German Histories In The Age Of Reformations 1400 1650

Download or read book German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1650 written by Thomas A. Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-13 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both a general reformation of the Church before 1520 and a national reformation thereafter. The resulting settlement maintained the public peace through politically structured religious communities (confessions), thereby avoiding further religious strife and fixing the confessions into the Empire's constitution. The Germans' emergence into the modern era as a people having two national religions was the reformation's principal legacy to modern Germany.

Download or read book The Unintended Reformation written by Brad S. Gregory and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-16 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Download or read book Reformations written by Carlos M. N. Eire and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 914 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.

Download or read book The Early Reformation in Germany written by Tom Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last twenty years research on the Reformation in Germany has shifted both chronologically and thematically toward an interest in the ’long’ or ’delayed’ Reformations, and the structure and operation of the Holy Roman Empire. Whilst this focus has resulted in many fascinating new insights, it has also led to the relative neglect of the early Reformation movement. Put together with the explicit purpose of encouraging scholars to reengage with the early ’storm years’ of the German Reformation, this collection of eleven essays by Tom Scott, explores several issues in the historiography of the early Reformation which have not been adequately addressed. The debate over the nature and function of anticlericalism remains unresolved; the mainsprings of iconoclasm are still imperfectly understood; the ideological role of evangelical doctrines in stimulating and legitimising popular rebellion - above all in the German Peasants’ War - remains contentious, while the once uniform view of Anabaptism has given way to a recognition of the plurality and diversity of religious radicalism. Equally, there are questions which, initially broached, have then been sidelined with undue haste: the failure of Reforming movements in certain German cities, or the perception of what constituted heresy in the eyes of the Reformers themselves, and not least, the part played by women in the spread of evangelical doctrines. Consisting of seven essays previously published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, together with three new chapters and an historical afterword, Scott’s volume serves as a timely reminder of the importance of the early decades of the sixteenth century. By reopening seemingly closed issues and by revisiting neglected topics the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what the Reformation in Germany entailed.

Download or read book The Empire’s Reformations written by David M. Luebke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empire's Reformations provides a concise overview of reform movements in 16th-century Germany that gave birth to the modern division of western Christianity into multiple denominations – Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and more. It exposes the origins of modern religious pluralism, both in battle for souls among these emerging camps and in the struggles of political leaders at every level to manage the threat that religious diversity posed to tranquillity and order in a rigidly hierarchical society. As such, it offers a prehistory of religious toleration, not as a positive value – few regarded toleration as inherently good – but as a strategy for keeping the peace. David M. Luebke considers the reformations of religion in the context of concurrent transformations in the political and judicial structures of the Holy Roman Empire, that sprawling confederation of principalities and city-states that embraced most regions where German was spoken. This allows Luebke to view the religious reforms through the lens of imperial politics, showing how the Empire differed from the Atlantic monarchies, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean. On a different and equally significant level, he examines how ordinary people of all backgrounds experienced the controversy over religion and responded to reforms of doctrine and observance. The inclusion of both the imperial and local perspectives moves the Reformation beyond the familiar story of theological combat and reimagines it as something that had resonance throughout the world, impacting people's lives in the process.

Download or read book German History in Modern Times written by William W. Hagen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of German-speaking central Europe presents the different eras of German history as successive worlds of German life, thought and mentality.

Download or read book Explorations and Entanglements written by Hartmut Berghoff and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.