Brown University historian Linford Fisher and the students in his "Religion and the Early Modern Atlantic World" course have put together a very helpful annotated bibliography of some of the best scholarship in the field.
Attention graduate students: add these books to your reading lists!
Here is a taste of Fisher's description of the project:
In short, on the pages that follow, we have attempted to rethink the
received geographical, temporal, and topical boundaries of the early
modern period. Using religion as a primary lens of analysis, we have
tried to put the following areas and eras into conversation, even
when—or perhaps precisely when—such conversation is non-existent in the
literature at present:
1) Early modern European religious history (era of Protestant reform and Catholic renewal)
2) Western European expansion – into Asia, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa
3) Atlantic world history, particularly the religious history of the Atlantic world
4) The history of religion in America (which often operates narrowly, within the boundaries of the present-day U.S.)
Taking all these various geographies together highlights the incredible motion
of people, goods, and ideas in ways that are truly global. If one of
the critiques of Atlantic world histories has been that they are
artificially limiting in terms of geography (see Peter Coclanis’ “Atlantic World or Atlantic / World?”
[2006]), the approach we have taken here is an explicit attempt to
partially remedy such geographic limitations. By considering North
America and the Atlantic World in tandem with early modern Europe and
considering the full expanse of early modern empires, a more accurate,
full span of early modern religious activity comes into focus. Jesuit
missionaries in China and India; English Protestant ministers in Japan,
Goa, and Istanbul; Protestant merchants and ministers circulating
through the Ottoman Empire, coming into contact with Jews and Muslims
alike; Catholic popular devotional practices being transported to the
shores of South America by “unorthodox” laypersons; Puritan colonists
founding Boston and Providence Island deep in the Spanish
Atlantic empire; Jewish and Moravian merchants moving from continental
Europe to North America to Brazil and Caribbean islands; all reveal the
interwoven, overlapping, and textured worlds of Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, and Muslim renewal and expansion into the various corners of the
early modern world.
