ABSTRACT
The idea of “Global Reformations” would once have seemed impossible, and even a contradiction in terms. That people can think of it now and explore the meaning and reach of the term demonstrates our expanding appreciation of the dynamics around religion, politics, and social change in the early modern period. The period when Europeans were moving out across the globe as traders, soldiers, colonists, and missionaries was the same period when they were re-examining their relation with God and reconsidering how that relation should affect their relations with each other. A global focus involves decentring Europe and examining the various intersecting forces, reciprocal influences, and parallel developments that are entangled or connected in the modern world. These global connections exploded in the early modern centuries – from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries – but most studies of global early modernity focus on trade, politics, demography, or colonization.
