1st Edition

Fictions of Sacrifice Early Modern Texts, Political Theology, and Secularization

Edited By Francesco Quatrini, Freya Sierhuis Copyright 2027
306 Pages 10 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This interdisciplinary edited collection reconsiders how sacrificial ideas – encompassing guilt, justice, punishment, atonement, and community formation – shaped debates over sovereignty, legal authority, religious identity, and the cultural imagination in early modern political theology. Major works in Reformation and early modern historiography still tend to overlook how deeply intertwined... Read more

1. Introduction – Sacrifice in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Europe
Francesco Quatrini and Freya Sierhuis

2. Self-Sacrifice and Kiddush ha-Shem: The Martyrdom of the Portuguese Conversos of Ancona (1556)
Martina Mampieri

3. Sacrifice, the Law of Nature, and Political Thought in Early Modern Catholicism
Sarah Mortimer

4. Until Death: Self-Sacrifice and Inquisitorial Apologetics in Early Modern Italy
Dennj Solera

5. Beyond Tragedy: Erasmus, Origen and Euripides on Sacrifice
Brian Cummings

6. The Mosaic Distinction and Dramatic Form: Sacrifice in the Tragedies of Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)
Freya Sierhuis

7. Joachim Oudaan’s Servetus: Collegiant Treurspel, Socinianism and the Vicissitudes of Martyrology
Russ Leo and Nigel Smith

8. Two Ideas of Theocracy: Erastus, Beza and Toleration
Girolamo Imbruglia

9. Cannibals, Cross, and Crown: Catholic and Indigenous Religion in the Making of English Protestant Identity during Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation of the World
Rhema Hokama

10. Sacrifice and Magistracy: From Faustus Socinus to Jan Crell
Francesco Quatrini

Biography

Francesco Quatrini is Senior Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Florence. He is the author of Adam Boreel (1602–1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity (2021) and I sociniani. Una chiesa ereticale in lotta con la cristianità (1563–1638) (2023). He is currently working on a monograph on the Dutch Collegiant movement.

Freya Sierhuis is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Related Literature of the University of York. She is the author of The Literature of the Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (2015) and the co-editor of Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Europe (2013) and Fulke Greville and the Literary Culture of the English Renaissance. She is currently working on a monograph on the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel (15871679)