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Storing, Archiving, Organizing: The Changing Dynamics of Scholarly Information Management in Post-Reformation Zurich is a study of the Lectorium at the Zurich Grossmünster, the earliest of post-Reformation Swiss academies, initiated by the church reformer Huldrych Zwingli in 1523. This institution of higher education was planned in the wake of humanism and according to the demands of the reforming church. Scrutinizing the institutional archival records, Anja-Silvia Goeing shows how the lectorium’s teachers used practices of storing, archiving, and organizing to create an elaborate administrative structure to deal with students and to identify their own didactic and disciplinary methods. She finds techniques developing that we today would consider important to understand the history of information management and knowledge transfer.
The Swiss physician and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) was one of the most prominent scientists of the early modern period and wrote numerous important works. During the last two decades were discovered nearly 400 titles from his private library. They give an interesting insight into his interests and his sources. The present book contains not only an introduction and a catalogue of these books, but also inventories of the lost works as well as the still extant and lost manuscripts possessed by Gessner. They open the door to Gessner's study and to the intellectual world of a fascinating Renaissance scholar.
Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many books that the German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The early modern classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars' libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast cultural movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; the curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by renowned experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Juergen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer and Nancy Siraisi.
This edited collection brings national and religious narratives into conversation with each other, helping readers to formulate a more sophisticated comprehension of the social and cultural factors involved in the religious tolerance and intolerance that has taken place in Europe and western Asia, and continues today. Bringing together scholars from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and America this volume embodies an international collaboration of unusual range. Its comparative approach will be of interest to scholars of Religion and History, particularly those with an emphasis on interreligious relations and religious tolerance.
This book provides the first analysis of the development of Erasmus’ historical methodology and its impact on Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians. Combining a biography of Erasmus with the larger theological debates and the intellectual history of his time, Christine Christ-von Wedel reveals many of previously unexplored influences on Erasmus, as well as his influences on his contemporaries. Erasmus of Rotterdam is a revised and considerably enlarged translation of Christ-von Wedel’s well-received 2003 study, originally published in German. Observing the influence of classical, biblical, patristic, scholastic, and late medieval vernacular and popular sources on Erasmus’ writing, the author provides comparisons with theologians Agrippa, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Eck, Luther, and Zwingli to demonstrate not only the singularity of Erasmus’ intellect, but also the enormous impact he had on the Reformation. The result is a lively picture of the man and his time, in which Erasmus emerges as both a devout Christian and a critical seeker of truth who conceded the ambiguities that he could not resolve.
Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer...
A Companion to the Swiss Reformation describes the course of the Protestant Reformation in the Swiss Confederation over the course of the sixteenth century. Its essays examine the successes as well as the failures of the reformation movement, considering not only the institutional churches but also the spread of Anabaptism. The volume highlights the different form that the Reformation took among the members of the Confederation and its allied territories, and it describes the political, social and cultural consequences of the Reformation for the Confederation as a whole. Contributors are: Irena Backus, Jan-Andrea Bernhard, Amy Nelson Burnett, Michael W. Bruening, Erich Bryner, Emidio Campi, Bruce Gordon, Kaspar von Greyerz, Sundar Henny, Karin Maag, Thomas Maissen, Regula Schmid-Keeling, Martin Sallmann, and Andrea Strübind.
In these lectures, C. Arnold Snyder offers an important historical study on the subject of religious toleration in the period of the Reformation, breaking new ground based on his own careful reading of Lutheran and Swiss Anabaptist sources. Snyder sheds new light on the nature of Swiss Anabaptism in the latter half of the sixteenth century, demonstrating that by the end of the century, the Anabaptists of Switzerland were no longer running from “the world” but actively engaging those in power and courageously lobbying for religious toleration. This historical inquiry also provides an occasion for contemporary reflection on faith and toleration today, in the context of rising social, political and religious tensions.
In Scholars in Action, an international group of 40 authors open up new perspectives on the eighteenth-century culture of knowledge, with a particular focus on scholars and their various practices.
Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter (1506–1557), humanist and privy councillor to popes and kings, has remained an enigmatic figure among Christian Hebraists whose views were little understood. This study leverages Widmanstetter's remarkable collection consisting of hundreds of Jewish manuscripts and printed books, most of which survive to this day. Explore in the first half the story of Jewish book production and collecting in sixteenth-century Europe through Widmanstetter's book acquisitions, librarianship, and correspondence. Delve into his unique perspective on Jewish literature and Kabbalah as the latter half of the study contextualizes the marginal notes in his library with his published works.