Responses to Religious Division in Europe, 1580-1620

Responses to Religious Division in Europe, 1580-1620 Synopsis

The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a series of religiously fuelled conflicts break out across Europe. This study explores the reaction of four important authors of the late Renaissance to this religious division, and the effects upon contemporary conceptions of morality and politics. It is argued that the writers under consideration - Pierre Charron, Justus Lipsius, Paolo Sarpi and King James I & VI - were deeply concerned with these issues, which they articulated in their publications. That these publications often received a contentious reception is linked to the fact that all four authors were perceived by their contemporaries as ambivalent in their religious convictions. The authors and the works discussed in this study represent a growing and influential body of opinion which in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had begun to doubt the singularity and authority of the institutionalised religion in matters of politics and morals. As a result it is argued that Charron, Lipsius, Sarpi and James all began to employ more fluid concepts of public and private religion, allowing states and societies to function without recourse to the strict denominational control that had resulted in so much religious strife. Whilst religion was still central to their conception of morality and politics, they believed that adopting forms of 'private' worship within a well regulated state would deter the corrosive effects of public religious extremism. Through such an investigation, this book furthers our understanding of the role of religion with early modern European society, bolstering the realisation that it was a much more complex and sophisticated issue than previously thought.