In this innovative study, Carol Thysell provides an in-depth examination of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron. While this collection of tales is traditionally considered to be secular in nature, Thysell argues that Marguerite de Navarre used it as a vehicle for a constructive theological program.

In this study, Irene Backus examines the fate of the Apocalypse at the hands of early Protestants in three centers of the Reformation: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. To do so, Backus systematically investigates sources and methods of the most important reformed and Lutheran commentaries of the Apocalypse from 1528-1584.

This study examines the theme of poverty in the fourth-century sermons of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory Nysson. These sermons are especially important for what they tell us about the history of poverty relief and the role of fourth century Christian theology in constructing the body of the redemptive, involuntary poor. Some of the topics explored include the contextualization of the poor in scholarship, the poor in late antiquity, and starvation and famine dynamics. In exploring this relationship between cultural context and theological language, this volume offers a broad...

Volume XVI in this well-received annual series contains an up-to-date survey of gender issues in modern Judaism. It includes original essays on Orthodox Judaism and feminism, American Jewish women, female rabbis, the impact of feminism on rabbinic study, masculinity, Jewish women in the Third Reich, and gender and military service.

Christianity is a religion of salvation in which believers have always anticipated post-mortem bliss for the faithful and non-salvation for others. Here, Trumbower examines how and why death came to be perceived as such a firm boundary of salvation. Analyzing exceptions to this principle from ancient Christianity, he finds that the principle itself was slow to develop and not universally accepted in the Christian movement's first four hundred years. In fact, only in the West was this principle definitively articulated, due in large part to the work and influence of Augustine.

This book attempts to understand Calvin in his 16th-century context, with attention to continuities and discontinuities between his thought and that of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Muller pays particular attention to the interplay between theological and philosophical themes common to Calvin and the medieval doctors, and to developments in rhetoric and method associated with humanism.

This is a sequel to Richard Muller's The Unaccomodated Calvin OUP 2000). In the previous book, Muller attempted to situate Calvin's theological work in their historical context and to strip away various twentieth-century theological grids that have clouded our perceptions of the work of the Reformer. In the present book, Muller carries this approach forward, with the goal of overcoming a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theological frameworks characteristic of much of the scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, or what might be called "Calvinism after Calvin."

Catholics and Protestants have, since the earliest days of the Reformation, held markedly different views about the Virgin Mary. In Reforming Mary Beth Kreitzer examines the development of Lutheran views on this subject as expressed in 16th-century Lutheran published sermons, starting with the earliest of Luther's own Reformation sermons.
She shows that from the beginning Lutherans rejected much of the theology and piety that surrounded Mary in Catholicism, especially her status as heavenly queen and intercessor with Christ. They affirmed those orthodox teachings about Mary that...

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. The unusually high regard with which he is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: sanctity based first and foremost on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. In this book, Kenneth Baxter Wolf takes a fresh look at Francis and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. Wolf's point of departure is a series of simple but hitherto unasked questions about the precise nature of Francis's poverty: How did he go about...

Though the Reformation was sparked by the actions of Martn Luther, it was not a decisive break from the Church in Rome but rather a gradual process of religious and social change. As the men responsible for religious instruction and moral oversight at the village level, parish pastors played a key role in the implementation of the Reformation and the gradual development of a Protestant religious culture, but their ministry has seldom been examined in the light of how they were prepared for the pastorate. Teaching the Reformation examines the four generations of Reformed pastors who served the...