11:15A-12:30P   MW   SY 212
THIS IS AN AUTHORIZED CLASS
YOU MUST OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM
THE HONORS DIVISION

In this course we will ask questions about the relationship between
practices and beliefs by looking at how these questions became crucial in
one specific historical context:  The Protestant and Catholic
Reformations. There are three reasons why this sixteenth-century context
offers a particularly fertile plot for cultivating these questions: the
bitter division between Catholics and Protestants highlighted ritual
differences (Lutherans, for example, removed all pictures of saints from
the walls of their churches, and Anabaptists stopped baptizing their
babies); people at this time explicitly linked beliefs and practices as
they expressed their different theological ideas by changing their
practices; and throughout this era the very phenomenon of religious
rituals was under attack by both Catholic and Protestant reformers who
critiqued rituals as superstitious and focused instead on ideas about
morality and theology. We will analyze these phenomena through our reading
of primary and secondary sources - including debates and decrees about
particular ideas and practices, and studies which describe how various
groups altered and preserved their rituals throughout this time of
religious upheaval.