This article addresses the questions of the history of emotions to the German Peasants' War of 1524-5. The biggest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution, it overturned lordship in wide areas of Germany and beyond for about three months. It transformed the character of the Reformation as Luther condemned the peasant rebels. The revolt followed an emotional arc, shaped as much by the seasons as it was by the logic of revolution. The article argues that historians need to understand emotions and emotional cycles to understand how revolutions begin and unfold.
FFR
Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy
May 2021
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Book
This book reflects on the way Martin Luther carefully crafted an image of himself, how others portrayed him for their own purposes (both during his life and after), and the ongoing legacy of these images.
Biography & Autobiography
Luther and Women
January 2020
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Chapter
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Sfer and Ritual in Reformation Europe
Karlstadt's Wagen: The First Visual Propaganda for the Reformation
April 2017
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Journal article
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Art History: journal of the Association of Art Historians
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
June 2016
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Book
Luther Relics
August 2015
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Chapter
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Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe
Martin Luther
January 2015
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Chapter
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The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation
Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer ...
History
Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe
March 2013
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Book
This bold and imaginative book marks out a different route towards understanding the body, and its relationship to culture and subjectivity. Amongst other subjects, Lyndal Roper deals with the nature of masculinity and feminity.
History
The Witch in Western Imagination
August 2012
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Book
In an exciting new approach to witchcraft studies, The Witch in the Western Imagination examines the visual representation of witches in early modern Europe. With vibrant and lucid prose, Lyndal Roper moves away from the typical witchcraft studies on trials, beliefs, and communal dynamics and instead considers the witch as a symbolic and malleable figure through a broad sweep of topics and time periods.
Employing a wide selection of archival, literary, and visual materials, Roper presents a series of thematic studies that range from the role of emotions in Renaissance culture to demonology as entertainment, and from witchcraft as female embodiment to the clash of cultures on the brink of the Enlightenment. Rather than providing a vast synthesis or survey, this book is questioning and exploratory in nature and illuminates our understanding of the mental and psychic worlds of people in premodern Europe.
Roper’s spectrum of theoretical interests will engage readers interested in cultural history, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, art history, and early modern European studies. These essays, three of which appear here for the first time in print, are complemented by more than forty images, from iconic paintings to marginal drawings on murals or picture frames. In her unique focus on the imagery of witchcraft, Lyndal Roper has succeeded in adding a compelling new dimension to the study of witchcraft in early modern Europe.
The Seven-headed Monster: Luther and Psychoanalysis
January 2012
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Chapter
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Clio's Dream
Martin Luther's Body: The 'Stout Doctor' and his biographers
April 2010
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Journal article
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American Historical Review
PERHAPS THE MOST DISCONCERTING monument to the Reformation is the double statue
of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon in the city market at Wittenberg. There
they stand, their feet locked onto grandiose Schinkel pedestals, and can do no other,
as they gaze grimly out from under their neo-Gothic baldachins. Melanchthon was
an afterthought: Luther’s statue was unveiled in 1821, and Melanchthon’s followed
a generation later in 1865, the monumental design of the first dictating the form for
the second.1 The two Reformation heroes tower over the meat stands and vegetable
stalls like two caged giants. But the effect of their being seen side by side like this,
even with the nineteenth-century attempts to minimize the difference, is disastrous:
the stout Luther confronts the cadaverous Melanchthon. In the contemporary double
portraits by Heinrich Aldegrever and the Cranach workshop, it is even worse:
Luther and Melanchthon are twinned like Laurel and Hardy. This dilemma takes us to the heart of the representational problem: Luther was stoutly built. Saints and pious clerics tend, on the whole, to come in Melanchthonian shape, their thinness underlining their indifference to the temptations of the flesh. In the history of Western Christianity, Aquinas aside, there were few spiritual figures who were corpulent. From Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting of the bulky Luther of 1529 to the jowly, double-chinned head of Luther that looks out at us from the iconic woodcut of Lucas Cranach the Younger of 1546, Luther was large.3 After around 1530, so essential was his size to his image that even when we see only his bust, his broad shoulders and fleshy face make him instantly recognizable.
'To his most learned and dearest friend': Reading Luther's letters
January 2010
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Journal article
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German History
There is probably no other sixteenth-century figure who has left such a wealth of ego-documents as Martin Luther: no fewer than eighteen volumes of letters and six volumes of the so-called ‘table talk’, the notebooks of dinner conversation recorded by his student visitors and lodgers. There are even several brief autobiographical fragments. No wonder he has proved such an attractive figure for those interested in individual character, from the very first biographies of the mid-sixteenth century through to the famous psychoanalytically influenced study by Erickson, the play by John Osborne, or even cinema versions of Luther’s life.2 Yet in this flood of words by (and about) Luther there are also vast areas of silence: he tells us, for instance, next to nothing about his childhood, his schooldays, his most dear childhood friend, Hans Reinicke, or even his mother (her exact identity was unclear for centuries):3 in short, many of the things one might want to know to construct a full account of the character of an individual. And in Luther’s case such absences matter, because his particular psychological constitution played a decisive role in history: it took an individual of quite remarkable stubbornness to take on the Papacy and launch what became the Reformation.
