Bücher der Reihe Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700

Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. This book examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil a specifically reformist spiritual imperative, acting as a tool for disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature.

The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly thinking.

Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus quickly established itself as one of the most dynamic, influential but divisive orders within early-modern Catholicism. This book not only illuminates the role and theology of Gonzalez, but also the tensions within late seventeenth-century Catholicism.

Offers an analysis of early modern Jesuit confessional manuals to explore the order's shifting attitudes to confession and conscience. This study traces in these works a subtly shifting theology influenced by both theology and classical humanism.

Offering a study of the writing career of Robert Persons, leader of the Elizabethan Jesuits, seen as an apostolate as well as a polemical contestation, this book relates Persons' interventions in various controversies during the period 1580-1610 to the formative purposes of the "Christian Directory" (1582).

A study of interactions between Italy's religious reform and English reformations, which were notoriously liable to pick up other people's ideas and run. It casts light on our understanding of Marian reformation, led by Cardinal Reginald Pole, English by birth but once prominent among Italy's spirituali.

A collection of eleven interdisciplinary essays, which address the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe. It offers cross-cultural readings essential to a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Covering a broad range of topics - encompassing legal, social, cultural, theological and political history - the volume asks fundamental questions about how we regard history, and what historians can learn from colleagues working in other fields that may not at first glance appear to offer any obvious links.

In recent years much scholarly attention has been focused on the encounter of cultures during the early modern period, and the global implications that such encounters held. As a result of this work, scholars have now begun to re-evaluate many aspects of early culture contact, not least with respect to Christian missionary activities. Prominent amongst the missionaries were members of the Society of Jesus. Emerging as a dynamic new religious order in the wake of the Reformation, the Jesuits were deeply committed to promoting religious and cultural reforms both within Europe and in non-Christian lands. Yet whilst scholars have revealed much about the Jesuits'' innovative educational endeavours, and their numerous missions to the Americas, Asia and the Sub-Continent, less attention has been paid to the nature of the Jesuits'' global civilizing mission as a key feature of their institutional character. Nor has sufficient work been done to fully explain the relationship between the Jesuits'' efforts to evangelize and civilize those areas within the Catholic fold and those without. Taking as its focus the city of Naples, this study illuminates how the Jesuits'' work in a Catholic European setting reflected their broader global civilizing mission. Despite its Catholic heritage, Naples was popularly perceived as a place of spiritual and social disorder, thus providing an irresistible challenge to religious reformers, such as the Jesuits, who sought to ''civilize'' the city. Drawing in considerable numbers of the order, Naples proved to be a training ground for the Jesuits that shaped the order''s missionary praxis and influenced the thinking of many who would later travel further afield. By gaining a fuller understanding of this process, it is possible to better understand what drove the Jesuits to craft and perpetuate a cultural map that continues to resonate down to our own times. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series ''Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu''.

An investigation of the Jesuit mission to England during a critical period between the unsuccessful armadas of 1588 and 1597, a period during which the mission was threatened as much by internal Catholic conflict as it was by the crown. It contextualizes the ambitions, methods and effects of the Jesuit mission.

Ferdinand III played a crucial role in helping to end the Thirty Years' War and in reestablishing Habsburg sovereignty within his hereditary lands. This title offers a case study in monarchical representation, for the war necessitated that he revise the image he had cultivated at the beginning of his reign, that of a powerful, victorious warrior.

Exploring the complex relationship between western monasticism and lay society in east central Europe across a broad chronological timeframe, this title provides a re-examination of the level and nature of interaction between members of religious orders and the communities around them.

The concept of Purgatory was a central tenet of late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism, and proved a key dividing line between Catholics and Protestants. This book states that ideas about purgatory were often ill-defined and fluid, and altered over time in response to particular needs or pressures.

The Jesuit Juan de Mariana is one of the most misunderstood authors in the history of political thought. This study aims to offer a radical departure from the old view of Mariana as an early modern constitutionalist thinker and advocate of regicide. It talks about the differentiated nature of political debate in Habsburg Spain.

A collection of essays by some of the leading international scholars in the fields of Italian Renaissance literature, music, history and history of art. It addresses the fertile question of the relationship between religious change and shifting cultural forms in sixteenth-century Italy.

The Pilgrimage of Grace, an uprising in the north of England against Henry VIII's religious policies, has been recognised as a crucial point in the fortunes of the English Reformation. This study examines evidence left by the Pilgrimage of Grace to reconstruct the social, political and religious attitudes of the society in the early Tudor period.

Explores the question of the intersection between politics and religion during the 1640s and 1650s in a historiographical context in which the manifold and complex link between the language of natural law and the language of theology in the history of English Republicanism is being taken into a account by a number of scholars.

By analyzing the changing theological and social nature of spiritual kinship and god parenthood between 1450 and 1650, this book explores how these medieval concepts were developed and utilized by the Catholic Church in an era of reform and challenge.