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Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster

Simone Laqua-O'Donnell

Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster examines how women from different social backgrounds encountered the Counter-Reformation. The focus is on Münster, a city in the north of ... More

Women and the Counter-Reformation in Early Modern Münster examines how women from different social backgrounds encountered the Counter-Reformation. The focus is on Münster, a city in the north of Germany, which was exposed to powerful Protestant influences which culminated in the notorious Anabaptist kingdom of 1534. After the defeat of the radical Protestants, the city was returned to Catholicism and a stringent programme of reform was enforced. By examining concubinage, piety, marriage, deviance, and convent reform, core issues of the Counter-Reformation’s quest for renewal, this fascinating study shows how women participated in the social and religious changes of the time, and how their lives were shaped by the Counter-Reformation. Employing research into the political, religious, and social institutions, and using an impressive variety of sources, Simone Laqua-O’Donnell engages with the way women experienced the new religiosity, morality, and discipline that was introduced to the city of Münster during this turbulent time.Less

Catholic Particularity in Seventeenth-Century French Writing: 'Christianity is Strange'

Richard Parish

The book adopts as its theme Pascal's assertion that “Christianity is strange” (“le christianisme est étrange”), taken from the Pensées, and explores various possible understandings of the statement ... More

The book adopts as its theme Pascal's assertion that “Christianity is strange” (“le christianisme est étrange”), taken from the Pensées, and explores various possible understandings of the statement in terms of Catholic particularity, as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals, catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic, and spiritual autobiography. The chapters consider a broad cross‐section of this corpus with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language, discernment, polemics, and salvation; and evidence is drawn both from canonical figures (Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, St François de Sales, Madame Guyon) and from less easily available texts. The writer's aim is to explore all those features that the heritage of the Catholic Reformation brought to the surface in France, and to do so in support of the numerous ways in which Christian doctrine could be understood as being strange: it is by turns contrary to expectations, paradoxical, divisive, carnal, and inexpressible. These features are exploited imaginatively in the more conventional literary forms, didactically in pulpit oratory, and empirically in the accounts of personal spiritual experience. In addition they are manifested polemically in debates surrounding penance, authority, inspiration, and eschatology, and often push orthodoxy to its limits and beyond in the course of their articulation. The work aims thereby to afford an unsettling account of a belief system to which early‐modern France often unquestioningly subscribed, and to show how the element of cultural assimilation of Catholic Christianity into much of Western Europe only tenuously contains a subversive and counter-intuitive creed. The degree to which that remains the case will be for the reader to decide.Less

Church, Society, and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730

Joseph Bergin

This book provides a synthesis devoted to the French experience of religious change during the period after the wars of religion up to the early Enlightenment. It provides an up-to-date and thorough ... More

This book provides a synthesis devoted to the French experience of religious change during the period after the wars of religion up to the early Enlightenment. It provides an up-to-date and thorough account of the religious history of France in the context of social, institutional, and cultural developments during the so-called long seventeenth century. The book argues that the French version of the Catholic Reformation showed a dynamism unrivaled elsewhere in Europe. The traumatic experiences of the wars of religion, the continuing search within France for heresy, and the challenge of Augustinian thought successively energized its attempts at religious change. The book highlights the continuing interaction of church and society and shows that while the French experience was clearly allied to its European context, its path was a distinctive one.Less

The Jews and the Reformation

Kenneth Austin

This book examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther's writings are ... More

