This article builds on recent advances in sensory anthropology to examine the significance of smell in late medieval and early Reformation ritual. It arguesthat late medieval ritual reflected and reinforced the power of smell to affect senses of boundary demarcation and transition between bodies, the world, and the divine. By removing incense from their rituals, early Reformers challenged this...
“Did the Pastor Buy You a Drink?” Religious Choice, Clerical Persuasion, and Confessional ...
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In 1575 the men in the village of Goumoëns-la-ville voted to abolish the Mass and establish Reformed Christianity as the sole creed in their village. Agreements between the ruling Orte, Bern and Fribourg, devolved the determination of the village’s religious adhesion to the residents themselves. For years, both creeds had coexisted in the village and this arrangement became the status quo that...
The Rhetoric of Domestic Morality in Last Wills and Testaments in Sixteenth-Century Prague
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About a third of the last testaments of Prague citizens from 1517 to 1544 referred to testators’ ethical beliefs. As their European neighbors, Praguers valued a pragmatic, life-sustaining, household oriented system of ethics consisting of orderliness, diligence, cooperation and domestic solidarity. They made no claim to rest their ethics on transcendental or universal values. The citizens’...
The Conclaves of 1590 to 1592: An Electoral Crisis of the Early Modern Papacy?
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This article reconstructs the politics behind the four papal elections that took place between 1590 and 1592, an apparently unusual period during which the papacy seems to have been undergoing an electoral crisis. It argues, however, that the impulse to select weak and short-lived candidates was in fact a rational response to the unusually fraught political situation in Europe as the only way...
After Iconoclasm: Reconciliation and Resacralization in the Southern Netherlands, ca. 1566–85
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This article considers the institutional response to the Iconoclastic Fury and the iconoclasm of the early 1580s in the southern provinces of the Netherlands. Although the restoration of Catholicism is more often associated with the early seventeenth century, this article demonstrates that the reconstruction of churches and reestablishment of worship took place a generation earlier in the...