Gary K. Waite

Gary Waite (PhD, Waterloo, 1987) is Professor Emeritus of Early Modern European History at the University of New Brunswick and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A prolific author (with ten books and over 80 academic articles and chapters), Waite's research has focused on the religion and culture of the early-modern Netherlands, beginning with the Dutch Anabaptist and Spiritualist David Joris (c.1501-1556), and expanding from there to include the wider radical Reformation movements. He has also published extensively in the fields of demonology and the witch-hunts, with to date two books, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, (Basingstoke, 2003, and Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1535-1600 (Toronto, 2007) and numerous other contributions to date. He has also published on the religious reform drama of the Dutch literary societies, the Chambers of Rhetoric: Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515-1556, Toronto, 2000) and more recent chapters on the subject. In 2019 he published Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends (London, 2019). His most recent publications arise from the Amsterdamnified! research programme on the radical religious roots of the early Enlightenment, including, Anti-Anabaptist Polemics: Dutch Anabaptism and the Devil in England, 1531-1660 (2023), and the co-edited Spiritualism in Early Modern Europe, in Church History and Religious Culture (101, 2021). Arising from his teaching and research, he is also co-editor, with Lisa M. Todd, of European Racism: A History in Documents (Peterborough, 2024).