This study examines the ethical character of John Calvin and his Genevan colleagues' evangelizing of France. It reveals that Calvin's plans for proselytizing his homeland involved lying, deception, and obfuscation which were employed as a means of evading detection by the French authorities. Balserak considers important questions about the relationship between godliness and cunning, about Calvin's manufacturing of his image, and about the lengths to which he and his colleagues went to spread their gospel.

Calvinism, based on the ideas of John Calvin, is a massive religion today, with widespread church affiliations. It has influenced contemporary thought - especially Western thought - on everything from civil government to money, and divorce. Jon Balserak explores the history of the religion and discusses the key ideas in Calvinist theory.

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

The centrality of the King James Bible to early modern culture has been widely recognized. Yet for all the vast literature devoted to the masterpiece, little attention has been paid either to the scholarly scaffolding of the translation or to the erudition of the translators. The present volume seeks to redress this neglect by focusing attention on seven key translators as well as on their intellectual milieu. Utilizing a wide range of hitherto unknown or overlooked sources, the volume furnishes not only precious new information regarding the composition and early reception of the King James Bible, but firmly situates the labours of the translators within the broad context of early modern biblical and oriental scholarship and polemics. Contributors are James P. Carley, Mordechai Feingold, Anthony Grafton, Nicholas J. S. Hardy, Alison Knight, Jeffrey Alan Miller, William Poole, Thomas Roebuck, and Joanna Weinberg.

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.

An indispensable guide to how marriage acquired the status of a sacrament. This book analyzes in detail how medieval theologians explained the place of matrimony in the church and her law, and how the bitter debates of the sixteenth century elevated the doctrine to a dogma of the Catholic faith.

What is it that compels a group of people to follow the leadership and vision of one person? Why are the insights and pursuits of certain individuals more persuasive than those of others? This book reveals how leadership should be characterized in the church, and how biblical leadership must differ from the kind of leadership promoted in the world. It explores the dynamics of leadership, particularly the character traits that need to be built up or eradicated in leaders, the dangers that leaders face and temptations to which they are particularly prone, and the development of future leaders: how to recognize leadership potential and encourage leadership gifts in the next generation.