifted from Anabaptists in the 1520s and 1530s to Reformed Protestants in the 1540s and 1550s, to Roman Catholics after 1580 in England, Asia, and the Americas. Nearly 500 known or ‘probable’ executions of Anabaptists had occurred in central Europe, including Switzerland and Bohemia, within a decade of the first deaths in 1525. In the Low Countries, the followers of David Joris and Menno Simons would experience more of the same in the years just after the fall of the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster in 1535. The number of Protestant martyrs grew with the proliferation of Calvinism in the 1540s and 1550s. In France, the Parlement of Paris issued only twenty-three death sentences for heresy from 1536 through 1543, for example, but 112 from 1544 through 1549.

Female sanctity, 1500–1660

Introduction During the Renaissance and early modern period, 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. Socially, sanctity was valued and was pursued both by licit means, that is, means relevant to the very nature of religious faith, and by illicit. Between 1500 and 1660, women expressed their religiousness according to traditional models that were valued differently as the political, social, and cultural situations proposed and imposed new conditions of life upon them. At the same time, religious conflicts and the plurality of religions generated new models of sanctity but at times reproduced the old ones. Considering the universality of the aforementioned problems, I intend to trace the evolutionary lines of female sanctity, starting with the most representative experiences of religious life during the period indicated, and to proceed in chronological order. I will not consider the approved model of sanctity exclusively, but will bear in mind the proscribed as well, while also referring to counter-models. In outlining the evolution of female sanctity, I will avail myself of traditional representations of Christianity while demonstrating the active role of women in interpreting such representations or in generating new ones. The models can be found in some principal chronological periods: the first decades of the sixteenth century; the period of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent; and the period of the Counter-Reformation and Catholic renewal. Models of female sanctity in the first decades of the sixteenth century: mystical and prophetic sanctity

Cambridge History of Christianity

This authoritative volume presents the history of Christianity from the eve of the Protestant Reformation to the height of Catholic Reform. In addition to in-depth coverage of the politics and theology of various reform movements in the sixteenth century, this book discusses at length the impact of the permanent schism on Latin Christendom, the Catholic responses to it, and the influence on the development of the Orthodox churches. This comprehensive and comparative overview covers the history of society, politics, theology, liturgy, religious orders, and art in the lands of Latin Christianity. In thirty chapters written by an international team of contributors the volume expands the boundaries of inquiry to the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism both in Europe and in the non-European world.

The Reformation and the visual arts

The theology of Incarnation and the visual arts Any consideration of the visual arts in the Reformation must begin with the Incarnation. Throughout their history, Christians have struggled with what it means that, in the words of the Gospel of John, ‘the Word was made flesh’ (1:14, KJV). The Incarnation overthrew the opposition many different schools of classical thought, from the presocratics through the Stoics, had posited: of flesh to spirit, matter to mind. For no Christian could ‘flesh’, or matter, be completely severable from ‘the Word’ or God – the two were bound together in Christ, and to state otherwise was heresy. The Incarnation also overthrew the Jewish prohibition of images. As both Rome and Constantinople declared during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, if God could take on the flesh, then material representations of Christ in some essential way belonged on a continuum in which matter could serve to make divinity present to the eyes of the faithful. With the rise of the cult of the saints in the high Middle Ages, that continuum came to encompass images of saints, which revealed God’s hand in the lives of Christians after the life of Christ. Thomas Aquinas, explicating the consequences of those pronouncements, explicitly located visual representations on an unbroken line that began with Jesus, then Mary, and then the saints, and ended with man-made visual representations, first of Christ, then Mary, and finally, the saints.

