Program

Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers

Period of Performance

7/1/2010 - 6/30/2011

Funding Totals

$50,400.00 (approved)
$50,400.00 (awarded)


The Wonders of the Wider World: Dutch Calvinism Overseas and European Protestantism, 1600-1800

FAIN: FA-54977-10

Charles Henry Parker
St. Louis University (St. Louis, MO 63103-2097)

My book examines Calvinist (Reformed Protestant) engagement with non-European, non-Christian societies around the world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Dutch Calvinists came into sustained contact with a remarkable variety of religious and cultural practices, ranging from shamanistic customs to more systematized Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist creeds across Africa, Americas, and Asia. The scope of these native societies and the diversity in their religious traditions confronted Calvinists in colonial societies and in European Reformed circles with an unprecedented array of cultural and intellectual problems. Overseas religious encounters over time necessitated systemic intellectual adjustments within Protestant Christianity. My book reconsiders whether the transformations that defined modernity were simply the product of European developments and seeks to situate the Protestant Reformation within the methodological framework of world history.





Associated Products

Converting souls across cultural borders: Dutch Calvinism and early modern missionary enterprises (Article)
Title: Converting souls across cultural borders: Dutch Calvinism and early modern missionary enterprises
Author: Charles Parker
Abstract: This study focuses on disputes among Dutch Calvinists (Reformed Protestants) in Asia and in Europe over how to administer the sacraments of baptism and communion to people with little or no exposure to Protestant Christianity. Historians have tended to view these conflicts as evidence of Calvinist rigidity and the incompatibility between Protestantism and non-European societies. When examined within global patterns of Christianization, however, it becomes clear that Calvinists had much in common with Roman Catholic missionaries in trying to convert people across cultural borders. All missionaries had to negotiate the inherent tensions between accommodation and orthodoxy in early modern missionary programmes. Many Calvinists on the missionary frontier, like their Catholic counterparts, opted for syncretistic strategies over objections from authorities in their religious heartland.
Year: 2013
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Global History, Volume 8

Missionaries as Exiles: Calvinist Strategies of Restoration in Communities under the Dutch East India Company (Book Section)
Title: Missionaries as Exiles: Calvinist Strategies of Restoration in Communities under the Dutch East India Company
Author: Charles Parker
Editor: Timothy Fehler
Editor: Greta Kroeker
Editor: Charles Parker
Editor: Jonathan Ray
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2013
Publisher: Pickering and Chatto Publishers
Book Title: Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile

Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation (Article)
Title: Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation
Author: Charles Parker
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Renaissance Quarterly