Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies

I neglected to remember to tell everyone in class about this lecture series (information below). The first meeting is tomorrow, September 11.  I put a link to WAGPCS on the list to the right.

The first meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2009-2010 series will take place on Friday, September 11th, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Woodrow Wilson Room (LJ-113), in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Philip Soergel will deliver a talk entitled “Piety, Polemic, and the Book as a Weapon in Reformation Germany .”

Abstract:

Unlike England, Protestant Germany produced few martyrs in the sixteenth century and as a consequence, no work that came to rival Foxe's great Acts and Monuments.  Religious violence in the empire was sporadic, not sustained, and periods of religious war were surprisingly brief. Yet if Germany was spared for a time the great bloodletting common in Western European states, it was not because of a lack of religious controversy. This paper examines the use of printed polemics as weapons in these disputes. Through a case study approach it demonstrates how books came to serve as the brickbats and pikes of theologians and religious officials anxious to encourage the state to take decisive action against their opponents. 

Philip Soergel is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland College Park.  The author of Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (1993) and a number of articles and essays. Professor Soergel has also edited two collections of essays in the series Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, and written two textbook volumes in the series, Arts and Humanities through the Eras. Over the years he has received a number of grants, among which are awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. During 1993-1995, he served as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and he has also been on several occasions a fellow of the Duke August Library, Wolfenbuettel and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.