Reformation, Tolerance, and Heterodoxy in Early Modern Europe
Level:
Master's Course Status:
Elective CEU credits:
2 ECTS credits:
3 Academic year:
2011/2012 Semester:
Fall Start and end dates:
19 Sep 2011 - 9 Dec 2011 Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]:
Academic Program:
Master of Arts in Central European History Stream/Track/Specialization/Core Area:
Culture, Religion and Intellectual History in a Comparative Perspective CEU Instructor(s):
György Szőnyi Learning Outcomes:
The goal of the course is to make students aware of the double nature of early modern tolerance and heterodoxy. It would be a mistake to examine the above mentioned phenomena only as precursors of modernity (no matter how important these aspects are too); the course will also highlight the specific historical, cultural and religious contexts which make this period so familiar and at the same time so remote from us.
The learning outcome should consist of 1/ an accumulation of historical knowledge about the connections of political and social history and premodern/early modern ideology and religiosity; 2/ a clear insight into the cultural history of such concepts as church and sect, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, interconfessionalism and dissent, eirenism and toleration; 3/ a realization how the genesis of many modern concepts of civil rights and civil society were forged in the religious discourse of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Assessment :
The grade will be composed of three components: 1/ Participation in classes (30%); 2/ A formal in-class presentation (20%); 3/ A final essay (8-10 pages long with a minimum of 5 items of bibliography; a case study, analysing one of the source-texts mentioned/studied during the course). Full description:
TOPICS AND READINGS
1.
Definitions: church and sect, dissent and heresy, heterodoxy, interconfessionalism, eirenism and tolerance.
READINGS: Kamen, Introduction; Hillerbrand, "Introduction" in Kiraly; Grell, "Introduction". (reader) [pdf] [pdf] [pdf]
2.
The nature of humanism, the rhetorical tradition, and the idea of tolerance.
READINGS: Remer, "Introduction". (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Erasmus, man and works. (Ref: Remer, Lisa Jardin)
3.
Humanist discourse of tolerance. A case study: Thomas More's Utopia.
READINGS: More, Utopia. (reader) [pdf] [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Thomas More, man and works. (Ref: Fleisher, Spitz)
4.
Humanism, hermeticism and the Reuchlin affair about Judaism.
READINGS: Szőnyi, "The dark Offsprings..." (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Johannes Reuchlin and Hebrew Studies in the Renaissance.
5.
The Reformation: a new orthodoxy and its discontents.
READINGS: Castellio, Concerning heretics. (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Spiritualism and legal issues: Servet, Castellio and Acontius. (Ref Kamen, MacCulloch, Spitz)
6.
The Radical Reformation: Antitrinitarism and tolerance in East-central Europe.
READINGS: MacCulloch, 253-70; 340-44;457-64. (reader) [pdf] Optional: Balázs, 191-217. (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Anabaptism, the Calvin–Servet controversy. (Ref: Kamen, MacCulloch, Spitz, Tazbir)
7.
Renaissance magic, interconfessionalism, enthusiasm.
READINGS: Lodovico Lazzarelli, from Crater Hermetis; From John Dee's Spiritual Diaries. (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Guillaume Postel, career and thought (ref: Kuntz); John Dee, career and thought (ref: Szönyi, John Dee).
8.
The ambiguous spaces of tolerance: case studies of Elizabeth I's England and Rudolf II's Prague.
READINGS: A speech of Queen Elizabeth to a petition of Parliament (1576). (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: The story of the Anglican Church; Rudolf's cosmopolitan Prague. (Ref: MacCulloch, Spitz, Fučikova; Szőnyi, "Magical Humanism at the Court of Rudolf II". (reader) [pdf])
9.
Europe and the Ottoman world in the contexts of toleration and "othering".
READINGS: Erasmus, De bello turcico; Postel, The Concord of the World. (reader) [pdf] [pdf]
PRESENTATION: The Pax Ottomanica. (Ref: Kiraly)
10.
A case study of late humanist toleration: Jean Bodin's Heptaplomeres.
READINGS: Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven... (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Bodin, man and work. (Ref: Kuntz)
11.
Further developments in the 17th century. The English Revolution, Hobbes and Locke.
READINGS: Locke, Letter. (reader) [pdf]
PRESENTATION: Hobbes and Locke, careers and ideas. (Ref: Kamen, Remer)
12.
Round up, Q&A.
