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.

"The book offers unique insights into complex cultural processes, reframing some supposedly well-known areas of German history. Its wide topical scope allows it to explore a remarkable variety of naming processes in the early modern period." Johannes Dillinger, Oxford Brookes University "These engaging and highly polished essays together speak to broader ways in which knowledge, political and religious movements, and other social arrangements came to define the history of early modern Europe." Philip M. Soergel, University of Maryland

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). Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is the Susan C. Karant Chair for Reformation and Early Modern European History in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona. She has published From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012).