22 May 2025
In the presence of more than 140 scholars from around the world, the Fourteenth Annual REFORC Conference on Early Modern Christianity started today with an impressive keynote lecture on rebellion and peace and with three panels with short paper presentations.
In his welcome speech, Matthias Riedl (CEU), mentioned that #REFORC2025 is the first big conference for CEU in Vienna. As to the topic he referred to the relevance of the topic of war, rebellion and dissent.
The reason for the plenary speakers’s chosen topic Religion and Rebellion is the 500th anniversary of the German Peeasant War, which, as REFORC president Herman Selderhuis explained, was not a war, was not German and was not fought by peasants. Perhaps precisely because of that the program of the conference shows a broad reflection on the topc of rebellion and related themes such as dissent, war, violence, disorder, resistance, attacks etc. both in the plenary papers and the short paper papers. The junior and senior scholars gathered here demonstrated creative and substantive approaches to the theme of the keynotes.
Kicking off the keynote lectures on the first day of the conference was REFORC Board Member Violet Soen (KU Leuven), who located her lecture “Between a Pacification and a Religious Peace Resistance, Reconciliation and Peace Making at a Crucial Juncture of the Dutch Revolt (1576-1578)” in the 16th century’s Dutch Revolt. She gave an impressive overview of the attempts to achieve peace or rather concord in cities such as Ghent and Antwerp and through various peace treaties. She ended her keynote with an invitation to think not only about rebellion, but also to examine carefully on which premises peace and reconciliation could be achieved.
Following the keynote, the first series of in total 41 short paper panels began with short lectures by scholars in the field of early modern Christianity, that in general were well rated by the participants. As one of the participants expressed: “The good thing of short papers is that one can get a lot of information in a short time, but that information is so interesting that one regrets that they are short papers, because one would like to hear more about it.”
As always, the conference is also a meeting place for researchers. So on this first day, the breaks and the reception provided ample opportunity for this, which was gratefully taken advantage of. Several participants indicated that precisely the internationality, the different confessional perspectives and the interdisciplinarity are important and inspiring to them.
