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

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.

Enchanted Europe

Enchanted Europe PDF Author: Euan Cameron
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199257825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Enchanted Europe offers the first comprehensive account of Europe's long, complex relationship with its own folklore and popular religion. From debates over the efficacy of charms and spells, to belief in fairies and demons, Euan Cameron constructs a compelling narrative of the rise and fall of 'superstition' in the European mind.

Miracles at the Jesus Oak

Miracles at the Jesus Oak PDF Author: Craig Harline
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300167431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A selected history of religious miracles from seventeenth-century Belgium, offering insight to the beliefs of Catholic Europeans in the Age of Reformation. In the tradition of The Return of Martin Guerre and The Great Cat Massacre, Miracles at the Jesus Oak is a rich, evocative journey into the past and the extraordinary events that transformed the lives of ordinary people. In the musty archive of a Belgian abbey, historian Craig Harline happened upon a vast collection of documents written in the seventeenth century by people who claimed to have experienced miracles and wonders. In Miracles at the Jesus Oak, Harline recasts these testimonies into engaging vignettes that open a window onto the believers, unbelievers, and religious movements of Catholic Europe in the Age of Reformation. Written with grace and charm, Miracles at the Jesus Oak is popular history at its most informative and enlightening. Praise for Miracles at the Jesus Oak "In his usual manner, lively and fresh, [Harline] not only brings ordinary people front and center but also offers startling insight into the political and religious dynamic of the time. His approach and writing style, although historically responsible, are enjoyable for non-specialists as well. . . . His work makes clear what professional historians alas sometimes forget an enjoyable story need not be taboo.” —Tertio (Belgium) “More than simply a collection of delightful tales. . . . Miracles still enthrall.” —Commonweal

Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation

Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation PDF Author: Ole Peter Grell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
An expert re-interpretation of how religious toleration and conflict developed in early modern Europe.

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.

Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader

Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe: A Reader PDF Author: Helen L. Parish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441100326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Superstition and Magic in Early Modern Europe brings together a rich selection of essays which represent the most important historical research on religion, magic and superstition in early modern Europe. Each essay makes a significant contribution to the history of magic and religion in its own right, while together they demonstrate how debates over the topic have evolved over time, providing invaluable intellectual, historical, and socio-political context for readers approaching the subject for the first time. The essays are organised around five key themes and areas of controversy. Part One tackles superstition; Part Two, the tension between miracles and magic; Part Three, ghosts and apparitions; Part Four, witchcraft and witch trials; and Part Five, the gradual disintegration of the 'magical universe' in the face of scientific, religious and practical opposition. Each part is prefaced by an introduction that provides an outline of the historiography and engages with recent scholarship and debate, setting the context for the essays that follow and providing a foundation for further study. This collection is an invaluable toolkit for students of early modern Europe, providing both a focused overview and a springboard for broader thinking about the underlying continuities and discontinuities that make the study of magic and superstition a perennially fascinating topic.

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 European Reformation

The European Reformation PDF Author: Euan Cameron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192670859
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Since its first appearance in 1991, The European Reformation has offered a clear, integrated, and coherent analysis and explanation of how Christianity in Western and Central Europe from Iceland to Hungary, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees splintered into separate Protestant and Catholic identities and movements. Catholic Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages was not at all a uniformly 'decadent' or corrupt institution: it showed clear signs of cultural vigour and inventiveness. However, it was vulnerable to a particular kind of criticism, if ever its claims to mediate the grace of God to believers were challenged. Martin Luther proposed a radically new insight into how God forgives human sin. In this new theological vision, rituals did not 'purify' people; priests did not need to be set apart from the ordinary community; the church needed no longer to be an international body. For a critical 'Reformation moment', this idea caught fire in the spiritual, political, and community life of much of Europe. Lay people seized hold of the instruments of spiritual authority, and transformed religion into something simpler, more local, more rooted in their own community. So were born the many cultures, liturgies, musical traditions and prayer lives of the countries of Protestant Europe. This new edition embraces and responds to developments in scholarship over the past twenty years. Substantially re-written and updated, with both a thorough revision of the text and fully updated references and bibliography, it nevertheless preserves the distinctive features of the original, including its clearly thought-out integration of theological ideas and political cultures, helping to bridge the gap between theological and social history, and the use of helpful charts and tables that made the original so easy to use.