A Global History of the Reformation

2017 marked the 500th anniversary of the publication of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” an event often considered to have caused the Reformation in Europe. This course explores the religious reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a global context, examining how the interaction of peoples from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas shaped both contemporary debates and their enduring legacies. Bound up in Catholic and Protestant controversies about how humanity should interact with the divine were fundamental reappraisals of how to define who counted as human, the desirability/possibility of cultural pluralism, and religion’s place in public life. P