When religion was put under stress in early modern Europe, the consequences were often dramatic and far-reaching. UC Berkeley History Professor Ethan Shagan studies this contested space, examining how material conditions, alongside theological and ideological factors, led to religious change during that period.
Shagan has explored subjects ranging from the Church of England’s shift towards Protestantism to the impact of European imperialism on global perceptions of religion. He is currently working on a new book titled “The Invention of Religion in Early Modern Europe,” which examines how understandings of belief evolved in early modern Europe and beyond.
Professor Shagan recently spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about his research. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to UC Berkeley?
Ethan Shagan: I was born in New York City and educated on the East Coast. After I finished my Ph.D. in history at Princeton and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, I began my career as a professor at Northwestern University in 2000. In 2007, I was lucky enough to be offered a job at UC Berkeley and jumped at the chance.
For decades, Berkeley has ranked among the top history departments in the United States, often at the very top. What drew me in particular was that Berkeley is a powerhouse in two of my specialties: European history and “cultural history” — studying what things meant to people, not just what people did.
From the minute I arrived here, I knew Berkeley was the place for me. I’ve been a professor at UC Berkeley for 18 years now, and it has been my privilege to chair the Department of History twice.
Can you give us an overview of your research?
Ethan Shagan: I study the history of early modern Europe. Early modernity stretches from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Early in my career, I was primarily an expert on Britain and its empire. Over time, I expanded my interests enormously and now study much of Western Europe, the cultural area where Latin was the lingua franca for literate people.
I have a particular specialty in the history of religion. I’m particularly fascinated by what happened when the Christian religion that dominated European society shifted and changed in response to events it could not control. When religion is put under stress, it produces compelling human stories and agonizing choices.
Part of what I find exciting about studying early modernity is the kinds of sources that are available for historians to read and analyze. Before the emergence of the printing press in Europe around 1450, every book copy was handwritten, so there are comparatively few surviving sources. After the Industrial Revolution around 1800, there are countless sources. The period I study is the sweet spot in between: an era with enough sources to learn about almost any subject that interests us, but not so many that we can’t hope to offer thorough and learned accounts of those subjects.
Your research focuses on the contested space of religion in the early modern world. What are some of the conflicts you’ve explored in that period?
Ethan Shagan: In my first book, “Popular Politics and the English Reformation,” I studied one of the weirdest events in European religious history. In the 1520s, King Henry VIII of England wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. But only the church could grant a divorce, and for various geopolitical reasons, the pope refused. In response, the king expelled the Roman Catholic Church, strong-armed parliament into declaring him Supreme Head of the Church of England instead, and granted himself a divorce.
You might be familiar with this story, but its connection to Protestantism isn’t straightforward. Martin Luther considered Henry VIII a slave to his lusts, and Henry himself continued to execute Protestants. However, in an ironic marriage of convenience, the strongest supporters of Henry’s attack on the Catholic Church were Protestants. So, the new Church of England gradually became Protestant, even as it persecuted Protestants!
This intersection of the sordid and the holy provided me with a way to explore religious change. Historians usually think of religious conversion as an internal shift. However, my research showed that many English people, especially the poor and powerless, converted to Protestantism because their interests aligned with those of the state. Sometimes, practical motives lead to spiritual outcomes, and people’s material or political interests shape their views in ways they don’t always understand themselves. As the American social theorist Rufus Miles put it, “where you stand depends on where you sit.”
In another book, “The Birth of Modern Belief,” I analyzed how the meaning of “belief” changed from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Today, “belief” can refer to anything from believing in God to global warming or ghosts, typically matters of personal opinion or judgment. In the European Middle Ages, however, “belief” had a specific meaning: it was certainty based upon trust in authority, rather than reason (which produced “knowledge”) or evidence (which produced “opinion”). So “belief” was a concept proper to religion in particular, organized around trust in the authority of the church and scripture.
My book looks at how, in the 16th and 17th centuries, this approach began to break down. A new model of belief emerged, grounded in probability and evidence. Belief flattened onto opinion.
That’s why today, belief in God, ghosts, and global warming can be imagined as the same kind of thing. In modernity, even though religion has in some ways declined, “belief” structures our world far more significantly than it did in the “age of faith.”
Can you tell us about the book you’re currently working on, “The Invention of Religion in Early Modern Europe”?
Ethan Shagan: Already in the 1960s, scholars figured out — although not everyone agreed — that “religion” is a peculiarly modern and Western concept that does not have close equivalents in all times and places. For instance, we think of religion as involving supernatural beings. However, many cultures do not have a concept of “nature” that is separate from the supernatural. We think of religion as a sphere of experience oriented towards the divine, separate from politics or law. But many cultures would not imagine politics, law or aesthetics as any less oriented towards the divine than worship is.
So I’m writing a history of how Europeans came to imagine “religion” as its own distinct category, and how they coded some things as “religious” rather than others. It’s exciting work that takes me in lots of different directions, from European attempts to make sense of Native American and Middle Eastern societies, to court cases litigating whether there could be such a thing as a “religious” riot, to Enlightenment debates over the boundary between religion and philosophy.
I hope that this new history might help to explain the continued presence and power of religion in supposedly secular modern spaces. After all, once we understand that “religion” isn’t a natural category but gets made and unmade, its presence can’t be taken for granted either. Instead it is the work of history.