History

Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (1693-1728) is colonial America's first commentary on the whole Bible. Perhaps best remembered for his writings on Salem witchcraft, the hugely prolific Mather was undeniably one of New England's leading Enlightenment thinkers.

As the founder of Pietistic Lutheranism, the letters of Philipp Jakob Spener are an essential source for research on the Early Modern Age, not only in terms of church history, but also regarding cultural history and the history of ideas. Volume 3 of the »Correspondence with Adam Rechenberg« contains 179 letters from the years 1691-1693.

Luther used and coined a rich arsenal of battle names and pejorative terms with which he labelled his 'radical' opponents and through which he marked 'deviation' from his own position. Thomas Hahn-Bruckart explores these and other strategies of linguistic inclusion and exclusion to trace how identity and alterity was marked and contoured in the early Wittenberg Reformation.

What rhetorical strategies with the goal of edification do theologians pursue in sermons? How are their theological concepts expressed in this aesthetic form, which is oriented towards the reality of people's lives? This volume is intended as a foundation for understanding the most important Protestant theologians since the Enlightenment.