Pathways through Early Modern Christianities [1 ed.] 9783412526085, 9783412526061

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Andreea Badea | Bruno Boute | Birgit Emich (eds.)

Pathways through Early Modern Christianities

© 2023 Böhlau | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412526085 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Kulturen des Christentums – Neue Zugänge zur Frühen Neuzeit Cultures of Christianity – New Approaches to Early Modern History Edited by Nadine Amsler, Andreea Badea, Birgit Emich, Markus Friedrich, and Christian Windler Advisory Board Marco Cavarzere, Liesbeth Corens, Simon Ditchfield, Christophe Duhamelle, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Matthias Pohlig, Ulinka Rublack, Ulrike Strasser, Sascha Salatowsky, and Günther Wassilowsky

Volume 1

“Cultures of Christianity” is a platform supporting innovative research on the histories of Christianity in the early modern period. We are particularly interested in approaches inspired by cultural history which emphasise the interactions among diverse religious phenomena and their political, social, economic, intellectual, and media environments. We do not treat religion as a fixed entity. Rather, we see religious cultures as the result of dynamic processes of identity affirmation and demarcation—shaped by the practices of individuals, groups, and institutions. To understand this complexity, we will pay close attention to regional plurality, local autonomy, and heterogeneous forms of Christianity. Chronologically, we understand our “early modern period” as a long epoch. We assume that many relevant phenomena had their roots in earlier periods and that early modern configurations of Christianity continued into the modern era. We are deeply interested in these continuities and will give them special attention. Geographically, our project is grounded in the recognition that Christianity became a decisively more global religion during the early modern period. Accordingly, we are excited to support research on all world regions as well as contributions to a global history of religious interdependence. The Editors

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BÖ

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Andreea Badea / Bruno Boute / Birgit Emich (eds.)

Pathways through Early Modern Christianities

© 2023 Böhlau | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412526085 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Funded by the DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2023 by Böhlau, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria). Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress und Wageningen Academic. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International license, at https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412526085. For a copy of this license go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Any use in cases other than those permitted by this license requires the prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Sebastian Glunz, Frankfurt am Main For a detailed description of the cover motifs, please cf. page 333 in this book. Cover design: Michael Haderer, Wien Proofreading: Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek, Wien Typesetting: le-tex publishing services, Leipzig Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-52606-1 (print) ISBN 978-3-412-52608-5 (digital)

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Table of Contents

Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Birgit Emich Introduction ...............................................................................................

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Birgit Emich Uniformity and Polycentricity. The Early Modern Papacy between Promoting Unity and Handling Diversity........................................................ 33 Christian Windler Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective. Catholic Missionaries and the English East India Company............................... 55 Simon Ditchfield, Linda Nolan Appropriation and Agency in the Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion ............................................................................................ 87 Ines G. Županov Religious Accommodation. Historicity, Teleology, Expansion ............................ 125 Stuart B. Schwartz Some Reflections on the Social History of Religious Tolerance in Spain, Portugal, and their Atlantic Empires............................................................... 155 John-Paul A. Ghobrial Connected Histories and Eastern Christianities ............................................... 185 Eugenio Menegon Local Religion in the Early Modern Period. Chinese Christianity as a Case Study .................................................................................................. 211 Mihai-D. Grigore Polycentric Order Formation. Political Hesychasm in Wallachia and Moldavia, 1300–1500 ................................................................................... 237 Jean-Pascal Gay Ideologisation, Publicity, Politicisation, and the Regimes of Ecclesiality in Early Modern Catholicisms ....................................................................... 261

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Table of Contents

Judith Pollmann Religious Identity in the Low Countries 1520–1650.......................................... 281 Alexandra Walsham Generations. Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations ............... 305 Credits Cover Illustrations ............................................................................ 333

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Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Birgit Emich

Introduction

The history of Christianity in the early modern period continues to attract a wide range of researchers with disparate agendas. This dense forest of fresh, inspiring and often trail-blazing scholarship, however, can seem forbiddingly difficult to penetrate. The opening volume of the new Cultures of Christianity series offers advanced students and seasoned scholars a practical and hands-on reference guide to research from the last two decades of a burgeoning field. In each of the eleven chapters, leading experts dwell extensively on the seminal key concepts or historiographical lenses that they have developed and finetuned over their scholarly careers. With topics and case studies spanning the four corners of the early modern world, the scholars contributing to this volume generously share research experiences, questions and doubts they have encountered in their work.1 The turn of the millennium has seen a significant shift in scholarship on early modern Christianity, a shift that merits our attention here. At the same time, however, the reader will notice in the following chapters how quite a few of the research paradigms from late twentieth-century scholarship continue to challenge us to revisit the wealth of information on and insights into early modern religious phenomena they have produced. In many respects, our teachers had quite similar goals: in a nutshell, to move away from the strictures of traditional Church histories and towards the religious life of ordinary people, or towards more social and cultural accounts of religious change. A few examples may illustrate the point here. For all its essentialist flaws, Jean Delumeau’s influential claim from the 1970s that the Protestant and Catholic reformations fuelled the first real Christianisation wave after the pagan Middle Ages brought the religious practices of the laity—“practising Christians” in the terminology of contemporary sociology of religion—squarely into the view of scholars in France and elsewhere.2 In Germany and beyond, the confessionalisation paradigm articulated by Reinhard and Schilling

1 In the spring and summer of 2021, the POLY Research Group (Plurality and Polycentricity of Premodern Christianities) at the Goethe University Frankfurt, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), convened a virtual, international community of scholars to look into pathbreaking scholarship of the past two decades, and to probe the fascinating journeys that lie ahead. The building blocks of these conversations have served as premises for the goal of the Frankfurt POLY Research Group to develop a new, decentralised line of approach and analysis tools for studying premodern Christianities in their polycentricity and endless plurality. 2 Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire; see also Henneau and Massaut, La christianisation des campagnes. A critical discussion is found in O’Malley, Trent and All That. See also Emich, “From the

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in the 1980s triggered fertile debates over the paradigm’s focus on social disciplining and the modernisation theory, its étatistic and Eurocentric leanings, as well as its tacitly assumed ubiquity.3 While the fortunes of Christianisation have waned somewhat, confessionalisation remains an inspiring paradigm to think with. Scholars have sought to distinguish between “weak” confessionalisation (without state support) and the classical, “hard” theory of confessionalisation.4 The paradigm has been freed from its geographical and chronological bounds by fruitful application to other regions and Christianities5 ; to Judaism and to Sunni and Shī‘ī Islam in the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires6 ; as well as to epochs prior to and after the early modern period.7 Other researchers have pointed out the limitations of and resistance to confessionalising trends: to interconfessionality, transconfessional osmosis, and intraconfessional plurality8 ; and to confessional ambiguity, indifferentism and other religious (or irreligious) practices in the cracks between the great confessional Churches.9 A series of cultural turns has allowed scholars to balance the parallelism of the classical paradigm with the propria of respective confessional cultures.10 It has also allowed them to highlight the performative, “weak”, and negotiated nature of religious acts and formations,11 bringing to mind the image of a confessional church as a “theatre church” along the lines of Clifford Geertz’s “theatre state”. This concept, in particular, calls to mind the profound changes in how historians since the

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Council to the Founding Myth.” On the genesis of the concept of the “practicing Christian”, see Boute, “Schreiben, Zensieren, Praktizieren”. For an overview, cf. Reinhard and Schilling, Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, as well as Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich”. For a first critical approach to this theory, see Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung.” Cf. Lotz-Heumann, “Confessionalisation”. See Farr, “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France”, De Boer, “Social Discipline in Italy” and Poska, “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in the Iberian World” (all part of the Focal point/ Themenschwerpunkt “Confessionalisation and Social Discipline in France, Italy, and Spain” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte). See also Plokhy: The Gates of Europe, p. 85–107. Krstíc, “Can we speak of ‘Confessionalisation’ beyond the Reformation?”. Such topics will be addressed in Badea, Boute, and Emich, Konfessionalisierung auf dem Prüfstand. For the Middle Ages, see Steckel, “Une querelle de théologiens?” With its clear decentralised focus, see Weltecke, “Space, Entanglement and Decentralisation”. von Greyerz, Jakubowski-Tiessen, Kaufmann, and Lehmann, Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Ambiguität. Cf. the contributions to Pietsch and Stollberg-Rillinger, Konfessionelle Ambiguität, and Ossa-Richardson, A History of Ambiguity. Emich expanded on Thomas Kaufmann’s concept of a “confessional culture” from a culturalistic point of view; cf. Emich, “Konfession und Kultur.” Boute, “Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques”, p. 474, 490; Boute, Academic Interests, p. 50; Stollberg-Rillinger, “Einleitung”, p. 14.

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Introduction

1980s have viewed early modern polities, i. e., since mono-dimensional, state-led confessionalisation emerged in scholarship as a powerful prism for examining religious change. Other scholars have proposed to ditch confessionalisation altogether, notably in the field of religious dissent and radicalism12 —a proposal that sparks new debates on how methodological asymmetries risk recycling old dichotomies between “church” and “sect”. Both within and outside this process, however, a more fundamental shift has taken place. The last two decades have been marked above all by a sustained assault on the processual, coherent and synoptic narratives generated by these models (and by the ecclesial sources on which they draw). The forceful account of religious change in terms of the diffusion of new religious forms from the centre to the periphery, and of stiff resistance or passive acceptance among ordinary believers, has lost much of its evidence in recent scholarship. One could attribute this shift, in part, to a growing reflexivity among historians with respect to the centralising effects of scholarly practices in the production of invisible hands. As a result of this reflexive awareness on the part of more recent historians, Delumeau’s practising Christians have themselves become genuine agents circulating and adapting religious forms to their own needs and programmes, with the implication that accounts of religious change should be tied to chains of actors rather than to overarching processes.13 However, it is obvious that the cultural turn has also introduced a wide range of themes that were previously considered self-evident or historically irrelevant, themes that shift attention to the actor’s perspective. Emotions—including emotional styles and regimes, strategies, communities, outlets, and restraints, also as they have changed in relation to religious conflict and violence, secrecy and exile—have made their way to centre stage of religious life.14 In the wake of Foucault and Certeau, among others, historians of early modern religion have uncovered how religious phenomena are not merely set in time, but are also deeply embedded in physical spaces that were experienced and organised in diverging (hegemonic and counterhegemonic) ways by ecclesial elites, ordinary believers, or religious exiles.15 The (male or female) body as a vessel of religiosity or religious enunciation or, conversely, as the body has been instrumentalised in religious practices, liturgies and discourses constitutes another

12 Villani, “Dal radicalismo al dissenso”, and Malena, L’eresia dei perfetti. 13 On the diffusion and translation models of change, see Latour, “The Powers of Association”. 14 Cf. Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling; Broomhall, “Miracles and Misery”, and Ferber, “Devotional Violence and Emotional Governance”; Cummins and Stille, “Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion”; Bähr, Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit; Tarantino and Zika, Feeling Exclusion, Sponholz and Waite, Exile and Religious Identity. 15 De Certeau, L’invention du quotidien; Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space; Corry, Faini, and Meneghin, Domestic Devotions.

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theme beloved by historians.16 The cultural and praxeological history of knowledge, science and ideas has also deeply informed the work of certain scholars, who, among other things, have rediscovered doubt and uncertainty as keys to early modern religion, including those seeming bastions of certainty: the large confessional churches.17 Two things can be inferred from all this. First, a “bottom-up” history of religions is no longer just a limited topic (i. e., research on lower social strata), but has evolved into a full-blown approach that, depending on the research subject, can target religious and scholarly elites as well. At the same time, micro- and macro-history appear now much more tangled than the discussions from the 1990s on the so-called jeux d’échelles in micro-analysis suggest.18 Second, and as a consequence of the first, plural, diverse, and precarious religious phenomena, or what seem to reflect a postmodern awareness among contemporaries of deep-seated uncertainties or of the situational (and conflicted) validity of liturgical, devotional, or moral codes, are no longer found exclusively at the margins of large religious denominations, which had always been fertile hunting grounds for historians of deviance and dissent, but at their very core. Where cohesion and centrality did emerge—and they did, recurrently, in the millenary history of Christianities—this has proven to be the precarious result of painstaking, meandering work-in-progress marked by trial and error, performative acts, and unstable negotiations.19 Catholicism is somewhat overrepresented in this volume, although this was by no means the editors’ intention. Even the chapters on other Christianities address the same methodological and hermeneutical concerns as the historiography of the Una Sancta Catholica. Two considerations, however, may reduce the surprise somewhat. First, earlier scholarship considered polycentricity and plurality to be distinguishing features of a Protestant confessional culture in contradistinction to Catholic unity.20 In the past two decades, by contrast, early modern Catholicism has furnished scholars in the field with a particularly fertile paradox. Its remarkable achievement to project a workable, transcendental order inherited from the Apostles has proven to square surprisingly well with an endless variety and plurality of Catholicism on the ground.21 In fact, the

16 Strayer, Suffering Saints; Fischer and von Tippelskirch, Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent; Alfieri, Il corpo negato; Vila, The Convulsionnaires. 17 Shagan, The Birth of Early Modern Belief; Dijksterhuis, Regulating Knowledge; Dürr, Threatened Knowledge, and Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? 18 Cf. the various contributions to Revel, Jeux d’échelles. 19 Boute, Badea, Cavarzere, Vanden Broecke, “A Product’s Glamour”, p. 12. See also Emich, “Localizing Catholic Missions”; Nelson Burnett, “Questioning Authority, Tolerating Dissent”; Walsham, “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence”; Kümin and Tramontana, “Catholicism Decentralized”; Steckel, “Historicizing the Religious Field.” 20 Cf. for instance Schwöbel, “Pluralismus und Toleranz”, p. 112–116. 21 Cf. an early eye-opening approach in Ditchfield, “In Search of Local Knowledge”, and Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung.

