This book gives an analytical review of the history of witch-hunt historiography. So far not much attention has been paid to how the European witch-hunts have been studied and explained in some 150 years of academic research on the issue. The history of the approaches and explanations in witch-hunt research fundamentally contributes not only to our understanding of the bizarre phenomenon in European history but also contributes to understanding of cultural as well as academic trends which heavily direct any research even when scholars are not cognisant of their underlying premises. How and...

Social imagery during the Late Middle Ages was typically considered to be dominated by the three orders oratores, bellatores, laboratores as the most common way of describing social order, along with body metaphors and comprehensive lists of professions as known from the Danse macabre tradition. None of these actually dominates within the vast genre of lay didactical literature. This book comprises the first systematic investigation of social imagery from a specific late medieval linguistic context. It methodically catalogues images of the social that were used in a particular...

This book is an intellectual biography of the Venetian historian and theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623). It analyses Sarpi's natural philosophy, religious ideas and political thought. Kainulainen argues that Sarpi was influenced by Neostoicism, Neoepicureanism and the sixteenth-century scientific revolution; that Sarpi was a fideist and Christian mortalist who, while critical of the contemporary Church of Rome, admired the purity of the early church. Focusing on Sarpi's separation between church and state, his use of absolutism, divine right of kings and reason of state, the book offers a...

The Oratorian priest Antonio Gallonio (1556-1605) devoted his life to writing about saints. The thread running through his hagiographical oeuvre was renunciation of this world: humility, subservience and endurance. Yet he engaged with the expertise of lay people, jurists, physicians and engineers, so as to appeal to their interests and convert them. In order to emphasize how saints endured torture, healed disease and exercised piety rather than ingenuity, Gallonio ventured into those secular disciplines, even if he did not endorse them. This book surveys Gallonio's published and unpublished...

The twenty studies collected in this volume focus on the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The method leads from technical investigations on William Durant the Younger (ca. 1266-1330) and Hermann Conring (1606-1681) through reflection on the nature of historical knowledge to a break with historicism, an affirmation of anachronism, and a broad perspective on the history of Europe. The introduction explains when and why these studies were written, and places them in the context of contemporary historical thinking by drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical...

Die marmorne Liegestatue der fruhchristlichen Jungfrau und Martyrerin Cacilie, die sich seit ihrer Entstehung zum Jubeljahr 1600 an ihrem ursprunglichen Aufstellungsort in Rom befindet, gilt aufgrund innovativer Rahmung und Formensprache als bahnbrechend in der westlichen Kunst. Im Hinblick auf ihren kulturellen, religiosen, sozialen und politischen Hintergrund wurde sie aber bislang noch nie umfassend untersucht. Die vorliegende, interdisziplinare Studie widmet sich genau diesem Kraftfeld. Es bestimmt die Genese, Bedeutung und fruhe Rezeption des Grabbildes Caciliens wie auch des Stifters,...

In Poetry and Censorship Jennifer Helm offers insight into motives and strategies of Counter-Reformation censorship of poetry in Italy. Materials of Roman censorial authorities reveal why the control of poetry and of its reception was crucial to Counter-Reformation cultural politics. Censorship of poetry should enable the church to influence human inner life that ---from thought and belief to fantasy and feeling--- was evolving considerably at that time. The control of poetic genres and modes of writing played an important part here. Yet, to what extent censorship could affect poetic...

The Dutch Revolt (ca. 1572-1648) led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people. In Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt, Johannes Muller shows how migrants and their descendants in the Dutch Republic, England and Germany cultivated their Netherlandish heritage for more than 200 years. Memories of war and persecution shaped new religious and political identities that combined images of suffering and heroism and served as foundational narratives of newcomers. Exposing the underlying narrative structures of early modern exile memories, this volume shows how stories about the Dutch...

In The Vacant See in Early Modern Rome John M. Hunt offers a social history of the papal interregnum from 1559 to 1655. The study concentrates on the Roman people's relationship with their sacred ruler. Using criminal sources from the Archivio di Stato di Roma and Vatican sources, Hunt emphasizes the violent and tumultuous nature of the lapse in papal authority that followed the pope's death. The vacant see was a time in which Romans of modest social backgrounds claimed unprecedented power. From personal acts of revenge to collective protests staged at the Capitol Hill and citywide...

Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe puts Reformation in a daily life context using lived religion as a conceptual and methodological tool: exploring how people "lived out" their religion in their mundane toils and how religion created a performative space for them. This collection reinvestigates the character of the Reformation in an area that later became the heartlands of Lutheranism. The way people lived their religion was intricately linked with questions of the value of individual experience, communal cohesion and interaction. During the late Middle Ages and...