Johann Sleidan And The Protestant Vision Of History

One of the major challenges faced by the emergent Protestant faith was how to establish itself in a hitherto Catholic world. A key way it found to achieve this was to create a common identity through the fashioning of history, emphasising Protestantism's legitimacy and authority. In this study, the life and works of one of the earliest and most influential Protestant historians, Johann Sleidan (1506-1556) are explored to reveal how history could be used to consolidate the new confession and the states which adopted it. Sleidan was commissioned by leading intellectuals from the Schmalkadic League to write the official history of the German Protestant movement, resulting in the publication in 1555 of De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto, Caesare, Commentarii. Overnight his work became the standard account of the early Reformation, referenced by Catholics and Protestants alike in subsequent histories and polemical debates for the next three centuries. Providing the first comprehensive account of Sleidan's life, based almost entirely on primary sources, this book offers a convincing background and context for his writings. It also shows how Sleidan's political role as a diplomat impacted on his work as a historian, and how in turn his monumental work influenced political debate in France and Germany. As a moderate who sought to promote accommodation between the rival confessions, Sleidan provides a fascinating subject of study for modern historians seeking to better understand the complex and multi-faceted nature of the early Reformation.

This book examines Johann Sleidan's Commentaries, a basic history of the early decades of the Reformation written by a younger contemporary of Martin Luther. Reveals Sleidan's Protestant but non-polemic objective approach, which was less concerned with the fine points of Lutheran doctrine than with the imminent threat to its survival in essense. Shows that Sleiden was one of the first exponents of a modern sense for objectivity and valid documentation.

Staging History unites essays by nine specialists in the field of late medieval and early Renaissance drama. Their focus is on English, Dutch and Humanist German drama, as well as on a modern Swiss adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Long considered a highly distinctive English writer, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) has not been treated as the significant historian he was. Fuller's The Church-History of Britain (1655) was the first comprehensive history of Christianity from antiquity to the upheavals of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the tumultuous events of the English civil wars. His numerous publications outside the genre of history—sermons, meditations, pamphlets on current thought and events—reflected and helped to shape public opinion during the revolutionary era in which he lived. Thomas Fuller: Discovering England's Religious Past highlights the fact that Fuller was a major contributor to the flowering of historical writing in early modern England. W. B. Patterson provides both a biography of Thomas Fuller's life and career in the midst of the most wrenching changes his country had ever experienced and a critical account of the origins, growth, and achievements of a new kind of history in England, a process to which he made a significant and original contribution. The volume begins with a substantial introduction dealing with memory, uses of the past, and the new history of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Fuller was moved by the changes in Church and state that came during the civil wars that led to the trial and execution of King Charles I and to the Interregnum that followed. He sought to revive the memory of the English past, recalling the successes and failures of both distant and recent events. The book illuminates Fuller's focus on history as a means of understanding the present as well as the past, and on religion and its important place in English culture and society.

This is a study of the religious controversy that broke out with Martin Luther, from the vantage of church property. The book shows how acceptance of confiscation was won, and how theological advice was essential to the success of what is sometimes called a crucial if early stage of confessional state-building.

The 'problem of authority' was not an invention of the Protestant Reformation, but, as the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, its discussion, in ever greater complexity, was one of the ramifications (if not causes) of the deepening divisions within the Christian church in the sixteenth century. Any optimism that the principle of sola scriptura might provide a vehicle for unity and concord in the post-Reformation church was soon to be dented by a growing uncertainty and division, evident even in early evangelical writing and preaching. Representing a new approach to an important subject this volume of essays widens the understanding and interpretation of authority in the debates of the Reformation. The fruits of original and recent research, each essay builds with careful scholarship on solid historiographical foundations, ensuring that the content and ultimate conclusions do much to challenge long-standing assumptions about perceptions of authority in the aftermath of the Reformation. Rather than dealing with individual sources of authority in isolation, the volume examines the juxtapositions of and negotiations between elements of the authoritative synthesis, and thereby throws new light on the nature of authority in early-modern Europe as a whole. This volume is thus an ideal vehicle with which to bring high quality, new, and significant research into the public domain for the first time, whilst adding substantially to the existing corpus of Reformation scholarship.

In The Reformation of Historical Thought, Mark Lotito re-examines the development of Western historiography by concentrating on Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) and his universal history, Carion’s Chronicle (1532), which transformed the early modern understanding of the Holy Roman Empire.

During the first half of the sixteenth century the Spanish Inquisition fought "Lutheranism" in a benign way, but as time passed the power struggle between those that favoured reform and the detractors intensified, until persecution became relentless under the mandate of Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés. The power struggle did not catch Constantino by surprise, but the tables turned faster than he had expected. On 1 August 1558 Constantino preached his last sermon in the cathedral of Seville; fifteen days later he was imprisoned. Constantino's evangelising zeal is evident in all his works, but the core of his theology can be found in Beatus Vir, where he deals with the doctrines of sin and pardon, free grace, providence, predestination, and the relationship between faith and works. In his exposition of Psalm 1, Constantino does not resort to human philosophies but associates the spiritual fall of humanity with ugliness. In his exhortation to the reader, he states: "we shall plainly see the repulsiveness of that which seems so good in the eyes of insane men, and the beauty and greatness of that which the Divine Word has promised and assured those who turn to its counsel."