Religious Dissent

La diffusione dell’Utopia di Thomas More coincide con momenti di straordinaria tensione politica e sociale. La sua fortuna editoriale, col favorire un’ampia circolazione delle idee dell’autore anche negli ambienti vicini alla Riforma radicale, poteva suscitare prima o poi il desiderio di tradurle in pratica. Quando ai primi di maggio del 1525 apparve il libretto luterano contro i contadini tedeschi, la loro rivolta aveva raggiunto la massima espansione. Lutero attaccava con veemenza Thomas Müntzer, associandolo ai contadini nell’accusa di banditismo per delegittimarne l’azione e smascherarlo come falso profeta. Müntzer possedeva tuttavia una cultura notevole e conosceva Erasmo, Platone e probabilmente anche More. La condivisione dei beni, che avvicinava Platone e l’umanista More al cristianesimo evangelico, sarà per il riformatore di Allstedt – diventata l’anti-Wittenberg – un sogno profetico da realizzare in un Regno terreno di Cristo senza empi e peccatori, regolato da principi di moralità e giustizia in coerenza con la parola di Dio. Ma Lutero, con la sua realistica apologia della repressione, poneva le premesse teoriche per il massacro di Frankenhausen e la nascita di un ethos militare della Riforma.

Die Warschauer Anhänger des jüdischen Pseudomessias Jakob Frank und die Glaubensenthusiasten um die St. Petersburger Prophetin Ekaterina Tatarinova pflegten kirchliche und ausserkirchliche sowie rabbinische und nichtrabbinische religiöse Praxen zugleich. Aus vergleichender lebensweltlicher und mikrohistorischer Betrachtung entwickelt die Autorin das Konzept der "situativen Religiosität", um die Selbstverortungsstrategien dieser Gläubigen zu beschreiben. Das Konzept bricht das vorgelagerte Verständnis von hoogenen religiösen Identitäten auf und zeigt die Gleichzeitigkeit mehrfacher religiöser Identitäten als besonderes Phänomen der Epoche am Vorabend der religiös pluralistischen Industriegesellschaften, ohne diese Identitäten als marginal, deviant oder korrupt zu lokalisieren.

This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It identifies 34 Quaker missionaries in 17th- and early 18C France, sheds new light on the French reception of Quakerism and suggests possible connections with non-violent, charismatic movements in Languedoc.

An entry in the online German-language MennLex encyclopedia project (originally from 2012; published in 2020). The article considers how Swiss Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites can be analyzed in terms of the historiographical model of confessionalization, if that concept is understood in a heuristically flexible way. The English version is a pre-publication text. Please consult and cite the German version (link included).

Публикация включает три письма, обнаруженные в архиве собрания религиозного движения Новый Израиль в г. Сан-Хавьер в Уругвае и краткую сопроводительную статью к ним. Письма были получены в 1927 г. из поселения, только что созданного новоизраильтянами на Северном Кавказе, и относятся к периоду, когда отношение Советской власти к «сектантским» коллективным хозяйствам было еще благожелательным. Письма затрагивают как хозяйственные, так и религиозные аспекты жизни новоизраильской общины.
This publication includes three letters found in the archives of the New
Israel meetinghouse in San Javier, Uruguay and a short explanatory article. The letters
were received in 1927 from the settlement just established by the New Israel
members in the Russian North Caucasus. They belong to the period when the attitude of the Soviet authorities toward the “sectarian” collective farms was still benevolent.
The letters cover both economic and religious aspects of life in the New Israel community.

