Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation by Nicholas Terpstra

Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation Reviews

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  Charlie

  Premise: 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 de-centers 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 1492?
  
  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 top-down 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 nation-state, 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 top-down 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.