1st Edition
Global Reformations Sourcebook Convergence, Conversion, and Conflict in Early Modern Religious Encounters
This volume of primary sources brings together letters, memoirs, petitions, tracts, and stories related to religion and reform around the globe from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
The common subject of the sources is the Reformation, and these texts demonstrate the themes and impacts of religious reform in Europe and around the globe. Scholars once framed the Reformation as a sixteenth-century European dispute between Protestant and Catholic churches and states, but now look expansively at connections and entanglements between different confessions, faiths, time periods, and geographical areas. The Reformation coincided with Europeans’ expanding reach across the globe as traders, settlers, and colonists, but the role that religion played in this drive has yet to be fully explored. These readings highlight these reformers’ engagements with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous spirituality, and the entanglement of Christian reform with colonialism, trade, enslavement, and racism.
Offering a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world, this collection of primary sources is invaluable to both undergraduate and postgraduate students working on theology, the Reformation, and early modern society.
Part A: Introduction and Orientation
1. Reform, Reformation, and the Global Reformation
2. How to Read a Primary SourcePart B: Imagination & Identity
3. Seeking Spiritual Renewal
4. Dangers and Threats
5. Satire & Reform
6. Creating and Restoring Ordered Communities
Part C: Co-existence, Conversion, Convergence
7. Negotiating Co-existence8. Rejecting Co-existence
9. Conversion: Threat or Opportunity?
10. Convergence
Part D: Space & Sense
11. Creating Separate Spaces12. Life Within the Walls
13. The Senses and Rhythms of Faith
Part E: Authorities Between Worlds
14. Nations at Prayer: State Churches
15. The Power of Words
16. Forming Clergy
Part F: Networks & Communities
17. Building Families of Faith
18. Order & Discipline
Part G: Tools
19. Glossary
20. Bibliography
Biography
Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He works at the intersections of gender, politics, charity, and religion in early modern Italy, focusing on civil and uncivil society, religious refugees, and the digital mapping of early modern social realities and relations.
‘As a term ‘Catholic Reformation’ has long been reckoned, by not a few, as a contradiction in terms. Meanwhile, ‘Global Reformation’ has been considered as an even harder sell: until now, that is. This volume, unprecedented both in thematic as well as geographical range, redraws our understanding of religious change in the early modern globe in fundamental ways. It is, without a shadow of doubt, the most comprehensive and intelligently chosen collection of primary sources I have ever encountered for use at university level (and beyond). This is very much a history of the Reformation for the ‘glocalised’ 21st century and it deserves the widest possible readership.’
Simon Ditchfield, University of York, UK
‘The Global Reformations Sourcebook is highly imaginative in terms of the breadth of coverage and freshness of approach to the Reformation and its far-reaching influence. Traditional theological and political concerns are placed alongside the experiences of less prominent individuals, both female and male, Christian and non-Christian. Terpstra expands the discussion to include Jewish and Muslim communities as well as indigenous African, American and Asian people. The results are at once challenging and appealing.’
Raymond Mentzer, University of Iowa, USA