There were times in the 19th century when disestablishment of the Church of England seemed inevitable. Dissenters had become a sizeable portion of the worshipping community, with a growing number of Roman Catholics. The privileges enjoyed by the Established Church were under attack from outside and occasionally from within.
The main aim of this paper is to explore why disestablishment of the Church did not happen in that century, when it was a popular political issue and there were passionate advocates for disestablishment. There were also passionate defenders of the establishment, but part of the task is to judge whether the Church’s survival as an established church was more to do with indifference than defence.
General arguments about church-state relationships are considered only in passing. The aim is not to argue the case for or against disestablishment, but to analyse why antidisestablishmentarianism triumphed.  The emphasis is on original material, rather than iteration of already published histories and arguments.
The paper begins with an overview of the Church’s condition at the start of the 19th century. Detail consideration is given to the creation of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, attitudes to the Church within the Chartist movement at a time of great discontent with government, the influence of the Liberation Society, and the role of Gladstone.
By the end of the 19th century, the Church of England was much less “established” than it had been at the start. This might be seen either as a consequence of the battles over disestablishment, or as one of the reasons why disestablishment was never achieved, for the supposed benefits of establishment had been whittled away until the Church of England was seen as just one Christian denomination among many, with far fewer privileges to attack.
The final part of the paper looks at our present time and secularised society, and asks whether a decisive alteration in the relationship between Church and State is any more likely now than over a hundred years ago. This part includes some speculation about whether past debates and arguments could have a bearing on the situation now, and about what future crises might provoke Church or Parliament to change the relationship.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the circumstances under which the New Israel group of Russian Spiritual Christians repatri-ated from Uruguay to Soviet Russia in the 1920s. New Israelites were the largest of all overseas "sectarian" groups that responded to the Soviet authorities' call to return to the country and take part in creating collective agricultural enterprises. The cooperative enterprise established by that religious community on the territory of the present day Rostov Region endured for a few years. Shortly thereafter, due to changes in government policies, it was transformed into a sovkhoz and lost its economic and ideological autonomy. The article demonstrates , using private correspondence between the movement's leaders as evidence, that contrary to popular opinion, political and ideological considerations did not play a significant role in their decision to re-emigrate. Key factors behind the re-emigration to Soviet Rus-sia were the catastrophic financial situation in which the New Israel community in Uruguay found itself, as well as the threat of criminal prosecution looming over its leaders. The leftist and communist language frequently employed by the New Israel leadership was mainly a rhetoric tool used to solve practical issues in the short run.

Harvest Thanksgiving rests at the junction of liturgy, nature and memory. From the late-nineteenth century it was a major event on Nonconformist church calendars, drawing crowds well beyond regular attendance. Yet it was the Nonconformist churches’ uneasy relationship with icons, visual display and imagery of all sorts that made the spectacular displays of fruit and vegetables associated with Harvest Thanksgiving so memorable, so marvellously out of the ordinary. Photographs were taken and treasured and these offer a glimpse into a rich and peculiar world of food and display that is at once consonant and disconsonant with Nonconformity’s professed and assumed theological stances on the use of imagery. In this time of celebration and thanksgiving, of spectacle and transformation, how were Nonconformist prohibitions on display, materiality and excess so extravagantly overcome? How was the divide between the sacred and profane so colourfully rearranged? This article explores the histor...

Abbiamo scelto la forma 'honoris gratia' consueta nel mondo accademico, legittimati e motivati, nello spirito di volontariato del nostro Centro, dalla stima e dall’amicizia che da oltre tre decenni ci rendono familiare la singolare vivacità intellettuale di Romeo De Maio per sintonia di 'curiositas' e affinità di arguzia. Il desiderio di festosa condivisione, maturato in occasione del suo ottantesimo genetliaco, ha suggerito di convocare ad un ideale simposio studiosi a vario titolo accomunati dalla ricerca storica intesa come percorso di coscienza etica e di mente libera.

[...] La bibliografia degli scritti di Romeo De Maio palesa la perspicacia del maître à penser che educa a scorgere e perlustrare campi storiografici inesplorati, per i quali appaiono paradigmatici i misteri di Michelangelo e la libertà di pensiero di Vittoria Colonna. [...].

Gli studi raccolti in questo volume miscellaneo attengono ad ambiti, questioni e temi dell’età moderna che preludono anche a sviluppi o nessi di pregnante attualità. Essi si susseguono secondo il solo criterio dell’ordine alfabetico dei rispettivi autori.[...]. (Dalla Presentazione di Luigi Gulia, Presidente del Centro di Studi Sorani, ivi, pp. 13-14).

