Protestant Network of Communications in Early Modern Europe

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The purpose of this research is to explore the Protestant correspondence network of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which, overlapping to some extent the Republic of Letters, linked various regions, from Lithuania and Transylvania to England and Ireland, and to place some voluntary associations in England, such as the SPCK, in the context of the European-wide Protestant Reformation. The research in the archives at Vilnius (Lithuania), Nagyenyed, Cluj Napoca (Rumania), Copenhagen (Denmark), Geneva, Neuchatel (Switzerland), Leiden, Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Torre Pellice (Italy), Armagh, London and Oxford (Great Britain) reveals that financial support was regularly offered to the Protestant minorities threatened by the Roman Catholic counter-reformation, and plans for a Protestant union in Europe, from a military level to an ecclesiastical one, existed throughout the period. Thus we see that a long battle against Roman Catholicism since the late sixteenth century still continued in the 'Age of Reason' for many Englishmen. If this cannot necessarily be described as an open war of religion, it was at least a cold war. From their point of views, the distressed Protestants on the continent, such as the Waldensians and the Lithuanian Calvinists, stood on the front line in this war.Part of this research has already been presented in 'The SPCK in defence of Protestant minorities in early eighteenth century Europe', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge University Press, November 2005, vol. 56, no. 4.