The reformation of the heathen - Theology, history, and nature in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1500–1700

This monograph investigates the idea of the ‘heathen’ in the English Protestant religious culture of the Atlantic world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It illuminates how religious attitudes towards multifarious manifestations of non-belief and heterodoxy, derived from the Bible, historical scholarship and theological texts, shaped an ambitious religious-imperial project of reformation, colonisation and evangelism based on the prospect of physical and spiritual expansion. Examining printed texts, manuscript writing and visual culture, this study traces the uses of the ‘heathen’ label in early modern England, Ireland, Virginia and New England. It reveals the evolving, yet enduring power of the concept as an expression of non-belief, uncultivated wilderness and corruption that Protestants perceived not only beyond, but also within Christian communities, even as the label could also invite conversion to the true religion and point the way to salvation. -- .