Theo Pleizier (Groningen, Netherlands)

The Use of the Bible in Protestant Religious Practices

The cultural and material turn in the discipline of practical theology lead to a broadening of the field into lived faith and lived religion. A practical theological inquiry studies whether and how the use of the Bible shapes current protestant religious practice. This paper addresses the use of the bible as religious practice in popular culture and personal devotion. First, a few historical and contemporary examples of the practice of ›using the bible‹ are presented and analysed. Secondly, based upon various examples of (empirical) research, the paper proposes a typology of using the Bible that tries to bring together the various ways the Bible is used, culturally, politically, devotionally, privately and economically.

 

Lina Vidauskytė (Kaunas, Lithuania)

Orality and Literacy after the Reformation

The translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages created a few important segments in European cultural and religious context. First, the Christian world was divided; second, vernacular languages were given a written and printed form. Thus, vernacular languages moved to the next cultural level. But at the same time, this sort of change opens up several problems. One of them is that vernacular languages came under the control of written and printed language. A visual architecture of language was superimposed upon a restless acoustic flow of sound. A combination of various tensions ensued, which can be considered as the condition of the possibility for the birth of the modern subject and the crisis of authority.

 

Andrew Pettegree (St. Andrews, Great Britain)

Print and the Reformation. A Drama in Three Acts

Throughout the history of printing, questions of design have been crucial to the development of the book industry. This is especially the case with the development of the title-page, the most crucial design feature for which there was no obvious model inherited from the manuscript book world. The Reformation both revolutionized the market for books and stimulated crucial innovations in the design and selling of books. This began in Wittenberg, where the partnership of Martin Luther and Lucas Cranach played a critical role in shaping the Reformation pamphlet. In lands more hostile to the Reformation the design task was more complex, since design features intended to facilitate identification could place the seller or owner in deadly danger. The paper concludes with an examination of the market for devotional literature in the Dutch Republic, the home to Europe’s most buoyant centre of book production.

 

Isabell Naumann (Strathfield, Australia)

Aspects of Luke’s Concept of Discipleship and the Magnificat

If Christian faith, the initial reality of salvation, is transmitted, it must be received, actively received. For the person to whom the Word of God is addressed it is a call that creates, virtually, an interpersonal relationship: the religious relationship which takes root in us through faith.

In Luke’s gospel, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is shown as the woman of faith, as the one who hears the Word and gives the appropriate response of acting upon it. In this she demonstrates the true ecclesial attitude of the believer in and for the world. Thus, a theology of the Word corresponds to a theology of discipleship, well presented in the marian paradigm of authentic theological response to the Word and particularly exemplified in the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55).

This paper will address facets of the aforementioned theological theme within the Lucan context; with a specific focus on the Magnificat and its related scriptural call for a prophetic aptitude, the paper will further present some considerations, theologically relevant and culturally important, to the question of women and poverty within the Oceanic-Asian context.

 

Mateo Žagar (Zagreb, Croatia)

The Language Concept in Glagolitic and Cyrillic Edition of the New Testament

Even though the Protestant tradition of the New Testament translation did not leave a lasting trace in the subsequent evolution of Croatian literary language, the Urach book printing enterprise achieved outstanding philological results. Over the period of less than five years, that rather small printing press printed ten publications in 28 editions and more than 30,000 copies. Those were in Croatian language and the three Croatian scripts (14 in Glagolitic, 8 in Cyrillic and 6 in Latin). The New Testament (Urach, 1562-1563) was translated to koiné based on Chakavian dialect with plenty of Shtokavian elements, aiming at the South Slavic audience further to the east of the Balkans. This paper intends to closely examine the differences between Glagolitic and Cyrillic edition.

 

Tomasz Ososiński (Warsaw, Poland)

Hermann Kyrieleis and His Forgeries of Luther’s Manuscripts

In the National Library in Warsaw there is preserved a book edited 1516 in Rome by Giaccomo Mazzocchi: De amore divino by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola. The book has very interesting provenances. It was acquired by the Library 1962, before it belonged a. o. to Hermann Kyrieleis, a German merchant that specialized in forging Luther’s manuscripts. Kyrieleis was one of the best-known forgers of the 19^th century. He produced false manuscripts of very high quality. On the pages of De amore divino Kyrieleis placed a forgery of Luther’s provenance note and of the text of the song Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. It was one of the last and most perfect forgeries in his career.

 

Marta Quatrale (Berlin, Germany)

Vergerio’s Counter-reaction to Moronessa’s Il modello di Martino Lutero. A Case of Programmatic Re-use of Italian Anti-Lutheran Sources

In the attempt to clarify the Gnesiolutheran heroisation of Luther or rather to define the Gnesiolutheran image of Luther, the aim of this contribution is to briefly present Vergerio’s case of re-use and over-interpretation of some excerpts of Moronessa’s Catholic, anti-Lutheran work Il Modello di Martino Lutero. In this work, Vergerio turned the Celestine monk into the author of a sharp attack against the Papacy, even published as Typus Martini Lutheri. Allowing a broader circulation in satirical terms of such texts both in Italy and in Germany, it has been transformed, against Moronessa’s original purpose, in a direct source for the Gnesiolutheran polemic against the Papacy itself.