Religion and Cultural Mediation in Early Modernity
In recent years, writing on early modern religious cultures has turned from examining the upheavals of the Reformation as rupture towards emphasis on continuity through processes of transition and adaptation.聽 New histories of early modern religious life in Europe are also expanding beyond the limits of Christian historiography, and the traditional scope of religious studies.聽 At the centre of many of the new cultural approaches to religiosity in the early modern world lie the questions of appropriation and continuity. How did the early-modern world wrestle with radical changes concerning the nature of belief? In what ways did they alter and reshape their religious and everyday lives to conform to the realities of religiously pluralistic societies? Key to understanding how these processes of change emerged and were configured is consideration of the ways in which religious ideas and concepts moved and migrated through cultural media, contexts and discussions from lived practices of everyday piety and belief, to the more esoteric complexities of academic debates in a range of fields.
