Arguably the single most important element in Abrahamic cross-confessional relations has been an ongoing mutual interest in perennial spiritual and ethical exemplars of one another’s communities. Ranging from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Crossing Confessional Boundaries explores the complex roles played by saints, sages, and Friends of God in the communal and intercommunal lives of Christians, Muslims, and Jews across the Mediterranean world, from Spain and North Africa to the Middle East to the Balkans. By examining these stories in their broad institutional, social, and cultural contexts, Crossing Confessional Boundaries reveals unique theological insights into the interlocking histories of the Abrahamic faiths.

This book is an examination of the uneasy alliance of two confessions, Lutheran and Catholic, at the prominent seventeenth-century court of Dresden, and the implications of this alliance for the repertoire of sacred art music cultivated there, an influential repertoire that has received only scant attention from scholars.

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history. In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.

The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.

Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.

The chapters in this volume contribute to recent scholarship exploring the reform of worship as a central feature of Protestant communities at their inception and through the ages. Case studies ranging from sixteenth-century Geneva and its environs to the early modern Netherlands and South Asia to nineteenth-century America provide a corrective to traditional depictions of Reformed worship as a static, sober, interior, and largely individual experience focused on the sermon. The key moments in the broad stream of Reformed worship traditions analysed by an international team of experts yield collectively an image of the adaptive and negotiated character of worship attitudes and practices over time and in varied cultural settings. The contributions examine the phenomenon of worship in broadly construed ways and from angles ranging from ritual studies, liturgical innovation, material culture, and social impact. A second »red thread« running through the volume concerns the material, sensory, emotional, and experiential dimensions of Reformed religious culture. Worship emerges as both a site of conflict and renewal in Reformed traditions, inspiring not only confrontations and debates but also fruitful engagements that stimulated and continue to invite reflection on this critical category of Reformed faith traditions, self-understandings, and cultural impact.

In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.

In Artistic Disobedience Claudio Bacciagaluppi shows how music practice was an occasion for cross-confessional contacts in 17th- and 18th-century Switzerland, implying religious toleration. The difference between public and private performing contexts, each with a distinct repertoire, appears to be of paramount importance. Confessional barriers were overcome in an individual, private perspective. Converted musicians provide striking examples. Also, book trade was often cross-confessional. Music by Catholic (but also Lutheran) composers was diffused in Reformed territories mainly in the private music societies of Swiss German towns (collegia musica). The political and pietist influences in the Zurich and Winterthur music societies encouraged forms of communication that are among the acknowledged common roots of European Enlightenment.

Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are all too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period. This book is about the history of Islam from the perspective of female social agents. It argues that irrespective of their religious affiliation, women possessed crucial means for affecting or hindering religious changes, not only in the form of religious conversion, but also in the adoption of practices and the delineation of communal boundaries. Its focus on the role and significance of female power in moments of religious change within family households offers a historical angle that has hitherto been relatively absent from modern scholarship. Rather than locating signs of female autonomy or authority in the political, intellectual, religious, or economic spheres, Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East is concerned with the capacity of women to affect religious communal affiliations thanks to their kinship ties.

Women Reformers of Early Modern Europe provides an expansive view of women negotiating their faith, voice, and agency in the religious and cultural scene of the sixteenth-century reformations. Women from different geographic contexts (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, and Scandinavia) and from a broad spectrum of vocations and social standings are highlighted along with examples of their original writings in English translation (in some cases brand new). An international, interdisciplinary cohort of over thirty scholars provide cutting-edge scholarship on women, religion, and gender in the sixteenth-century reformation context. Chapters interpret historical sources relevant to the women in question and provide original material for a deeper understanding of each woman's specific negotiations about her faith and religious preferences, as well as about her specific options--as a woman. Most of the women in the book left a written record, providing a valuable window into women's spirituality and theology. Gender questions are engaged throughout the chapters that provide irrefutable evidence of women's essential roles in the reception and implementation of the Protestant confessions. An important voice comes from women who defended their right to profess Catholic faith. Thematic articles enhance the analysis of the roles, experiences, and contributions of individual women in different contexts and positions vis-à-vis reformation teachings. Women stand out as writers, theologians, historians, biblical interpreters, publishers, hymnwriters, rulers, pastoral care givers, defenders of justice, "heretics," rebels, midwives, mothers, and friends. The tone of the volume is scholarly but invites a broad spectrum of readers who have varying levels of background knowledge. It is especially suitable as a textbook or as a reference guide in different disciplines (reformation studies, church history, theological history, gender scholarship, early modern and sixteenth-century studies; and language studies).