Leiden was the second largest city of the early modern Dutch Republic. This city became officially Protestant in 1572, but it took fifty years before the Reformed Church settled completely into the city's polity and society. This was largely due to disagreements between the city's ruling elites and the Reformed leaders about how much independence the church should enjoy.
This book examines the establishment and early history of the Reformed community of Leiden. The evolution of the controversy between church and state is examined, from the 1570s, during the Dutch Revolt, to the early 1620s...

Responding to Bishop Robert Ceneau, Sorbonnist, Bucer's subject-matter is twofold. Firstly, maintained is the compatibility of Reformation theology with Scripture, Patristic testimony, and the "saner Scholastics." Secondly, denying association with the heresy of Berengar, Bucer develops his perception of a common eucharistic theology among the Reformers, a theology Bucer finds corroborated in Scripture and Christian antiquity. After a plea for a fair hearing for the Reformation in France, Part I irenically surveys controverted dogmas and practices. Part II substantiates the thesis of...

This study examines the sociocultural context of ten plays performed during the formative years of the Bernese Reformation. It treats not only three pre-reform carnival plays by Niklaus Manuel, but also six newly edited works by local court secretary Hans von Rute. Individual chapters focus on the plays' polemics, staging, and choruses, as well as on local Zwinglian reform. An appendix contains the plays' fifteen song texts. The vivid staging and choral interludes of Bern's Reformation theater belie the assumption that the city's Zwinglian reform, which eliminated imagery and song from...

An important aspect of the Italian Renaissance was church reform. This book examines the nature of that reform - especially in Venice, Florence and Rome - as viewed through the unpublished manuscripts of a Venetian nobleman who became a Camaldolese hermit: Vincenzo Querini (1478-1514). This book sets Querini's personal journey to reform in the context of Venetian society, as well as against the backdrop of political crisis, cultural revival, and monastic renaissance in Italy generally. Querini's attempt to reform himself, the Roman Catholic Church, and the whole of Christendom are of interest...

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of...

The study is dedicated to Bonagratia of Bergamo, a Franciscan layman of the 14th century, who played an important part in his Order's controversy with the Spirituals and in the debate of the poverty of Christ. Together with his general minister Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham and Francis of Ascoli, Bonagratia came into conflict with Pope John XXII and wrote many polemical texts and his famous appellationes. A detailed study of these writings elaborates Bonagratias intellectual merits as a legal expert and as the procurator of the Franciscan Order. Wittneben demonstrates that the...

This work examines Martin Luther's interpretation of the female characters in the stories of Genesis, drawing attention to his appropriation of premodern catholic interpretations of the biblical "saints." In Luther's hands, many of these women became heroic examples of the godly life newly adapted to the worldly asceticism of emerging Protestantism. Their everyday sanctity, exercised for the most part within the limits Luther believed God had imposed on their sex, displayed the kind of piety he thought should animate Christian women in their own households. Two chapters evaluate Luther's...

This volume deals with norms relating to trade and price expressed in handbooks designed for the education of confessors or as aids in the confessional. Parts I and II trace the development of such norms from the earliest times to the Reformation. Some ninety penitential handbooks are analyzed, with biographical sketches of the authors. Part III provides a general overview of penitential trade and price doctrine with an emphasis on the late major Italian summas and compares this doctrine with secular economic thought in the Renaissance and later. The main contribution of this book to the...

This volume contains 11 contributions that open up unknown and unstudied sources for the culture of nunneries in the later Middle Ages using examples from Germany, Switzerland and England. It focuses on the spiritual life of nuns, their education and vocational training, forms of art and piety, legal status position, and aspects of monastic architecture. Edited here for the first time are a treatise or Sendbrief on simony, a Low-German rule for Franciscan nuns, and documents on the reformation history of North-German nunneries. Art-historical contributions discuss the relationship of...