The research group Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), explores the rich diversity of Christian communities in the premodern world—from the earliest followers of Jesus Christ up to around 1800, across all regions where Christian communities took root.

Our research group aims to facilitate and support comparative interdisciplinary research into preindustrial or premodern Christianities around the globe. Our primary goal is to decentralise religious history before 1800. We also historicise and question the unitary and universalist self-images nurtured by institutional churches, as well as the corresponding models of religious culture or transformation found in modern scholarship. This ambitious intellectual agenda is supported by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars. Together, we hope to more deeply understand the formation of religious communities by local and global forces, as well as the myriad connections among them.

POLY adopts a praxeological, interdisciplinary, global and cross-epochal perspective. The point of departure for POLY is the notion of Christianities in the plural: What did it mean, in different times and places, to live as a Christian? To answer this question, our research group focuses on practices—shared, regularly repeated, and often routinized actions that manifested in specific sayings and doings such as praying, fasting, almsgiving, child-rearing, or observing holidays, to name just a few.

While varying significantly from context to context, these practices created shared meanings and established a sense of cohesion within Christian communities that is experienced by the group members and external observers alike. In this sense, Christianities can be seen as communities of interaction whose practices offer insights into how people understood and shaped their Christian identities.

The second key concept is polycentricity. Christian practices were always oriented towards and around multiple centers—persons, places, objects, texts, symbols, or institutions. Jesus Christ stands out as the prominent center that all Christian communities had in common, but beyond that, individual Christianities had their own sets of centers. In their endless variety, these centers provided meaning, authority, and structure to Christian life.