Religions in Medieval Urban Europe (original) (raw)
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The post-medieval centuries witnessed dramatic transformations in both the physical and mental landscapes within which life was lived. These were landscapes in which, by any standard, religion played a vital role. Religious beliefs and identities were both unifying and divisive as marks of political allegiance and community membership and as deeply profound and meaningful elements of collective and individual mentalities. This period saw the fragmentation of the world of medieval Christendom as distinctive and vibrant Protestant and Catholic religious cultures were forged in the wake of the European Refor-mation. Across the continent new denominations, sects and religious groups emerged to challenge religious and political hegemony within European states. As a dramatic cultural transformation the Reformation was in many ways a conflict over the use and meaning of religious spaces and objects; accordingly, the physical religious landscape was transformed along with the cultural and ideological landscape with which it was intimately bound.
Medieval Religious, Religions, Religion
History Compass, 2012
This article sketches the most important shift in medieval religious history over the past few decades: the transition from ''church history'' to ''the history of religious culture.'' First, it surveys the field's expansion of ''the religious'' beyond a clerical elite to a broad demographic of the faithful, and its interest in devotion and lived experience in ways that have produced more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of Christian orthodoxy. Second, it sketches how the religions falling under the aegis of medieval religious history have increased from Latin Christianity only to Judaism, Islam, Greek Christianity, and even to forms of religiosity identified as pagan. Third, it argues that regardless of the field's many expansions and changes, scholars have tended not to make explicit the definitions of ''religion'' with which they work, and considers the ramifications and possible value of doing so.
From Contested Space to Sacred Topography Jews, Protestants, and Catholics in Reformation Cracow
Early Modern Toleration: New Approaches, 2023
Throughout the sixteenth and into the start of the seventeenth century, a time when England was satirically considered a "Hell of Horses […] and the Paradice of Weomen," 1 Poland was described as a paradise for Jews (para disus Judaeorum) and refuge for heretics (asylum haereticorum). 2 Indeed, in a Europe fraught with religious wars, Poland-in its "golden and silver age" 3accommodated a multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious mosaic that attracted members of persecuted denominations from outside the country and empowered the development of local religious groups. 4 The unification with Lithuania (1569) and the resulting territorial expansion from the Baltic Sea almost all the way up to the Black Sea coincided with economic prosperity as Poland became the "wheat barn of Europe" and experienced a cultural and intellectual boom. Concurrently, the aristocracy's increased power in relation to the church and monarchy led to the emergence of a "democracy of nobles," able to legislate limited religious pluralism. All these factors, along with a pronounced fear of religious war, resulted in the coexistence of Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Muslims, Jews, and Protestants of different denominations in sixteenth-century Poland, with minimal religious coercion from the state. 5 This situation encouraged the development of everyday practical toleration among neighbours of different religions or confessions and facilitated the development of a number of arrangements that allowed different ethnic or religious groups to share urban spaces. The shared churches of Catholics and Protestants, or of Lutherans and Calvinists, mosques in the outskirts of Vilna, multiple Jewish communities, and a multidimensional coexistence between the followers of various confessions were a source of Polish pride at the time and attracted the attention of foreign travellers and emissaries, such as the papal nuncio Niccolo Stoppio, who was astounded by the power of Protestants during his visit of Cracow in 1564: So powerful are the heretics, that they dare take arms and wreak havoc on the royal city. 6