The Earliest Mapping of the Religions of the World

How did scholars initially attempt to map the world's religions? This presentation tells the remarkable story of a 1607 Dutch map, a London professor's groundbreaking study of global religious diversity, and a clergyman's decision to pair them together, a combination that helped create the modern study of world religions.

In 1613, Samuel Purchas published Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages—a conceptual revolution signaled by the plural 'religions.' The following year, Edward Brerewood's Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions was published posthumously. These were the first two books published in England to use the plural 'religions' rather than the singular 'religion', a linguistic shift that reflected a new way of understanding global religious diversity.

A decade later, in 1625, Purchas published his massive travel anthology Purchas his Pilgrimes, choosing Jodocus Hondius's Map of the Christian World to illustrate Brerewood's text. The first professor of astronomy at the newly founded Gresham College in London (though trained as a geographer at Oxford), Brerewood created an unprecedented analysis of religious geography. Purchas's pairing of Brerewood's text with Hondius's map offered readers a revolutionary visualization of the world's religions.

Join Dr. Craig Phillips on a bibliographic journey through rare book collections—including the New York Public Library, the Morgan Museum and Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library of Oxford, and the Folger Shakespeare Library—where examining original copies and different editions of these remarkable works reveals how Renaissance ethnography and early modern geographical scholarship converged to shape how we see and study religion today. Dr. Phillips will share insights into these collections and the discoveries that emerged from hands-on research with thesedelicate early printed books.

About the speaker:

The Rev. Craig A. Phillips, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Theology at St. Anselm College in Manchester, NH. He is a retired priest of the Episcopal Church who served as the Rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Arlington, Virginia from 2002-2021. A former Assistant Professor at Temple University, Dr. Phillips has also taught at Georgetown, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Rosemont College, and Virginia Theological Seminary.

He completed his doctoral work in Theology and Ethics at Duke University and holds an M.Div. from Harvard University and an A.B. in Religious Studies and Classics from Brown University. His academic research focuses on the intersections of literary theory, philosophy, critical theory, contemporary theology, the history of the study of religion, and colonial and postcolonial studies."

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