Men, women, civil rulers, and religious leaders of the Renaissance and Reformation era were passionately concerned about education at all levels. Catholics and Protestants inherited late medieval universities and monastic order studia. Some civil and religious leaders on both sides of the religious divide found them wanting and created new institutions to teach theology. This survey will summarize the position of theology in institutions of higher learning. And it will describe the massive Catholic and Protestant efforts to teach the fundamental beliefs and doctrines of Christianity to the laity through catechesis.

In 1521 Martin Luther spent a tense and frustrating year in the Wartburg Castle. Five years previously he had been virtually unknown outside the narrow circle of his colleagues in the German Congregation of the Augustinian Hermits order. Now he was one of the most notorious men in Germany, a condemned heretic and a German cause célèbre. His incarceration in the Wartburg came immediately after his appearance at the German Imperial Diet, an interview forced on a reluctant emperor by the German princes. Now he was a fugitive, an outlaw, living under the protection of his own ruler, the elector of Saxony, who had his own reasons not to surrender Luther for punishment for his heresies.

In order to tell the literary history of “progressive liberalism” in the twentieth-century American novel, this chapter traces the career of the word “liberalism” from progressivism’s synonym during the Progressive Era to its antonym ever since the Cold War. This conceptual history has underwritten not only the history of American political thought, but also that of the American novel in the twentieth century. It was in the literary imagination – from the realist and, even more crucially, the naturalist novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the multicultural novel of the late twentieth century – that the changing meanings of “progressive” and “liberal” were developed and tested. By the same token, these political categories provided a vocabulary for politically placing and adjudicating individual works and even whole genres and literary developments – efforts that became increasingly central to literary studies as the discipline became self-consciously politicized. In particular, the chapter pays attention to canonical novels by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison.

Faced with the challenge of defending the orthodoxy of the Evangelical Reformation against attacks from the Catholic Church, the early Reformers tended to regard all other competing groups as an undifferentiated threat, generally under the heading of Schwärmerei (fanatics). In their eyes these movements were dangerously subjective and seditious – a threat to both the Reformation cause and to good public order. Thus, in his 1528 tract Von der Widertauffe Martin Luther described his opponents as “wild-eyed fanatics,” bent on destroying godly order in church and society. Two years later Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon depicted them as “angels of the devil” whose only interest was to sow seeds of confusion and division.

In recent decades the historiographical landscape of the Reformation in the British Isles has witnessed a growing concern for the international context within which confessional identities, whether Protestant or Catholic, were formed.1 This is in no small part due to a generation of scholarship on the English church, which overturned the “myth” of the English Reformation as an exceptional via media between Geneva and Rome. This myth, a descendant of polemically charged histories of the late nineteenth century, contrasted a conservative Anglicanism, only minimally influenced by Protestantism, with Puritanism, a radical and foreign importation of Calvinism onto English soil.

The history of the faculty of theology of Paris1 cannot be separated from the history of the university as a whole, nor from other factors such as the city of Paris, its bishop, the pope, and the king. Its schools had an episcopal character, that is, they were associations of masters who were obliged to accept a chancellor as commissarius Papae. The pope allowed the schools to become a universitas, that is to say, he granted it the right to confer the licentia ubique docendi, and thus its degrees had universal authority.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning work of feminist science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, from the standpoint of a Hegelian understanding of the politics of recognition. It identifies three approaches to the politics of recognition, associated with the ideas of the politics of difference, the politics of identity, and the politics of identity-and-difference. The first is based on the notion of order, hierarchy status, and relationships between those who consider themselves to be unequals. The second is based on the notion of dialogue and communication between those who consider themselves to be equals. It sets aside all differences as being morally irrelevant. As such, it is associated with the notion of strong cosmopolitanism. The third attaches importance to both the similarities and the differences that exist between individuals. Le Guin’s commitment to feminism in the novel is sometimes associated with the second of these approaches. She is thought to be a strong cosmopolitan thinker. The chapter argues that Le Guin is in fact an advocate of the third approach. She is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker.

Moving from the more explicitly political fiction of the 1930s and 1940s to the critiques of neoliberalism that emerged at the end of the century, this chapter traces how American realist writers engaged with the political questions that challenged and transformed the United States in the twentieth century. Despite realism’s association with progressive politics during the first half of the century, this chapter explores how American writers did not present a unified political voice; the views expressed in realistic fiction were as wide-ranging as the writers who produced them. The central part of this chapter considers how midcentury writers – a group that includes Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Richard Yates – embraced new forms of realism to engage with and critique the shifting political realities of American life. The chapter concludes by exploring how Chang-rae Lee and Jonathan Franzen employed realism as way of chronicling the questions and challenges that the nation faced at the end of the millennium.

The Reformation began, and arguably ended, as the work of learned theologians. Yet, for a brief period of time, it gave unprecedented opportunity to uneducated lay people to voice their theological opinions publicly, and the echoes of this activity continued through much of the long Reformation.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.

One cannot write a history of theology1 without involving spiritual motives and concepts as constitutive impulses (principia) that have influenced and propelled the progress of history. Therefore, a history of theology does not need to be a classical history of ideas2 and may not exclude from its consideration historical facts, contexts, and human interests. It will instead always attempt to understand the historical rationality, the “meaning,” and relevance of theological concepts and to appreciate them as motives of the historical actors.

This chapter considers the theologians and clergy of the Reformation period, asking about their social background, and how this changed during the period and between confessions; how and where they were educated; and their social status. It begins by discussing the situation of clergy in the medieval church, and tracing the way that this changed in response to the Council of Trent’s decree introducing seminaries. It then turns to Protestant theologians in the German territories and Switzerland, exploring the ways in which their social backgrounds and education differed from that of Catholic clergy. Finally, it discusses the effect of the Reformation on the theological education of women, and offers a brief consideration of the social milieu of the leaders and preachers in radical and, later, dissenting groups.

Most histories of Reformation-era theology have been organized either by theologian or by subject. Both approaches follow a straightforward logic, but they also have limitations, and these have become more evident as the field has expanded and become more complex. Works that treat theology as products of individual minds tend to overlook the role of dialogue and collaboration, mutual influences, and academic exchange in the generation of ideas. That is especially problematic for an era that was shaped by the emergence of new religious communities and confessional identities, powerful currents of polemic and controversy, and strategies for conflict resolution – none of which are given adequate account by viewing individual theologians in isolation. Organizing a history of theology by subject, that is, according to a list of prominent theological topics, solves some of the problems of the first approach but introduces a different set of deficits.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw significant changes in Roman canon law. The libri legales that were taught in the law schools and used in the courts had been compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After the first half of the fourteenth century popes no longer attempted to shape papal law. After the middle of the fourteenth century the bishops of Rome did not promulgate any more collections of papal court decisions (decretals). They left the development of canonical jurisprudence to the jurists. Together with the Justinian codification of Roman law these libri legales formed the “required books” for every European law-school class.1