Literature on confessionalization has opened new vistas for considering early-modern Christianity and its place in Western social-political contexts, but the ecclesiastical cultures of the period need further research and analysis to refine our focus on how Christians lived in their own communities and related to society at large. This volume’s essays assess eight elements of Lutheran life (its foundation in sixteenth-century processing of Luther’s legacy, university teaching, preaching, catechesis, devotional literature, popular piety, church and society, church and secular government) and two geographical areas (Nordic and Baltic lands, the kingdom of Hungary) to orient readers to current scholarly discussion and suggest further avenues for exploration and evaluation. Each offers perspectives on Lutherans’ attempts to practise their faith in the world. Contributors are: Kenneth Appold, Gerhard Bode, Susan Boettcher, Christopher Boyd Brown, Robert Christman, David Daniel, Irene Dingel, Robert von Friedeburg, Mary Jane Haemig, and Eric Lund.

Faithful Teaching is the twelfth dialogue of the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue. It seeks greater mutual understanding of the two communions' respective processes of faithful teaching. In challenging times, the call to continue to preach and teach the gospel together resounds with new urgency.

Lucas Osiander (1534-1604) was an influential preacher of the Lutheran orthodoxy. As a Wuerttemberg court preacher and superintendent, he played a central role when the country was established as one of the leading Lutheran forces in the Empire. Osiander preached to a wide audience in a time when sermons were a privileged form of communication and when preachers could address and negotiate the central interests in society. Using confessionalization theory, Sivert Angel studies Osiander's preaching in its political and theological context and shows how Osiander as a preacher could exert political influence. By analyzing Osiander's sermons in light of his own homiletic, the author describes how Osiander's role as a preacher may be traced in his sermons' rhetoric structures and in his use of theological concepts. The discussion of Osiander's theory and practice of preaching documents the ways that Osiander's sermons reinforced the existing political and social order and portrays central aspects of theology and piety in the later sixteenth century.

A specialist in seventeenth-century Germany piety and devotional writings presents new translations of the prose works and hymnody from the century following the start of the Protestant Reformation

This is the first Handbook of the Reformations to include global Protestantism, and the most comprehensive Handbook on the development of Protestant practices which has been published so far. The volume brings together international scholars in the fields of theology, intellectual thought, and social and cultural history. Contributions focus on key themes, such as Martin Luther or the Swiss reformations, offering an up-to-date perspective on current scholarly debates, but they also address many new themes at the cutting edge of scholarship, with particularly emphasis on the history of emotions, the history of knowledge, and global history. This new approach opens up fresh perspectives onto important questions: how did Protestant ways of conceiving the divine shape everyday life, ideas of the feminine or masculine, commercial practices, politics, notions of temporality, or violence? The aim of this Handbook is to bring to life the vitality of Reformation ideas. In these ways, the Handbook stresses that the Protestant Reformations in all their variety, and with their important "radical" wings, must be understood as one of the lasting long-term historical transformations which changed Europe and, subsequently, significant parts of the world.

This unique collection of excerpts from Lutheran historical documents--many translated here for the first time--presents readers with a full picture of how the Lutheran movement developed in its thought and practice. Covering not only theology but also church life, popular piety, and influential historical events, the primary documents include theological treatises, confessional statements, liturgical texts, devotional writings, hymns, letters and diaries, satirical polemics, political documents, woodcuts, and pamphlet literature. This first volume covers the chronological period from Luther‘s first calls for reform to the development of Lutheran Orthodoxy and Pietism during the seventeenth century. The judiciously selected and carefully translated texts as well as the contextualizing information provided in each chapter‘s introductory essay acquaint readers with the turbulence and fervor of this revolutionary Christian movement, its struggles for survival and consolidation, and its further evolution up to the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Heinrich Heshusius (1556-97) became a leading church superintendent and polemicist during the early age of Lutheran orthodoxy, and played a major role in the reform and administration of several German cities during the late Reformation. As well as offering an introduction to Heshusius's writings and ideas, this volume explores the wider world of late-sixteenth-century German Lutheranism in which he lived and worked. In particular, it looks at the important but inadequately understood network of Lutheran clergymen in North Germany centred around universities such as Rostock, Jena, Königsberg, and Helmstedt, and territories such as Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, in the years after the promulgation of the Formula of Concord (1577). In 1579, Heshusius followed his father Tilemann to the newly founded University of Helmstedt, where Heinrich served as a professor on the philosophy faculty and established lasting connections within the Gnesio-Lutheran party. In the 1590s, Heshusius completed his doctoral degree in theology and worked as a pastor and superintendent in Tonna and Hildesheim, publishing over seventy sermons as well as a popular catechism based on the Psalms and Luther's Small Catechism. As confessional tensions mounted in Hildesheim, Heshusius worked as a polemicist for the Lutheran cause, pressing for the conversion or expulsion of local Jews. At the same time, Heshusius began to argue aggressively for the expulsion of Jesuits, who had been increasing in number due to the activities of the local bishop and administrator, Ernst II of Bavaria. By discussing the connection between these two expulsion efforts, and the practical activities Heshusius undertook as a preacher, catechist, and administrator, this study portrays Heshusius as a zealous protector of Lutheran traditions in the face of confessional rivals. Understanding this zeal, and the policies, piety, and propaganda that came as a result, is an important factor in relating how Lutheran orthodoxy gained momentum within Germany in the last decades of the sixteenth century. In all this book will reveal the complex characteristics of an important (but virtually unknown) Lutheran superintendent and theologian active during the era of confessionalization, providing a useful resource for the ongoing efforts of scholars hoping to understand the nature of orthodoxy and its importance for early modern Europeans.f