Global Reformations

Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures

Nicholas Terpstra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367025120
• eBook ISBN: 9780429678257
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Global Reformations offers a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world.

The volume explores global developments and tracks the many ways in which Reformation movements shaped relations of Christians with other Christians, and also with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and aboriginal groups in the Americas. Contributions explore the negotiations, tensions, and contacts that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in different parts of the globe, focusing on how different convictions about religious reform and approaches to it shaped social action and cross-confessional encounters. The essays explore the convergence of religious reform, global expansion, and governmental consolidation in the early modern world and examine the Reformation as a global phenomenon; the authors ask how a global frame complicates our understanding of what the Reformation itself was and offer a unique and up-to-date examination of the Reformation that broadens readers' understanding in creative and useful ways.

Demonstrating new research and innovative approaches in the study of cross-cultural contact during the early modern period, this volume is ideal for advanced undergraduates and graduates of early modern history, religious history, women's & gender studies, and global history.

1 Introduction

Global reformations: reframing early modern Christianity

Nicholas Terpstra

What is Reformation, and when and where? Who did it affect, and how? Scholars once confidently framed the Reformation as a sixteenth-century European Protestant phenomenon, and then from the later nineteenth century began to look more expansively across Europe’s different confessions, time periods, and geographical areas. Some insisted on adjectives to identify geographical areas, or debated whether particular Reformations were Late (Medieval) or Early (Modern), Clerical, Civic, or Communal, and above all whether that other one was Counter or just Catholic. These same historians had more commonly agreed that the real subject was ideas and men, before realizing that thought and experience seldom lined up quite as smoothly as they’d assumed, or that men’s and women’s experience and thinking on religion, spirituality and reform might diverge quite widely.

Some of these historiographical movements were glacial, and some revolutionary. But all changed the landscape. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it was impossible to think of the Reformation in the parochial, gendered, and nationalist terms that historians had taken for granted 100 or 200 years before.

And then came 2017. Scholars might rework the terrain of Reformation with the tools of anthropology and sociology, and with questions about gender, class, ritual, or emotion, but publics often inhabit a different landscape. In a host of exhibitions and events aimed at broad audiences, the traditional contours, paths, and boundaries of a very German and indeed a very Hegelian Reformation reasserted themselves. State agencies and private foundations across Germany proclaimed the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and their birthday celebrations took some surprising forms. The refurbishing of the doors of the Wittenburg castle church had the sobriety if not the scale of the large architectural monuments erected in 1817 and 1917. Church and State seemed sometimes to be singing out of each other’s hymn books as they celebrated the country’s early modern moment in the world historical spotlight. The German government internationally distributed a high-quality detailed poster exhibition on the causes and progress of the religious reformation triggered by a German monk. Church celebrations marked the emergence of the individual conscience and will. Even toy companies celebrated the birth of the individual and the modern age. Playmobil Luther underscored the reality that this celebration was as much a commercial as a religious and cultural celebration. Holding pen and Bible, and pictured before that resonant castle church door, Playmobil Luther was a figure Hegel might not have anticipated, but one he certainly prepared the way for. This was not the stern and imperative maker of a church and nation perhaps, but the charismatic and sympathetic maker of a modern cultural public, not least because he was an individual who bucked authority, followed his conscience, and found his bliss.

Martin Luther as token and talisman fits well with the idea of Reformation as a datable event. It’s no great surprise that the necessities of commercial culture, political opportunism, and invented traditions would converge to create the kinds of popular celebrations and touristic events held around Germany and elsewhere in 2017. Some found this a comforting reaffirmation of traditional character and values, while for others it was the ghostly echo of a distant past. Yet others were troubled about the implicit messages conveyed by the celebrations about Germany as a distinctly Christian nation, and what that meant for who was and who was not part of that nation in the twenty-first century.

The fact that different people and groups both in Germany and around the globe could give this individual and “event” widely varying religious, national, and racial shadings and inflections shows just how fluid and contested Reform and Reformation remain. Few historians now would venture to date the start of a movement as diffuse as the Reformation, or to frame it around a single confession, nation, or individual. Yet many took advantage of the public interest generated around the anniversary of Luther’s public challenge to a sale of indulgences in order to hold conferences and publish works that re-examined religious reform and Reformation in light of current methods, understandings, and preoccupations. And so, while there were certainly some conferences that examined Luther’s biography and theology, there were many more that explored the broader social contacts for Reformation, and that set movements for the reform to Christianity into the contexts of relations with other religious communities in Europe and beyond, above all Jews and Muslims.

