the Ninth Annual RefoRC Conference on Early Modern Christianity
In the fourth centenary of the Defenestration of Prague, this momentous incident, which was fraught with ominous consequences, has to be reconsidered not as a circumstance merely stemming from the Holy Roman Empire’s endemic political instability, but as a crucial event in European history belonging to a broader chronological and geographical framework. Part of the issues this event raises are connected to a longue durée process of Konfessionalisierungredesigning the political and religious categories of a Christian West in which the reform of the Church had been deferred for too long. This is to say that intra-Christian violence, devastating Europe from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century, was rooted in the violence on which the Christendom regime had been built upon three hundred years before, and was in turn fed by the delay in Church reform and the idea of defence against external enemies (i.e. the Ottoman Empire), which at the beginning was looked at as necessary war.
The plenary lectures are focusing on the topics of war, violence, peace, tolerance, and intolerance in the context of a multi-confessional Europe going roughly from the Diet of Augsburg (1530) to the Peace of Westphalia (1648).