REFERENCES (items indicated as "Reader" will be available in PDF format)
Primary Texts
Bodin, Jean. Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime (Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis, 1595). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. (excerpts, reader)
Castellio, Sebastian. Concerning Heretics (). Tr. and ed. Roland H. Bainton. New York: Octagon Books, 1965. (excerpts, reader)
Dee, John. From the Spiritual Diaries. Ed. Meric casaubon, 1659. (excerpts, reader)
Elizabeth I. Collected Works. Ed. Leah S. Marcus et al. University of Chicago Press, 2000 (speech to Parliament, 1576, reader)
Erasmus of Rotterdam, De bello turcico. (excerpts, reader)
Lazzarelli, Lodovico. Crater hermetis. In Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn ed., Lodovico Lazzarelli: The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents. Tempe, Arizona: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. (excerpts, reader)
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration (1686). (reader)
More, Thomas. Utopia (1518). (reader)
Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate, 1485). (excerpts, reader)
Postel, Guillaume. The Concord of the World (De orbis terrae concordia, Basel: Oporinus, 1544). Introduction to the Zohar; De la république des Turcs (Poitiers, 1560). (excerpts, reader)
Scholarship
Balázs, Mihály. Early Transylvanian Antitrinitarianism (1566-1571). Baden-Baden: Editions Valentin Koerner (Bibliotheca Dissidentium, Scripta et studia 7), 1996. (reader)
––. "About a Copy of De falsa et vera unius Dei... (Additional data to the history of the English connections of the Antitrinitarians of Transylvania)." Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 47 (2003): 54-64.
Bejczy, István. "Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept." Journal of the History of Ideas 58.3 (1997): 365-84.
Black, Robert. "Humanism." In Christopher Allmand, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 7: 243-77. (CEULib, reader)
Cassirer, Ernst. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. (CEULib)
Fleisher, Martin. Radical Reform and Political Persuasion in the Life and Writings of Thomas More. Geneve: Droz, 1973. (CEULib)
Fučiková, Elizka; James Bradburn et al. ed. Rudolf II and Prague. The Court and the City. London / Prague: Thames & Hudson / Skira, 1997. (CEULib)
Green, V. H. H. The European Reformation. Stroud: Sutton, 1998. (CEULib)
Grell, Ole Peter and Bob Scribner ed. Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. New York: Cambrdige University Press, 1996. (CEULib)
Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. "French Free-Thinkers in the First Decades of the Edict of Nantes." In A. Levine ed. Early Modern Scepticism and the Origins of Toleration. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 77-101. (reader)
Jardin, Lisa. Erasmus: Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (CEULib)
Kamen, Henry. The Rise of Toleration. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. (CEULib)
Király, Béla K. ed. Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe. New York: Columbia University Press (East European Monographs 13), 1975. (CEULib)
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: the Classic, Scholastic and Humanic Strains. New York: Harper & Row, 1955. (CEULib; excerpts reader)
Kuntz, M. L. "The Concept of Toleration in the Colloquium Heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin" in Kuntz, Venice, Myth and Utopian Thought in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Ashgate, 1999, 125-144. (CEULib)
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. London: Penguin, 2004. (CEULib)
Ozment, Steven E. The Reformation in the Cities : the Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. (CEULib)
––. The Age of Reform (1250-1550): an Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. (CEULib)
Remer, Gary. Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1996. (CEULib;excerpts reader)
Ross, James Bruce, Mary Martin McLaughlin ed. The Portable Renaissance Reader. London: Penguin, 1968. (CEULib;excerpts reader)
Spitz, Lewis W. The Reformation: Basic Interpretations. Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1972 (CEULib).
Spitz, Lewis W. The Protestant Reformation, 1517-1559. New York: Harper & Row, 1987 (CEULib).
Szőnyi, György Endre. "Scientific and Magical Humanism at the Court of Rudolf II." In Elizka Fučiková, James Bradburn et al. (ed.), Rudolf II and Prague. The Court and the City. London / Prague: Thames & Hudson / Skira, 1997, 223-31. (CEULib, reader)
––. John Dee's Occultism. Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004 (Series in Western Esoterism). (CEULib)
––. "The Dark Offsprings of Humanism: Erasmus, Reuchlin, and the Magical Renaissance." In Marcell Sebök (ed.), Republic of Letters, Humanism, Humanities. Budapest: Collegium Budapest (Workshop Series 15), 2005, 107-25. (CEULib, reader)
Tazbir, Janusz. A State without Stakes. Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Warsaw: PIW, 1967.
Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1931). Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 1992. (CEULIb)
Voegelin, Eric. Renaissance and Reformation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. (CEULib)
Williams, George Hunston. The Radical Reformation (1962). Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth century Journal Publishers, 1992 (revised, enlarged, 3rd edition). (CEULib)
