The Luther anniversary of 2017, as Nicholas Terpstra, the editor of Global Reformations, points out, put Martin Luther, Wittenberg, and Germany (back?) at the center of the story of the Reformation. The popularity of Playmobil Luther seemed to symbolize the staying power of the myth of the great man who challenged the authority of the church and changed the world. Five hundred years after the posting of the Ninety-five Theses, this myth still captivates the educated public and even the scholarly community.

This volume seeks to open up new and broader perspectives on “Reformations.” As the title indicates, the chapters published here examine religious reform across the world in the early modern period. In doing so, they, by necessity, examine developments beyond the new Protestant churches, particularly within Catholicism, but also within Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. In this kind of analysis, what makes religious reform movements global is both their reach across the world and their interactions with other religions. This perspective is not entirely new and has been integrated into the study of the Reformation for the last forty years at least, but it does benefit from the more recent commitment among historians to look at global interactions more consciously. The chapters in this volume do not always succeed in moving beyond a straightforward analysis of interactions across religious lines, but, taken together, they challenge historians to think more broadly about what “Reformation” means.

Terpstra's introduction lays out the ambitious goals of the volume: “[The] essays explore the various intersections, entanglements, negotiations, and tensions that developed across social, gender, and religious lines in the Americas, Asia, the Aegean, and other parts of the globe” (2). Religious reformers, in many places around the world, wanted to “reform, purify, or convert others” (3). The efforts took place across a long time frame, involved people not traditionally studied by Reformation scholars, and could be found in many religious traditions. And, as Terpstra recognizes, “a global approach to reformation and Reformations inevitably draws in the Catholic Church more fully, since it was . . . the first truly global corporation and it was forming the first world religion” (11).

Luke Clossey's essay, “Religious Expansion in Islam, Catholicism, and Buddhism” is the most ambitious contribution in this collection. Clossey challenges traditional categories used to explain religious expansion, such as mission, conquest, and diffusion, as relics of a Christianity centered historiography. Instead, he argues that a comparative perspective across these three world religions requires a focus on “transformations,” often set in motion by the agency of local people and characterized by hybrid religious practices. Early modern people, he points out, were aware of the messy and contingent nature of religious change, as exemplified by a late sixteenth-century report from a friar in Mexico. A young man there told him, “they were still not well rooted in the faith, I should not be surprised that they were still neutral, that they neither answered to one faith nor the other or, better said, that they believed in God and at the same time kept their ancient customs and demonic rites” (23). In the end, says Clossey, “some expansions may be more conquest than others, some converts or holdouts may have the less agency than others, and some new growth may resemble the old faith more or less than others” (25).

The rest of the volume is organized into four parts. Part one is about conversion, coexistence, and identity; part two, spatial and social disciplines; part three, cultural and religious politics, and part four, “life across boundaries.” Each of the three chapters in each section are in a sense case studies of the kinds of issues Terpstra and Clossey outline. For example, in “Gypsies in Counter-Reformation Rome,” Giorgio Caravale traces the relationship between the authorities and the Roma population of the Papal States. Here a kind of medieval benevolence that focused on turning the Roma into good Christians was replaced in the sixteenth century by a harsher disciplinary regime that followed a missionary model, such as used in the Americas or in southern Italy. This policy, which emphasized the incompatibility of a traditional Roma lifestyle with being a “good Christian,” was usually a failure, driving the Roma even further to the margins of society, sometimes into banditry, and rarely leading them to settle in one place.

There are several contributions in part two about the experience and conceptualization of ghettos in early modern Italy. Justine Waldman highlights the ways Florentines equated Jews and prostitutes, as both groups were considered to pollute the community, and how they were forced to live in near proximity. In part three, Luka Spoljaric tells the story of the papacy's policy toward the so-called Manichean heretics in Bosnia in the fifteenth century. This study is about the failure of the church to grasp the nature of Christianity in the Balkans and a policy of reform that did not help the Bosnians in the face of Ottoman invasion. Lindsay Sidders examines the complex identity and policies of an early seventeenth-century Mexican creole bishop. Born in New Spain, Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Excobar defended the economic and political power of his social class against Spanish authorities, sympathized with and wondered at the lives and beliefs of indigenous people, while also enforcing a program of religious reform and “civilizing” of the population. On the one hand, his accounts of his episcopal visitations “revealed the wonder and possessiveness of the quotidian that fills the pages of Mota y Escobar's account” (184). The complexities of the bishop's descriptions of “his flock” range from a clearly imperial perspective, to a deeply engaged description of “the singularity of the territory he believed was his right to possess, enjoy, and control” (184). And, despite his great efforts, is appears that no one in Spain took the trouble to read his writings.

There are other excellent chapters in this volume, and they take the reader from Japan to Manila, Georgia in the American colonies, and the island of Naxos in the Aegean. As with any collection of essays, at times this one feels scattered and diffuse. What does the experience of Jews in the ghetto of Florence teach us about “global Reformations”? Or, put the other way around, how does a global perspective inform the study of the Roma in the Papal States? Many of the authors engage these questions, at least to some extent, and this volume shows the potential of a global perspective, a potential that will continue to develop in the coming years.