Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe

Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe PDF Author: Helen Parish
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719061585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Superstition" is one of the most fought over terms in the history of early modern popular culture, especially religious culture, and is also one of the most difficult to define. This volume offers a novel approach to the issue, based upon national and regional studies, and examinations of attitudes to prophets, ghosts, saints, and demonology, alongside an analysis of Catholic responses to the Reformation and the apparent presence of "superstition" in the reformed churches. It challenges the assumptions that Catholic piety was innately superstitious, while Protestantism was rational, and suggests that the early modern concept of "superstition" needs more careful treatment by historians.

Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe

Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe PDF Author: Helen Parish
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719061585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Superstition" is one of the most fought over terms in the history of early modern popular culture, especially religious culture, and is also one of the most difficult to define. This volume offers a novel approach to the issue, based upon national and regional studies, and examinations of attitudes to prophets, ghosts, saints, and demonology, alongside an analysis of Catholic responses to the Reformation and the apparent presence of "superstition" in the reformed churches. It challenges the assumptions that Catholic piety was innately superstitious, while Protestantism was rational, and suggests that the early modern concept of "superstition" needs more careful treatment by historians.

Enchanted Europe

Enchanted Europe PDF Author: Euan Cameron
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161372X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Since the dawn of history people have used charms and spells to try to control their environment, and forms of divination to try to foresee the otherwise unpredictable chances of life. Many of these techniques were called 'superstitious' by educated elites. For centuries religious believers used 'superstition' as a term of abuse to denounce another religion that they thought inferior, or to criticize their fellow-believers for practising their faith 'wrongly'. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, scholars argued over what 'superstition' was, how to identify it, and how to persuade people to avoid it. Learned believers in demons and witchcraft, in their treatises and sermons, tried to make 'rational' sense of popular superstitions by blaming them on the deceptive tricks of seductive demons. Every major movement in Christian thought, from rival schools of medieval theology through to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, added new twists to the debates over superstition. Protestants saw Catholics as superstitious, and vice versa. Enlightened philosophers mocked traditional cults as superstitions. Eventually, the learned lost their worry about popular belief, and turned instead to chronicling and preserving 'superstitious' customs as folklore and ethnic heritage. Enchanted Europe is the first comprehensive, integrated account of western Europe's long, complex dialogue with its own folklore and popular beliefs. Drawing on many little-known and rarely used texts, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise, diversification, and decline of popular 'superstition' in the European mind.

Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe

Staging the Superstitions of Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Asst Prof Verena Theile
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409474305
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collection scrutinizes the historical intersection of early modern European superstitions and English stage literature. Contributors analyze the cultural mechanisms that shape, preserve, and transmit beliefs. They investigate where superstitions come from and how they are sustained and communicated within early modern European society. It has been proposed by scholars that once enacted on stage and thus brought into contact with the literary-dramatic perspective, belief systems that had been preserved and reinforced by historical-literary texts underwent a drastic change. By highlighting the connection between historical-literary and literary-dramatic culture, this volume tests and explores the theory that performance of superstitions opened the way to disbelief.

The Scandinavian Reformation

The Scandinavian Reformation PDF Author: Ole Peter Grell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521441629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
When Martin Luther's protest began making an impact in Scandinavia in the 1520s, this region belonged to the religious and political periphery of Europe. A century later the Nordic countries had become of paramount importance to European Protestantism, and it was the intervention of Lutheran Scandinavia in the Thirty Years' War which helped secure the survival of European Protestantism. This volume describes how the Nordic countries came to be solidly Lutheran states by the early seventeenth century; how the evangelical movements differed and succeeded, and the different pace of reform and its institutionalisation. It offers a revisionist view of the role of the Catholic Church in Scandinavia, and its attempts to halt the reformation, and demonstrates the difficulties facing the new Lutheran churches trying to convert a conservative, peasant population to Protestantism.

The European Reformation

The European Reformation PDF Author: Euan Cameron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199547858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
A fully revised and updated version of this authoritative account of the birth of the Protestant traditions in sixteenth-century Europe, providing a clear and comprehensive narrative of these complex and many-stranded events.

Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800

Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 PDF Author: Kasper von Greyerz
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195327659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In the pre-industrial societies of early modern Europe, religion was a vessel of fundamental importance in making sense of personal and collective social, cultural and spiritual exercises. This text presents Kaspar von Greyerz's important overview and interpretation of the religions and cultures of Early Modern Europe.

The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations

The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations PDF Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199646929
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 849

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Book Description
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online

Magic and Superstition in Europe

Magic and Superstition in Europe PDF Author: Michael David Bailey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742533875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The only comprehensive, single-volume survey of magic available, this compelling book traces the history of magic and superstition in Europe from antiquity to the present. Focusing mainly on the medieval and early modern era, Michael Bailey also explores the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and the spread of magical systems_particularly modern witchcraft or Wicca_from Europe to the United States. He explains how magic was understood, constructed, and frequently condemned and how magical beliefs and practices have changed over time yet also remain vital even today.

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies

Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies PDF Author: Michael D. Bailey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind—praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition—tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe’s universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.

Religion and Devotion in Europe, C.1215- C.1515

Religion and Devotion in Europe, C.1215- C.1515 PDF Author: Robert Norman Swanson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521379502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Underlying the discussion are basic questions about the format of medieval religious experience, ranging from the nature of authority to the relationship between priests and laity, and how far it is actually possible to talk of a monolithic catholicism.