Names And Naming In Early Modern Germany

Throughout the many political and social upheavals of the early modern era, names were words to conjure by, articulating significant historical trends and helping individuals and societies make sense of often dramatic periods of change. Centered on onomastics―the study of names―in the German-speaking lands, this volume, gathering leading scholars across multiple disciplines, explores the dynamics and impact of naming (and renaming) processes in a variety of contexts―social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific―in order to enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences.

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant-Nunn Chair for Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. Her publications include From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012), She is co-editor of Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H. C. Erik Midelfort (2009), Archeologies of Reformation: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 (2017), and Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (2018).

Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He has published seven books on various social, legal, and religious aspects of pre-modern Germany, including Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within (2018), and The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (2013). He served as President of the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär from 2012-15 and hosted the society’s triennial conference at Vanderbilt in 2015.