This collection emerges out of that broader research effort. The authors move outside of Germany and the northern European sphere generally in order to trace global developments and track some of the ways in which Reformation movements, broadly conceived, shaped relations of Christians with other Christians, and also with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and aboriginal groups in the Americas. Their essays explore the various intersections, entanglements, negotiations, and tensions that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in the Americas, Asia, the Aegean, and other parts of the globe. In these different settings, they pursue the common question of how convictions about religious reform and varied approaches to it shaped both social action and cross-confessional encounters.

Religious reformers of all confessions emphasized the implications of their ideas about religion for all areas of life. Reform was never limited to issues of theology, liturgy, or church order, but was assumed to have a profound impact on how people lived, worked, and worshipped in civil society. The definition of civil society, and the boundaries of it, were expanding rapidly in the early modern period. Within continental Europe, forces of purification and exclusion led to mass expulsion or ghettoization of religious aliens from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, turning this into the period when the religious refugee emerged as a mass phenomenon. These were also the centuries when European powers colonized and missionized large parts of the globe. In some areas, they worked to impose very particular forms of a reformed Christian civil society on indigenous populations. In others, they aimed to segregate enclosed enclaves of either Christians or non-Christians, and in this way protect Christian society from contamination by religiously distinct groups and cultures. Conversion became both a highly sought-after goal, and a deeply disturbing threat, as Europeans fretted over who they could trust – and how they could tell.

The early modern world saw a great increase in contacts between religious traditions and their believers. Many meetings were fraught with the tensions of alterity. All contacts generated new forms of accommodation, exclusion, communication, exchange, and transformation. The essays here explore contacts that emerged in the context of religious reform movements from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries – a long Reformation indeed. Yet the fifteenth-century developments sketched here demonstrate concerns and approaches that would continue to develop more fully in sixteenth-century Reformation movements, and the eighteenth-century examples quite consciously related back to the Reformation as a historical period and identity, or to specific Protestant or Tridentine objectives. The essays all deal with the transmission and translation of material, textual, and cultural practices in contexts that were animated by the effort to reform, purify, or convert others. All probe the inter-actions that developed across confessional lines, and the unanticipated consequences that rippled out across the globe from the religious schisms in Europe. Many of these interfaith contacts were driven by dynamics arising directly from the religious reform movements that emerged in the fifteenth century and that historians have long associated with the Reformation.

One way to approach these global dynamics is to look not just beyond Germany, but beyond Christianity itself, and to ask to what extent religious reform and expansion was an early modern phenomenon more generally around the world. Luke Clossey opens the collection by comparing how Islam, Buddhism, and Catholicism each experienced deliberate movements of reform and expansion in the early modern period. Clossey sets the context for the entire volume by comparing some models for that expansion that have emerged in recent scholarship, and then working out some of the historiographical issues that they have in common. Words fail us, as he points out wryly, or at least they betray us when we use terms like “transmission” or “conversion” in thoughtlessly anachronistic ways that impose linearity and a movement from A to B. Our metaphors – whether of fire or of water – can also force us into interpretations that emphasize spread, flow, consumption, and erasure. Clossey looks in the broadest cross-cultural context at how historians have worked to explain the dynamics of religious expansion within different religious communities, and invites us to reframe our language as we aim to express religions’ meaning and dynamics at those places where they meet and meld.

From this expansive, comparative, and challenging view, the collection then divides into four parts, the first dealing with questions of conversion, coexistence, and identity in religious reform, the second with spatial and social disciplines of religious reform, the third with cultural politics and religious identity, and the fourth with how various households of different confessions managed life across boundaries.

The first set of essays offer three examples of cross-cultural transmission and exchange, which highlight the complexities of conversion and identity in contexts where coexistence is fraught or forbidden. We see here not just the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion or the interweaving of tolerance and intolerance, but more generally how knowledge of other religious traditions and communities spreads, how communities shape identities with the materials of different traditions, and how the presence of diasporic groups can shape and reshape host societies. In these instances, Reformation involves an ongoing revision of traditional views by and with those on the margins or under persecution, who aim to push the horizons of expectations steadily further without undermining or rejecting the traditions themselves.

Japanese Kirishitan (Christian) authors charged with producing saints’ lives for popular devotion rewrote martyrdom into their own social context in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Haruko Nawata Ward shows how in the process they transformed medieval Catholic sources and devised new models for sanctity and vocation, particularly women’s vocation, which challenged both Buddhist and Catholic models. Japanese authorities had not used executions to enforce religious unorthodoxy before the later sixteenth century, but this began to change as a result of political turmoil and growing concern over European intrusions. Ward considers how these pressures influenced the creation of a new genre of Kirishitan literature produced by teams of European-born and Japanese-born Jesuits, and female and male translators. Writing in a context of expanding persecution that forced Catholics into hiding, they depicted medieval European female saints’ lives through the lens of their own experience in Japan. These new martyrologies were not simply sociocultural hybrids, adaptations, or accommodations to local circumstance. They portrayed the female saints as Kirishitan women who were resisting Japanese authorities’ efforts to impose a state Buddhism. Yet they also portrayed them as women who were taking on leadership in Kirishitan communities in defiance of Tridentine efforts to restrict and limit the role of women in the Catholic Church. These martyrologies remained in secret circulation until the nineteenth century, and Ward argues that in making Kirishitan women exemplary, they helped women, in particular, cultivate religious vocations that expressed resistance as much to Catholic authorities as to Japanese ones.