The Radical Reformation

Neither Catholic nor Protestant, Anabaptism and Spiritualism constituted another, more radical, Reformation in the sixteenth century. Although they agreed with Catholics and Protestants in important ways, they also departed from both on essentials. Following Luther and the Protestants, they rejected the Catholic hierarchyas mediator of divine grace, authoritative source of doctrine, and gatekeeper to the Lord’s sheepfold. They also agreed with Protestantism by according faith and scripture unprecedented weight. However, they rejected a purely imputed forensic righteousness and refused to separate justification and sanctification as sharply as Protestantism did. In effect, they returned to the Catholic ‘faith formed by love’. Distinctive teachings on the Bible, the sacraments, and the religious role of the state made them anathema to Protestants and Catholics alike. They hint at the rich variety of Christian expression with roots in the later Middle Ages that lay concealed alongside, and beneath, Tridentine Roman Catholicism and classical Protestantism. In reappropriating Catholic elements, the radicals drew upon their general religious formation, since all first-generation reformers were, after all, Catholics. However, the radicals also made use of certain identifiable sources. Mysticism, Erasmus, and monasticism were the most important. Late medieval mysticism, particularly the anonymous Theologia Germanica published by Luther (1516; 1518) and the works of Johannes Tauler ( c . 1300–61) contributed an emphasis on inwardness, suffering, and a disinterest in externals. It also urged a Gelassenheit (resignation) that could be applied not only to mental prepossessions, but to material possessions as well. Erasmian humanism reinforced inwardness and de-emphasis on externals.

Christianity in Europe and overseas

The standard distinction between settled societies and nomadic or seminomadic peoples captures contrasts in the scale and organisation of warfare. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, who generally relied on pastoral agriculture or slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, were less populous and their governmental structures were less developed. The timing and rate of change are also issues in assessing whether there was a Military Revolution in the early modern period. The standard account posits one period of revolution from 1560 to 1660, indecisiveness and stagnation, then a second period of revolution that began with the outbreak of the War of American Independence in 1775 and continued with the French Revolutionary Wars to 1815. The Ottoman army, and even more the navy, of 1600 were very different from those of 1450, such that there was a sustained transformation in Ottoman war-making. The political culture of the Ottoman court and public finances also failed to support the enhancement of Turkish military capability.

The Mediterranean Inquisitions of early modern Europe

There are good reasons to separate the Inquisitors of Heretical Pravity, who had been operating under papal commissions in several parts of Europe since the thirteenth century, from their modern successors. Of course, one must recognize that several fundamental continuities connected medieval inquisitors and modern holy offices. Their purposes were identical: all Inquisitors always sought primarily to uncover and punish heretics. Because both used legal procedures taken from canon law, their modus operandi was essentially identical: no new general handbooks for inquisitors were needed to replace the fourteenth-century models by Bernard Gui or Nicolas Eymeric, which were reprinted centuries later with relatively minor changes for use by their successors. But holy office organization became radically different after 1500 and their activities expanded in new directions, as they began investigating such offences as owning heretical books, homosexuality, or even (for a short time and in a few parts of Spain) horse smuggling. The early sixteenth century also marks a watershed in inquisitorial history because jurisdiction over heresy, always the principal business of Inquisitions, had passed into the hands of secular courts almost everywhere north of the Alps and Pyrenees around the time of Luther’s Reformation. For anyone accused of heresy, this was an ominous development. In an extreme but significant instance, two successive southern French Inquisitors were themselves indicted as Protestant heretics by the Parlement of Toulouse and the second man was actually burned in 1538. Overall, more than 3,000 Protestants, mostly Anabaptists, were burned for heresy throughout western Europe in the sixteenth century. However, fewer than 10 per cent of them perished at the hands of Inquisitorial courts in Mediterranean Europe.

The Calvinist Reformation in Geneva

The Reformation in Geneva began as a political revolution, quickly followed by a religious revolution, both directed against the power of a prince-bishop. For centuries Geneva had been ruled by a prince-bishop as the headquarters of a large diocese extending over much of what is now south-western France. He had ruled this diocese in close collaboration with the duchy of Savoy. Many bishops had come from the ducal family. A concrete symbol of the Savoyard role in the city was the office of vidomne , an agent of Savoy sent into the city to regulate the administration of justice. Much of the strictly internal government of the city had been granted by earlier bishops to the local inhabitants, organized into a hierarchy of councils and represented before the bishop by agents called syndics. There had been an important shift in the economy of Geneva late in the fifteenth century, away from trade in good part with Italy to trade increasingly with Germany and the Germanic areas making up the Swiss Confederation. This helped lead to a political alliance between the local government of Geneva and the Swiss governments of Fribourg and Bern. That alliance made possible the revolution against the prince-bishop and Savoy, although it was the militarily powerful republic of Bern alone that supported Geneva in the final climactic stages of revolution. Change was accomplished in a number of steps. One of the first was the creation of a new council, called the Council of Two Hundred, in imitation of a similar council in Bern, to increase local participation in government.