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Taking the religiously diverse city of Augsburg as its focus, this book explores the underappreciated role of local clergy in mediating and interpreting the Peace of Augsburg in the decades following its 1555 enactment, focusing on the efforts of the preacher Johann Meckhart and his heirs in blunting the cultural impact of confessional religion. It argues that the real drama of confessionalization was not simply that which played out between princes and theologians, or even, for that matter, between religions; rather, it lay in the daily struggle of clerics in the proverbial trenches of their ministry, who were increasingly pressured to choose for themselves and for their congregations between doctrinal purity and civil peace.
List of contents
1. Introduction 2. That Forgotten Place Between Heaven and Hell: Resistance and Compromise During the Augsburg Interim 3. The Sin Unconfessed: Meckhart and the Act of Confession 4. Dance of the Augsburg Preachers: The Melhorn Controversy and the Culture of Confessionalization 5. The Meckhart Confession: Negotiating Moderation 6. A Rudderless Ship in Stormy Seas: Conflict, Crisis, and Concord at the Dawn of the Confessional Age 7. Hellhounds in the House of Fugger 8. The Path of Resistance: Augsburg’s Divergent Evangelical Responses to the Counter Reformation 9. The Calendar Riot: Conceptually Expanded, Contextually Explored 10. Caught in No-Man’s Land: The Vocation Controversy 11. Conclusion
About the author
Adam Glen Hough is a graduate of the University of Arizona’s Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, and a past fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek and the University of Victoria’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society.
Summary
This book explores the underappreciated role of local clergy in mediating and interpreting the Peace of Augsburg in the decades following its 1555 enactment, focusing on the efforts of the preacher Johann Meckhart and his heirs in blunting the cultural impact of confessional religion.
