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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. …

Sacrilegi E Spazi Sacri E Profane: Ebrei E Cristiani In Polonia D’Età Moderna, Magda Teter

Magda Teter

As late as the 1926, and perhaps even up to the eve of World War II, on Fridays, in a small church on the Jewish street, a few meters off the main market square in the city of Poznań, the traditional song Kyrie Eleison, God Have Mercy, Christ Have Mercy, was replaced by a song on Jewish desecration of the host in Poznań in 1399. It was a legend, for there is no record of the case; no court room drama, for the trial never took place. The drama was elsewhere: the set was the city, its geography, and its …

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 …

Jews And Catholics In Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church In The Post Reformation Era, Magda Teter

Magda Teter

My first book, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post Reformation Era (Cambridge University Press, 2006, pbk 2009), introduced Jews into a traditional Polish narrative of post-Reformation Poland that had been grounded in a Catholic-Protestant dichotomy, allowing me to reposition the role of Jews and other non-Catholics in multicultural Poland in a completely new way. My approach has broadened the context of Poland’s religious history and has revealed the superficiality of the re-Catholicization of the ruling elites, whose economic interests triumphed over their religious loyalties, challenging the view of the “triumph of the Counter-Reformation” in …