Religion and empire were inseparable forces in the early modern Atlantic world. Religious passions and conflicts drove much of the expansionist energy of post-Reformation Europe, providing both a rationale and a practical mode of organizing the dispersal and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from the Old World to the New World. Exhortations to conquer new peoples were the lingua franca of Western imperialism, and men like the mystically inclined Christopher Columbus were genuinely inspired to risk their lives and their fortunes to bring the gospel to the Americas. And in the thousands of religious refugees seeking asylum from the vicious wars of religion that tore the continent apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these visionary explorers found a ready pool of migrants-English Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots, German Moravians, Scots-Irish Presbyterians-equally willing to risk life and limb for a chance to worship God in their own way.

Focusing on the formative period of European exploration, settlement, and conquest in the Americas, from roughly 1500 to 1760, Empires of God brings together historians and literary scholars of the English, French, and Spanish Americas around a common set of questions: How did religious communities and beliefs create empires, and how did imperial structures transform New World religions? How did Europeans and Native Americans make sense of each other's spiritual systems, and what acts of linguistic and cultural transition did this entail? What was the role of violence in New World religious encounters? Together, the essays collected here demonstrate the power of religious ideas and narratives to create kingdoms both imagined and real.

About the Author
Linda Gregerson is Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Susan Juster is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Reviews

"In its effort to unearth complexity as well as its intellectual and methodological diversity, Empires of God offers a sometimes bewildering, but frequently rewarding, entry into the interplay between its two central characters: "empire" and "religion." It provides scholars of Atlantic world religious history with a strong and theoretically driven survey of the field, particularly issues related to conquest, violence, evangelization, and the influence of the colonial world on discourses of religion in Europe."-Church History

"This stimulating collection of essays from leading scholars of literature and history explores the complex relationships between Christianity and empire in the English, French, and Spanish Americas. . . . A major contribution of this work is thus to place religious thought at the heart of the analysis of colonialism."-Religious Studies Review

"A fine collection with plenty of fascinating articles, particularly in the second and third sections which present us with various individual religious initiatives and experiences. . . . The variety of subjects discussed in Empires of God will eventually help to sharpen the minds of scholars working on one of the many connections of religion and (Atlantic) empire."-Sixteenth Century Journal

Book Information
ISBN 9780812222609
Author Linda Gregerson
Format Paperback
Page Count 344
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press