Peter Matheson has written the first study in English of the Reformation as a literary phenomenon. This book traces the first emergence of a 'public opinion' in European history.Using insights from social history, religion and literature, Professor Matheson explores the connection between the 'communal Reformation' and the outpouring of pamphlets in the early 1520's. These pamphlets helped to create a dynamic and subversive network of communication where language and structure were of equal importance.He also examines the relative strengths of polemical and dialogical approaches in winning...

In this small gem of Reformation research, Peter Matheson offers a rich view of the Reformation as it appeared in pamphlets and sermons, woodcuts and paintings, poetry and song, correspondence and the contours of daily life. The popular media he explores evince the Reformation's novel use of images and metaphors, its deep effects on personal and family life and spirituality, heightened civic engagement, great utopian dreams and experiments, as well as its nightmarish excesses.

About the Contributor(s): Peter Matheson is a Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Otago University in New Zealand. He has authored several books in Renaissance and Reformation studies, with a particular focus on radical movements and women's history, including The Imaginative World of the Reformation.

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that the sixteenth-century ""ecumenical movement,"" and in particular, the colloquy between Catholics and Protestants at Regensburg in 1541, was by no means an idle ""dream of an understanding,"" doomed from the start. Contarini's campaign for reconciliation mirrors the richness and elusiveness of pre-Tridentine Catholicism. It was the clash of cultures and politics as much as purely theological considerations that led to the failure of the Regensburg colloquy. Contarini was not without sympathy for Lutheran theology until faced by the full implications...