Papers by Costas Gaganakis
Marc Bloch, Απολογία για την ιστορία, 1984
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 14, 2021
From the mid-sixteenth century, the emergent Calvinist movement was actively engaged in the massi... more From the mid-sixteenth century, the emergent Calvinist movement was actively engaged in the massive ‘turn to history’ generated by both confessional camps of the Reformation crisis, in their doctrinal and subsequently military and political confrontation that escalated into religious war. Following the lead of their Lutheran counterparts, Calvinist historians ascribed the confrontation in the broader, providential plan, while at the same time attempting to incorporate the national histories of their countries in the narrative of the opposition against Roman theological and political tyranny. Despite Calvin’s original distancing from the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse dominant in the Lutheran camp, the cataclysmic events ushered in by the escalation of the Reformation crisis, especially in France, generated a return to the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse of ecclesiastical history, historia sacra. With the sole exception of Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière, Calvinist historians in the late sixteenth century sought consolation and encouragement in the providential history of the true, universal Church.
Historein, Aug 21, 2018
Positioning religious refugees or exiles at the centre of the historical phenomenon known as the ... more Positioning religious refugees or exiles at the centre of the historical phenomenon known as the Reformation, Nicholas Terpstra utilizes key concepts including purity, contagion and purgation to construct a cross-confessional narrative that covers the Mediterranean basin and the Americas. He suggests that the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 is at least as significant amongst the events marking the start of the Reformation as Martin Luther's decision to post his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. 'To its proponents [the expulsion of the Jews] was an exercise in community building and a pious act. It was also the wave of the future. It set membership in the national community on the foundations of religious truth and individual will, rather than on accidents of birth' (2). Terpstra states that the Reformation was 'the first period in European and possibly global history when the religious refugee became a mass phenomenon' (4). That phenomenon, whether resulting in exile across borders or containment within an enclosed space in a city or territory (such as Jewish ghettoes), is the focus and organizing principle of his wide-ranging and erudite study. Terpstra highlights the importance of the body as a metaphor during the early modern period and uses it to structure his six chapters. First, he considers the Body of Christ-as the physical body of Jesus, the Host, and Corpus Christianum-and the core threats to its integrity that troubled Europeans: Ottoman Islam, heresy, corruption and the judgement of God evident in natural disasters. The second chapter examines how Europeans dealt with threats to the purity of Corpus Christianum through four key strategies: separation, containment, prosecution and purgation. The Galenic understanding of the body informed its use as a social model in early modern thought and legitimized the implementation of these radical remedies: 'To bringing [sic] a sick body back to health and prevent infecting others, you had to be willing to cut into it, bleed it, force out rotting matter, and then rebuild.. .' (17). The third chapter considers how the body was divided as a result of these strategies and offers several individual case studies (
Historein, May 1, 2001
It is by now a commonplace among historians that Protestantism was the first major movement to fu... more It is by now a commonplace among historians that Protestantism was the first major movement to fully and systematically use the new medium of the printing press. 1 Following on Luther's steps, the leaders of the Reformation became actively engaged in a multilayered printing and disseminating mechanism which produced an unprecedented mass of printed material and provoked an equally massive-though somewhat belatedresponse from the Catholic side. With the emergence of Calvin as the leader of the French Reformation movement and the constant influx of French refugees, the city of Geneva was eventually transformed into a hub of a European printing network, devoted to the dissemination of the Calvinist message. 2 Besides the rejection of Catholicism on dogmatic grounds, the initial aim of Protestant propaganda was to establish the historical continuum of the "new religion" within the framework of an alternative history of Christianity, and on the other hand to underline the "obvious relation" between the ancient Christian martyrs and the persecuted reformed Christians of the sixteenth century. This would serve to identify the Catholics with the enemies of Christianity and actually reverse the grave accusation of heresy. In the 1560s, the exiled French Protestant leadership in Geneva sought to boost the moral of Protestant enclaves in France by means of a "martyrization" of the Huguenot struggle for survival. 3 Yet the Calvinists were called quite soon to answer to accusations of treason and rebellion against the king and the kingdom of France.
