Friars, Nobles and Burghers – Sermons, Images and Prints

Studies of Culture and Society in Early-Modern Europe - In Memoriam István György Tóth
ISBN: 
978-963-9776-67-8
cloth
$111.00 / €95.00 / £90.00
Publication date: 
2010
490 pages

The essays in this volume reflect the broader interpretation of culture as a system of shared meanings, values, attitudes and symbolic forms in any sphere of human life. Although thematically diverse, all these studies adhere to the concept of what is sometimes termed the new cultural history or socio-cultural history.

The work opens with a cluster of methodological and historiographical reflections. Topics covered by the thematic sections include confessional and religious life in early modern Europe, symbolism and representation, strife and accommodation among different denominations compelled to live in a common space, order and hierarchy, cracks in the machinery of authority and the threat of disintegration as well as the history of alphabetization, literacy and reading and writing practices.

This book pays tribute to István György Tóth (1956–2005), Head of the Department of Early-Modern History at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of History at Central European University (both in Budapest), until his premature death in 2005. 

László Kontler
Farewell to István György Tóth

Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler
Foreword

I. Approaches and Historiographical Issues

Heinz Schilling
The Religious Borderlines of the Confessionalization and Secularisation of European Culture and Societies: Results and Perspectives of My Cooperation with István György Tóth

Charles Kecskeméti
The Value of Foreign Sources for the Understanding of National History

Dubravko Lovrenović
Hungary and Bosnia 1387–1463: Between Stereotypes and New Interpretations

II. Confessional and Religious Life

II.1. Confessional Identities

Maria Crăciun
Eucharistic Iconography and the Confessional Identity of the Saxon Community in Early Modern Transylvania

Márta Fata
“Wider den grausamen Erbfeind deß Christlichen Nahmens”: Lutheran Military Chaplains from Württemberg in the Hungarian Wars against the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Eva Kowalská
The Ambivalence of Exile: Hungarian Exiles in Germany in the Seventeenth Century

Georg B. Michels
The Counter-Reformation and the 1672 Kuruc Revolt

II.2. Symbol and Representation

Radmila Pavlíčková
A Funeral and a Political Pamphlet: The Funeral Sermon for Archbishop Johann Schweikard of Mainz in 1626

Martin Elbel
The Making of a Perfect Friar: Habit and Reform in the Franciscan Tradition

II.3. Strife and Accommodation

Antonín Kalous
The Politics of Church Unification: Efforts to Reunify the Utraquists and Rome in the 1520s

Daniel Tollet
Some Reflections on Uniatism in the Confederation of Poland and Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century

II.4. Religion, Empire and Ideology

Ronnie Po-chia Hsia
The Political Theologies of Empires: Jesuit Missionaries between Counter-Reformation Europe and the Chinese Empire

Alfred J. Rieber
Conversion as an Instrument of Imperial Rule: The Case of the Russian Empire

III. Society and Culture

III.1. Order, Hierarchy and Cultural Capital

Joachim Bahlcke
The “Bishops of the Hungarian Crown”: A Case Study in the Ecclesiastical, Social and Constitutional History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in South-Eastern Europe

Emese Bálint
Levels of Group Loyalty at the Turn of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Kolozsvár in the Rákóczi War of Independence

Anna Maria Rao
Comparing the Enlightenment: Men of Letters and the Intellectual Milieu in Eighteenth-Century Naples

III.2. Disorder, Discipline and Denunciation

Cornel Zwierlein
Burning Germany: Cities on Fire, Fire Fighting and Fire Insurance in Early Modern Germany

Kateryna Dysa
Orthodox Demonology and the Perception of Witchcraft in Early Modern Ukraine

Blanka Szeghyová
Punishment in Sixteenth Century Hungarian Towns

III.3. Word and Print, Education and Literacy

Zoran Velagić
Reading Aloud: Between Oral and Literate Communication

Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih)
A Virgin Deserving Paradise or a Whore Deserving Poison: Manuscript Tradition and Printed Books in Ottoman Turkish Society

Victor Karady
Education and Denominations in Transdanubia (1910)

Register of Geographic Names

István György Tóth’s Bibliography

List of Contributors