This careful study explores puritan attitudes through the life and works of Elizabethan minister George Gifford. He was on the frontlines of religious controversies in a time when the English church was being shaped by Protestant evangelicals who felt compelled to carry their understanding of 'true religion' to all corners of England. Known among themselves as 'the godly' or 'gospellers' and to their enemies as 'puritans' or 'precisionists', these ministers believed the Church of England was only partially reformed. Gifford tried to convert the many parishioners who he believed to be...

Explores the cultural dynamics of Siena, and its art in a specifically Sienese context. This volume shapes an understanding of Sienese culture in the early modern period, and defines the questions scholars ask, while formulating changes to shape its future, with the city's efforts to fashion a civic identity through the visual arts.

John Calvin made a significant contribution to the world of early modern printing. Jean-Fran?ois Gilmont, one of the foremost experts in the field, has thoroughly researched and presented all aspects of John Calvin's interaction with books?from the authors he read, to the works he wrote, to his relationships with the printing and publishing world of the sixteenth century. Originally in French, Karin Maag makes Gilmont's research available in this English translation.

This volume examines the history of religious dissent and discord in France, from the time of the Wars of Religion to the present day. Contributors analyze the various solutions elaborated by the government, by religious institutions, and by private groups in response to the serious problems raised by religious differences. This collection of essays also explores the impact these problems and solutions have on religious and national identity, and how these issues play out in political and religious life today.

Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries...

Through the colorful family histories and rich detail of the Zimmern Chronicle, historian Judith Hurwich examines marriage, family, and sexuality among the early modern German nobility. She uses the house chronicles of the Zimmern family and the families of the counts and barons with whom they intermarried, to investigate marriage and nonmarital sexuality in the southwest German nobility in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Along with a deeper look at women's roles as wives, mothers, and concubines, Noble Strategies shines a light on the intimate lives of the early modern German...

This collection of essays offers a thorough study of the patron-artist relationship through the lens of one of early modern Italy's most powerful and influential historical families. Contributors present a longitudinal study of the della Rovere family's ascent into Italian nobility. The della Rovere was a family of popes, cardinals, and powerful dukes who financed some of the world's best-known and greatest artwork. The essays explore the issue of identity and its maintenance, of carving a permanent spot for a family name in a rapidly changing atmosphere. Although these studies depart from...

Martin Luther's lectures on Genesis, delivered at the University of Wittenberg during the last decade of his life and later published by his students, allow modern readers to view a sixteenth-century professor engaging his students with the text of scripture and using that text to form them spiritually. The lectures show how Luther attempted to form in his students a new identity, an Evangelical identity, enabling them to make sense of the rapidly changing society and church in which they were being prepared to serve, primarily as pastors in the developing territorial churches of the...

These essays add a unique perspective to studies that reconstruct the identity of manhood in early modern Europe, including France, Switzerland, Spain, and Germany. The authors examine the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authorities, both secular and religious, labored to turn boys and men into the Christian males they desired. Topics include disparities among gender paradigms that early modern models prescribed and the tension between the patriarchal model and the civic duties that men were expected to fulfill. Essays about Martin Luther, a prolific self-witness, look into...