The Reform Of Christian Doctrine In The Catechisms Of Peter Canisius

The Reform of Christian Doctrine in the Catechisms of Peter Canisius

The catechisms of Peter Canisius reveal the contours of the struggle within the Catholic Church to reframe Christian identity in response to the Protestant Reformation. Canisius published his first catechism in 1555, and immediately achieved phenomenal publishing success. Yet his catechisms received neither endorsement nor approbation from Rome. Canisius’s catechesis proposed a confident vision of Christian identity grounded in the practice of Catholic piety. The Roman Curia increasingly conceived of catechesis as a defensive bulwark against Protestant assault. Although Canisius’s catechisms often appear in scholarship as representatives of a combative, post-Reformation style of defending Catholic orthodoxy, the combat in which they actually engaged was internal to the Catholic Church, over how to reframe post-Reformation Catholic identity.

The Reform of Christian Doctrine in the Catechisms of Peter Canisius

Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg

In an age characterized by religious conflict, Protestant and Catholic Augsburgers remained largely at peace. How did they do this? This book argues that the answer is in the “emotional practices” Augsburgers learned and enacted—in the home, in marketplaces and other sites of civic interaction, in the council house, and in church. Augsburg’s continued peace depended on how Augsburgers felt—as neighbors, as citizens, and believers—and how they negotiated the countervailing demands of these commitments. Drawing on police records, municipal correspondence, private memoranda, internal administrative documents and other records revealing everyday behavior, experience, and thought, Sean Dunwoody shows how Augsburgers negotiated the often-conflicting feelings of being a good believer and being a good citizen and neighbor.