Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century. Trans. Jackie Feldman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. viii + 314 pp. index. bibl. $69.95. ISBN: 978–0–8122–4011–5.

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 905-907
Author(s):  
Adam Shear
Author(s):  
Kenneth Austin

This chapter analyzes “Counter Reformation,” a terminology that implies the developments within the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century and beyond of reactions to the Protestant challenge. It explains how historians generally prefer the term “Catholic Reformation” over Counter Reformation as it is more neutral and better able to accommodate the range of initiatives witnessed in the period. It also points out reform efforts that predate the Protestant challenge, in which a new ethos developed within the Catholic Church in the middle of the sixteenth century. The chapter talks about the fathers of the Council of Trent, who sought to address a wide range of issues relating to belief and practice. It looks at the “Tridentine” decrees that were implemented alongside various papal initiatives and efforts at the local level.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katlyn Kichko

This paper interacts specifically with two separate texts, that is Michel de Certeau’s The Possession at Loudun and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Both of these texts present a narrative of religious turmoil, demonic possessions and a heretical Inquisition, respectively, and the events which surround a single religious dissenter. Examining the two heretical men presented within these texts in comparison allows for an understanding of Catholic Church dogma during the age of the Counter Reformation, and how such an institution managed threats, both external and internal. Moreover, this paper also examines the methodologies behind the historical discourse, in order to understand the validity of the narratives presented, and the scope of historical depth sought. Addressing methodology is crucial when one narrows focus to two singular case studies by two separate historians. Thus, this paper intends to illustrate the threats to normative religious discourse which Urbain Grandier and Menocchio possessed in the face of the Catholic Church, while also demonstrating the methodologies by which the two men are presented within their respective histories.


1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Kuttner

It is not within the purpose of this paper to appraise the historical significance which the Council of Trent held for the consolidation of Catholic doctrine on all the points of dogmatic and sacramental theology that had been put into question by the religious innovators. Nor shall we examine the role which its measures of canonical legislation played in the great process of spiritual and disciplinary renewal which eventually determined the position of the Catholic Church in the modern world. We propose rather to turn our attention to the great goal which the Council did not reach: the restoration of the one Respublica Christiana, of the Catholic unity which prior to the sixteenth century had been the only conceivable form of Christian religious existence. To the eye of the historian, it is true, the rift in Western Christendom appears quite obviously prepared by the developments of two centuries preceding Luther's challenge. The exile of Avignon; the great schism; the constitutional unrest of the conciliar epoch of Constance and Basel; the political realism by which Renaissance popes had sought above all to consolidate their position as Italian territorial rulers; the growth of the national states and national sovereignties; the ferment of humanistic ideologies—they all were alarming and distressing symptoms of the radical disintegration of mediaeval unity.


Author(s):  
David W. Kling

By the early sixteenth century, the call to conversion had moved in other and more radical directions, resulting initially in renewed personal spiritual commitment at odds with the Catholic Church and then moving to outright schism and a change of institutional commitment. Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin experienced new and profound reorientations through their focus on the Bible and its teaching of salvation by faith alone, by grace alone, and through Christ alone. Anabaptists such as Menno Simons embraced these basic teachings but also placed emphasis on conversion (the “new birth”) as a life of discipleship. The reformers’ success in transmitting a thoroughgoing change of heart and mind to the populace, however, had mixed results. Political resistance, spiritual indifference, theological polemics, Catholic intransigence, and the persistence of ancient magic lore and occult practices ensured that the wholesale reformation of Europe, even in Protestant-controlled areas, would never become a reality.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEIL TARRANT

AbstractIt has long been noted that towards the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to use its instruments of censorship – the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books – to prosecute magic with increased vigour. These developments are often deemed to have had important consequences for the development of modern science in Italy, for they delimited areas of legitimate investigation of the natural world. Previous accounts of the censorship of magic have tended to suggest that the Church as an institution was opposed to, and sought to eradicate, the practice of magic. I do not seek to contest the fact that ecclesiastical censors prosecuted various magical and divinatory practices with greater enthusiasm at this time, but I suggest that in order to understand this development more fully it is necessary to offer a more complex picture of the Church. In this article I use the case of the Neapolitan magus Giambattista Della Porta to argue that during the course of the century the acceptable boundaries of magical speculation became increasingly clearly defined. Consequently, many practices and techniques that had previously been of contested orthodoxy were categorically defined as heterodox and therefore liable to prosecution and censorship. I argue, however, that this development was not driven by the Church asserting a ‘traditional’ hostility towards magic, but was instead the result of one particular faction within the Church embedding their conception of orthodox philosophical investigation of the natural world within the machinery of censorship.


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