History

Integrating the Anabaptist movement coherently into their own historiographical concept of the Reformation challenged both Lutheran and Reformed scholars. Steffie Schmidt examines the extent to which these narrative patterns were questioned and possibly updated under the conditions of pietism and Enlightenment.

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.

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.

This handbook brings together both classic and cutting-edge methods for interpreting the New Testament. Chapters on historical-critical, literary, and reader-response approaches showcase the wide methodological range through which the text's original setting and its contemporary significance can be explored.