Keith P. Luria – författare

Territories of Grace offers a sophisticated model of cultural change in early modern rural society, by examining the religion of villagers in the French diocese of Grenoble during the Counter-Reformation. Keith P. Luria describes the encounter of village and official forms of piety, arguing that historians have oversimplified the struggle between high and low culture in early modern Europe. He shows how religion was constructed in a complex relationship between villagers, concerned with creating their own religion, and a bishop, intent on cultivating in his flock a Counter-Reformation style of worship and a new standard of social behavior. Luria analyzes records of pastoral visits, examines forms of devotion to saints, and undertakes an ethnographic investigation of one community, to illustrate this interaction. He uncovers a process of cultural change in which villagers and reformers alike took an active role in creating their own culture by adopting, adapting, or resisting the symbols, practices, and meanings of others. The theoretical insights of his study will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and others concerned with rural society, comparative religion, and questions of cultural change. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Territories of Grace offers a sophisticated model of cultural change in early modern rural society, by examining the religion of villagers in the French diocese of Grenoble during the Counter-Reformation. Keith P. Luria describes the encounter of village and official forms of piety, arguing that historians have oversimplified the struggle between high and low culture in early modern Europe. He shows how religion was constructed in a complex relationship between villagers, concerned with creating their own religion, and a bishop, intent on cultivating in his flock a Counter-Reformation style of worship and a new standard of social behavior. Luria analyzes records of pastoral visits, examines forms of devotion to saints, and undertakes an ethnographic investigation of one community, to illustrate this interaction. He uncovers a process of cultural change in which villagers and reformers alike took an active role in creating their own culture by adopting, adapting, or resisting the symbols, practices, and meanings of others. The theoretical insights of his study will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and others concerned with rural society, comparative religion, and questions of cultural change. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Religious rivalry and persecution have bedeviled so many societies that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Sacred Boundaries challenges this assumption by examining relations between the Catholic majority and Protestant minority in seventeenth-century France as a case study of two religious groups constructing confessional difference and coexistence. The book studies bi-confessional communities and families, gender roles, confessional polemics, and conversion narratives to discuss topics that include missions, intermarriage, cemetery sharing, women's religious activities, and the meaning of conversion. Its exploration of how the religious groups found ways to live together provides an approach to studying religious rivalry in other times and places. To explain how confessional groups in this period could be peaceful as well as contentious, the book offers a new conceptualization of three ways Catholics and Protestants constructed the confessional boundary. In the first, their shared concerns for communal harmony and familial interests led them to blur confessional identities. In another, it led them to reach agreements on sharing civic spaces and institutions; such arrangements made their confessional identities clear, but each group maintained an acknowledged place in communities. And in a third form of boundary, the groups were rigidly divided; Protestants were pressured to convert as a way of reintegrating themselves into communities they shared with Catholics. Yet family members and neighbors of the two faiths found ways to over-come even this harshest of confessional boundaries. Through its examination of confessional identity and the different means of constructing the boundary between religious groups, Sacred Boundaries provides a new understanding of the enduring concerns of religious intolerance and coexistence. And because the study itself crosses boundaries - in the questions it poses, the topics it treats, and the disciplinary approaches it employs - it will interest scholars in history, religion, anthropology, sociology, women's studies, and literary studies.

Exploring the impact French history has had on world history, this book unpacks the events and their significance from the Black Death to the beginning of the French Revolution, as well as how climate change, global trade, and epidemic disease, has impacted France.During the colonial period, the French came to define themselves as a nation by contrasting themselves with outsiders, including European rivals, the people they colonized, and the Africans they enslaved. They also defined themselves as a nation against insiders, people who were not accepted as French, such as people of Jewish and Protestant faith, as well as longtime residents of foreign origin. Classic topics of French history, the growth of the state, the Wars of Religion, Louis XIV’s monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the origins of the French Revolution, appear in a new light when understood in the context of world historical developments and the way in which the French defined themselves through inclusion and exclusion.France in the Early Modern World 1300-1790 is essential reading for students of early modern French and European history and for historians for whom it offers a model for examining the history of one country within a world history context.