Heretics and Believers: a history of the English Reformation

[ed] wide acceptance within the Lutheran church in Germany,’ went through sixty-eight editions in German by 1743, and was among the books studied in Spener’s first collegium pietatis in Frankfurt-am-Main. Such genetic links between English puritanism and German pietism are not sufficiently addressed. The second example is Robert von Friedeburg’s ‘The Rise of Natural Law in the Earlymodern Period.’ In this essay, the author transitions from a survey of natural law in the Reformation era to the work of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, and then the subsequent eighteenth-century development. The development of natural law beginning with Grotius is interpreted through primary and secondary sources, but no attempt is made to understand how seventeenth-century contemporaries reacted to Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. But arguably the immediate reception of these authors is relevant to their interpretation as in some sense ‘modern’ or innovative relative to the larger tradition. To clarify more precisely the ‘breakthrough’ with respect to confessional theology (637), this essay would have benefited from the inclusion of such research as that of Merio Scattola, who discusses the differing reactions of Lutheran scholastic theologians to the work of Grotius and Pufendorf. The former was viewed by Lutherans as compatible with theological orthodoxy and the latter as a novator and theologically problematic. Overall, this handbook includes many fine essays by distinguished senior scholars that serve as reliable guides to further research. It is an excellent resource for students of early-modern theology.