Brepols

This book explores representations of saints in a variety of Latin and Greek late antique hagiographical narratives, such as saints’ Lives, martyr acts, miracle collections, and edifying tales. The book examines techniques through which the saints featured in such texts are depicted as heroes and heroines, i.e., as extraordinary characters exhibiting both exemplary behaviour and a set of specific qualities that distinguish them from others. The book inscribes itself in a growing body of relatively recent scholarship that approaches hagiographical accounts not just as historical sources but also as narrative constructions. As such, it contributes to the development of a scholarly rationale which increasingly values imaginative and fictional aspects of hagiography in their own right, with the aim of answering broader questions about narrative creativity and ideology. For instance, individual chapters examine how hagiographical accounts mobilize and capitalize on earlier literary and rhetorical traditions or narrative models. These questions are specifically addressed to explore the narrative construction of characters. The chapters thereby encourage us to acknowledge that many hagiographers were more skilful than is often accepted.

In considering the construction of medieval sermons, the term ‘construction’ has many meanings. Those studied here range from questions about sermon composition with the help of artes praedicandi or model collections to a more abstract investigation of the mental construction of the concepts of sermon and preacher. Sermons from a range of European countries, written both in Latin and vernaculars, are subjected to a broad variety of analyses. The approach demonstrates the vitality of this sub-discipline. Most of the essays are more occupied with literary and philological problems than with the religious content of the sermons. While many focus on vernacular sermons, the Latin cultural and literary background is always considered and shows how vernacular preaching was in part based on a more learned Latin culture. The collection testifies both to the increasing esteem of the study of vernacular sermons, and to a revival in the study of all those things contained in a preacher’s ‘workshop’, ranging from rhetorical invention, medieval library holdings and study-aids, through to factors that are crucial for the successful delivery of the sermon, such as the choice of language, mnemonic devices and addressing the audience. The interdisciplinary approach remains ever-present, not only in the diversity of the academic disciplines represented, but also within individual essays. The volume is based on a conference held in Stockholm, 7-9 October 2004.

Entre la fin du IXe et le milieu du Xe siècle, de nouvelles formes de pouvoir émergent en Occident, au sein d’un monde encore carolingien : un bouleversement majeur qui marque la genèse de la société seigneuriale. C’est cette période charnière que permet d’appréhender la figure d’Odon, deuxième abbé de Cluny, grand aristocrate, réformateur acharné et intellectuel de haut niveau.

L’itinéraire d’Odon (né vers 879, mort en 942), acteur de premier plan et témoin privilégié de son temps, reflète en effet la profonde transformation des structures aristocratiques alors à l’œuvre, tandis que l’ecclésiologie originale élaborée par l’abbé réformateur, avec un bagage qui demeure celui du lettré carolingien, définit les conditions et les contours d’une société d’un type nouveau. L’objet de cet ouvrage est bien de cerner au plus près la recomposition des rapports de force et les ressorts idéologiques d’un monde où le champ des possibles est largement ouvert. À quelles stratégies, à la fois sociales et discursives, un puissant aristocrate entré au service de Dieu a-t-il recours pour fonder et asseoir son pouvoir ? À un moment où évoluent les cadres de la société et où se bâtissent de nouvelles légitimités, de quelle manière un réformateur justifie-t-il la domination des moines sur l’ensemble du corps social ? Il s’agit en d’autres termes d’analyser comment un abbé du Xe siècle construit, tant sur le plan des pratiques sociales que des représentations, une certaine société seigneuriale.

Isabelle Rosé, agrégée et docteur en histoire, a réalisé ce travail dans le cadre du Centre d’études Préhistoire, Antiquité, Moyen Âge, unité mixte de recherche de l’université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis et du CNRS. Elle est à présent maître de conférences à l’université de Haute-Bretagne - Rennes 2.

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.

