The nineteenth-century differentiation and pluralisation of Protestantism in response to the Enlightenment, rationalism and religious criticism, which in church historiography goes under the label ‘revival movements’, continues to pose a considerable historiographical challenge. This volume suggests understanding the revival movements as part of the transformations of the popular since around 1800 in a global perspective. Specifically, this volume deals with discursive negotiation processes for interpretative sovereignty between experts and laypeople and the resultant practices since the nineteenth century. This ties in with an interest in ‘lay theology’ (theologia popularis), which on the Protestant side has its classical place in the church and cultural history of the Reformation as an impulse for an ecclesiastical and theological empowerment of ‘laypeople’.