Bridget Heal Livres

The book explores the evolution of Marian piety during Germany's Reformation and Counter-Reformation, challenging the notion that the Virgin Mary vanished from Protestant life. It reveals that in Lutheran regions, Marian liturgy and art persisted, albeit with altered meanings. Meanwhile, in Catholic areas, baroque expressions of devotion coexisted with traditional forms, despite the Church's efforts for uniformity. By examining local contexts, the author highlights how diverse Marian practices influenced both women's and men's experiences amid religious transformations.

The first comprehensive history of the Reformation origins and flourishing of Lutheran baroque; while the Protestant reform movements are generally associated with iconoclasm, this book studies art, religion, and politics to show that in Lutheran Germany a rich visual culture developed, despite theologians' ambivalent attitude towards images.

This volume of essays explores the themes of radicalism and dissent within Protestantism. The comparisons highlight the contingent nature of particular settlements and narratives, and reveal the extent to which the definition of religious radicalism was dependent upon immediate context and show that radicalism and dissent were truly transnational phenomena. The historiography of the so-called radical reformation has been unduly shaped by the hostile categories imposed by mainstream or magisterial reformers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume argues that scholars should adopt an open-ended understanding of evangelical reform, and recognize that the boundaries between radicalism and its opposite were not always firmly drawn. The distinction between the two is an inheritance of the Lutheran Reformation of the 1520s, which shaped not only the later course of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire but also attitudes towards and writings on religious dissent in the Netherlands and England. Radical critique is immanent within mainstream Protestantism, in a faith that emphasizes the power of the gospel with its unrelenting demands.