Making Truth In Early Modern Catholicism

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of "Baroque Science". Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

In Becoming a New Self, Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the case that these practices promoted the idea of achieving a new self through the knowing of oneself. Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.

This volume demonstrates that the Catholic rhetoric of tradition disguised both novelties and creative innovations between 1550 and 1700. Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism reveals that the period between 1550 and 1700 emerged as an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, shaped by the tensions between personal creativity and magisterial authority. The essays explore ideas about grace, physical predetermination, freedom, and probabilism in order to show how the rhetoric of innovation and tradition can be better understood. More importantly, contributors illustrate how disintegrated historiographies, which often excluded Catholicism as a source of innovation, can be overcome. Not only were new systems of metaphysics crafted in the early modern period, but so too was a new conceptual language to deal with the pressing problems of human freedom and grace, natural law, and Marian piety. Overall, the volume shines significant light on hitherto neglected or misunderstood traits in the understanding of early modern Catholic culture. Re-presenting early modern Catholicism more crucially than any other currently available study, Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism is a useful tool for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in the fields of philosophy, early modern studies, and the history of theology.

In the midst of a global pandemic, the Frankfurt POLY (Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities) Lectures on "Pathways through Early Modern Christianities" brought together a virtual, global community of scholars and students in the Spring and Summer of 2021 to discuss the fascinating nature of early modern religious life. In this book, eleven pathbreaking scholars from the "four corners" of the early modern world reflect on the analytical tools that structure their field and that they have developed, revised and embraced in their scholarship: from generations to tolerance, from uniformity to publicity, from accommodation to local religion, from polycentrism to connected histories, and from identity to object agency. Together, the chapters of this reference work help both students and advanced researchers alike to appreciate the extent of our current knowledge about early modern christianities in their interconnected global context—and what exciting new travels could lie ahead.

This book is about the relationship between belief, credibility, and credulity in post-Reformation Catholicism. It argues that, starting from the end of the sixteenth century and due to different political, intellectual, cultural, and theological factors, credibility assumed a central role in post-Reformation Catholic discourse. This led to an important reconsideration of the relationship between natural reason and supernatural grace and consequently to novel and significant epistemological and moral tensions. From the perspective of the relationship between credulity, credibility, and belief, early modern Catholicism emerges not as the apex of dogmatism and intellectual repression, but rather as an engine for promoting the importance of intellectual judgment in the process of embracing faith. To be sure, finding a balance between conscience and authority was not easy for early modern Catholics. This book seeks to elucidate some of the difficulties, anxieties, and tensions caused by the novel insistence on credibility that came to dominate the theological and intellectual landscape of the early modern Catholic Church. In addition to shedding light on early modern Catholic culture, this book helps us to understand better what it means to believe. For the most part, in modern Western society we don't believe in the same things as our early modern predecessors. Even when we do believe in the same things, it is not in the same way. But believe we do, and thus understanding how early modern people addressed the question of belief might be useful as we grapple with the tension between credibility, credulity, and belief.

Stefania Tutino shows that post-Reformation Catholic culture was a rich laboratory for our current moral and hermeneutical anxieties.

This volume launches the book series of “Inquire – International Centre for Research on Inquisitions” of the University of Bologna, a research network that engages with the history of religious justice from the 13th to the 20th century. This first publication offers twenty chapters that take stock of the current historiography on medieval and early modern Inquisitions (the Spanish, Portuguese and Roman Inquisitions) and their modern continuations. Through the analysis of specific questions related to religious repression in Europe and the Iberian colonial territories extending from the Middle Ages to today, the contributions here examine the history of the perception of tribunals and the most recent historiographical trends. New research perspectives thus emerge on a subject that continues to intrigue those interested in the practices of justice and censorship, the history of religious dissent and the genesis of intolerance in the Western world and beyond.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Empire, hosted Catholic missionaries of more diverse affiliations than most other cities in Asia. Attracted by the hope of converting the Shah, the missionaries acted as diplomatic agents for Catholic rulers, hosts to Protestant merchants, and healers of Armenians and Muslims. Through such niche activities they gained social acceptance locally. This book examines the activities of Discalced Carmelites and other missionaries, revealing the flexibility they demonstrated in dealing with cultural diversity, a common feature of missionary activity throughout emerging global Catholicism. While missions all over the world were central to the self-fashioning of the Counter-Reformation Church, clerics who set out to win over souls for the “true religion” turned into local actors who built reputations by defining their social roles in accordance with the expectations of their host society. Such practices fed controversies that were fought out in newly emerging public spaces. Responding to the threat this posed to its authority, the Roman Curia initiated a process of doctrinal disambiguation and centralization which culminated in the nineteenth century. Using the missions to Safavid Iran as a case study for “a global history on a small scale,” the book creates a new paradigm for the study of global Catholicism.