History Commons^™

Sinners On Trial: Jews And Sacrilege After The Reformation, Magda Teter

Magda Teter

My book, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation tells a story of the process of affirmation of Catholic dogmas after the Reformation, not necessarily though religious education and propaganda but through the application of criminal law, and the courts' treatment of "the sacred" and, thus, also of the "sacrilege."

"Sinners on Trial" combines political, legal, and cultural historical approaches. In Poland, the contest over the sacredness of the Eucharist, a major Catholic dogma challenged by the Reformation, became manifest in lay courts' adjudication of crimes against property and religious symbols, especially those linked to the Eucharistic rituals. …

Out Of The (Historiographic) Ghetto: Jews And The Reformation, Magda Teter, Debra Kaplan

Magda Teter

Existing historiography has created a historiographic ghetto, seldom considering Jewish sources and Jews as relevant to the larger narrative of European history. This has created two parallel, often disconnected areas of study, “European history” and “Jewish history.” Archival materials from across Europe strongly show that Jews and Christians resided side by side and interacted on a daily basis in early modern Europe. Reformation Strasbourg and post-Reformation Poland, two geographically and demographically diverse cases offer new insights about the past by including sources about Jews. In Reformation Strasbourg, cross-confessional collaboration was more frequent than previously imagined, as leaders of different Christian …

Social Discipline In Scotland, 1560-1610, Michael Graham

Michael F. Graham

This volume is an excellent introduction to Calvinist morals’ control in sixteenth-century Geneva, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scotland. The Calvinists were typically seen as stricter than Lutherans, Catholics, or Anglicans—and in some ways as strict as groups associated with the Radical Reformation. The six case studies presented here are based largely on archival research. They explore the Calvinist endeavor to set high standards of behavior and to enforce them through the consistory.

The Civil Sword And The Scottish Kirk, 1560–1600, Michael Graham

Michael F. Graham

This volume presents the evolution of Calvin’s ideas in the latter part of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries along national lines. Calvin’s influence is traced in Switzerland, France, Scotland, the Rhinelands, Holland, and England. As John Leith points out in his “Foreword,” this book enables many American Protestants to understand their history, how they came to believe what they do, how scholastic theology of the nineteenth century is firmly rooted in later Calvinism.