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.

Table of Contents:
Part 1: How to use this Sourcebook Part 2: Sources 1. Joining the Church: Translating Rituals of Initiation 2. Purifying the Community: Purging the Alien 3. Evaluating Others: Cross-Cultural Assessments 4. The Politics of Conversion – Early & Late ‘Reformation’ 5. Living Together: Co-existence, Conversion, Convergence 6. Ordering Faith, Ordering Society 7. Performing the Faith: The Art of Religious Identity & Difference 8. Exploiting Faith: Conversion, Capitalism, Colonialism 9. Going Underground – Negotiating Difference 10. Living the Traditions: The Religious Politics of Daily Life 11. Finding Self & Others

About the Author :
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.

Review :
‘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