Duane Corpis

Beyond the Parish

My ongoing research project “Beyond the Parish” examines the expansion of Protestant charity’s geographic scale as it grew from local, civic poor relief during the sixteenth-century Reformation to the transregional charity projects characteristic of international Protestantism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  I situate this project within the scope of the KFG project “Religion and Urbanity” because of the central role played by Protestant urban communities in founding, financing, expanding, and exporting charitable projects across city-based networks and imperial routes of circulation. Responding to Catholicism’s global successes, Protestant communities in German cities began to network first with one another and later with other European cities like London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm to design intercity infrastructures that facilitated the movement of charitable resources across ever increasing distances. These charitable resources had many aims:  supporting the conversion of individuals from competing religions, resettling Protestant refugees fleeing persecution, ransoming Protestants taken captive by corsairs in the Mediterranean, rebuilding churches damaged by natural or wartime disasters, or establishing charity schools and orphanages.  By the late 18th century, such charitable initiatives had connected not only Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican urban communities, but also incorporated colonial port cities in India, the East Indies, and British North American. In turn, the urban worldviews of Protestants became infused with a cosmopolitan brand of empathy that was culturally expansive but also shaped by the imperial infrastructures and colonial ideologies that promoted the spatial expansion of charitable networks.  Thus, while charitable networks were a vector for extending the global reach of evangelical Christianity, they were also anchored – socially, politically and spatially – within the urban communities that funded them.

Publications Relevant to Current Research:

Premodern Radicalisms, Radical Premodernisms, special issue of Radical History Review 130 (January 2018): 1-198.  Co-editors Kaya Sahin and Dave Kinkela.

Sound Politics: Critically Listening to the Past, special issue of Radical History Review 121 (January 2015): 1-208 (co-authored editorial introduction, 1-7).  Co-editors Daniel Bender and Danny Walkowitz.

Crossing the Boundaries of Belief:  Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800. Charlottesville, VA:  University of Virginia Press, 2014. [Awarded the Smith Book Award of the Southern Historical Association for 2013-2014]

“Christianity in the Atlantic World.” In The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, edited by Joseph C. Miller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

“Marian Pilgrimage and the Performance of Male Privilege in Eighteenth-Century Augsburg.” Central European History 45 (September 2012): 375-406.   [Awarded the Hans Rosenberg Article Prize for 2011-2012]

“Paths of Salvation and Boundaries of Belief: Spatial Discourse and the Meanings of Conversion in Early Modern Germany.” In Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, edited by David M. Luebke, et al., 14-31. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.

“Losing One’s Place:  Memory, History, and Space in Post-Reformation Germany.” In Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 327-367. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010.

Critical Approaches to Religion and Politics, special issue of Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 1-284 (co-authored editorial introduction, 1-17). Co-editor Rachel Scharfman.

“Mapping the Boundaries of Confession:  Space and Urban Religious Life in the Diocese of Augsburg, 1648-1750.”  In Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, 302-325. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.