Reformations

This  week, join Meeter Center director Karin Maag for a show-and-tell  featuring amazing medals commemorating the Reformation from the Meeter  Center's collection. We are fortunate to have received an extensive set  of medals from a local collector, to add to the medals we already had -  many of these mark significant anniversaries of Calvin's life, but  others, like the ones featured in today's short video, highlight  significant dates or events that helped shape Reformed identity. The  iconography, symbols, and artistic talent together make these medals  truly engaging witnesses to the ongoing significance of the Reformation  well after the sixteenth century.

The video version of this podcast can be watched here: https://youtu.be/08QEBuOTLcU

We heard from Dr. Maximilian Miguel Scholz, assistant professor of History, Florida State University, speaking about his upcoming book, _Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608_ (University of Virginia Press - release date January 17, 2022).  Following Max's presentation of the main themes of his book, we had responses from Dr. Jesse Spohnholz (Washington State University) and Dr. Mirjam van Veen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), both of whom have published works and ongoing projects on religious refugees in the early modern era. After that, we hed our open forum discussion by Zoom chat.

We were delighted to host another Reformation Conversations Webinar this fall, this time focusing on Dr. Bruce Gordon’s upcoming biography of the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli. The session took place on Thursday, Nov. 4, from 1 PM to 2:30 PM. Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School, where he has served since 2008. His research focuses on the Reformation and its reception, especially in the Swiss lands. In 2009, he published his biography of John Calvin (Yale University Press), one of the best English-language biographies of the Genevan Reformer. Now he has turned his attention to the leading early Reformer of the city of Zurich in his monograph, _Huldrych Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet_, due to be released by Yale University Press on November 30, 2021.

Here is the recording of the final presentation in our summer 2021 webinar series, featuring Martin Klauber.  Dr. Klauber is an Affiliate Professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and our 2019 Emo Van Halsema fellowship recipient.  He began his fellowship with two weeks of study at the Meeter Center in 2019 and returned this year to complete his research.  His presentation is titled “Pierre Allix (1641-1717) Pastor at Charenton: Preparation for the Lord's Supper.” According to Philip Benedict, one of the key areas of Huguenot publications during the seventeenth century were devotional books designed to help prepare believers to partake of the Lord’s Supper. The pastors at the great temple at Charenton which served the Reformed community in Paris were at the forefront of these efforts.  Jean Claude, the famous Charenton pastor at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, also took his turn at this type of devotional literature in 1682 with his _L’examen de soy-mesme pour se bien preparer à la communion_. Claude’s treatise experienced a brief period in the sun for the first two years after its initial publication with seven French and one English edition. His colleague Pierre Allix penned a similar work, _Preparation à la Sainte Cene_. Allix saw his own work go through three editions in French and one in English. This presentation will focus on Allix and his _Preparation à la Sainte Cene_, showing how he contributed to the literature and practice of preparing for the Lord’s Supper for French Protestants. This event will took place on Friday, August 13th.

Here is our next presentation in our summer webinar series, featuring Max Rogland.  Dr. Rogland is the Senior Minister at Rose Hill Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, and the 2021 recipient of our Emo Van Halsema Fellowship.  His presentation, titled  "Chasing the Wind? Pursuing the Annotations in the 1637 Statenbijbel (Dutch) Translation of Ecclesiastes,"  considers the link between the interpretation of Ecclesiastes and views on the book's authorship in the 16th and 17th centuries, taking the Annotations of the Statenvertaling as a starting point. According to these Annotations, "Many of the Learned are of the opinion, that Salomon wrote this Book in his old age, after that he had for many years together turned away from the right path of true godliness; but was now again converted unto God..." Such remarks not only indicate the existence of other interpretive approaches to the book but could even suggest that some voices were already denying its Solomonic authorship, as became common in later scholarship. In this presentation, Dr. Rogland seeks to clarify the Annotations' intent in their historical context.  Dr. Rogland's talk took place on Thursday, August 5th.

