In recent years, writing on early-modern culture has turned from examining the upheavals of the Reformation as the ruptured birth of early modernity out of the late medieval towards a striking emphasis on processes of continuity, transition, and adaptation. No longer is the ‘religious’ seen as institutional or doctrinaire, but rather as a cultural and social phenomenon that exceeds the rigid parameters of modern definition. Recent analyses of early-modern cultures offer nuanced accounts that move beyond the limits of traditional historiography, and even the bounds of religious studies. At their centre is recognition that the scope of the religious can never be extricated from early-modern culture. Despite its many conflicts and tensions, the lingua franca for cultural self-understanding of the early-modern period remains ineluctably religious. The early-modern world wrestled with the radical challenges concerning the nature of belief within the confines of church or worship, but also beyond them. This process of negotiation was complex and fuelled European social dynamics. Without religion we cannot begin to comprehend the myriad facets of early-modern life, from markets, to new forms of art, to public and private associations. In discussions of images, the Eucharist, suicide, music, street lighting, or whether or not the sensible natural world represented an otherworldly divine, religion was the fundamental preoccupation of the age. Yet, even in contexts where unbelief might be considered, we find the religious providing the fundamental terminology for explicating the secular theories and views which sought to undermine it as a valid aspect of human life. This collection of essays takes up these themes in diverse ways. We move from the 15th century to the 18th, from the core problem of sacramental mediation of the divine within the strict parameters of eucharistic and devotional life, through discussion of images and iconoclasm, music and word, to more blurred contexts of death, street life, and atheism. Throughout the early-modern period, the very processes of adaption – even change itself – were framed by religious concepts and conceits.

Disputes, discord and reconciliation were fundamental parts of the fabric of communal living in early modern Europe. This edited volume presents essays on the cultural codes of conflict and its resolution in this period under three broad themes: peacemaking as practice; the nature of mediation and arbitration; and the role of criminal law in conflicts. Through an exploration of conflict and peacemaking, this volume provides innovative accounts of state formation, community and religion in the early modern period.

In the pre-industrial societies of early modern Europe, religion was a vessel of fundamental importance in making sense of personal and collective social, cultural and spiritual exercises. This text presents Kaspar von Greyerz's important overview and interpretation of the religions and cultures of Early Modern Europe.

Current scholarship continues to emphasise both the importance and the sheer diversity of religious beliefs within early modern societies. Furthermore, it continues to show that, despite the wishes of secular and religious leaders, confessional uniformity was in many cases impossible to enforce. As the essays in this collection make clear, many people in Reformation Europe were forced to confront the reality of divided religious loyalties, and this raised issues such as the means of accommodating religious minorities who refused to conform and the methods of living in communion with those of different faiths. Drawing together a number of case studies from diverse parts of Europe, Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe explores the processes involved when groups of differing confessions had to live in close proximity - sometimes grudgingly, but often with a benign pragmatism that stood in opposition to the will of their rulers. By focussing on these themes, the volume bridges the gap between our understanding of the confessional developments as they were conceived as normative visions and religious culture at the level of implementation. The contributions thus measure the religious policies articulated by secular and ecclesiastical elites against the 'lived experience' of people going about their daily business. In doing this, the collection shows how people perceived and experienced the religious upheavals of the confessional age and how they were able to assimilate these changes within the framework of their lives.

With its emphasis on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection of essays takes the messenger figure as a focal point for the discussion of transnational exchange and intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sees the emissary as embodying the processes of representation and communication within the world of the text, itself an 'emissary' that strives to communicate and re-present certain perceptions of the 'real.' Drawing attention to the limits and licenses of communication, the emissary is a reminder of the alien quality of foreign language and the symbolic power of performative gestures and rituals. Contributions to this collection examine different kinds of cross-cultural activities (e.g. diplomacy, trade, translation, espionage, missionary endeavors) in different world areas (e.g. Asia, the Mediterranean, the Levant, the New World) via different critical methods and approaches. They take up the literary and cultural productions and representations of ambassadors, factors, traders, translators, spies, middlemen, merchants, missionaries, and other agents, who served as complex conduits for the global transport of goods, religious ideologies, and socio-cultural practices throughout the early modern period. Authors in the collection investigate the multiple ways in which the emissary became enmeshed in emerging discourses of racial, religious, gender, and class differences. They consider how the emissary's role might have contributed to an idealized progressive vision of a borderless world or, conversely, permeated and dissolved borders and boundaries between peoples only to further specific group interests.

Leading scholars from Italy and the United States offer a fresh and nuanced image of the religious reform movements on the Italian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. United in their conviction that religious ideas can only be fully understood in relation to the particular social, cultural, and political contexts in which they develop, these scholars explore a wide range of protagonists from popes, bishops, and inquisitors to humanists and merchants, to artists, jewelers, and nuns. What emerges is a story of negotiations, mediations, compromises, and of shifting boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. This book is essential reading for all students of the history of Christianity in early modern Europe.

The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics. The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for structured diversity. The chapters of this book are arranged in three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations') is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the 'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the early modern English stage. Key features High quality anthology on phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era With contributions by outstanding international experts