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Introduction

notion of Catholicisms au pluriel is today generally accepted along the same lines as Protestantisms or decentralised Eastern Christianities.22 In this respect, it is interesting to note that references to Roman sources abound in this volume and elsewhere, bearing testimony to the contribution that scholars working in Vatican archives or on the Roman Curia itself, of all places, have made to new histories of plural, fragile, and meandering Catholicisms that were shaped by doubt and internal conflict.23 Several historical factors seem to have encouraged this shift: Catholicism’s intersections between technique, doxa and self-care24 ; its complicated dynamics between religious truth and purification; and its proverbial inclinations towards sensuality, materiality, and aestheticism.25 Among others, these factors furnish historians with a wide set of heuristic and hermeneutic treasure troves. In the field of the history of knowledge, the self-professed repository of Absolute Truth has proven to have been remarkably reluctant to recur to authoritative settlement, wielding instead an impressive and flexible epistemic toolkit to navigate doubt, endemic doctrinal conflict, and uncertainty.26 These features are by no means unique to early modern Catholicism. In part, the overrepresentation of the so-called “Old Faith” in these fields may be rooted in the older, asymmetric treatment by secularist, Northern European and Anglo-Saxon scholars of early modern Catholicism (or eastern Christianities), who considered Catholicism to be a more “primitive” counterpart to modern, intellectual, and enlightened Protestantism, with anthropologists and sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu among them) rushing to Southern Europe after decolonisation to observe la pensée sauvage in more accessible regions. This asymmetry was lifted, first by the parallelism in the Christianisation and confessionalisation theses, and, later on, by the growing awareness that modernity itself is anything but stable or self-evident, not to mention the notion of modernity as the destination of humanity’s march trough history.27 Conversely, historians of early modern Protestantisms have, of course, not been idle in the past two decades, and

22 Schunka, “Konversion, Toleranz – oder doch Union?” and Schunka, “Das Theatrum des Kirchenkriegs”; Fragnito and Tallon, Hétérodoxies croisées; Weltecke, “Space, Entanglement and Decentralisation”. See also Gay, Morales en conflit. 23 Compare the warnings against the “centralising” bias of missionary archives in Rome in Koschorke, “Rückblicke, Ausblicke”, p. 437. 24 Cf. Foucault, Les anormaux, p. 155–216; Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern. 25 Cf. De Boer and Göttler, Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe; Hall and Cooper, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church; De Boer, “The Counter-Reformation of the Senses”; Ivanic, Laven, and Morall, Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World. 26 Tutino, Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism; Badea, Boute, Cavarzere, and Vanden Broecke, Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism. 27 Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes.

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have moved away from Weberian narratives and towards a cultural history of “lived” Reformations.28 Second, the global reach of this volume and the time period under investigation need to be taken into consideration. Although research on Protestant missions is gaining strength, an immensely rich historiographical tradition on early modern Catholic missions continues to hold its own and has also become a platform for exploring new approaches, since new generations of non-confessional historians have felt compelled to break free from the field’s ecclesial origins and Eurocentric mindset. Moving away from the traditional image of missions and missionaries as mere agents of the Church or European empire-building, the field of missionary studies has come to emphasise actors’ perspectives, joined by a focus on practices designed to generate trust and credibility, and a general move towards the history of intercultural communication. This approach has generated rich micro- or local histories that have then been plugged into global transfers formatting Catholicism as a world religion.29 At the centre of these scholarly endeavours are, first, the encounters with and the experience of non-European (conquered and unconquered) peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, along with their often bewilderingly different cosmologies, cults and deities, in societies that were taxed either as civilised (mostly in the established empires of Asia) or uncivilised (in the European empires in the Americas), which fuelled the development of asymmetric anthropologies and diverging missionary strategies. Second, remaining firmly in the picture is the internal governance of religious orders, which until the eighteenth century were the main agents of Catholic missions other than those in Latin America. This includes the study of transnational, “glocal” religious order formations, the European (as well as non-European) hinterlands and the human capital of these religious orders, as well as their resources and the highly diverse relations they had with the Crowns of Spain, Portugal, and France, with colonial administrations or “Indigenous” polities, and with the Roman Congregation de Propaganda Fide.30 The polycentricity and “in-betweenness” of glocal Catholicisms have become new hallmarks for study that carry great promise for research on the “Indigenous” peoples of Europe—le nostre Indie, as Italian Jesuits dubbed their missions in the Mediterranean.

28 Millner, The senses and the English Reformation; Rublack, Reformation Europe, notably the chapter “Protestant Emotional and Material Cultures”, p. 211–233; Cummings, Riley, Law, and Walsham, Remembering the Reformation; Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs; Villani, “Unintentional dissent”; in the field of knowledge history, see for instance an early and very inspiring example in Gierl, “The Triumph of Truth and Innocence”. 29 State of the art in Hsia, A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions. See also Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs; Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient; Županov, Missionary Tropics; and Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars. 30 Hsia, “Introduction”.

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Introduction

By contrast, monographs or volumes of collected papers that compare or combine research on missions or the overseas experiences and transfers of Catholic, Protestant and other Christianities are not the rule, but remain the (rare) exception. This is so, despite the fact that from the mid-seventeenth century at the latest, it was hardly possible for missionaries (and their Indigenous flocks) to engage in their missionary activities without considering the activities of other Christian missionaries and tailoring their missionary strategies accordingly.31 This is a lacuna to be filled. Recent scholarship on plural Protestant missions is participating in this move towards a cultural history of interreligious and intercontinental encounter,32 and has also opened several alternative paths that would greatly benefit scholars on early modern Catholicism and other Christianities, notably at the painful nexus between mission, colonialism, race and slavery.33 The reader will note that the various pathways to early modern Christianities in this volume intersect at many points. In particular, all of the chapters offer viable solutions for overcoming the binary oppositions ingrained in our mental maps between domination and submission; centre and periphery; Europe and the world overseas; elite and popular religion; or local, specific religious expressions and global, universal traits and trends. Uniting most of the chapters of this volume is an orientation towards the local at a grassroots level, with bottom-up or micro-historical leanings. Whether methodologically or thematically, all of the chapters seek to take a salutary distance from older, synoptic, Eurocentric and Whiggish master narratives. They do this either by studying Christianities as full-fledged entities in their non-European contexts overseas, or by introducing fresh reflexive insights and bottom-up approaches to European history. This shift of emphasis proves rewarding not merely at or in between the margins of the large confessional Churches, but also at their very core, to the extent that the history of theology and of ecclesial regimes, the themes favoured by classical Church history, becomes highly relevant against the backdrop of the fascinating history of plural, composite, appropriated, local, connected, polycentric, imagined, reproduced and commemorated Christianities across the globe. Seen from this perspective, Birgit Emich (Frankfurt) embarks on a rather surprising topic in her chapter, namely, the drive towards religious uniformity and centricity—both privileged in older scholarship as the hallmark of religious change—in the prime locus of monolithic and centric master narratives: the Eternal City. She distinguishes between a formal, administrative type of uniformity finetuned by the Roman Curia, seen as a forerunner of bureaucratic development, and a practical, material uniformity on the ground that, amidst a plethora of local, often older religious practices and local 31 Friedrich and Zaunstöck, Jesuit and Pietist Missions. 32 See Rublack, Protestant Empires, or Maghenzani and Villani, British Protestant Missions. 33 Cf. on Quakers and slavery, Gerbner, “The Ultimate Sin”; Petterson, “Colonial Subjectification”, and Faull, “Charting the Colonial Backcountry”.

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appropriations of new Tridentine forms of religiosity, largely failed to emerge. The decision-making of the Roman Congregation of the Council, which formally wielded a monopoly over the interpretation of the decrees of the Council of Trent, is a case in point. With the help of well-chosen cases ranging from the veneration of images to the canonisation of saints, Emich convincingly argues that the Curia’s reluctance to impose rigorous homogenisation on practical and material aspects of religious life in its answers to the thousands of requests pouring in from all over the globe did not amount to a failure of administrative centralisation, but its very precondition. A number of practices afforded considerable wiggle room to decision-makers processing, on a caseby-case basis, the various problems and doubts that arose on the ground. These practices included practical ambiguities in Roman congregations (including even the Holy Office); a highly reactive style of governance based on the vetting (and sometimes shelving or ignoring) of supplications and requests; the secrecy of bureaucratic proceedings; and the different treatment of precedents as a source of authority both within and outside bureaucratic procedures in Rome. In return, these practices made a seemingly timeless and rigid system inhabitable for Catholics in the four corners of the world, who turned to Rome not only for their spiritual and religious needs, but also for authoritative intervention in the doubts, conflicts, and questions that arose from the dogmatic and material aspects of church life. Because Rome was hardly the only religious centre of early modern Catholicisms, these ideas allow new perspectives to develop on (poly)centricity, perspectives at the heart of the Frankfurt Research Group Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities. Emich’s chapter, in sum, provides researchers with tools to reconcile a more de-centred, fluid and entangled account of religious change with the top-down, centric and processual narratives fostered both by contemporary agents and modern scholarship on the confessional age. From a different angle—namely, the Catholic missionaries operating under the aegis of the English East India Company—Christian Windler (Bern) proposes a different tack for overcoming older scholarly biases towards coherent, relatively homogenous and omnipresent religious processes. Drawing on John H. Elliot’s seminal “Europe of Composite Monarchies”,34 Windler highlights the composite and layered patterns of global Catholicism with, on the one hand, its jurisdictional diversity and highly autonomous subaltern actors like the Jesuits or the clergy of the Estado da Índia, and, on the other hand, practices of alignment with one prince of the Church, the universal pastor in Rome. This “monarchical diversity” is the bottom line in the chapter’s microhistorical case study of missions located far away from Rome in a “company-state” (Philip Stern) within the context of the Anglo-Indian “composite monarchies”. The need to provide pastoral care of the Catholic Luso-Indian communities on Company territories, and the competition (or even antagonism) between Portuguese, French and

34 Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies”.

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Introduction

Rome-oriented clergies and religious orders fuelled the rise of a “Company Catholicism” that favoured (Italian) missionaries associated with Rome and the Roman Congregation De Propaganda Fide, who operated independently from the Portuguese Padroado or other political and commercial competitors. Interesting similarities emerge between different forms of composite governance. Notably, we find similarities between, on the one hand, the Roman Curia integrating or neutralising the variety of local practices and jurisdictions that could have potentially collided with its (largely symbolical) claim to superiority, and, on the other hand, the East India Company that, being an extension of a Protestant and anti-papist composite monarchy, tolerated the co-existence of different faiths. But this toleration existed only as long as it served the Company’s claim to authority in matters of church government, this applying as much to chaplains of the Church of England as to the Catholic clergy. Discussing the financial, legal and intraCatholic dimensions of what to modern eyes seems a peculiar arrangement, Windler also draws attention to everyday co-existence and transconfessional sociability within these trading posts or on Company ships, including references to unwritten and situational norms of respectful correspondence between people of different confessions. This recalls Willem Frijhoff ’s influential essay of the early 2000s on pragmatic co-existence in the Dutch Republic.35 At the same time, the trial of the French Capuchin missionary Ephrem de Nevers by the Inquisition of Goa examined by Windler reveals that similar practices of accommodation and competing protections (in de Nevers’ case, between Rome, the French crown and the English), as much as differing dogmatic positions, did not go unchallenged. Notably, the Portuguese clergy, just as the French and Italian missionaries did, legitimized their privileges and exemptions by reference to their service to the one Catholic Church and the Supreme Pontiff in Rome. Simon Ditchfield (York) and Linda Nolan (Rome) take another pathway for decentralising scholarly accounts of how world religions emerge. In an account that moves from the oversea missionary worlds to Rome and back again, they offer a complementary yet alternative approach for avoiding traditional, dyadic narratives that explain the power dynamics of inequality in the binary terms of (active) domination by spiritual conquest and the (passive) submission or resistance of the indigenous peoples in the Old and New Worlds. Rather than reconceptualising the nature of religious movements and their internal governance, which is a common thread through the previous chapters, Ditchfield and Nolan seek to introduce greater reciprocity by choreographing the “dance of agency” performed by all actors involved. Central to this approach is the appropriation model of religious change, in which chains of actors meaningfully modify, translate and mould religious forms to fit their own needs. This model appears in sharp contrast to the traditional one of religious change as a processual diffusion of hallmark religious forms from the centre to the periphery. Seen from this perspective, it is the New World

35 Frijhoff, “The Treshold of Toleration”.

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that converted the Old, rather than the other way around. Moreover, with reference to Actor Network Theory and the challenges posed by the material turn for rethinking agency, the notion of agency employed in this chapter is not limited to human actors, but is rather considered an assemblage of multiple components. Drawing on David Morgan’s The thing about Religion,36 Ditchfield and Nolan argue that things—which also include immaterial agents such as angels, demons, and saints—push back and extend influence on human bodies through their specific materiality and, in so doing, transfer the efforts of these bodies across contexts and continents. Such theoretical claims are then convincingly put to use in several case studies: the migration of a Madonna from colonial Mexico to Rome and on to China, Goa, and the Mughal court; the circulation of wax agnus dei sacramentals, silver votives and sacramental water from Rome to Spain, Mexico and the Germanies; images of Christ discovered in nature in the New World; the Holy House of Loreto (and its countless replicas) as it travelled from the Holy Land to Dalmatia, Italy and beyond; Amerindian featherwork journeying to Spain and Italy, as well as to East Africa and Northern China. These sacred objects emerge in Ditchfield’s and Nolan’s account as mediators to universalise the particular and to particularise the universal, in a flux of appropriation practices that were moulded by the materials of which they are composed, thus adding substance to the authors’ proposal that materiality is agency. In her chapter on religious accommodation, Ines G. Županov (Paris) examines the historiography of this influential concept and its long history, a history that goes back to the encounters between Abrahamic religions and the Greco-Roman world. The resilience of accommodation as a concept and strategy means that it has mutated over time from its theological and hermeneutic significance in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (Maimonides, Augustine, Aquinas), where it served to reconcile divine immutability and historical change, to its rhetorical significance in Renaissance humanism, whereby accommodation formed a strategy of tailoring one’s writing to a particular audience (Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare). This latter meaning of accommodation became a basic principle in the Jesuits’ ministry in the early modern period: strategies of representing reality without telling the complete truth (including less prestigious forms such as Nicodemism, adiaphora, dissimulation, equivocation, and mental reservation). The Jesuits’ epistemic practices collided with a paradigmatic, epistemic shift in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the form of a rigoristic universalism that vehemently attacked the Jesuits’ preference for the particular and for heterogeneity. This cultural conflict provides the backdrop for the subject of this chapter: religious accommodation in Jesuit missions, with “accommodation” as a concept for “Jesuit” missionary strategies reaching centre stage only in the eighteenth century, in the context of the Chinese and Malabar rites controversies that were deeply

36 Morgan, The Thing About Religion.

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Introduction

entangled with similar conflicts in the Middle East (as well as in Europe, notably in the Franco-Belgian region explored by Gay in this volume). In the Chinese context in particular, il modo soave, the “soft way”, as Jesuit correspondents and authors had earlier dubbed their missionary practices, was based on four theoretical arguments that were simultaneously practical strategies: immersion in linguistic and literary learning; emulation of social and cultural roles; semiotic transubstantiation of concepts and practices into Christian meanings and connotations; historical or historicist arguments drawn from European, paleo-Christian antiquity. In a meticulous analysis of different accommodation strategies in India from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, it is shown that these were not only highly tailored to meet local challenges, but were also heavily contested by Portuguese colonial authorities and other missionary orders, and even to a great extent by the Society of Jesus itself—rifts that add another dimension to Christian Windler’s “Composite Catholicism”. Accommodation opened doors to a world in which Christianity, without European customs, could become truly plural. Conversely, it also particularised cosmopolitan religion and fuelled the emergence of a plurality of religious expression that, justified by distinctions between the “political” and the “religious”, limited the scope of “religious facts”, turning the latter into objects of study from without and in relation to a “non-religious” sphere.37 Closely related to the concept and practice of religious accommodation is, of course, the issue of tolerance and toleration, which Stuart Schwartz (Yale) explores in his chapter on the late medieval and early modern Iberian and Iberian-Atlantic world. Until the end of the twentieth century, mainstream histories of tolerance largely consisted of somewhat Whiggish, (Western) Eurocentric, “high” histories of ideas that paid little or no attention to non-European polities such as the Ottoman and Mughal empires or Ming China, or to the “lands of the Inquisition”, namely, Southern Europe and the Latin American colonial empires. In contrast, Schwartz offers from the bottom-up a history of tolerance—itself a concept fraught with difficulties, since it denotes the toleration of diversity for pragmatic reasons—following the “Copernican Revolution” in religious studies from the 1980s onwards with respect to attitudes, values, practices and sentiments of common folk, whether within majority religions or as minority or dissident communities. Inspired by Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the case of Menocchio, Schwartz tells us in detail how the voices of similar “nobodies” in Spanish Inquisition documents in the Madrid national archives moved him to study the everyday practice and experience of toleration along lines similar to Alexandra Walsham and Benjamin Kaplan, among others.38 His is an account of toleration in regions where it had previously been considered inexistent: early modern Iberia and its Atlantic empires. The permissive soteriology summarised in the popular maxim Cada uno se puede salvar en su ley (“each

37 See also Menegon, “European and Chinese Controversies.” 38 Cf. Walsham, Charitable Hatred and Kaplan, Divided by Faith.