The Romani, then known as ‘gypsies’, evoked similarly tough responses in early modern Italy. Giorgio Caravale shows how the ambition to convert and reform them shaped Catholic treatment of the community, particularly in Rome itself. Roma, or gypsies, emerged as an identifiable group in European historical records in the fifteenth century, although what that identity was could still be puzzling: contemporaries used concepts of nation and people to categorize them, but a range of different communities would fall under the generic term. Seen initially as refugees from Ottoman expansion, who wished only to practise the Catholic faith in peace, they enjoyed a degree of toleration and coexistence until the early sixteenth century. By that point, they were more broadly stigmatized and marginalized as fraudulent, predatious, and a socio-economic menace, which ought to be disciplined or expelled as a threat to public order. Caravale shows that Catholic authorities in Rome aimed to take a longer view, and that some gypsies’ apparent embrace of Catholicism caused them to be seen as a group ready for conversion and assimilation – a local victory that would prove a universal truth. In most cases, these authorities were less clear on what the gypsies were than on what they were not – that is, they were not Jews or Muslims who professed a non-Christian faith. They were therefore ripe for conversion, and this ambition made Catholic authorities in Rome less punitive or violent in their efforts to forcibly assimilate gypsies.

Outsider groups clearly had an impact on dominant ones, and the gypsies’ experience of troubled coexistence was not rare. Early sixteenth-century authorities applied the term “Anabaptist” as an insult to wide and heterogeneous groups, particularly when identifying them as a threat to be suppressed. Initially, these radical reformers were not particularly tolerant of others, but Gary K Waite looks at how their views of conversion, coexistence, and toleration gradually changed as they began examining other religions through the lens of their own persecution. Dutch Anabaptists had been persecuted intensely in the early sixteenth century as heretics, Turks, and atheists, in part since they deliberately positioned themselves outside the formal political regime and its concerns about public order. Yet this position allowed them to promote forms of toleration that went beyond grudging, strategic, or self-benefitting coexistence. By the seventeenth century, their various spiritual descendants like Mennonites and Spiritualists were considered fully part of the Dutch Republic’s civic community, and poster children for its promotion of religious toleration. This put them in a better position than most to probe and push the limits of cross-cultural religious coexistence. Could their emphasis on inner religious spirituality over doctrine allow these Dutch thinkers to promote a fuller civic embrace of those outside the Christian community, and particularly of Jews and Muslims? Waite argues that it did, and offers case studies of some key individuals whose capacious theologies allowed them to think more positively about Islam and Judaism, and whose reputations in diplomacy, learning, commerce, and politics allowed them to become public advocates for a broader civil toleration.

The second set of essays deals with the spatial dimensions of reform, considering how sites of encounter, exchange, and enclosure emerged and functioned, and looking at how segregated zones developed and were marked off. The early modern reforming impulse often looked at segregation as the best context for protection and disciplined spiritual and moral formation. Walls only occasionally marked the boundaries of enclosures, and whether physical or not, they raised questions of who was being protected, how, and against what?

Venice was the first Italian city to force Jews into a segregated ghetto in 1516. Rome, Bologna, and Ancona followed in 1555–1556, and Florence and Siena did the same in 1571–1573. Justine Walden looks at how and where Jews lived in Florence in the centuries before that physical enclosure, and particularly in the decade or two before the ghetto opened. These spaces had evolved with the city and with changing views about how Christians and non-Christians should coexist. Medieval legislators had kept Jews beyond the city walls as a religiously polluting presence. The new circuits of walls that Florence built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries enclosed the extramural zones once reserved for the living and dead of the Jewish community. Yet these newly enveloping walls offered no embrace. Spatial exclusion revived as part of the politics of Reformation and social discipline. Before the ghetto, fewer than a hundred Jews had lived in different parts of the city according to will, work, and income. In a short time, four to five times that number were forced into a single small area where prostitutes called, thieves picked pockets, and butchers made the streets flow with blood. This revived the medieval practice of viewing the Jews as an abject and polluting population, tolerated out of economic necessity, but not accepted on their own terms and certainly not free to choose the spaces where they lived.