This volume explores the Viking Age colonization and exploration of the North Atlantic, from Arctic Norway to Vinland in eastern North America. Its contributors, predominately archaeologists by training, bring new evidence and an interdisciplinary perspective to a subject often dominated by sources of variable historicity. They explore the creation and transformation of ethnicity in new lands - some occupied, others empty. They also address the historiography of Norse Landnám, unravelling the processes by which scholarly interpretations of the Viking Age have been created. The result illuminates the consequences of migration in the early Middle Ages and the interplay of local and large-scale socio-economic processes. In concluding, the volume assesses the relationship between Norse expansion and later European ‘rediscovery’ of the New World.

This bookaddresses the issue of political celebration in early modern Venice. Dealing with processional orders and iconographic programs, historiographical narratives and urbanistic canons, stylistic features and diplomatic accounts, the interdisciplinary contributions gathered in these pages aim to question the performative effectiveness and the social consistency of the so called ‘myth’ of Venice: a system of symbols, beliefs and meanings offering a self-portrait of the ruling elite, the Venetian patriciate. In order to do so, the volume calls for a spatial turn in Venetian studies, blurring the boundaries between institutionalized and unofficial ceremonial spaces and considering their ongoing interaction in representing the rule of the Serenissima. The twelve chapters move from Ducal Palace to the Venetian streets and from the city of Venice to its dominions, thus widening considerably the range of social and political actors and audiences involved in the analysis. Such multifocal perspective allows us to challenge the very idea of a single ‘myth’ of Venice.

Que peut faire un clerc de l'administration royale, à la fin du XIIe siècle, s'il est doté d'un humour féroce, d'une langue agile, d'une culture vaste et éclectique, d'un goût irrépressible pour les bonnes histoires colorées et corsées, face à la montée en force des nouvelles modes littéraires de la littérature en français et des romans courtois? Il prend une plume et rédige de "bonnes histoires pour les gens de cour", pour montrer qu'on peut s'amuser en latin, de façon moins ridicule à ses yeux que ceux qui pâlissent d'amour aux pieds des dames. Gautier Map, clerc anglais richement prébendé, grand conteur et amuseur des milieux de la cour de Henri II Plantagenêt, est à la fois attiré et agacé par les thèmes fantastiques, merveilleux et amoureux qui font les délices de la cour anglaise lorsque la reine Aliénor y séjourne. Il veut faire encore mieux: plus varié, plus subtil, plus savant, plus drôle et moins naïf. S'il méprise l'amour courtois, ce n'est pas par pudibonderie; s'il écrit dans la langue savante de son temps, ce n'est pas par timidité. Son oeuvre, que par nonchalance sans doute il garda dans ses papiers personnels, est fantaisiste, insolente, ironique; c'est pour les ethnologues un réservoir de renseignements sur des coutumes et des traditions que personne avant lui n'avait notées, pour les historiens de la littérature un témoignage d'une époque où rien n'était encore joué entre la langue vulgaire et le latin (qui pouvaient encore se donner la réplique), pour tous un moment privilégié de l'émergence dans la littérature européenne d'un art du récit qui aboutit de temps en temps, dans ce recueil jamais ennuyeux ni banal, à d'éblouissantes réussites.

The essays in this book tap the potential of the historical analysis of social contexts in which property rights are embedded - social relations, power and agency, political institutions, culture - to understand how landed resources are actually appropriated. This exploratory approach seeks both to take advantage of the existing theory of property rights, as it is applied by the institutionalist outlook on economic history, and to go beyond it by explicitly incorporating social processes and factors in the analysis of property institutions. With this common aim in mind, the book covers a wide variety of historical cases throughout space and time, from the late Middle Ages in the Czech lands and in Tuscany to the very recent de collectivisation of the countryside in former socialist countries, which will contribute rich and grounded insights to the discussion of the topic and of its implications.

Rosa Congost is senior researcher at the Centre de Recerca d'Història Rural and teaches at Facultat de Lletres in Universitat de Girona. Her research interests cover the history of landed property and agrarian social relations.

Rui Santos is senior researcher at CESNOVA and teaches at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas in Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His research interests cover historical and economic sociology and rural studies.

