Team Transregional History/Research Group Early Modern History

History Department/Research Group Early Modern History
Faculty of Arts

Under the guidance of PI prof. dr. Violet Soen, the ten members of the research group www.transregionalhistory.eu prioritize the study of borders and bordercrossings in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. They have developed a novel method that serves as a valuable tool for analyzing the complexity of early modern borders, boundaries and borderlands (Journal of Early Modern History 2017), and they are working towards a trilogy of edieted volumes: Transregional Reformations (V&R 2019), Transregional Territories (Brepols 2020) and Noblesses Transregional (Brepols 2021). They work towards the compilation of databases on print and intellectual history in early modern borderlands. As the Low Countries were embedded in the Spanish Empire, this group is very strong on Spanish History, and the PI is series editor of Habsburg Worlds at Brepols Publishers.

We seek to find answers to four exciting research questions related to borderlands, migration and religious war in the early modern era. (1) Our first research question deals with ‘transregional territories‘: it explores how dynastic and religious war led to changing borders and border management in the early modern era. (2) The second research goal examines ‘transregional reformations‘: it analyzes how the Protestant and Catholic Reformations reconfigured border crossings for religious and intellectual reasons. (3) A third and related project charts how a ‘transregional print culture‘ and intellectual life functioned in buttressing and transcending new confessional frontiers. (4) The fourth and final question asks how ‘transregional elites‘ interacted in all of the aforementioned border dynamics. Our fields of expertise thus straddle questions of religious war and peace, inquisition and reconciliation, church-state relationships and the history of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations between 1500 and 1800

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