ABSTRACT
Protestantism was born in Europe, but it came of age in the Atlantic world. For much of the sixteenth century, it was uncertain whether either reformed Christianity or the Atlantic colonization schemes of the northern European states that most readily embraced Protestantism would endure. By the seventeenth century, though, it is possible to discern an interconnected, vibrant Protestant Atlantic world that provided the setting for many important developments in religious and cultural history. This Protestant Atlantic was but one segment of the Atlantic world as a whole, overlapping with other subdivisions of that wider zone of interaction and exchange: the multinational commercial Atlantic, the Atlantic empires of European powers, the black Atlantic, and those parts of the Atlantic world where Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, west African religions, or an array of American indigenous religions predominated. Differentiating part of the Atlantic world as the Protestant Atlantic risks obscuring the myriad connections between it and other ‘Atlantics’ as well as places and people elsewhere in the world. However, focusing on the Protestant Atlantic as an expansive but integrated space allows its particular features to be seen in relief. Here, three of those features will be stressed: the way the Atlantic functioned as a zone of religious contact and competition; the central role that the circulation of people, texts, and practices played in this space; and how these patterns of contact and circulation fostered a creativity that produced new and signi cant forms of religiosity.1
