ABSTRACT In the early modern period, physical symptoms were frequently interpreted as markers of religious affiliation. This article examines ecstatic states from this period, focusing on those interpreted by physicians and theologians as signs of divine intervention, possession, disease, or simulation. It specifically explores the prophetic utterances and physical manifestations of the so-called petits prophètes in the French Dauphiné, reported during the intensification of Huguenot persecution in the late seventeenth century. These phenomena sparked a range of contemporary responses, particularly in Protestant circles in Lausanne, Geneva, and Rotterdam, where debates over their credibility raged. Catholics also participated, often ridiculing the events. In the context of confessional polemics, bodily signs were used as proof of authenticity, yet their validity was continually contested.

ABSTRACT This introduction establishes a conceptual and historiographical framework for the present special issue, on “Bodily Practices and the European Reformations.” It charts the development of scholarly interest in the body and embodied religion, questions the lingering tendency to distinguish belief and practice, and suggests that this is partly an intellectual legacy of the Reformation itself. It surveys the common themes that emerge from the essays that comprise this collection. Collectively they demonstrate how the religious transformations of the early modern period shaped, and were shaped by, the ways in which individuals and communities expressed and enacted their faith through the body.

ABSTRACT The case of the physician Sebastiano Flaminio, tried by the Inquisition in Imola in 1558, comprises an exceptional case study to investigate the transformation of the religious and social control exercised by the Catholic Chruch on Italian society, through the Inquisition, in the aftermath of the shock provoked by the Reformation. Following an initial phase of the Inquisition – with a restless persecution of the reformed groups in Italy and a political use of the religious court inside the highest spheres of the Catholic Church – the Holy Office turned its attention to “sins” and “crimes” that involved the body. The trial against Sebastiano Flaminio was one of the few that played out on the decision taken by Pope Paul IV in November 1557 to include sodomy among the crimes persecuted by the Holy Office. Besides his sexuality, the information collected by the inquisitors in Imola about Flaminio – he was never questioned, or at least nothing survives of his examinations – offers a more complex picture of a misbeliever and materialist.

ABSTRACT When the city state of Zurich gave up the Catholic mass in 1525 and introduced the Reformation, it founded a new matrimonial court (Ehegericht), which no longer referred to Catholic canon law but to mandates of the secular court (Ratsgericht). That same year, the mandates defined a new offence called berühmen: men publicly claiming illegitimate sex with women were to be severely prosecuted. This paper argues that men’s talk about illegitimate sex with women was defined by a plurality of norms. In informal contexts, men practising berühmen expected to rise in their peers’ estimation. Before court, however, they had to renounce their presumed virility. Women affected by berühmen had to prove their immaculate way of life. If they succeeded, the courts punished the defendants. The Reformation thus sought to control the verbal sexualization of the female body in a society permeated by the ideal of male sexual prowess.

ABSTRACT The article looks at embodied experience in a letter sent home by a young Finnish student at a Jesuit college in Rome. Placing the letter against the wider context of Catholic Reformation teaching on images and letter-writing, this article explores the role of the body in both the images attached to the letter (or the verbal descriptions of the images) and in the use of those images in devotional meditation and prayer. Using a “history of experience” framework, it shows how the body was a medium used to create, share, and transfer experiences of faith and conversion across time and space.

ABSTRACT This article examines the 1525 vandalization and looting of the churches in Stralsund, in modern northeast Germany, focusing on the destruction of sacred objects and its implications for religious and social change. Through Catholic and Protestant testimonies, the study reveals how bodily and material practices influenced the conflict, highlighting the role of religious objects, property disputes, and violence against the clergy. By framing these events within the evolving Lutheran identity, the article reinterprets the Stralsund events as both a religious and a sociopolitical struggle. This analysis contributes to an understanding of the Reformation's impact on sacral materiality and the embodiment of faith practices.

ABSTRACT This article compares the Sabbath discourse in a tract on the observance of the Sabbath and statutory holidays (Von dem Sabbbat und geboten feyertagen, 1524) by the Protestant reformer Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541) with a book about Jewish rituals (Der Gantz Jüdisch Glaub, 1530) by the convert from Judaism, Anthonius Margaritha (1492/1498–1542). Focusing on the bodily practice of rest, the article examines the idea of holiness, the Sabbath as a social institution, and the disciplined body resting on the Sabbath. It explores whether contemporary Jewish observance of the Sabbath with its focus on the biblically commanded practice of rest played a role in the Reformers’ quest for biblical authenticity. The article confirms that Judaism remained a critical reference point for Christian theologians but actual Jewish practice was dismissed as “carnal” and subversive. The accusation of “judaizing” served as a powerful rhetorical device to undermine a Christian opponent’s theological position.

ABSTRACT Circumcision occupied a paradoxical position in early modern Protestant thought. As one of the ceremonies of the Jewish law which had been abolished with the coming of Christ, it was no longer binding on Christians. Yet it also represented the Abrahamic covenant between God and his chosen people which was continued, in a new form, in the sacrament of baptism. As Archbishop George Abbot wrote in 1600: “Circumcision was to the Israelites, as Baptism is to the Christians.” This article presents a general survey of early modern Protestant theologies of circumcision and some of the key biblical texts associated with it. It argues that the paradoxical nature of circumcision made it troubling for Christian theologians but also a source of fruitful ambiguity, particularly as a means to explore and negotiate their complex relationship with Judaism. The connection between circumcision and blood exercised a powerful hold over the Protestant imagination, and challenges popular stereotypes of Protestantism as fearful or suspicious of the body.

ABSTRACT The weather was part of the material world that human bodies encountered and engaged. Human bodies did not occupy the world, they were vulnerable organisms who inhabited it, and their way of being in the world was distinguished by heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to an environment that was always in flux. Starting from almanac annotations, parish registers, hymnals, and theological tracts from Sweden, the article explores the challenges that seventeenth-century weather afforded people in the North and what they can tell us of what it meant to be a Lutheran human being. The earth they walked upon, the skies they gazed at, and the rivers and lakes they crossed were active and constantly changing, and human bodies were required to adjust and anticipate. Clergymen’s reports and annotations in almanacs, therefore, attempted to reconcile the order of nature, providential theology, and human existence in the world. Life in post-lapsarian Creation offered lessons in everyday inconveniences, lessons that were highly corporeal and emotional. Fortifying body and soul, the weather instilled an acute sense of vulnerability and complete reliance on a power much greater than any on earth.

ABSTRACT This article explores how the religious upheavals of the early modern era re-embodied belief and reshaped bodily practices by examining two types of devotional object that bring the intrinsic tactility of late medieval and early modern Catholic piety into sharp focus: reliquary pendants and decade rings. Such items facilitate an investigation of the social and cultural history of the senses, especially touch, in the wake of the Protestant and Counter Reformations. They demonstrate how the body was used as a devotional instrument and the ways in which sensory experiences became tools for sustaining faith and fashioning religious identity in a context in which Catholicism was reduced to an underground church and a beleaguered community of believers.