“The pivotal role in European history of the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 [one could argue even to 1800] have sometimes been questioned but rarely denied.” Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, two terms and concepts, “The Renaissance” and “The Reformation,” were employed to express historians’ sense of the role; designating not just events or series of events, but turning points in history from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. These concepts were connected to fundamental notions, such as the birth of the individual and emancipation from old structures and institutions. However, in the twentieth century, with the rise of social and economic history, “the ebbing prestige of individualism and Christianity,” and the rise of global history, Renaissance and Reformation became controversial and disputed, even robbed of their explanatory power. “Nowadays, the place of the old revolutionary shift from medieval to modern has been taken by a gradual, fluctuating, highly contextualized blending of ‘late medieval’ and ‘early modern.’” [T.A. Brady, H.A. Oberman, James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History (1985), xiii-xvii]

This shift has drawn attention to the early modern age not just as the early stages of the modern era but also as a period in its own right, with its own dynamic, whose outcomes were not self-understood and inevitable. The age was marked by a close interplay of religion, society, politics, and culture; interaction, negotiation, and mediation of conflict between individuals and institutions, secular and religious, at the local, national, and regional levels. These conflicts took place both within European communities and societies, as well as between Europe and other societies of the world.

This session will present case studies of authority and conflict in the Spanish Empire, Papal Rome, and pre-revolutionary Paris. They draw on archival and published sources that have not previously been studied before to explore conflicts within religious orders at various levels, status of non-Catholics as a minority in a largely Catholic environment, and resistance by popular spiritual groups on the margins of Catholicism, respectively.

This panel was inspired by and honors R. Po-chia Hsia, The Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University, on his 70^th birthday. Across his distinguished career as a remarkably productive scholar and teacher and mentor, with an incredible scholarly and publication trajectory, he has authored and edited over a dozen books, with translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. In his early career he focused on the German Reformation, society and religion in the Low Countries, Catholic Renewal, and Anti-Semitism, and then moved on to encounters between Europe and Asia and global history.