The Legal Treatment of Religious Dissent in Western Europe: A Comparative View

This article examines the legal treatment of religious dissent from a comparative perspective, by focusing on the legal evolution from intolerance to toleration, and from toleration to emancipation in France, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Historically, in Europe, only people professing the official religion were regarded as full members of the political community. Those who professed another religion were expelled, persecuted, discriminated or – in the best cases – merely tolerated. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in different degrees and forms according to the country concerned, European states started separating citizenship from religious belonging – a fundamental step in the process of secularisation of law in Europe. This development led to the emancipation of religious dissenters through the recognition of both the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of one's religion or belief, and the individual right to freedom of religion and belief.

Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late Medieval England

This book examines vernacular and Latin anchoritic writings in England (c.1170–1400) as these participated within late medieval negotiations between the distinct, and at times divergent, cultures of religious reform and spiritual charisma. It argues that admonitory (or regulatory), devotional, and hagiographic works composed for anchorites transmit, together with their intertexts, the urgent need within orthodox culture to manage the various and potentially unruly spiritualities so often associated with late medieval charismatics, including anchorites. So too, this study traces through the images of embodiment and angelic mediation a set of religious and cultural tensions around the efforts by religious (esp. clerical, monastic, and mendicant) elites to align individual and charismatic gifts (1 Cor. 12:8–11) with the widespread calls for obedience and submission to church authorities. This masculine suspicion of spiritual gifts was strategically framed within a discourse about (and in defence of) the clerical, Eucharistic, and ecclesial body, often in reaction against the increasingly acute threat of religious dissent. Related to these developments were the dominant narratives of corporate unity that marshaled images of angels—at once the messengers of charismatic power and the celestial associates of orthodox culture—as well as the Pauline text on angelic transfiguration (2 Cor. 11:14) to articulate major challenges at the level of institutional authority and spiritual power. Underwriting the fragile boundary between heresy and orthodoxy, mainstream figurations of charisma and the angelic image worked on behalf of a culture of reform and/as transformation in its efforts to secure the clerical and ecclesial body from corruption and falsification.

Marguerite of Angouleme and the problems of Renaissance religious dissent

The article is devoted to the religious pursuit of Marguerite of Angouleme. Analyzing the creative legacy of the Duchess, her extensive correspondence with representatives of the reformation movement, the author convincingly proves that, despite the fact that Marguerite was the patroness of the reformation movement in France, and she was described as having religious and ethical searches characteristic of many representatives of the Renaissance era, she did not completely break with the Catholic faith, remaining a transitional figure in spiritual terms.

LONDON, 1584: TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL POLITICS

London, in the year 1584, was a crossroads of cultural exchange, philosophical elaboration, religious dissent. The present contribution focuses on this year considering the circulation of people – especially foreign intellectuals – and books: it looks at the cultural circle established in the household of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau; at works such as Giordano Bruno’s his Cena de le ceneri and John Florio’s First Fruites; at a cultural mediator, William Fowler, and at his translation of Machiavelli’s Prince. Through the investigation of the meetings and exchanges that took place in this pivotal year the present contribution attempts to shed light on the cultural dynamics, supported by book-buying, translation, quotation and allusion, that constitute such a fundamental element of the construction of Elizabethan culture.