Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

28 results

Page 1 of 2

Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800
  • Edited by Jesse Spohnholz, Gary K. Waite
  • Published by:
    Pickering & Chatto
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
  • Exile was a central feature of society throughout the early modern world. Political and religious disputes meant hundreds of thousands of people directly experienced exile either as a victim, a perpetrator or as a host to refugees. The impact of exile was wide-ranging, affecting religious identity, political institutions, economic welfare, charitable systems and gender roles in cities and towns across Europe. The contributors to this volume see exile as a critical framework for analysing and understanding the period, showing how the experience of exile had a profound effect on the way that individuals understood themselves and the world around them.

  • 11 - Conversos and Spiritualists in Spain and the Netherlands: The Experience of Inner Exile, c. 1540–1620

  • from Part III - The Memory of Exile
  • Edited by Jesse Spohnholz, Washington State University, Gary K. Waite, University of New Brunswick
  • Book:
    Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800
    Published by:
    Pickering & Chatto
    Published online:
    05 December 2014, pp 157-170

  • Summary

    The Reformation movements divided Christian Europe into competing and often warring denominational factions. Defining one's religious affiliation therefore became even more important a task than during the era of the medieval inquisition. In the pre-Reformation era, Catholic preachers and inquisitors had spread anxiety about heretics and blasphemers drawing down divine retribution in plagues or catastrophes, while inquisitions and judicial action proved fairly effective in suppressing most heretical movements across Europe by 1500. However, not all dissidents had given up their unorthodox beliefs; in many cases they had learned only to be very cautious in expressing them publicly, some following the example of Nicodemus, the disciple of Jesus who kept his affiliation secret.

    Concealment of heterodox beliefs had also been suspected of the Lower Rhine mystics and especially of the supposed members of the ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit’, which was hardly the organized sect that inquisitors portrayed it to be. The mystical tendency to internalize spirituality was taken by the orthodox to imply depreciation, even renunciation, of external religious forms, and at times there was some truth to this suspicion. Such misgiving quickly became attached to the famed Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), who satirized popular devotion to saints, relics and sacramentals. The late medieval Devotio Moderna's emphasis on the inner reception of the sacraments was seen by many churchmen as potentially anticlerical.

Page 1 of 2