Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Crawford Gribben ◽  
Graeme Murdock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Linear Fashion ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Claims

Calvinism did not develop as a uniform Christian tradition across early modern Europe. Nor did Calvinism make a discrete, standalone impact on the development of European culture. This introduction does not seek to establish or to reinforce a set of unambiguous arguments about what Calvinist culture was, is, or ought to be, nor is it concerned with outlining how, in some linear fashion, Calvinism shaped European and global cultures or contributed to the cultures of modernity. Instead, this introduction offers a portrait of Calvinism and Reformed religion, understood as a sociocultural phenomenon as well as an expression of truth claims about God and the world, to examine how this form of Christian religion developed in different cultural settings. This introduction also supports an analysis of the ways in which Calvinism related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation.

Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Complex Character ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Modern Europe

Calvinism has been associated with distinctive literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, with enlightened cultures, with cultures of social discipline, with secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Despite these many associations, this volume recognizes that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition with straightforward social, cultural, or political implications. This book assesses the complex character and impact of Calvinism in early modern Europe. It analyzes the ways in which Calvinism related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation, while also considering the objectives, as well as the unintended and unexpected consequences, of the cultures of Calvinism in early modern Europe.

scholarly journals Basel's Rural Pastors as Mediators of Confessional and Social Discipline

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Nelson Burnett
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Disciplinary Process ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
And Control

Overthe last two decades historians of early modern Europe have adopted the paradigm of confessionalization to describe the religious, political, and cultural changes that occurred in the two centuries following the Reformation.1As an explanatory model confessionalization has often been portrayed as the religious and ecclesiastical parallel to the secular and political process of social discipline, as formulated by Gerhard Oestreich.2In its simplest form, the process of confessional and social discipline is depicted as hierarchical and unidirectional: the impulse to discipline and control came from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the laity, particularly the peasants at the bottom of the hierarchy, had little possibility of exerting counterpressures on those seeking to shape their beliefs and behavior. The inevitable result of the disciplinary process was the gradual suppression of popular culture and the imposition of new standards of belief and behavior on the subjects of the territorial state.

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

“I Obstruct Not Your Dominion”

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-156
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter examines Augustine of Hippo’s world-historical sermons on the Roman trial of Jesus. “Pilate was a Roman”, he says, “and the Romans sent him to Judaea as governor.” As this suggests, for the illustrious African bishop, the sentence under which Jesus died is a Roman sentence. The passion is legally, for Augustine—unlike for many patristic commentators—a Roman affair. On Augustine’s reading, Jesus is arrested by the Romans, and it is a “Roman judge” (iudex Romanus) who sentences him to death. In contrast to much of the Christian tradition, Augustine accepts that it is the Roman imperium that most brutally tortures, condemns, and kills Jesus. The rest of this book will argue that Augustine’s insistence on Pilate’s guilt has a long political legacy in medieval and early modern Europe. In a word, this political legacy is the concept of the ‘secular’.

The mobility transition revisited, 1500–1900: what the case of Europe can offer to global history

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Lucassen ◽  
Leo Lucassen
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sharp Increase ◽  
Seasonal Migration ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Global History ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Divergence

AbstractHistorians of migration have increasingly criticized the idea of a ‘mobility transition’, which assumed that pre-modern societies in Europe were geographically fairly immobile, and that people only started to move in unprecedented ways with the onset of modernization in the nineteenth century. In line with this critique, this article attempts to apply thorough quantitative tests to the available data. The focus is on ‘cross-community migration’, following Patrick Manning's argument that migrants moving over a cultural border are most likely to accelerate the rate of innovation. Six forms of migration are considered: emigration out of Europe, immigration from other continents, rural colonization of ‘empty spaces’, movements to large cities, seasonal migration, and the movement of sailors and soldiers. To illustrate regional variations, the examples of the Netherlands and Russia are contrasted. The reconstruction presented here is partial and preliminary, but it unequivocally shows that early modern Europe was much more mobile than modernization scholars allowed for. There was indeed a sharp increase in the level of migration after 1850, but it was due to improvements in transport rather than to modernization in a more general sense. This model has been elaborated for Europe but it can also be applied to other parts of the world and can hopefully contribute to the debate on the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia.

Writing Cultural History in Early Modern Europe: Christophe Milieu and his Project

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Comprehensive History

AbstractChristophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.

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