Paolo Sarpi, Caesar Baronius, and the Political Possibilities of Ecclesiastical History

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Keenan
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Religious Problems ◽  
The Relationship

Two of the most famous Catholic histories written during the early modern period were the Annales ecclesiastici of Caesar Baronius (d. 1607), a year-by-year chronicle of the Catholic Church from the birth of Christ to the twelfth century, and the Istoria del concilio tridentino of Paolo Sarpi (d. 1623), a scathing critique of the Council of Trent that argued the famous council had only made religious problems worse. Rather than comparing either of these works with similar histories written by protestants—thereby investigating inter-confessional Reformation debates—this article sets Baronius's Annales and Sarpi's Istoria side by side to explore disputes within Catholicism itself. By analyzing how the authors examine four topics in their histories (Peter and the papal primacy, the relationship between the local and universal church, the history of ecumenical councils, and the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities), as well as considering both historians' actions during the Venetian interdict crisis of 1606, this essay argues that Sarpi and Baronius fundamentally disagreed about the origins and exercise of both secular and ecclesiastical authority. These two modes of Catholic history-writing reveal how Sarpi and Baronius drew from contemporary political models, such that “ecclesiastical history” could have significant political ramifications.

Past Belief

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

5. Forbidden reading

2019 ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Belinda Jack
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Censorship, book burnings, and secret reading highlight the relationship between reading and power, and hence the relationship between limiting access to reading and political control. But from the very beginning there have been dissidents who refused to give up the intellectual freedom provided by their reading in the face of despotic regimes. ‘Forbidden reading’ considers the history of book burnings undertaken by repressive political regimes, religious authorities, and maverick leaders. It also discusses the Inquisitions and indexes of banned books first led by the Roman Catholic Church, but then later by other religions. Finally, it looks at different forms of censorship, including press censorship during times of war, censorship of ‘undesirable’ content, and self-censorship.

Patrick Boyle, The Irish Colleges and the Historiography of Irish Catholicism

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Irish College ◽  
History Of

More than forty Irish colleges were established in France, Spain, Portugal, the Italian States and the Austrian Empire between the 1580s and 1690s to cater for a diverse range of Irish Catholic students and priests who had travelled to the continent to pursue higher education. The colleges were a significant feature of Irish Catholicism, most obviously in the early modern period, and they have therefore attracted substantial attention from historians. The first modern attempts to write their histories appeared in the later nineteenth century and were heavily influenced by a Rankean emphasis on primary sources, as well as contemporary Irish Catholic nationalism. If the dominant historiography of the period emphasized the persecution of the ‘penal era’, then the existence of a network of Irish colleges producing redoubtable clergy for the Irish mission helped to explain how the Catholic Church survived in Ireland. In this paradigm, the production of priests was the main role bestowed on the colleges. This essay examines the foremost early historian of the colleges, and of the viewpoint just oudined, the Vincentian priest and superior of the Irish College in Paris, Patrick Boyle. In 1901 he produced the first book-length history of an Irish college: The Irish College in Paris from 1578 to 1901.

Elizabeth Cary

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Swan
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Elizabeth Cary ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
The People ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
The Many ◽  
The 19Th Century

Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, was born in 1585 or 1586 to Elizabeth (née Symondes) and Lawrence Tanfield in Burford close to Woodstock, where the Lady Tanfield’s relations were prominent, notably Queen Elizabeth’s Champion, Sir Henry Lee. The Lord Tanfield was an upwardly mobile lawyer of the Inner Temple, eventually becoming Lord Chief Justice of the Exchequer and extensive landlord in and around Burford, including famously, because of his grandson, Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, owning the estate known as Great Tew. Cary was an only child and was married into the Cary family, notable for its close kinship relations to Queen Elizabeth. Eventually having eleven children, with one dying in infancy, Cary is remarkable in Catholic history as a powerful and effective champion of Catholicism in the Caroline court and for bringing six of her children into the Catholic Church, while she is remarkable in English literary history for authoring the first original play in English by a woman to be published in print (the play is The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry) and being the first woman to author a modern-style history in English (that of the reign of Edward II). Exactly who and what kind of person Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland, could be or should be has been and continues to be the most characteristic feature of the contemplations of Cary, from the time of her life to the present. Cary herself wondered who she could and should be as did many of the people of her life, including the daughter who was her first biographer, and the speculations and consideration of various possibilities continued, through the 19th century, when Cary was made into a champion of Anglo-Catholics, both masculine and feminine, and the 20th century, when Cary drew the interest of literary historians concerned with the development of modern biography and drama and then feminists concerned to correct masculinist literary history by reviving knowledge of the many quelled women writers. She should be gaining further interest as the centrality of translation in the early modern period is better integrated into emergent literary historiography. Some interest more recently has been expressed in departing from thinking about Cary as an individual and in various biographical ways in favor of using her works as touchstones for other matter, especially social and cultural, yet there continues to be interest in Cary as a woman and in her works as the expressions of a woman when modernity was still inchoate.

