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This study examines how authors of memoirs from the first half of the 17th century reflected on sermons they heard in cities and on the figure of the preacher in their memoirs, diaries, and chronicles. The aim is first to identify the most common circumstances under which authors recorded mentions of sermons in their personal writings and then to analyse how they reflected on sermons during the period of confessionalization, religious transformations, and state-imposed re-Catholicization. A close examination of this historical period – marked by the threats of war, economic uncertainty, and crises of conscience for lay believers – reveals that authors paid considerable attention to sermons in their personal records. They sought to preserve their memory, expressed their own opinions, and often transcribed the content, key message, or specific details of sermons – particularly those that irritated them. In their writings, they frequently aimed to critique, ridicule, or condemn these aspects.

The article focuses on the origins of Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox identities in the early modern and modern Slavic East. The concept of confessionalization can serve as a helpful tool in exploring questions of ecclesial identity. Applied to the Slavic East, the confessionalization paradigm helps to uncover both continuities and discontinuities in post-Byzantine religious history, approached in a comparative East-West perspective. The article critically engages with contemporary scholarship on the subject and seeks to contribute to a rethinking of some of the most common assumptions about the world of Eastern Christianity and the place of the Eastern Catholic churches in it. The approach of the article bridges history and ecclesiology.

This article casts a spotlight on various stages of the entangled history of German Protestantism and psychology from the 16th to the 19th centuries to make visible the hitherto neglected religious past of this discipline and the educational aspirations tied to it. In broad strokes, it retraces how the idea of psychology emerged in the wake of the Reformation and continued to be shaped by German Protestant thinkers for centuries to come. First, the article reconstructs how, after Luther, the term “psychology” came to denote Protestant attempts to construct a non-Catholic scientia de anima. The dissemination and popularization of this endeavor in the writings of German Protestants is discussed in the second section. The third and fourth sections are devoted to shifts in reasoning about the soul during the early German Enlightenment and the subsequent flourishing of attempts at establishing psychology as a scientific discipline in its later stages. Finally, the last section looks at the further “scientification of the soul” during the 19th century, which, as will be argued, was crucial to the constitution of the modern educational field in Germany.

Abstract In the seventeenth century, Ottoman jurists repeatedly tried to stop Muslims from stating that they \"belonged to the religion of Abraham.\" A century earlier, however, the expression had been a core part of the new confessional identity of the empire's Muslims. This article explores how the phrase changed from an attestation of faith to a sign of heresy through a study of a short pamphlet by Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā Efendi. Minḳārīzāde argued that the use of the phrase is not permissible and addressed his arguments not to learned scholars, but to the semi-educated. I argue that Minḳārīzāde's pamphlet provides a glimpse into \"vernacular legalism\" in action in the Ottoman Empire, that is, how semi-educated audiences received and understood legal debates and subsequently turned law into a space of popular politics.

In the debate over the theory and practice of the Spanish empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century, political, religious, and legal discourses differentiated conquered peoples and recent converts to Christianity from so-called “old Christians”, thereby creating distinct categories of Spanish subjects. In Spain itself, cultural markers like language, dress, and diet became the foundations of fiscal and legal differences, while normative codes were promulgated and negotiated across a range of documents, e.g., legal instruments, civic and ecclesiastical records, university debates, and juridical theory. Concomitant with this process, a set of Christian catechisms was produced in Spain, both before and after the promulgation of Tridentine reforms, that were directed especially at the converted morisco populations in Granada and Valencia. These catechisms were produced in Iberian Arabic and Romance languages and included instructions about how new converts from Islam should behave, as well as what they should believe in order to participate in liturgical activities and to be recognized as full members of the Christian community. This article examines the morisco catechisms produced in Spain between 1496 and 1566, as these documents are representative of a unique period in both the history of Latin Christianity and the burgeoning Spanish empire. Through the emergence of this corpus and against the backdrop of targeted legislation and new policies aimed at Arabic-speaking moriscos, first in Granada and later in Valencia, the ideological foundations constraining the morisco experience were forged.

The presented distributional and contextual analysis of Polish equivalents of Greek lexemes, recognized in religious polemics of the Reformation era as doctrinally significant words, i.e. έκκλησία ‘a (religious) congregation’, μετάνοια ‘repentance’, μετανοέω ‘to repent’, βάπτισμα ‘a dipping or sinking’, βαπτίζω ‘to dip, sink’ in Renaissance renderings of the New Testament aims to assess lexical distinctiveness of Nontrinitarian renderings – the Szymon Budny’s Bible (1572), the Szymon Budny’s New Testament (1574), the Marcin Czechowic’s New Testament (1577), The New Testament of Rakow (1606). The lexemes zbor, zborowy (for Greek έκκλησία), pokajanie, kajanie się (for Greek μετάνοια), kajać się, pokajać się (for Greek μετανοέω), ponurzenie, nurzanie (for Greek βάπτισμα), ponurzyć, nurzać (for Greek βαπτίζω) should be considered as particular lexemes to the Renaissance Nontrinitarian renderings of the New Testament. Juxtaposing them with the equivalents introduced into the Renaissance renderings of both Catholic and Evangelical provenance allows to consider them as lexical exponents of the Nontrinitarian Unitarian, Anabaptist and Congregational doctrinal community. These lexemes, as a result of the philological and exegetical investigations of the translators of the Greek New Testament, gain the status of nontitrinitarian religious terms.

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.

This study analyzes confessionally conditioned self-image and mutual perception of the Catholic and Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Upper Hungary in the context of the second confessionalization process. Based on comparative research of the contemporary press, including either the printed or handwritten homiletic and catechetical literature, predominantly from the area of Upper Hungary, the study examines which phenomena and processes taking place since the 1830s until the end of the 1850s signaled a renewal in confessional identities in both the Catholic and Evangelical Churches. A particular emphasis has been placed on indicators of the second confessionalization, such as the debate on mixed marriages, a rising number of conversions, or legislative interventions in the freedom of religion. Through discourse analysis, the study explores how the image and self-image of the Catholic and Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession evolved as a result of the expansion of the catechetical literature and apologetic works and identifies the narrative strategies employed in their respective confessional discourses. The Catholic discourse stressed maintaining dogmatic integrity and Church authority in particular, whereas the Evangelicals more frequently accentuated a thorough biblicality and rationality as a counterposition to Catholic piety. Both traditions claimed exclusive access to “true religion” and used apologetic genres to defend and enhance their identity. Polemical texts also served as tools to form confessionally conditioned collective consciousness, as well as a part of contemporary cultural and political debates.

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.

In the 16th–17th centuries, the Russian Church was undergoing the same process of confessionalization as the churches in other European countries. A special role in it was played by the patriarchate of Filaret, when the Synod of 1620 recognized immersion baptism as the only correct way to baptize and formulated the features that distinguish Moscow Orthodoxy from both Catholics and other churches. Under Filaret, the state and church systems of government merged, and “Procheiron laws” began to be applied against violators of church rules. Reforms of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich opened a new stage of confessionalization, changing the already approved symbols, which was perceived as the introduction of a “new faith.” Handwritten materials from the Synods of 1666 and 1666–1667 are considered, and an attempt is made to answer the question why they have never been published in full. It is shown that only those Acts that were included in the Service Book of 1667 became known to contemporaries. The changes in relation to the previous period of confessionalization were radical.