The voyages of Columbus and the religious changes of the Reformation are often seen as ushering in the modern world, but they are usually examined separately. This talk will bring them together, discussing religious changes around the world in the sixteenth century. Some of these occurred because of interactions between cultures that resulted from the voyages of discovery, but many grew out of movements of reform within various religious traditions as highly-educated thinkers and ordinary people changed religious beliefs and practices, and sought to redefine the relationship between the divine and the human. Seeing the Reformation within the context of religious transformations across the globe does not diminish its importance, but allows us to understand it in a new way.
Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. She is the long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, editor of the Journal of Global History, and the editor-in-chief of the nine-volume Cambridge World History (2015). She is an author or editor of more than 30 books and nearly 100 articles that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. Her books include scholarly monographs, translations, thematic overviews, edited collections, textbooks and source readers for the college classroom, and books for young adults and general readers. Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, among many others.
This lecture is part of a series, presented by the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. For further events, please visit dlmrs.web.arizona.edu and Reformation.arizona.edu.
