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Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.
This chapter explores popular and learned manifestations of an increasingly difficult neutral position at the height of the Reformation in Germany, in order to underscore and reassess the prevalence of third forces in sixteenth-century religion. The first two sections examine experiences of ambivalent change, at the scale of territorial Reformations and at the scale of personal and local histories. The remaining sections review sixteenth-century attempts to theorize a middle-ground position. Those attempts challenge the historian to integrate marginal, unconventional viewpoints into an otherwise “confessional” intellectual milieu.
This chapter examines the extraordinary case of Ruprecht von Mosheim, author of a neglected proposal to reject papal and Lutheran arguments in favor of the middle position of "a third German." Discussed and dismissed by Johannes Eck, the Archduke Ferdinand, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and other reformers, Mosheim reflects uncertainties that also gripped so-called Erasmians, such as Nikolaus Ellenbog.
Barbara von Fuchstein struggled to recover property lost to her cousin Ulrich Schweikert during the Peasants’ War. Her tenacity in the sequel to armed conflict illustrates the responses of ordinary lay women to the challenges posed by Reformation events. She shows the capacity of a lay woman to navigate a system of property transfer that privileged men, after she was swept into the ferment of German lay spiritualities appearing in the mid-1520s. And she illustrates the flux of religious identities at ground level in the early Reformation, among people whose interest in religious debate was secondary to, perhaps inseparable from, family business. If we wish to understand the Reformation not only among its principal protagonists, who were in most instances clerical partisans in the debate over Luther and the papacy, the saints, and the Mass, but also among ordinary people, we must pay close attention to people like Barbara, who were deeply affected by the Luther affair without choosing to participate in it.
This accessible general history of the Reformation in the Netherlands traces the key developments in the process of reformation – both Protestant and Catholic – across the whole of the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Synthesizing fifty years' worth of scholarly literature, Christine Kooi focuses particularly on the political context of the era: how religious change took place against the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Special attention is given to the Reformation's role in both fomenting and fuelling the Revolt against the Habsburg regime in the later sixteenth century, as well as how it contributed to the formation of the region's two successor states, the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands. Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620 is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern European history, bringing together specialized, contemporary research on the Low Countries in one volume.
A non-violent position drawn from the Anabaptist tradition (‘two-kingdom dualism’) is contrasted with the Christian pacifism with which that position is commonly conflated. It is argued that two-kingdom dualism more effectively leverages the philosophical and practical features of its particularly Christian character than does Christian pacifism – and that these features may have implications beyond the philosophy of religion.
Sixteenth-century Reformers would not have understood Michel Foucault’s postmodern assault on polemic as the antithesis of truth because the defense of truth – divine truth, that is – was the guiding purpose of their endeavors. They would, however, have recognized Foucault’s description of their tactics as a no-holds-barred contest against an “enemy who is wrong, who is hurtful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.”1 Across the confessional divide, early modern polemicists believed they were engaged in a war of words as deadly serious as the bloody confrontations taking place in the streets and on the battlefields of Europe. The new medium of print became a critical instrument in their efforts to win princely support; mobilize public opinion across broad geographical, linguistic, and confessional boundaries; and vanquish the heretic in their midst.
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