This collection of essays intervenes in two principal historiographical areas. The first is the history of religious toleration. Crystallising in a European context during the 1980s, the confessionalisation thesis traced the consolidation of political units along confessional lines in the wake of the Reformation, thus opening the way for narratives of division and violence in which ‘difference’ seemed paramount. In subsequent decades, scholars reacted against these assumptions by examining modes of co-existence and peace afresh. The earlier emphasis on confessional conflict increasingly gave way to studies of ‘multiconfessionalism’, ‘getting along’ and the socio-political reciprocity between religious tolerance and intolerance. These scholarly shifts have often taken place in the shadow of debates about secularisation and modernity. The second intervention situates religious difference and tension within global history, which is often marked by its stress on connectivity and exchange. Historians have only partially explored the global dimensions of the Reformation and, until recently, their focus has been on global Catholicism. One of several fruits of a project that takes the ‘Global Reformations’ as its focus, this volume often considers the global contexts in which religious differences shaped identities and communities.

At this juncture, reappraising ‘difference’ requires integrating tension and conflict without obscuring flexibility and negotiation. The volume achieves this by capturing the ways in which people not only defined and asserted, but also exploited, resisted and sought to work out religious differences. It suggests that notions of unity and division were themselves hotly contested and appropriated. Several contributions challenge binary frameworks by demonstrating that multiple shades of similitude and difference characterised religious change. Evoking a rich spectrum of theological and cultural attitudes, the titular ‘reframing’ signals a recurring effort to ‘move beyond the magisterial mainstream to see what reform looked like on or from the margins’ (p. 19).

The first section is about ‘framing’ religious differences and focuses on perception and performance. David Robinson shows that adversarial religious disputations during the reign of Henri iv of France privileged confessional partisanship over compromise despite ostensibly facilitating impartial resolutions. Riccardo Saccenti explores Catholic efforts to centralise canonisation and thus reaffirm singular, infallible papal authority that could operate around the world. Particularly timely is Heather Coffey's analysis of images in French works of history and biography that envisioned the Prophet Muhammad through the lens of attitudes towards the Ottoman sultan. While the resultant ‘pictorial restraint’ (p. 93) could inflect Christian discourses about Islam with a degree of deference, combining visuality with textual exegesis ultimately distinguished between hegemonic Catholic truth and the deficiencies of non-Christianity. Perhaps in tension with judgements reached elsewhere in this section, Nina Schroeder argues that, although earlier detractors often seized upon the imagery of adult baptism to belittle Anabaptists and Mennonites, the Enlightenment heralded comparative religion marked by ‘greater objectivity’ (p. 130), thereby fostering interpretative attitudes and self-affirmation. While it is difficult to determine the extent to which prescriptive models resonated with lived experience, these chapters effectively interrogate assumptions and agendas that led believers to construct difference.

Focusing on ‘mobilising’ religious differences, the next section shows that alterity could be turned to intellectual, socio-political and spiritual advantage. Locating Erasmus among Italian humanist writers, Nathan Ron suggests that his writing about Islam became a pivotal tool in the forging of ‘oppositional’ (p. 186) European attitudes. James Nelson Novoa uncovers strategies that Portuguese converts from Judaism to Christianity deployed in Rome as they sought to establish a distinct, yet veritably Catholic identity as insulation against Inquisitorial persecution. There are parallels here with Jason Dyck's chapter, which suggests that indigenous converts to Catholicism in New Spain contributed to the advancement of Jesuit missionary activity, not only by adhering to orthodoxy, but also by acting as translators, educators, martyrs and even potential administers of baptism. This interplay between cooperation and coercion complicates ‘the traditional binary between Europeans and natives’ (p. 216) that has often informed scholarship. Despite reaching somewhat divergent conclusions, these contributions reveal that ideas about difference were not straightforwardly imposed upon individuals and communities, but rather continually evolved in conjunction with the initiatives of minority groups.

The final section explores ‘transcending’ difference, investigating efforts to complicate, resist or dismantle divisions, often through aspirational expressions of spiritual unity among God's people. Janine Rivière demonstrates that Scripture and providentialism regulated the potentially disruptive meaning of dreams, which became channels for Puritan introspection as well as points of contact between English settlers and indigenous peoples in colonial New England. The power of transcendent experiences to divide and unify also emerges in Yvonne Petry's chapter about the heterodox visions of the French polymath Guillaume Postel, who predicted that shared reason would harmonise Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist ideas. Marvin Lee Anderson uncovers another case of individual resistance to post-Reformation divisiveness in the figure of Jacob Boehme, for whom the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) demonstrated the destructive folly of claiming divine authority for one particular Christian sect or nation while ignoring God's universal presence. Meanwhile, Judith Pocock emphasises that Quakers appealed to an interior divine experience that might reconcile, if not dissolve, theological and philosophical distinctions. There might have been scope in this section to further consider strategic or rhetorical arguments for unity among those least likely to accept compromise or integration themselves. None the less, by contrasting the realities of religious dissonance with imagined irenic futures, these articles convincingly distil the essential struggle between unity and divisiveness which the volume takes as its starting point.

The contributions to this volume pluralise religious difference, illuminate internal as well as external divisions and undermine simplistic notions of homogeneity. They uncover diverse efforts to construct, navigate and overcome invariably complicated boundaries. These insights might sometimes call into question the concept of the ‘other’ as a useful heuristic tool. The volume invites a departure from such oppositional and binary models that could perhaps have been pursued in greater depth. However, this potential for further debate itself reflects the success of the volume, which imaginatively and coherently illuminates the fluid, volatile and, above all, multifarious development of religious difference in early modern Europe and beyond.