From the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-Chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records and popular pamphlets, Hsia examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the...

This is the first comprehensive account of Jewish-Gentile relations in central Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on cultural, economic, social, and political issues, and incorporating much new research. Individually, the essays probe the central questions of Jewish development within the territorial states, secular and clerical, and in both rural and urban environments. The authors grapple with such relevant issues as cultural identity, representation, toleration, and minority/majority relations.

This is the first comprehensive account of Jewish-Gentile relations in central Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on cultural, economic, social, and political issues, and incorporating much new research. Individually, the essays probe the central questions of Jewish development within the territorial states, secular and clerical, and in both rural and urban environments. The authors grapple with such relevant issues as cultural identity, representation, toleration, and minority/majority relations.

Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness since the sixteenth century. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe. Paradoxically, it was committed to a strictly Calvinist public Church and also to the preservation of religious plurality. R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop have brought together a group of leading historians from the U.K., the U.S. and the Netherlands. Their outstanding essays probe the history and myth of Dutch religious toleration.

This authoritative volume presents the history of Christianity from the eve of the Protestant Reformation to the height of Catholic Reform. It thoroughly examines the impact of the permanent schism on Latin Christendom, the Catholic responses to it, and the influence on the development of the Orthodox churches. The volume covers the history of society, politics, theology, liturgy, religious orders, and art in the lands of Latin Christianity, while expanding the boundaries of inquiry to the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions both in Europe and in the non-European...

This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural...

Recent years have witnessed some dramatic changes in the kinds of questions that historians ask about the religious schisms of sixteenth-century Europe. In the past, scholars tended to treat the Reformation as a chapter in the history of ideas...

This volume brings together 29 new essays by leading international scholars, to provide an inclusive overview of recent work in Reformation history.

• Presents Catholic Renewal as a continuum of the Protestant Reformation.
  
• Examines Reformation in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.
  
• Takes a broad, inclusive approach - covering both traditional topics and cutting-edge areas of debate.

This second edition features an updated synthesis of the vast scholarship on the history 0f Catholicism from the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century. The book covers the doctrinal and ecclesiastical renewal after Trent and the progress of Catholic reconquest in various lands. It also analyses the social composition of the Tridentine clergy and the papal curia and studies the making of early modern sainthood and the enclosure of religious women. An additional chapter on The Catholic Book as well as an...

This groundbreaking 2007 volume gathers an international team of historians to present the practice of translation as part of cultural history. Although translation is central to the transmission of ideas, the history of translation has generally been neglected by historians, who have left it to specialists in literature and language. This book seeks to achieve an understanding of the contribution of translation to the spread of information in early modern Europe. It focuses on non-fiction: the translation of books on religion, history, politics and especially on science, or 'natural...