Irenicism

In diesem Beitrag werden Regina Toepfers Kriterien mediävistischer Kanonbildung auf einen Text der Frühen Neuzeit angewendet. Gemessen an seinen zahlreichen Ausgaben zählt der "Froschmeuseler" von Georg Rollenhagen zu den "Bestsellern'" der Frühen Neuzeit. Basierend auf der spätantiken "Batrachomyomachia" schildert der Autor den alles vernichtenden Krieg zwischen den Fröschen und Mäusen. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass dieser Text mit seinen moralischen und irenischen Dimensionen fest im Wittenberger Späthumanismus und Philippismus verwurzelt ist. Seine zentrale Botschaft, dass von den Machthabern angezettelte Kriege stets Leid und Tod vieler Menschen zur Folge haben, macht den "Froschmeuseler" zu einem "Klassiker", der in einer neuen Auswahlausgabe auch an Schulen und Universitäten gelesen werden könnte.

Freedom of religion generally resonates in the collective mind as a prized legacy of the European Enlightenment alongside most individual liberties and modern values. This assumption, however, is flawed as it tends to downplay centuries of religious pluralism and cohabitation. Tolerance, in other words, was a practice long before it became a theory. This article considers tolerance not as an idea, but as a religious belief and a practice in the early Enlightenment. Drawing from rare manuscript sources scattered over several countries, it argues that tolerance was a grassroots Christian belief primarily promoted by those who needed it the most: persecuted radical dissenters. It shows how the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 sparked a tolerationist spur in Protestant countries, ‘refuges’ that often offered only a limited level of freedom. By contrast, more radical forms of tolerance existed among underground millenarians and ecumenical societies of this period. These refuges and milieus made a significant contribution to the Enlightenment debate on tolerance and deserve to be acknowledged for it.

The violent religious conflicts that shook Early Modern Europe gave rise to several
models for peaceful coexistence with religious pluralism. Ideas of toleration and reunification were more closely interrelated than one may think. A principal proponent of irenicism was the French scholar and diplomat Jean Hotman (1552–1636), who was
widely read in the humanist Respublica litteraria. Hotman used a wide and diverse range of media to achieve his goals, which can be regarded as the epitome of scholarly
research practices around 1600.

Pedro Ximénez (Petrus Ximenius, 1524-1595) es un personaje muy poco conocido actualmente, a pesar del gran prestigio del que gozó en vida. La reciente identificación del anónimo Dialogus de pace como obra suya permite estudiar su avanzada postura ante el habitual uso de la coerción para imponer la unidad religiosa, en concreto en el marco de la conferencia de paz de 1579 en Colonia. En esta obra, marcadamente pacifista, incide en los conceptos de amnistía, consenso y restitución, con un desarrollo que puede ponerse en parangón con las aportaciones de otros españoles sobre el mismo asunto, como las de Fadrique Furio Ceriol.

This essay examines the state of the Philadelphian Society in the aftermath of Jane Lead’s death in 1704. It challenges the centrality of her matriarchal authority and portrays her instead as a controversial, divisive figure among the Philadelphians, whose Society had already collapsed by the time of her death. It shows how the arrival of the Camisards in London in 1706 gave the Philadelphian Society a second life, as both movements merged into the ‘French Prophets’ the following year in celebration of the Union Act. Yet if the Prophets became notorious for their spiritual performances, it is argued that this owed more to the Philadelphians’ influence among them than to their actual French followers. Overall, this essay concludes that the Philadelphians proved far more radical than hitherto acknowledged and that Lead’s English legacy was almost non-existent.
This essay also contains a list of 70 Philadelphians together with their occupations in appendix.

Hugo Grotius' Treatise De veritate religionis christianae had a big impact in his time and in the floowing centuries. The article gives a short survey of Grotius' life and main works and focuses afterwards on a discussion about the structure and contents of De veritate christianae and its reception in Central Europe

Religious conflict and civil war plunged Europe into severe crises in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focussing on the French monarchy,Mona Garloff analyses the wider European struggle in which these conflicts became embroiled. In this way she demonstrates the extent to which the idea of a stable European order was discussed in transnational terms. One tireless exponent of religious and political peace was the French scholar and diplomat, Jean Hotman (1552–1636). During the course of his career, Hotman became acquainted with different models of religious pacification and established contacts with learned scholars all over Europe. He and his contemporaries did not pursue irenic theology in the spirit of utopianism, but understood their writings as practical contributions to religious politics and day-to-day decision-making. Mona Garloff takes a broad look at scholarly practice in the period around 1600 and sheds new light on the intellectual culture of the late-humanist republic of letters. Her study is an important new contribution to the transnational history of religious diversity beyond confessional borders in Early Modern Europe.

