Terpstra, Nicholas (University of Toronto)

Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation Terpstra, Nicholas (University of Toronto)

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Exiles and Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation. 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 non-technical 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.--; Provided by publisher. Brief Description: "Exiles and Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation. 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 non-technical 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."--Brief Description: This book examines the emergence of the religious refugee as a mass phenomenon from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Table of Contents: Introduction; 1. The body of Christ: defined and threatened; 2. Purifying the body; 3. Dividing the body; 4. Mind and body; 5. Re-forming the body; 6. Re-imagining the body.

Contributor Bio:  Terpstra, Nicholas Nicholas Terpstra is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Toronto. He has been a Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University, the University of Sydney, the University of Warwick, and the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. His books have shown how Renaissance cities handled orphans, abandoned children, criminals and the poor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His most recent book, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (2014), won prizes from the Renaissance Society of America and the American Historical Association.