The twenty-eighth annual conference of CEMERS, held on 21-22 October 1994 at Binghamton University, featured thirty-three panel sessions and approximately 150 presentations. The ten essays in this volume consist of the five plenary speakers - leaders in their field - and five panel essays, each of which was reviewed for this volume. The volume comprises a body of work organised around a governing theme - modes of historicisation. Each of the essays demonstrates the practice of, or a commentary upon, a distinctive historicized criticism. By 'historicized' as contrasted with 'historical' criticism, it is meant that these essays problematicize, stretch or reconceive traditional historical practices. Challenging the notion that the production of paintings, dramatic texts or even conduct books can be read against a stable historical ground, they show that paintings, works of literature, and treatises not only participate in history but are exemplars of textual instability. The very content of these texts can be shown, in various editions, to change over time - and yet each bears a single, determinate title. In such ways the contributions gathered here all show that they have been affected by 'the new history'.

This volume explores the question of continuities and disruptions between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rather than addressing the question in a general way, it brings together a number of case studies, dealing with the changing interest in, and knowledge of Stoicism, the variations in the manuscripts of medical texts, the changing emphases within the penitential genres of 'Mirrors', developments in the philosophy of love and in attitudes towards pagans, and the transformation of the art of disputation between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. One article considers the interpretation by a Renaissance scholar (Girolamo Cardano) of the ideas of a medieval scholar (Pietro d'Abano) concerning nature and demons, while another looks at the 16th-century School of Salamanca as a synthesis of the two periods. These papers were originally presented at the second colloquium of the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d'Études Médiévales with the same title, organised jointly by two institutes that embody between them Renaissance and Medieval Studies: the Warburg Institute of London, and the Gabinete de Filosofia Medieval of Porto.

The volume includes papers by J. Marenbon (Cambridge), G. Giglioni (London), J. Kraye (London), O. Merisalo (Jyväskylä), S. Orrego-Sánchez (Santiago de Chile), A. Passot-Mannooretonil (Paris), J. J. Vila-Chã (Braga) and O. Weijers (Den Haag).

Rédigé en 363-364, le traité Contre les manichéens de Titus de Bostra est la plus importante réfutation chrétienne du manichéisme. Elle se distingue par sa composition en deux volets (réfutation rationnelle et réfutation scripturaire) et par la richesse de sa documentation (on y dénombre quelque 150 « citations manichéennes »). Préservé en grec aux deux-tiers et intégralement dans une version syriaque de la fin du IV e ou du début du V e siècle, cet ouvrage est d’une importance capitale pour l’histoire de la théologie chrétienne ancienne et du manichéisme.

Ce volume offre une double traduction française annotée du grec et du syriaque, la première dans une langue moderne, établie sur une base philologique sûre. L’édition critique gréco-syriaque et sa traduction française permettent désormais une nouvelle approche des sources manichéennes et de leur réfutation.Le texte qui a servi de base à cette traduction est celui qui a paru dans la Series Graeca du Corpus Christianorum (vol. 82, 2013). Il s’agissait de la première édition critique synoptique intégrale des textes grec et syriaque de cette oeuvre, accompagnée d’une édition critique des extraits préservés en grec dans les Sacra Parallela de Jean Damascène.

Agathe Roman est agrégée de lettres et docteur en littérature grecque (Montréal).

Thomas S. Schmidt est professeur de langue et littérature grecques à l'Université de Fribourg (Suisse).

Paul-Hubert Poirier, membre de l'Institut, est professeur d'histoire du christianisme ancien à l'Université Laval (Québec).