The belief that there is a moral right to opinions is widespread. The philosopher Jamie Whyte argues that no such right exists. In this essay, I defend the existence of a moral right to beliefs, but argue that this right is not, as some believe, the right never to be publicly contradicted. Instead, it is, more or less, the right not to be threatened or persecuted for what you believe. I also argue that publicly expressing counter-evidence to another person’s views is not a rights violation; on the contrary, it is a way of treating her with dignity.

La via dritta della salute. Tolleranza e convivenza nell'Europa dell'età moderna di michaeLa vaLente «Quanto più in questa mia ultima persecuzione m'ha scacciato il mondo, tanto più ho io sentito che Dio m'ha abraciato», così scriveva Bernardino Ochino, definito eretico da tutte le chiese 1 . Per distruggere questa consolatoria immagine di essere nel giusto perché vittima di persecuzione, si opposero fiumi di inchiostro su montagne di carta dal momento che con l'imporsi della Riforma, in Europa gli stati e le chiese fecero fronte rendendo impossibile la convivenza tra fedi diverse, giungendo a adottare misure estreme, quali l'espulsione o la ghettizzazione 2 . Al con-1 m. FiRPo, Boni Christiani merito vocantur haeretici: Bernardino Ochino e la tolleranza, in: La formazione storica della alterità. Studi di storia della tolleranza nell'età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò, a cura di H.

Герман Аркадий Адольфович, докт. ист. наук, профессор (Россия, Саратов), заместитель главного редактора Ван Сяоцзюй, докт. ист. наук, профессор (Китай, Пекин) Венгер Наталия Викторовна, докт. ист. наук (Украина, Днипро) Головнёв Андрей Владимирович, член-корреспондент РАН, докт. ист. наук, профессор (Россия, Санкт-Петербург) Дённингхаус Виктор, доктор, профессор (Германия, Люнебург) Манхерц Карл, доктор, профессор (Венгрия, Будапешт) Мусагалиева Арайлым Сабитовна, докт. ист. наук (Казахстан, Нур-Султан) Нам Ираида Владимировна, докт. ист. наук, профессор (Россия, Томск) Нойтатц Дитмар, доктор, профессор (Германия, Фрайбург) Петров Юрий Александрович, докт. ист. наук (Россия, Москва) Фризен Эйлин, профессор (Канада, Виннипег) Функ Дмитрий Анатольевич, докт. ист. наук, профессор (Россия, Москва) Черных Александр Васильевич, член-корреспондент РАН, докт. ист. наук (Россия, Пермь) Силантьева Ольга Юрьевна, канд. филол. наук (Россия, Москва), ответственный секретарь Киссер Татьяна Сергеевна, канд. ист. наук (Россия, Санкт-Петербург), ответственный секретарь Вагнер Евгений Петрович, председатель Немецкого молодежного объединения (Россия, Томск) Лейман Андрей Рихардович, канд. филол. наук, директор Института этнокультурного образования (Россия, Москва) Мартенс Ольга Константиновна, канд. филос. наук, заместитель председателя Международного союза немецкой культуры (Россия, Москва) Штралер Олег Францевич, канд. полит. наук, заместитель председателя Федеральной национально-культурной автономии российских немцев (Россия, Сыктывкар) YEARBOOK INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HISTORY AND CULTURE RESEARCHERS OF THE RUSSIAN GERMANS Science Magazine № 2 (8), 2020

Меннониты, представители одной из старейших протестантских церквей, в период сталинизма были последовательными противниками политики советизации и секуляризации. В годы после Второй мировой войны меннониты продолжали активно выступать против государственного вмешательства в жизнь верующих и контроля за делами церкви. В издание, тематически продолжающее опубликованные в 2006 и 2009 гг. документальные сборники, включены архивные документы Совета по делам религий при Совете министров СССР, региональных уполномоченных Совета, а также местных партийных и советских органов, посвященные жизнедеятельности меннонитских общин Западной Сибири в послевоенные годы. Книга рассчитана как на профессиональных историков, так и на всех интересующихся историей церковно-государственных отношений, а также национальной проблематикой в СССР.

