![]() In many cases, reformed consistories reasoned with the heterodox among their flock in an effort to return them to the fold. While recognizing that executions and other heavy forms of punishment certainly did occur, and were undeniably accompanied by denunciations in highly charged language, the authors draw attention to the equally important proliferation of much more lenient methods used against deviants. Several contributors reveal that religiously deviant individuals were not by definition labeled and treated in the dogmatic, inquisitorial manner for which the age of Reformation is popularly known. Heretical opinions were not heretical in and of themselves they were forms of behavior that were successfully given this meaning in complicated social processes that did not always result in legal condemnation. The “labeling approach” chosen by the authors aims to reveal the process by which designations such has “heresy” or “godlessness” acquired meaning in different contexts. The contributors to this volume argue that beyond the many interesting exceptions that occurred, there was another important complicating factor in play that merits further investigation: the labeling process. Decisions to condemn or approve heterodox texts, we now know, were the result of complex political processes, in which the social status of the transgressing author was often a significant factor.īut these insights do not merely underscore what we already knew about the history of religious deviance in the early modern period, namely, that there were many exceptions to every rule. Research into intellectual heterodoxy up to the eighteenth century has similarly revealed gray areas as far as censorship of printed works is concerned. Many scholars now emphasize that there existed many ambiguous and unstable gray areas allowing the continued practice of religious heterodoxy, or as the authors of this volume call it, religious deviance. This included its displacement to a private sphere, which was never strictly private, but sufficiently low key not to upset the status of the dominant religion. In fact, as a range of recent studies has showed, religious dissent in the early modern period was handled in a variety of ways. The Reformation was much more than a process of religious polarization that resulted in a world where varying degrees of intolerance and persecution predominated. Here too, the limits of language come to the fore as the contributing authors show the complexities behind the ways in which religiously transgressive behavior came to be labeled as such. In this volume, rooted in ongoing research at the Dresden Technical University into religious deviance, various authors show that far from condemning anyone who misbehaved, municipal and ecclesiastical authorities responded in a variety of ways to heterodox and deviant individuals. The second book is a collection of essays edited by Alexander Kästner and Gerd Schwerhoff on the rather different subject of divine wrath ( Göttlicher Zorn) and religious deviance. In the first book, Shadows of Doubt, Stefania Tutino discusses how Catholic theologians working on themes such as lying, oath-taking, rhetoric, and historiography discovered unsettling disconnections between thought, language, and reality that should seem very familiar to philosophers of the (post)modern age. And yet, as the two books to be reviewed below each make clear, the grip of language on reality in this period was considerably weaker and more complicated than even historians have long believed. Language during the Reformation era has often been perceived as dogmatic, confessionalized, and disinclined to accommodate nuances or doubt. ![]() ![]() ![]() Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture. Göttlicher Zorn und menschliches Maß: religiöse Abweichung in frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgemeinschaften.Ĭonstance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |