The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion." One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change- conversion-had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies. David M. Luebke is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His publications include His Majesty's Rebels: Factions, Communities, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest (Cornell University Press 1997) and many articles, most recently "Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation" (Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101: 2010). Jared Poley is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is the author of Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Peter Lang 2005). Daniel C. Ryan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston. He was awarded his PhD in 2008 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a study on conversion and peasant protest in Imperial Russia. David Warren Sabean is the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Professor of German History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1990) and Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge University Press 1998). He recently edited, with Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu, Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development, 1300-1900 (Berghahn Books 2007).

Drawing on an extensive collection of Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist sermon collections (postils), this book offers the first comprehensive, systematic presentation of standard preaching texts in early modern Germany including their creation, print production, use, and censorship.

Preliminary Material /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy -- Ideas of Reformatio and Renovatio from the Middle Ages to the Reformation /Gerald Strauss -- Visions of Order in the Canonists and Civilians /Constantin Fasolt -- Voices of Reform from Hus to Erasmus /Erika Rummel -- The Humanist Movement /Ronald G. Witt -- Luther's Reformation /Martin Brecht -- The Popular Reformation /Peter Blickle -- The Urban Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire /Berndt Hamm -- International Calvinism /Robert M. Kingdon -- The Radical Reformation /James M. Stayer -- The New Religious Orders, 1517-1648 /S.J. John Patrick Donnelly -- Catholic Reformation, Counterreformation and Papal Reform in the Sixteenth Century /Elisabeth G. Gleason -- Settlements: The Holy Roman Empire /Thomas A. Brady -- Settlements: The Netherlands /J.J. Woltjer and M.E.H.N. Mout -- Settlements: France /Philip Benedict -- Settlements: The British Isles /W. Ian P. Hazlett -- Settlements: Spain's National Catholicism /Christian Hermann -- Scandinavia, 1397-1560 /Michael F. Metcalf -- Reformation and Counterreformation in East Central Europe /Winfried Eberhard -- New Patterns of Christian Life /Hans-Christoph Rublack -- The Great Witch-Hunt /Brian P. Levack -- Confessional Europe /Heinz Schilling -- The Coinages of Renaissance Europe, circa 1500 /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy -- European Rulers, 1400-1650 /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy -- Index of Persons /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy -- Index of Places /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy -- Religions of Europe circa 1580 /Thomas A. Brady , Heiko A. Oberman and James D. Tracy.

This book examines how Johannes Buxtorf's works helped to transform seventeenth-century Hebrew studies from the hobby of a few experts into a recognized academic discipline. The first two chapters examine Buxtorf's career as a professor of Hebrew and as an editor and censor of Jewish books in Basel. Successive chapters analyze his anti-Jewish polemical books, grammars and lexicons, and manuals for Hebrew composition and literature, including the first bibliography devoted to Jewish books. The final chapters treat his work in biblical studies, examining his contribution to Targum and Massorah studies, and his position on the age and doctrinal authority of the Hebrew vowel points. The chapters on anti-Jewish polemics and the vowel points will interest Jewish historians and Church historians.

Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers—interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger. In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has a history that has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.

'In the last two decades, the history of the Counter-Reformation has been stretched and re-shaped in numerous directions. Reflecting the variety and innovation that characterize studies of early modern Catholicism today, this volume incorporates topics as diverse as life cycle and community, science and the senses, the performing and visual arts, material objects and print culture, war and the state, sacred landscapes and urban structures. Moreover, it challenges the conventional chronological parameters of the Counter-Reformation and introduces the reader to the latest research on global Catholicism. The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation presents a comprehensive examination of recent scholarship on early modern Catholicism in its many guises. It examines how the Tridentine reforms inspired conflict and conversion, and evaluates lives and identities, spirituality, culture and religious change. This wide-ranging and original research guide is a unique resource for scholars and students of European and transnational history.

In this ground-breaking book, Kristin Zapalac brings together the methods of social, intellectual, and art history to achieve a new understanding of how the Protestant Reformation altered the terms of political discourse in a German free imperial city. In Zapalac's view, visual and verbal images, many of them having their origins in conceptions of the sacred, were more central to sixteenth-century political thought within the city walls than was the rationalized language of law. Drawing on a wealth of sources including bookbindings, sermons, wills, frescoes, decrees, and woodcuts, she traces the impact of religious change on the languages of judgment and authority used in the city of Regensburg, and thereby sheds light on the nature of political thought in early modern Germany.

Charitable Hatred offers a challenging new perspective on religious tolerance and intolerance in early modern England. Setting aside traditional models charting a linear progress from persecution to toleration, it emphasizes instead the complex interplay between these two impulses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.