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The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history. The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society.

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The complex relationship between masculinity and religion, as experienced in both the secular and ecclesiastical worlds, forms the focus for this volume, whose range encompasses the rabbis of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, and moves via Carolingian and Norman France, Siena, Antioch, and high and late medieval England to the eve of the Reformation. Chapters investigate the creation and reconstitution of different expressions of masculine identity, from the clerical enthusiasts for marriage to the lay practitioners of chastity, from crusading bishops to holy kings. They also consider the extent to which lay and clerical understandings of masculinity existed in an unstable dialectical relationship, at times sharing similar features, at others pointedly different, co-opting and rejecting features of the other; the articles show this interplay to be more far more complicated than a simple linear narrative of either increasing divergence, or of clerical colonization of lay masculinity. They also challenge conventional historiographies of the adoption of clerical celibacy, of the decline of monasticism and the gendered nature of piety. Patricia Cullum is Head of History at the University of Huddersfield; Katherine J. Lewis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield. Contributors: James G. Clark, P.H. Cullum, Kirsten A. Fenton, Joanna Huntington, Katherine J. Lewis, Matthew Mesley, Catherine Sanok, Michael L. Satlow, Rachel Stone, Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, Marita von Weissenberg

Clergy --- Masculinity --- Civilization, Medieval. --- Church history --- Clergé --- Masculinité --- Civilisation médiévale --- Eglise --- History --- Histoire --- Clergé --- Masculinité --- Civilisation médiévale --- History. --- Religious aspects --- Christianity --- Masculinity (Psychology) --- Sex (Psychology) --- Men --- Antioch. --- Babylonian. --- Carolingian. --- Chastity. --- Clerical Enthusiasts. --- Clerical celibacy. --- Crusading Bishops. --- Ecclesiastical world. --- Ecclesiastical. --- Gender roles. --- Gendered Nature of Piety. --- Historical analysis. --- Holy Kings. --- Masculine Identity. --- Masculine identity. --- Medieval England. --- Medieval society. --- Middle Ages. --- Monasticism. --- Norman France. --- Palestinian Talmud. --- Rabbis. --- Reformation. --- Religious Men. --- Religious institutions. --- Religious masculinity. --- Religious practices. --- Secular world. --- Secular. --- Siena.

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A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday livesThe Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.Margaret Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and spent their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions, their failures as the result of blind economic forces.A majestic work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.

Secularism --- Enlightenment. --- History --- Americas. --- Celestino Galiani. --- Christian theology. --- Christian time. --- Christianity. --- Edinburgh. --- French Enlightenment. --- German Enlightenment. --- German universities. --- Inquisition. --- Italian Enlightenment. --- Italian intellectual circles. --- Leibniz. --- Locke. --- Milan. --- Naples. --- Napoleon. --- Newtonian optics. --- Romantics. --- Rousseau. --- Scotland. --- Scottish Enlightenment. --- Secular Enlightenment. --- Voltaire. --- Westphalia. --- absolutism. --- anti-Catholic. --- anticlerical. --- atheism. --- calendar. --- censorship. --- clocks. --- commerce. --- educated elite. --- educated people. --- eighteenth-century philosophes. --- enlightened attitudes. --- enlightened ideas. --- enlightened people. --- enlightened thinking. --- expansion. --- human time. --- intellectuals. --- materialism. --- modern time. --- new science. --- organized religion. --- philosophes. --- pocket watches. --- political instability. --- political structures. --- pornography. --- presbyterian clergy. --- religion. --- religiosity. --- religious authority. --- religious questions. --- religious warfare. --- revolution. --- revolutionary ideals. --- revolutions. --- secular Enlightenment. --- secular democracy. --- secular lives. --- secular order. --- secular outlook. --- secular world. --- secular. --- secularity. --- secularization. --- spatial reality. --- terrestrial space. --- time. --- university professors. --- urban elite.