Bøker i Oxford Studies in Historical Theology-serien

In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval era, the Latin Church denounced and prohibited dancing in religious and secular realms, often aligning it with demonic intervention, lust, pride, and sacrilege. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages,Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. This book investigates how dance became a legitimate form of devotion in Christian culture. Sacred dance functioned to gloss scripture, framespiritual experience, and imagine the afterlife. Invoking numerous manuscript and visual sources (biblical commentaries, sermons, saints'' lives, ecclesiastical statutes, mystical treatises, vernacular literature, and iconography), this book highlights how medieval dance helped shape religious identity and social stratification. Moreover, this book shows the political dimension of dance, which worked in the service of Christendom, conversion, and social cohesion. In Ringleaders ofRedemption, Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed.

In this book, Shaun Blanchard uses a close study of the Synod of Pistoia (1786) to argue that the roots of the Vatican II reforms must be pushed back beyond the widely acknowledged twentieth-century forerunners of the Council, beyond Newman and the Tubingen School in the nineteenth century, to the eighteenth century, in which a variety of reform movements attempted ressourcement and aggiornamento.

The place of Hilary of Poitiers in the debates and developments of early Christianity is tenuous in contemporary scholarship. In this book, Jarred A. Mercer makes a case for understanding Hilary not only as an important historical figure, but as a significant and independent thinker. Divine Perfection and Human Potentiality offers a new paradigm for understanding Hilary's work De Trinitate as a trinitarian anthropology.

While Augustine's understanding of will is constantly invoked in secondary literature, it rarely receives analysis in its own right. In this book, Han-luen Kantzer Komline provides such an analysis, demonstrating that Augustine's view is "theologically differentiated," comprising four distinct types of human will, which correspond to four different theological scenarios.

This is a study of the life, monastic writings and spiritual theology of John Cassian (c.365-430). Cassian's writings were the bridge between eastern monasticism and the developing Latin monasticism of Southern Gaul, and exerted a major influence on the Rule of Benedict and the theology of Gregory the Great.

By exploring how Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and John Calvin interpreted a set of eight messianic psalms (Psalms 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 110, 188), Sujin Pak elucidates key debates about Christological exegesis during the era of the Protestant reformation. More particularly, Pak examines the exegeses of Luther, Bucer, and Calvin in order to (a) reveal their particular theological emphases and reading strategies, (b) identify their debates over the use of Jewishexegesis and the factors leading to charges of ''judaizing'' leveled against Calvin, and (c) demonstrate how Psalms reading and the accusation of judaizing serve distinctive purposes of confessional identity formation. In this way, she portrays the beginnings of those distinctive trends that separatedLutheran and Reformed exegetical principles.

In this book Susan Schreiner analyzes the pervading questions about certitude and doubt in the terms and contexts of a wide variety of thinkers during Europe in the sixteenth century.

This book examines the early development of the Reformation debate over the Lord's Supper. Going beyond Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, it demonstrates the importance of late medieval heresy and the key role played by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt in challenging traditional belief in Christ's corporeal presence in the sacrament.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) was regarded by sixteenth century Europe as one of the most contested religious and philosophical authorities. Through deep examination of the production, circulation and consumption of Augustine's works, Arnoud Visser reveals the wildly contrasting ways in which he was read and appropriated by publishers, humanist scholars, and individual readers.

Paul C. H. Lim offers an insightful examination of the polemical debates about the doctrine of the Trinity in seventeenth-century England, showing that this philosophical and theological re-configuration significantly impacted the politics of religion in the early modern period.

This book explains Martin Bucer's unique perspective on the doctrine of justification and demonstrates how this doctrine acted as a foundation for his entrance into discussions with Catholics between 1539 and 1541. The author argues that Bucer was consistent in his irenic endeavors, never sacrificing his theological convictions for ecclesial expediency.

Examines the four generations of Reformed pastors who served the church of Basel in the century after the Reformation. This work focuses on the evolution of pastoral training and Reformed theology, the theory and practice of preaching, and the performance of pastoral care in both urban and rural parishes.

