"Complexifying the view from the North: global Italians and religious flows" - Mark Hutchinson (WSU)

This is part of the 2024 Religion & Society Online Seminar Series that takes place on the third Wednesday of the month at 12pm (Sydney time). It is convened by Cristina Rocha & Kathleen Openshaw (Western Sydney University) 

Abstract

The standard North Atlantic view of European religion is one which starts in the Middle East, engages the Graeco-Roman world, zooms in on Catholic expansion and then forgets about that in the desire to tell the story of religious wars and rising Protestant ‘recentering’, goes to the Americas and the spreads throughout the world. There have been numerous attempts to improve upon this view – for example, in accounts of reverse missions from the Majority World--but its entrenching in the various enlightenment and nineteenth century nationalist historiographies (which emerged coterminously with the rise of professional history writing in the academies of the global north) have generally meant that this basic theme has been carried even into attempts to write global histories. Common to those who have sought to relocate the story away from the North Atlantic axis has been the discovery that they need to start elsewhere. Is there, for instance, an alternative story of the Reformation which might help in this? An alternative story for the engagement of Protestantism with liberal national states, for global circulation which is not centred on the imperialism/ colonialism/ post-colonialism straitjacket, for the rise of modern new religious forms and flows? As it happens, yes. This paper reflects on a large, multi-year project on the global history of Italian Protestantism – the first volume of which will be published by Brill in 2025, and the second in 2026. Involving over 60 scholars who mainly publish in Italian, these two volumes trace the pre-history through the lens of the debated origins of the medieval Waldenses and the engagement of medieval heresies in Protestant literature, the geographical, social and political spread (and exile of) Italian protestant reformation, the role of inquisition and censorship, the contribution of Libertinism  and religious critiques to Enlightenment and dissent, transnational networks such as freemasonry and liberal republicanism, the Napoleonic excursus, the rise of the new European nation states, and the second and third globalizations of Italian migration and Protestantization, Italian Modernism, Pentecostalism and the rise of global catholic charismatic renewal. What it demonstrates is that, when one takes the standard model, turns it upside down, and reads it through the texts and experiences of another language and the largest single national people movement in modern history, the story of European religion no longer quite looks the same.

Bio

Mark Hutchinson is an intellectual historian who has specialized for many years in the history of higher education and the historiography of migration and new religious movements. He is currently University Historian at Western Sydney University, and he sits on a variety of international boards and committees in his field. Among his publications are the Cambridge Short History of Global Evangelicalism, volume V: Global Themes, in the Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Movements, the first and (soon the second) histories of Western Sydney University, and many others. With Maria Benedetti, Paolo Zanini and Gianclaudio Civale of the Universita’ degli Studi di Milano, his two volume Global History of Italian Protestantism will emerge in 2025 and 2026.