The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion."
The significant changes in early modern German marriage practices included many unions that violated some taboo. That taboo could be theological and involve the marriage of monks and nuns, or refer to social misalliances as when commoners and princes (or princesses) wed. Equally transgressive were unions that crossed religious boundaries, such as marriages between Catholics and Protestants, those that violated ethnic or racial barriers, and those that broke kin-related rules. Taking as a point of departure Martin Luther's redefinition of marriage, the contributors to this volume spin out the multiple ways that the Reformers' attempts to simplify and clarify marriage affected education, philosophy, literature, high politics, diplomacy, and law. Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.
In a series of rebellions that took place in the small, impoverished Black Forest lordship of Hauenstein between 1725 and 1745, David Martin Luebke finds evidence for a new and more nuanced view of peasant action and discourse on power and community. In the rebellions called the Salpeter Wars on which Luebke bases his analysis, the peasants of Hauenstein all sought to curtail the expansion of centralizing bureaucratic powers that were eroding traditional local autonomies. They could not agree how best to resist and two factions emerged, the quarrels between them escalating finally into civil war