Sacred History Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World

by Van Liere, Katherine; Ditchfield, Simon; Louthan, Howard

• ISBN13: 9780199594795
• ISBN10: 0199594791
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Representing and distilling the work of leading scholars in the emerging field of Renaissance 'sacred history', these thirteen chapters consider how humanism, religious reform, national expansion, and other cultural trends influenced European writing about early Christian history from 1450 to 1650.

Author Biography

Katherine Van Liere is professor of history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Spain, and has published numerous articles on Renaissance humanism, education, and historiography. Her current research focuses on the historical writings of Ambrosio de Morales and Antonio Agustin.


Simon Ditchfield is reader in history at the University of York, England. He specialises in Roman Catholic history writing and uses of the past in early modern society (especially Italy). He is currently completing a history about the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion for the Oxford History of the Christian Church series to be published by OUP. His next project will be a study of the world history of the Society of Jesus by Daniello Bartoli (1608-85).

Howard Louthan is professor of history at the University of Florida. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern central Europe. His most recent book examines the Catholic Reformation in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Bohemia. His current research focuses on the Reformation in Poland.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Figures	p. xvii
List of Abbreviations	p. xix
List of Contributors	p. xxi
Bibliographical Note	p. xxiii
Church History in the Renaissance and Reformation
Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation	p. 3
Primitivism, Patristics, and Polemic in Protestant Visions of Early Christianity	p. 27
Cesare Baronio and the Roman Catholic Vision of the Early Church	p. 52
What Was Sacred History? (Mostly Roman) Catholic Uses of the Christian Past after Trent	p. 72
National History and Sacred History
The Germania illustrata, Humanist History, and the Christianization of Germany	p. 101
Renaissance Chroniclers and the Apostolic Origins of Spanish Christianity	p. 121
Imagining Christian Origins: Catholic Visions of a Holy Past in Central Europe	p. 145
Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins	p. 165
Reconstructing Irish Catholic History after the Reformation	p. 186
Uses of Sacred History in the Early Modem Catholic World
The Lives of the Saints in the French Renaissance c.1500-c.1650	p. 209
Doubting Thomas: The Apostle and the Portuguese Empire in Early Modern Asia	p. 231
Cultural History in the Catacombs: Early Christian Art and Macarius's Hagioglypta	p. 250
Scholarly Pilgrims: Antiquarian Visions of the Holy Land	p. 267
Bibliography	p. 285
Index	p. 325
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.