Feeling Exclusion. Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe

For Europe, the early modern period was an age of religious strife, persecution and exile within Christendom. The passions unleashed by the Reformation and Thirty Years War, the state building that accompanied the process of con-fessionalisation and an increased policing of religious beliefs meant that those individuals or communities that did not form part of the religious majority were actively excluded and 'othered'. Huge numbers of Europeans were forced to worship in secret, abandon their homelands or face legal persecution and sometimes death. As the editors remind us in the brief introduction (1–8), the objective of this book is to 'open up emotional strategies that contributed to the formation and maintenance of stereotypes of difference throughout much of Europe' in the early modern era (2). Interestingly, the emphasis of this book is not on the views and actions of ruling states and church hierarchies, a well-covered subject, but rather on the daily life and culture of communities who experienced persecution and exclusion. The work is divided into three discrete parts with four or five chapters each (for a total of thirteen chapters).