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person can be saved under his or her own law”) proves to have circulated widely in fifteenth-century Spain among old Christians as well as conversos and moriscos, and it was underpinned by a variety of attitudes ranging from religious ideas of scepticism or indifference to pragmatism. Despite efforts on behalf of the authorities, heterodox soteriologies were transferred to the Americas alongside (in)credulities, local practices, and superstitions, these being proffered to Indigenous peoples as well as to enslaved Africans. In response, the authorities strengthened their resolve to continue battling the inherent notion of freedom of conscience or doubts about the Church as the exclusive mediator of Divine Grace. It is in the eighteenth century that popular ideas related to religious tolerance were systematised in philosophical arguments stemming from elsewhere in Europe and transformed into tolerantism, a doctrine that in turn suffered intense persecution during the revolutionary era, the Napoleonic wars, and in their immediate aftermath. Raising questions about the circulation of ideas and attitudes between dominant and subordinate classes and their cultures, Schwartz cautions us against the fallacy of anachronism and implores scholars to take into account local, regional and national differences in the use of these concepts. Schwartz’s fascinating tale of the circulation of practices and experiences of tolerance across the Iberian Atlantic also provides, in more ways than one, a gateway to the chapter on connected histories and Eastern Christianities in the Ottoman Empire by John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford). Ghobrial contends that our understanding of the entangled lives of individuals and local communities scattered across the Middle East can be greatly enhanced by stories of movement and circulation, as well as the work of connecting writings and experiences of Middle Eastern Christians into a single analytical framework that links the Ottoman Empire to Europe, East-Asia and the Americas. Earlier scholarship poses particular challenges, being limited in geographical and chronological scope as it was stuck in the implicit understanding of a sort of unity that distracts from the endless local variety of geographies, languages, demographies, doctrines, manuscript cultures, and liturgical traditions. By contrast, “connected history” focuses on previously largely overlooked interactions between communities and corrects the (in part anachronistic) notion of early modern Eastern Christians as a mere minority in an Islamic world by situating them within their local contexts of the Ottoman world. Such an agenda does away with isolated histories of an inward-facing early modern Eastern Christianity, revealing its interconnectedness with European and global histories. Furthermore, connected history emphasises that the story of Eastern Christianity comprises a much more local, diverse, contextual, spatial, local and nonetheless entangled experience, an experience that is beyond the grand linear narratives of an ecclesiastical or missiological bent which distract from contingencies and unpredictable developments. With reference to Dorothea Weltecke’s bamboo forest of

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Introduction

decentralised yet entangled Christianities,39 Ghobrial distinguishes between two main trends: one that focuses on relationships between different and distant geographies (comparative history combined with modes of interaction linking different localities); and a more micro-historically oriented histoire croisée that puts a greater emphasis on memory and record-keeping, as well as other modes of social formation such as kinship and tribal identity, which focus on the connections between individuals and families. Central to this endeavour, and a leitmotiv throughout this chapter, is the collecting, connecting and digitising of the extant but largely dispersed documentary evidence. This challenge not only supports but also mirrors and indeed mediates the connecting of the histories of early modern Eastern Christians between themselves, with the West, and with the Far East. This emphasis on the local and granular nature of Christianities is foregrounded in the next chapter by Eugenio Menegon (Boston) on local religion in China. The notion of “local religion” as a pathway to early modern religious history was first championed by William Christian in his 1981 book Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain40 and is rooted in an amalgam of research interests that seek to unearth “folk”, “popular” and rural “peasant religiosity” from the bottom-up, drawing from sociology, anthropology, and ethnography. Rather than trying to enforce order on a bewildering variety of local diversity by searching for broader patterns, adepts of local religion embrace the unique context of each place within both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic or subversive dynamics—a concern that also informs the previous chapters of this book. With myriad references to the wealth of promising results of such an approach to religious phenomena in the “four” corners of the early modern world, Menegon highlights its perks for Chinese middle- and late-imperial history (between the tenth and nineteenth centuries). This field has benefitted greatly from an overall “localist turn” as its practitioners have gradually integrated more local primary sources into their work and as Chinese elite discourses are shown to be deeply entangled with a sense of local belonging that permeated society at large. Menegon’s move to access Christianity in late imperial China via the pathway of local religion is warranted by the observation that religious rituals, including Christian practices, have proven to be among the most powerful expressions of this “localism”, cautioning, on lines quite similar to Ghobrial’s, against treating Christianity as an “extraneous”, imperialist entity in Chinese history. Alongside the highly intellectual “Confucian” Christianity of the mobile elites, the resilience of Christian communities and their devotional practices was, especially in the countryside, often embedded in kinship networks on a local level that blur the traditional elite/popular dichotomy haunting much of older scholarship. Such an assessment defies any attempt at generalisation, however, as Menegon, at the same time, furnishes several examples

39 Weltecke, “Space, Entanglement and Decentralisation”. 40 Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain.

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of local Christian communities thriving on the absence or fragmentation of similar social formations. Patterns of localisation are central to Menegon’s own monograph on the Dominican missions in the northeast of the Fuan district and in parts of the Fuijan district.41 He concludes by highlighting how local religious life and experience, while being connected with general Christian liturgical and theological imperatives, was shaped by continuous local and situational bargaining among multiple social formations and plural Chinese cultural imperatives—ranging from Confucianism to other “heterodox” Chinese traditions (including exorcism and healing, among others)—as well as Christian ritual and devotional practices that fulfilled specific local needs or that could appeal to local communities. The polysystem theory, which sprang to a large extent from Ferdinand de Saussure’s work in anthropology and social studies, but was developed further in literature and translation studies in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Itamar Even-Zohar, is used by Mihai-D. Grigore (Mainz) to offer another approach to related hermeneutical challenges, one that is more functionalist-structuralist. In his chapter on the formation of a polycentric order (in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) in Orthodox Christianity in general and in the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in particular, Grigore delves deeply into a paradox: the role of hesychasm in the formation of a polycentric order that continues to inform (anti-Western) Orthodox identity in Russia and elsewhere. This mystical current of hesychasm, which was influenced by late medieval controversies on the proposed union between the Latin and Eastern Churches, advocated ascetic rejection of the world for the sake of the equanimity obtained by approaching and experiencing God Himself through the intermediacy of divine energies descending upon Earth. Simultaneously, however, Grigore uncovers how religious hesychasm, while preaching withdrawal from the world, became pivotal to Orthodox Christianity forming a highly resilient polycentric world order as an alternative to the crumbling order of the highly centralised monocentric Byzantine Empire. A significant role in the dynamics out of which an orthodox Commonwealth emerged was played by the “hesychastisation” of public ecclesiastical offices and an anti-Latin orthodox religious culture, lifestyle and identificatory ethos, which was disseminated via various (mainly monastic) networks and communication channels. In Grigore’s words, Orthodoxy itself created Orthodoxy in an autopoietic manner. The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia became important agents of political hesychasm from the late fourteenth century until their eclipse by the Muscovite Grand Duchy in the mid sixteenth century. Simultaneously, they provided a solid material base for large-scale policies allowing for a discursive association of mysticism and politics mediated by highly mobile figures who justified their position in worldly affairs by reference to their ascetic withdrawal from them. The activities of the (Serbian?) monk Nicodemos of Tismana (1320–1406)

41 Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars.

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Introduction

as the founder of an orthodox infrastructure counteracting Dominican and Franciscan missionaries in the Wallachia and Moldavia area, and as a reconciliation mediator between the Serbian and Byzantine orthodox Churches, a reconciliation that was also favoured by the Ottomans, are cases in point. Grigore shows that the polycentricity of the Orthodox commonwealth rested on the interaction of functionally diversified centres: centres with spiritual functions (e. g. Mount Athos, Mount Sinai), with ecclesiasticaladministrative and canonical functions (Constantinople and other patriarchates), and with politico-economic functions (the Balkan principalities, the Kievan Rus, Muscovite Grand Duchy), respectively. These, in turn, established subaltern hubs by, among many other activities, founding dominion- and confession-building monasteries with various dependencies, both on the ground or by creating exarchates. Polycentricity and the related intertwining of spiritual, economic and political power in plural, competing and shifting centres constituted the link between an endless plurality of religious practices on the ground, and an astonishingly complex Orthodox “polysystem” that defied the dyadic scheme of centre and periphery. This raises interesting points for comparison with similar plural and polycentric Catholicisms across the globe. The chapter on publicity, ideologisation, politicisation, and regimes of ecclesiality by Jean-Pascal Gay (Louvain-la-Neuve) draws the reader’s attention to the other end of the continent and intra-Catholic theological conflict as a defining trait of confessionalised Catholicisms. While the other chapters of this book do not exactly nurture irenic views of early modern Christianities, in this chapter the connection between conflict and confessionalisation (or between publicity, on one hand, and ideologisation and politicisation, on the other) in seventeenth-century France moves to centre stage. Avoiding the pitfalls of teleology, Gay makes the traditional field of the history of theology and theological conflict relevant for a wider audience of scholars by integrating it into a cultural and social history of the public sphere. The centrepiece of his account of intra-Catholic controversies in France is of course the publication and (both wide and limited, mostly urban and courtly) circulation of Blaise Pascal’s defamatory Lettres Provinciales of 1656 and the following years against “Jesuit” casuistry in moral theology and its locus of production: the confessional. In the immediate aftermath of the Fronde civil war, a range of religious controversies became particularly intense and, from a social point of view, involved much wider groups of people, with the actors of these controversies turning to new media (pamphlets, poems, songs, and the like) to convince an individualised public. This turned the traditional religious controversies into full-blown polemics. The intersection of these polemics with the literary field and the increasing social status of writers (Pascal, Racine, and, at the time of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Nicolas Boileau, among others) is specific to France, in contrast with, say, the controversies about quite similar theological and moral issues in the Habsburg Netherlands, which (as far as non-French regional publications are concerned) remained more strongly tied to scholarly institutions and practices of (self-)censorship. This literalisation of theology through polemics was vehemently opposed by its main

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victims, the Jesuits, at least until the end of the seventeenth century. In this context, the politicisation of the public realm emerged from within the common space of the Church. As a consequence, as Gay argues, it should be considered a characteristic of the (French) regime of ecclesiality, rather than an external dynamic that influenced religious and Church life. While similar polemics were eminently local and rooted in local divisions and pre-existing conflicts between different sections of the clergy and the public, they were also interconnected and transferred decades later to northern Italy, among other places. Moving on to the “Jesuit civil wars” that emerged from the polemics in France in the folds of the global Society of Jesus, and to the (ultimately failed) attempts of the Roman Curia and the Holy Office to rein in politicisation and ideologisation, Gay shows how from within early modern French religiosity a formerly eucharistic common space of the Church transformed into a political public space as an amalgamation of individual opinions. Focusing on the Low Countries in her contribution, Judith Pollmann (Leiden) reflects on identity as a keyword for religious history. Hers is a personal account about how rather abrupt deconfessionalisation processes affected her own “post-Catholic” environment and its sense of belonging, prompting questions in her research as a historian about how individuals and communities coped with the transitions of the Reformation. As it turned out, Pollmann notes, she had been exploring identity all along. With a route that moves through psychology (Freud, Erikson), history (Gleason), and sociology (Goffman), Pollmann highlights the impacts of social constructivism (Bourdieu, Foucault) and the cultural turn on the study of history in general, and on concepts like religion and identity that were previously considered clearly stable or irrelevant to historical research. Since the self-understanding of individuals is closely intertwined with that of the communities where they live, Pollmann proposes using identity and identity formation to capture the dramatic changes that took place in peoples’ lives during the Reformation era in the Low Countries. Top-down scholarship on processes of confessionalisation and Christianisation have highlighted the slow progress of reformations and limited the agency of individual believers to acceptance or resistance. This is a problem that previous chapters in this volume have raised as well. The Low Countries offer a telling example: adherents of the Reformation hailed from all social strata, exercised considerable religious agency, and many laypeople remained highly eclectic believers who shunned clear confessional choices much longer than did populations in countries like France because of the relative weakness of the Reformed heersende Kerk. Identification with emerging confessional subcultures was neither stable nor universal. In this context, microhistories provide interesting clues as to why and how certain people made specific religious choices, as in the case of the Utrecht lawyer Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641), who switched from being Catholic to unaffiliated to libertine and finally to being a hard-line Calvinist. Because many factors prove to have informed his choices, multiple and intersecting identities were at play in this process (including gender). Relations with others were largely determined by the unwritten

