Hagiography played a seminal role within early modern Catholicism, with the writing and dissemination of the lives of saints – ancient, medieval, and contemporary – essential to countering Protestant attacks and reinforcing Catholic identities. This chapter investigates how printed lives, epics, and dramatic performances contributed to a multisensory experience of sanctity that connected local religious communities with the broader aims of early modern Roman Catholic Reform.

This study has approached the Ottoman nineteenth century with three basic schemes – namely, a quadruple, triple and binary composition. It examined the impact of the quadruplet of the steamship–railway–printing press–telegraph on the binary of centre–periphery relations through the trinity of Caliphate–Wahhabism–Mahdism. In that way, it has addressed the political and intellectual histories of the era in light of global developments.

This chapter explores the parallel efforts of the CCP and the KWP to train loyal party cadres. This was a critical taks for both parties. It shows how Sino-North Korean friendship was a powerful tool for training the emotions of the party bureaucracy.

The lens is adjusted so that over the next three chapters ICCAJ’s developing views on antisemitism and the Jewish problem are juxtaposed on a shared landscape of UCCLW-WCCIF responses to unfolding Nazi persecution of Jews. Beginning with the ascension of Hitler in January 1933, three events shaped the parameters of response. First, the threat of ecumenical division was reignited in March over Germany’s handling of its Jewish problem, lodging as a permanent feature informing decisions about what could and could not be said about Germany. Second, the introduction of Nazi Aryan legislation began to be viewed as an attack against Christianity, moving the perceived anti-Christian aspects of Nazi antisemitism to the forefront of transnational ecumenical concerns. Third, the September adoption of the Aryan Paragraph by the Prussian Synod and the subsequent outbreak of the Confessing church internal struggle against the Deutsche Christen faction began to be ecumenically explained as a representative fight on behalf of the Church Universal. As this path was being sedulously cut by UCCLW leaders, ICCAJ’s goals remained focused on efforts to educate Protestant audiences about the Jewish problem, convince them of the need for conversionary cure and disseminate theory about the causes of antisemitism. Both before and after enactment of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and the corresponding increase in Nazi propaganda on ‘Judaisation’, ICCAJ pointed with frequency to a ‘renaissance of Jewishness’, Jewish racial identity with nationalism and increasing atheistic Jews as ‘undeniable entrenchment of Jewry in opposition to Christianity’.

Chapter 2 serves as an introduction to Wahhabism and Mahdism, which were the ideologies of two respective kinds of revival movements, the former doctrine-oriented and the latter person-oriented. Both, however, stood in opposition to the caliphal discourse. After providing a brief history of the Wahhabi and Sudanese Mahdi movements and a comparison of them, I evaluate their perceptions of “infidel Turks”, whom they deemed to be their main enemy, as a means of shedding light on their religious mission to fight the Ottoman state. By doing so, I also seek to show why the Ottomans saw those ideas as threats. Wahhabism and Mahdism entailed rebellion, and as a means of demonstrating the dangers they posed for the Ottomans, I discuss how the two revival movements tapped into global networks via the tools of steam and print.

Canonization proceedings underwent dramatic changes during the early modern period in response to scathing external criticism and a growing internal demand for new saints. This chapter explores how these stringent new rules shored up papal authority and redefined Catholic practices of veneration, by complicating the path to sainthood for centuries to come.