Gerd Schwerhoff and Alex Kästner, eds., Göttlicher Zorn und menschliches Maß: Religiöse Abweichung in frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgemeinschaften (Constance: UVK, 2013)

Jordan, John (2014). Gerd Schwerhoff and Alex Kästner, eds., Göttlicher Zorn und menschliches Maß: Religiöse Abweichung in frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgemeinschaften (Constance: UVK, 2013). German History, 32(3), pp. 462-464. Oxford University Press 10.1093/gerhis/ghu019

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This book presents six essays by researchers associated with the Technological University of Dresden’s collaborative research centre, Transzendenz und Gemeinsinn, on the interesting theme of religious deviance in early modern cities.

As Gerd Schwerhoff and Alexander Kästner make clear in the introduction, early modern religious deviance is a broad concept, and one difficult to delimit, particularly because most early modern secular crimes—theft, adultery, witchcraft and magic, blasphemy—were also sins. Should such offences fall under the rubric of secular or religious deviance? Historians have traditionally approached these offences as secular (and indeed, they were commonly prosecuted in ‘secular’ courts), but one cannot help but see their religious roots. Moreover, religious deviance also encompassed divergence over confessional practices and doctrinal beliefs among Catholics, Protestants, Anabaptists, Calvinists, and so on. To try and demarcate this broad field, Schwerhoff and Kästner advocate using the ‘labelling approach’, drawn from sociology and previously used in Schwerhoff’s work: that is, behaviour only becomes deviant when contemporaries classified (or labelled) it as such (p. 27).

Item Type:

Journal Article (Review Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of History and Archaeology > Institute of History > Recent History

UniBE Contributor:

Jordan, John

Subjects:

900 History > 940 History of Europe

ISSN:

0266-3554

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Language:

English

Submitter:

Claudia Ravazzolo

Date Deposited:

30 Apr 2014 15:32

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:33

Publisher DOI:

10.1093/gerhis/ghu019

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.50566

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/50566

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