Conversions

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Impact

Under the combined effects of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations within and pressure from the Ottoman Empire without, early modern Europe became a site in which an unprecedented number of people were confronted by new beliefs, and collective and individual religious identities were broken down and reconfigured. Conversions: gender and religious change in early modern Europe is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. The varied and wide-ranging chapters in this collection bring the Renaissance 'turn of the soul' into productive conversation with the three most influential ‘turns’ of recent literary, historical, and art historical study: the ‘turn to religion’, the ‘material turn’, and the ‘gender turn’. Contributors consider masculine as well as feminine identity, and consider the impact of travel, printing, and the built environment alongside questions of genre, race and economics. Of interest to scholars of early modern history, literature, and architectural history, this collection will appeal to anyone interested in the vexed history of religious change, and the transformations of gendered selfhood. Bringing together leading scholars from across the disciplines of literary study, history and art history, Conversions: gender and religious change offers novel insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes, and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Modernization on the Northern Fringe of Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vesa-Pekka Herva ◽  
Magdalena Naum ◽  
Jonas M. Nordin ◽  
Carl-Gösta Ojala
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Northern Fringe

The Atlantic world looms large in discussions of how the modern world emerged, and what modernization was about; but there have been calls to engage with these topics from the perspective of ‘margins’. Covering large areas of Fennoscandia, the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Sweden represented a northern end of urban Europe, but also encompassed the mythical Lapland, homeland of the Sámi and of natural and supernatural wonders—a contested borderland between the European ‘western’ and Russian ‘eastern’ worlds. This northern fringe of early modern Europe saw dynamic arenas of interaction where new cultural forms were generated. These localized transformations and the transmutations of modernity are the subjects of this chapter. Studying early modern processes of modernization from the perspective of the northern peripheries can provide new insights and challenges, not only into the understanding of the early modern history of the Swedish kingdom, but into the general perception of these processes.

scholarly journals FROM SACRED HISTORY TO THE HISTORY OF RELIGION: PAGANISM, JUDAISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN EUROPEAN HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM REFORMATION TO ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 1117-1160 ◽  
Author(s):  
DMITRI LEVITIN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Sacred History

ABSTRACTThis essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early modern history of religion as stale, pedantic, and blandly ‘orthodox’ until it was swept aside by a critical and heterodox ‘enlightenment’ is being revised, first in new approaches to early modern histories of biblical Judaism and historicizations of the Old Testament, second in new readings of early modern scholarship on primitive Christianity. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of research which divorce narratives of intellectual change from the linear and inconclusive emphasis on ‘enlightenment’, favouring an approach that conversely emphasizes the impact of confessionalization in creating a newly critical scholarly culture.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

Lost (and Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators and Translating in Early Modern Europe

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER BURKE
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Special Case ◽  
Made In

Attempting to combine cultural history with translation studies, this article examines translation between languages as a special case of a more general phenomenon, translation between cultures. It surveys printed translations made in Europe between 1500 and 1700, discussing which kinds of people translated which kinds of book from and into which languages. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the early modern ‘regime’ of translation, in other words the manner (free or literal, domesticating or ‘foreignizing’) in which translations were made.

Jesuits and Islam in Early Modern Europe

2018 ◽  
pp. 348-378
Author(s):  
Emanuele Colombo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Ignatius Of Loyola ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Willingness To Engage

This chapter discusses Jesuit narratives of Islam and the Jesuits’ approaches to Muslims in early modern Europe. It argues that the Jesuits’ interaction with Islam was a key component of the Society’s identity, despite the fact that the order was not celebrated for the success of this interaction. It explores the desire of Ignatius of Loyola and the first Jesuits to convert Muslims; the history of Muslims who converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Jesus; the Jesuits’ tension between a polemical attitude and a missionary approach to Muslims; and, finally, the Jesuits’ willingness to engage Islam and their attempts to study Arabic during this period. The chapter sheds new light on the presence of Islam in early modern Europe and helps our understanding of views that also influenced early modern Jesuit missionaries overseas, most of whom undertook their formation in Europe.

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