The Thirteenth Annual REFORC Conference on Early Modern Christianity, hosted by the Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, will be held May 14-16, 2024 in Palermo. Short paper submission and registration are now open.

Topic Plenary Papers
Plenary papers will deal with the topic: Early Modern Encounters. Religions, Cultures and Societies.

Alongside the historical narratives of Konfessionalisierung and Sozialdisziplinierung in the early modern Euro-Mediterranean space – highlighting clashes, tensions and the ossification of the boundaries between the religious confessions that sprang up in the wake of the Reformation – the reality of a variegated pluralism engendered by the cohabitation (albeit not always peaceful) and the cross-fertilisation of different Christian traditions, as well as the complex encounter of Christians, Jews, and Muslims at a religious, cultural, intellectual, and social level should be duly taken into account. In addition to the Mediterranean space, the area of interest of such transcultural and religious encounters – both inter- and intraconfessional – and spans from continental Europe to the Balkans, the Baltic, Scandinavia, the Eastern Orthodox space (including the Polish-Ukrainian space), and the Armenian, Syriac, and Coptic traditions. What were the different conceptual frameworks within which the encounter with Otherness took place in Europe? How can the fall of Granada and the persecution of Jews and Muslims be placed alongside the long-standing diversity of ethnicity and faith in Vilnius? How (if at all) was the concept of tolerance implemented in, and adapted to, different geographical and cultural contexts as well as to political contingency, from the treatment of conversos in Sicily, to the Jewish ghettoes in Venice and Rome, to the wintering of the Ottoman fleet in Toulon in 1543-44? How did the growing diplomatic relations between East and West help the cross-fertilisation of knowledge between Muslim and Christian scholars and fostered the growth of early modern Western orientalism? How did arts reflect on these encounters or acted as actors in these transconfessional and transcultural negotiations?

The international conference aims at problematising religious encounters and the issues of religious diversity in the early modern period with an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective.

Short Papers
Short papers can focus on all disciplines related to Early Modern Christianity, ca. 1400-1700, such as philosophy, law, history, theology, etc., independent of the theme of the plenary papers.

Deadline
The call for papers is open until March 1, 2024.