Jesus the Pharisee: Leon Modena, the Historical Jesus, and Renaissance Venice

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 81-101
Author(s):  
Cristiana Facchini
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Second Temple Judaism ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

This article is devoted to Leon Modena’s anti-Christian polemical work Magen ve-herev (1643 ca.) as a useful source for the reconstruction of notions about the historical Jesus in the early modern period. In this work, Modena depicts Jesus in a sympathetic way, placing his religious activity against the backdrop of second Temple Judaism. Modena’s Jesus is fully Jewish, and Magen ve-herev offers different perspectives on the religious and historical context of Jesus’ life, and on the development of Christianity. The text is interpreted not exclusively against the backdrop of Jewish anti-Christian polemics but as the result of an increasing interest in the history of Christianity and ecclesiastical history, mainly as a response to the religious strife that resonated in the Republic of Venice and its ghetto.

Max Planck Institute and Habilitation

Dieter Grimm ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Dieter Grimm
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
History Of ◽  
Max Planck Society ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Student Protest Movement ◽  
First Job ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter describes the first job as a researcher in legal history in the newly founded Max-Planck-Institut for the History of European Private Law in Frankfurt, his work on the relationship between constitutional and private law in the nineteenth century, his Habilitation on the same subject, the novelty and importance of the subject. The year 1968, student protest movement, his involvement in two reform movements in connection with 1968, one concerning the Cusanuswerk (scholarship fund of the Catholic Church), the other the Max-Planck-Society.

Rethinking “Catholic Reform” and “Counter-Reformation”: What Happened in Early Modern Catholicism—a View from Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Firpo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Early Modern Catholicism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reform

There are now a number of ways to describe the phenomena which come under the umbrella of innovations in Roman Catholicism in the early modern period including “Counter Reformation”; “Catholic Reformation” and “Early Modern Catholicism.” After a brief survey of the various labels used by scholars over the last half century or more, this article seeks to rehabilitate the use of the label “Counter Reformation” in the light, particularly, of the determining role played by the Holy Office (aka Roman Inquisition) in shaping the Catholic Church down to Vatican ii (1962-65). A key role in this was played by Gian Pietro Carafa, who was made head of the congregation of the Holy Office at its foundation in 1542 and who became pope as Paul iv in 1555. During the key decades from the 1540s to 1570s the Inquisition in Rome set the agenda and by means, not only, of a series of trials of prominent members of the clerical establishment whom they regarded as their enemies, succeeded in intimidating their opponents. In doing so they also subverted episcopal authority, whose strengthening had been a watchword at the Council of Trent.

scholarly journals Introduction: The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract All of the articles in this special issue show the necessity of having to combine different kinds of sources—texts with images, images with objects, and objects with absences—to build an integrated history of the material worlds of food in the early modern period. They also reflect newer approaches to materiality which are sensitive to the relationship between matter and the senses and consider the haptic, visual, olfactory, and even aural aspects of cooking and eating alongside taste. In turn, the tastes of collectors and the fragility and absence of source material also need to be taken into consideration in order to write a meaningful cultural and social history of food. Despite the ephemeral nature of eating and cooking, this special issue shows that the sources studied by historians of material culture of the early modern period are remarkably rich, and their analysis fruitful.

Some French Reactions to the Council of Trent

1964 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kingdon
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ideas And Institutions

In this age of growing ecumenicism, many scholars are turning to the history of the sixteenth century for a fresh examination of the origins of those ideas and institutions which continue to divide the Christian community. During these years of the widely publicized meetings of an ecumenical council sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, many are turning specifically to the canons and decrees drafted by the Council of Trent for a fresh study of the extent to which they do or must divide Christians. But fully to understand these Tridentine decisions from an ecumenical perspective requires not only a knowledge of their texts and of the debates from which they emerged. It requires also a knowledge of the hostile reactions which they aroused among the many Christians who would not accept these decisions or the authority of those who promulgated them. An interesting spectrum of such reactions can be found among French criticisms of Trent published during the sixteenth century. Of these publications, three semto me to demonstrate this proposition neatly: one by a distinguished French theologian, John Calvin; a second by a dustinguished French Jurisconsult, Charles Dumoulin; a third by a prominent French lawyer and historian, Innocent Gentillet. These works have not been ignored by such experts on the historiography of Trent as professor Jedin. But I feel they merit a more detailed and more considered examination than they have as yet received. This paper sketches some of the lines upon which such an examination might proceed.

scholarly journals The Athos Bulgarian history writing of the 18th century between the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-19
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Polyvyannyy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
History Writing ◽  
National History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bulgarian Population ◽  
The One

The article is dedicated to three Bulgarian historical works created at Athos in the second half of the 18th c. – "Slavo-Bulgarian History" by Saint Paisius of Hilendar, anonymous "Zograf History" and "Brief History of the Bulgarian Slav People" by monk-priest Spyridon of Gabrovo. By the author’s opinion, these works, on the one hand, were born in the atmosphere of rivalry between the monasteries of Athos and their Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian clergy, and on the other, were actualised by the strengthening contacts of Hilandar and Zograf with Bulgarian lands. If the first affected the contents of the mentioned works, the second lead to sufficient enlargement of their audience, which, in its turn, became a precondition of the growing interest to the national history among the Bulgarian population of Rumelia in the first half of the 19th c.

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