Religious History

This paper analyses the role played by the female religious community of San Zaccaria in the political, social and religious context of the Venetian Dogado during the Early Middle Ages. On the one hand, by comparing the convent with the other Venetian male and female monasteries, the study clarifies that the community exercised a more or less incisive role in representing first the doge’s family, then the entire city, during a specific timeframe. On the other hand, the analysis
reveals to what extent the functions the monastery exercised were influenced by events external to the Dogado or by developments within San Zaccaria itself.

The aim of this paper is to examine the elements integrated at the end of the 15th century in the political culture (propaganda, forms of communication and logistics) and the fiscal culture (mechanisms of payment, strategies for the development and control of fraud, abuses, channels of complaint and solutions) observed in the management of the Bull of the Crusade authorized in Castile by the Papacy to finance the final war against Granada between 1482 and 1492. Attention will be paid to the impact of these factors in the success of the collection of alms, and its ability to produce a fragile consensus on this source of income from the application of concepts from the tax sociology (tax morality, fiscal equity, vertical equity and equity of exchange).

The Protestant Reformation was not, as previous scholars have already pointed out numerous times, a sudden and unexpected development. Instead, it represented the outcome of a long-term paradigm shift. This paper examines the larger literary framework and then focuses on one of the crucial texts from the late Middle Ages where most of the ideas as formulated by Luther in 1517 and later were already expressed in more or less the same way. The loss of spirituality is commonly identified as one of the central concerns, both already in the high Middle Ages and here in the Reformatio Sigismundi.

Table of Contents for Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism
Editor-in-chief: Peter J. Forshaw
Guest Editor: Julian Strube
Issue 16.1 containing Introduction by Julian Strube and articles by Daniel Cyranka, Friedemann Stengel, and Michael Bergunder

This article examines the role of disputation in the conversion narrative of the clergyman and poet William Alabaster, written after he converted to Catholicism in the 1590s. Disputation, a mode of debate that had developed in the universities, is a preoccupation of the narrative, and is here used to place the work within the immediate history of religious disputation, and in the wider struggle over scholarship that accompanied post-Reformation religious controversy. The article asks why formal disputation was so important to religious writers and polemicists, drawing on Alabaster’s perception of reason and its relationship to faith. It is asserted that the convert’s eagerness for scholarly disputation arose from a fusion of religious with intellectual assurance: certainty in faith, and in the academic process. A comparison with examples taken from a long catalogue of works describing public, cross-confessional disputation is then used to enhance our understanding of Alabaster’s influences; the building-blocks of his newfound religious identity. Taking Alabaster as its model, the article directs attention not only to the hitherto undervalued phenomenon of public or ‘professional’ religious disputation in post-Reformation England, but also to the role played by reason and scholarship in the thought and faith of Catholic—and Protestant—divines.

With a focus on England from the accession of Elizabeth I to the mid-1620s, this book examines the practice of direct, scholarly disputation between fundamentally opposing and oftentimes antagonistic Catholic, Protestant and nonconformist puritan divines. Introducing a form of discourse hitherto neglected in studies of religious controversy, the volume works to rehabilitate a body of material only previously examined as part of the great, subjective mass of polemic produced in the wake of the Reformation. In so doing, it argues that public religious disputation – debate between opposing clergymen, arranged according to strict academic formulae – can offer new insights into contemporary beliefs, thought processes and conceptions of religious identity, as well as an accessible and dramatic window into the major theological controversies of the age.

Formal disputation crossed confessional lines, and here provides an opportunity for a broad, comparative analysis. More than any other type of interaction or material, these encounters – and the dialogic accounts they produced – displayed the shared methods underpinning religious divisions, allowing Catholic and reformed clergymen to meet on the same field. The present volume asserts the significance of public religious disputation (and accounts thereof) in this regard, and explores their use of formal logic, academic procedure and recorded dialogue form to bolster religious controversy. In this, it further demonstrates how we might begin to move from the surviving source material for these encounters to the events themselves, and how the disputations then offer a remarkable new glimpse into the construction, rationalization and expression of post-Reformation religious argument.

This article reaches out to the audience for controversial religious writing after the English Reformation, by examining the shared language of attainable truth, of clarity and certainty, to be found in Protestant and Catholic examples of the same. It argues that we must consider those aspects of religious controversy that lie simultaneously above and beneath its doctrinal content: the logical forms in which it was framed, and the assumptions writers made about their audiences’ needs and responses. Building on the work of Susan Schreiner and others on the notion of certainty through the early Reformation, the article asks how English polemicists exalted and opened up that notion for their readers’ benefit, through proclamations of visibility, accessibility and honest dealing. Two case studies are chosen, in order to make a comparison across confessional lines: first, Protestant (and Catholic) reactions against the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which emphasized honesty and encouraged fear of hidden meaning; and second, Catholic opposition to the notion of an invisible – or relatively invisible – church. It is argued that the language deployed in opposition to these ideas displays a shared emphasis on the clear, certain, and reliable, and that which might be attained by human means. Projecting the emphases and assertions of these writers onto their audience, and locating it within a contemporary climate, the article thus questions the emphasis historians of religion place on the intangible – on faith – in considering the production and the reception of Reformation controversy.

Founded in 1892, the Pühtitsa convent held a miracle-working icon of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. This was a valuable spiritual and economic asset, drawing in crowds of thousands on the feast day of the Assumption (15 August). In the early 20th century, the convent also sent the icon on an annual tour around other towns and villages in the eastern part of Estland province. In this interactive map, we follow the icon's tour around Estland in 1907.

From 1900, the miracle-working Iakobshtadt icon of the Mother of God was annually dispatched by rail to the Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia hermitage near Mitau (Jelgava), attracting hundreds of pilgrims to accompany it on its journey. In this interactive map, we follow one such pilgrim, Father Ellii Verkoustinskii, as he and his parishioners travel from Dvinsk (Daugavpils) between 18 and 22 May 1912.

From the establishment of the Riga diocese in 1836, Orthodoxy in the Baltic has a long and storied history as a site of confessional tension, a unique laboratory of church reform, and the origin of new and distinctive forms of Orthodox religiosity. This site will offer a range of resources helping members of the public, students and academics to learn about and research this fascinating chapter in European religious history.