Maximilian I Der Katholische

Der Band ist einem Gegenstand gewidmet, der nach Ansicht mancher Forscher gar nicht existiert. Die frühneuzeitliche Leichenpredigt gilt - nach und aufgrund der eminenten Aufwertung der Gattung durch Martin Luther - in weiten Kreisen der Forschung als exklusives kulturelles Phänomen der protestantischen Territorien innerhalb des deutschsprachigen Raumes, das niemals ein entsprechendes Pendant in den Beerdigungs- und Totenehrungsritualen der katholischen Kirche gefunden habe. Tatsächlich aber ist - trotz aller einschlägigen Verbote der katholischen Kirchenobrigkeiten - eine bislang noch nicht genau quantifizierbare Menge an gedruckten katholischen Leichenpredigten aus dem 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert überliefert, wenn auch in der Überzahl an entlegenen und schwer zugänglichen Orten (zumeist in kirchlichen Privatbibliotheken). Ziel des Bandes ist es, jene über Jahrzehnte hinweg kolportierte Forschungsmeinung zu widerlegen und erste Ansätze zu einer Erschließung von katholischen Leichenpredigten der frühen Neuzeit zu liefern. In zwölf interdisziplinär breit gestreuten Studien werden die unterschiedlichsten druck-, sozial-, frömmigkeits-, rhetorik- und kunstgeschichtlichen Aspekte dieser Gattung katholischer Gebrauchstexte erstmals in den Blick der kulturhistorischen Forschung genommen. Zum anderen werden in einem Katalog die Bestände an deutschsprachigen katholischen Leichenpredigten in Einzeldrucken aus zwei bedeutenden einschlägigen Sammlungen (Stiftsbibliothek Klosterneuburg, Universitätsbibliothek Eichstätt) exemplarisch durch Autopsieaufnahmen auf hohem bibliographischem Niveau erschlossen.

This book examines the intersection between religious belief, dynastic ambitions, and late Renaissance court culture within the main branches of Germany's most storied ruling house, the Wittelsbach dynasty. Their influence touched many shores from the "coast" of Bohemia to Boston.

The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state. In this era the reading public?s obsession with the most destructive and divisive war in its history?the Thirty Years? War?resurrected old animosities and sparked a violent, century-long debate over the origins and aftermath of the war. The core of this bitter argument was a clash between Protestant and Catholic historians over the cultural criteria determining authentic German identity and the territorial and political form of the future German nation. ø This groundbreaking study of modern Germany?s morbid fascination with the war explores the ideological uses of history writing, commemoration, and collective remembrance to show how the passionate argument over the ?meaning? of the Thirty Years? War shaped Germans' conception of their nation. The first book in the extensive literature on German history writing to examine how modern German historians reinterpreted a specific event to define national identity and legitimate political and ideological agendas, The Thirty Years? War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century is a bold intellectual history of the confluence of history writing, religion, culture, and politics in nineteenth-century Germany.

Argues that religion was not the catalyst to the Thirty Years War, but one element in a mix of political, social, and dynastic forces that fed the conflict that ultimately transformed the map of the modern world.

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound—including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony—not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.