NARRATIVES OF GERMAN HISTORY AFTER THE REFORMATION

Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling. ‘Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte’, Vol. 198. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995. Pp. xiii+472. ISBN 3-579-01666-0. DM 148.The Salzburg transaction: expulsion and redemption in eighteenth-century Germany. By Mack Walker. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi+242. ISBN 0-8014-2777-0. $38.50.War, state and society in Württemberg, 1677–1793. By Peter H. Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+294. ISBN 0-521-47302-0. £18.95.Kaiser Maximilian II. Kultur und Politik im 16. Jahrhundert. Edited by Friedrich Edelmayer and Alfred Kohler. ‘Wiener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit’, Vol. 19. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1992. Pp. 263. ISBN 3-486-0317-3. ÖS 396.Post-Reformation development in Germany has few of the features that encourage historians to describe an age with a catchy noun or turn of phrase. As a land comprised of hundreds of principalities, dioceses, and free imperial cities, Germany does not easily lend itself to descriptions of the evolving state. Equally, as the German lands were divided by confessional alliance and subject to a wide range of intellectual currents and traditions, it has proven difficult to come up with a term comprehensive enough to include the full sweep of social, religious, and intellectual life. Most of the concepts we use to define European development in this age fall short when applied to Germany. In view of this, historians tend either to emphasize certain aspects of the nation's development, or to isolate events that seem to reveal something central. Both approaches have been taken in the books under review.

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THE FOREST FOR THE TREES: SOCIETY AND THE HOUSEHOLD IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x98008218 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 41 (4) ◽

pp. 1161-1172 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

JOEL F. HARRINGTON

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

University Of Pennsylvania ◽

Italian Renaissance ◽

German History ◽

Early Modern Europe ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Johns Hopkins University ◽

Big Picture ◽

To Come ◽

The Ideal

Gender relations in German history: power, agency, and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey. London: UCL, 1996. Pp. x+262. ISBN 1-85728-485-2. £12.95.Adultery and divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. ix+214. ISBN 0-674-00520-1 (hb). £18.50.Housecraft and statecraft: domestic service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. By Dennis Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvi+333. ISBN 0-8018-5288-9. £37.00.The European nobility, 1400–1800. By Jonathan Dewald. New approaches to European history, ix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+209. ISBN 0-521-42528-x (pb). £12.95.Garden and grove: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600–1750. By John Dixon Hunt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xix+268. ISBN 0-8122-1604-0 (pb). £23.50.Like an ancient woodsman or a guide through the Amazonian jungle, the ideal historian possesses at least two kinds of expertise: enough familiarity with the general terrain to plan successful expeditions and enough experience in the field to make inevitable adjustments to ‘the big picture’ when underway. Of course in the real world (of both geography and history) the tasks of exploration and cartography are often bifurcated, without necessarily disastrous results. The historian who is equally skilled at both close-up description and large-scale theorizing is consequently celebrated as a rare and valued anomaly. Meanwhile, for most of us stumbling scouts, the world beyond our familiar trails remains largely one of learned lore, with connections to our own limited forays often vague at best. Unless, of course, we are fortunate enough to come across something which provides an almost magical link between the narrow and the wide, the micro and the macro.

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Reformation without end

10.7228/manchester/9781526126948.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Robert G. Ingram

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

English Reformation ◽

Political Issues ◽

Civil Unrest ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

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