This concluding chapter showcases the ways that rivers and their stories bound stories and places across the ages, despite very tangible changes to the environmental and urban contexts of Europe post 1000. These stories helped people on the other end of the year 1000 shift to negotiate, as had Ausonius and Fortunatus, between change and continuity, past and present. It starts with a discussion of a thirteenth century artwork, the Metz ceiling, connecting it to Late Antique and early medieval ideas of hybrid animals, hybrid identities, and other kinds of barrier crossing in and around water. It concludes with an exploration of the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (c. 1100) as hybrid/composite text. How did its author use the stories of the past? How did artists and authors in the Central Middle Ages assess and assemble the inherited ideas about rivers and their relation to human identity? Just as rivers are continually reshaped yet (mostly) endure, their stories and uses shift over time, yet persist. There is always a riverscape that is shaping contemporary cultures that are also looking back to the past to find meaning in nature.

This introductory chapter first defines what is meant by popular culture, with a discussion of different scholarly and theoretical approaches. Next discussion homes in on specifically ancient popular culture, making particular use of relevant comparative material from Pompeii and Aphrodisias. Then the particular geographical and chronological focus of the book – southern Gaul in late antiquity – is introduced, with a discussion of the region’s political and social history in the period. This is followed by an introduction to the dominant figure of Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542. The chapter ends with a discussion of sources and guiding methodological principles.

This chapter commences by looking at how the ideas of Europe and European Union have informed debates about the European Union. It then traces the history of the European Union since the Second World War. It considers how two ideas have been central to European integration. Intergovernmentalism emphasises the place of the national State within European integration, and sees it as the only arena serving as the locus for democracy. Supranationalism allows for political decision-makers that are not national ones, the overriding of the national veto and conceives democracy as something that can transcend the nation State. The chapter then looks at the current treaties which establish the European Union. The Treaty on European Union set outs its institutions, central values and foreign and defence policy. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union sets out its other policies. The chapter culminates by looking at the crises that have beset the Union in recent years: the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the crisis in liberal values, Covid-19 and, most recently, the crisis in Ukraine.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

Erasmian humanism paved the way for the spread of the Protestant Reformation in the Swiss Confederation. Basel’s printing houses played a major role in the diffusion of Luther’s ideas, which were then further disseminated by preachers in other cities. Supported by Zurich’s ruling council, Huldrych Zwingli played a key role in spreading the Evangelical movement in Switzerland. Anabaptism also attracted many adherents, but persecution effectively marginalised the movement and limited it to rural areas. Central Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic, and a brief war broke out between Catholic and Protestant Confederates in 1531. The resulting Peace of Kappel rolled back the progress of reform and created a bi-confessional structure within the Confederation. The Catholic cantons formed a majority but they were countered by the powerful Reformed cities of Zurich, Basel, Bern and Schaffhausen. Through the second half of the century these cities allied with Geneva and developed a strong Swiss Reformed identity in response to both German Lutherans and the Tridentine Catholicism that spread from Italy. Confessional tensions were particularly marked in areas jointly governed by Protestant and Catholic members of the Confederation, but competing religious loyalties were never strong enough to overcome their shared political identity as Swiss.

This chapter aims to define the limits of religious toleration of the Eastern Orthodox Church in those areas of Europe which remained outside of direct Ottoman or Muscovite rule in the early modern period. The rudimentary confessional balance that had obtained between the Eastern and the Latin Churches in the kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Transylvanian principality and the kingdom of Hungary was disturbed by the arrival of Protestantism in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The growing numerical strength and political influence of Evangelical nobles and burgesses necessitated the introduction of toleration as a state policy. When it was set in place, however, the politically emasculated believers of the Eastern Church were either effectively excluded from, or found themselves on the bottom rung of a tiered system of, official toleration. The survival of Orthodox privilege in Moldavia and Wallachia, and the full religious toleration granted by the Habsburgs to the South Slav peoples in exchange for their support in defending the imperial frontiers from the Ottomans, underscore the significance of political authority and instruments of violence in the hands of local élites for the preservation of traditional Orthodox identity.

The diametrically opposed outcomes of the Reformation in England and France have led historians to presume that there were significant differences in their religious situations before the Reformation that help account for that ultimate divergence. This chapter argues that any such presumption is wide of the mark. Not only were the supposed ‘preconditions’ for the success of the Reformation in England (such as Renaissance humanism, anticlericalism and church-state tension) more evident in France, but the early diffusion of Reformation teachings was swifter and more widespread there as well. Although in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation received increasing royal support in England but not in France, that early progress was insecure and was briefly reversed. Decisive divergence between the two realms in this regard began only around 1560, and in each of them the outcome might still have been different under other circumstances. The ultimate outcomes reflected the interplay of political contingency with pre-existing differences not in religious experience but in political structures and political culture, which put the English monarchy in a position to impose its will upon the English nation, but left the French monarchy less able not only to impose change but also to suppress it.

