Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers both early modern religious history and the study of the Atlantic World. The former is a mature tradition, sustained by a voluminous body of scholarship that explores the evolution and course of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century and their institutional and devotional ramifications in the seventeenth. The book focuses on the early modern period, and attempts to chart the influence of Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonisation on women and religion' in their subject territories. It adopts an approach that is closer to that of Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf. Natalie Zemon Davis, and other scholars who subsequently explored the impact of religious transformations in relation to gender, revealed the era of reform that spanned the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a turning point in the history of women's experience.