The Quest for Compromise is an interdisciplinary study of the imperial court in late sixteenth-century Vienna, and a detailed examination of a fascinating moment of religious moderation. Against a ...backdrop of rising religious and confessional dogmatism, the Emperor Maximilian II (1564-1576) assembled a remarkable cast of courtiers who resisted extremes of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book investigates the rise and fall of an irenic movement through four individuals whose work at the imperial court reflected the ideals of religious compromise and moderation. An Italian artist (Jacopo Strada), a Silesian physician (Johannes Crato), a Dutch librarian (Hugo Blotius) and a German soldier (Lazarus von Schwendi) sought peace and accommodation through a wide range of cultural, intellectual and political activity.
Louthan explores the role of holy remains of the saints in the process of re-converting Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. The fresh wave of these relic 'discoveries', such as the ...bodies of the Christian martyrs allegedly uncovered at Sacromonte in Granada between 1588 and 1595 gave expression to an attempt to harness the 'useable past.' Here too Catholic elites deliberately sought to revive the memory of the Czech nation's pre-Hussite heritage and to repair a major rupture in its history by means of a species of ecclesiastical antiquarianism. The recovery and translation of relics was central to the resurgence of the Church of Rome in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as to its mission to evangelize the New World.
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Book Review
Reformacja w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej i jej europejskie konteksty. Postulaty badawcze
(Reformation in the Old Respublica and Its European Contexts) Edited by Piotr Wilczek. Warsaw: ...Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa (www.sublupa.pl), 2010. 230 pages. ISBN 978-83- 9292-44-3-2. Paper.
