Reformation In The Low Countries 1500 1620

This accessible general history places the Reformation in the Low Countries within its broader political and religious context.

The Revolt of the Netherlands has long been familiar to English-speaking readers, but the Reformation there has remained largely a closed book. The Reformation in the Low Countries developed along very different lines from German Lutheranism. While the decentralised character of political authority ensured the survival of religious dissent, a prolonged persecution of heresy postponed the formation of public Protestant churches until after 1572. Conflicting interests and beliefs, as well as the war and political struggle, shaped the final religious outcome. Local considerations and individual responses played their part alongside the decisions of rulers, whether Philip II and his lieutenant, the duke of Alva, or William the Silent. Alastair Duke's work is of central importance to a proper understanding of both Reformation and Revolt.

Offers comparative perspectives and fresh insights into the unfolding of the Reformation across the whole of Europe.

Both in our time and in the past, death was one of the most important aspects of anyone’s life. The early modern period saw drastic changes in rites of death, burials and commemoration. One particularly fruitful avenue of research is not to focus on death in general, but the moment of death specifically. This volume investigates this transitionary moment between life and death. In many cases, this was a death on a deathbed, but it also included the scaffold, battlefield, or death in the streets. Contributors: Friedrich J. Becher, Benedikt Brunner, Isabel Casteels, Martin Christ, Louise Deschryver, Irene Dingel, Michaël Green, Vanessa Harding, Sigrun Haude, Vera Henkelmann, Imke Lichterfeld, Erik Seeman, Elizabeth Tingle, and Hillard von Thiessen.

The arrival of the printing press -- Humanist scholarship and editorial guidance -- Augustine after Trent -- How to find the right argument : bibliographies and indexes -- Customizing authority : anthologies and epitomes -- How readers read their Augustines -- Patristics and public debate.

Studies the causes, character, and consequences of the rise of Protestantism and the Catholic reforms within the context of European history.

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future. Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history. The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel's contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.