The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Ranging from the extraordinary burst of English literary writing under the reign of Richard II to the literature of the Reformation, this title challenges traditional assumptions and argues that the stylistic diversity enjoyed by late medieval writers was curtailed by the authoritarian practice of the 16th-century cultural revolution.

When Paul III was elected in 1534, hopes arose across Christendom that this pope would at last reform and reunite the Church. During his fifteen-year reign, though, Paul's engagement with reform was complex and contentious. A work of cultural history, this book explores how cultural narratives of honour and tradition, including how honour played out in politics, significantly constrained Pope Paul and his chosen reformers in framing strategies for change. Indeed, the reformers' programme would have undermined the culture of honour and weakened Rome's capacity to ward off current threats of invasion. The study makes a provocative case that Paul called the Council of Trent to contain reform rather than promote it. Nevertheless, Paul and the Council did sow seeds of reform that eventually became central to the Counter-Reformation. This book thus sheds new light on a pope whose relationship to reform has long been regarded as an enigma.

Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, showing how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.

An overview of Susan Karant-Nunn’s impact on the social and cultural history of the Reformation in central Europe.

This is the second volume of Friedell's monumental A Cultural History of the Modern Age. A key figure in the flowering of Viennese culture between the two world wars, this three volume work is considered his masterpiece. The centuries covered in this second volume mark the victory of the scientifi c mind: in nature-research, language-research, politics, economics, war, even morality, poetry, and religion. All systems of thought produced in this century, either begin with the scientifi c outlook as their foundation or regard it as their highest and fi nal goal. Friedell claims three main streams pervade the eighteenth century: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Classicism. In ordinary use, by "Enlightenment" we mean an extreme rationalistic tendency of which preliminary stages were noted in the seventeenth century. Th e term "Classicism", is well understood. Under the term "Revolution" Friedell includes all movements directed against what has been dominant and traditional. Th e aims of such movements were remodeling the state and society, banning all esthetic canons, and dethronement of reason by sentiment, all in the name of the "Return to Nature." Th e Enlightenment tendency might be seen as laying the ground for an age of revolution. Th is second volume continues Friedell's dramatic history of the driving forces of the twentieth century.

This history tells the story of how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes forced upon them by the Reformation and, in doing so, radically reconstructed their culture.

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Despite the decisive turn toward cultural history in the last generation, scholars working on the Reformation have only gradually perceived the riches that are available if they place sixteenth-century Reformers and their theological innovations within a broader context of established beliefs and practices. Inspired by such pioneers as Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert W. Scribner, this aggregation of leading historians demonstrates that cultural approaches to the past may suggest whole new opportunities for research: Time (Helmut Puff), shared spaces (David Luebke), the senses (Philip Hahn), religious singing (Francisca Loetz), the use of images (Bridget Heal), healing and material culture (Ute Lotz-Heumann), physico-theology (Kaspar von Greyerz), reproduction and ensoulment (Kathleen Crowther), Calvin's sexuality (Susan Karant-Nunn), women's spirituality (Alexandra Walsham), the translation of texts (Renate Durr), and missionary practices (Ulrike Strasser). Charles Zika and Merry Wiesner-Hanks admit us to the perusal of historiographic essays that reveal both their profound expertise and their personal involvement in our profession. Within Reformation studies, this collection signals both a perspective attained by the time of the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Reformation, and a milestone from which a new and innovative generation of researchers will depart.