Jean Calvin includes the descensus ad inferos among the events in Christ’s Passion – that is, as the culmination of his agony rather than the commencement of his glorious reign – and interprets the descensus as the experience of despair. And while he is not the first to do so, Calvin intensified earlier accounts of Christ’s descent into hell to an unparalleled degree, arguing not only that Christ experienced a unique despair and abandonment reserved for the damned but also that it is this feeling that satisfies the conditions of the law. It is through Christ’s exemplary descensus, that mankind is redeemed and saved from a similar experience. Building on the work of Desiderius Erasmus, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Martin Luther, and Martin Bucer, among others, Calvin controversially foregrounds the redemptive station of Christ’s affects. For Calvin, human salvation hinges not only on what Jesus wills, but also on what Jesus feels.

"Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation." Reformation, 22(2), pp. 147–148

Leben und Werk der Reformatoren mit und um Martin Luther sowie deren weltweite Nachwirkungen sind untrennbar mit der Universitat, der kurfurstlichen Residenz und der Stadt Wittenberg verbunden. Einem Segment dieses Beziehungsgeflechts, den in verschiedenen Funktionen und Institutionen wirkenden Juristen in bzw. aus Wittenberg, sind die folgenden Betrachtungen gewidmet.

Die folgende Darstellung dient als Grundorientierung zur regionalen Ereignisgeschichte der Reformation im Deutschland des 16. Jh.s. Samtliche Ausfuhrungen sind diesem Ziel einer moglichst umfassenden und gleichformig strukturierten Informationsdarbietung uber die jeweils grosen Linien der reformatorischen Entwicklung verpflichtet.

Die Iberische Halbinsel war durch zwei Faktoren entscheidend gepragt: die reconquista und die Pionierrolle, die die Konigreiche Portugal und Spanien bei der Entdeckung und Eroberung der Neuen Welt spielten. Im 8. Jh. hatten die Mauren, nordafrikanische Berberstamme, die von den Arabern islamisiert und unterstutzt wurden, bis auf die nordlichen Randbereiche die gesamte Iberische Halbinsel erobert.

He may be largely unknown today, but in his own time William Forrest was a poet of real ambition. This we can tell from his manuscripts, which are variously dedicated to William Parr, Protector Somerset, Queen Mary, and Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. With these men and women we are brought right into the center of mid-Tudor politics in its various guises, which is a remarkable achievement for an obscure poet who seems never to have held an official position at court. But making sense of Forrest's career is not always straightforward, not least because he has always been thought of as a conservative in religion, unlike many of his dedicatees. My aim in this essay, therefore, is to begin to address some of the complexities of Forrest's career. In particular my focus is the problem of Forrest's association with Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, to whom the poet dedicated his Certaigne Psalmes of Dauyd in New Year 1551. In this essay I examine this book in relation, first, to Forrest's other poetry, a sense of his literary practice being crucial to any understanding of his individual works, and second in relation to some of the broader political and literary contexts within which the poet operated. Not only is the Certaigne Psalmes of Dauyd a book that seems to place Forrest's commitment to Somerset beyond doubt, but his decision to paraphrase the psalms at all also associates him with what had already become a preferred genre of reformers at the mid-Tudor court. However, as I go on to show, Forrest's interest in the psalms actually spanned the rupture of Reformation, a reality that leaves its imprint on his book, and his voice did not simply replicate the voice of the evangelical psalmist. What this suggests is that though, in the search for patronage, Forrest's poetry may have been motivated by the concerns of the center, his voice was not uncomplicatedly of the center, at least not in this case.

Jeremy Tambling was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. He has written many books touching on Renaissance literature and on religious writing of the period including Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester UP, 1990), Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare (Rodopi, 2004), and, as part of the New Critical Idiom series, Allegory (Routledge, 2009). Hasting G. Chen is a graduate student at National Taiwan University who works on Renaissance Literature and History. He is also the Chief Executive of L’Atelier Culture and Publishing Co., Ltd., cofounded in 2012, which is interested in bringing English and Renaissance literature to more readers in Taiwan. Q: You taught English literature of the early modern period to students in Hong Kong for eighteen years. I wonder if you could share something of that experience with us. What courses did you teach? A: I taught a variety of courses, one on nineteenth-century literature, another on literature and philosophy, another on history of sexuality, still another on carnival and tragedy.While I was engagedwith cultural studies, I also started a course onDante and Boccaccio, just looking at these two writers and their English translators. It was a very enjoyable experience. I devised the course called “Carnival and Tragedy” to try to approach the early modern [period]. I took the view that [Hong Kong] students were completely new to the subject. For that reason, almost anything I offeredwould be new. It was best not to present them with a course on a particular topic or specific historical period.However, in “Carnival andTragedy” Iwas able to include a little bit ofRabelais, Erasmus (APraiseofFolly), andquite a lotof Shakespeare, albeit in translations. For this course I even covered Racine’s Phaedra. I was always trying to excite student interest. Q: What would you consider to be the most challenging aspect for introducing early modern English literature to students in Asia? A: When I first came to Hong Kong, I found it very challenging, because I had to teach all kinds of literature with which the students were not familiar. There was no reason why a Chinese student should feel interested in Western texts. However,

Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Brian Cummings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-0199677719A Will to Believe: Shakespeare a...