In The Reformation of Historical Thought, Mark Lotito re-examines the development of Western historiography by concentrating on Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) and his universal history, Carion’s Chronicle (1532). With the Chronicle, Melanchthon overturned the medieval papal view of history, and he offered a distinctly Wittenberg perspective on the foundations of the “modern” European world. Through its immense popularity, the Chronicle assumed extraordinary significance across the divides of language, geography and confession. Indeed, Melanchthon’s intervention would become the...

In Between Popes, Inquisitors and Princes Jessica Dalton uses extensive, original archival research to provide the first history of a unique and controversial papal privilege that allowed the first Jesuits to absolve heretics in sixteenth-century Italy without involving bishops or inquisitors. Dalton uses the story of this remarkable privilege to reconsider two central aspects of Jesuit history: their role in the Counter-Reformation and their relationship with the papacy. She convincingly argues that, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, the Jesuits were valued collaborators of...

Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548–1648 offers an in-depth history of the Reformed Churches in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in their first hundred years. Kazimierz Bem analyses church polity, liturgy, the practices of Calvinist church discipline and piety, and the reasons for conversion to and from Calvinism in all strata of the society. Drawing on extensive research in primary sources, Bem challenges the dominant narrative of Protestant decline after 1570 and argues for a continued flourishing of Calvinism in the Commonwealth until the 1630s.

In The Excommunication of Elizabeth I, Aislinn Muller examines the excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I of England by the Roman Catholic Church, and its political afterlife during her reign. Muller shows that Elizabeth’s excommunication was a crucial turning point for both Catholics and Protestants, one that irrevocably changed attitudes towards the queen, widened political participation and resistance, and posed a destabilising threat to her regime. The Excommunication of Elizabeth I demonstrates how this event exacerbated religious tensions in England’s foreign and...

Cultures of Care: Domestic Welfare, Discipline and the Church of Scotland, c. 1600–1689 explores voluntary networks of charity and their interaction with the Reformed Church of Scotland. Whereas most previous histories have assessed the growth of institutional charity, this book contends that the Reformed Church of Scotland was heavily reliant on informal, domestic modes of self-help throughout the seventeenth century. The existence and widespread acceptance of informal care dramatically changes our understanding of the impact of the Calvinist Reformation. Local ecclesiastical and secular...

The life of Roger Ascham (1515/16–1568) coincided with the reigns of four Tudor monarchs, the rise and death of Luther, the Council of Trent and the wholesale division of Christendom. He operated in arenas including Cambridge University, the court, the continent and the capital, and his writings engaged with the most important intellectual concerns of his age, including humanism, educational reform, religion and politics. In this volume historians, literary specialists and classicists have worked together both to re-evaluate more familiar territory in Ascham’s life and work, and to...

This book highlights the famous ‘Athenian tribe’: a group of humanist scholars in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, who resolved many difficult problems concerning the Tudor succession, diplomacy, and the English Church. They included Sir John Cheke as their early leader, and with him, Roger Ascham, Thomas Smith, and John Ponet. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s invaluable chief minister, was the most influential of them all. The Cambridge Connection explores the interdependency of scholarship, politics, and religion in the sixteenth century. The...