Cartography Website

Interesting website with lots of maps of the Holy Land from the early modern era.
http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/maps/pal/html

BOOK: Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives

Just out: Cornelia Moore's latest, a study of biographical writing as presented in sixteenth and seventeenth century evangelical funeral sermons. The result of years of work at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Moore's book defines the genre, discusses its origins and disappearances, and considers its context in noble, civic and monarchic culture.

Niekus Moore, Cornelia. Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany. 403 pp., 33 illustrations. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. ISBN10: 3-447-05429-8 ISBN13: 978-3-447-05429-4.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Calvin Studies Colloquium

"John Calvin and Roman Catholicism"

Calvin Studies Society Colloquium

University of Notre Dame

April 12-14, 2007

We would like to invite you to attend the upcoming Calvin Studies Colloquium, to be held at the University of Notre Dame.

The theme of “John Calvin and Roman Catholicism” was chosen for several reasons.First of all, it is an acknowledgement that Calvin did not envision himself as the founder of a new tradition called “Calvinism,” but rather as one who soughtto restore the Catholic Church to what he called its “purer form” under the <>apostles and early Church writers. Calvin thought of himself as belonging tothe “orthodox and evangelical” tradition, which associated him not only with Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, and Heinrich Bullinger, but also with Cyprian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine. One of the concerns of the colloquium will therefore be to assess the degree to which Calvin might be seen as a Catholic theologian, as surprising as such a claim might appear to be on its face. Secondly, as a consequence of his desire to restore the Catholic Church of his day, Calvin’s engagement with his contemporary Roman Catholics was not tangential to his concerns, but was directly related to the task he was called to carry out. By placing Calvin and his followers within the context of their wider interactions with Roman Catholics in Geneva and its environs, and in places like Holland, we can get a better idea of what the real issues were that both united and divided them, and will be able to see more clearly how members of the Old Church regarded the work of Calvin and his colleagues. Thirdly, the theme of the conference highlights the remarkable fact that a good deal of the best scholarship on Calvin has been done by Roman Catholics such as Alexandre Ganoczy, George Tavard, Lucien Richard, Carlos Eire, and Dennis Tamburello. By holding the conference at Notre Dame, Calvin scholars would not only be acknowledging the major contributions made to their field by their Roman Catholic colleagues, but would also be recognizing the irreducible importance of listening to what our Roman Catholic colleagues see in the thought of Calvin and the movement he so deeply influenced. Finally, Notre Dame seems to be the ideal place for such a discussion to occur because of its long involvement in and commitment to the ecumenical outreach to other Christian traditions initiated in earnest at Vatican II, which has made Notre Dame such a welcome home for those in Calvin’s tradition such as Alvin Plantinga, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch. It is our hope that this colloquium could give further impetus to these efforts at ecumenical understanding, which help us to overcome unfortunate stereotypes and to come to a richer understanding of the Christian tradition we all share.

Full details, including program, are available from Randall Zachmann at the University of Notre Dame.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Call for Papers, SCSC 2007

The Society for Reformation Research, a North American scholarly organization and partner group to the Verein für Reformationgeschichte, is concerned with furthering scholarly research on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and all other aspects of religious life in the early modern era. Following our mandate, we will sponsor a variety of sessions at the 2007 annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference held in Minneapolis, Minnesota (USA), from October 24-28 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

We will accept papers and sessions on any theme related to Reformation research, but are particularly interested in sponsoring a series of sessions this year on the theme of "Reformation Encounters with the Other." Papers could treat any number of themes involving encounters between differing groups in the area of theology, religion, social and political relationships and arrangements, travel narratives and literature, and so on, in any context or period affected by the Reformation or the long sixteenth century (c. 1450-1650).

We also seek papers for a series of panels entitled "Religion on the Brink of Reformation," intended to bring medievalists and early modernists together for comparative and epoch-bridging discussion.

Finally, as always, we would like to sponsor a limited number of sessions on approaches to teaching the Reformation.

We encourage proposals both for individual papers as well as full sessions; we particularly welcome panels that offer closely focused comparisons across national borders or those that include scholars and scholarly approaches from different continents. Papers should not have been previously presented at any other scholarly meeting nor have been published. The deadline for submitting paper proposals (by mail or email) is March 15th.

If you would like to present a paper under the auspices of the Society for Reformation Research, or for more information about our programs,

please contact:

Susan R. Boettcher

c/o Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit

Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften

Humboldt Universität

Unter den Linden 6

D-10099 Berlin

Germany

Email: susan.boettcher@mail.utexas.edu

More information about the conference is available at the website of the

SCSC: http://www.sixteenthcentury.org/