Here is the next presentation in our summer webinar series, featuring Christine Kooi.  Dr. Kooi is the Lewis C. and Katheryn J. Price Professor of European History at Louisiana State University, and the 2020 recipient of our Friends of the Meeter Center Fellowship.  She will speak about her forthcoming book, _Reformation in the Low Countries, 1500-1620_, which is slated to be published by Cambridge University Press next year.  This project is the first-ever book-length narrative in English of the Reformation in entirety of the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands). An attempt to synthesize more than a half-century's worth of scholarly research on religious change (Protestant and Catholic) in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century, it focuses on the relationship between religion and politics, especially its contribution to the Revolt of the Netherlands against the Habsburgs and the formation of the region's two successor states, the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands.

The Meeter Center is pleased to present our summer scholar presentation series, featuring this year’s visiting scholars who are pursuing their research at the Meeter Center.  The first of these took place on July 1, 2021, and our speakers were Amanda Eurich and Preston Hill.  Dr. Eurich, our 2019 Faculty Fellowship recipient, is professor of history at Western Washington University.  Dr. Hill, a recipient of our Student Fellowship award in 2020, received his Ph. D. from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland this spring. After each scholar spoke, there followed a time of questions and discussion. A brief summary of their presentations appears below.    "Coras under Cover: Rage and Resistance in the French Wars of Religion" Presented by Amanda Eurich  The sixteenth-century French jurist, Jean de Coras, is largely known to Anglophone audiences as the judge who presided over a notorious case of identity theft that seized the imagination of celebrated writers, such as Michel de Montaigne.  In real life, Coras himself was playing a double game, just like the peasant, Pansette, who briefly managed to steal the wife and property of a companion-in-arms, Martin Guerre.   In 1568, Coras was expelled from office, along with seven of his Protestant co-religionaries, all deemed guilty of heresy and treason and condemned to death in absentia. In exile, Coras joined the service of Jeanne d'Albret, titular head of the militant Protestant party in France, as her chancellor and superintendent of finance, overseeing the funding of the Protestant insurgency and its armies in the field. He also began honing his skills as a Protestant propagandist, publishing two highly inflammatory works, which situate Coras among the earliest proponents of Huguenot resistance theory.  In _A Political Question: Is it legal for subjects to negotiate with their prince_ (1570), Jean de Coras developed a highly original challenge to royal power and authority that finds reverberations in Theodore Beza's _Du Droit des magistrats_ (1574). These philosophical connections along with the more personal exchanges that may have occurred between Coras and Beza frame the research I am doing at the Meeter Center this summer.    “The Death of the Soul: Christ’s Descent into Hell in the Thought of Calvin, Lefèvre, and Cusa” Presented by Preston Hill  There currently exists a substantial lacuna in scholarship on the place of Christ’s descent into hell in the theology of John Calvin. The impression given by this scarcity is that Calvin had little to say about the descensus or that what he did have to say is so obvious as to require only minimal secondary exposition. However, a mere glance beyond the Institutes to Calvin’s other writings significantly unsettles such an opinion. Calvin devoted five times more space in his Institutes to explaining the descent into hell than any other clause of the Apostles’ Creed, and this explanation repeats the same interpretation already developed in his first treatise the Psychopannychia. Although Calvin defended his interpretation throughout his commentaries, sermons, letters, and final edition of the Institutes, the secondary literature on this theme is virtually non-existent in scholarship to date. This presentation aims to show that the French Humanist scholar Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples' reliance on Nicholas of Cusa demonstrates an organic stream of teaching in the late medieval period within which Calvin’s own theology of Christ's descent into hell is obviously situated. Calvin, Lefèvre, and Cusa all understood the descent into hell as Christ’s experience of the second death, or the death of the soul. The major finding advanced here is that Calvin’s descensus theology was far from novel despite suggestions to the contrary in many popular summaries of Calvin’s theology.

