The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750
Author: Hamish M. Scott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199597251

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, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information, social and economic developments, and religion, including chapters on Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam.

Trent and All That

Trent and All That
Author: John W. O'Malley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780674041684

Counter Reformation, Catholic Reformation, the Baroque Age, the Tridentine Age, the Confessional Age: why does Catholicism in the early modern era go by so many names? And what political situations, what religious and cultural prejudices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to this confusion? Taking up these questions, John O'Malley works out a remarkable guide to the intellectual and historical developments behind the concepts of Catholic reform, the Counter Reformation, and, in his felicitous term, Early Modern Catholicism. The result is the single best overview of scholarship on Catholicism in early modern Europe, delivered in a pithy, lucid, and entertaining style. Although its subject is fundamental to virtually all other issues relating to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, there is no other book like this in any language. More than a historiographical review, Trent and All That makes a compelling case for subsuming the present confusion of terminology under the concept of Early Modern Catholicism. The term indicates clearly what this book so eloquently demonstrates: that Early Modern Catholicism was an aspect of early modern history, which it strongly influenced and by which it was itself in large measure determined. As a reviewer commented, O'Malley's discussion of terminology opens up a different way of conceiving of the whole history of Catholicism between the Reformation and the French Revolution.

Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism

Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism
Author: Steven Vanden Broecke
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9048550041

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of "Baroque Science". Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism

Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism
Author: Ulrich L. Lehner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000471683

This volume demonstrates that the Catholic rhetoric of tradition disguised both novelties and creative innovations between 1550 and 1700. Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism reveals that the period between 1550 and 1700 emerged as an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, shaped by the tensions between personal creativity and magisterial authority. The essays explore ideas about grace, physical predetermination, freedom, and probabilism in order to show how the rhetoric of innovation and tradition can be better understood. More importantly, contributors illustrate how disintegrated historiographies, which often excluded Catholicism as a source of innovation, can be overcome. Not only were new systems of metaphysics crafted in the early modern period, but so too was a new conceptual language to deal with the pressing problems of human freedom and grace, natural law, and Marian piety. Overall, the volume shines significant light on hitherto neglected or misunderstood traits in the understanding of early modern Catholic culture. Re-presenting early modern Catholicism more crucially than any other currently available study, Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism is a useful tool for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in the fields of philosophy, early modern studies, and the history of theology.

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism
Author: Erin Kathleen Rowe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108421210

This is the untold story of how black saints - and the slaves who venerated them - transformed the early modern church. It speaks to race, the Atlantic slave trade, and global Christianity, and provides new ways of thinking about blackness, holiness, and cultural authority.

Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts

Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts
Author: A. Marotti
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 285
Release: 1999-06-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0230374883

Responding to recent historical analyses of Post-Reformation English Catholicism, the essays in this collection by both literary scholars and historians focus on polemical, devotional, political, and literary texts that dramatize the conflicts between context-sensitive Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England. They foreground some major literary authors and canonical texts, but also examine non-canonical literature as well as other writings that embody ideological fantasies connecting the political and religious discourses of the time with their literary manifestations.

The Holy Land and the Early Modern Reinvention of Catholicism

The Holy Land and the Early Modern Reinvention of Catholicism
Author: Megan C. Armstrong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108832474

Explores the Holy Land as a critical site where Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound change.

Becoming a New Self

Becoming a New Self
Author: Moshe Sluhovsky
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 022647299X

In Becoming a New Self, Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the case that these practices promoted the idea of achieving a new self through the knowing of oneself. Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.

Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy

Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy
Author: Peter A. Mazur
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2016-01-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317265688

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conversion took on a new importance within the Catholic world, as its leaders faced the challenge of expanding the church's reach to new peoples and continents while at the same time reinforcing its authority in the Old World. Based on new archival research, this book details the extraordinary stories of converts who embraced a new religious identity in a territory where papal authority and Catholic orthodoxy were arguably at their strongest: the Italian peninsula. Through an analysis of both the unique strategies employed by clerics to attract and educate converts, and the biographies of the men and women—soldiers, aristocrats, and charlatans—who negotiated new positions for themselves in Rome and the other cities of the peninsula, a new image of Italy during the Counter-reformation emerges: a place where repression and toleration alternated in unexpected ways, leaving room for negotiation and exchange with members of rival faiths.