Il Contro gli Acefali del diacono romano Rustico, composto fra il 553 e il 564, si inserisce nel contesto della controversia dei Tre Capitoli e si propone di confutare la cristologia monofisita ('acefali' era infatti il nome con cui all'epoca si indicavano, appunto, gli esponenti di questa fazione). L’opera si presenta come un dialogo, preceduto da un breve prologo, fra due interlocutori, un ortodosso (indicato con il nome dell’autore), portavoce di una cristologia strettamente calcedonese, ed un monofisita di stampo severiano, qualificato come ‘eretico’. Nel corso della discussione Rustico sviluppa una approfondita ed originale riflessione sui concetti di natura, persona, sostanza e sussistenza, nella quale si possono riconoscere significativi punti di contatto, sia nel metodo che nei contenuti, con i trattati teologici di Boezio; e proprio nel complesso rapporto con il modello boeziano, importantissimo punto di riferimento ma anche oggetto di critica, risiede il particolare interesse di un’opera purtroppo ancora poco conosciuta, ma che sta suscitando negli ultimi anni una rinnovata attenzione da parte degli studiosi.

Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Latina presso l'Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VI secolo.

La versione latina originale del testo proposto in traduzione in questo volume è pubblicata nella collana Corpus Christianorum Series Latina con il titolo Rusticus Diaconus, Contra Acephalos (CCSL 100). I rimandi alle pagine corrispondenti dell’edizione sono forniti a margine di questa traduzione.

Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Sara Petri si è laureata ed ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca in Filologia e Letteratura Greca e Latina presso l’Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VILatina presso l’Università di Pisa, sotto la direzione del prof. C. Moreschini. Attualmente insegna materie letterarie presso il Liceo Classico di Grosseto. Si occupa di letteratura cristiana antica di lingua latina, in particolare delle controversie cristologiche fra V e VI

The walls of early modern convents suggested the existence of absolute conditions that seldom existed in reality. While the built enclosure communicated the convent’s isolation from the world outside, connections between women religious and individuals or groups outside their communities extended into and from these houses, with each constituency exploiting these associations to serve its own aims.Likewise, the walls conveyed the presence of a homogeneous and unified community where, often, differences in status, power, and other interests led to the development of internal alliances and factions.

Building on an upsurge of scholarly interest in convent networks that previously has not been focused in a single volume, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how and why such associations existed. The collection examines personal, spatial, and temporal networks that emerged in, among, and beyond convents in Italy during the early modern period. These ties were established, cultivated, or even rejected in a variety of ways that influenced nuns’ devotional lives, their relationships with patrons, and their cultural engagement and production.

These essays cover the time period before and after the Council of Trent, permitting an analysis of convents’ responses to changing power dynamics, both inside and outside the enclosure. The book also engages a broad geographical and cultural range, with chapters focusing on the centres of Florence, Venice, and Rome, the courts of Urbino, Ferrara, and Mantua, and smaller cities across Northern Italy, offering unprecedented insights into early modern Italian convent life and its varied forms and modes of expression.

This volume presents a state-of-the-art collection of essays on the socio-cultural aspects of the conversion to Christianity in Viking-Age Scandinavia and the Scandinavian colonies of the North Atlantic. The nine scholars, drawn from the disciplines of history, archaeology, and literary studies, have been brought together to address the overarching topic of how conversion affected peoples’ identities - both as individuals, and as members of broader religious, political, and social groups - on either side of the ‘divide’ between paganism and Christianity. Central to this exploration is the question of how existing and changing identities shaped the progress of conversion as a process of societal, and more specifically cultural, change.

Each of the papers in this volume provides examples of the complicated patterns of interaction, influence, and identity-modification that were characteristic of the transition from paganism to Christianity in the Viking world. The authors look for new ways of understanding and describing this gradual intermingling between the two fuzzy-edged religious communities, and they provide a challenging redefinition of the nature of conversion in the Viking Age that will be of interest both to a wide variety of medievalists and to all those who work on conversion in its theoretical and historical aspects.

The mystery of writing is that there is nothing mysterious about it.  If Saramago is right, then it is obvious that palaeography has not yet found all the keys we need if we are to enter amongst the people who gave form to the thoughts and memories of the medieval world.  In order to reveal their identity – the greatest mystery of all – it is sometimes necessary to pass over what has already been written, affirmed and maintained, and to return to the sources instead. The “Memoriali” conserved in the Archivio di Stato in Bologna reveal stories of men and women who created, with pen and quill veritable cathedrals of ink, indelible and sometimes of ineffable beauty. In this volume the names are collected, the commissions listed, where possible the careers and tribulations described of more than 270 copyists documented at Bologna between 1265 and 1270. In short, it is the documentary sources, not the works produced or such as have survived, on which the present  book has been based.

