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The Bourbon Restoration of 1815 was exceptional in Italy not only because of the relatively peaceful transition of power, but also because the Neapolitan Bourbons retained the political and institutional innovations made during the years of French rule more completely than any other Italian ruler. Indeed, in 1816 they extended the principal French reforms — the abolition of feudalism, the reorganization of central and local administration, of the law codes, and the administration of justice — to Sicily as well, which lost its ancient autonomies. The chapter examines how the advisors of the Bourbon monarchy judged the reforms of the Napoleonic period and why they chose to preserve them. It concludes with an analysis of the place of the newly restored Bourbon kingdom in the geo-politics of southern Europe and the Mediterranean — where Austria and Great Britain were now the dominant powers — and the difficulties facing the survival of small dynastic states in post-Napoleonic Europe.

On 17 July 1789 the sejm took the estates of the bishopric of Cracow for the treasury, leaving the future bishop an annual salary of 100,000 złotys. This decision followed months of ‘intrigues and simonies’ — as the nuncio put it — in which the king, the primate, the opposition, the envoys of Russia and Prussia, and aspirants for promotion participated. A week later the law Fund for the Army extended the principle to the other bishoprics of both rites, as they became vacant, and invited the nuncio and the episcopate to participate in the redrawing of diocesan boundaries. This decision provides a case study of the interaction between high politics and political culture. Besides threatening schism between the Commonwealth and Rome and driving the primate abroad, the affair further undermined the royal prerogative, and contributed to the political realignment that ended the first phase of the Polish Revolution.

Schism between the Commonwealth and the Holy See seemed a real possibility in the aftermath of the law Fund for the Army. The tact and dexterity of the nuncio, Ferdinando Saluzzo, bought time for the negotiations between himself, the episcopate, and the sejm's ‘clerical deputation’. These negotiations covered many points at issue between clergy and laity, including residence, surplice fees, and monastic profession, and finally yielded a compromise proposal, whereby the bishops could draw their equalized revenues from landed property rather than in salaries. However, its acceptance by the sejm seemed impossible until the proposer of Fund for the Army, Wojciech Suchodolski, left Warsaw. The reason for his departure yields a vignette of the relationship between a magnate and his client. The chapter also considers religious and ecclesiastical dimensions of other questions discussed by the sejm in 1789‐90: military recruitment, local government, education, towns, and the new form of government.

This chapter considers the questions of legal codification, education, ‘police’, and censorship in terms of a conflict between the hosts of God and Caesar. Warsaw and Rome engaged each other on several fronts. The king wanted papal blessing for the Constitution of 3 May 1791, and so reined in reformers (linked with Hugo Kołłątaj) who wished to use the projected ‘Code of Stanisław August’ to restrict papal jurisdiction and end monastic autonomy in the Commonwealth. The monarch was also happy to help avert a request to restore the Jesuit order, which would have embarrassed the pope. The newly founded Police Commission encountered some resistance from the clergy in its attempts to regulate hospitals and move cemeteries outside city walls, but much cooperation in combating vagrancy. The episcopate was frustrated in its efforts to implement ecclesiastical censorship of works on religion or corruptive of morals, although few laymen opposed the principle.

Warsaw was not prepared to concede to Rome on the question of an autocephalous or autonomous Orthodox hierarchy. This was seen as essential to cutting off Russian influence and preventing rebellion among the Orthodox Ruthenian peasantry. However it was only following further papal approval of the Polish Revolution in May 1792 that the sejm agreed a comprehensive reform of the Orthodox Church within the Commonwealth. At the same time it shelved the question of a fundamental reform of the Catholic clergy of both rites. Hugo Kołłątaj and his circle pressed both reforms, but for the sejm, the Russian invasion of 14 May made the one an urgent geopolitical necessity and the other dispensable. The chapter analyses the proposed reforms to the Catholic clergy, and concludes with a coda that brings together the Commonwealth's ecclesiastical policies in its most confessionally volatile corner — the Ukraine.

The history of monastic exemption in France gives witness to a rich and lively institutional story of freedom and protection. This opening chapter frames the subject, its historiographical traditions, and methodological challenges, advancing the argument for a Roman tradition whose origins and development date firmly to the early Middle Ages.

