EMoDiR (Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism) is an international research group dedicated to the study of religious differences, conflicts and plurality in Europe during the early modern period.
The group was first constituted at Pisa by a group of European scholars based in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the USA and the UK in 2007. After four years, during which the members of the group met regularly and organized a series of workshops in Italy, EMoDiR has formally instituted a scientific organization, based in Verona in 2011. Since then, scholars from a wide range of universities and research centers located in Europe, North America and Australia have joined the group and a series of formal institutional partnerships have been established.
The aim of the research group is to examine the early modern discursive constructions of religious dissent and the socio-cultural practices of radical movements and religious minorities transcending traditional historiographical boundaries (notably national and/or confessional). Since the ‘construction of the dissenter’ is the outcome of a complex process, it is necessary to analyze this process both in terms of internal and synchronic dynamics, and of external and diachronic ones.
We understand religious dissent as discourses, practices, attitudes, or habits that express tension with, or rejection of, the dominant socio-cultural dynamic, whether openly, clandestinely or unconsciously. Study of such dissent must be connected with a thorough reflection about the categories that inspire and structure the researchers’ own terminologies.
From its very beginning EMoDiR has promoted research into the social networks of individuals and specific groups, as well as on the dynamics involved in constructing socio-cultural identities. By considering dissent as a socio-cultural construction rather than a doctrinal position, the first objective of the group consists in deconstructing and historically contextualizing such commonly used categories as dissent, radicalism, dissidence, libertinism, heresy, heterodoxy as prerequisite to a critical and problematic use of them.
Therefore EMoDiR is committed to gathering together a variety of research projects on early modern religious culture conceived as a multi-faceted and dynamic system. This religious culture, moreover, was essential in forging complex identities and encouraging dialogue between them. Analysis, both at local and transnational level (from a predominantly but not exclusively European perspective) is intended to contribute to a cultural and social history of dissent.
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Simone Maghenzani, and Stefano Villani, eds. British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600-1900. Routledge Studies in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020)
Continental Europe was considered a missionary land—another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origins and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory.
In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.
Introduction
Section I. Missionary Models
1. ‘One World is not enough’: the ‘myth’ of Roman Catholicism as a ‘World Religion’
Simon Ditchfield
2. The Jesuits have shed much blood for Christ’: Early Modern Protestants and the Problem of Catholic Overseas Missions
John Coffey
Section II. The Origins of Global Protestantism
3. (Re)making Ireland British: Conversion and Civility in a Neglected 1643 Treatise
Joan Redmond
4. Charting the ‘Progress of Truth’: Quaker Missions and the Topography of Dissent in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe
Sünne Juterczenka
5. The English and the Italian Bible
Simone Maghenzani
Section III. Missions and Church Unifications in the Age of the Enlightenment
6. "True Catholic Unity": The Church of England and the Project for Gallican Union, 1717-1719
Catherine Arnold
7. "Promoting the Common Interest of Christ" H.W. Ludolf’s ‘impartial’ Projects and the Beginnings of the SPCK
Adelisa Malena
8. Between Anti-popery and European Missions: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and its Networks
Sugiko Nishikawa
Section IV. A British Missionary Land
9. The Evangelical Transformation of British Protestantism for Mission
David Bebbington
10. The London Jews’ Society and the Roots of Premillenialism, 1809-1829
Brent S. Sirota
11. Missions on the Fringes of Europe: British Protestants and the Orthodox Churches, c. 1800-1850
Gareth Atkins
Section V. Making Propaganda, Making Nations
12. Sermons in Stone: Architecture and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts within the Diocese of Gibraltar, c.1842-1882
G. Alex Bremner
13. The Land of Calvin and Voltaire: British Missionaries in Nineteenth-century Paris
Michael Ledger-Lomas
EMODIR ROUTLEDGE SERIES
Titles in the Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism Series address the discursive constructions of religious dissent and the practices of radical movements in the early modern world. The series transcends traditional national and confessional historiographies to examine early modern religious culture as a dynamic system that was essential in forging complex identities and encouraging dialogue among them. The editors seek manuscripts that consider questions of dissent, radicalism, dissidence, libertinism, heresy, and heterodoxy, and examine these themes historically as socio-cultural constructions.