This book examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther's writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. The book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities, and it has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly. The book begins by focusing on the impact and various forms of the Reformation on the Jews and pays close attention to the global perspective on Jewish experiences in the early modern period. It highlights the links between Jews in Europe and those in north Africa, Asia Minor, and the Americas, and it looks into the Jews' migrations and reputation as a corollary of Christians' exploration and colonisation of several territories. It seeks to next establish the position Jews occupied in Christian thinking and society by the start of the Reformation era, and then moves on to the first waves of reform in the earliest decades of the sixteenth century in both the Catholic and Protestant realms. The book explores the radical dimension to the Protestant Reformation and talks about identity as the heart of a fundamental issue associated with the Reformation. It analyzes “Counter Reformation” and discusses the various forms of Protestantism that had been accepted by large swathes of the population of many territories in Europe. Later chapters turn attention to relations between Jews and Christians in the first half of the seventeenth century and explore the Sabbatean movement as the most significant messianic movement since the first century BCE. In conclusion, the book summarizes how the Jews of Europe were in a very different position by the end of the seventeenth century compared to where they had been at the start of the sixteenth century. It recounts how Jewish communities sprung up in places which had not traditionally been a home to Jews, especially in Eastern Europe.Less

Planting the Cross: Catholic Reform and Renewal in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

This book examines how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented changes to monastic life in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France. Scholars of France’s Catholic Reformation have ... More

This book examines how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented changes to monastic life in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France. Scholars of France’s Catholic Reformation have tended to focus on the movement’s later stages and, taking a top-down approach, view it from the perspective of activist clerics seeking to impose a fixed idea of religious life. This study focuses instead on the movement’s beginnings and explores the aims and tactics of proponents of reform from different but overlapping perspectives. The six case studies draw from three regions—Paris, Provence, and Languedoc. The first chapters tell the story of religious caught in the direct path of the Wars of Religion, which reduced France to near anarchy in the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 tells of the difficulty traditional women’s orders had surviving—much less reforming themselves—in Protestant-dominated Montpellier. Chapter 2 examines the rebellion of Paris’s Feuillants against both their ascetic abbot and the king during the Holy League revolt. Chapter 3 recounts the implantation of the militant Franciscans called Capuchins in the Protestant heartland, Languedoc. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the struggle to reform two old orders—the Dominicans and Trinitarians—that had fallen into decay. Chapter 6 explores conflicting interpretations of Teresa of Avila’s legacy at France’s first Carmelite convents. The book illuminates persistent debates about what constituted religious reform and how a reform’s success should be judged. It shows reform to have been lived as an ongoing process that was more diverse, experimental, and experiential than is often recognized.Less

Book for the Hour of Recreation

Maria de San Jose Salazar

Alison Weber (ed.)

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving ... More

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, she fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and the staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, she demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and María's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as María's tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, it also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations.Less

Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy

Andrew Dell'Antonio

The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequences—such as tonal music—began to develop, is also notable for another shift: the ... More

The early seventeenth century, when the first operas were written and technical advances with far-reaching consequences—such as tonal music—began to develop, is also notable for another shift: the displacement of aristocratic music-makers by a new professional class of performers. This book looks at a related phenomenon: the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing. Drawing from contemporaneous discourses and other commentaries on music, the visual arts, and Church doctrine, this book links the new ideas about cultivated listening with other intellectual trends of the period: humanistic learning, contemplative listening (or watching) as an active spiritual practice, and musical mysticism as an ideal promoted by the Church as part of the Catholic Reformation.Less

The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform

Stefan Bauer

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s ... More

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.Less

The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement

Ulrich L. Lehner

The most cherished values of modernity are unthinkable without the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Equal rights, the growth of democracy, and the idea of perpetual progress stem from thinkers who ... More

The most cherished values of modernity are unthinkable without the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Equal rights, the growth of democracy, and the idea of perpetual progress stem from thinkers who lived 250 years ago but whose ideas are as attractive as ever. This book argues that while Catholic beliefs are commonly assumed to be at odds with modernity, most of the progressive reforms associated with the Enlightenment actually began to take shape during the Catholic Counter-Reformation two centuries earlier, and were staunchly defended by enlightened Catholics during the eighteenth century. This is the forgotten story of a progressive Catholicism that actively engaged with the world. Although this mode of thought declined in the nineteenth century, it reemerged powerfully at, and after, Vatican II (1962–1965).Less