PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

What is Reformation, and where? Who does it impact, and how? This conference invites a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of these questions. We are particularly interested in exploring global impacts and the many ways in which the Reformation movements (broadly conceived) shape relations of Christians with other Christians, and also with Muslims (Ottoman, North African, Iberian), with Jews, with Hindus and Buddhists, with aboriginal groups in the Americas, and with the animistic popular religions of Europe itself. How do these interfaith and cross-confessional relations shift under the impact of the religio-political changes that sweep rapidly across Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, particularly as they redraw borders and overturn long-established institutions? And how do these dynamics interrogate and overturn traditional approaches to centres & peripheries?

The early modern period saw a great increase in contacts between religious traditions. Many contacts were fraught with the tensions of alterity. All contacts generated new forms of accommodation, exclusion, communication, and exchange. Our interdisciplinary conference will explore the resulting cultural, historical, literary, and intellectual disruptions and convergences. We will probe the sharing that developed across confessional lines, and the unanticipated consequences that ripple out across the globe from the religious schisms in Europe. Many of these inter-faith contacts are driven by dynamics arising directly from the Reformation, and this is the theme we plan to explore in the conference.

This conference brings together urban and art historians, literary critics, social, intellectual, and religious historians, musicologists, book historians, and scholars researching the visual, plastic and performing arts. Together we will explore how the transmission and translation of material, textual and cultural practices create identity and cross-cultural identifications in contexts that are animated by the effort to reform, purify, or convert others.

For more information, including programme and registration, click here: https://crrs.ca/event/global-reformations-2017/