Frömmigkeitsbewegung und Selbstinszenierung: Die Rezeption englischer Erbauungsliteratur in der Straßburger Reformorthodoxie zwischen 1630 und 1655

In the 1630s, Strasbourg is the first Lutheran region in the German-speaking lands to officially permit English devotional books such as Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety to be used for private edification. The English books ‘travelled’ across Europe in a process of translation and adaptation enabled by booksellers and publishers that ultimately made them compatible with a specific form of Strasbourg Lutheranism purported by the theologist Johann Schmidt. In Strasbourg, the English books were esteemed highly enough that in the 1640s and 1650s, the writer Johann Michael Moscherosch ostentatiously referred to them as part of a rhetorical strategy aiming to portray himself as good Christian by the definition of Schmidt.