In forty-one essays eminent historians of culture, religion, and social history redefine and redirect the debate regarding the scope and impact of European anticlericalism during the period 1300-1700. The meaning of reform and resentment is here clearly articulated.

Traditionally anticlericalism has been regarded as a significant historical factor, by some historians even as the unifying focal point for the host of movements known as the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In forty-one essays eminent historians of culture, religion, and society redefine and redirect the debate regarding the scope and impact of European anticlericalism during the period 1300-1700. The meaning of reform and resentment is here clearly articulated and the sentiments are analyzed which were directed first against all levels of the Roman hierarchy and later as well against the evangelical pastor. Using sources drawn from a wide variety of city and village archives, of literary genres and theological tracts, the articles presented here uncover the clusters of reform hope and bitter resentment directed toward parish priest, monk, bishop and pope, in addition to the early Protestant clergy. The volume highlights the continuity and discontinuity of anticlerical passion, language, goals and actions between the late medieval and Reformation periods.

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

This intellectual and social history is the first comprehensive biography of Pilgram Marpeck (c. 1495–1556), a radical reformer and lay leader of Anabaptist groups in Switzerland, Austria, and South Germany. Marpeck’s influential life and work provide a glimpse of the theologies and practices of the Roman Church and of various reform movements in sixteenth-century Europe. Drawing on extensive archival data documenting Marpeck’s professional life, as well as on his numerous published and unpublished writings on theology and religious reform, Stephen B. Boyd traces Marpeck’s unconventional transition from mining magistrate to Anabaptist leader, establishes his connections with various radical social and religious groups, and articulates aspects of his social theology. Marpeck’s distinctive and eclectic theology, Boyd demonstrates, focused on the need for personal, uncoerced conversion, rejected state interference in the affairs of the church, denied the need for a monastic withdrawal from the secular world, and called for the Christian’s active pursuit of justice before God and among human beings.

Why has the work of writers in eighteenth-century Latin America been forgotten? During the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers in Spanish territories in the Americas engaged in lively exchanges with their counterparts in Europe and Anglo-America about a wide range of topics of mutual interest, responding in the context of increasing racial and economic diversification. Yet despite recent efforts to broaden our understanding of the global Enlightenment, the Ibero-American eighteenth century has often been overlooked. Through the work of five authors--Jose de Oviedo y Banos, Juan Ignacio Molina, Felix de Azara, Catalina de Jesus Herrera, and Jose Martin Felix de Arrate--Domesticating Empire explores the Ibero-American Enlightenment as a project that reflects both key Enlightenment concerns and the particular preoccupations of Bourbon Spain and its territories in the Americas. At a crucial moment in Spain's imperial trajectory, these authors domesticate topics central to empire--conquest, Indians, nature, God, and gold--by making them familiar and utilitarian. As a result, their works later proved resistant to overarching schemes of Latin American literary history and have been largely forgotten. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Ibero-American writing complicates narratives about both the Enlightenment and Latin American cultural identity.

The issue of clerical celibacy has played a long and profound role in the history of the Christian church. From the first Christian centuries to the present day, the question of whether clergy should be allowed to marry has attracted a vast amount of theological attention and debate. Yet despite the acknowledged importance of this issue, there have been few attempts to present an objective and historical study of the origins and development of clerical celibacy.In order to address this lacuna, Dr Parish offers a reassessment of the history of sacerdotal celibacy, examining the emergence and evolution of the celibate priesthood in the Latin church from the beginning of the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries. Around this core area of study, the book also considers the influence of the early apostolic church and the example of the Greek church.

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.