Matthew Wranovix, Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2017, xx, 221 pp.

One of the most effective propaganda tools used by the Humanists and early Protestants directed against the Catholic clergy was the severe criticism of their lack of education, their ignorance about the biblical texts, and their material abuse of their position within their communities. Scholarship has mostly accepted this viewpoint, subscribing to the notion of a dramatic decline of the late medieval clergy in terms of its morality, intellectual abilities, and religious devotion and piety. The alleged ‘autumn of the Middle Ages’ hence gave way to the rise of a new world, the Renaissance and the age of the Protestant Reformation.

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The Protestant Reformation, 1517–1559. By Lewis W. Spitz. The Rise of Modern Europe Series: A Survey of European History in Its Political, Economic, and Cultural Aspects From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. xiii + 444 pp. $22.95.

Church History ◽

10.2307/3165686 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 401-402

Author(s):

Eric W. Gritsch

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Middle Ages ◽

European History ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Cultural Aspects ◽

Modern Europe ◽

Political Economic ◽

The Middle Ages

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History of the Christian Church. By Philip Schaff. Volume V., Part II. The Middle Ages, from Boniface VIII., 1294, to the Protestant Reformation, 1517. By David S. Schaff, D.D., Professor of Church History in the Western Theological Seminary, Pittsburg. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1910. Pp. xi, 795.)

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr/16.2.342 ◽

1911 ◽

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Church History ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Theological Seminary ◽

Christian Church ◽

History Of ◽

The Middle Ages

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Joanna Miles, The Devil’s Mortal Weapons: An Anthology of Late Medieval and Protestant Vernacular Theology and Popular Culture. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018, xv, 400 pp.

Mediaevistik ◽

10.3726/med.2019.01.138 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 500-502

Author(s):

Albrecht Classen

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Late Medieval ◽

The Public ◽

Religious Issues ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Middle Ages

As recent scholarship has increasingly realized, all our traditional paradigms regarding historical or cultural epochs are the results of long academic debates and represent the outcome of extensive negotiations. What we have traditionally identified as the Middle Ages and as the Renaissance or the era of the Protestant Reformation, suddenly no longer seems to be so neatly separated. In fact, much of the public discourse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially with respect to religious issues, morality, and ethics, continued well beyond 1500 and even extended into the seventeenth century, as mirrored, for instance, by Shakespeare, who certainly reveals many medieval elements in his writings.

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