The Reformation and Early Modern Periods

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-34
Author(s):  
Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Christmas Trees ◽  
Radical Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Catholic Churches

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, Christians in Western Europe and North America celebrated Christmas in a variety of ways. Some of the practices or elements of celebration are familiar as they are still a part of many Christmas celebrations today, such as gift-giving, hospitality, feasting, singing, and decorating with greenery and Christmas trees. Other aspects of Christmas revelry were reduced during this period, as reformers in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches worked to rid the holiday of some of its excessive forms of festivity, such as misrule, social inversion, or superstitious practices. While in some areas, namely Scotland, England, and New England, radical reformers, including the Puritans, did away with Christmas festivities in the late-sixteenth and early- to mid-seventeenth centuries, these legal strictures were difficult to enforce and were not long-lasting. Instead, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, Christmas celebrations continued, though they often changed from what they had been in the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century, traditions such as Christmas carols, Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, and Saint Nicholas iconography had been established that were taken up and popularized on a wider scale, but claims that those traditions were not invented until the nineteenth century are often rather overstated. Instead, many of these traditions grew and blossomed throughout the early modern period, sometimes despite radical Reformation attempts to get rid of Christmas, sometimes because of reforms in its celebration.

Monastic Burials of Non-Patronal Lay Benefactors

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 620-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Postles
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Middle Ages

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

Literature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sverre Bagge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Great Emphasis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

There is a continuous tradition of historical writing from the Middle Ages to the present day in all three of the Scandinavian kingdoms, as well as in Iceland, though admittedly it began later (not until the early fourteenth century) in Sweden than in the other countries. The works dating from the Middle Ages have already been discussed. Those of the Early Modern Period are of interest as evidence of learning and for an understanding of how “history” was viewed at the time, and also because they contain a number of documents from the Middle Ages whose originals have been lost. However, the beginning of modern scholarly historical writing is usually dated to the early nineteenth century, in Scandinavia as in the rest of Europe. The professionalization of history, which started in Germany, quickly spread to Scandinavia. Throughout Europe, this professionalization was related to a national revival that typically placed great emphasis on a nation’s medieval past....

500 Jahre Rezeption der Reformation in Siebenbürgen und Ungarn: Anfänge und Netzwerke von Konfessionspluralismus in der Überlappungszone von West- und Ostkirche

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ulrich A. Wien
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Joint Effort ◽  
Influence Zone ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Reformation

Abstract This thematic issue of the Journal of Early Modern Christianity focuses on the reception of the Reformation in Transylvania and especially on the development of Protestant churches oriented towards Luther and influenced by Melanchthon. In the late Middle Ages, Transylvania had become part of the cultural influence zone of Central Europe, but throughout the sixteenth century the region became permeated by religious developments in Western Europe too. Here, a very peculiar constellation of religious pluralism and co-existence emerged, and the different contributions examine the premises and networks behind these dynamics. In this joint effort, it becomes clear how Transylvania turned into a pioneer region of religious freedom, as it witnessed simultaneously the development of Catholic, Orthodox and various Protestant confessional cultures.

Early Modern Forerunners of Terrorism in Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Dillinger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Early Modern Era

First, this chapter explores political violence in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Even though the term terrorism did not exist before the French Revolution, political phenomena that closely resembled various forms of modern-day terrorism have been known and feared since the fourteenth century. The late Middle Ages and the early modern period witnessed the assassinations of numerous princes. The authorities as well as the populace feared organized gangs of criminals in the pay of rival political or religious leaders. These gangs were said to attack the civilian population using arson and mass poisoning in order to destabilize whole states. The fear of the terrorist “state destroyer” was part and parcel of state building from its very beginning. Secondly, the chapter discusses nineteenth-century historiography about early modern political violence. Nineteenth-century historians refused to interpret early modern political crime as terrorism: they either denounced it as lacking any political concept or vindicated it as justifiable resistance.

Flora Unveiled

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lincoln Taiz ◽  
Lee Taiz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Neolithic Period ◽  
Pollination Mechanisms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Theory ◽  
The One

Sex in animals has been known for at least ten thousand years, and this knowledge was exploited during animal domestication in the Neolithic period. In contrast, sex in plants wasn’t discovered until the late seventeenth century. Even after its discovery, the sexual “theory” continued to be hotly debated for another 150 years, pitting the “sexualists” against the “asexualists.” Why was the idea of sex in plants so contentious for so long? In answer, Flora Unveiled offers a deep history of perceptions concerning plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. Evidence suggests that an obstacle far beyond the mere facts of pollination mechanisms stymied the discovery of two sexes in plants, and then delayed its acceptance. This was a “plants-as-female” paradigm. Flora Unveiled explores the sources of this gender bias, beginning with women’s roles as gatherers, plant-textile makers, crop domesticators, and early horticulturists. In myths and religions of the Bronze and Iron Ages, goddesses were strongly identified with flowers, trees and agricultural abundance. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this tradition was assimilated to Christianity in the person of Mary. The one-sex model of plants continued into the Early Modern Period, and staged resurgences during the eighteenth century Enlightenment and in the Romantic movement. Not until the nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Hofmeister demonstrated the universality of sex in the plant kingdom, was the controversy over plant sex finally resolved. Flora Unveiled chronicles how persistently cultural biases can impede discovery and delay the acceptance of scientific advances.

