When more than one volume emerges from a major academic conference or festschrift, they are ordinarily published together. In this case, however, two such volumes have appeared consecutively in different countries. First, the University of Toronto chose to celebrate the quincentenary of Martin Luther’s Reformation—the only major European event to originate in a university—with a multinational conference on “Global Reformations.” Two years later, a commercial Anglo-American firm published a volume of revised conference papers under the original conference title (abbreviated here as gr), promising a “sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations across the early modern world” (gr, i). One year later, a second collection of revised essays from the same conference was published by its host organization under a different title (rr herein), in which gr discreetly concludes the editor’s capsule biography (rr, 16).
In addition to their common origin and editor,...