The great majority of Protestants now live outside Europe, so the Reformation quincentenary of 2017 had an inevitable global dimension. But to what extent should the Reformation itself be considered a global phenomenon? And how might our understanding of it be enhanced by thinking about it in the context of developments in other world faiths, or vice versa? A distinguished group of international scholars met in October 2016 at the Instituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento to consider these questions. The resultant set of proceedings is a volume full of creative insight and constructive provocation, but rather short on unifying theory.

Part of the problem is that the Protestant Reformation – in marked contrast to the Catholic one – had little direct influence or impact outside Europe in the sixteenth century or for much of the seventeenth. Indeed, in a pair of stimulating essays about the state, politics and confessionalisation in Europe, the leading scholars Thomas Kaufmann and Paolo Prodi turn out to have relatively little to say about the wider global context. Nor is the comparative invitation warmly embraced in Martin Tamcke's discussion of reform movements in Russian Orthodoxy. Warning against ‘hasty conclusions’ drawn from comparison with other settings, he insists that ‘the Russian reform movements should be analysed in the context of Russian culture’ (p. 109).

Other contributors are more willing to recognise congruence. Silvana Seidel Menchi compares and contrasts concepts of martyrdom across different faith traditions. Roni Weinstein finds evidence of an early modern ‘global turn’ in the history of the Jewish diaspora, though its patterns of connection and ‘confessionalisation’ were cultural, theological and legal as much as they were geographical, involving the creation of an ‘imagined center’ (p. 131). Gudrun Krämer's interesting discussion of renewal and reform in Sunni Islam observes how Islamic understandings of ‘reform’ as the revival and restoration of an erstwhile pristine condition had much in common with the outlook of other religious traditions. Yet the European comparators here might as easily be the fifteenth-century Observant movement, or the Council of Trent, as the Lutheran revolt. Krämer expresses some exasperation with commentators, Muslim and non-Muslim, proclaiming the need for a contemporary ‘Islamic Reformation’.

The most fruitful lines of inquiry in fact trace the rhetorical and ideological strategies implicit in such calls. As more than one contributor notes, several non-Christian activists in modern times have cheerfully been dubbed ‘the Luther of Confucianism’ or ‘the Luther of India’. Brian Pennington's illuminating survey of ‘reform’ in modern Hinduism encourages us to recognise the contingent and political ways through which the concept became a cross-cultural category. British colonial administrators and self-proclaimed Hindu reformers (who were in truth ‘innovators’) had a joint interest in constructing (i.e. inventing) an essentialist, pan-Indian Hinduism, corrupted over time, and in need of recall to its supposedly authentic roots. In Pennington's view, this ‘Protestantization of India, celebrated as an emulation of Europe's own decisive break with its medieval past’ (p. 158), deserves to be both explained and exposed.

The idea that the Protestant Reformation's long-term contribution to global configurations of faith was to supply the set of templates for a historically specious taxonomy of ‘world religions’, and indeed for definitions of ‘religion’ itself, is in fact a fairly well-established one. It takes us a long way from 1517, Luther and Wittenberg. We are directed back there in a particularly thought-provoking chapter by Wolfgang Reinhard. The dramatic impact of such exact contemporaries of Luther as the father of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, the neo-Confucian sage Wang Yangming, and the Shiite founders of the Savafid empire, points Reinhard in the direction of ‘a general transcultural inclination to transcend the “works” of a ritualized tradition through a spiritualized relationship with God’, and to the possibility that ‘the Weltanschauung of different so-called “high cultures” around the year 1500 reached a comparable level of development with similar religious needs’ (p. 28). This is impressively high-concept, if not high-wire, comparative history. The risk, as with much well-intentioned global historicising, is that it can end up prioritising the European comparator as a conceptual focus, and thus sustaining rather than dissolving a Eurocentric perspective.

In an invigorating and helpfully schematic final chapter, Heinz Schilling seeks to draw the disparate threads of the volume together, and make sense of it all. He reiterates that thinking about the Protestant Reformation in context of global religion should be a ‘comparative’, not a ‘normative’ undertaking, and (drawing on materials from his recent book about the year) he notes other events of 1517 which might also claim world-historical significance – such as the Ottoman capture of Cairo, which relocated the caliphate to Istanbul for centuries to come. Within Europe, Luther's was not the only pathway of religious reform, and Tridentine Catholicism should equally be seen as a facet of ‘modern Christianity’. There is, Schilling suggests, no real compelling reason to privilege the Protestant Reformation as the fount of fundamental, modernising change in world affairs. But, at the same time, Schilling does regard Luther's teaching as a unique ‘redirection of existential religion towards the world’, profoundly transforming marriage, sexuality, work and politics. Some ‘structural differentiation’ of European culture and civilisation was already discernible in the Middle Ages, ‘but only Luther was ready to push this process of differentiation into the very center of Western European civilization’, ultimately pointing the way towards the freedoms and pluralism of modernity. Schilling concedes that this was not a straightforward path, but, in a phrase now well established in the British political lexicon, it does seem a bit like having your cake and eating it.