© 2023 Böhlau | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412526085 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Introduction

norms of a practical and pragmatic omgangsoecumene, which suggests that Dutch believers tended to live alternating confessional and generalised Christian identities, depending on the situation. The choices, identities, and anti-Protestant mobilisation of those who clung to Catholicism are not self-evident either, as shown by Pollmann’s subsequent analysis of the emergence of a Catholic identity in the South (along with the spectacular revitalisation of a revanchist frontier Catholicism). Recent research has revealed how lay exiles and the middle classes played a pivotal role in this process. This assessment raises new questions about the role of memory in the cultural split between the populations of the Dutch Republic and of the Habsburg state in the Low Countries. This has been the object of some joint research that has tackled issues ranging from the role of religion in public memories, to the personal (and religious) dimensions of memories of war and violence, to the processing of traumatic events into “secondary gain” miracles. While questions of identity played a crucial role in restoring the religious agency of believers, “identity” has become part of a much broader research topic on the practices and strategies of early modern people to negotiate change. In her chapter on the English Reformation, Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) proposes revisiting the European reformations by means of another subject that both facilitated religious rupture and helped contemporaries to address these profound religious transformations: generation, the “act and fact” of bringing something into existence across the boundaries between the biological and social, between the past and future, and between ancestry and posterity. In this deeply reflexive chapter, Walsham notes how we have underestimated the impact of generation and the sense of radical change in “lived religion”, and have instead emphasised stasis and inertia. Other historiographical backgrounds to her interest in generations as mediators of religious change include the shift to socio-cultural histories of the Reformation, micro-histories, and symbolic practices and collective mentalities highlighting the grassroots agency of ordinary believers. In addition, Walsham describes the need to evade (mono)linear, teleological accounts by involving cyclical concepts of time in the analysis; the shift from vertical to horizontal histories of religious change; the surge in studies on memory and remembrance; and the need to reintegrate the history of theology and ideas into a social and cultural history of Christianity, a concern already raised in Gay’s chapter. While generational metaphors are rampant in historiographies of the Reformation, its potential as a prism has been hardly explored for periods prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (in which the term is mainly used as an imagined community of coevals). Walsham’s understanding of the concept is diachronic, cyclical and linear at the same time, as she demonstrates in a section exploring three strands of research she has been conducting in the field. The first is age and the lifecycle, which carried enormous metaphorical weight for contemporaries when describing the progress of the Reformation at both the collective and individual level. An individual believer’s spiritual age could differ greatly from his or her biological age. At the same time, the organic nucleus of the family moved to the forefront as a transmitter of true faith. Second is the

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pivotal issue of ancestry. Ancestry is seen in terms of genealogies of heresies and of true Churches, of course, but also with respect to the disrupted intergenerational solidarity between Earth and Purgatory, as well as the possibility for parents to save unchristened infants from eternal damnation. Original Sin made its way into early modern notions of race and heredity, as well as salvation, among others. In a world to be populated by true believers descending from godly men and women, families of blood fused with families of faith. In the third section on memory, Walsham bundles these issues together, with memory and commemoration raising generational consciousness and turning biological lines into imagined communities that transmitted stories, records, and objects to posterity. While (the reformation of) generations smoothed over abrupt religious transformations, Walsham concludes that generations, in families of blood and of faith, are both born and made. Gerd Schwerhoff has recently drawn attention to the difficulties scholars face when doing research on religion in the early modern period.42 He has emphasised the concept’s container character, which makes it challenging to provide clear definitions or to attempt classifications. The contributors to this volume have each pointed out ways for addressing such ambiguities and for writing a modern academic history of Christianity that takes into account the plurality and fluidity of religion as a cultural phenomenon. In recent years, this dynamic plurality, the praxeological and doctrinal diversity demonstrated even by supposedly monolithic religious constructs, has been explored quite adequately in addition to the research assembled here.43 Long-lasting certainties have been questioned and dissolved, and scholars have analysed early modern Christian religions from new perspectives, abandoning the outdated search for the one centre that dichotomously related to a periphery, a periphery which was always defined from the perspective of the supposed centre. For this reason, the shift in recent years towards a polycentric perspective has been crucial in the study of religious organisations, practices, and actors. Reflecting these recent trends, our volume offers a wide-ranging overview of the current contours of the debate, which can be seen as a prism of manifold queries addressing a globally interconnected past in which religion is viewed as a medium of entanglement that weaves together the social, intellectual, artistic, and scientific aspects of everyday life. In addition, we understand our volume to be a platform for further debates to explore the heuristic power of “plurality” and “polycentricity” in a new light. Nonetheless, we do not consider either of these concepts, which figure prominently in the POLY research group’s name and programme, to be the purpose of our research. Rather, we believe they ought to serve as instruments for synthesising and introducing a

42 Schwerhoff, “Choosing my religion”, p. 277–278. 43 Plummer and Christman, Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance; Weltecke, “Space, Entanglement and Decentralisation”, Krstíc, “Can we speak of ‘Confessionalisation’ beyond the Reformation?”; Plokhy: The Gates of Europe; Friedrich and Zaunstöck, Jesuit and Pietist Missions; Maghenzani and Villani, British Protestant Missions; Windler, Missionare in Persien; Županov, Missionary Tropics.

© 2023 Böhlau | Brill Deutschland GmbH https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412526085 | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Introduction

new perspective on pre-modern Christianities, which is POLY’s raison d’être. The plural in Christianities should help us to escape the dichotomy of “norm” and “anomaly” as well as categories like “church”, “sect” or “syncretism”. With such a perspective, it will be easier to consider the self-ascriptions of the actors involved, and to acknowledge the interaction of Christians on different levels and in different fields, both within these churches and beyond them, along with the ensuing interdependencies and dynamics.44 Journeying along these pathways and through fascinating landscapes, we have relied on the help, support, and counsel of many. The peer reviewers, series editors and publisher made the new Cultures of Christianity series a venue for this book; Dorothee Wunsch and Julia Roßberg accompanied the volume attentively and always helpfully. We wish to thank also our able student assistant Chiara Schrankl for her enthusiastic and highly competent assistance to the editing of this volume; Alexander Garnick for his elegant language editing of the individual chapters; and our colleague Bernd Vest for the meticulous copy-editing of the final manuscript. Johanna Fritz, the other student assistant of the POLY research group, and our colleague Kevin Klein merit our gratitude for their careful work. Last but not least, we wish to thank our colleague Sebastian Glunz for his artful design of the cover.

Bibliography Alfieri, Fernanda. Il corpo negato. Tre discorsi sulla castità in età moderna. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 2014. Amsler, Nadine. Jesuits and Matriarchs. Domestic Worship in Early Modern China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Badea, Andreea, Bruno Boute, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke (eds.). Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Badea, Andreea, Bruno Boute, and Birgit Emich (eds.). Konfessionalisierung auf dem Prüfstand. Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, forthcoming. Bähr, Andreas. Furcht und Furchtlosigkeit. Göttliche Gewalt und Selbstkonstitution im 17. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2013. De Boer, Wietse. “Social Discipline in Italy. Peregrinations of a Historical Paradigm.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94 (2003), p. 294–307. De Boer, Wietse and Christine Göttler (eds.). Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012. De Boer, Wietse. “The Counter Reformation of the Senses.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen, and Mary Laven. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013, p. 243–260.

44 Cf. Emich’s chapter in this volume for a description of the Frankfurt POLY project.

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Boute, Bruno. “‘Que ceulx de Flandres se disoijent tant catholicques, et ce neantmoings les hereticques mesmes ne scauroijent faire pir.’ The Multiplicity of Catholicism and Roman Attitudes in the Correspondence of the Nunciature of Flanders under Paul V (1598–1621).” In Die Außenbeziehungen der römischen Kurie unter Paul V. Borghese (1605–1621), edited by Alexander Koller. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2008, p. 457–492. Boute, Bruno. Academic Interests and Catholic Confessionalisation. The Louvain Privileges of Nomination for Ecclesiastical Benefices. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2010. Boute, Bruno. “Schreiben, Zensieren und Praktizieren. Die Aufklärung und die Geburt des praktizierenden Christen.” In Inquisitionen und Buchzensur im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, edited by Hubert Wolf. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011, p. 431–442. Boute, Bruno, Andreea Badea, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke. “A Product’s Glamour. Credibility, or the Manufacture and Administration of Truth in Early Modern Catholicism.” In Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, p. 7–38. Broomhall, Susan. “Miracles and Misery. Nuns’ Narratives of Psychic and Spiritual Violence in Sixteenth-Century France.” In Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, edited by Susann Broomhall and Sarah B. Finn. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. De Certeau, Michel. L’invention du quotidien. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Christian, William. Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Corry, Maya, Marco Faini, and Alessia Meneghin (eds.). Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019. Coster, Will, and Andrew Spicer (eds.). Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cummings, Brian, Karis Riley, Ceri Law, and Alexandra Walsham (eds.). Remembering the Reformation. London/New York: Routledge, 2020. Cummins, Stephen, and Max Stille. “Religious Emotions and Emotions in Religion. The Case of Sermons.” In Preaching and Passions. Sermons and the History of Emotions, Special Issue of Journal of Religious History 45 (2021), edited by Stephen Cummins and Max Stille, p. 3–24. Delumeau, Jean. La Peur en occident (XIVe-XVIIIe siècles). Paris: Fayard, 1978. Delumeau, Jean. Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 3 1985. Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan (ed.). Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World. London/New York: Routledge, 2022. Ditchfield, Simon. “In search of local knowledge: Rewriting early modern Italian religious history.” In Cristianesimo nella storia 19 (1998), p. 255–296. Dürr, Renate (ed.). Threatened Knowledge. Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. London/New York: Routledge, 2021. Elliott, John. H. “A Europe of Composite Monarchies.” In Past & Present 137 (1992), p. 48–71.

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Emich, Birgit. “Konfession und Kultur, Konfession als Kultur? Vorschläge für eine kulturalistische Konfessionskultur-Forschung.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 109 (2018), p. 375–388. Emich, Birgit. “Localizing Catholic Missions in Asia. Framework Conditions, Scope for Action, and Social Spaces.” In Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia. Patterns of Localization, edited by Nadine Amsler, Andreea Badea, Bernard Heyberger, and Christian Windler. London/ New York: Routledge, 2019, p. 190–204. Emich, Birgit. “From the Council to the Founding Myth: How the ‘Spirit of Trent’ Came to Be Named.” In Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany, edited by Marjorie E. Plummer and Joel F. Harrington. New York: Berghahn, 2019, p. 40–61. Farr, James R. “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France, 1530–1685.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94 (2003), p. 276–293. Faul, Katherine. Moravian Women’s Memoirs. Their Related Lives, 1750–1820. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Faul, Katherine. “Charting the Colonial Backcountry: Joseph Shippen’s Map of the Susquehanna River.” In Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 136 (2012), p. 461–465. Ferber, Sarah. “Devotional violence and emotional governance in a seventeenth-century French female religious house.” In Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, edited by Susann Broomhall and Sarah B. Finn. London/New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 111–126. Fischer, Elisabeth, and Xenia von Tippelskirch. Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent. Naked, Veiled, Vilified, Worshiped. London/New York: Routledge, 2021. Foucault, Michel. Les Anormaux. Cours au collège de France 1974–1975, edited by François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Fragnito, Gigliola, and Alain Tallon (eds.). Hétérodoxies croisées. Catholicismes pluriels entre France et Italie, XVIe-XVIIe siècles. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2015. Friedrich, Markus and Holger Zaunstöck (eds.). Jesuit and Pietist Missions in the Long Eighteenth Century in Cross-Confessional Perspective. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2022. Frijhoff, Willem. “The Threshold of Toleration: Interconfessional Conviviality in Holland during the Early modern period.” In Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History, edited by Willem Frijhoff. Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002, p. 39–65. Gay, Jean-Pascal. Morales en conflit. Théologie et polémique au Grand Siècle (1640–1700). Paris: Cerf, 2011. Gerbner, Katharine. “The Ultimate Sin: Christianising Slaves in Barbados in the Seventeenth Century.” In Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010), p. 57–73. Gierl, Martin, “‘The Triumph of Truth and Innocence’: The Rules and Practice of Theological Polemics.” In Little Tools of Knowledge. Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, edited by Peter Becker and William Clark. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004, p. 35–66. von Greyerz, Kaspar, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann, and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.). Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität. Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003.

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Hall, Marcia B., and Tracy E. Cooper. The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Henneau, Marie-Elisabeth, and Jean-Pierre Massaut (eds.). La christianisation des campagnes. Actes du colloque du CIHEC (25–27 août 1994). Turnhout: Brepols, 1996. Hersche, Peter. Muße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter. 2 vols. Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 2006. Heyberger, Bernard. Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique. Rome: École française de Rome, 1994. Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia. “Introduction.” In A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, edited by Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018, p. 1–15. Ivanic, Suzanna, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall (eds.). Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Kaplan, Benjamin. Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Tolerance in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Koschorke, Klaus. “Rückblicke, Ausblicke. Die München-Freising-Konferenzen und das Programm einer polyzentrischen Geschichte des Weltchristentums (Looking Back, Looking Forward. The Munich-Freising Conferences and the Program of a Polycentric History of World Christianity.” In Polycentric Structures in the History of the World Christianity, edited by Klaus Koschorke and Adrian Hermann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014, p. 435–456. Krstić, Tijana, and Derin Terzioğlu (eds.). Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2022. Krstić, Tijana. “Can We Speak of ‘Confessionalization beyond the Reformation? Ottoman Communities, Politics of Piety, and Empire-Building in an Early Modern Eurasian Perspective.” In Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries, edited by Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2022, p. 25–116. Kümin, Beat and Felicita Tramontana. “Catholicism Decentralized: Local Religion in the Early Modern Periphery.” In Church History. Studies in Christianity and Culture 89 (2020), p. 268–287. Latour, Bruno. “The Power of Association.” In Sociological Review 32 (1984), p. 264–280. Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte, 2 2006. Lotz-Heumann, Ute. “Confessionalization.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the CounterReformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen, and Mary Laven. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013, p. 165–182. Maghenzani, Simone, and Stefano Villani (eds.). British Protestant Missions and the Conversion of Europe, 1600–1900. London/New York: Routledge, 2021. Malena, Adelisa. L’eresia dei perfetti. Inquisizione romana ed esperienze mistiche nel Seicento italiano. Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2003.