Les ravages corporels et leurs représentations, signes d’outrage aux corps, forment un trait d’union trop souvent négligé entre l’Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. À avoir opposé des civilisations anciennes marquées par un certain « culte de corps » à des sociétés médiévales méprisant la chair, on en aurait presque oublié que le corps y voyage à travers les savoirs, de l'histoire à la littérature, de la science au droit, de la biologie à la théologie et la philosophie. Aussi les sources nous invitent-elles à regarder au-delà des frontières historiques et culturelles qui séparent l'Antiquité et le Moyen Âge. De la plus haute Antiquité au Moyen Âge tardif, chaque outrage au corps physique est lourd de sens: faisant écho dans le corps social, il renvoie aux normes et aux assises de l’ordre politique, affirmant une morale, des valeurs et des croyances qui cimentent les corps constitués dont l’individu n’est qu’une partie. La signification des outrages aux corps diverge suivant la personnalité ou la fonction de celui qui brutalise, comme de celui qui est maltraité. Elle est aussi tributaire du système de représentation du temps et du lieu, du contexte et de l'univers culturel dans lesquels ils s'inscrivent. L’objet de cet ouvrage collectif est de comprendre comment les sociétés antiques et médiévales représentent le modelage du corps humain, à la fois au plan social, mental, politique et religieux, dans l'intention de façonner des individus adaptés à des environnements propres. Il s'agit de saisir comment les outrages et les ravages infligés aux corps physiques et symboliques offrent des clés de compréhension générale de la société qui voit le corps vivre et mourir.

In the civilisations of the Ancient World, where the holy was omnipresent, any undertaking of importance was placed under the aegis of the gods, for no other course of action was conceivable. Humankind addressed the divinity in particular through prayer, a means of communication of which Greek and Latin texts furnish numerous examples. The goal of the present work is to reflect the diversity of these speech acts to the gods in presenting a corpus of Greek and Roman pagan prayer. The authors have selected some two hundred texts covering all of the ancient period and representing different sources and genres : formulaic prayers of rituel, literary prayers in verse and prose, private writings, mystical and magical texts, and so on. They have presented the documents in the original tongue with a new translation and a commentary.

This is the companion volume to the Analytic Bibliography of Greek and Roman Prayer (Bibliographie analytique de la prière grecque et romaine) which began the collection.

Frédéric Chapot and Bernard Laurot, specialists of ancient language and literature, are associate professors at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg.

Il volume raccoglie 25 studi sulla cosmologia medievale, affrontata nelle sue diverse componenti in un arco di tempo che va da Calcidio al XIV secolo. Dieci contributi investigano questioni di cosmologia ebraica e islamica, in particolare le opere di Gersonide (R. Gatti), Maimonide (L. Pepi), Avicenna (C. Di Martino), Avicenna (O. Lizzini), Sohravardî (I. Panzeca), Qûnawî (P. Spallino), i Fratelli della Purità (C. Baffioni) e le interferenze fra medioevo islamico e latino: la grande questione delle cosmologie alchemiche (M. Pereira), testi tradotti come il De secretis naturae (P. Travaglia), la dottrina del grande anno in Thebit e Pietro d’Abano (F. Seller). All’influenza della Patristica greca sul pensiero occidentale dedicano ampio spazio i lavori di E. S. Mainoldi e R. Gambino. Ulteriori studi presentano lo sviluppo del pensiero cosmologico e scientifico latino a partire da Calcidio (C. Militello), attraverso Adelardo di Bath (P. Palmeri), Guglielmo di Conches (G. Pellegrino) e documenti diversi (A. Tarabochia Canavero) sino alla ripresa dell’aristotelismo fisico, in particolare nei commenti universitari ai Meteorologica (G. Fioravanti), De caelo (C. A. Musatti, A. Vella) e in Dante (M. Gallarino, P. Falzone). La letteratura scientifica in volgare è rappresentata da Restoro d’Arezzo (U. Villani-Lubelli) e Ramon Llull (J. Gayà). A questioni di metodo storiografico è dedicato il saggio di G. Alliney, mentre un magistrale contributo di Tullio Gregory su «Cosmogonia biblica e cosmologie cristiane» traccia idealmente le coordinate generali del complesso problematico affrontato nelle sue diverse sfaccettature dagli autori del volume.

