Outline: Modern Protestant debates about spousal relations and the meaning of marriage began in a forgotten international dispute some 300 years ago. The Lutheran Pietist ideal of marriage as friendship and mutual pursuit of holiness battled with the idea that submission defined spousal roles. Exploiting material culture artifacts, broadsides, hymns, sermons, private correspondence, and legal c…
The Baron d'Holbach, a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment, is best known for his writings against religion. His prolific campaign of atheism and anti-clericalism, waged from the printing presses of Amsterdam in the years around 1770, was so radical that it provoked an unprecedented public response. For the baron's enemies, at least, it suggested the end of an era: proof that the likes…
As Europe wrangles over questions of national identity, nativism and immigration, Olivier Roy interrogates the place of Christianity, foundation of Western identity. Do secularism and Islam really pose threats to the continent's 'Christian values'? What will be the fate of Christianity in Europe? Rather than repeating the familiar narrative of decline, Roy challenges the significance of secular…
Is the Christian church in Europe doomed to collapse under the weight of globalization, Western secularism, and a flood of Muslim immigrants? Is Europe on the brink of becoming "Eurabia"?Though many pundits are predicting just such a scenario, God's Continent reveals the flaws in these arguments and offers a much more measured assessment of Europe's religious future. While frankly acknowledging…
"In this masterful, stylish, and authoritative book, Michael Burleigh gives us an epic history of the battles over religion in modern Europe, examining the complex and often lethal ways in which politics and religion have interacted and influenced each other over the last two centuries. From the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Earthly Powers is a unique…
In the fall of 2003, editors from Brill Academic Publishers invited me to oversee the compilation of a series of essays for their hand book series on the topic of the “Radical Reformation.” Although the work of editing collections is generally a thankless undertaking, the invitation intrigued me......
Having begun as an attempt to reform the perceived abuses and errors of the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation affected many aspects of daily life, including marriage and divorce, the role of the clergy, and the prevalence of persecution and bloodshed on both sides of the divide.
This 2007 text is a comparative, analysis of one of the most fundamental stages in the formation of Europe. Leading scholars explore the role of the spread of Christianity and the formation of new principalities in the birth of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Rus' around the year 1000. Drawing on history, archaeology and art history, and emphasizing problems related to the…
This book deals with the early history of the process that advanced atheism, agnosticism, and religious unbelief. This chapter discusses the coverage of the book and provides a brief background of the individuals who overtly rejected religious faith from 1520 to 1780. That period saw the fears that unbelief and irreligion were on the rise, as well as sustained and systematic attacks on Christia…
This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term…
Early modern Europe witnessed changes in the social, political, and ecclesiastical structures supporting poor relief, but notions that sharp fault lines divide rationalized, secular poor relief from morally and spiritually motivated ecclesiastical charity need rethinking. Spiritual ideals shaped political and social poor relief structures just as much as rationalization and effective administra…
Outline: In 1968 Eric Wolf write that anthropology needed to discover history. In this book he applies history to world anthropology. But Wolf's history is not Western history, divided into separate "nations" and chronicling the progress of the victorious elite. Wolf sees history as a web of complex, changing relationships, spun by Europe's rise to world domination. The true history of European…
Outline: This book examines Christian ethnographic writing about the Jews in early modern Europe, offering a systematic historical analysis of this literary genre and arguing its importance for understanding both the period in general and Jewish-Christian relations in particular. The book focuses on nearly 80 texts from Western Europe (mostly German) that describe the customs and ceremonies of …
Outline: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and cr…
Outline: The second volume in the series, The Bible as Book, deals with the effect of early printing on the text, format and use of the Bible, and investigates the unique features of various editions of fifteenth-century printed Bibles as well as the social, political, and technological circumstances under which these publications were produced. This volume represents a gathering of research by…
Overview: This is a survey and an analysis of the European Reformation of the sixteenth century. During this period western Christianity underwent the most dramatic changes in its entire history. From Iceland to the Transylavania, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees, the Reformation divided churches and communities into 'catholic' and 'protestant', and created varying regional and national traditio…