A structured and partly annotated bibliography of religious non-conformism / dissent / heresy / heterodoxy and its repression in the history of Christianity (now around 750 standard pages) intended to update and supplement, among others, Grundmann, Herbert, Bibliographie zur Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters (1900-1966), Rome 1967, and Berkhout, Carl T. – Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography 1960-1979, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1981. All headings are now also in English; some annotations are in Czech.

Böhme is an important figure who connects the histories of early modern religious dissidence to Continental philosophy and later countercultural movements, yet he remains understudied. Challenging prevalent views that Böhme's writings are exercises in irrationality or "primitive" religious speculation, I argue that his work provides the theory for a practice aimed at (a) relocating religious authority in the body and (b) fostering an experience of the world that rejects contemporaneous theological and scientific cosmologies in favor of an ontology of human/world co-constitution. I demonstrate that many of Böhme's concepts do not "make sense" when approached as theology, philosophy, or theory, because his texts are indexed to the body: they are meant to catalyze existential transformation rather than convey purely conceptual content. My dissertation attempts to rectify the tendency to "disembody" Böhme, by approaching him first and foremost as a praxis-oriented thinker. I analyze Böhme's work, not as an example of introspective mysticism or speculative philosophy, but as the framework for a praxis meant to be performed in real time: an "existential paradigm" that is simultaneously (a) a phenomenology of desire; (b) a theory, method, and practice of self and world creation; and (c) a creative action aimed at disrupting the social imaginary and influencing the larger body politic.

Quand il est à Rome, le pape François déjeune chaque jour au milieu de bonnes soeurs dont il partage le modeste repas. Signe de la vie simple qu’il s’est choisie en référence à François d’Assise, dont il fut le premier pape à adopter le patronyme comme pour inaugurer une ère nouvelle. Mais aussi, dit-on, façon de conjurer le risque d’un empoisonnement, tant sa volonté de réforme heurterait les puissants du Vatican… Pour autant, en faire un pape révolutionnaire reviendrait à ne pas saisir à quel point son action est limitée par la doctrine, le fonctionnement des structures de l’Église et les difficultés contemporaines du catholicisme. Si François, professionnel de la communication et habile jésuite, tient tant à un aggiornamento, c’est avant tout pour tenter d'enrayer le recul, aussi rapide que profond, de la foi romaine partout en Occident.

Beliakova N. A. ‘“We Report about the Crimes against Justice…”: Believer’s Appeals and Complaints in the Brezhnev USSR’, Modern History of Russia, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018, pp. 640–658. https://doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu24.2018.307
Abstract: In the article are analyzed the appeals, complaints, and letters of believers in the Soviet Union as one of the long-standing cultural forms of communication with the authorities. The religious people, using the legitimated by the soviet authoritarian system channel of communication, fill it with opposition/protest content. The writing of appeals and complaints, which contained the information on the needs and requirements of believers, who did not hide their religious affiliation, becomes mass since the Khrushchev era. A number of letters reflect the soviet civic formation, for example, the recognition of individual and civil rights is used to demand freedom of conscience. The article shows, how a form of communication approved by the government and designed for demonstrating sympathy towards the regime was privatized by common people and filled with a new meaning. Religious people strove to show that their actions were in accordance with the current law, and local authorities are represented as law-breakers. Furthermore, their action against believers / religion undermine the confidence and even discredit the Soviet power. The propaganda of the Helsinki agreements and the new Constitution led to appropriating the “eхport” (for the bourgeois society) ideas/concepts inside the soviet society. Apprehended the article “The Soviet Law and the Freedom of Conscience” in the newsletter “Izvestija” (1976) as a sign about the change / the turn of religious policy inside the country, the believers’ petition campaign for their rights protection significantly increased