Join Reformation scholars Philip Benedict (Emeritus Professor, Institut d'histoire de la Réformation, Geneva) and Michael Bruening (Associate Professor, History Department, Missouri University of Science and Technology) in conversation with Meeter Center Director Karin Maag on the key themes of their recent books, including fresh insights regarding John Calvin's role and status in the course of the Reformation in French-speaking areas.   Philip Benedict has recently published _Season of Conspiracy: Calvin, the French Reformed Churches and Protestant Plotting in the Reign of Francis II_ (American Philosophical Society, 2020). Michael Bruening's monograph, _Refusing to Kiss the Slipper: Opposition to Calvinism in the Francophone Reformation_, has just been released by Oxford University Press.

In this episode Meeter Center Curator Paul Fields chats with Tom Lambert about paleography.  Dr. Lambert has conducted workshops on paleography for the Meeter Center on many occasions, and will do so again this summer.

Join Reformation scholars Philip Benedict (Emeritus Professor, Institut d'histoire de la Réformation, Geneva) and Michael Bruening (Associate Professor, History Department, Missouri University of Science and Technology) in conversation with Meeter Center Director Karin Maag on the key themes of their recent books, including fresh insights regarding John Calvin's role and status in the course of the Reformation in French-speaking areas.   Philip Benedict has recently published _Season of Conspiracy: Calvin, the French Reformed Churches and Protestant Plotting in the Reign of Francis II_ (American Philosophical Society, 2020). Michael Bruening's monograph, _Refusing to Kiss the Slipper: Opposition to Calvinism in the Francophone Reformation_, has just been released by Oxford University Press.

Meeter Center Curator Paul Fields and Calvin University Classics Professor David Noe discuss Dr. Noe's translation of two letters by Calvin in his new book _God or Baal: Two Letters on the Reformation of Worship and Pastoral Service_ (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020).

This episode features fascinating insights into trends and lines of enquiry in Reformation studies, led by three noted Reformation scholars: Susan Karant-Nunn, director emerita of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona; Victoria Christman (Luther College), and Beth Plummer, who holds the Susan Karant-Nunn Chair in Reformation and Early Modern History at the University of Arizona. Susan Karant-Nunn's research has primarily focused on various aspects of the Lutheran Reformation, including most recently _The Personal Luther: Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical Perspective_ (Brill, 2017). Her forthcoming work, co-edited with Ute Lotz-Heumann, is titled _The Cultural History of the Reformations: Theories and Applications_. Among their many works, Beth Plummer and Victoria Christman co-edited a festschrift in Susan Karant-Nunn's honor, titled _Cultural Shifts and Religious Transformations in Europe_ (Brill, 2020).

Listen in as Dr. Maag chats with Raymond Mentzer.  Dr. Mentzer is professor of religious studies at the University of Iowa, where he holds the Daniel J. Krumm Family Chair in Reformation Studies.  His work focuses on the sixteenth and seventeenth century French Reformed community.  In this conversation, he and Dr. Maag discuss Reformed studies today, and look at where scholarly trends in the area are headed.

Featuring Dr. Jeffrey Watt, Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. author of _The Consistory and Social Discipline in Calvin's Geneva_, published by the University of Rochester Press (2020). Dr. Watt is joined by Dr. Scott Manetsch (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) and Dr. Karen Spierling (Denison University), for a three-way conversation on this fascinating topic, followed by a moderated Q&A based on audience questions.

Dr. Lyle Bierma and Dr. Yudha Thianto discuss aspects of baptism in the Reformed church.  Lyle Bierma is professor of historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary.  His upcoming book, _Font of Pardon and New Life: John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism_, will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2021.  He talks here about Calvin’s theology of baptism.  Yudha Thianto is professor of theology at Trinity Christian College, and here he discusses his research on the practice of Reformed baptism in seventeenth-century Java. Unfortunately the recording begins about three minutes in, so the introductions are missing, but the rest is still worth hearing.  Have a listen.

