Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The travail of tolerance: containing chaos in early modern Europe
- 3 Preconditions of tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Germany
- 4 Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565
- 5 Un roi, une loi, deux fois: parameters for the history of Catholic-Reformed co-existence in France, 1555–1685
- 6 Confession, conscience and honour: the limits of magisterial tolerance in sixteenth-century Strassburg
- 7 One Reformation or many? Protestant identities in the later Reformation in Germany
- 8 Toleration in the early Swiss Reformation: the art and politics of Niklaus Manuel of Berne
- 9 Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Basle
- 10 Exile and tolerance
- 11 The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620
- 12 Archbishop Cranmer: concord and tolerance in a changing Church
- 13 Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan revolution
- 14 The question of tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia in the age of the Reformation
- 15 Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Hungary
- 16 Protestant confessionalisation in the towns of Royal Prussia and the practice of religious toleration in Poland-Lithuania
- Index
4 - Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The travail of tolerance: containing chaos in early modern Europe
- 3 Preconditions of tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Germany
- 4 Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565
- 5 Un roi, une loi, deux fois: parameters for the history of Catholic-Reformed co-existence in France, 1555–1685
- 6 Confession, conscience and honour: the limits of magisterial tolerance in sixteenth-century Strassburg
- 7 One Reformation or many? Protestant identities in the later Reformation in Germany
- 8 Toleration in the early Swiss Reformation: the art and politics of Niklaus Manuel of Berne
- 9 Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Basle
- 10 Exile and tolerance
- 11 The politics of toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620
- 12 Archbishop Cranmer: concord and tolerance in a changing Church
- 13 Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan revolution
- 14 The question of tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia in the age of the Reformation
- 15 Tolerance and intolerance in sixteenth-century Hungary
- 16 Protestant confessionalisation in the towns of Royal Prussia and the practice of religious toleration in Poland-Lithuania
- Index
Summary
To the best of my knowledge, no general synthesis of trials and executions for heresy in Reformation Europe has ever been attempted. We are all aware that executions for heresy occurred throughout western Europe after Luther's successful defiance of papal authority in December 1520. We hear vague reports of massive executions of Anabaptists in the aftermath of the German Peasants' War, and again after the collapse of the New Jerusalem at Münster. And the dreary tale of religious persecution continues. In Mediterranean Europe, a nascent Protestant movement was snuffed out by organised repression from the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. In France and the Low Countries, we hear many reports about executions of Huguenots and about the vast havoc wrought by Alva's ‘Council of Blood’. Englishmen remember the persecutions under Mary Tudor. But nobody has tried to measure overall religious persecution in Reformation Europe (not forgetting that early Protestant governments also put several people to death for heresy). Just how bad was it? Should Reformation Europe be considered as the zenith of R. I. Moore's ‘Persecuting Society’?
The obstacles standing in the way of a provisional census of heresy executions in Reformation Europe are considerable; but enough evidence remains to permit some fairly precise estimates of both the timing and the geography of heresy prosecutions after Luther defied papal authority, and to offer at least one major provisional hypothesis about the institutional dynamics of these executions. An investigator of heresy executions in sixteenth-century Europe possesses the unusual advantage of having documentation available from the persecuted as well as from the persecutors.
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- Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation , pp. 48 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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