A monastery’s relationship with Rome raises fundamental questions about its origins and nature. Exemption privileges form an important part of this story – a connecting link between the centre in Rome and the Christian periphery. This chapter questions the monastery’s impetus for seeking special exemption from Rome by examining the practice’s development from the papal perspective. It seeks to understand the gravitational pull of ‘Rome’s orbit’, which reveals the precedent, pragmatism, and vision of early medieval popes in the organization and governance of religious life. Formulating the popes’ attitude towards, and involvement in, western monasteries, this chapter explains why the granting of monastic exemptions became so pronounced a feature of papal government in the early Middle Ages.

Monastic exemption was a product of political negotiation and re-negotiation. More than just a passive outcome of individual circumstance, monastic freedom and protection were objectives reached with direct and effective papal support and intervention. These specific rights and liberties were achievable in no small measure because of Rome’s increasing role in challenging unwanted episcopal and lay domination. Although initiated by monks in Christian provinces like France – and supported regionally by Frankish bishops, kings, and magnates – exemptions became increasingly mobilised as powerful social, political, and legal mechanisms of medieval papal governance. This concluding chapter questions this so-called ‘victory of the papacy’, asking whether this is still the most accurate and lasting impression.

This chapter examines the notion of the “the West” as presented in the writings of Russia's nineteenth-century academically trained Orthodox theologians and historians. While scholars have extensively analyzed Slavophile and Westernizer debates concerning Russia and the West and even Orthodoxy and the West during this period, scholars have focused relatively little on the views of Russia's Orthodox thinkers professionally trained in Russia's four theological academies located in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. While less well known than Russia's secularly-trained intellectuals, the voices of Russia's academic theologians, a large number of whom were also laymen, are no less significant for our understanding of modern Orthodox constructions of the West. As one-time students and teachers in seminaries and theological academies, and sometimes in secular universities, and as active scholars who published in Russia's often spirited Orthodox theological and devotional journals, they formulated their notions of the West in the context of the Orthodox establishment and its specifically Orthodox ecclesial concerns during this period.

This is the first of two chapters addressing the formation of a British ‘Protestant Dante’. It focuses upon three main areas of enquiry: the circulation of Dantean texts in the Henrician period; the perception of the poet’s canonical status as one of the ‘three crowns of Florence’ and the potential significance of this for Henrician court culture; and the early stages of his conscription as a ‘proto-Protestant’ writer, chiefly through the historiographical work of early Reformation polemicists such as John Bale and Matthias Flacius. It presents some new evidence about the circulation of printed texts of the Commedia in early sixteenth-century England, and it demonstrates Dante’s relevance to two of the myths that scholars have identified in the debate about literary tradition at this time: ‘myths of empire and myths about the continuity of Protestant thought’.

This chapter assesses Victoria’s efforts to cope with the religious diversity of the United Kingdom. Although Victoria’s admiration for the Church of Scotland, which was centred on the Highlands and a small circle of eloquent preachers, made her a biased participant in disputes over its established status, impressions of Victoria’s Presbyterian sympathies sank deep in Scotland and around the Empire. Victoria had hoped to commend herself to the Irish as she had to the Scots, by paying respect to their different kind of national faith, but the chapter shows that her estrangement from Irish Roman Catholics mounted with her reluctance to cross the Irish Sea. Though increasingly appreciative of Roman Catholicism as she encountered it during travel or in the lives of friends and relatives, and friendly towards popes, who she hoped might bring the Irish hierarchy to heel, Victoria could not translate these affinities into a constructive relationship with Catholic Ireland.

This chapter begins by detailing the critical developments that took place during the seventh and eighth centuries, when the monothelite and iconoclastic controversies greatly enhanced the pope’s standing in the Eastern church. However, this new-found prestige was soon put to the test by the so-called Photian Schism (863–67), when the pope’s interference in local ecclesiastical affairs confronted the Eastern reluctance to surrender its ecclesiastical independence. Yet the debate was not yet about Rome’s primacy, but only about the jurisdictional limits of papal power and the right of the pope to involve himself in matters beyond his patriarchate. A temporary peace was eventually established during the “pornocracy” that governed Rome during the tenth century, but in failing to resolve the deeper ecclesiological issues that had emerged, both East and West had only postponed the greater schism that lie ahead.