Following Zwingli

Following Zwingli explores history, scholarship, and memory in Reformation Zurich. The humanist culture of this city was shaped by a remarkable sodality of scholars, many of whom had been associated with Erasmus. In creating a new Christian order, Zwingli and his colleagues sought biblical, historical, literary, and political models to shape and defend their radical reforms. After Zwingli’s sudden death, the next generation was committed to the institutional and intellectual establishment of the Reformation through ongoing dialogue with the past. The essays of this volume examine the immediacy of antiquity, early Christianity, and the Middle Ages for the Zurich reformers. Their reading and appropriation of history was no mere rhetorical exercise or polemical defence. The Bible, theology, church institutions, pedagogy, and humanist scholarship were the lifeblood of the Reformation. But their appropriation depended on the interplay of past ideals with the pressing demands of a sixteenth-century reform movement troubled by internal dissention and constantly under attack. This book focuses on Zwingli’s successors and on their interpretations of the recent and distant past: the choices they made, and why. How those pasts spoke to the present and how they were heard tell us a great deal not only about the distinctive nature of Zurich and Zwinglianism, but also about locality, history, and religious change in the European Reformation.

Following Zwingli explores history, scholarship, and memory in Reformation Zurich. The humanist culture of this city was shaped by a remarkable sodality of scholars, many of whom had been associated with Erasmus. In creating a new Christian order, Zwingli and his colleagues sought biblical, historical, literary, and political models to shape and defend their radical reforms. After Zwingli’s sudden death, the next generation was committed to the institutional and intellectual establishment of the Reformation through ongoing dialogue with the past. The essays of this volume examine the immediacy of antiquity, early Christianity, and the Middle Ages for the Zurich reformers. Their reading and appropriation of history was no mere rhetorical exercise or polemical defence. The Bible, theology, church institutions, pedagogy, and humanist scholarship were the lifeblood of the Reformation. But their appropriation depended on the interplay of past ideals with the pressing demands of a sixteenth-century reform movement troubled by internal dissention and constantly under attack. This book focuses on Zwingli’s successors and on their interpretations of the recent and distant past: the choices they made, and why. How those pasts spoke to the present and how they were heard tell us a great deal not only about the distinctive nature of Zurich and Zwinglianism, but also about locality, history, and religious change in the European Reformation.

Historians and scholars of the Reformation's earliest century are invited to expand their understanding of that critical era by an examination of aspects of Reform which are lesser known than Luther and his activities. This volume widens and deepens and broadens our perceptions of »the Reformation« and reminds us that in fact what we have in the 16th and early 17th century are »Reformations«. On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the German monk and reformer Martin Luther posting his theses (October 31, 1517), the contributors of this volume invite us to expand our understanding of »the Reformation« by an examination of aspects of Reform which are lesser known than Luther to probe some less-explored corners of the Reformation. To be sure, Martin Luther himself receives attention in this volume. But the aim of this book is really to take the occasion provided by the increased attention paid to the Reformation during the year 2017 to explore other theologians, movements, and ideas. The expanding of the scholarly mind and opening up of new vistas often overshadowed by larger figures, like Luther, can only be good for the study of the Reformation and Early Modern era. This volume is intended for students of early modern Church history with a particular focus on the non-Lutheran aspects of that history.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Mention history and some might struggle to stifle a yawn. But when presented as a narrative it can often be compelling reading. Stephen J. Nichols takes a key period in time, the Reformation, and presents its major players in a fresh way. From Martin Luther, a simple monk who wielded the mallet, to kings and queens, this book goes behind the scenes to uncover the human side of these larger-than-life Reformers. Along the way readers meet Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Kings Henry VIII and Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, Anne Bradstreet, and many others. For those wanting to see history in its context, Nichols also provides a sampling of primary source materials. It is an engaging read that will remind readers of the foundational truths that can never be taken for granted by the church in any age. Includes numerous illustrations.

This volume covers a period of major change that had a lasting impact on art, science, economics, political thought, and education. Rudolph W. Heinze examines the various positions taken by medieval church reformers, explores the efforts of the leading reformer Martin Luther, and emphasises how the reformations brought moral and doctrinal changes to Christianity, permanently altering the religious landscape, then and now.

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire offers a new interpretation of the development of German-speaking central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire or German Reich, from the great reforms of 1495-1500 to its dissolution in 1806 after the turmoil of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Going against the notion that this was a long period of decline, Joachim Whaley shows how imperial institutions developed in response to the crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably the Reformation and Thirty Years War, and assesses the impact of international developments on the Reich. Central themes are the tension between Habsburg aspirations to create a German monarchy and the desire of the German princes and cities to maintain their traditional rights, and how the Reich developed the functions of a state during this period. The first single-author account of German history from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century since Hajo Holborn's study written in the 1950s, it also illuminates the development of the German territories subordinate to the Reich. Whaley explores the implications of the Reformation and subsequent religious reform movements, both Protestant and Catholic, and the Enlightenment for the government of both secular and ecclesiastical principalities, the minor territories of counts and knights and the cities. The Reich and the territories formed a coherent and workable system and, as a polity, the Reich developed its own distinctive political culture and traditions of German patriotism over the early modern period. Whaley explains the development of the Holy Roman Empire as an early modern polity and illuminates the evolution of the several hundred German territories within it. He gives a rich account of topics such as the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, Pietism and baroque Catholicism, the Aufklärung or German Enlightenment and the impact on the Empire and its territories of the French Revolution and Napoleon. It includes consideration of language, cultural aspects and religious and intellectual movements. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire engages with all the major debates among both German and English-speaking historians about early modern German history over the last sixty years and offers a striking new interpretation of this important period. Volume I extends from the late fifteenth century through to the Thirty Years War.