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Menegon, Eugenio. Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars. Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2009. Menegon, Eugenio. “European and Chinese Controversies over Rituals. A Seventeenth-century Genealogy of Chinese Religion.” In Devising Order. Socio-religious Models, Rituals, and the Performativity of Practice, edited by Bruno Boute and Thomas Smålberg. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013, p. 193–222. Millner, Matthew. The Senses and the English Reformation. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Morgan, David. The Thing About Religion. An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2021. Nelson Burnett, Amy. “Questioning Authority, Tolerating Dissent.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 108 (2017), p. 162–170. O’Malley. Trent and All That. Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Ossa-Richardson, Anthony. A History of Ambiguity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Petterson, Christina. “Colonial Subjectification. Foucault, Christianity and Government.” In Cultural Studies Review 18 (2012), p. 88–108. Pietsch, Andreas, and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (eds.). Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013. Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe. A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2 2021. Plummer, Marjorie Elizabeth, and Victoria Christman (eds.). Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance. Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018. Poska, Allyson M. “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in the Iberian World.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94 (2003), p. 308–319. Reinhard, Wolfgang, and Heinz Schilling (eds.). Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Wissenschaftliches Symposium der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte. Münster: Aschendorff, 1995. Revel, Jacques (ed.). Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience. Paris: Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1996. Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 2017. Rublack, Ulinka (ed.). Protestant empires. Globalizing the Reformations. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Schilling, Heinz. “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620.” In Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), p. 1–45. Schmidt, Heinrich Richard. “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung.” In Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997), p. 639–682. Schreiner, Susan. Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in The Early Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schunka, Alexander. “Das Theatrum des Kirchenkriegs. Konfessionelle Pluralität im deutschen Protestantismus um 1700 – Befunde und Perspektiven.” In Konjunkturen konfessioneller Dif-

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ferenz. Lutheraner und reformierte zwischen Westfälischem Frieden und Union, edited by Jan Brademann and Marianne Taatz-Jacobi. Münster: Rhema, 2018, p. 65–85. Schunka, Alexander. “Konversion, Toleranz – oder doch Union? Protestantische Optionen um 1700.” In Über Religion entscheiden / Choosing my Religion. Religiöse Optionen und Alternativen im mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Christentum/Religious Options and Alternatives in Medieval and Early Modern Christianity, edited by Matthias Pohlig and Sita Steckel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021, p. 135–158. Schwerhoff, Gerd. “Choosing my Religion. Zu einer Neuperspektivierung der europäischen Religionsgeschichte.” In Über Religion entscheiden / Choosing my Religion. Religiöse Optionen und Alternativen im mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Christentum/Religious Options and Alternatives in Medieval and Early Modern Christianity, edited by Matthias Pohlig and Sita Steckel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021, p. 277–285. Schwöbel, Christoph. “Pluralismus und Toleranz aus der Sicht des Christentums. Eine protestantische Perspektive.” In Religiöser Pluralismus und Toleranz in Europa, edited by Christian Augustin, Johannes Wienand, and Christiane Winkler. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006, p. 102–122. Shagan, Ethan H. The Birth of Modern Belief. Faith and Judgement from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018 Sloterdijk, Peter. Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2012. Sponholz, Jesse, and Gary K. Waite. Exile and Religious Identity, 1500 – 1800. London/New York: Routledge, 2018. Steckel, Sita. “Une querelle de théologiens? The concept of ‘polemic’ in the historiography of the secular-mendicant controversy.” In Les Régimes de Polémicité au Moyen Age, edited by Bénédicte Sère. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019, p. 83–97. Steckel, Sita. “Historicizing the Religious Field: Adapting Theories of the Religious Field for the Study of Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” In Church History & Religious Culture 99 (2019), p. 331–370. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. “Einleitung.” In Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Andreas Pietsch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013, p. 9–38. Strayer, Brian E. Suffering Saints. Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640–1799. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming. Tarantino, Giovanni, and Charles Zika. Feeling Exclusion Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 2019. Tutino, Stefania. Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism. A History of Probabilism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Villa, Anne C. The ‘Convulsionnaires’, Palissot, and the Philosophical Battles of 1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Villani, Stefano. “Dal radicalismo al dissenso: l’abbigliamento dei quaccheri come simbolo identitario.” In Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 30 (2017), p. 57–69.

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Villani, Stefano. “Unintentional Dissent: Eating Meat and Religious Identity among British in Early Modern Livorno.” In The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries, edited by Katherine Aron-Beller and Christopher Black. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018, p. 373–394. Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Walsham, Alexandra. “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence. The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation.” In Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 108 (2017), p. 181–190. Weltecke, Dorothea. “Space, Entanglement, and Decentralisation: On How to Narrate the Transcultural History of Christianity (550 to 1350 CE).” In Locating Religions: Contact, Diversity, and Translocality, edited by Reinhold Glei and Nikolas Jaspert. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017, p. 315–344. Windler, Christian. Missionare in Persien. Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert). Cologne: Böhlau, 2018. Županov, Ines G. Missionary Tropics. The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

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Birgit Emich

Uniformity and Polycentricity The Early Modern Papacy between Promoting Unity and Handling Diversity

1.

Introduction

If one had to reduce to a common theme the approaches and pathways that have changed our understanding of premodern Christianity in recent decades, it would surely be this: diversity over uniformity. The buzzwords are “polycentricity” and “plurality”, “diversity” and “ambiguity”—local heterogeneity instead of global homogeneity. Instead of adopting a singular religious identity in its approach, cultural studies-inspired research examines the performative production of religious belonging and its situational requirements. Instead of understanding religious denominations as rigid containers, the current generation of researchers has sought to explore whether concepts like entanglement and hybridity can yield more accurate historical accounts. The “Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities” (POLY) research group in Frankfurt is also committed to this research agenda: we understand premodern Christianities as polycentric and plural entities, and it is our explicit intention to work towards overcoming traditional narratives that depict an ever-growing uniformity. This might make it all the more surprising that my contribution to this volume, as suggested by its title, discusses the issue of uniformity, of all things. One might reasonably ask whether this is not a giant leap backwards. Aren’t questions regarding the extent and production of uniformity not rooted in a perspective that relies on outdated notions of modernity and modernization, after all? A perspective that misapprehends diversity as a sign of lax enforcement, and thereby fails to appreciate the contingency of events as well as the agency of historical figures? If this were indeed the case, the question of uniformity would, in effect, not be a path towards understanding early modern Christianities, but rather a dead end. Given the title of this chapter, it may not come as a surprise that I have a different view on the matter. I believe that the old question of uniformity and standardization may actually help us to get a better handle on our current concepts of polycentricity and plurality. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to discuss the usefulness of revisiting the old concept of uniformity, using the early modern papacy as an example. I shall proceed in four steps. The first is to clarify what is actually meant by uniformity of the early modern papacy. In order to do this, I very briefly review some of the major strands of research on the papacy and, on the basis of this, try to define the concept

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of uniformity. I claim that we ought to distinguish two dimensions of uniformity: centrality and homogenization. The next part of the chapter explores how the postTridentine papacy fared in terms of uniformity, or rather, centrality and homogenization. And in the third part, I shall assess the usefulness of the concept of uniformity and centrality, both for the study of the papacy as well as for more general questions regarding the polycentricity of premodern Christianities. In the closing remarks, I will briefly summarize the benefits of such an approach as we see them within the POLY research group.

2.

What is Uniformity?

For a long time, it was entirely uncontroversial among historians that there were strong tendencies toward standardization, centralization and administrative consolidation within the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. Historians such as Paolo Prodi or Wolfgang Reinhard, interested in questions of state formation and the expansion of central power, have identified the ecclesiastical–secular dual monarchy of the popes as a prototype of early modern statehood.1 This was supported first and foremost by the expansion of public administration within the lands of the church. With the defection of large parts of Europe to the Protestant camp and with many Catholic princes fending off Roman claims to authority, the papacy found itself increasingly pushed back to Italy and its own territory. From then on, most of the resources with which the popes financed their policies around the globe came from the Papal States. In order to be able to siphon off these financial resources efficiently, the papal sovereign had to whip his administrative and law-enforcement apparatus into shape. At around the same time, the Council of Trent established the foundational tenets on which the Catholic world wanted, or at least planned, to regroup after the Reformation’s momentous blow. There were also new institutions and procedures put in place for the administration of the church, all of which made the Roman Curia a forerunner of bureaucratic development. The system of Roman Congregations is considered the epitome of this expansion of the curial authorities. In 1588, nine of these collegial bodies took care of the secular administration of the Papal States, while the remaining six Congregations were responsible for the spiritual affairs of the universal Church. Thus there are good arguments for the traditional notion that Rome was the powerful centre of a universal church whose bureaucratic expansion was accompanied by a significant gain in uniformity. However, this notion of the strong monolithic centre has come under increasing pressure in light of global historical perspectives. Studies on the Jesuit Order and the

1 See Prodi, The Papal Prince; and Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, p. 59 f.

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Uniformity and Polycentricity

Catholic mission in general—such as the works by Markus Friedrich and Christian Windler, to name just two prominent examples from the German-speaking research community—have shown that local churches did not simply implement Roman directives.2 Outside of Rome, the Curia obviously did not have the all-dominating influence so long attributed to it, both by scholars and, most notably, the Curia itself. The claim of the popes to central regulatory power over the church may have indeed increased rather than decreased after the Council of Trent. Nonetheless, the centre in Rome obviously failed at unifying and consolidating the diverse ecclesiastical experiences that existed on the local level. One might explain this phenomenon by arguing that such claims to uniformity simply failed to meet the historical reality at the time. In the conditions of the early modern period, the diversity of a globally expanding church simply could not be effaced; it was still too early for homogeneity. But a teleological perspective such as this, in the spirit of modernisation theory, is not the only possible interpretation. In order to understand the interplay between strong discourses of uniformity on the one hand and weak practices of its implementation on the other, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at the concept of uniformity itself. In fact, in claims to uniformity, a distinction ought to be made between two forms of uniformity: a formal, administrative form, and a practical, material one. The first form concerns institutions, hierarchies and procedures. Here, the claim to uniformity aims at achieving uniformity of regulatory power, with Rome at the top. It aims at a clear hierarchy with a strong centre; in other words, it aims at centrality. The second form of uniformity concerns standardizing the practical aspects of church life in all parts of the world as much as possible. This claim to uniformity is of a more practical or material nature, and it aims at making uniform various practices, beliefs and other aspects of daily life. In short, it aims at homogeneity. Centrality and homogeneity—these are the two categories into which I would like to divide our initial concept of uniformity. One could also use the terms centralization and homogenisation in much the same way that historians generally think of uniformity: less as a condition or a state at a particular moment in time, but more as a process (i. e. the process of unification). The terms centrality and homogeneity always come with an implicit understanding of this dynamic dimension in tow. As a matter of fact, I will use the terms centrality and homogenisation throughout the rest of this chapter. After all, research has shown that while there was a certain degree of centrality, the early modern papacy was in fact far from achieving homogeneity. But these two observations should not be considered to be in conflict with one another. Instead of simply assuming a failure of bureaucratic claims to reality, I will continue to explore the relationship between centrality and homogenisation over the next few pages. What we need is a better understanding of the relationship between the formal uniformity of bureaucratic

2 See Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms? See also id., The Jesuits; Windler, Missionare in Persien.

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procedures on the one hand, and the material uniformity of church life on the other. My hypothesis is that the avoidance of rigorous homogenisation does not represent a failure of centralized administration, but was rather the very precondition of this centrality. Moreover, the institutional actions of the early modern papacy tell us about its desire and repeated efforts to reconcile the diversity of church life with Rome’s claims to centrality. This desire shaped procedures and hierarchies, and permeated all official actions of the Curia’s institutions. The mediation of centrality and diversity was therefore one of the Curia’s main tasks and is crucial for understanding the early modern papacy in general. The next part of this chapter will illustrate and elaborate on this point.

3.

Centrality and Homogenisation in the Early Modern Papacy

As for the relationship between institutions and religious tenets, the reforms of the Council of Trent and the question of their implementation come to mind immediately. The Council not only renewed the normative constitutional order of the early modern papacy, it was also the arena and object of a power struggle. At the outset, the central position that Rome would eventually come to occupy was by no means a foregone conclusion.3 It is well known that in the looming schism of the church in the first half of the sixteenth century, the popes hesitated for a long time before they were finally willing to give in to the many voices that desperately urged them to convene a council. Memories of fifteenth-century conciliarism and its challenges to papal power were still fresh, and so the popes had some difficulty judging the extent of the drive to reform among the agents within their own ranks. Thus, on the one hand the popes had to fend off ecclesiological notions that sought to put the council on a level with—or even above—the Pope. On the other hand, they had to rebuff calls for reform that were aimed at the Curia itself, as well as at its established financial practices. The popes ultimately succeeded in doing both. From the very moment the council began in Trent in 1545, the Curia kept a tight rein on it to ensure that its decisions would remain within the system’s limits, and thus that the flow of money from the church’s coffers into the pockets of the Roman elite would remain intact. The real coup, however, came after the council was concluded in 1563. Although Pope Pius IV confirmed all of the Council’s decrees by his papal bull “Benedictus Deus” of June 1564, the very same document also prohibited—under threat of excommunication—any glossing, commenting or other form of unauthorized interpretation of the Council’s reform provisions. The document stated that His Holiness alone had the right to interpret the Council and its results. Anyone struggling with the meaning of the decrees, the bull said, should “go up to the

3 On the Council of Trent, see O’Malley, Trent; Wassilowsky and Walter, Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur; Catto and Prosperi, Trento and Beyond.

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Uniformity and Polycentricity

place which the Lord hath chosen; that is, to the Apostolic See”.4 Or in plain English: what the council participants had decided in Trent was binding. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. How the decrees were supposed to be read, though, was to be decided by the Pope alone. In doing so, Pius IV had made it clear that his own rank and that of his successors in office were not below, but was in fact above the council and its decrees. From that point on, the Tridentine Reform sailed under the flag and command of Rome.5 The fact that the Curia resorted to the tried and tested method of an interpretation ban, by which it reserved for itself the monopoly of interpreting the Council’s decrees and ordered the entire church to directly and exclusively “go up” (as the bull puts it) to the Apostolic See whenever doubts or questions arise, makes Rome’s claim to centrality unambiguous. At the same time, Pius IV must have been aware of the fact that the road to homogenisation—that is, to a universal implementation of the Tridentine decisions—would be a long one, and that he would hardly be able to administer the monopoly of interpretation and everything coming with it by himself. Given the diversity of practices and problems in local churches, a flood of requests was to be expected. And so Pius IV, following the trend of the times, opted for a bureaucratic hedging of his claim to a monopoly of interpretation. Just a few weeks after the promulgation of the interpretation ban, he created an administrative agency—the Congregatio pro executione et interpretatione Concilii Tridentini—for handling the requests that would inevitably start to come in. From then on, this Congregation for the Execution and Interpretation of the Council of Trent, or Congregation of the Council for short, handled almost all requests about the appropriate interpretation and practical implementation of the Tridentine reform provisions. While it was the Inquisition that was responsible for the dogmatic provisions of the Tridentine Council, the Congregation of the Council oversaw the more practical aspects of the organisational reform programme that had been outlined in Trent. A bureaucratic detail shows how closely the administrative work was tied to the normative provisions of the Council. For at least the first century of its existence, the Congregation did not file its paperwork in the chronological order of its individual meetings, but rather according to the sessions during which the council in far-off Trent met and adopted decrees in bundles.6 The agency’s archive is therefore structured, like the council itself, into 25 sessions, with the manuscript holdings of each sessio comprising all the requests and documents on every subject area that was discussed

4 Cf. Wassilowsky, “Posttridentinische Reform und päpstliche Zentralisierung”, p. 147. 5 On this process of the Curia’s appropriation and monopolization of the Council, see also Wassilowsky, “The Myths of the Council of Trent”, p. 69–98; and Emich, “From the Council to the Founding Myth”, p. 40–61. 6 The definitive reference text on this Congregation is Calvo, La Sacra Congregazione del Concilio. For an excellent overview, see Puza, “Die Konzilskongregation”, p. 23–42. On the archival holdings and their internal structure, see also Caiazza, “L’archivio della Sacra Congregazione del concilio”, p. 7–24.