The ghetto became a common Italian answer to the question of how to handle religious diversity in a period when many Catholics saw diversity precisely as a threat to reform. They were most anxious about diversity if it was a recent development within Christianity itself. Stefano Villani considers the fate of Protestants in particular, and explores whether ghettos were ever an option for them. Briefly, no. Catholic authorities in practice could negotiate with those they considered to have been deviants of long standing with some connection to Italian society, like the Orthodox, the Waldensians, and even the Jews and Muslims. Yet they were adamant about rejecting Protestantism as a foreign novelty, and the very caution that many Italian governments exercised with regard to these groups shows how intensely political this rejection was. De facto toleration sometimes existed locally, but usually under the guise of mercantile privileges, and with the demands for invisibility and silence. It was only in the eighteenth century that this crack in the wall expanded thanks to the growing global influence of the British, and their determination to flex their imperial muscles as a distinctly Protestant power that would be seen and heard. Italian governments continued resisting more open recognition of public Protestant worship till the nineteenth century, and the radical change in state policy to allow religious toleration did not come until the Risorgimento, when an Italian government roundly rejected by the Papacy had to seek its friends where it could find them.

Many reformers saw enclosure as a critical vehicle for marginalized populations to learn and exercise a religious life in peace and security. This drew as much out of humanist as of clerical models, and reformers of all stripes moved quickly to protect and reform wards they had once simply sheltered. European authorities took enclosures overseas to colonial settlements as key tools of social and spatial discipline, and Allison Graham explores the results when the Spanish entered Manila in 1571. Graham sees religious institutional enclosure as a critical dimension of Spanish colonization efforts generally. Spanish colonial administrators often depicted the areas outside the walls as ungovernable and chaotic, so they built in Manila, as in many other colonial cities, an additional inner walled district (the Intramuros) to separate Spanish from Philippino residents. They saw institutional enclosures as part of the strategy of creating a colonial ruling class that was disciplined and Catholic. They were also betting that Spanish males would be more likely to come to Manila if they knew that there were Spanish women there that they could marry and Spanish enclosures that could be safe places to send their daughters for education and possibly vocation. Manila’s walled Intramuros included within it many additional enclosures for juvenile women, yet Graham shows that it proved easier to enclose women than to control them. The wards had their own agendas and desires which challenged or at least personalized the colonialist project, frustrating the authorities and throwing many enclosures into disorder.

Enclosures gave physical definition to the disciplinary impulse in both its protective and punitive forms. Yet reformers everywhere knew that walls and boundaries could only work if animated by will, and, in particular, the will of determined rulers and clergy. Cross-cultural dynamics made clergy all the more critical as agents who negotiated differences. What they thought and how they acted demonstrated the entangled nature of culture, politics, and religious identity when these were complicated by fear, domination, and race. Our third section looks at three very distinct cases of efforts by higher clergy to impose reforms in cross-cultural environments marked by power dynamics and persecution. In each case, these clergy encountered the resilience of different boundaries based in cultural patterns and political realities. While they used reforming language to erode those boundaries, the laity they dealt with were seldom persuaded, and geopolitical realities more often set the agendas.

European Catholics in the fifteenth century considered Ottoman expansion to be one of their greatest existential threats. Religious reform could unite all Christians under a single church which would facilitate the crusade that would save Constantinople and drive the Turks from Europe. The Council of Florence achieved at least formal union in 1439, but battlefield defeats continued, and in the attention turned to the frontier state of Bosnia, which had its own Church of Krstjani that had separated from Rome centuries earlier. Luka Špoljarić painstakingly recreates a critical stage in the little-known history of how Popes worked with Franciscan Observants, the Bosnian King, and other high nobles from 1443–1463 to Catholicize the Krstjani, whom they dismissed as “Manicheans” rather than genuine Christians. A critical step in this process was a forced conversion campaign, or purge of 12,000 Krstjani in 1459, pushed by the reforming humanist Pope Pius II and comparable to the forced baptisms of Iberian Jews and Muslims in the 1490s and 1500s. This suggests that the forced conversions in Spain and Portugal were not some kind of Iberian exceptionalism, but took root and energy from broader reform movements.

Fifteenth-century Bosnia offers one example of Catholicization in which reform language is used to embroider forced conversion and conquest; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain offers another. While distinct in time and colonialist setting, the Spanish Americas demonstrate similar power dynamics animating the relationships between the social and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: global reformations: reframing early modern Christianity
• 2 Religious expansion in Islam, Catholicism, and Buddhism
• Part 1 Conversion, co-existence, and identity
• Part 2 Spatial and social disciplines
• Part 3 Cultural and religious politics
• Part 4 Life across boundaries
• Index