Amsterdamnified!

"Amsterdamnified!" is a research project based in Canada (UNB-Fredericton and Brock University) with European partners. For the period from 2015 to 2023 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) provided generous funding. The full title of the project is "Religious Dissenters, Spiritualist Ideas and Urban Associationalism in the Emergence of the Early Enlightenment in England and the Low Countries, 1540-1700." The short title is derived from a 1641 pamphlet by the English poet John Taylor.

“The Devil Shoots Heresies at the Church”: About the Amsterdamnified Banner Image

Click here to find out more about the image we use at the top of this website.

NEW: Special Issue of CHRC

We are pleased to announce the publication of a Special Issue of Church History and Religious Culture (101: 2-3) that will be published in late July 2021. The theme is “Spiritualism in Early Modern Europe.”

Amsterdamnified! A brief project description

Keywords: lay religion, heterodoxy, the devil, natural philosophy, Enlightenment, Spiritualists, Familists, Mennonites, Socinians, Quakers, David Joris, Baruch de Spinoza, Amsterdam, London.

Email group: “Spiritualist scholars network”

We are seeking to collaborate with other scholars who are working in the area of spiritualism and spiritualists in Early Modern Europe. Join us!

Reading John Taylor’s 1641 pamphlet using Voyant Tools

This post is about the oldest source of the quirky term in our project’s title. In the post we use the source to showcase our use of Voyant Tools for digital text analysis.

NEW: Special Issue of CHRC

New Book (2019) by Gary Waite

Gary Waite has recently (2019) published Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends.

Amsterdamnified Working Group Meeting (March 2019)

In March 2019 the Amsterdamnified team leaders hosted a symposium for project members and a small number of guests.

Hair(esy): Hirsute Histories, featuring Gary Waite

Gary K. Waite, “Early Modern Hair: Religion and Ritualized Belief”

Reframing the History of New Religious Movements

A new special issue of Nova Religio (May 2018), guested edited by Michael Driedger and Johannes Wolfart. Free access at http://nr.ucpress.edu/.

September 2017 conference

From the 27th to the 30th of September several members of the Amsterdamnified Research Team (Ace Gammon-Burnett, Nina Schroeder, Gary Waite, and Mike Driedger) participated in an international conference organized by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto.Read more

2017 Essay Collection

You can now order this collection of essays featuring work by three Amsterdamnified team members (Waite, van Veen, and Driedger). Or find it at your university library.

July 2017 conference

From the 18th to the 21st of July 2017 Gary Waite and Mike Driedger participated in a conference on “Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Reformation Era” in Nuremberg, Germany.

The links below lead to specialized lists of research resources.