The intellectual achievements of Ioannes Broscius (Jan Brożek, 1585−1652) are fairly well-studied: his research in the field of geometry and algebra has been explored in several studies, along with his involvement in anti-Jesuit polemics, his role as the first biographer of Copernicus, his research into the history of science and culture, and his reading strategies and scholarly and scientific workshop. Despite this rich bibliography, a few areas of his public and academic activity have been overlooked or disregarded by historians. One such areas is Broscius’s interest in chronology and synchronization of the Catholic and Orthodox Christian calendars, as well as his involvement in the Roman Catholic political plans related to the Uniate Church.
The 1640 brochure entitled The Old Calendar (Kalendarz stary) written by Kasjan Sakowicz (ca. 1578−1647), a Uniate priest and theologian, opened a new front in the theological and political dispute between the members of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, earning its author widespread condemnation from Uniate hierarchs. Sakowicz’s agenda was to bring the Uniates back to the Roman church and one means of achieving this goal was to convince them to reform their calendar – namely to accept the Gregorian calendar as the only method of counting time. Sakowicz found a supporter in Broscius, who has been commissioned by the Catholic hierarchs to prepare a brochure on the Gregorian calendar. The First Apology of the Roman Catholic Calendar (Apologia pierwsza kalendarza rzymskiego powszechnego) was published by Broscius in 1641 and constituted a brief yet multi-faceted and well-written voice in this debate. Broscius, as a great, however eccentric erudite, theologian, mathematician, and astronomer used all his knowledge to support Sakowicz’s argument. In both, The First Apology and its sequel, The Second Apology (Apologia wtóra, 1641), the Kraków scholar developed a highly rhetorical line of argument which built upon astronomical and mathematical proofs, common sense knowledge, as well as scriptural and theological argumentation.
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Thanks to these brief texts, the Passover was situated once again in the midst of religious, academic, and political controversy – a controversy which had stoked the interest and enthusiasm of such intellectual giants as Joseph Julius Scaliger, Gilbert Génébrard, Johan Heinrich Alsted, and Athanasius Kircher. Although he did not play in the same intellectual league as these men, Broscius took advantage of these discussions while preparing his statement regarding the Uniates.
This paper is aimed at outlining the main strands of the discussion and types of arguments used by both Broscius and Sakowicz. It will be also attempt to reconstruct the debate between traditions of Western and Eastern Christianity, the political and religious aspects of this clash, and the tension between irenicism and proselytism epitomized by the calendar and two chronological traditions.

Primary sources
I. Broscius (1641), Apologia pierwsza Kalendarza Rzymskiego powszechnego [...] do zacnego narodu ruskiego na pokazanie słuszności wywodów o Kalendarza Starego błędach podanych od Wielebnego Ojca Kassiana Sakowica (Krakow).
I. Broscius (1641), Apologia wtóra Kalendarza Rzymskiego powszechnego [...] do zacnego narodu ruskiego na pokazanie słuszności wywodów o Kalendarza Starego błędach podanych od Wielebnego Ojca Kassiana Sakowica (Warsaw).
K. Sakowicz (1641), Kalendarz stary w którym jawny i oczywisty błąd okazuje się około święcenia Paschi [...] (Vilnius).
K. Sakowicz (1644), Okulary kalendarzowi staremu [...] (Krakow).

On the basis of the seminal paper On the Historical and Dogmatic Methods in Theology authored by Ernst Troeltsch and of critical assessments of his polemicists, mainly Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, this article aims to recognise the recent tendencies in theological and philosophical development of the studies devoted to the early modern Protestant thought. The subject matter of the paper, which is not a bibliographical study but a description of current intellectual history, is concerned with the consequences of Troeltsch’s thesis, namely the separation of scientific lore together with its particular and different goals – the theological one concerned with doctrinal questions, and the historical one concerned with rise, development and change. Due to the doctrinal problems discussed in the first part, the contemporary ecumenical movement appears to be the main driving factor for theological recognition of early modern Protestant doctrines. Beside the several unquestionable benefits of the recent intensification of Reformation studies in Poland, there are also several disadvantages or inherent limitations of this branch of Polish scholarship. First of all, the conceptual framework typical for ecumenism poses a threat of anachronic attitude to the specificity of early modern religious realities that were different from contemporary conditions of the ecumenical movement. Secondly, it may overlook the semantic changes undergone by the historical meanings and modes of usage of particular terms, once used for specific intended purposes. Consequently, basic concepts devoid of historical significance  like irenicism, toleration and ecumenism, lacking their Begriffsgeschichte clarifications, are too often used interchangeably, although there are pivotal differences between them. Moreover, the area of​the interest of ecumenism is currently restricted to the historical precedents (irenicism, for instance) of the modern strive for an interconfessional agreement and is limited merely to the questions that divide contemporary Christianity (for example, the Lutheran doctrine of justification). Therefore, numerous other theological problems of Protestant Reformation are ignored.

The second part of this paper will discuss the historical facet of the specificity of Troeltsch’s legacy.

The Aberdeen Doctors promoted concord between Reformed and Lutheran churches in Europe and between evangelical parties in Scotland. Their efforts to establish concord internationally implied tolerance between Protestant parties with differing theological convictions and practices. Their efforts to establish concord in Scotland explicitly advocated tolerance between dissident parties, but equally insisted upon compliance with liturgical and political reforms pursued through proper legal process. This essay explores the Doctors advocacy of concord and of tolerance both internationally and nationally, drawing careful attention to the precise degree of tolerance the Doctors deemed possible and/or desirable in the particular context of early seventeenth-century Scotland.

The liturgy has often been a source of conflict within Christian communities. After comparing several recent exhortations by Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI concerning the importance of the unity of the Church, this essay examines resources for articulating an approach of “liturgical irenicism” on the basis of texts from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Magisterium of the Church.