FactGrid:The Landscape of Early Modern Religious Dissent
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(Field of Research:Q23177) The history of Christianity can – also – be told as continuous conflict over spiritual and political unity as Gottfried Arnold proposed with his Impartial History of the Church and Heretics (1699/1700). The continuities are, however, not that clear. Fundamental tenets and polarities between individual inspiration and theological orthodoxies might look like constants but the political and technical environments have been changing dramatically. Christianity became a state religion and states faced ever new challenges to guarantee minority rights if not a citizen-status regardless of the "personal" and "private" religious affiliation. Notions of subjectivity emerged and both created and relativised new fields of "free" expression. New media facilitated the spread of ideas and the ways societies could generate and handle internal conflicts.
The FactGrid The Landscape of Early Modern Religious Dissent project wants to serve the research community exploring the early modern religious map with the interactive database software we are using. Create items on persons, meetings, correspondences with little more than two or three connections; others might draw further connections with the data they have. The site's wider focus will raise particular questions: The "enlightenment" has been said to have discredited much of the "enthusiastic" religious landscape that still characterised early 18th century. We should be able to get beyond this statement: New organisational ties became fashionable with the emergence of freemasonry and the development of the global industrial market on which esotericism could thrive as new commodities of personal style and perception. It is not that clear how this new map of self-orientation could grow on the old religious soil, nor do we presently have a clearer picture of the networks that shaped and pervaded these developments.
- The network of the Theocratie du verbe incarné (experimental sketch)