Intra-Confessional Polemics in the Reformation

Abstract

Although religious polemic is typically understood and studied as a phenomenon of mutual antagonism across the confessions—Protestant against Catholic and Catholic against Protestant—the growth of the early modern polemic traditions was the product of heated internal controversy. In a series of theses intended to point to rhetorical aspects of conflicts within the Lutheran and Catholic confessions, this paper brings forward features of polemical writings from the disputes between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists in the wake of the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and those between and among Jesuits and Jansenists in the seventeenth century. Early modern religious thought, I suggest, cannot be understood without attention to the fissures within the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions.