The editors open by drawing the map. By the mid-seventeenth century Europe's confessional geography had settled into a pattern that would hold for centuries: Catholic in the south and west, Protestant across the north and the Baltic, and through south-central Germany, Hungary and Transylvania a jostling mixture of Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, smaller Protestant groups and Jews, with Orthodoxy dominant further east.

Beyond Europe the picture was uneven. Conversion had gone deep in Spanish and Portuguese America and barely at all in the north; in Africa, Christian communities clung on along the Congo and Angola coasts and the lower Zambezi; Goa served as a base for missions across southern India and Ceylon.

Three themes then organise the volume — Enlightenment, reawakening and revolution — and the editors insist they be read together rather than in turn, since each provoked and reshaped the others throughout the period.