God’s Theatre: Global Conceptions of Space in the Early Modern Mennonite Diaspora, c. 1550–1800

Abstract

In 1598 the Schottland Bible, a large, printed volume, was produced for the Danzig Mennonites, decorated with maps. Space and landscape were essential to their self-conception. This chapter offers an original way of conceptualizing global Protestant cultures through an examination of the interconnected spaces in early modern Mennonite diasporic communities. This chapter will focus in particular on the way in which Mennonites who migrated from the Netherlands to the Vistula delta in the sixteenth century expressed connected confessional identities through space. Space is essential if scholarship is to construct a narrative of global Protestantisms. Lacking the notion of the universal church which connects global Catholic cultures, scholars of the global in early modern Protestantism face a challenge in the spatial frameworks they might adopt. The chapter will focus on three types of Mennonite space – past, present, and future – as a way of reconceptualizing global Protestantisms.