Venus in Wittenburg: Cranach, Luther, and Sensuality
May 2009
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Chapter
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Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H.C. Erik Midelfort
While the assumption of a sharp distinction between learned culture and lay society has been broadly challenged over the past three decades, the question of how ideas moved and were received and transformed by diverse individuals and groups stands as a continuing challenge to social and intellectual historians, especially with the emergence and integration of the methodologies of cultural history. This collection of essays, influenced by the scholarship of H.C. Erik Midelfort, explores the new methodologies of cultural transmission in the context of early modern Germany. Bringing together articles by European and North American scholars: this volume presents studies ranging from analyses of individual worldviews and actions, influenced by classical and contemporary intellectual history, to examinations of how ideas of the Reformation and Scientific Revolution found their way into the everyday lives of Germans of all classes. Other essays examine the ways in which individual thinkers appropriated classical, medieval, and contemporary ideas of service in new contexts, discuss the means by which groups delineated social, intellectual, and religious boundaries, explore efforts to control the circulation of information, and investigate the ways in which shifting or conflicting ideas and perceptions were played out in the daily lives of persons, families, and communities. By examining the ways in which people expected ideas to influence others and the unexpected ways the ideas really spread, the volume as a whole adds significant features to our conceptual map of life in early modern Europe.
Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe
Addressing a key challenge facing feminist scholars today, this volume explores the tensions between shared gender identity and the myriad social differences structuring women's lives. By examining historical experiences of early modern women, the authors of these essays consider the possibilities for commonalities and the forces dividing women. They analyse individual and collective identities of early modern women, tracing the web of power relations emerging from women's social interactions and contemporary understandings of femininity. Essays range from the late medieval period to the eighteenth century, study women in England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Sweden, and locate women in a variety of social environments, from household, neighbourhood and parish, to city, court and nation. Despite differing local contexts, the volume highlights continuities in women's experiences and the gendering of power relations across the early modern world. Recognizing the critical power of gender to structure identities and experiences, this collection responds to the challenge of the complexity of early modern women's lives. In paying attention to the contexts in which women identified with other women, or were seen by others to identify, contributors add new depth to our understanding of early modern women's senses of exclusion and belonging.
Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany
September 2006
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Book
Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families and tribulations.
History
Witchcraft and the Western Imagination
January 2006
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Journal article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
This essay proposes a new view of demonology, arguing that it was not just a set of theological and legal writings but could also form part of a literature of entertainment. Demonologists frequently used literary techniques such as the dialogue form, hyperbolic set-piece descriptions of the dance or the Sabbath, told stories to pique the reader's interest, and employed humour, salaciousness and horror. Their work intersected with that of artists, influenced by classical images of witches, who began to produce elaborate panoramas of the Sabbath. The cultural legacy of demonology was immense. Through theFaustbuchof 1587, which borrowed from demonological treatises, demonology influenced drama and even figured in the development of the early novel.
Witchcraft, Nostalgia, and the Rural Idyll in Eighteenth-Century Germany
January 2006
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Journal article
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Past & Present
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis
December 2003
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Book
Dreams are universal, but their perceived significance and conceptual framework change over time. This book provides new perspectives on the history of dreams and dream interpretation in western culture and thought.
Dreams and History contains important new scholarship on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and subsequent psychoanalytical approaches from distinguished historians, psychoanalysts, historians of science and anthropologists. This collection celebrates and evaluates Freud's landmark intellectual production, whilst placing it in historical context. A modern view of psychoanalysis, it also discusses the controversial idea of the role of the external world on the shaping of unconscious mental contents.
In highly accessible language it proceeds through a series of richly illustrated case studies, providing new source materials and debates about the causes, meanings and consequences of dreams, past and present: from Victorian anthropological exploration of ancient Greek dream sources to peasant interpretation of dream-life in communist Russia; from concepts of the dream in sixteenth-century England to visual images in nineteenth-century symbolist painting in France.
Psychology
Religion and Culture in Germany (1400-1800)
August 2001
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Book
The late Bob Scribner was one of the most original and provocative historians of the German Reformation. His truly pioneering spirit comes to light in this collection of his most recent essays.
In the years before his death, Scribner explored the role of the senses in late medieval devotional culture, and wondered how the Reformation changed sensual attitudes. Further essays examine the nature of popular culture and the way the Reformation was institutionalised, considering Anabaptist ideals of the community of goods, literacy and heterodoxy, and the dynamics of power as they unfold in a case of witchcraft.
The final section of the book consists of three iconoclastic essays, which, together, form a sustained assault on the argument first advanced by Max Weber that the Reformation created a rational, modern religion. Scribner shows that, far from being rationalist and anti-magical, Protestants had their own brand of magic. These fine essays are certain to spark off debate, not only among historians of the Reformation, but also among art historians and anyone interested in the nature of culture.
'Evil imaginings and fantasies': Child-witches and the end of the witch-craze
May 2000
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Journal article
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Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies
The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg
January 1991
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Book
This is a fascinating study of the impact of the Reformation idea of ‘civic righteousness’ on the position of women in Augsburg. The author argues that its development, both as a religious credo and as a social movement, must be understood in terms of gender. Until now the effects of the Reformation on women have been regarded as largely beneficial: this book argues that such a view of the Reformation's legacy is a profound misreading, and that the status of women was, in fact, worsened. This book is the first scholarly account of how the Reformation affected half of society. It greatly advances our understanding of the Reformation, of feminist history, and of the place of women in European society.