Les appartenances religieuses. Confessions, sensibilités et particularismes dans l'histoire du Sud-Ouest (original) (raw)
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The path of Protestant minorities towards religious tolerance during the Catholic Reformation was a very long and complex process. From the first third of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century, Bohemian Protestants as well as French Huguenots endeavoured to maintain their religious alterity and to obtain the equality of their Church. As they were deprived of their clergy and their worship was forbidden, the persecuted Protestants could preserve their spiritual tradition only through illegal and extra-ecclesiastic structures. Their attempt to preserve their hidden existence generated the inevitable loss of the dogmatic purity and thus caused misunderstanding and even serious conflicts with the Protestant authorities in exile. Especially the lay leaders of these secret Evangelical communities, strong personalities often perceived as the ‘enlightened’, or as the select few on the road to God, gave rise to a lack of trust and critical reactions. Their specific doctrinal beliefs, leading rather often to prophetic movements, turned out to be the only possible solution in the context of the continuous religious persecution in both states. While, at the end of the 18th century, thanks to the influence of Enlightenment discourse, the French Huguenots endeavoured to participate actively in the civic life of whole society, the Protestant minority in Bohemain lands still stuck to by its exclusiveness, blocking therefore its social integration.
The culminating confessional rivalries in the early 17th century provided fertile ground in much of Europe, especially Central Europe, for visions of the imminent End of the World and Christ’s Second Coming. This paper offers a new perspective for the well-known topic and compares the eschatological visions in the 17th and 18th centuries of the Bohemian non-Catholics and emigrants on the one hand and the secret Huguenots on the other. While the belligerent apocalyptic visions in the Bohemian environment to the end of the 18th century saw a turning point and an opportunity to overthrow the Antichrist in the imminent coming of an allied Protestant ruler destined by God, the French Protestant prophecies appealed almost exclusively to the glory of Christ and his rule on Earth. Despite signifi cant diff erences in the religious practice and historical contexts of the two cases, we observe not only very similar physical manifestations in the prophets’ behaviour but also, thanks to these ideas, a renewal of the declining piety of the believers and the reactivation of the underground religious movement. In both environments the apocalyptic visions have been heavily criticized by legal ecclesiastical authorities in exile. Disciplinary interventions against these heterodox ideas had however a completely diff erent result, playing a signifi cant role in the process of legalization of Protestant worship at the end of the period in question.
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2003
Research into the life and thought of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64)-philosopher, theologian, canon lawyer, cardinal and reformer-has experienced resurgence in the United States, thanks especially to the American Cusanus Society whose conferences have led to the publication of this book and two predecessors, the first of their kind in English. The dedication of the current volume to three distinguished Renaissance scholars indicates the wide scope of the society's appeal : it has attracted more than those who specialise in some particular aspect of the cardinal's thought, probably because he represents an alternative to late medieval scholasticism and nominalism. At the same time, the editors have invited younger scholars to participate along with those who have established reputations, such as Bernard McGinn, Louis Dupré and Wilhelm Dupré. The present volume contains thirteen essays that cover three general topics. The first section, on context, interprets the subject in a broad sense, and includes two chapters on metaphysical issues : Wilhelm Dupré on spirit and mind in Cusanus and Louis Dupré on the cardinal's theory of religious symbols. A wider historical context engages Dennis Martin who writes on the Carthusians and late medieval spirituality. Cusanus' early life as a canon lawyer is not forgotten, however, as is demonstrated in Thomas Morrissey's article on 'Canonists in crisis ' during the fifteenth-century reform councils. The second section takes us into still fairly uncharted territory with three articles on Nicholas's sermons: Lawrence Hundersmarck and Thomas Izbicki on some of the early sermons ; Walter Euler on the role of Christ in sermons from the cardinal's visitation to Brixen ; and Clyde Lee Miller on the presence of Eckhart's thought in a sermon from 1456.
German History, 1999
The idea that 'confessionalization' provides a decisive analytic key to understanding post-Reformation Germany has taken a central role in the burgeoning literature on the subject that has appeared during the last two decades. Formulated most coherently by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, the confessionalization paradigm provides a coherent perspective on the social, political and cultural forces that shaped central Europe during the century after the Reformation, reuniting the previously disparate historiographies of Lutheran, Reformed and Catholic Germany under the single umbrella of neo-Weberian modernization of state, society, and individual. 1 The success of Schilling and Reinhard's model rests on its sophistication in several different areas. Methodologically, it takes account of the best recent social history without jettisoning the painstaking accumulation of political and institutional history, it also provides a coherent account of similar tendencies found in all the confessional