Ecclesiology/Church–State Relationship in Early Modern Catholicism

Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

This essay provides a broad overview of the main ecclesiological controversies within the Catholic Church between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and it shows how the Reformation affected the ways in which Catholic theologians understood the Church as both a spiritual community and a political government. This essay also explores some of the most relevant repercussions of the Catholic ecclesiological debates in the political history of post-Reformation Europe. By discussing issues such as the nature and scope of the supreme authority over the Church, the political aspect of the Church, and the complex relationship between political and spiritual authorities, early modern Catholic theologians contributed significantly to the broader history of Western thought. Moreover, following the developments of the Catholic ecclesiological debates can help us to put the political history of Europe in a wider theoretical and transnational perspective.

Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton

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.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Wilt

AbstractThe return of the repressed “Catholic” has been lurking at the edge of English literary consciousness since early modern times, especially in the shorthand form of the plotting Jesuit. In its combined familiarity and mystery, grandeur and meanness, legitimacy and treason, “the Jesuit” even constitutes a figure for the Sublime. Novels by Thackeray, Kingsley, and Shorthouse locate the Jesuit in the political history of the nation, as the seducer of young noblemen. But this essay studies lesser-known novels by Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Trollope, and Mary Arnold Ward in which the plotting Jesuit, himself an object of allure in his un-Anglican “reserve” and his pre-Reformation Englishness, is suborned by his own humanity into the forbidden sublimities of love. As political threat and psychological object of desire, the Jesuit-in-love also represents Anglicanism's flirtation with Catholicism and with Queerness, his defeat/conversion sealing its commitment to its heterosexual priesthood and its post-Catholic modernity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-494
Author(s):  
Gisela Schlüter

Summary „A pharmacopoeia for any prescription“ (Paolo Mattia Doria).Machiavelliana after 1700 Recent research has gained many new insights into Machiavelli’s influence on Early Modern European political history. This article focuses on a so far little researched, but decisive stage in the history of Machiavelli’s influence, namely Paolo Mattia Doria’s treatise „La Vita Civile“ (1709/10; further editions in the 18th century), which was written in Naples, a centre of the Early European Enlightenment. In a peculiar mixture of anti-machiavellism that is inspired by Platonic thought and allegiance to Machiavellian ideas, Doria follows the structure and texture of Machiavelli’s „Il Principe“. The political treatise is still coloured by humanist ideas and includes a speculum principis („L’Educazione del Principe“). Despite the similarities, Doria criticizes Machiavelli’s amoral analysis of power politics and postulates, with reference to Machiavelli’s „Discorsi“, an ideal republic or a principality of virtue with a virtuous ruler (principe virtuoso) at the top. In the course of his analysis, Doria re-moralizes Machiavelli’s morally neutral, praxeological concept of virtù. The treatise reflects the fork in the history of Machiavelli’s influence both on a general level and in its details: the ambivalence of „Il Principe“ as political advice for the successful and unscrupulous prince on the one hand but, on the other hand, as an exposure of unscrupulous power politics, written modo obliquo by the passionate Republican whom Rousseau, for example, wanted to see in Machiavelli.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Mazierska

This essay discusses representations of Polish martial law of 1981 in Polish feature films made after communism collapsed. It considers them against the political history of Poland over the last thirty years, especially the history of Solidarity and the shift from communism to post-communism. It argues that the way martial law is portrayed changed over the years. While initially, as represented by Kutz’s Death as a Slice of Bread, the aim was to commemorate the victims of martial law and condemn the authorities, in later films we observe more complex portrayals that reflect the growing erosion of the myth of Solidarity and the Church.


2021 ◽  
pp. 120-148
Author(s):  
David Dickson

This chapter traces the long history of the rival confessional communities in Ireland that cohabited in the cities, which provides a key to understanding urban culture. It underlines the contrast between the non-existent legal status of the Catholic Church and the exclusive constitutional position of the established Church of Ireland. The eighteenth-century Catholic Church continued to function both in Dublin and the southern cities. But deprived of the patronage of a sympathetic gentry, the Church as an organization was drastically weakened after the Jacobite defeat. The chapter then presents the Catholic Church's organizational recovery and the creation of a new Catholic politics, urban and lay in character. It details the growth of functioning parishes of the Church of Ireland built in Dublin between the 1660s and 1800s. The chapter then turns to discuss the Church of Ireland's visible challenge in artisan districts: the arrival of a string of Methodist preachers, and investigates its immediate impact in Dublin. Ultimately, the chapter unveils the political power of Presbyterians in Dublin, and it analyzes the significance of Dublin in the emergence of the reformist tendency in Presbyterianism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 67-88
Author(s):  
Jacek Wojda

Seventieth of XIX century were very hard time for Catholic Church in Polish Kingdom. Mainreason was aim for independency in Poles’ hearts. Deeply connected with polish nation, Churchsuffered because of Tsar’ political repression. Although different stages of its history are not closelyconnected with post uprising’s repressions.Report of French General Consulate in Warsaw bearing a date 1869 stress accent on samekind of the Catholic Church persecutions, which were undertaken against bishops and dioceseadministrators, and some of them were died during deportation on Siberia, north or south Russia.Hierarchy was put in a difficult position. They had to choose or to subordinate so called Rome CatholicSpiritual Council in Petersburg or stay by the Apostolic See side. Bishop Konstanty Łubieński isacknowledged as the first Victim of that repressions.Outlook upon history of persecutions, which is presented, shows not only Church but pointsout harmful consequences Russia’s politics in the Church and society of the Polish Kingdom. Citedarchival source lets us know way of looking and analysing history during 1861−1869 by Frenchdiplomats.


Author(s):  
Rembert Lutjeharms

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book—Kavikarṇapūra, theology, Sanskrit poetry, and Sanskrit poetics—and provides an overview of each chapter. It briefly highlights the importance of the practice of poetry for the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition, places Kavikarṇapūra in the (political) history of sixteenth‐century Bengal and Orissa as well as sketches his place in the early developments of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava tradition (a topic more fully explored in Chapter 1). The chapter also reflects more generally on the nature of both his poetry and poetics, and highlights the way Kavikarṇapūra has so far been studied in modern scholarship.


Author(s):  
Carolyn James

Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, this book analyses the marriage of Isabella d’Este, one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance, and her less well-known husband, Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of the small northern Italian principality of Mantua (r. 1484–1519). It offers fresh insights into the nature of political marriages during the early modern period by investigating the forces which shaped the lives of an aristocratic couple who, within several years of their wedding, had to deal with the political challenges posed by the first conflicts of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) and, later, the scourge of the Great Pox. The study humanizes a relationship that was organized for entirely strategic reasons, but had to be inhabited emotionally if it was to produce the political and dynastic advantages that had inspired the match. The letter exchanges of Isabella and Francesco over twenty-nine years, as well as their correspondence with relatives and courtiers, show how their personal rapport evolved and how they cooperated in the governance of a princely state. Hitherto examined mainly from literary and religious perspectives and on the basis of legal evidence and prescriptive literature, early modern marriage emerges here in vivid detail, offering the reader access to aspects of the lived experience of an elite Renaissance spousal relationship. The book also contributes to our understanding of the history of emotions, of politics and military conflict, of childbirth, childhood, and family life, and of the history of disease and medicine.


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