The fragments on the ancients and the moderns are continued. Arguments are presented for and against the role played by the ancients in establishing a modern culture of genius and taste. The effect of writing on oral poetry is discussed together with the invention of paper, printing, and copper engraving. These had an important effect on poetic expression and public culture, and the advantages and disadvantages are weighed. The Middle Ages ended with the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, changes in the financial system, in war, and class relationships. German literature is discussed in relation to other European traditions, and its shortcomings and merits are considered. In conclusion, it is argued that comparison of the national poetic traditions is difficult, perhaps futile, and that every nation should value its own tradition.

The spirit of the age is defined as the friend, the harbinger, and the servant of Humanity, but also as the ruler of the age. Martin Luther’s writings on education as well as his exegesis of the Psalms are cited to elaborate on his thoughts on government, and the change of government, particularly his denunciation of the tyranny of monarchs and what he called the rabble. Luther’s praise of German honesty and forthrightness is cited in order to position faith and loyalty as the cornerstone of human society. Klopstock’s poem on the naval warfare between Britain and France is cited in order to argue for the necessity of fairness and reason in all aspects of government. The ability of enlightened monarchs to uphold the spirit of the age is called into question, and Frederick the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire is further cited as evidence of a monarch’s struggles with his own human shortcomings. This is answered with a call for reform of education and politics. The inherent nature of human beings is described in its relationship to society and government, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s dialogue on Freemasonry is cited to elaborate on the importance of reason in civil society and the state.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

Traces the readership and use of Matthew Paris’ manuscripts after his death and in subsequent centuries before and after the Reformation dissolution of the monasteries as far as the modern era.

The Statute of Uses enacted radical reform which can still be felt across the common law world. It was from exceptions to the statute’s execution of uses to perform last wills that the modern trust emerged. Our understanding of the passage of the statute has been shaped by the survival of several draft bills and ancillary documents. It has been argued that a draft bill introduced in 1529 was rejected by the Commons in March 1532. This in turn inspired the landmark litigation in Dacre’s Case (1533–35), which paved the way for the subsequent enactment of the Statute of Uses. This chapter challenges that orthodox position by demonstrating that there were in fact three early drafts which were considered. It then considers what this tells us about the role of the crown, parliament and the courts during this pivotal period in our legal history.

Jan Schnell picks up the thread in the formative period of the late Middle Ages and early modernity, the era of the Reformation. She surveys the ways in which Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Jean Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and John Knox, among others, brought about substantial adaptations to the traditional liturgies they had inherited from Catholicism, and what motivated them theologically to do so.

Although all these men were Christian, only five of the six who lived during the Reformation (among the eight men who are the central focus of the book) converted to Protestantism. Each represented their religious commitments differently, however, and the single merchant who did not convert (Fürer) spent much of his later career as a vigorous critic of Luther. The chapter also explores the religious commitments of other merchants who left Selbstzeugnisse during the period, some of whom provided richer evidence of their spiritual life and their support of ecclesiastical and charitable institutions.

This chapter asks: how did notions and practices of individual equality arise out of the experience of the Reformation and of the religious pluralism that it engendered across Europe?

Two networks transformed the early modern world. The first was the Iberian network of discoverers and conquerors that helped usher in an age of European world domination and colonialism. The second was facilitated by a new technology, printing, which helped unleash the huge religious and political disruption we know as the Reformation. What Niall Ferguson describes as a “religious virus that came to be known as Protestantism” disrupted an ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, fractured into many pieces Europe’s Catholic Christianity, and ushered in a long era of violent conflict. This chapter investigates religious networks within the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical wings of the Reformation and highlights the formation, evolution, suppression, and ultimate survival of the Jesuit Order as a classic transnational network within Catholic Christianity.

Whenever the story of lollardy has been told, that story has been shaped by the prevailing historical, theological and intellectual climate. This chapter surveys how lollardy has been narrated, looking at the terminology, people and communities, practices and texts, and beliefs associated with the lollard or Wycliffite movement of late medieval England.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation had a profound effect on the treatment of unchristianised peoples in Europe, intensifying efforts to convert them to Christianity, while Protestants and Catholics vied to establish their own version of the faith as the true one. The theme of paganism, intensely polemicised, occupied a central place in the religious rhetoric of the Reformation, with Protestants accusing Catholics of being little more than pagans while Catholics in turn denounced Protestants as infidels with no respect for the holy. The result was the effective reinvention of the concept of paganism, which came to be identified with folk religion (and, more specifically, folk Catholicism). ‘Paganism’ became both a greedy and a fuzzy concept, blurring the lines between those who were poorly catechised and those who were wholly unchristianised. Furthermore, ideas of infidels and idolaters formed in the New World were reimported to Europe in this period. This chapter seeks to dispel the fog of Reformation polemic in order to determine what we can know of unchristianised peoples in Europe during this period, when Orthodox Muscovy was also expanding eastward into unchristianised areas of Europe’s far east.

In the Middle Ages kingdoms could nominally reach very far, although kings typically did not have more resources than the most powerful feudal lords. Their mystical, sacred power ensured their right to rule over vast lands. The king obtained these attributes during the coronation, during which he simultaneously had to subjugate himself to the pope and the emperor. The coronation was an anchoring representant that enacted the God-given hierarchy in the cathedral: the laity was in the nave, the king in between the laity and the clergy, and the archbishop as the representative of the pope performed the unction with the holy balm through which the sacred entered the ceremony. It was the universal monarchy on stage. To rid themselves of papal and imperial superiority, while simultaneously maintaining their standing above feudal lords, kings modified the coronation and adapted other representants. This fundamental struggle led to a change in the early modern European order. During the Reformation, iconoclasms destroyed Catholic representants that upheld the hierarchical order. Simultaneously, kings adapted and repurposed existing Catholic representants for their own needs. The resulting dynastic divine right absolutism resembled the authority of pope and emperor, but it was territorially constrained.