AS SHERLOCK HOLMES’s dog knew, those incidents that don’t happen are not only some of the most curious: they are also the easiest to overlook. For example: in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Catholic missionaries swept the world and put down deep roots on every inhabited continent bar Australia. Yet Protestants, their bitter rivals in Europe, scarcely seem to have noticed that there was a wider world out there. What was — or wasn’t — going on?

The answer that historians are just starting to piece together was: more than you might think. There were no Protestant missionary agencies in this period, no institutional counterparts to the RC Church’s religious orders. But there was more to the story of Protestantism’s spread beyond Europe than just the English colonies in North America. Put together enough pieces, and a mosaic starts to appear.

In this book, Ulinka Rublack, a Reformation historian at Cambridge who has a refreshing readiness to ask big questions, is helping to launch that mosaic-making process. Most of the 12 scholarly essays that she has assembled for this collection are precise case studies, glimpses of a highly varied and fragmented process.

Some essays cover well-known subjects — the transplanting of English Puritanism to Massachusetts, or the burgeoning interest in the wider world in European Protestant literature. But, even within Europe, there are unexpected stories to be told, such as in Renate Dürr’s remarkable study of the dozens of recorded cases of Muslims’ being baptised in 17th-century Germany. Some were expats choosing to settle; some were prisoners of war. Sometimes assimilation worked, but not always. When a Turkish baby was baptised in Wittstock in 1687, the mother drowned herself and the child in the river.

Other highlights look at the Pietist encounters with Native Americans and enslaved Africans in Georgia; at the early Moravians’ distinctively affective (yet not effective) mission strategies; and at the religion of the enslaved Bermudan Mary Prince (which, as an early-19th-century story, stretches the volume’s definition a bit).

The most important and far-reaching article, by Charles Parker, looks at the otherwise neglected Dutch sphere, which was by some way the largest and most diverse Protestant empire in the 17th century, stretching from Indonesia and Taiwan via Sri Lanka and South Africa to Brazil and Manhattan.

alamyThe title page of The Mariners Mirrour, London, 1588, Sir Anthony Ashley’s translation of the sea-atlas by Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, is reproduced in the book

His unique expertise on this world allows him to track how Dutch attitudes towards Islam, in particular, shifted during this period: from an initial blithe confidence that their self-evidently superior religion would sweep all before it, through a slow realisation that they had better understand their enemy a little better, to an emerging sense in the 18th century that Islam could be lived with and respected.

It is a story with wider applicability, as the book’s title suggests. The first Protestants to meet non-Christian non-Europeans were fresh from fighting Europe’s wars of religion, and they thought that they knew how to deal with religious opposition. The realisation that Europe’s Reformation was not simply something that could be globalised — that a quite different set of approaches would be necessary to root their faith in other cultures, especially in non-literate cultures — was not one that came easily. Like all of us, early Protestants tended to draw on their experience when they met new situations, and were slow to recognise that that experience was not worth very much on the other side of the world.

Missionaries like to tell improving and inspiring stories, and those are scarce here. But as a first serious foray into the range of early Protestant attempts to propagate their gospel, a task that turned out to be far harder than most of them imagined, it is worth our attention — and even, occasionally, our wary respect.

Dr Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University.

Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformation
Ulinka Rublack, editor
Cambridge University Press £75
(978-1-108-84161-0)
Church Times Bookshop £67.50