Contemporary historiography holds that it was the practices and technologies underpinning both the Great Voyages and the ‘New Science’, as opposed to traditional book learning, which led to the major epistemic breakthroughs of early modernity. This study, however, returns to the importance of book-learning by exploring how cosmological and cosmographical ‘novelties’ were explained and presented in Renaissance texts, and discloses the ways in which the reports presented by sailors, astronomers, and scientists became not only credible but also deeply disturbing for scholars, preachers, and educated laymen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.

It is argued here that dialectic - the art of argumentation and reasoning - played a crucial role in articulating and popularizing new learning about the cosmos by providing the argumentative toolkit needed to define, discard, and authorize novelties. The debates that shaped them were not confined to learned circles; rather, they reached a wider audience via early modern vernacular genres such as the essay.

Focusing both on major figures such as Montaigne or Descartes, as well as on now-forgotten popularizers such as Belleforest and Binet, this book describes the deployment of dialectic as a means of articulating and disseminating, but also of containing, the disturbance generated by cosmological and cosmographical novelties in Renaissance France, whether for the lay reader in Court or Parliament, for the parishioner at Church, or for the student in the classroom.

Qu'est-ce qu'un couple dans le royaume des Francs du haut Moyen Âge ? Quelles en sont les différentes formes ? À quelle réalité sociale correspond-il ? Sur quelles bases s'organisent les relations entre les conjoints ? Comment le discours et les pratiques évoluent-elles entre le VIe et le XIIe siècle ? Pour y répondre, il a fallu croiser des sources de nature diversifiée (narratives, diplomatiques, législatives, morales, administratives, poétiques, épistolaires, iconographiques et archéologiques), analysées à la lumière des questionnements sociologiques, psychologiques, anthropologiques et philosophiques actuels. Il en ressort, même si la conjugalité constitue la norme dans tous les milieux sociaux, une grande diversité de situations et de parcours. Tous les couples n'étaient pas mariés, monogames, formant une communauté de résidence, d'affection et de solidarité hiérarchisée, comme pourrait le laisser supposer la documentation écrite, monopole d'une élite, le plus souvent ecclésiastique, qui tend à présenter comme des normes ce qui n'est qu'un idéal souhaité. Quatre chapitres le montrent en analysant successivement, la diversité des formes de conjugalité, les paramètres qui influent sur le couple et lui permettent ou non de se construire et de durer, sans jamais nier son identité, les éléments qui participent à la construction de la communauté conjugale et l’identifie comme telle, ainsi que la nature et les formes de relations entre les conjoints.

This study represents a new approach to the analysis of early modern court festivals, setting the question of identity at its heart. It explores identity as it was portrayed, constructed, and upheld through court festivals within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the coronation of Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, as King of Bohemia in 1619. Structured thematically, this detailed analysis touches on core themes of early modern European history including state formation, princely courts, gender, religion, science and the natural world, and cultural encounters. In doing so, it draws on, and speaks to, scholarly literature not only from different historical sub-disciplines but also from sociology and anthropology. Ultimately, Morris argues that these court festivals provided a flexible, albeit contested, rhetoric of identity, grounded in the performance of humanist virtue. Through the performed, material, and literary rhetoric of court festivals, the concept of nobility through virtue was reworked, refined, and given a new vocabulary within the German context. This was inextricably linked with politics in light of the reforms made to the Holy Roman Empire at the end of the fifteenth century, the confessional divisions of the sixteenth century, and the mounting tensions of the early seventeenth century which were to culminate in the Thirty Years War.