Organizers: Amanda Pipkin, Professor of History, UNC Charlotte, and Sarah Moran, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo
Deadline: July 15, 2026
The early modern Low Countries, divided in the late sixteenth century into the Protestant Dutch Republic in the North and the Catholic, Spanish Habsburg-ruled South, were a crucible of religious upheaval, intellectual debate, and commercial expansion. This panel will situate women’s religious lives within broader histories of migration, exile, evangelization, and globalization, contributing to emerging scholarship that treats mobility not as exceptional but as constitutive of women’s experience in the early modern world.
Confessionalization often spurred women to move. During the Revolt, Catholics fled to Germany and Italy, while after Spain re-took the South, Flemish Protestants moved to the Republic, or went farther afield to exile communities in England, the Rhineland, the Baltic, and North America. Evangelization was also a motive to cross the seas, and the Counter-Reformation channeled Catholic women’s mobility into new missionary convents across the Spanish Empire. As women migrated, so did their ideas, and the presses of Antwerp, Leiden, and Amsterdam circulated their theological and devotional works within the Low Countries and around the globe.
The panel brings together scholars working across confessional and disciplinary lines to ask: How did women adopt religious identities that enabled, constrained, or redirected their movement? What roles did women play in transplanting and adapting faith across borders? How did print culture facilitate the development and transmission of women’s theological viewpoints and devotional practices? And how did colonial and missionary expansion transform the possibilities for and the perils of female mobility? We welcome papers that engage any aspect of this framework, from local case studies to investigations of global networks.
Please submit proposals to both Amanda Pipkin (apipkin@charlotte.edu) and Sarah Moran (sarah.joan.moran@gmail.com) by July 15.
Your email should include:
- Name and preferred email address
- Paper title (15 words maximum)
- Paper abstract (200 words maximum)
- A short Academic CV (PDF or Word, 5 pages maximum, mentioning major publications)
- Your primary discipline (see the RSA discipline list)
- Current affiliation and position
- Year PhD received or expected
Applicants will be notified of acceptance by July 31. The panel (possibly with multiple sessions) will be submitted for sponsorship from the SSEMWG.