The organization and rise of land and lease markets in northwestern Europe and Italy, c. 1000–1800

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. J. P. VAN BAVEL
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Main Determinant ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Institutional Organization

ABSTRACTIn the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in Western Europe, ways of transferring and redistributing land outside the market were replaced by market transactions. This, however, was by no means a general and unilinear process, but one that displays strong regional differences and temporal discontinuities. This article aims to gain more insight in the factors underlying these differences, by reconstructing and analysing the institutional organization of exchange in land and lease markets. The analysis, undertaken for northwestern Europe and Italy, points to the socio-political context as a main determinant of this organization.

Pietists and Kibbitzers

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Hasidei Ashkenaz

This chapter offers a reply to the criticism on the essay presented in the previous chapter. It focuses on Edward Fram's article, 'German Pietism and Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Polish Rabbinic Culture'. Fram's article shows that German Pietism as a radical religious and social movement was no more influential in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had been in medieval western Europe. In retrospect, it appears that it could hardly have been otherwise. The standard Sefer Ḥasidim, first published, as noted by Fram, in Bologna (1538) and quickly republished in Basel (1580) and Kraków (1581), is a compound work, opening with the conventional pietism of the first 152 sections and continuing with the radical one of the German Pietists. For every passage of radical pietism there is a counter-passage of the conventional sort, the result being that no one could infer from the work any coherent religious position. And, as Fram points out, Polish ethicists and thinkers were singularly uninclined to the distinctive doctrines of German Pietism and never reproduced those passages that expressed the idiosyncratic agenda of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. His conclusions simply extend those of the author about the Middle Ages to eastern Europe in the early modern period.

“WITHOUT THE CAMP”: LEPROSY AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY WRITING

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Western World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Lyrical Ballads

FOUCAULT WAS PROBABLY RIGHT WHEN he argued in the first chapter of Madness and Civilization that the asylum replaced the lazar house at the end of the Middle Ages, but he exaggerated in claiming that leprosy had disappeared from the western world. The decline of leprosy in early modern Europe did not mean that fear of it vanished or that Europe lost all contact with the disease. From the sixteenth century it became involved in the debate about the origin of syphilis, which at first was widely believed to be a new form of leprosy. A later, converse theory claimed that leprosy was a common terminal stage of syphilis, particularly in hot climates (Leprosy in India 353). This was given circulation and respectability at the turn of the nineteenth century by William Jones when he wrote that “The Persian, or venereal, fire generally ends in this malady” (qtd. in Crook and Guiton 91). The Collected Works of this distinguished Orientalist were published in 1799 and widely discussed. Britain’s steady colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century had brought renewed contact with leprosy and the consequent fear of its reintroduction into Europe. Although the disease had remained available to writers as a figure for horror throughout the early modern period, it was to take on renewed force in the century or so following the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Gloss

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Stenner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Marginal Status ◽  
Reading History

A gloss is an interpretive aid, and glossing represents the act of interpretation itself. A gloss can be as brief as a single word, can be a coherent set of marginal notes, or can extend to whole volumes. It is an ancient form with its roots in the Roman imperial legal system. Developing alongside changes in reading practice and scholarship, the gloss evolved extensively during the Middle Ages, reaching great significance in the early modern period during the controversies of the Reformation. The gloss can be seen as subsidiary to the main text, as a crucial adjunct to it, or as a sign of the plenitude of interpretive possibility. A gloss’ presence foregrounds literary authority, hierarchies of knowledge, and processes of meaning-making. The reader of a glossed text is placed within the creative community surrounding the work and offered a heightened sense of the temporality of reading. Recent scholarship on this form has emerged from the fields of book and reading history, but owing to the marginal status of the gloss, this scholarship also has particular affinities with structuralist and poststructuralist thought.

Medieval Marian Pilgrimage in the Catholic West

2019 ◽  
pp. 559-578
Author(s):  
James Bugslag
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period

The slight evidence for Marian pilgrimage in Western Europe from the sixth century begins to increase by the tenth century. Pilgrimage shrines, often related with an apparition of Mary, mushroomed from the eleventh century, appearing in greater and greater numbers into the early modern period. Marian relics begin to appear, as well, in the eleventh century, but the vast majority of Marian pilgrimages focused on miraculous images, icons in Italy and Eastern Europe, statues elsewhere. As Mary became more embedded in affective devotion from the twelfth century onwards, Marian pilgrimage experienced dramatic escalation. Yet, much local pilgrimage, which rooted Mary’s presence in the landscape, was related to help in this life: cures, protection, security, etc. Despite the presence of some major international pilgrimage shrines, most Marian pilgrimage was very local by the late Middle Ages, creating a dense network of Marian shrines all over Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document