Social Groups and Religious Ideas in the Sixteenth Century

“The papers emphasize the plural nature of the sixteenth-century historical experience. Changes occurring within one sector were not assimilated within the other sectors. Economic and religious forces fostered the development of group differentiation and greater group consciousness, while social and political forces led to the concentration of power in the hands of one group — the urban and rural nobility. Religious institutions, even those created by the Reformation, were unable to accept dissent. Their answer to diversity was orthodoxy.” – Miriam Usher Chrisman, “Introduction,” pp. xv-xvi.

• Edited by Miriam Usher Chrisman
• Edited by Otto Gründler