Religion and Freedom of Expression in the Early Modern Period

More often than not, debates around free speech in the early modern period had to do with religious speech and expression. This interdisciplinary volume extends the discussion of free speech to look at the broader concept of free of expression in relation to religious practice and religious belief in early modern Europe. It includes exploration of actual speech and freedom of press, but also moves beyond this to look at in practice, theory, and writing. Chapters span a wide range of geographical and linguistic contexts, including the Netherlands, Italy, England, Switzerland, and Poland. Authors provide essays sharing insights from different scholarly fields including church history, intellectual history, cultural studies, history of the press, literary studies, theology, philosophy, and art history. Ultimately, the case studies explored here shed light on both freedom and its curtailment as this relates to religious experience from the post-Reformation times up to the early enlightenment period.

Contributors to this volume: Markus Bardenheuer, Wouter Kreuze, Timothy G. Fehler and Amelia Spell, Jakub Basista, Marius van Hoogstraten, Jan Květina, Gary K. Waite, Martin van Gelderen, Vincenzo Lavenia, William Cook Miller, Nigel Smith, Erica Heinsen-Roach, Vera J. Camden, and Freya Sierhuis.

Silke Muylaert is an independent scholar in migration history, focusing on sixteenth-century migrants and their churches. She obtained her PhD at the University of Kent (UK) in 2017, after which she worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

Francesco Quatrini (PhD University of Macerata, 2017) is a Senior Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Florence. His research interests focus on early modern Protestant dissenters and the interrelations between their practices and ideas.

Nina Schroeder-van ’t Schip is an art historian and specialist in Dutch Mennonite history. She researches and publishes on the topic of Mennonites and visual art. She obtained a PhD at Queen’s University (Canada) and presently works for Doopsgezind Amsterdam.