Thomas Müntzer and John Knox: Radical and Magisterial Reformers?

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-545
Author(s):  
PETER MATHESON
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Realm

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.

Shakespeare and Derivatives

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
David Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Financial Derivatives ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Twenty First Century

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise to power of images in every aspect of human endeavour. Speculative financial derivatives have achieved a predominant place in the economy, spin and perception rule the political sphere, and technological media ensure that we spend our lives surrounded by images of all kinds. Reading the works of Shakespeare reveals the roots of this process in the early modern period, when the iconoclasm of the Reformation, popular protests against usury, and the campaign against ritual magic combined to provide an ethically based popular resistance to the power of signs.

Briton and Scythian: Tudor representations of Irish origins

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 390-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Chronicles ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Origin Myth ◽  
John Leland

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

Monastic Burials of Non-Patronal Lay Benefactors

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 620-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Postles
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

Select document: ‘The present state of Ireland’, 1749

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (144) ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Eoin Magennis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present State ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Government

The effectiveness of the government of Ireland throughout the period of its rule by England and then Britain depended on the accuracy of the information provided to Dublin Castle and sent from thence to the political masters, based largely in London. The text reproduced below is one of a large number of manuscripts that were sent periodically in the early modern period and the eighteenth century to inform those not resident in Ireland about conditions in the country. Some of these are calls to action for various monarchs or their ministers, with prescriptions for the ‘reform’ of Ireland.

scholarly journals A Hive of Her Own: Early Modern Women Beekeepers

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-194
Author(s):  
Shannon Jane Garner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Key Participants

While much important work has been done on the early modern fascination with the political nature of bees and bee societies, this essay instead takes a closer look at the conflation of honeybees, women, and domestic spaces within the multi-generic textual ecology of early modern beekeeping. In the early modern period women were the primary beekeepers. As key participants in this art of sustained and intimate collaboration across species and environment, these women managed their own hives using the multifaceted skills of the early modern housewife, including textile arts, brewing, distilling, medicine, horticulture, and husbandry. This essay highlights the tension between knowledgeable women apiarists and male textual authorities in early modern apiary treatises and husbandry manuals and focuses on the persistent descriptive slippage between both bees and women and the hive and home in early modern sources. In early modern texts women’s bodies, domestic spaces, and hives are all over-determined entities invested in containment, preservation, and productivity. This essay emphasizes the ways in which early modern women and the occupants of the hives they cared for resisted and worked within the allegorical, anthropocentric, and patriarchal frameworks provided for them in the textual narratives of the early modern period.

Hippologischer Fachdiskurs und dialogische Fiktion

Daphnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 416-443
Author(s):  
Stefanie Stockhorst
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Textual Strategies

Abstract This contribution analyses the textual strategies in Danup’s literary dialogue, which is enriched in many ways with literary topoi and rhetorical devices. It is, in fact, a specialised text on the art of horsemanship, which proves to be surprisingly innovative in this regard. However, it is not only relevant to the hippological, but also to the political culture of the early modern period. For the author updates a literary genre pattern, takes up literary traditions and uses aesthetic means for successful self-promotion as an expert.

Religious Reformation and the Crisis of Providentialism in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611): A Cultural Materialist Reading

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 65
Author(s):  
Shahab Entezareghaem
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Cyril Tourneur ◽  
Philosophical Debates

The early modern period in England is characterised by philosophical and moral debates over the meaning and pertinence of Christian beliefs and teachings. One of the most controversial topics in this epoch is God’s providence and its supposed impacts on man’s daily life. In the wake of the Reformation and emerging philosophical schools, particularly in the second half of the sixteenth century, Providentialism was seriously put into question and the meaning and influences of God’s providence were, therefore, investigated. Epicureans and Calvinists were two prominent groups of religious reformists who cast doubt upon the validity and pertinence of Christian Providentialism as it was taught during the medieval period. These intellectual and philosophical debates were reflected in the literary productions of the age in general, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in particular. Cyril Tourneur is one of the early modern English playwrights who inquired into the meaning and relevance of Providentialism in his last play, The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611). Adhering to a cultural materialist mode of criticism, I will show in this paper that Tourneur is a dissident dramatist who separates the realm of God’s divinity from man’s rational capacity in his tragedy and anticipates, hence, the emergence and development of new religious and philosophical visions in the Renaissance.

