This volume invites scholars of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations to incorporate recent advances in transnational and transregional history into their own field of research, as it seeks to unravel how cross-border movements shaped reformations in early modern Europe. Covering a geographical space that ranges from Scandinavia to Spain and from England to Hungary, the chapters in this volume apply a transregional perspective to a vast array of topics, such as the history of theological discussion, knowledge transfer, pastoral care, visual allegory, ecclesiastical organization, confessional relations, religious exile, and university politics. The volume starts by showing in a first part how transfer and exchange beyond territorial circumscriptions or proto-national identifications shaped many sixteenth-century reformations. The second part of this volume is devoted to the acceleration of cultural transfer that resulted from the newly-invented printing press, by translation as well as transmission of texts and images. The third and final part of this volume examines the importance of mobility and migration in causing transregional reformations. Focusing on the process of 'crossing borders' in peripheries and borderlands, all chapters contribute to the de-centering of religious reform in early modern Europe. Rather than princes and urban governments steering religion, the early modern reformations emerge as events shaped by authors and translators, publishers and booksellers, students and professors, exiles and refugees, and clergy and (female) members of religious orders crossing borders in Europe, a continent composed of fractured states and regions.

A description of the course of the Protestant Reformation in the city of Geneva from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

Offers comparative perspectives and fresh insights into the unfolding of the Reformation across the whole of Europe.

The first volume of The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism explores the period 1530-1640, from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the outbreak of the civil wars in Britain and Ireland. It analyses the efforts to create Catholic communities after the officially implemented change in religion, as well as the start of initiatives that would set the course of British and Irish Catholicism, including the beginning of the missionary enterprise and the formation of a network of exile religious institutions such as colleges and convents. This work explores every aspect of life for Catholics in both islands as they came to grips with the constant changes in religious policies that characterised this 110-year period. Accordingly, there are chapters on music, on literature in the vernaculars, on violence and martyrdom, and on the specifics of the female experience. Anxiety and the challenges of living in religiously mixed societies gave rise to new forms of creativity in religious life which made the Catholic experience much more than either plain continuity or endless endurance. Antipopery, or the extent to which Catholics became a symbolic antitype for Protestants, became in many respects a kind of philosophy about which political life in England, Scotland, and colonised Ireland began to revolve. At the same time the legal frameworks across both Britain and Ireland which sought to restrict, fine, or exclude Catholics from public life are given close attention throughout, as they were the daily exigencies which shaped identity just as much as devotions, liturgy, and directives emanating from the Catholic Reformation then ongoing in continental Europe.

Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England details the relationship between transnational mobility and the development of Tudor Catholicism. Almost two hundred Catholics felt compelled to exile themselves from England rather than conform with the religious reformations inaugurated by Henry VIII and Edward VI. Frederick E. Smith explores how these émigrés' physical mobility reconfigured their relationships with the men and women they left behind, and how it forced them to develop new relationships with individuals they encountered abroad. It analyses how the experiences of mobility and displacement catalysed a shift in their religious identities, in some ways broadening but in others narrowing their understandings of what it meant to be 'Catholic'. The author examines the role of these émigrés as agents of religious exchange, circulating new doctrinal and devotional ideas throughout western Europe and forging new connections between them. By focussing particularly upon those individuals who subsequently returned to their homeland during Mary I's Catholic counter-reformation, the study also explores the lasting legacies of these émigrés' displacement and mobility, both for the émigrés themselves as they grappled with the difficulties of re-integration, but also for the broader development of English Catholicism. In this way, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England deepens our understanding of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which exile shapes religio-political identities, but also underlines the importance of international mobility as a crucial factor in the development of English Catholicism and the wider European Catholic Church over the mid sixteenth century.

Twelve contributors offer new perspectives on the efficacy of the handpress book industry to support the Catholic strategy of the Spanish Low Countries.

George Herbert (1593-1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. The literary, philosophical and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its investment in international Protestantism. The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics and theology in modern universities are a stark contrast to the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent.