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The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations by Ulinka Rublack AZW

The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations covers the “long Reformation” period from ca.1400 to 1750 in its European and global dimensions. Thirty-eight contributors offer cutting-edge research. This is the most comprehensive handbook of Protestant Reformations ever published to investigate the beliefs, practices, and institutions which followed medieval reform movements and Martin Luther’s Reformation in Germany. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a particular focus as the central time for the initial developments of faiths which began to be called “Protestant.” Contributors explore the Protestant Reformations in relation to the Catholic Renewal before and after Trent and repeatedly point to areas of convergence among Protestants and Catholics. The handbook highlights the significance of cultural—historical approaches and the history of emotions to understand confessional identities. It also thoroughly engages with revisions of Max Weber's influential arguments about the impact of Protestantism on attitudes toward work, capital accumulation, and rational lifestyles. The handbook emphasizes the importance of radical traditions, especially from a global perspective. Previous handbook literature omits global Protestantism, and the influential confessionalization paradigm was entirely European-based. The point of incorporating global dimensions is that it demonstrates the vitality of varied traditions, which confronted very different institutional milieux, could significantly challenge political and cultural ideas of mainstream European faiths, and in turn reshape European Protestantisms. The handbook thus aims to be an indispensable guide to reshaping future discussions in the field, to recover the early history of Protestantism as part of our account about a history of the world.

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