Listen in as Dr. Maag talks with Rebekah Earnshaw, assistant professor of theology at Dordt University.  Dr. Earnshaw recently published _Creator and Creation According to Calvin_ on Genesis (July 2020 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage).

In this Reformations Conversation, Dr. Maag chats with Richard Muller, whose latest book, _Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace_, is just out with Oxford University Press.  Dr. Muller is the PJ Zondervan Professor Emeritus at Calvin Theological Seminary, and the Senior Fellow at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research.  Have a listen.

Join us for the next in our series of interviews with authors of recent books on Calvin, Calvinism, and the Reformation. Today's conversation features Dr. Forrest Buckner from Whitworth University on his recent book, _Uncovering Calvin's God: John Calvin on Predestination and the Love of God (Fortress Academic, August 2020).

Listen in as Meeter Center director Karin Maag interviews Dr. Barbara Pitkin (Stanford University) on her brand-new book, _Calvin, the Bible, and History_, published by Oxford University Press in June 2020.

Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag chats with Dr. Frans van Liere, Professor of History at Calvin University.  Listen in as they discuss the advantages and shortcomings of using digitized scholarly materials, as well as scholars' growing interest in medieval Africa and Asia.

This time, Dr. Maag chats with Stephan Van der Watt, our inaugural recipient for the Meeter Family Fellowship.  Dr. Van der Watt, who grew up in South Africa, now teaches pastoral theology and care at Kobe Reformed Theological Seminary in Japan.   His experiences have given him a unique and valuable perspective on presenting Reformed ideas in a contemporary and non-European context.

In this episode, Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag sits down with Martin Klauber, 2019 recipient of the Emo Van Halsema Fellowship at the Meeter Center. Dr. Klauber studied under Bob Kingdon at the University of Wisconsin, and now teaches at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois.  

In this episode, Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag chats with Dr. Alice Chapman, Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. Dr. Chapman discusses how a physiology major at Utah State became a professor of Medieval history, and why the Meeter Center and Hekman Library are such valuable resources for her work.

In this episode, Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag chats with Paul Fields about curating the Meeter Center collection, the importance of rare 16th-century books you can actually touch, and why it matters that scholars can research and work in person at the Meeter Center.  Mr. Fields is the Meeter Center Curator and the theological librarian on the fourth floor of Hekman Library at Calvin University.

In this episode, Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag chats with Reverend Dr. Laura Smit, Professor of Religion at Calvin University and Assistant Pastor of Good Shepherd ECO Presbyterian Church.  Listen as they discuss the importance of beauty in Reformed theology, and the continuity between medieval theology and Calvinism.

Listen in as Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag sits down with Dr. Andrew Spicer, Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University.  Dr. Spicer discusses his research on sacred spaces and Reformed churches.

In this episode, Dr. Maag sits down with Hyun-Ah Kim, our 2019 Meeter Family Fellowship recipient. Dr. Kim is a postdoctoral fellow at the Theological University in Kampen, in the Netherlands.  Her work focuses on the history and theology of music in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and particularly in Reformed churches.

Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag sits down to chat with Eric MacPhail, Professor of French and Italian from Indiana University Bloomington. Professor MacPhail was awarded the Friends of the Meeter Center Fellowship for 2019. He came to the Meeter Center to complete research for his book, _Atheist's Progress: Religious Tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment_ (Routledge, 2019).

Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag sits down with Dr. Susan Felch, Professor of English at Calvin University. Dr. Felch recently finished editing a book on the English Reformer Anne Lock, and is currently the executive editor of a seven-volume critical edition of the works of William Tyndale, which will be published by Catholic University of America Press.

Meeter Center Director Dr. Karin Maag talks with Richard Muller, Emeritus Professor at Calvin Theological Seminary and a noted expert on Calvin and Calvinism. Dr. Muller discusses his early career, what got him interested in Reformation studies, and offers tips for new graduate students.