Terpstra, Nicholas, ed. Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This volume originated from a research project and conference addressing "Global Reformations" that convened at the University of Toronto in 2017.The date is significant: the chapters of this book may be read as counterpoints to the prevailing theme in early modern European studies at the time-the quincentenary of Martin Luther's posting of the Ninety-five Theses.While a tide of scholarly and popular media during that year reflected on the origins and legacy of the Reformation, this book's contributors chose a different tack.As editor Nicholas Terpstra observes in the introduction, fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury reformers desperately fought to salvage confessional unity but instead witnessed violent fragmentation such as Christians had not seen in the previous thousand years.Alongside mainline reformers, the turmoil may be understood through discourse conducted far afield from Wittenberg, Geneva, or Rome.Religious differences among Christians-the only religious group dealt with in this volume-did not proceed inevitably from theological debates or shifting ritual practices.Early modern authors fashioned the differences as they amplified and framed apparent contrasts between individuals or communities.Four chapters in the volume's first section ("Framing Difference") explore this process in polemic, satirical images and the partisan reporting of events.For example, David Robinson suggests that a conférence at the court of French King Henri IV in May 1600 was staged as an academic disputation but in reality served a Catholic purpose to undermine the prominent Huguenot participant Philippe Duplessis Mornay.Widespread reporting cast the event as a triumphant performance of true belief against Protestant heresy.Likewise, Nina Schroeder's chapter concerning depictions of infant baptism demonstrates that seventeenthcentury polemics could present the rite as demonic or debauched.Only in the eighteenth century did Mennonites depict their own rite in celebratory terms.A second set of chapters ("Mobilizing Difference") considers how writers harnessed conceptions of religious difference to advance objectives for ministry or reform.On both sides of the Atlantic, communities of recent converts to
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Author: Mitchell Hammond
Institution: Western University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410087771