Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation
In post-Reformation Poland--the largest state in Europe and home to the largest Jewish population in the world--the Catholic Church suffered profound anxiety about its power after the Protestant threat. Magda Teter reveals how criminal law became a key tool in the manipulation of the meaning of the sacred and in the effort to legitimize Church authority. The mishandling of sacred symbols was transformed from a sin that could be absolved into a crime that resulted in harsh sentences of mutilation, hanging, decapitation, and, principally, burning at the stake. Teter casts new light on the most infamous type of sacrilege, the accusation against Jews for desecrating the eucharistic wafer. These sacrilege trials were part of a broader struggle over the meaning of the sacred and of sacred space at a time of religious and political uncertainty, with the eucharist at its center. But host desecration--defined in the law as sacrilege--went beyond anti-Jewish hatred to reflect Catholic-Protestant conflict, changing conditions of ecclesiastic authority and jurisdiction, and competition in the economic marketplace. Recounting dramatic stories of torture, trial, and punishment, this is the first book to consider the sacrilege accusations of the early modern period within the broader context of politics and common crime. Teter draws on previously unexamined trial records to bring out the real-life relationships among Catholics, Jews, and Protestants and challenges the commonly held view that following the Reformation, Poland was a "state without stakes"--uniquely a country without religious persecution.
Pietro Aretino, religious writer
Although Pietro Aretino's vernacular biblical paraphrases and saints’ lives were popular and greatly admired in the sixteenth century, modern scholarship often has dismissed them as commercial potboilers. This study presents the case that Aretino was a serious reformer in religion and possibly a Nicodemite. It traces his long relationship with Antonio Brucioli, who was an important conduit of Protestant writings and whose reformist Bible translation enabled Aretino's paraphrases. Relying on their letters, it examines Aretino's friendship with Pier Paolo Vergerio and his attraction to Bernardino Ochino, both of whom became apostates, and his reaction to the arrest of his confessor for having Lutheran sympathies. Aretino's biblical paraphrases were esteemed in Italian reformist circles and translated into French by a prior attached to Marguerite of Navarre's court. In England Sir Thomas Wyatt based his Lutheran Penitential Psalms on Aretino's I sette Salmi.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.