Godly Governance

Religious and political thought have seldom been entirely separable, but this was especially the case following the seismic changes that characterized the early modern period. These transformations affected the relationship of the religious and the political, blurring the boundaries between sacred and secular, public and private in ways previously inconceivable.

These two sources of power met on a large scale in wars of religion or the establishment of national churches. But this period also witnessed the internalization of godly governance: manuals describing self-regulation, covering topics as diverse as child-raising, managing the home, ordering the diet, and dying well, abound.

Intersections between these two facets of early modern life fill the period’s literature, music, art, and material culture, in the spaces of high culture and the quotidian, in performative and textual expression. Recent work has established that both religion and politics intersect with confessional identities, material culture, the spatial imagination, intellectual and patronage networks, and across manuscript and print culture. This conference seeks to illuminate the entanglements and confrontations between God and government in these diverse fields, hoping that the study of these difficult but fruitful meeting places can open up new avenues of understanding about the early modern world.

Conference Website: http://godlygov2014.wordpress.com