A Companion to the Reformation in Central Europe analyses the diverse Christian cultures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Czech lands, Austria, and lands of the Hungarian kingdom between the 15th and 18th centuries. It establishes the geography of Reformation movements across this region, and then considers different movements of reform and the role played by Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox clergy. This volume examines different contexts and social settings for reform movements, and investigates how cities, princely courts, universities, schools, books, and images helped spread ideas about reform. This volume brings together expertise on diverse lands and churches to provide the first integrated account of religious life in Central Europe during the early modern period. Contributors are: Phillip Haberkern, Maciej Ptaszyński, Astrid von Schlachta, Márta Fata, Natalia Nowakowska, Luka Ilić, Michael Springer, Edit Szegedi, Mihály Balázs, Rona Johnston Gordon, Howard Louthan, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Liudmyla Sharipova, Alexander Schunka, Rudolf Schlögl, Václav Bůžek, Mark Hengerer, Michael Tworek, Pál Ács, Maria Crăciun, Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Laura Lisy-Wagner, and Graeme Murdock.

This work provides a comprehensive and multi-facetted account of the Reformation in eastern and central Europe, drawing on extensive archival research carried out by Continental and British scholars. Across a broad thematic, temporal and geographical range, the contributors examine the cultural impact of the Reformation in Eastern Europe, the encounters between different confessions, and the blend of religious and political pressures which shaped the path of Reformation in these lands. By making the fruits of their research accessible to a wider audience, the contributors hope to emphasise the important role of eastern and central Europe on the early modern European scene.

This work provides a comprehensive and multi-facetted account of the Reformation in eastern and central Europe, drawing on extensive archival research carried out by Continental and British scholars. Across a broad thematic, temporal and geographical range, the contributors examine the cultural impact of the Reformation in Eastern Europe, the encounters between different confessions, and the blend of religious and political pressures which shaped the path of Reformation in these lands. By making the fruits of their research accessible to a wider audience, the contributors hope to emphasise the important role of eastern and central Europe on the early modern European scene.

This book considers the emergence of a remarkable diversity of churches in east-central Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, which included Catholic, Orthodox, Hussite, Lutheran, Bohemian Brethren, Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian and Greek Catholic communities. Contributors assess the extraordinary multiplicity of confessions in the Transylvanian principality, as well as the range of churches in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary. Essays focus on how each church sought to establish its own identity in a crowded market-place of religious ideas, and on the extent to which printed literature brokered the popular reception of religious doctrine. The volume addresses how ideas about religion spread within the largely illiterate societies of east-central Europe, especially through catechisms, and how printed literature was used to instruct congregations about doctrinal truth, to encourage the faithful to pious devotions, and to shape the religious life and identity of local communities.

Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.

The most ambitious one-volume survey of the Reformation yet, this book is beautifully illustrated throughout. The strength of this work is its breadth and originality, covering the Church, art, Calvinism and Luther.

The first major study of the early Reformation and the Polish monarchy for over a century, this volume asks why Crown and church in the reign of King Sigismund I (1506-1548) did not persecute Lutherans. It offers a new narrative of Luther's dramatic impact on this monarchy - which saw violent urban Reformations and the creation of Christendom's first Lutheran principality by 1525 - placing these events in their comparative European context. King Sigismund's realm appears to offer a major example of sixteenth-century religious toleration: the king tacitly allowed his Hanseatic ports to enact local Reformations, enjoyed excellent relations with his Lutheran vassal duke in Prussia, allied with pro-Luther princes across Europe, and declined to enforce his own heresy edicts. Polish church courts allowed dozens of suspected Lutherans to walk free. Examining these episodes in turn, this study does not treat toleration purely as the product of political calculation or pragmatism. Instead, through close analysis of language, it reconstructs the underlying cultural beliefs about religion and church (ecclesiology) held by the king, bishops, courtiers, literati, and clergy - asking what, at heart, did these elites understood 'Lutheranism' and 'catholicism' to be? It argues that the ruling elites of the Polish monarchy did not persecute Lutheranism because they did not perceive it as a dangerous Other - but as a variant form of catholic Christianity within an already variegated late medieval church, where social unity was much more important than doctrinal differences between Christians. Building on John Bossy and borrowing from J.G.A. Pocock, it proposes a broader hypothesis on the Reformation as a shift in the languages and concept of orthodoxy.