The first week’s lectures, on belief systems in the Reformation era, will enable participants to develop a solid knowledge base regarding early modern Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Calvinist beliefs. These first sessions will help participants develop approaches to teach complex concepts to high school students in accessible ways, by stressing the involvement of early modern lay-people across confessional boundaries in the shaping of both doctrine and religious practice. This institute intentionally includes the Catholic Reformation as one key aspect of the transformations of religious culture in the sixteenth century, and considers the experience of Catholic communities at the time alongside, and not apart from or in reaction to the various Protestant movements for reform. In the second week, we will consider ways in which early modern people made the leap from belief to practice, whether in the realm of worship and church discipline, or in the communication of ideas through the spoken word or in print. The second week’s sessions will provide a particularly rich array of materials that participants will be able to make use of in their classes to whet students’ interest through music, images, and primary source texts. In the third week, we will consider three different models of communities in which religious conflict emerged and was dealt with in three very different ways. Participants will be able to make use of what they have learned in the earlier sessions as well as their own prior knowledge to make fruitful comparisons with other situations of religious conflict, past and present.

The institute will meet daily from Monday to Friday for a lecture and discussion with the visiting lecturer from 8:30 am to noon, with a twenty-minute break for refreshments half-way through each morning. Three afternoons a week, from 1 to 4 pm, the group will meet in a seminar style, to discuss issues arising out of the assigned readings for the day and to examine the related primary sources. The format of the afternoon seminars will vary from whole-group discussion to smaller sets of four or five participants each, to allow everyone the opportunity to participate actively in the conversation. The afternoon sessions will also provide a particularly good forum for participants to make links between the themes presented in the lectures and their own knowledge of related historical topics. One afternoon a week will be dedicated to participants’ individual work on integrating the information learned into their own lecture outlines, to strengthen their future teaching. The other afternoon will be left free for participants to focus on the assigned readings. Lecture outlines and other teaching materials developed by participants will be circulated to the entire group by the end of the second week and will be discussed during the final week, during which two afternoons will be devoted to providing feedback on each other’s materials. See below for the planned daily schedule

“Making Sense of the Reformation” Summer Institute Schedule