If there was one person who could be said to light the touch-paper for the epochal transformation of European religion and culture that we now call the Reformation, it was Martin Luther. And Luther and his followers were to play a central role in the Protestant world that was to emerge from the Reformation process, both in Germany and the wider world. In all senses of the term, this religious pioneer was a huge figure in European history. Yet there is also the very uncomfortable but at the...

Accessible yet authoritative biography of the colorful character who instigated the Protestant ReformationMartin Luther, the Augustinian friar who set the Protestant Reformation in motion with his famous Ninety-Five Theses, was a man of extremes on many fronts. He was both hated and honored, both reviled as a heretic and lauded as a kind of second Christ. He was both a quiet, solitary reader and interpreter of the Bible and the first media-star of history, using the printing press ...

While the socio-economic and historical aspects of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) have been extensively documented and researched, the role of the VOC in visual culture and the arts has been relatively neglected. This authoritative volume addresses various aspects of cultural exchange between the Low Countries and Asia. Increased prosperity and the flood of imported goods from Asia had a huge influence on seventeenth-century Holland. To cite some examples: when the VOC spread its merch...

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors’ introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparabl...

Rudolf II: The Life and Legend of the Mad Emperor offers a fresh perspective on the Habsburg ruler, shedding new light on a reign often coloured by myths of madness. Contrary to popular belief, Rudolf was not a passive recluse but an engaged monarch, navigating the complexities of state affairs with a moderate hand amid turbulent times. By contextualizing his interests in astrology, alchemy and magic, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann offers new insights into Rudolf’s support for scientific...

Thomas Kaufmann, the leading European scholar of the Reformation, argues that the main motivations behind the Reformation rest in religion itself. The Reformation began far from Europe's traditional political, economic, and cultural power centres, and yet it threw the whole continent into turmoil. There has been intense speculation over the last century focusing on the political and social causes that lay at the root of this revolution. Thomas Kaufmann, one of the world's ...

An exploration of the 1525 German Peasants' War which emphasises the crucial role of media and the printing press in the conflict and its legacy.Why did German agrarian protests, normally very local or regional, all meld together into one vast uprising that became the 1525 'Peasants' War'? Thomas Kaufmann emphatically argues that the recent availability of printing, which created links between the various regions of revolt, led to the conflict distinguishing itself...

Based on real events of the French Resistance during World War II, Édith Thomas's stories explore how ordinary people respond to the extraordinary conditions of political occupation. The stories, first published under the title Contes d'Auxois (Auxois Stories) by an underground press in 1943, were written to oppose Vichy-Nazi propaganda and to offer encouragement to civilians who felt resigned to defeat.Whether lining up to wait for food, tuning in to a forbidden ...

Oslo Syndrome (in research still known as H63D Syndrome) is a worldwide health problem in the field of iron metabolism disorders. After scientists from all over the world joined together in 2019 to form the H63D Syndrome Consortium, the consensus paper "H63D Syndrome" was adopted at a meeting in Oslo in December 2019. On the occasion of the 2022 conference the syndrome was renamed Oslo Syndrome for clinical settings. It is available in bookshops for a symbolic price. Also free of charge di...

Combining seamless synthesis of original material with updated scholarship, The European Reformations 2nd edition, provides the most comprehensive and engaging textbook available on the origins and impacts of Europe's Reformations - and the consequences that continue to resonate today.A fully revised and comprehensive edition of this popular introduction to the Reformations of the sixteenth centuryIncludes new sections on the Catholic Reformation, ...

This groundbreaking comparative history of the early centuries of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland sets the development of each polity in the context of the central European region as a whole. Focusing on the origins of the realms and their development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the book concludes with the thirteenth century when significant changes in social and economic structures occurred. The book presents a series of thematic chapters on every aspect of the early history of the...

This introduction presents Martin Luther as historians now see him. Instead of singling him out as a modern hero, the book emphasizes the context in which Luther worked, the colleagues who supported him, and the opponents who adamantly opposed his agenda for change. Scott H. Hendrix explains the religious reformation and Luther's importance, without ignoring the political and cultural forces that led the reformation down paths Luther could neither foresee nor influence. This Very Short...