A Companion to the Reformation World

This volume brings together 29 new essays by leading international scholars, to provide an inclusive overview of recent work in Reformation history.

• Presents Catholic Renewal as a continuum of the Protestant Reformation.
• Examines Reformation in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.
• Takes a broad, inclusive approach – covering both traditional topics and cutting-edge areas of debate.

List of Contributors viii

Introduction: The Reformation and its Worlds xii
R. Po-chia Hsia

Part I On the Eve of the Reformation

1 Dissent and Heresy 3
Euan Cameron

2 Society and Piety 22
Larissa Taylor

Part II The Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire

3 Martin Luther and the German Nation 39
Robert Kolb

4 The Peasants’ War 56
Tom Scott

5 Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation 70
Hans-Jürgen Goertz

6 The Reformation in German-Speaking Switzerland 86
Kaspar von Greyerz

Part III The European Reformation

7 Calvin and Geneva 105
Robert M. Kingdon

8 Reform in the Low Countries 118
Joke Spaans

9 The Reformation in England to 1603 135
Christopher Haigh

10 The Religious Wars in France 150
Barbara B. Diefendorf

11 The Italian Reformation 169
Massimo Firpo

12 The Reformation in Bohemia and Poland 185
James R. Palmitessa

13 Old and New Faith in Hungary, Turkish Hungary, and Transylvania 205
István György Tóth

Part IV Catholic Renewal and Confessional Struggles

14 The Society of Jesus 223
John O’Malley

15 Female Religious Orders 237
Amy E. Leonard

16 The Inquisition 255
William Monter

17 The Thirty Years’ War 272
Johannes Burkhardt

18 Spain and Portugal 291
José Pedro Paiva

19 Parish Communities, Civil War, and Religious Conflict in England 311
Dan Beaver

Part V Christian Europe and the World

20 Religion and the Church in Early Latin America 335
Kevin Terraciano

21 Compromise: India 353
Ines G. Županov

22 Promise: China 375
R. Po-chia Hsia

23 A Mission Interrupted: Japan 393
Michael Cooper

Part VI Structures of the Reformation World

24 The New Parish 411
Bruce Gordon

25 Making Peace 426
Olivier Christin

26 Magic and Witchcraft 440
James A. Sharpe

27 Martyrs and Saints 455
Brad S. Gregory

28 Jews in a Divided Christendom 471
Miriam Bodian

29 Coexistence, Conflict, and the Practice of Toleration 486
Benjamin J. Kaplan

Bibliography 506

Index 553

"This volume of essays can greatly help teachers and students alike read more deeply in a variety of topics in the Reformation era, pick up various lines of research, and often get a good grasp of some current lines of questioning and scholarship in the academy." Teaching Theology and Religion

"This volume offers an interesting and thought-provoking overview ... and is equally useful as a teaching aid and as a general reference work on the Reformation." Sehepunkte

“The various contributors skilfully weave past and current research into their critical accounts, always trying their best to keep their texts accessible to the general reader and the scholar alike … The editor is to be commended for his success in bringing together a cohort of such experts and for viewing the world of the Reformation from so many different angles, extending the historical range far into the late seventeenth century, which allows the reader to comprehend the long-term effects of the Reform movement.”
Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Journal of Early Modern Studies

“The quality of the essays is uniformly and consistently high … .Overall, [this book] should prove to be of considerable value.” H-Net Reviews

“Professor Po-chia Hsia, well known as the author of many books and articles on the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the history of anti-Semitism, assembled a team of twenty-eight scholars from Europe,
America and Asia to join him in writing contributions to this volume. The volume contains several very useful overviews of countries or areas about which relatively little has been published in English.” English Historical Review

R. Po-chia Hsia is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. He previously taught at Columbia, Cornell, University of Massachusetts, and New York University. He has received fellowships from the United States and Germany, and has held visiting professorships and research positions in Germany and the Netherlands. Elected in 2000 to the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), he is currently researching the history of Sino-European relations from the 16th to the 18th centuries. His books include Society and Religion in Munster 1535–1618 (1984), Social Discipline in the Reformation. Central Europe 1550–1750 (1989), and The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (1998).

This volume brings together 29 new essays by leading international scholars, to provide an inclusive overview of recent work in Reformation history. The articles examine the Reformation in its broadest definition, presenting the Catholic Renewal as a continuum of the Protestant Reformation. The essays span the late fifteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century and they focus on the workings of religious reform in all areas of Latin Christendom and beyond to include Eastern as well as Western Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Established topics are examined alongside new areas of study, incorporating the latest scholarship and conceptual debates to provide a wide-ranging survey of the state of contemporary Reformation historiography. The book will be the ideal reference for students and professional historians interested in understanding the current concerns and future direction of this field.