scholarly journals Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise Schorn-Schütte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Professional Education ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Comparable Level ◽  
Modern Europe

The discussion above can be summarized in three points that refer back to the introductory remarks.1. On the basis of their social origin and social integration, both Protestant pastors and Catholic pastoral clergy were a part of that bourgeois group who acted in the service of the secular authority; this applies to all of early modern Europe. What the pastors' family achieved on the social level through familial contacts in Protestant areas was established through the mediated connections of extended family, clientage, and friendship in Catholic areas. The similarities are strengthened by the comparable form and contents of education and of educational institutions. Insofar as the state of research allows generalization, it seems that the pastoral clergy of both confessions had attained a comparable level of education by the seventeenth century. In Catholic areas university study was the exception but priests were required to complete their education at a seminary, whose standards surely met the qualifications for a specialized professional education. A complete course of study in theology was not the rule within Protestantism, either; having graduated from a philosophical faculty was a sufficient qualification. In comparison with the standards of pre-Reformation education, there was a clear improvement in education that can be called the early modern “path toward a profession.” This, together with the development of a social and familial network, allows us to characterize the pastoral clergy of Europe during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a part of that “power elite”144 who were essential for the early modern period.2. The formal conditions for the suitability of clerical officeholders reached cum grano salis a comparable level in all confessions throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The disagreements concerning the evaluation of these conditions stem from the measures by which historical change is characterized. For the group of pastoral clergy examined here, the category of modernization proves to be insufficient, since there was a tendency transcending the confessions to appeal to prereformatory traditions in establishing an understanding of office. Historians must be able to describe how tradition was able both to accommodate and to be transformed.3. From this point of view the question of the clergy’s suitability for the goal of the developing modern state encompasses only half of the historical reality. The clergy and their contemporaries who comprised their congregations were also concerned with their role as mediators of the holy, of “the religious” in the world. Clerical perception of self and of office was decisively stamped by the conviction that despite all contradictions these formed an insoluble unity. For this reason we must also consider for both confessions the broad impact of the doctrine of the Christian state, whose core was the doctrine of the three estates. In the political and social controversies of the late sixteenth century the political impulse of this doctrine grew in strength in a way more clearly seen in Protestantism than in the territories that remained Catholic. Nevertheless the concept of the monarchia temperata in the Catholic understanding of authority also gave the clergy a right to criticize the ruler. The long tradition of the correctio principis was put into practice through the clerical understanding of office in both confessions and became a very concrete reality for people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a typically early modern way of developing tradition further through the consensus of generations, whose relevance the historian of the early modern period must take just as seriously as the attempts of the secular authority to use the power elites in their own interests.

scholarly journals Understanding Research Methodology: Social History and the Reformation Period in Europe

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 370
Author(s):  
Laura Kathryn Jurgens
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Life Work

This article provides an overview of the social-historical methodology, highlights relevant scholarship on this approach, and offers specific examples of studies on the Reformation period in Europe that use the social-historical method. I begin by explaining how the social-historical methodology, otherwise known as new social history, originated from the historical method. While highlighting key scholarship on this approach, I outline how the social-historical method differs from the historical method. I also present two essential methodological features of social history, including using sources in new, more analytical ways. I conclude by presenting specific examples of how historians of the early modern period, such as Kirsi Stjerna and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, apply the social-historical method in their own studies. This last section focuses on works that explore women’s history, family life, work, and witchcraft, primarily during the Reformation period in Europe. My goal is to provide a resource for emerging young scholars, such as undergraduate students and newly admitted graduate students, who are interested in strengthening their own work by better understanding the social-historical research method and how it is used in the study of history and religion.

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