2. Religious Networks in the Reformation Era

Event details

Date: Tuesday 5 October 2021, 5.30 - 6.30pm

The lecture may be followed by questions.  Latest finishing time is 7pm.

Venue: The Playfair Library, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL

Lecture abstract

Two networks transformed the early modern world. 

The first was the Iberian network of discoverers and conquerors that helped usher in an age of European world domination and colonialism. 

The second was facilitated by a new technology, printing, which helped unleash the huge religious and political disruption we know as the Reformation.  

What Niall Ferguson calls a ‘religious virus’ called Protestantism’ disrupted an ancient ecclesiastical hierarchy, fractured into many pieces Europe’s Catholic Christianity, and ushered in a long era of violent conflict.  

This lecture will investigate religious networks within the Lutheran, Reformed, and Radical wings of the Reformation and highlight the formation, evolution, suppression, and ultimate survival of the Jesuit Order as a classic transnational network within Catholic Christianity.

Lecture video