Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture began in late 2010 at the annual Sixteenth Century Society Conference, held that year in Montreal, Quebec. There I presented a paper entitled ‘From Old World Synagogue to New: What Happened to Sephardic Synagogue Design and Architecture between the Iberian Expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s and the First New World Synagogue in Brazil?’ At the same conference, the Sixteenth Century Society gave me a book, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, by David B. Ruderman, for the purposes of writing a review for their journal. Additionally, Daire Carr, a commissioning editor at Pickering & Chatto Publishers, took an interest in my early modern studies research and encouraged me to submit a proposal. Meanwhile, I was also nearing completion of my first book, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History, a revised corpus of work that began as my doctoral dissertation. As part of that project I had encountered material that was beyond the geographic scope of the Atlantic World, yet very relevant to the early modern period that I was working in. All this serendipitously came together at that fateful conference, which I am very glad to have attended and to have had the opportunity to meet the other people there. The question of what to do next with my research agenda had been answered, as well as the mode of approach.