2024-2025

This lecture establishes a conceptual framework for the rest of the series by examining early modern assumptions about motion and emotion. It demonstrates their close interconnection in the spheres of religion, medicine, and natural philosophy. It begins by analysing contemporary thinking about earthquakes, which were interpreted as both eschatological signs and events whose secondary causes could be discerned by empirical means. It then turns to reconstruct prevailing assumptions about the operation of the affections and passions in the body and soul. It culminates by considering the shifting ways in which a providential God was understood to be at work in the created world, casting light upon the genesis of the field of natural theology itself.

The medieval tradition of religious mobility was transformed and challenged by the Reformations. While Protestantism firmly repudiated that idea that arduous journeys could assist believers in the task of securing a place in paradise, the early modern period saw the revival and transformation of pilgrimage as a spiritual practice. This lecture considers the physical and virtual pathways to heaven that people of all confessions pursued, from the quotidian act of walking in the landscape and long-distance travel to other lands to mystical inner peregrinations that took place in the realm of the mind. The final part investigates the moral and social fears provoked by the restless itinerancy of poor, underprivileged, and marginal people who were perpetually on the move.

Religiously motivated migration was a major consequence of the conflicts and ruptures wrought by the Reformations. This lecture analyses the movements of devout people who went into exile and sought refuge from persecution and discrimination by crossing borders and seas. It investigates the conscientious dilemmas linked with mobility, the emotional experience of physical dislocation from one’s homeland, and the mixture of compassion and prejudice with which displaced people were regarded in this period. The voluntary migrations of religious minorities and of those whose evangelical convictions incited them to undertake missionary enterprises are juxtaposed with the coerced movements associated with the processes of deportation, transportation, and enslavement.

The Reformation era was an age of religious conversion. The powerful ideas and feelings that it unleashed inspired many to move from nominal and lukewarm commitment to intense zeal. Such translations of the soul were formative experiences for self-conscious believers. The schism within Christendom also compelled people to make difficult personal decisions in the interests of their spiritual health: could they find salvation in the ecclesiastical institution to which they belonged or should they abandon it as a limb of Satan? Apostates and side-changers were widely regarded with distrust and suspicion. In search of certainty, some underwent multiple metamorphoses and serial conversions between Christian denominations, but also to other faiths entirely. These interior alterations often coincided with translations in space. Individuals with mobile identities often led mobile lives.

The fifth lecture explores the turbulence stirred up by the imposition and spread of religious change. One of the vernacular terms contemporaries used to describe such disturbances was ‘hurly burlies’. Others worried that the world was being turned upside down. From outbreaks of iconoclastic violence and sectarian riots to large scale rebellions, such ‘commotions’ were key elements of the confessional conflicts and wars that engulfed post-Reformation Europe. The antagonisms and passions that underpinned them are another dimension of the flux and instability that characterised societies divided by faith. Simultaneously, this lecture investigates evolving perceptions of the emotional and corporeal experiences of those transported by the Holy Spirit, which were increasingly diagnosed as forms of religious ‘enthusiasm’.

The concluding instalment of this series draws together the threads woven through the previous ones by examining the religious movements that drove the successive phases of Reformation itself. It provides a snapshot of three moments in early modern Christian history in which individuals driven by strong convictions coalesced into groups intent upon achieving radical social and spiritual goals. It progresses from the Anabaptist kingdom of Munster of 1534-5 to the explosion of sects in Civil War Britain, before turning to Methodism as the epitome of eighteenth-century evangelical heart religion. By teasing out further links between motion and emotion, it hopes to open a window into when religious movements emerge and why people unite to transform the present and reshape the future.