| Summary: | This volume provides the first geographically broad, comparative survey of early modern 'sacred history', or writing on the history of the Christian Church, its leaders and saints, and its institutional and doctrinal developments, in the two centuries from c. 1450-1650. With deep medieval roots, ecclesiastical history was generally a conservative enterprise, often serving to reinforce confessional, national, regional, dynastic, or local identities. But writers of sacred history innovated in research methods and in techniques of scholarly production, especially after the advent of print. The demand for sacred history was particularly acute in the various movements for religious reform, in both Catholic and Protestant traditions.
|
|---|