Like the rest of Northern Europe, the Low Countries experienced a wide variety of religious reform movements in the sixteenth century: humanism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism and Catholic reform. In many respects, with its urban and rural diversity, the Netherlands could be seen as a microcosm of Reformation Europe as a whole. What made the case of the Low Countries distinct, however, was the political context: religious rebellion took place against the backdrop of the integration and disintegration of the Habsburg composite state in the Netherlands. Religious dissent grew inextricably entangled with political opposition to the centralising efforts of the Habsburg dynasty. This state of affairs led to the two key features of the Reformation in the Low Countries that distinguished from the rest of Europe: (1) an unusually harsh degree of official prosecution of Protestant heresy, and (2) the creation, by century’s end, of two distinct states, the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, because of the wars that Reformation at least partially instigated. Thus, while the ideas and qualities of the various reform movements in the Netherlands differed little from the rest of Europe, their outcome proved quite distinctive.

The kingdom of Denmark, which then included Norway and Iceland, and the kingdom of Sweden, which encompassed Finland, were influenced early on by the Evangelical movement. It first gained a foothold in maritime towns, particularly in Denmark. The traditionally close ties with Germany played an important role. The Evangelical movement developed into distinct princely Reformations in Denmark and Sweden and resulted in the establishment of two strong Lutheran confessional states. When Christian III emerged victorious from the Danish Civil War in 1536 he enjoyed a uniquely powerful position and quickly implemented a Reformation settlement according to his own Lutheran beliefs. None of the Swedish kings secured as strong a position in the sixteenth century and religious change was effected more slowly in Sweden. Differences in social structure also greatly influenced the impact of the Reformation. The Reformation progressed more quickly in Denmark, which was more urbanised, commercialised and feudal, than in the less developed regions north of the Skagerrak. In Sweden and Finland a larger proportion of the peasants were freeholders compared with Denmark and they showed themselves willing and able to resist the crown’s assaults on their traditional religiosity. In Norway and Iceland too the predominance of freeholder peasants was associated with a slower pace of Reformation than that in Denmark.

Saxony, home of Martin Luther, was the first country to be divided over the issue of the Protestant faith. While Ernestine Saxony became the heartland of the Reformation, the neighbouring principality of Albertine Saxony saw the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation. The two Saxonies provide almost perfect laboratory conditions for comparing contrary reactions to the Reformation. By investigating the lives, piety and politics of the Wettin princes, Frederick the Wise, John the Constant and George of Saxony the Reformation is revealed to have been a true game changer. Christian humanism, attempts at church reform and sympathy for the Reformation did not correlate neatly. Rather, the dynamics of religious conversion disrupted lines of continuity from the Middle Ages into the early modern era. That disruption testifies to the groundbreaking impact of Protestant ideas. At the same time, early resistance to Luther in Electoral Saxony proves that even in his homeland, Reformation and Catholic reform were alternatives right from the very beginning.

Reformations Compared presents a collection of comparative studies of the Reformation as it reverberated across Europe in the sixteenth century. Each chapter is focused on two or more comparable geographical spaces, isolating the variables that help explain how and why the Reformation unfolded as it did in each separate setting. Rejecting notions of insularity, the contributors seek out the connections and contrasts that shaped the experiences of the Reformation, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from Ireland to Transylvania. In doing so, the volume offers a fresh understanding of the conditions in which the movement succeeded, whether wholly or partially, and those in which it did not. Reformations Compared provides a broad vantage point that encourages readers to reshape their understanding of this decisive episode in European history.

The religious world of late medieval and early modern Central Europe is complicated, convoluted and, above, all entangled. But despite the real and tangible connections that linked the various polities of this region together, scholars have tended to explore this landscape along anachronistic divisions defined narrowly by language and nation. This article, by contrast, examines connections that developed between the Bohemian and Austrian lands. It begins in the mid-fourteenth century by exploring rivalling efforts of Emperor Charles IV in Prague and his son-in-law, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, to build the institutional foundations upon which critical ecclesiastical changes occurred in the following three centuries. The chapter traces parallel reform programmes in the fifteenth century that had very different outcomes. While Hussitism left Bohemia isolated, the efforts of Nicholas of Cusa and others helped to integrate the Austrian lands into the broader ecclesiastical culture of the West. The sixteenth century brought an Erasmian humanism to both regions as well as more radical expressions of reform. Protestantism reached its high point here in the late sixteenth century only to collapse dramatically a few decades later with the great crisis of the Thirty Years’ War. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the exiles who left this region after the Catholic victory.