Words Across Worlds: Mapping the Reformation as a Global Textual Network

Completed for Dr. Louise Kane’s ENG 6801: Texts and Technology in History, Spring 2026.

Visit the Twine here.

Project Team

• Concept & Initial Setup: Christina Restrepo, University of Central Florida
• Content & Documentation: Teddy Duncan Jr., University of Central Florida
• Technical Development & Hosting: Glenn S. Ritchey III, University of Central Florida

This project was co-developed with help from Claude in alignment with Distant Coding principles.

Abstract

This project considers the Protestant Reformation a global event involving three networks that extend beyond its European origins: texts, the advent of the press, and silences. Rather than limiting the Reformation to its localized textuality, including the letters of Henry VIII, religious treaties, and circulation through the printing press, our project contends with the global network of the unwritten: colonized nations and people who encountered these ideas but whose experiences and responses are not inscribed in the textual archives.

Main Argument

The Protestant Reformation cannot be fully captured by European textual representation; instead, it should be understood as a global, largely unwritten, network-event.

Key Findings

We performed a distant reading analysis of four of Henry VIII’s main writings. These included: The Letters to Anne Boleyn, The Defence of the Seven Sacraments, Henry VIII’s poems and songs (largely attributed to him), and a speech to Parliament done at the latter part of his reign. From a distant reading, we discovered the thematic nexus of these texts. A distant reading is a macro-interpretation of a text, providing a higher—more remote—vantage from which to view its meaning; the language is severed from its sentence-level context, where the larger textual patterns (the nexus) come into focus.

For example, in the love letters, the nexus was romantic language; for Henry VIII’s speech to the courts, it was religious terms like “God,” “charity,” and “love” (though “love” here is in a register distinct from that of the love letters). This provided a baseline for approaching the Reformation as a global event—by first understanding it as precipitated by an interpersonal relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, then as a series of theological texts, resulting in ideas that proliferated beyond their European origins.

By considering the places (and people) colonized by Europe that encountered the Reformation network (meaning they were proselytized, oftentimes coercively), we discovered the periphery-edge extending beyond what is directly archivable from first-hand accounts and the circulation of texts by the press. Here, the project identifies the silences that remain unaccounted for in the Reformation’s textual network—the unarchived limit.

Scholarship

Our project can be situated between two texts in particular; these texts (above) both approach the reformation as a global event:

For Charles Parker, the Reformation prompted “powerful missionary impulses that spilled out across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Trying to make converts throughout all the world coincided with the colonizing ambitions of imperialistic Catholic powers” (925). Through this “missionary” impulse coinciding with “colonizing ambitions,” people across the world encountered Christianity, resulting in “a kaleidoscope of native Christianities” (926).

In Susan Boettcher’s article, she posits that post-colonial hybridity—the commonalities that form when two cultures, namely the colonized and colonizer, meet, resulting in a kind of cultural synthesis—can be applied to the missionary work of the Reformation. As she writes, “Insofar as theoretical ideas about hybridity constitute themselves as a critique of the colonizing power’s notion(s) of purity, thinking of the Reformation as an intra-European religious colonization may usefully break down perennial debates about the extent of continuity and change in the resulting religious syntheses” (444).

According to both texts, the Reformation cannot be read as a European phenomenon—as an “intra-European” network—and must instead be understood as a global network (though neither text employs the language of ‘network’), engendering religious, cultural, and national shifts.

Works Cited

Boettcher, Susan R. “Post-colonial reformation? Hybridity in 16th-century Christianity.” Social Compass 52.4 (2005): 443-452.

Parker, Charles H. “The Reformation in global perspective.” History compass 12.12 (2014): 924-934.