6.1.1 Religions in Early Modern Europe (ca. 1500-1800)

Renaissance Quarterly, 2008

Protestants. The destination of this political order was to keep up the German ... Alexander Schmidt has written a learned, cogent study that does a great deal ... Kaspar von Greyerz. Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe 1500-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ix + ...

The Catholic Historical Review, 2007

History of the study of religion Phenomenology of religion Religion and public education Religion in Europe a b s t r a c t This essay discusses main features and developments of the study of religion(s) in Western Europe. It attempts a historical, geographical, and thematic synthesis. Part III outlines post-World War II developments with regard to journals, textbooks, and survey works. It looks at national figureheads, disciplinary boundaries and the changing fortunes of the phenomenology of religion. The series concludes by addressing selected key areas of scholarly work and current issues and concerns.

Historians usually tell us about the development of religious toleration in Early Modern Europe while referring to official government policies, religious conflicts and their consequences, and publications on the virtues or vices of toleration by high-minded scholars and zealous pamphleteers alike. The social history of toleration construed as the study of tolerance or intolerance in daily life is, however, a different subject. Benjamin J. Kaplan courageously tackles this complicated problem in a well-written and original book. It does not come as a surprise that he finds little evidence of religious toleration as it is understood today. But by assembling and comparing many regional and local case studies he succeeds in presenting considerable evidence of practical coexistence. Although he still clings to the traditional image of the Reformation as, above all else, a history of religious conflict, he has a keen eye for the effects of this practical coexistence on daily life. Did religious differences within a given community contribute to feelings of dislike, hatred or even to inimical actions? If so, where these curbed or not, and how was this done? Or was there a general tendency to ignore these differences as much as possible because the daily work of peacefully living together was considered more important? What happened in the case of intermarriage? These and similar questions are treated by Kaplan, who succeeds in drawing patterns which seem to make sense of what is, by all accounts, a rather perplexing story of contact, negotiation and conflict between different confessional groups. The central question he poses is: how was religious diversity accommodated in the Christian society of Early Modern Europe? To illustrate the complex nature of this problem he quite rightly draws attention to the fact that historical maps cannot capture the different religious affiliations in Europe except in a rather rough way, as these varied sometimes even from one village to the next. The obstacles to peaceful coexistence are determined and described in the first, introductory, part of the book. Among them Kaplan counts, unsurprisingly, a form of Christian piety that zealously excludes dissidents from the way to salvation, but also the nature of the Christian community itself because, in its ideal form, it constituted a religious body that must not accommodate imperfections. He aptly describes the kind of attitudes and events that could, and often did, trigger violence. Kaplan terms them flashpoints which are difficult, though not always impossible, to defuse. "So long as a sacral act occurred

Journal of Early Modern History, 2007

In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe. Edited by Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean, 79–99. (New York: Oxford, 2021).

This course examines the fragmentation and expansion of Christianity from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Today, this period, often referred to simplistically as “the Reformation and Counter-Reformation,” is littered with misconceptions. The general public tends to think of this time as a singular religious moment when one person, Martin Luther, confronted the corruption of the Church and ushered in instant, universal change that led to a more “modern” and tolerant era. More properly, however, this was an age of Reformations that gradually affected both Europe and the wider world, possessing links to medieval church criticism, and characterized by attitudes that were far from “tolerant” in a modern sense. We will therefore look at late medieval Christendom and the forces that gave rise to the attack on the Catholic Church by Luther and his contemporaries, the subsequent Catholic response, as well as how this upheaval affected areas outside Europe. We will study the larger social, cultural, and intellectual forces that shaped Christianity’s diverging groups alongside the roles of individual leaders.

Jewish Historical Studies

This article has been peer reviewed through the journal's standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.

History Compass, 2012

This article sketches the most important shift in medieval religious history over the past few decades: the transition from ''church history'' to ''the history of religious culture.'' First, it surveys the field's expansion of ''the religious'' beyond a clerical elite to a broad demographic of the faithful, and its interest in devotion and lived experience in ways that have produced more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of Christian orthodoxy. Second, it sketches how the religions falling under the aegis of medieval religious history have increased from Latin Christianity only to Judaism, Islam, Greek Christianity, and even to forms of religiosity identified as pagan. Third, it argues that regardless of the field's many expansions and changes, scholars have tended not to make explicit the definitions of ''religion'' with which they work, and considers the ramifications and possible value of doing so.

The Ohio Academy of Religion Scholarly Papers (2005): 66-80.

Cahiers du monde russe, 2017

The last thirty or so years have witnessed a dramatic expansion of the study of the history of religion as practiced by the various peoples historically Orthodox. The traditional preoccupation with ecclesiastical structures and the literary analysis of devotional texts no longer monopolize the subject. The history of liturgy, monasticism, and popular devotions has come to occupy the attention of more and more scholars. The recent literature, in addition to providing much new information and new ideas, has also revealed how much remains unknown. 1 The present issue of the

2019

2019

The separation of Church from Synagogue was not a one-time act, but a long-lasting, multi-layered, and diversified process. The attempt to explain this process, namely the process of parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity in the years 30 – 313, constitutes the main research subject of this publication. The aim of this study is the presentation of the dynamism of Christian-Jewish relations in the first three centuries of the existence of the Church taking into account mainly historical and theological (but not only) factors which influenced these relations and finally led to the creation of two separate religions. It must be added: religions existing side by side, in many aspects connected with each other mostly because both originate from biblical Judaism.

History Compass, 2008

Volumes 8 and 9 of the Cambridge History, representing the work of 72 scholars, reflect two major recent historiographical trends: 1) the increased attention paid to religion in modern European history, and 2) the increasing importance of Christianity in as a topic in world history. While these volumes serve to summarize the work already done in the first field, with articles on a wide variety of European countries, they should significantly move the second field forward by bringing together the work of specialists on many different parts of the world in a single place. Volume 8 summarizes scholarship on the Western religious revivals of the nineteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant. By integrating religion and politics, it also presents a more complex picture of the formation of European national identities than Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities suggests. One third of the volume is devoted to the spread of Christianity to the non-Western world. In Volume 9, the European and world history perspectives are more evenly interspersed. Major themes include the papacy, ecumenism, colonialism, Pentecostalism, and the independent churches of Africa and Asia. The 1960s emerge as a turning point, if for different reasons in different parts of the world. This was the decisive period of secularization in Europe, and the final section documents the social and cultural impact of that shift, particularly on the arts. Although there are inevitable gaps in coverage, these volumes will serve as an invaluable research tool for years to come.