The Scholarly Discovery Of Religion In Early Modern Times Chapter

Roman Catholic House of Habsburg and its allies fought against the Protestant princes of Germany, supported at various times by Denmark, Sweden and France. The Habsburgs, who ruled Spain, Austria, the Crown of Bohemia, Hungary, Slovene Lands, the Spanish Netherlands https://alanyaistanbul.com/ and much of Germany and Italy, were staunch defenders of the Roman Catholic Church. Some historians believe that the era of the Reformation came to a close when Roman Catholic France allied itself with Protestant states against the Habsburg dynasty.

  • Spain controlled the Netherlands until the Dutch revolt, and important states in southern Italy.
  • When linked to the social status of the patrons of the building projects, it is observed that resilience to demographic crisis and political turmoil differs among the social groups and political elite of a medieval society.
  • The Bavarian state did embrace “an ideology of spatial segregation” and sought to confine the mad in the Holy Spirit Hospice in Munich.
  • Worldwide religious missions, such as the Jesuit China mission, were established by Pope Gregory XIII. Gregory XIII is also responsible for the establishment of the Gregorian calendar.

The legal systems in the different regions where some of these demonologists wrote and worked often operated differently. The Parlement of Paris, the supreme appeals court, was incredibly reluctant to issue death sentences to accused witches because they were concerned with the lack of tangible evidence. Bodin often wrote on sensationalized cases wherein the defendant was sentenced to death as a means of setting precedents to “justify harsh sentences passed by lower courts” and pressure the Parlement of Paris to abstain from passing lighter sentences. From 1565 to 1575, witchcraft appeals in the Parlement were heard at roughly the same rate as other crimes, with five or six appeals heard per year. By 1587, however, the witchcraft appeals heard by Parlement constituted approximately ten percent of all cases they reviewed. While the number of cases heard by the Parlement in peak witch hunting years increased substantially, the Parlement remained far more lenient in their decisions. Nearly thirty percent of cases resulted in punishments as minor as a fine, and in eighty years beginning in 1565, only ten percent of accused witches were condemned to a death sentence.

Holy Roman Empire

Catholics became a minority while three Protestant denominations, Lutheran, Calvinist and Antitrinitarian, took strong positions all over the country. The process of confessional change, concomitant with political turns, can be drawn up in three phases during the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history of Transylvania. In the first phase, Antitrinitarians grew to prominence in the political elite of the princely court, and Antitrinitarianism was embraced by John Sigismund (1540–1571), the Catholic-born prince. The third and longest phase, unfolding over the seventeenth century, was marked by the rule of a series of Calvinist princes. The peace treaties of Vienna and Linz between the Habsburgs and Transylvanian rulers contributed to the consolidation of the rights of Protestants in Hungary. But it was above all the Council of Trent that would define the internal reform of the church and the principles of Catholic orthodoxy from then on.

Marriage Strategy Among The European Nobility

Even though in France , the stereotype of witch hunts as wars on women is mainly false, many demonological authors nonetheless assumed that women were significantly more likely to become involved in witchcraft than men. Historians have written extensively on the complex history of witchcraft and demonology, especially concerning the aspects of religion, misogyny, magic, sex, and philosophy. In Stuart Clark’s “Thinking With Demons,” he situates the subject of witchcraft within a larger conceptual framework of how early modern thinkers viewed the world in general through a “Saussurean” lens, wherein concepts can only exist with their opposite.

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