In this chapter, I want to offer an account of Church and State between 1550 and 1750 that does not point inexorably towards the separation of Church and Dissent. Instead, I want to stress that the story of Dissent can only be told in conjunction with the story of the Church of England.  Until late in the seventeenth century, most Dissenters remained thoroughly invested in the state Church, and deeply committed to the ideals of the magisterial Reformation. While the sects did sever links with the Established Church, the parting of the ways between the Church and a broader Dissent was a slow and painful business, one that was contingent rather than inevitable. What we call Puritanism was imbricated with Anglicanism. To set these abstractions at war with each other is to distort the story of post-Reformation England. Much of early Protestant Dissent was not dissent from the Church of England, but dissent within it and on its behalf. The religious settlement continued to be hotly debated long after 1559, and there were numerous attempts to remake the English Church – by Puritans and Laudians, Presbyterians and Independents, Latitudinarians and High Churchmen. Only after much struggle and various contingencies did Church and Dissent become rival ecclesiastical blocs

The paper explores the ways religious grassroots actors in the borderlands contribute to the new understanding of cross border regions and religious groups in the space between the Serbian and Romanian Banat from the perspective of the anthropology of borders. The border region included in this paper was the place of interreligious and interethnic encounter, where religions and languages mixed and there was a continuous interaction between Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants. By studying the region that had strong cultural, historical and religious connections, the aim is to provide new insights on the borders and religious groups that are understudied. This article explores the "liminal" character of religious identities, development of renewal movements and crossing symbolic boundaries with the examples of the "home-grown" religious movement of the Lord' s Army (Rom. Oastea Domnului) emerged in the first decades of the 20th century.

Heresy had social, cultural and political implications in the middle ages, and countering heresy was often a central component in the development of orthodoxy. This series publishes work on heresy, and the repression of heresy, from late antiquity to the Reformation, including monographs, collections of essays, and editions of texts.

The Steri, prison of the Spanish Holy Office in Palermo (XVII-XVIII centuries), are to be investigated as a site of production of a peculiar religious culture: what kind of religiosity emerges, given the heterogeneous composition of the prison population? What religious practices take place in the cells? What kind of religious interaction take place between prisoners looked up in a same cell? Drawings and graffiti are linked through an iconographic tradition to hagiography and theology and to author's proximity-based iconic memory.

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.

Introduction to my edited volume:
“The Riddles of Monism: An Introductory Essay,” in: Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd Weir. Palgrave Series in Intellectual and Cultural History (Palgrave: New York, 2012), pp. 1-44.

The manuscript J II 44, held by the National Central Library of Florence (Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Conventi soppressi, ms. J II 44, also known under the shelf mark I II 44), contains several theological treatises originating in the heterodox milieu of mid-thirteenth-century Lombard Cathars from the Desenzano Church who were also called Albanenses. The main works in the manuscript – The Liber de duobus principiis and the Florence Ritual – were competently edited by Antoine Dondaine and Christine Thouzellier in the 1930s and 1970s. However, smaller pieces, additions, and marginalia in the manuscript have attracted less attention. Some of them remain unpublished and have passed almost unnoticed in recent scholarship. Probably the most interesting of these unpublished parts is a compilation from Old Testament sapiential books on fol. 51v-53r. This article provides an edition of this piece with an introduction and commentary explaining its interest. The compilation is by no means a result of the haphazard copying of biblical passages. Quite to the contrary, it shows careful and focused theological work. Albeit written down and most probably also compiled by the Cathar redactor of the Florence manuscript, this collection of quotes departs from what we know about Catharism, and serves as a warning against interpreting Catharism as a theological system limited to dualism, soteriology, and the criticism of the Catholic Church. No less importantly, however, this sapiential compilation and the Florence manuscript in general also help us to avoid the other extreme: interpreting Catharism merely as a popular movement with virtually no elements of theological learning.

The heavily censored Prague edition of tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud, published in Prague in 1728, was the product of collaboration between Franciscus Haselbauer, the Jesuit censor of Hebrew books in Bohemia, and Jonathan Eibeschütz, the prodigy of the Prague rabbinate. In contrast to most censored editions of Hebrew books in the early modern period, the Prague Talmud featured extensive rewriting, rather than only expurgating, of the text. Drawing on archival materials, this article analyzes the backdrop of the publication and the changes introduced by the editors, teasing out the theological assumptions underlying the publishing enterprise.

Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian by Paul Brewster was published in 2010.  Mr. Brewster was a pastor of Ryker’s Ridge Baptist Church in Madison, Indiana and earned a Ph.D. From Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and an M.Div. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.