Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe

What is Reformation, and where? Who does it impact, and how? This collection offers a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world. The Reformation was once framed as a sixteenth-century European Protestant and Catholic phenomenon, but scholars now follow its impacts across different confessions, faiths, time periods, and geographical areas. The essays in this volume track global developments and compare the many ways in which Reformation movements shaped relations between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and aboriginal groups in the Americas. The authors highlight the various negotiations, tensions, and contacts that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in different parts of the early modern world. Working with themes of Framing, Mobilizing, and Transcending Difference, they explore how different convictions about religious reform and different approaches to it shaped both social action and cross-confessional encounters.

"This collection injects fresh life into the field of Reformation history, inviting readers to think more broadly and deeply about the legacy of the Reformation(s) in a pluralistic world."
- Robert Bast, University of Tennessee

"This book disturbs the comfortable interpretations of clear confessional identities and points out, very strongly, that the Reformation was much richer, confusing, and diverse than has been generally portrayed."
- Gary K. Waite, University of New Brunswick

NICHOLAS TERPSTRA is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, exploring questions at the intersection of politics, religion, gender, and charity with a focus on relations between religious communities in the early modern world. He has published Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge, 2015), and Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures (Routledge, 2019).