The Religious Field during the Long Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Introducing a thematic section, this article presents an overview and some of the theoretical considerations resulting from COST Action IS1301, an international research network devoted to the study of lay religious culture during the long fifteenth century. A particular aim of this network was to discuss new European narratives framing the important transformations of lay religious culture during the period c. 1350–1550—a complex historical process that is still often obscured by the competing older narratives of Reformation, humanism, and Renaissance which shape the historiographical heritage. To get beyond the “methodological nationalism” and “methodological modernism” inherent in older paradigms, the article suggests viewing the transformation of lay religious culture as a long-term process of cultural evolution. It closes with an overview of the most important aspects of this evolutionary process during the long fifteenth century.

The Historiography of Medieval Monasticism: Perspectives from Northern Europe

“…This is exemplified by the multiple "national" Reformation paradigms entangled with the different confessional versions. The German, English, or Czech narratives of Reformation relied on creating genealogies of "proto-Reformations" that required borrowings from other "nationalized" stories of proto-Protestant figures but re-telling them within a different national and linguistic framework (Corbellini and Steckel 2019). Northern-European Protestant perspectives in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century needed to accommodate within the narratives of its medieval history the seemingly alien church history including monastic history that was not part of the genealogy of Protestant narratives.…”

Theology, Martyrdom and Female Agency in Reformation Prague

“…This includes evaluating the ways in which women participated in religious reform but also the manner in which those same developments affected women. 5 By looking at three specific females within the Hussite movement in the post-medieval world, it is possible to expand our understanding of the ways in which women reflected and informed the impulses of Reformations that swept the religious worlds of early modern Europe bearing in mind there is no fundamental cultural change between the medieval period and the age of Reformation (Corbellini and Steckel 2019). These historiographical politics must be discarded.…”