Reforming Church Space: Altarpieces and Their Functions in Early Modern Transylvania

2007 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Maria Crăciun
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
Ritual Context

AbstractFocused on an analysis of surviving late medieval religious art in Transylvanian Lutheran churches, this study wishes to explore the ways in which these images were presented to and viewed by the congregations after the Reformation of the Saxon community. The article considers the connection between these artifacts and the ritual context that framed them whilst assessing their ability to shape different patterns of piety and a new confessional identity. Drawing mostly on visual evidence, the study also relies on an exploration of the records of the synods of the Transylvanian Lutheran Church in order to understand this newly forged religious culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kirsten Macfarlane
Keyword(s):  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction begins by outlining how Broughton’s modern reputation as an angry puritan was created over two centuries by a series of historians with various confessional motivations. Next, it analyses Broughton’s early life as a promising scholar at Cambridge, and explains key issues such as how his beliefs about scripture affected his attitudes to the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. Finally, it summarizes the three major interventions of this book. The first concerns the relationship between scholars’ beliefs about scripture and the methods they used to study it. Broughton shows that it was possible to be an innovative exponent of the historical-philological method, while also believing that the Bible was infallible and verbally inspired; and that these positions could be mutually reinforcing. But while scholars like Broughton have generally been used as proof of the ‘unintended consequences’ theory of change from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, the introduction uses him to critique this theory. The second intervention concerns the relationship between confessional identity and historical scholarship, building on recent works that have emphasized the impossibility of theologically ‘neutral’ scholarship in this period by extending their findings into new areas such as chronology. Lastly, the third intervention concerns the relationship between elite neo-Latin biblical scholarship and vernacular lay religious culture in this period. It argues that biblical scholarship, even of the most demanding kind, deeply appealed to ordinary readers of scripture, and posits Broughton as a pioneer in the field of accessible, vernacular-oriented— but still highly scholarly—biblical criticism.

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

scholarly journals Worlds of Difference

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Charles E. Butterworth
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Detailed Explanation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Modern Times

This is an appealing and clearly written account of how European thinkersfrom late medieval to early modern times reflected upon and explored thequestion of what to do about people of different religions and cultures. Inother words, how should their divergent opinions be understood and, eventually,what practical dispositions should be taken toward them? CaryNederman devotes the introduction and first chapter to an excellent,detailed explanation of the book’s focus and goals. Simply put, he is intentupon challenging two currently dominant views: that toleration emerged inEurope only at the time of the Reformation, and that it is ineluctably linkedwith the kind of political liberalism usually associated with John Locke. Tothis end, he calls the reader’s attention to expressions of religious, and evensomewhat political, toleration that appear early in the twelfth century andcontinue well into the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, he does not succeedin this ambitious, even appealing, stratagem as fully as he would havewished, for he admits in passing that he is content to “offer illustrations,”instead of a “comprehensive account,” of this phenomenon ...

Reforming Time

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Temporal Change ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Single Path ◽  
Theological Concept

Protestant attitudes toward and teachings about time and history were shaped on a fundamental level by ongoing transformations in late-medieval and early modern temporal sensibilities. But Protestants consciously rejected a number of key medieval assumptions about time, and in some respects the Reformation movements dramatically reshaped or accelerated trends that were already underway. This essay addresses three general approaches to time: as mundane experience, as a theological concept, and as a historical and prophetic narrative. While the various branches of Protestantism by no means followed a single path in negotiating these realms, they all contributed to a uniquely early modern array of fears and hopes in the face of temporal change.

Bibles in the Hands of Readers: Dutch, English, French, and Italian Perspectives

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Thomas Fulton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Biblical Texts

Abstract Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late medieval and early modern Europe, both in manuscript and print. Vernacular scripture circulated throughout Europe in different ways and to different extents before and after the Reformation. In spite of the differences in language, centers of publication, and confessional orientation, there was nonetheless considerable collaboration and common ground. This collection of essays explores the readership of Dutch, English, French, and Italian biblical and devotional texts, focusing in particular on the relationships between the texts and paratexts of biblical texts, the records of ownership, and the marks and annotations of biblical readers. Evidence from early modern biblical texts and their users of all sorts – scholars, clerics, priests, laborers, artisans, and anonymous men and women, Protestant and Catholic – sheds light on how owners and readers used the biblical text.

Mapping the Memory of Luther: Place and Confessional Identity in the Later Reformation*

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-210
Author(s):  
Kat Hill
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Specific Point ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Confessional Identity

Abstract In 1571 mapmakers Johannes Mellinger and Tilemann Stella produced a map of the county of Mansfeld, Luther’s birthplace. This article considers this map as a complex printed material object: it is far more than a straightforward representation of place as it is covered with historical details, quotations, writing and references to Luther’s life, the Reformation and Mansfeld’s history. It created a notion of Lutheran space and used this space as a form of memory-making and memorialization at a critical time in Lutheran history. The decades following the death of Luther, in 1546, were a time of crisis, when Lutheranism grieved the loss of the Wittenberg reformer while also inscribing its presence on the confessional map of sixteenth-century Europe. Mellinger and Stella’s map of Mansfeld reveals how second-generation Lutherans reconceptualized the landscape to provide an alternative way of writing Luther’s life, and how Lutherans could integrate pasts and places which were not specifically Lutheran into a providential narrative. The map addressed the tensions of tradition and novelty with its composite, hybrid form that combined space, events and person, and it historicized and reimagined space. This map demands that we think about how space functioned within a culture which wanted to remember Luther’s life and write histories in a way that could validate Lutheranism and its future, and in particular it focuses our attention on how memory-making at this specific point of existential concern shaped the Lutheran Church.

Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Languages

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”

Translating the Legenda aurea in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Morgan Ring
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Devotional Life ◽  
Legenda Aurea

To its admirers, the Legenda aurea is a powerful expression of medieval belief. To the evangelical pamphleteers of early modern England, it was a symbol of all the failings of unreformed religion. For historians, it is a convenient shorthand for popular hagiography before the Reformation. These readings, however, understate the Legenda's often ambiguous place in early modern devotional life. This article seeks to complicate the Legenda's history in late medieval and early modern England. It argues that the concept and the act of translation rendered Jacobus's text more complex than the historiographical shorthand allows. Translation contributed to the Legenda's power as a devotional work, was a means by which it found its use, impact and wide audience, and was central to how reformers remembered both the text itself and its author. The translated Legenda was not the exception to the narrative of the long Reformation, but an emblem of it.

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