Crossing Confessional Boundaries

Arguably the single most important element in Abrahamic cross-confessional relations has been an ongoing mutual interest in perennial spiritual and ethical exemplars of one another’s communities. Ranging from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Crossing Confessional Boundaries explores the complex roles played by saints, sages, and Friends of God in the communal and intercommunal lives of Christians, Muslims, and Jews across the Mediterranean world, from Spain and North Africa to the Middle East to the Balkans. By examining these stories in their broad institutional, social, and cultural contexts, Crossing Confessional Boundaries reveals unique theological insights into the interlocking histories of the Abrahamic faiths.

This book is an examination of the uneasy alliance of two confessions, Lutheran and Catholic, at the prominent seventeenth-century court of Dresden, and the implications of this alliance for the repertoire of sacred art music cultivated there, an influential repertoire that has received only scant attention from scholars.

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history. In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.

In this 2005 book, leading historians examine sanctity and sacred space in Europe during and after the religious upheavals of the early modern period.

This volume contains selected papers presented at a conference on Orthodox Christianity and its contemporary European setting. The conference was held in England, at the University of Leeds, in June 2001 and drew together historians, theologians, philosophers, specialists in theological education and political scientists. Countries with an Orthodox Christian history were well represented, as well as Orthodoxy in the diaspora and other Christian confessions by representatives from Western Europe and the United States and Canada. The coherence of Orthodox Christianity and contemporary threats to its coherence formed one main strand for reflection, but discussion also broadened out to consider the nature of religious tradition as such. Part I of the collection brings together papers on such matters as identity, nationalism, globalization, human rights discourse, ecumenical dialogue and competing interpretations of what it means to be European. Part II focuses on Orthodox Christianity in Russia and Part III on the traditionally Orthodox countries of Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. The present collection is meant as a contribution to further reflection on Orthodox identity, and relationship between Christianity and culture in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In Artistic Disobedience Claudio Bacciagaluppi shows how music practice was an occasion for cross-confessional contacts in 17th- and 18th-century Switzerland, implying religious toleration. The difference between public and private performing contexts, each with a distinct repertoire, appears to be of paramount importance. Confessional barriers were overcome in an individual, private perspective. Converted musicians provide striking examples. Also, book trade was often cross-confessional. Music by Catholic (but also Lutheran) composers was diffused in Reformed territories mainly in the private music societies of Swiss German towns (collegia musica). The political and pietist influences in the Zurich and Winterthur music societies encouraged forms of communication that are among the acknowledged common roots of European Enlightenment.

The Republican Alternative seeks to move beyond the mere notion of scholarly inquiry into the republic—the subject of recent rediscovery by political historians interested in Europe’s intellectual heritage—by investigating the practical similarities and differences between two early modern republics, as well as their self-images and interactions during the turbulent seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among the world’s most economically successful societies, Switzerland and the Netherlands laid much of the foundation for their prosperity during the early modern period discussed here. This volume attempts to clarify the special character of these two countries as they developed, including issues of religious plurality, the republican form of government, and an increasingly commercially-driven agrarian society.