The commandment to “love the neighbor as oneself” is central to Christianity. Yet the question “who is the neighbor?” rarely gets asked and the concept often acquires conflicting meanings and scopes. My project uses this open-ended notion as a lens for studying the scopes and boundaries of moral obligation and belonging in sixteenth-century German popular sources (vernacular print and sermons). Is the neighbor someone physically proximate? Do Christians have a duty to love other Germans or other Christians they never met? What about heretics, heathens, Jews, and other outsiders? I begin by reframing the Indulgence Controversy (1515-1519) as a debate over the scope of Christian popular responsibility: the indulgence campaigns claiming that Christians have a duty to aid neighbors near and far and Luther insisting that one’s neighbor is always “in one’s parish at home.” I then trace how this rhetoric of locality-alone shifts toward one centered on German nation and how the language of neighbor-love changes in the process.

https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/matei-epure/