This book takes a new look at sacred music written in present-day central Germany during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), and in doing so reveals distinct connections between religious works and the historical and political contexts in which they emerged. As author Derek L. Stauff asserts, specific Lutheran biblical motets and sacred concertos engage with the war's events, people, and politics in more detailed and meaningful ways than previously imagined. Composers working in Saxony, like H...

Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang man...

From the author of the acclaimed biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, new perspectives on how Luther and others crafted his larger-than-life imageMartin Luther was a controversial figure during his lifetime, eliciting strong emotions in friends and enemies alike, and his outsized persona has left an indelible mark on the world today. Living I Was Your Plague explores how Luther carefully crafted his own image and how he has been portraye...

Worship is at the heart of the Christian faith. This applies equally to all denominations. For that reason it is all the more important that the ordering of worship and its place in the life of the church is regularly rewritten and reinterpreted. This volume—based on the third, completely revised German edition from 2013 by two of the foremost liturgical scholars in Germany—offers a contemporary, comprehensive introduction to the foundations for the study of liturgy today, one from which s...

Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music...

Emphasizes how relevant Luther's message is for Christians of all denominations. Luther's message of divine mercy was his answer to his own problems and to the questions of his time, as it is now to us in our times.

Online supplement,"Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund": full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website.Martin Mulsow’s seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment i...

In the last decades of the 17th century, the feast of Christmas in Lutheran Germany underwent a major transformation when theologians and local governments waged an early modern "war on Christmas," discouraging riotous pageants and carnivalesque rituals in favor of more personal and internalized expressions of piety. Christmas rituals, such as the "Heilig Christ" plays and the rocking of the child (Kindelwiegen) were abolished, and Christian devotion focused increasingly on the me...

This is the story of the most significant devotional author of the seventeenth century in his first full English language biography. Using previously unknown letters as a few of the resources, this story aims to recreate the theological, sometimes magical, and social worlds of Johann Arndt.Arndt was regarded by his peers and successive generations as either the most significant Reformer since Luther, or an uneducated and dangerous element within the Lutheran church. Later commentat...

August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncove...

An up-to-date portrait of a defining moment in the Christian story—its beginnings, worldview, and cultural significance.Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award of the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown CollegeAn Introduction to German Pietism provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualis...

C. Arnold Snyder's full-length biography and analysis of the thought of Michael Sattler, the noted Anabaptist leader, martyr, and author of The Schleitheim Articles. This book is another case study in Anabaptist origins, as well as a being a biographical study of Michael Sattler. It is particularly stimulating in breaking new ground around the Roman Catholic (Benedictine) roots of Swiss and South German Anabaptism. This study, therefore, constitutes a major advance in Anabaptist historiogr...