Universal Reform: Studies in Intellectual History, 1550-1700

The fission of the western Church in the Reformation era released great quantities of energy, not all of which was contained by the confessional churches. Alongside the well-studied process of confessionalisation and the persistence of variety within popular religion, the post-Reformation period witnessed a series of poorly understood attempts by a wide variety of intellectuals to extend the reforming impulse from the spheres of church and theology to many different areas of life and thought. Within these ambitious reforming projects, impulses originating in the Reformation mixed inextricably with projects emerging from the late-Renaissance and with the ongoing transformations of communications, education, art, literature, science, medicine, and philosophy. Although specialised literatures exist to study these individual developments, they do not comfortably accommodate studies of how these components were sometimes brought together in the service of wider reforms. By providing a natural home for fresh research uncomfortably accommodated within Renaissance studies, Reformation studies, and the histories of science, medicine, philosophy, and education, this new series will pursue a more synoptic understanding of individuals, movements, and networks pursuing further and more general reform by bringing together studies rooted in all of these sub-disciplinary historiographies but constrained by none of them.