• About Us
• News & Events
• People
• Publications
• Early Modern Studies Minor
• Affiliates
• Make a Gift

The Center for Early Modern History promotes scholarly inquiry into the interchange of peoples, goods, and ideas that marks the first era of global contacts, ca. 1300-1800. Since its founding, the Center has drawn on the talents of faculty and students from a variety of disciplines, with interests in many parts of the world, for a vibrant program of intellectual exchange.

Welcome to the Center for Early Modern History

The Center for Early Modern History is a premier research, teaching, and resource center for studying the early modern world. The Center emphasizes a global and comparative approach and supports historical work drawing from a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives. CEMH collaborates with other centers and departments to coordinate interdisciplinary activities and graduate seminars on campus relating to the early modern period, and seeks to create scholarly connections between the University of Minnesota and other institutions.

Explore our website to view CEMH's many activities. Our calendar contains colloquia, workshops, and symposia that explore an array of early modern issues. Visit our publications section for more information about the Center's book series, Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History and Ming Studies Research Series, and the CEMH-affiliated Journal of Early Modern History. Finally, learn more about the new interdisciplinary graduate minor in Early Modern Studies.

Upcoming 25th Anniversary Celebration and FEEGI Conference

CEMH will be celebrating its 25th Anniversary on Thursday, April 19, 2012 with a keynote address, "On the Mar del Sur: Early Spanish Trade in Pacific South America," by Kris Lane, Frances V. Scholes Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University, at 7:30 p.m. in the James Ford Bell Library. The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) will be held at the University of Minnesota April 20 and 21, 2012. Many panels at FEEGI meetings are organized thematically, often around oceanic paradigms, to encourage discussion about the ways in which world regions can be compared, contrasted, and connected. Please visit their website for information on how to register and for further details on the conference. The program for the conference can be downloaded here.

New from CEMH

The center is happy to announce the publication of Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World, edited by Marguerite Ragnow and William D. Phillips. This volume, the third in the Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History series, brings together eight original essays that study complex religious interactions from a broad range of communities around the world.

Dramatic events involving religious leaders and their more zealous followers have intruded on the world’s stage in recent decades, bringing renewed attention to religion as a significant factor in modern society. This collection of essays, drawn from a conference inspired by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, explores religious conflict and accommodation in various places around the world in the early modern period. The individual studies, though focused on an earlier time, illuminate the challenges facing the early twenty-first-century world, some of which may be hauntingly familiar.

Professor James Tracy discusses the battle between Christianity and Islam in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean basin, what he calls the background war of the early modern period. His essay reminds us that these two groups of believers were long-standing enemies, both sides preoccupied with challenges to their own faith.

The relationship between religion and politics played out much differently in other parts of the early modern world and the studies in this volume reflect a complexity and diversity of experience that ranges from the conflicts within Christianity during the French Wars of Religion to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s attempts to forge mutual understanding among the varied cultures under his rule to the struggles between the Spanish and Chinese for supremacy in the Philippines. Religious conflict has long been a worldwide issue, as these essays attest, yet as they also demonstrate, accommodation was not only possible, it was often quite successful.

To order Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World, or any other CEMH title, visit our How to Order page

 

 

Events

View all events