A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region not only the spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but also a source of a living sacred history that informs contemporary realities and religious identities. This book explores the Holy Land as a critical site in which early modern Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land, the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian conflict by 1517. This contestation underscored the Holy Land's importance as a frontier and center of an embattled Catholic tradition.

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

This is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehemites. With newfound wealth, these merchants built shimmering pink mansions that transformed Bethlehem from a rural village into Palestine's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan town. At the center of these extraordinary occurrences lived Jubrail Dabdoub. The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub tells the story of Jubrail's encounters, offering a version of Palestinian history rarely acknowledged. From his childhood in rural Bethlehem to later voyages across Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, Jubrail's story culminates in a recorded miracle: in 1909, he was brought back from the dead. To tell such a tale is to delve into the realms of the fantastic and improbable. Through the story of Jubrail's life, Jacob Norris explores the porous lines between history and fiction, the normal and the paranormal, the everyday and the extraordinary. Drawing on aspects of magical realism combined with elements of Palestinian folklore, Norris recovers the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bethlehem: a mood of excitement, disorientation, and wonder as the town was thrust into a new era. As the book offers an original approach to historical writing, it captures a fantastic story of global encounter and exchange.

Franciscan friars were everywhere in the early modern Catholic world, a world that stretched from the Americas, through Western and Central Europe, to the Middle East and Asia. This global brotherhood was as deeply entangled in the great religious wars that convulsed Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. While the political and imperial theories of Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas, who took the theology of Thomas Aquinas as their starting point, are well-known, this has not been the case for Franciscan thinking until now. The Franciscans and their allies built a body of political writings around the theology of John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308), and this book presents a wide selection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotist writings on politics, warfare, and empire in English for the first time. Beginning with Scotus’s own doctrine on the forced baptism of Jews, this collection translates John Mair (1467–1550) on European imperialism and holy war, Alfonso de Castro (1495–1558) on the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, Juan Focher (1497–1572) on the war against the Chichimeca Indians of Mexico, and John Punch on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s. The availability of these primary sources for teaching and research will clarify the connection between religion, politics, and imperialism in the early modern world.

Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and Reformation provides the first in-depth study of contacts between Rome and the Maronites during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This book begins by showing how the church unions agreed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1445) led Catholics to endow an immense amount of trust in the orthodoxy of Christians from the east. Taking the Maronites of Mount Lebanon as its focus, it then analyses how agents in the peripheries of the Catholic world struggled to preserve this trust into the early sixteenth century, when everything changed. On one hand, this study finds that suspicion of Christians in Europe generated by the Reformation soon led Catholics to doubt the past and present fidelity of the Maronites and other Christian peoples of the Middle East and Africa. On the other, it highlights how the expansion of the Ottoman Empire caused many Maronites to seek closer integration into Catholic religious and military goals in the eastern Mediterranean. By drawing on previously unstudied sources to explore both Maronite as well as Roman perspectives, this book integrates eastern Christianity into the history of the Reformation, while re-evaluating the history of contact between Rome and the Christian east in the early modern period. It is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern Europe, as well as those interested in the Reformation, religious history, and the history of Catholic Orientalism.

This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship.

The rosary has been nearly ubiquitous among Roman Catholics since its first appearance in Europe five centuries ago. Why has this particular devotional object been so resilient, especially in the face of Catholicism's reinvention in the Early Modern, or "Counter-Reformation," Era? Nathan D. Mitchell argues in lyric prose that to understand the rosary's adaptability, it is essential to consider the changes Catholicism itself began to experience in the aftermath of the Reformation. Unlike many other scholars of this period, Mitchell argues that after the Reformation Catholicism actually became less retrenched and more open to change. This innovation was especially evident in the sometimes "subversive" visual representations of sacred subjects and in new ways of perceiving the relation between Catholic devotion and the liturgy's ritual symbols. The rosary played a crucial role not only in how Catholics gave flesh to their faith, but in new ways of constructing their personal and collective identity. Ultimately, Mitchell employs the history of the rosary as a lens through which to better understand early modern Catholic history.

In 1975, a group of Dutch and British scholars published a conference volume of collected essays entitled "Some Political Mythologies." That conference sought to examine the political myth as an object of historical study, particularly in the context of the tumultuous and exceptional history of the Low Countries. Thirty years later, a more diverse group of scholars gathered to re-examine the history of Dutch myth-making in light of developments in theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the role of myths in national identity, moral geography, and community formation. The results of their efforts appear in this volume, "Myth in History: History in Myth." The essays cover developments in history, anthropology, cartography, philosophy, art history, and literature as they pertain to how the Dutch historically perceived these myths and how the myths have been treated by previous generations of historians.