Theology

Eric J. P. Wagner identifies and analyzes personified mountains in the Epic of Gilgameš, the Iliad and Odyssey, and Genesis-2 Kings. These »embodied landscapes« represent mythic thinking, inviting a re-reading that traces their meaning(s) and function(s) across each corpus.

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.

In their study, Ittai Gradel and Nils Arne Pedersen intersect archaeology, religious history, and apocryphal literature to show how ten rings from the 3rd century AD, all inscribed »Solomon says: 'Watch out!',« provide a new perspective on the Testament of Solomon and its place in early Christianity.

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.