Reforming Saints is an investigation of how and why early German humanists were attracted to composing saint's lives in the half century preceding the Reformation. David J. Collins approaches the humanists' writings on their own terms and recaptures the creative energy the humanists brought to the task of revising the legends of the saints. The cult of the saints and Renaissance humanism are two topics that attract considerable scholarly attention.Reforming Saints considers them as studies rarely do - at their intersection.

In Going Dutch in the Modern Age John Wood examines how Abraham Kuyper adapted the Dutch church to its modern social context through a new account of the nature of the church and its social position.

This is the first study in any language dedicated to the seminal theological works of the French Reformed pastor, professor, and master of genres Antoine de Chandieu 1534-1591.

The "Awakening" was the last major Protestant reform and revival movement to occur in Germany. This book examines the Awakening as a product of the larger social changes that were re-shaping German society during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Awakened Protestants were traditionalists who rejected the changes that Enlightenment thought had introduced into Protestant theology and preaching. But, Kloes argues, their efforts to spread their religiousbeliefs were only successful because of the new political freedoms and economic opportunities that the Enlightenment had introduced.

In this sequel to Richard Muller's 'The Unaccommodated Calvine', Muller carries his approach forward, with the goal of overcoming a series of 19th- and 20th-century theological frameworks characteristic of much of the scholarship on Reformed orthodoxy, or what might be called 'Calvinism after Calvin'.

Much has been written about the influence of humanism on the Reformation. This study reverses the question, asking how the Reformation affected humanism. The author argues that humanism was co-opted, perhaps even exploited, in the religious debate by both Reformers and Catholic reactionaries.

Takes a look at St Francis of Assisi, and the idea of voluntary poverty as a basis for Christian perfection. The author finds that while Francis's conception of poverty as a spiritual discipline may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians, it precluded the idea that the poor could use their poverty as a path to heaven.

This book is a wide-ranging study of Johannine exegesis in the sixteenth century, centered on the John commentary of Wolfgang Musculus (1497-1563), an influential leader of the Protestant Reformation. Farmer compares Musculus's exegesis of the Johannine miracle stories not only with that of other sixteenth-century commentators but also with ancient and medieval commentaries.

In the 1520s, a battle raged between Luther and Erasmus over the freedom of the will. This book demonstrates that Philip Melanchthon - hardly a silent observer in the fray - was actively involved, especially in his 1528 commentary on Colossians. He rejected Erasmus's position while developing an independent, but compatible stance to Luther's own.

The middle decades of the 17th century saw the expansion of the Baptist sect, as well as the rise and growth of Quakerism. Hostility quickly came to characterize relations between two groups. In examining the Baptist-Quaker controversy, Underwood is able to identify a primary link between the two and at the same time to discover explanations for some of their dramatic differences.

God's Irishmen describes the theological debates that tore the Cromwellian movement apart and caused its eventual failure. An informed analysis of the texts that survive from the period, Gribben dissects the contentious theological issues and reflects on larger questions about the characteristics of the Protestant churches in Cromwellian Ireland.

This work attempts to understand Calvin in his16th-century context, with attention to continuities and discontinuities between his thought and that of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

In this study, Irene Backus examines the fate of the Apocalypse at the hands of early Protestants in three centres of the Reformation: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. To do so, Backus systematically investigates sources and methods on the most important reformed and Lutheran commentaries of the Apocalypse from 1528-1584.

Examines how and why death came to be perceived as such a firm boundary of salvation. Analyzing exceptions to this principle from ancient Christianity, this book states that the principle itself was slow to develop and not universally accepted in the Christian movement's first four hundred years.

This text traces the way in which Calvin's exegetical labours contributed to his understanding of faith. Through detailed analysis of Calvin's interpretation of selected biblical passages, the study shows how his views evolved.

Susan R. Holman examines the theme of poverty in the fourth-century sermons of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory Nysson. These sermons are especially important for what they tell us about the history of poverty relief and the role of fourth century Christian theology in constructing the body of the redemptive, involuntary poor.

In this innovative study, Carol Thysell provides an in-depth examination of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron. While this collection of tales is traditionally considered to be secular in nature, Thysell argues that Marguerite de Navarre used it as a vehicle for a constructive theological programme.