Claim Now Religious Refugees In The Early Modern World: An Alternative History Of The Reformation Written And Illustrated By Nicholas Terpstra Displayed As Audio Book

Terpstra's work is not quite an "alternative history of the Reformation," as the subtitle claims, but it does furnish the content and method necessary for a paradigm shift.
If reformation is defined as the process by which early modern European states began assuming and then enforcing religious homogeneity within their borders, attention shifts away from theological disputes per se and onto the perpetrators and victims of strategies of religious exclusion, exile, or forced conversion.
This approach also decenters Christianity, allowing Jews and Muslims full participation in conversations about reformation, Terpstra's approach is adumbrated in his opening question: Why not date the start of the Reformation at the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in

Methods and Content: This book is not a narrative history.


Instead, it combines social history, microhistory, and a rather Foucauldian cultural critique in an impressionistic manner, Concrete numbers abound when Terpstra's goal is to impress the reader with the extent to which religious migrations, forced and voluntary, increased in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
More of the book, though, is focused on the conceptual categories and bureaucratic tools that prompted and carried out religious persecution,
The first chapter takes the Corpus Christianum Christian body as the root metaphor for Christians, exemplified by two popular images of the time: the sheltering cloak of Mary and topdown depictions of cities.
The second then builds on the body metaphor by depicting religious persecution as an attempt to purify the body from disease, For this strategies of separation, containment, prosecution, and/or purgation are employed, The third chapter switches to microhistory, offering vignettes of a few people who became exiles and of places that became popular destinations for exiles.
Despite its necessary lack of comprehensiveness, this chapter does give a good sense of the spectrum of possibilities for exiles, The fourth chapter attempts to account for the religious conflicts of the time within this framework, The categories of initiation, presence, and authority are used to describe all the religions and their subdivisions, It also covers how various religious groups responded to the refugee crisis with increasingly elaborate systems of charity, This is probably the weakest chapter of the book, as the categories used have trouble expressing the material, The fifth chapter examines new tools and institutions that impelled, enabled, and consolidated reformation, Basically, it addresses implements of confessionalization, The sixth and final chapter is really an extended conclusion, musing on the connections between reformation and the emerging nationstate, or between religious violence then and nationalist violence now.


Noteworthy features: The paradigm shift offered here is intriguing, The focus on the refugees themselves helps balance what could become a simple topdown account of confessionalization, Restoring Jews and Muslims to Europe's population, and the Ottoman Empire to Europe's concerns, is quite welcome, The deployment and elaboration of the body metaphor through the first two chapters works very well as an explanatory framework, Similarly, the microhistories of places and to a lesser extent people make readily available a wealth of information that one would otherwise probably have to dig into specialized monographs to find.


However, this survey suffers from one glaring problem, There are no notes. No footnotes, no endnotes, no parenthetical citations, After consulting with some colleagues, I am confident in saying that this is truly bizarre, I don't know whether publisher, author, or both are to blame, There is a select read: woefully incomplete bibliography in the back divided by chapter, but it is not particularly helpful, The result is that the reader cannot readily identify where Terpstra is repeating a scholarly commonplace and where he is engaging in original interpretation.
This gravely limits the usefulness of the book for a researcher,

Evaluation: Despite its flaws, I highly recommend the introduction and first three chapters to someone trying to get a grasp on the phenomenon of religious exile in the early modern period and the social imaginary behind it.
The religious refugee first emerged as a mass phenomenon in the late fifteenth century, Over the following two and a half centuries, millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christians were forced from their homes and into temporary or permanent exile.
Their migrations across Europe and around the globe shaped the early modern world and profoundly affected literature, art, and culture, Economic and political factors drove many expulsions, but religion was the factor most commonly used to justify them, This was also the period of religious revival known as the Reformation, This book explores how reformers' ambitions to purify individuals and society fueled movements to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien or spiritually contagious.
Aims to explain religious ideas and movements of the Reformation in nontechnical and comparative language, Moves Jews and Muslims to the centre of the traditional Reformation narrative, and considers how the exile experience shaped early modern culture, art, politics, and cities.
Traces the historical patterns that still account for the growing numbers of modern religious refugees, Nicholas Terpstra University of Toronto is author of Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna, which won the Howard K, Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and the editor of The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy.
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