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in the eponymous session in Trent. The sub-series are organized according to the individual decrees or, if necessary, according to individual sections of these decrees. The hundreds of volumes that the agency’s proceedings would fill within the first century of its existence7 therefore represent both the full range of topics that had been negotiated in Trent, as well as the structure that the council itself had imposed on the rich diversity of local church life. The symbolism of the filing system reveals how the Congregation viewed itself: as a continuation of the council in bureaucratised form, but this time—and this is the significant difference—on behalf and under the control of the Pope. Seen in this light, it was not just the Apostolic See’s monopoly of interpretation that was institutionalized by this agency, but also the pope’s supremacy in the ecclesiastical system in general. What this means for the Roman bureaucracy’s role as a potential driver of uniformity is obvious: from an organisational standpoint, the Congregation and the monopoly of interpretation it exercised offered a formal procedure that put into the hands of Rome every conceivable interpretive uncertainty of the Tridentine decisions. This left not a shadow of doubt about the central position of the Curia. On the level of institutions and procedures, the post-Tridentine papacy’s claim to uniformity was thus fulfilled. But the bureaucracy also had considerable potential with regard to the practical and material uniformity of church life. With the centralized interpretation of the decrees, the agency also promised a universal reply to all unresolved questions. Our next step then is to check whether or not the centralized bureaucratic structures aimed at achieving uniformity were actually put into the service of homogenisation. Unsurprisingly, Rome did not lack a will to bring about such standardization. This is evidenced, for example, by the liturgical books that the popes issued in the wake of the council in order to consolidate and standardize the rituals of the church, from the Liturgy of the Hours to the episcopal High Mass. Breviarium, Missale and Rituale Romanum were the names of these reference works. Researchers commonly lump them together under the term Tridentine liturgy.8 But at first, even these rule books only produced a flood of inquiries. A quick glance at the records of the Congregation of the Council demonstrates how such requests were handled, that is, how the Roman bureaucracy dealt with ambiguities and local differences. The first thing that catches one’s eye are the basic rules of the game, above all, the channels of communication. Requests were usually submitted in the form of petitions: parish priests, bishops, or whoever else happened to have a question, addressed their concerns as petitioners to the Curia. In the early years, the petitioners usually addressed the Pope directly and asked him to have the problem discussed by 7 By 1911, more than 6,000 volumes had been compiled; see Puza, “Die Konzilskongregation”, p. 31. 8 This notion has been thoroughly and convincingly refuted in Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History. A brief summary appeared under the programmatic title: id., “Giving Tridentine Worship Back Its History”, p. 199–226.

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Fig. 1 Sketch of a presumed miracle-working icon. AAV, S. Congreg. Concilii, Positiones 209, Sess. 25: De Invocatione, Veneratione et Reliquiis Sanctorum, et Sacris Imaginibus, fol. 79v/80r.

the appropriate agency. In later decades, advice seekers increasingly addressed their requests directly to the appropriate agency itself.9 Apparently, word had spread about the existence of the Congregation: all over the world, people were aware of the fact that Rome had created a separate agency dedicated to establishing uniformity. Reading the documents, one is immediately struck by the thoroughness and the professionalism with which the members of the Congregation not only handled the flood of requests, but apparently also tried to substantiate their decisions. The cardinals and experts of the collegial body usually divided the work amongst themselves: one of the cardinals acted as speaker and presented the case, the others cast their vote, while the secretary was responsible for taking notes and handling the necessary correspondence. Lower-ranking experts would often work out the technical details afterwards, and whenever the Congregation deemed it necessary, it would also send experts to the provinces where the requests came from.

9 These salutations can be found in the countless petitions and requests from all over the world that are compiled in the volumes of the record series AAV, S. Congreg. Concilii, Positiones.

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Fig. 1 shows the sketch by a curial expert on devotional images who had been sent to Perugia in 1569 to examine a painting that the locals believed to be a miracle-working icon.10 As is well known, the Council of Trent had rejected the idea of miracle-working paintings in its decree on images in 1563 (Sessio XXV). Notwithstanding, people all over the world kept reporting painted Madonnas that suddenly rolled their eyes, depictions of Christ that started to bleed, and other works of art that gave signs of their miracleworking potential. And so in 1569, reports of this nature began to arrive from Perugia as well. There was a crucifixion scene whose figure of Christ supposedly kept opening and closing its eyes and was rumoured to perform miracles. The bishop of Perugia was unsettled both by the rumours themselves as well as by the pilgrims who kept pouring into the city in growing numbers week after week. Wondering what to do about this state of affairs, he turned to Rome for advice. The Congregation left no stone unturned in seeking a clear picture of the situation. Rome’s expert not only drew up a detailed site plan, but also interviewed numerous witnesses, joined pilgrims who spent hours in front of the painting in order to catch a glimpse of the next miracle, and maintained his focus even when one of them thought they had seen the miraculous signs. In his report to Rome, the icon expert mentions that he had been standing right in front of the picture and still had not been able to catch a single blink of the eye. It is hard to imagine a more meticulous way of looking into the matter. This makes the Congregation’s decision all the more puzzling. One day, the bishop of Perugia received a letter in which the Congregation told him what he was supposed to do: nothing. After its thorough field investigation, the Congregation was convinced that the veneration of the miracle-working image was nothing but pure superstition. Yet after several internal discussions and having checked with the Pope himself, the agency instructed the bishop to refrain from taking any actions against this “superstizione” and to continue tolerating the veneration of the image—a decision which in essence flew in the face of the decrees that the Council of Trent had adopted just a few years prior. The bishop should simply wait, the letter said, until the whole situation peters out and the problem solves itself; the people will eventually abandon their superstition of their own accord.11 From today’s perspective, the ruling may seem quite humane. Such pragmatism, however, does not square with the decisions of the Council of Trent, nor does it fit the image of a post-Tridentine Church that implemented its provisions with as much rigor as uniformity. Apparently, the formal uniformity of the procedure and its thoroughness did not necessarily lead to rigor vis-à-vis the practical and material aspects of church life. Time and again, the decrees of the Council were not followed to the letter but rather tailored to local needs. Flexibility took priority over standardization, and the 10 On this case, see Zitzlsperger, “Trient und die Kraft der Bilder”, p. 340 f. 11 AAV, S. Congreg. Concilii, Positiones 209, fol. 51r, includes instructions to send a letter to the bishop telling him that “che si continui in lassare raffreddare così la cosa, accio che poco a poco vadi estinguendosi et il populo se retiri dalla superstitione”.

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diverse experiences within the universal Church were handled in a bureaucratic but by no means standardized way. There are other conspicuous features of the procedure which suggest that it was not about standardizing church life through the consistent application of uniform rules. Take, for example, the principle of case-by-case reviews and the policy of secrecy. Both of these elements served to ensure that the Congregation of the Council had a fair amount of manoeuvring room. The Congregation’s decisions were not accompanied by detailed statements but simply communicated—and only to those parties who were directly affected.12 Printed collections of the decisions did not appear until the eighteenth century, because strict secrecy of the proceedings was mandated until then.13 Before that, there were no official precedents that petitioners could cite or follow. It fits the pattern that all documents from the era of the Council of Trent which would have offered insights into the deliberations and intentions of the Council Fathers were also gathered and locked away in Rome.14 Apparently, the Congregation of the Council was to have the greatest possible amount of freedom to interpret the decrees. Precedents would have only limited this flexibility; the policy of secrecy protected the agency from having to commit itself to its past decisions. Case law and secrecy, however, did not merely provide manoeuvring room for the decision-makers. They also prevented the comparability of the Congregation’s decisions, which in turn made it virtually impossible for people outside the Curia to monitor or judge the actual state of uniformity. It almost seems as if the Congregation of the Council wanted to deliberately hide the evident diversity and inconsistency of its decision-making behind such bureaucratic walls. But not every problem could be mitigated by isolating and treating it as an individual case. Sometimes, for instance, the Curia received requests for which there were no easy answers, or simply no answers at all. In his work on the Persian mission, Christian Windler has recently given a vivid description of the Curia’s preferred way out of such situations. Rome repeatedly received requests from the mission field about how to deal with liturgical regulations that were absolutely binding from a theological point of view but virtually impossible to implement on the local level. The Curia found itself in a bit of a catch-22 situation: any of its directives could have been either impracticable 12 See the Congregation’s outgoing correspondence register: AAV, S. Congreg. Concilii, Libri Litterarum, aa. 1564–1903. 13 See Puza, “Die Konzilskongregation”, p. 34, who cites an early example: Joannes Gallemart, Concilium Tridentinum, Additis Declarationibus Cardinalium Concilii Interpretum etc. Such casebooks cited the Congregation’s decisions in the footnotes and actually had a strong normative effect later on; according to Puza, ibid., the said casebook still played a role in drafting the CIC 1917. In the seventeenth century, however, the desire and effort to maintain secrecy was still dominant. 14 On the creation of the Fondo, see Prosperi, Il Concilio di Trento, p. 93. Interestingly enough, the ultimate prohibition to access and review these archival holdings was issued in connection with the final ruling on the Controversy on Divine Grace in 1607 (which stipulated that from then on, even this core theological question was no longer allowed to be discussed).

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or theologically flawed. In such situations, even the Holy Office—the Inquisition—resorted to a formula that was also used by the Congregation of the Council: “nihil esse respondendum”, or “no response shall be given”.15 All in all, the early Roman bureaucracy’s track record in terms of establishing uniformity turns out to be quite a mixed bag so far. Because of the ban on commenting and interpreting, the interpretation of the decrees of Trent remained in the hands of the Pope alone, and with the establishment of the Congregation of the Council, there was also a bureaucratic procedure in place ensuring that such claims to the uniformity and centrality of decision-making would be implemented through official channels. In reality, however, there was no such thing as rigorous enforcement of abstract rules. The principle of case-by-case reviews and the policy of secrecy provided the Congregation with ample manoeuvring room and concealed its inconsistencies. The high level of professionalism and meticulousness underscored the seriousness of decisions that even the Council Fathers would have been very surprised to learn about. And as a last resort, the Congregation could still fall back on the instruction not to respond. Of course, every now and then there were precise instructions. But even those instructions express Rome’s willingness to adapt its decisions to the individual case and thus to the local conditions. In other words, the diversity of church life was administered rather than smoothed out. But why did Rome not make full use of the bureaucracy it obviously had at its disposal? Why did it shy away from using its bureaucratic apparatus against this diversity? It is quite obvious that the popes used their central agencies and their Rome-centred procedures to produce formal uniformity on both a symbolic and performative level. Why then did the bureaucracy barely use them as an instrument of uniformity to contribute to the homogenisation of church life? Did the Roman officials surrender in the face of reality, or was the de facto non-enforcement of their claims to uniformity intentional in some way? To gain a better understanding of this, we should first look over the shoulders of the petitioners. What stands out is that the demand for Roman decisions remained strong, despite the peculiarities of the system. The petitioners’ motives for reaching out to Rome were certainly varied. In writing their reports and requests, many petitioners simply honoured their oath of office and dictates of conscience. But not everyone who went through the trouble of sending a request and having their behaviour formally approved by the bureaucratic processes did so with their salvation in mind. As Simon Ditchfield has shown in his work on liturgical reform, most of the requests were motivated by the petitioners’ hope that a decision from Rome would help them settle a local dispute in their favour.16 Rome was simply called upon as an arbiter, usually by those who

15 As cited in Windler, “Uneindeutige Zugehörigkeiten”, p. 338. 16 See Ditchfield, “Giving Tridentine Worship Back Its History”, p. 216–219.

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expected to benefit greatly from the centre’s arbitration. The fact that they also accepted the Curia’s claim to a monopoly of interpretation and central decision-making by calling upon Rome as an arbiter probably did not bother the beneficiaries of those decisions very much. What we know from studies on the early modern use of courts and legal systems,17 or from studies on state-building from below, with its empowering interactions,18 also applies to the Roman Curia: centrality emerges where there is a demand for it, and this demand will not decrease so long as the subjects have something to gain from centrality as well. However, calling upon Rome was only worth the trouble if petitioners did not have to fear draconian measures in response and if the centre was prepared to accept deviations and diversity. So, in a certain way, the avoidance of standardization ensured the uniformity of the process: what mattered most was centrality, which protected the Pope against competing claims and underscored his supremacy. Under no circumstances was this centrality to be jeopardized by decisions that were not enforceable or might have triggered protest and resistance. This pragmatic approach may well have led to inconsistencies, but at the end of the day, these could be concealed. “Centrality over homogenisation” seems to have been the motto of the Roman bureaucracy. Which brings me back to our initial question: what is the relationship between centrality and homogenisation? First and most importantly, the strong claim to uniformity and the lax practices of its implementation were not mutually inconsistent at all. Rather, they were entwined and, in a certain sense, even mutually dependent. The bureaucracy, on the other hand, served more or less as the linchpin between the two; its communication channels and procedures definitely lived up to the Curia’s claim to uniformity. The fact that the whole world had to send their requests to Rome—and did so by the thousands—expressed the Curia’s interpretive authority over ecclesiastical matters in a symbolic-performative way. And how the agencies dealt with the diversity and differences they encountered in the requests from all over the world made the harsh claims to uniformity bearable in everyday life. The Congregation of the Council helped petitioners in their efforts to comply with the Roman guidelines and offered them ways out whenever the former proved to be absolutely impossible. This was certainly not a means for the Roman bureaucracy to overcome diversity. What it could do, however, was handle and administer it. This made it possible to articulate differences without compromising the claim to uniformity. Conversely, the claim to uniformity could be made without being immediately contradicted by reality. I would argue that the avoidance of homogenisation laid the foundation for centrality. The fact that Rome’s central position was accepted, confirmed and reconfirmed over and over again with each new 17 On early modern subjects’ use of the courts and the legal system as well as the concept of “Justiznutzung”, see Dinges, “Justiznutzung”, p. 503–544. 18 On state-building from below and the concept of empowering interactions, see Blockmans, Holenstein, and Mathieu, Empowering Interactions.

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request was also due to the Curia’s willingness to administer diversity rather than fight it. Thus bureaucracy’s contribution to uniformity must be understood in the following sense: bureaucracies help to build and maintain the formal uniformity of decisionmaking processes. Under the aegis of this formal uniformity, the agencies and procedures of the Curia were in no way expected to overcome diversity, but rather to administer it. Contrary to what one might expect, the task of the formally standardized and centralized administration was not to establish or boost material uniformity. Rather, Rome’s reluctance to push forward with the homogenisation of the local churches laid the foundation for the acceptance of its centrality.

