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.