Historein, May 1, 2007
The articles gathered in this volume were first presented as papers at the 3rd European History S... more The articles gathered in this volume were first presented as papers at the 3rd European History Symposium, held in Volos from June 11-13, 2004. 1 The papers explored strategies in the construction of identities and of otherness in religious groups and communities, examined mechanisms and processes of confrontation and of stigmatization of the other and pointed to the shift from previously tolerated images of the other to a climate of religious intolerance in various historical eras. The fields of investigation included wars of narrative, representations, mechanisms of persecution and historiographical approaches. Is there an ethics of religious violence? Despina Iosif argues that the lack of a coherent and definite view regarding war and the resort to violence has led to the selective use of passages from the New Testament in support of divergent interpretations and strategies. In his paper, Dimitris Kyrtatas views the anti-heretical campaigns launched by the leaders of the Christian community of Rome in the second century as an integral part of their drive to establish a universal Church. Paris Gounaridis seeks to illuminate the political circumstances that led to a climate of intolerance regarding what was systematically denounced as deviant philosophical views in eleventh-century Byzantium. Robert Moore shows that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the pursuit on the part of the Roman Church of a monopoly of religious authority involved the denigration of possible alternatives, Christian and non Christian, and, equally, the invention of an external foe seeking to corrupt the Latin West through missionary work.
The Sixteenth century journal, 2001
In 1962, the German Reformation historian Bernd Moeller published his Reichsstadt und Reformation... more In 1962, the German Reformation historian Bernd Moeller published his Reichsstadt und Reformation, bringing about a major revitalization of historical interest in the German urban Reformation. Moeller's book sought to disengage the historiography of the Reformation from theological controversy by pointing, in the tradition of Max Weber, to the intersection of Reformation theology with the urban socio-political milieu.
From the mid-sixteenth century, the emergent Calvinist movement was actively engaged in the massi... more From the mid-sixteenth century, the emergent Calvinist movement was actively engaged in the massive ‘turn to history’ generated by both confessional camps of the Reformation crisis, in their doctrinal and subsequently military and political confrontation that escalated into religious war. Following the lead of their Lutheran counterparts, Calvinist historians ascribed the confrontation in the broader, providential plan, while at the same time attempting to incorporate the national histories of their countries in the narrative of the opposition against Roman theological and political tyranny. Despite Calvin’s original distancing from the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse dominant in the Lutheran camp, the cataclysmic events ushered in by the escalation of the Reformation crisis, especially in France, generated a return to the prophetic/apocalyptic discourse of ecclesiastical history, historia sacra. With the sole exception of Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière, Calvinist historians in t...
Historein, Aug 21, 2018
Review of Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History... more Review of Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 348 pp.
The Sixteenth Century Journal, XXXII, 2,, 2001
Historein, Jan 5, 2001
It is by now a commonplace among historians that Protestantism was the first major movement to fu... more It is by now a commonplace among historians that Protestantism was the first major movement to fully and systematically use the new medium of the printing press. 1 Following on Luther's steps, the leaders of the Reformation became actively engaged in a multilayered printing and disseminating mechanism which produced an unprecedented mass of printed material and provoked an equally massive-though somewhat belatedresponse from the Catholic side. With the emergence of Calvin as the leader of the French Reformation movement and the constant influx of French refugees, the city of Geneva was eventually transformed into a hub of a European printing network, devoted to the dissemination of the Calvinist message. 2 Besides the rejection of Catholicism on dogmatic grounds, the initial aim of Protestant propaganda was to establish the historical continuum of the "new religion" within the framework of an alternative history of Christianity, and on the other hand to underline the "obvious relation" between the ancient Christian martyrs and the persecuted reformed Christians of the sixteenth century. This would serve to identify the Catholics with the enemies of Christianity and actually reverse the grave accusation of heresy. In the 1560s, the exiled French Protestant leadership in Geneva sought to boost the moral of Protestant enclaves in France by means of a "martyrization" of the Huguenot struggle for survival. 3 Yet the Calvinists were called quite soon to answer to accusations of treason and rebellion against the king and the kingdom of France.
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Papers by Costas Gaganakis