4.

Perspectives for Future Research: From Centrality to Polycentricity

What are the takeaways of our search for uniformity? As for the early modern papacy, there is one aspect that stands out more than anything: the effort to mediate between centrality and diversity has proven to be one of the Curia’s basic modes of institutional action. This is true not only for the Congregation of the Council, which has been the main focus of this chapter. One could easily name other procedures and claims that follow in the same vein, such as the periodic ad limina visits to Rome, for instance, which since 1585 bishops have been required to undertake every five or ten years. Yet in practice, only a few bishops actually fulfilled the task of regularly visiting the tombs of the apostles and presenting themselves before the Pope to give an account of the state of affairs within their dioceses. Nonetheless, when such visits did take place, the trip to the Eternal City served as a performative staging of Rome as the centre of the world and the universal Church. The symbolic meaning of this was lost on no one. And even when such visits did not come to pass, the onerous task of providing a reason, year after year, for why the mandatory ad limina visit had to be postponed once again must have been, in itself, a constant reminder to the defaulting bishops of their duty to “go up” to the Apostolic See.19

19 The series “Lib Litt.” holds letters of notification from the Congregation of the Council to individual bishops stating that the Pope had granted their request for postponement of the journey, such as for the bishop of Ferrara in AAV, S. Congreg. Concilii, Lib. Litt. 8 (1592–1598), fol. 160, 193, 200, and 376. Both the ad limina reports, which also had to be submitted in writing (and which were reviewed by the Congregation of the Council), as well as bishops’ requests for either a postponement of the journey or permission to appoint a procurator who would set out for Rome in their stead can be found in varying degrees of intensity in AAV, Congreg. Concilio, Relat. Dioc. The Index 1140 in the Sala Indici merely identifies the boxes holding such reports for any given diocese. For an initial overview of the dioceses of the Holy Roman Empire, also including the years for which such ad limina reports are available, see Gatz, “Das Bischofsideal des Konzils von Trient”, p. 204–228.

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Another domain in which diversity was tolerated so long as it did not interfere with the Curia’s claim to centrality, was the post-Tridentine synods. Conceived by the Council Fathers of Trent as hotbeds of ecclesiastical self-renewal, such clergy meetings did indeed take place at the level of dioceses and provinces. But by having all synodal decrees submitted to Rome for final approval (where they were quite often truncated, amended, or otherwise tampered with), this double-edged instrument of regional autonomy was brought under control through official channels.20 And to offer a third example: diversity and centrality dovetailed nicely in the cosmos of saints as well. Again, this was due to a procedure whose development cannot be understood without the dialectic of diversity and uniformity. Since the early seventeenth century, the canonisation process has made a distinction between the “saints” (santi) on one hand, and the “blessed” (beati) on the other. Whereas saints were to be venerated throughout the universal Church, the cultic veneration of the blessed was only allowed in particular regions. Within their regions, however, the blessed were venerated so much the more. The local rootedness of the blessed and the regional limitedness of their cults thus facilitated a regional differentiation of the cosmos of saints that answered to the diversity of the church. And although suggestions came from throughout the universal Church about whom the respective populations in the various regions of the world deemed worthy of veneration, the ultimate decision about who was to be officially considered “blessed” always rested with the Pope and his appropriate Congregation.21 It is probably true that centrality only emerged through demand; conversely, however, diversity also depended on procedures that reconciled local desires with the centre’s claims to authority. At least in the Roman case, centrality and diversity should therefore be seen as two sides of the same coin. Hopefully, these examples have convincingly demonstrated that research on the early modern papacy can benefit from exploring the relationship between centrality and

20 Examples of the revision of the synodal decrees can be found in the agency’s outgoing correspondence register, for instance in the cover letter to the archbishop of Toulouse, Cardinal Joyeuse, dated 9 April 1592 (AAV, Congreg. Concilio, Liber Litt. 8, fol. 14), which is followed (fol. 14v–24r) by over ten pages of “Nota ad Synodum Provincialem Tholosanam”, i. e., a list of the Congregation of the Council’s comments and requests for changes. 21 On this aspect, see Gotor, Chiesa e santità nell’Italia moderna; Ditchfield, “Coping with the beati moderni”, p. 413–439; Emich, “The Production of Truth”.

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homogenisation.22 But what—and this is my final point—does all this have to do with the concept, let alone the term, of “polycentricity”? As mentioned above, the POLY research group in Frankfurt am Main also takes diversity and plurality of premodern Christianities as a point of departure for its research. Polycentricity is a framework that helps us bring some order to the rich diversity of religious plurality, and above all, to better understand its dynamics. I would like to outline what I mean by this in four brief observations. While each takes the concept of centrality as its starting point, together they should lead us to a polycentric matrix, which strikes me as central to our topic. 1. Centrality is always a matter of supply and demand. This also applies to the domain of procedures, bureaucracy and hierarchy, as has been explored in this chapter. Places where decisions are being made only become centres when their supply meets demand. This is true even for Rome; indeed, one cannot overlook the fact that the Curia claimed central control. But as we have seen, the Roman authorities were quite considerate of their petitioners’ wishes and interests. If the avoidance of rigorous homogenisation helped stimulate demand from local churches, Rome was willing to make this sacrifice. Centrality was not the same as homogenisation, after all. One can go a step further and argue that it was basically the periphery that set the Roman bureaucracy in motion in the first place. Without the numerous requests that arrived in Rome from all over the world, the papal centre would have had little to do. The early modern papacy definitely had pretensions to clear hierarchies; in its administrative practices, however, it remained mostly reactive. The Roman agencies responded to requests, but they rarely launched any initiatives of their own.23 As much as probably any centre of the early modern period, the Curia was thus dependent on the periphery over which it claimed authority. It established and constantly re-established itself as the central place for decision-making through the demand for such decisions. The requests from within the provinces thus provided the fuel that fed the bureaucracy, the decision-making machine at the centre. One can go yet another step further. The requests that arrived in Rome from all over the world differed in density, content and urgency, after all. And so one might add that the activities of the Roman centre were also shaped quite substantially by the peripheries. 22 Of course, one must also examine the limits of this tolerance for heterogeneity: i. e. taking a closer look at the tipping points at which managing diversity created more problems than it solved and that eventually forced Rome to respond with far more vigorous homogenisation efforts; but also the course of events in the long term. By the same token, the Roman findings require a comparative assessment, for instance the question of whether (and if so, how) the interplay of promoting unity and handling differences was unique to the Catholic Church compared to how secular empires dealt with similar phenomena. There is certainly no lack of new questions to be explored in the future. 23 On the reactive rather than proactive nature of early modern administration, whose policies and actions were usually prompted by requests from subjects and took place in form of rescripts, see Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, p. 139.

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Uniformity and Polycentricity

In summary, then, centres are created, maintained, shaped and also reduced in their importance from two sides: by interested parties in the centre itself, whose claims to and instruments of power should by no means be underestimated here; and by historical agents in the periphery. Of course, there are a number of factors and phenomena that play a role in this dialectic of supply and demand, such as processes of institutionalization, flows of money and funds, narratives and self-images, and the weight of tradition. But broadly speaking, we can say that research on centres and their strong bureaucracies, as well as research on local diversity may be well advised not to lose sight of the interplay between supply and demand. 2. Now, one might object that the conceptual pair “centre” and “periphery” alone does not do full justice to the complexity of what we see in the sources. That is why I would like to add an important point to my concept of centrality. Centrality relates to more than a particular church offering to make administrative decisions. Rather, it is evident that there are also cultural centres, economic centres, centres of justice and the administration of justice, centres for social mobility, and so on. We are obviously dealing with a variety of centres of different forms and functions. But what connects these centres, and how might one define centres and centrality in a general or comprehensive sense? In his concept of central places, the German geographer Walter Christaller (1893–1969) emphasized the functions that centres assume for their surrounding areas.24 Political centres provide decisions and access to power; religious centres provide rules and models for dogma and piety; and economic centres are giant marketplaces whose spheres of influence extend well beyond their original boundaries. In this sense, a centre serves one purpose in particular: it is the coordinating mechanism within a specific functional domain. Given the importance we attach to the aspect of demand, however, Christaller’s approach seems a little too narrow. I would therefore like to define centrality not only in terms of functions, but also in terms of interactions. Drawing on Christaller, one could distinguish various centres according to the respective domains for which these centres staked certain claims and for which they offered specific functions, i. e. politics, art, economy, religion, and so on. The extent to which a place truly assumed centrality in any given domain, however, would have to be measured by the density of interactions it was able to stimulate and attract.25 Therefore, centrality is not only defined by the coordinating role of a place within a particular domain, but is also reflected in the density of interactions. Thus, the term centralization describes the process of a growing concentration of interactions within, or at least towards, a specific place. Social agents increasingly turn 24 For this seminal but not wholly uncontroversial concept, see Christaller, Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. 25 A quite similar approach (which also takes Christaller as a starting point while also emphasizing interaction) was recently developed in Nakoinz, Zentralität, p. 53 f.

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to that particular place in order to achieve certain goals in the interaction: to obtain information; exchange goods; earn reputation; gain attention; find opportunities; or bring about decisions (the petitions to the Congregation of the Council from all over the world is a prime example of such interactions that gravitate around and towards a centre). Whenever such interactions can be attributed to a particular domain, one can speak of a specific centrality for that particular domain. Whenever a place concentrates central functions across various domains, the result is something that is perhaps best described as generalized centrality. This distinction between specific and generalized centrality calls attention to the relationship of these centres to one another. One can identify three types of relationships. The first type of relationship is quite obvious: it describes the parallel existence of various functional centres. One group of historical agents can identify—or dismiss—different places as the respective centres within different domains. This may seem trivial, but it carries profound implications for their agency. To continue with the Roman example: in dealing with Rome, the municipalities of the Papal States—for whom the Pope was not only the head of the church but also the sovereign prince—definitely had courses of action available to them in the ecclesiastical domain that differed from, say, a parish or a bishop within the territories of the Spanish crown. The municipalities of the Papal States were faced with a generalized centrality. Both the ecclesiastical and the secular power resided in one hand, and in both domains, Rome was the centre. In the Spanish case, on the other hand, one can distinguish between a political centre and an ecclesiastical one, that is, Madrid as the central place of the Spanish crown and papal Rome as the central place of the universal Church. Here, it was much easier to set the political centre against the ecclesiastical centre. Madrid’s central role could significantly curb Rome’s influence, even in matters concerning bishops and parishes.26 The second type, by contrast, does not involve different centres in different domains (i. e. politics, religion, economy) but rather competing centres, that is, places offering similar benefits in one and the same domain. To stay with our example and the domain of religion: competing ecclesiastical centres would be Rome and Wittenberg, for instance, but also Geneva, Aksum, Baghdad, or Constantinople. And there is a third type of centre to be mentioned. A closer look reveals some sort of internal differentiation in just about every functional domain, whereby several centres emerge within one and the same domain—centres that do not compete with one another. Instead, they provide benefits and services addressing different issues. This may be illustrated by the implementation of the Tridentine reform decrees: while the Inquisition was responsible for dogmatic questions of doubt, another Roman agency, the Congregation of the Council, was responsible for matters of organisation and church

26 One might assume that generalized centrality stands in the way of diversity, but like many other hypotheses regarding the polycentric matrix, this aspect would have to be examined more closely.

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discipline. And when it came to piety, there was yet another place that played a central role: Carlo Borromeo’s Milan, to which many eyes and pleas of reform-minded believers were directed.27 And so the formula for this constellation is: Rome and Milan. I will return to this point below, but first there is another observation to be made about the concept of centrality. 3. Centrality is also a matter of scaling. Contrasting centres with peripheries does not mean that peripheries cannot have regional centres of their own. After all, interactions that give rise to centres when they consolidate can be seen not only in different domains, but also at all levels. If we take a wide-angle view, we see the global Papal Church with Rome as the centre with a myriad of “local churches”28 as the counterpart to this centre. If we take a close-up view, however, we can see smaller-scale centres. Within Rome, for instance, there are the various Congregations that particularly stand out—and whose areas of responsibility could not always be clearly separated. Looking even closer, one can even identify different factions and clusters within each and every Congregation. The same applies to local churches all over the world. By way of just one example, the Christian community in Beijing around 1600 hardly numbered more than a few hundred people. But this small group could choose from among the churches of not just one, but several religious orders and nations to worship in.29 Apparently, then, “local churches” also contained competing centres within themselves. 4. With this, I finally arrive at polycentricity. After this long run-up, it should be much easier to define polycentricity. Polycentricity exists where people give rise to various centres through their interactions. These centres can pertain to different domains. But centres can also provide one and the same service and thus be in competition with one another. They can also express internal differentiation within one and the same domain. And they can be seen at every level and scale. What are the implications of these observations for research on early modern Christianities? The POLY research group invites scholars to see Christianities as communities of interaction, i. e. as groups of social agents. Each of these communities or groups is defined by a religious core; they share common dogmas, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and religious practices, however they choose to emphasize them. At the same time, the Christians under investigation here, interact with one another and with other groups in a wide variety of domains. Centres emerge whenever and wherever such interactions concentrate and become denser and stronger. Conversely, whenever and wherever interactions become sparse or disappear altogether, boundaries between individual religious groups arise. And whenever historical agents appear who obviously do not belong

27 On Milan as a spiritual centre, see, for example, Buzzi and Zardin, Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della Grande Riforma. 28 On this concept, see Eugenio Menegon’s contribution to the present volume. 29 See ibid.

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to the Christians of the group in question but still interact with them, the dividing lines—perhaps even in the religious domain—become quite blurry. All this unfolds in a polycentric matrix. One finds competing centres in the ecclesiastical domain (Rome and Wittenberg), parallel centres in different domains (Madrid and Rome), but also a differentiation of the religious domain along the lines of dogma or devotional practice (Rome and Milan). Which centres become visible in each individual case is always also a matter of scale. Centres can be found at all levels, from the local churches all the way up to the religious power hub that Rome was and still is to this day. This polycentric matrix is the source of the plurality of premodern Christianities. Driven by a dual dynamic—the emergence and decline of centres through the interactions of social agents, as well as the complex interplay of centres between cooperation and competition—this polycentric matrix shaped the development of Christianities and their interconnectedness across the globe. If this characterization is anywhere close to being accurate—and we in Frankfurt believe that it is—the framework offered by this polycentric matrix should help us identify patterns, types and mechanisms within the plurality of premodern Christianities. This is precisely the systematic model we are striving for.

5.

