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Karen Spierling

I am a scholar of the Reformation period in Western Europe, and particularly of the development and spread of Reformed (Calvinist) Christianity. One of the key questions driving my research is the nature of the relationship between religious ideas and practices. In my work, I seek to examine how social, political, and economic factors, among others, interacted with doctrinal concerns to both influence the articulation of religious ideas and affect how those ideas were put into practice. My first book, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Ashgate, 2005; paperback with Westminster John Knox, 2009), examined the development of the Genevan Reformed baptismal ritual and its related traditions in order to reveal the social, cultural, and theological dynamics of transforming a Catholic society into a Protestant one in the mid-sixteenth century. Based on extensive research in the Genevan archives—including the records of the city council and consistory (the disciplinary court of the Reformed church)—the study demonstrates that theologians, government leaders, and the general laity were engaged in a constant process of negotiation regarding the meaning of baptism, the significance of baptismal rituals, and the importance of the relationships established or affirmed during the ceremony of baptism.

In the course of doing that research, I was intrigued to discover how much ongoing interaction existed between Genevan inhabitants and Catholic neighbors in the surrounding French localities, despite determined efforts by both church and city officials to limit, or even end, such contact. My current monograph project—Love Thy Neighbor: The Preservation of Protestant-Catholic Relations in Reformation Geneva—explores this phenomenon further, looking at the social, political, and economic factors involved in Reformed Genevan relationships with neighboring Catholic governments and individuals. While the phenomenon of religious conflict during the Reformation has been well studied, the dynamics of interfaith connections during the same period remain insufficiently understood despite their important implications for all later religious communities that claim ties to the sixteenth-century reformers.

My conception of this project has been greatly informed by the work of other early modern scholars who are exploring notions of community and boundaries among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews of the period. My interest in questions of community definition and operation led to a collaborative project with Michael Halvorson of Pacific Lutheran University, Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008), a co-edited volume that "illuminates the variety of ways in which communities were defined and operated across early modern Europe: as imposed by community leaders or negotiated across society; as defined by belief, behavior, and memory; as marked by rigid boundaries and conflict or by flexibility and change; as shaped by art, ritual, charity, or devotional practices; and as characterized by the contending or overlapping boundaries of family, religion, and politics" (book jacket).