Bøger af Christopher Ocker

An account of the life and circumstances of a little known Augustinian friar with an interesting career, Johannes Klenkok. Author Christopher Ocker attempts to reconstruct his biography more accurately than has been achieved up to now, but in so doing he considers as much as possible the organizations and habits that Klenkok shared with those among his contemporaries of a similar station in life, namely, mendicant friars. The sources led Ocker to pay particular attention to the character of education within the mendicant orders and to Klenkok's campaign against the "Sachsenspiegel," the first written code of traditional German laws.

An account of the life and circumstances of a little known Augustinian friar with an interesting career, Johannes Klenkok. Author Christopher Ocker attempts to reconstruct his biography more accurately than has been achieved up to now, but in so doing he considers as much as possible the organizations and habits that Klenkok shared with those among his contemporaries of a similar station in life, namely, mendicant friars. The sources led Ocker to pay particular attention to the character of education within the mendicant orders and to Klenkok's campaign against the "Sachsenspiegel," the first written code of traditional German laws.

Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.

Martin Luther was the subject of a religious controversy that never really came to an end. This book describes the main features of 'the matter of Martin Luther' in its original environment, and it poses an argument about the contributions of the conflict over Luther to the place of religion in European and post-colonial societies today.