Conclusions

This leads me to my closing remarks. Some people may find such an approach too intricate; others may find it too schematic. I would therefore like to conclude by summarizing the benefits we can expect from this model. 1. If one seeks to identify religious groups through their interactions, the boundaries between the individual Christianities inevitably become more fluid. Religious groups no longer appear as immutable and rigid containers, but rather as expressions of long, continuous processes. 2. This approach further accentuates the agency of historical agents. In our model, the characteristics that constitute and define individual Christianities are no longer determined by us researchers. It is through their actions that the historical agents tell us what was important to them as a group. These actions may involve dogmatic definitions or consolidations on an organisational level. There are, however, also other quite different factors, such as religious practices or the exchange of resources, that can constitute and shape what we perceive as Christianities. 3. By leaving our definition of polycentricity open to all domains, we aim for the broadest possible contextualization. In order to gain a better understanding of events and phenomena in the ecclesiastical domain, we are also examining political, economic, cultural and other interactions and centres. And since our approach is premised on the interconnectedness of all these fields, we also expect our research to provide new

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insights into the stimuli and contributions that premodern Christianities, on their part, brought to developments in other areas of life. 4. In our approach, polycentricity not only extends to different domains, but also to different levels. By relating these domains and levels to one another, we aim to do justice to the complexity of the developments under consideration. After all, it is probably precisely the interferences and interactions within the polycentric matrix that set off the dynamics that shaped both the history of the various Christianities and the processes surrounding them. Our polycentric matrix will hopefully allow us to better identify, describe and perhaps even systematize these dynamics. This is the present state of discussion within the POLY research group. In summary, we envision a sophisticated model to describe premodern Christianities. Indeed, it is a model that certainly cannot, and need not, be fully explored in every case-study of this volume. I myself have examined only a very narrow aspect in this chapter. Nonetheless, it is to be hoped that my reflections on centrality have clarified what our concept of polycentricity is all about. If I have been successful, then maybe it is now clear that good old uniformity is not a dead end after all, but rather a worthwhile detour that can lead to new insights.

Bibliography Archival Sources Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Vatican City (AAV) S. Congreg. Concilii, Positiones 209; Libri Litterarum aa. 1564–1903, 8 (1592–1598); Relationes Diocesium. Printed and Edited Sources Gallemart, Joannes. Concilium Tridentinum, Additis Declarationibus Cardinalium Concilii Interpretum etc. Cologne: 1712. Literature Blockmans, Wim, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu. Empowering Interactions. Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Buzzi, Franco, and Danilo Zardin (eds.). Carlo Borromeo e l’opera della Grande Riforma. Cultura, religione e arti del governo nella Milano del pieno Cinquecento. Milan: Silvana, 1997. Caiazza, Pietro “L’archivio della Sacra Congregazione del concilio (Primi appunti per un problema di riordinamento).” In Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa 42 (1992), p. 7–24. Catto, Michela, and Adriano Prosperi (eds.). Trento and Beyond. The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. Christaller, Walter. Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Eine ökonomisch-geographische Untersuchung über die Gesetzmäßigkeit der Verbreitung und Entwicklung der Siedlungen mit

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städtischer Funktion. Nachdruck der Ausgabe von 1933. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980. Ditchfield, Simon. Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular. London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ditchfield, Simon. “Giving Tridentine Worship Back Its History.” In Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, edited by Robert N. Swanson. Woodbridge: Suffolk, 1999, p. 199–226. Ditchfield, Simon. “‘Coping with the beati moderni’: Canonization Procedure in the Aftermath of the Council of Trent.” In Ite Inflammate Omnia: Selected Historical Papers from Conferences Held at Loyola and Rome in 2006, edited by Thomas M. McCoog. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2010, p. 413–439. Dinges, Martin. “Justiznutzung als soziale Kontrolle in der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Kriminalitätsgeschichte. Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne, edited by Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000, p. 503–544. Emich, Birgit. “From the Council to the Founding Myth: How the Spirit of Trent Came to be Named.” In Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany, edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington. Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2019, p. 40–61. Emich, Birgit “The Production of Truth in the Manufacture of Saints: Procedures, Credibility, and Patronage in Early Modern Processes of Canonization.” In Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Andreea Badea, Bruno Boute, Marco Cavarzere, and Steven Vanden Broecke. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, p. 165–190. Friedrich, Markus. Der lange Arm Roms? Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesuitenorden 1540–1773. Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2011. Friedrich, Markus. The Jesuits. A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. Gatz, Erwin. “Das Bischofsideal des Konzils von Trient und der deutschsprachige Episkopat des 19. Jahrhunderts. Zum Quellenwert von Relationes status.” In Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 77 (1982), p. 204–228. Gotor, Miguel. Chiesa e santità nell’Italia moderna. Rome: Laterza, 2004. Nakoinz, Oliver. Zentralität. Theorie, Methoden und Fallbeispiele zur Analyse zentraler Orte. Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2019. O’Malley, John. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Prodi, Paolo. The Papal Prince. One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, translated by Susan Haskins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Prosperi, Adriano. Il Concilio di Trento: una introduzione storica. Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Puza, Richard. “Die Konzilskongregation. Ein Einblick in ihr Archiv, ihre Verfahrensweise und die Bedeutung ihrer Entscheidungen von ihrer Errichtung bis zur Kurienreform Pius’ X. (1563–1908).” In Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 90 (1995), p. 23–42. Reinhard, Wolfgang. Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: C.H. Beck 1999. Wassilowsky, Günther. “Posttridentinische Reform und päpstliche Zentralisierung: Zur Rolle der Konzilskongregation.” In Reformen in der Kirche. Historische Perspektiven, edited by An-

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dreas Merkt, Günther Wassilowsky, and Gregor Wurst. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2014, p. 138–157. Wassilowsky, Günther, and Peter Walter (eds.). Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur. Münster: Aschendorff, 2016. Wassilowsky, Günther. “The Myths of the Council of Trent and the Construction of Catholic Confessional Culture.” In The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545–1700), vol. 1, edited by Violet Soen and Wim François. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018, p. 69–98. Windler, Christian. “Uneindeutige Zugehörigkeiten: Katholische Missionare und die Kurie im Umgang mit ‘communicatio in sacris.’” In Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Andreas Pietsch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013, p. 314–345. Windler, Christian. Missionare in Persien. Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert). Cologne: Böhlau, 2018. Zitzlsperger, Philipp. “Trient und die Kraft der Bilder. Überlegungen zur virtus der Gnadenbilder.” In Das Konzil von Trient und die katholische Konfessionskultur (1563–2013), edited by Peter Walter and Günther Wassilowsky. Münster: Aschendorff, 2016, p. 335–372.

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Christian Windler

Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective Catholic Missionaries and the English East India Company

1.

Introduction In India, no other European nation does as much good for the Roman missionaries as the English nation; although it is heretical, it is the only one that protects us, receives us and helps us, and gives us everything that is necessary, especially to our Order; I write this from experience, and all those who have consorted with the said English nation say it, and I say that if it were not for the English, we would no longer be in India, and the mission in the Mughal Empire would already be over, this praise and glory must be given to the English; Your Lordship can tell His Holiness and the Holy Congregation [for the Propagation of the Faith] of the benefits we receive from the English gentlemen in India.1

Thus wrote the Discalced Carmelite Innocenzo di San Leopoldo in 1721 in a letter addressed to the secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), Pietro Luigi Carafa. In his message he praised English Bombay as a safe haven for the vicar-apostolic in the Mughal Empire and for the missionaries of his order. How did Innocenzo di San Leopoldo, brother of Sigismund von Kollonitz, Archbishop of Vienna from 1722 to 1751, arrive at such a favourable image of the English nation, which he, at the same time, explicitly described as “heretical”? Against whom exactly did the Discalced Carmelites in India need the protection of these “heretics”? One year on, Innocenzo di San Leopoldo addressed another letter to the Praepositus generalis of his Order in which he gave an answer to this: “[...] suffice it to say that our priests of the

1 P. Innocenzo di San Leopoldo OCD to [Pietro Luigi Carafa, secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith], Bombay, 28 January 1721: “[…] nell’India non è altra natione Europea che fà tanto biene [sic] a’ Missionarii di Roma, come la Natione Inglesa, essendo essa Heretica, questa è la sola, che ci protege, ci riceve, et adjuta, e ci da tutto che è necessario, particolarmente a nostra Religione, io lo scrivo per esperienza, e tutti lo dicono che trattarono con la detta Natione Inglesa, e dico che si non fossero gli Sri Inglesi, già noi no staressimo più nell’Indie, e la Missione di Mogol già sarebbe finita, questa lode et gloria è necessario di dar a’ Sri Inglesi, che Vostra Signoria lo può contar’a Sua Santità, ed alla Sacra Congregatione, li bieni che riceviamo da’ Sri Inglesi nell’Indie” (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 15-2, fol. 677v). The author wishes to thank Regine Maritz (Bern) for the English translation of this chapter. She, Nadine Amsler, and Samuel Weber read earlier versions of this contribution and their comments allowed the author to improve the text in numerous ways.

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Mughal mission could not endure without the English gentlemen, because of the great persecutions we suffer on the part of the reverend fathers of the Society [of Jesus], our sworn enemies, as a result of the fantasy of the patronage of the King of Portugal”.2 Innocenzo di San Leopoldo was not the only non-Portuguese missionary in South Asia to complain about the hostility of the Portuguese and to describe the protection provided by the English East India Company and by individuals more or less related to the company. The present contribution analyses South Asian contact zones between missionaries of different origins and jurisdictional dependencies. It asks how non-Portuguese clerics far away from Rome—regular and secular French priests and missionaries of the Roman Propaganda Fide—dealt with the competition between different centres of the Catholic mission, which was characteristic of global Catholicism in the early modern period. Because of the sharp contrast with the Portuguese Padroado, non-Portuguese clerics either operated permanently under English protection or depended at least temporarily on “good correspondence” and “friendship” with the English. The chapter shows how, in the course of the practical differentiation between papal and French missions and the church under the Portuguese Padroado and the concomitant contacts with the English, a specific Company Catholicism emerged, which was characterised by intensive trans-confessional relations. To this end, it examines the perceptions and practices that shaped the activities of Catholic clergy, with a particular focus on the English settlements in Bombay and Madras. Due to its limited scope, the contribution only touches on the no less important subject of contacts beyond the still tiny English dominions. These occurred, for instance, during the long journeys that non-Portuguese clergymen often undertook on English ships, especially within Asia.3 Building on research on secular early modern “composite monarchies”, which was pioneered by John H. Elliott, the contribution focuses on the “composite” and “layered” patterns of global Catholicism. It was characteristic of early modern “composite monarchies” that their constituent parts had their own rights which were secured by custom and privilege. According to John H. Elliott, a “composite monarchy” was held together less by military force than by the combination of new courtly institutions with the use of patronage. In this way, the ruler sought to secure the loyalty of the elites in the individual territories within the framework of a “mutual compact”.4 Inspired 2 P. Innocenzo di San Leopoldo OCD to [Philippe-Thérèse de Sainte-Anne, praepositus generalis OCD], Karwar, 20 January 1722: “[…] e sono incredibili i favori, che continuamente ci fanno e non è dicibile l’amore, la riverenza, ed il rispetto, che ci portano, basta dire, che se non fossero li Sri Inglesi li NN. PP. della Missione di Mogol non potrebbono sossistere, per le persecutioni grandi, che patiamo da RR.PP. della Compagnia nostri nemici giurati a causa della Chimerica immaginazione del Ius Patronato del Rè di Portogallo” (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 16-1, fol. 191v). 3 The author of the present contribution is currently working on a book project that examines the interactions between Catholic clerics and the English East India Company in a range of contact zones, including Company settlements, ports under non-Christian rulership, and ship voyages. 4 Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies”.

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by Elliott’s understanding of the “composite monarchy”, I introduce here the concept of “composite Catholicism”. It draws attention, on the one hand, to the jurisdictional diversity of global Catholicism in the early modern period and, on the other hand, to practices of alignment with the one prince of the Church, which were decisively shaped by the agency of subaltern actors. This micro-historical case study of missions located far away from Rome focuses on the multilateral dependencies of such subaltern actors, the autonomy of their fields of activity, and their hierarchical entanglements. While I think it makes sense to examine early modern “Christianities” in their confessional diversity from the point of view of polycentricity, the term “composite Catholicism” seems to me more appropriate to account for the monarchical diversity that was characteristic of early modern Catholicism. With regard to the context under investigation, this opens up possibilities for comparison with the missionaries’ “heretical” counterpart—the East India Company—in its relationship with the English Crown. Philip Stern examines the early East India Company as a “company-state” and not merely as a trading company.5 He locates it in the context of the English and Indian “composite monarchies”, and thus describes it as a body that was endowed with privileges by both the English Crown and Indian rulers, and which in turn exercised rulership. Two characteristics of the specifically early modern structures of composite monarchies thus come to the fore: “layered” sovereignties and multiple affiliations. They explain the fact that until the first half of the eighteenth century, the East India Company’s practice of power largely evaded the sharp rejection of “popery” and “papists”, which was once more reenergised in England in the context of the Glorious Revolution.6 It is also apt that during the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession, the ongoing peaceful relations between the English Fort Saint George in Madras and French Pondicherry were only occasionally disturbed by third parties.7 The expulsion of the French Capuchins and almost all Catholics from the “white town” of Madras in 1749 following the French occupation of 1746 can thus also be interpreted as an expression of structural changes within the British “composite monarchy”. Until then, Catholic Luso-Indians had lived side by side with predominantly Protestant people of European origin in the inner Fort of Madras, which had been called “Christian” rather than being referred to as a “white town”. From then on, the latter was no longer to be inclusively Christian, but British, Protestant, and white.8

5 6 7 8

Stern, The Company-State. Walsham, Charitable Hatred, esp. p. 267–268, p. 316–319; Glickman, The English Catholic Community. Heijmans, The Agency of Empire, chapter 4 “Inter-Imperial Cooperation”, p. 141–181. Denominations, however, were just as important as skin colour. Statements such as the following are one-sided and lack nuance: “The idea of separating a ‘black town’ from a ‘white town’ dates back to 1700, when British officials decided that color designations were crucial to governing their southern Indian colonial city of Madras […]” (Nightingale, Segregation, p. 3). Segregation according to skin colour has a history that reaches further back in time. Catholic missionaries found that the English did not allow

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When we consider the competition between Catholic missionaries in South Asia, the “composite” and “layered” character of global Catholicism emerges with particular clarity in the contrast between the claims of the post-Tridentine papacy and those of the Portuguese Crown to the patronage (Padroado) over the church of its Estado da Índia. The post-Tridentine papacy, despite its claim to universality, was—in terms of its jurisdictional activity—a predominantly Italian institution. Its capacity to act remained limited even on Italian ground outside the Papal States9 as a result of both a lack of resources10 and the legal constitution of the Church. It has been rightly pointed out that the papacy justified its claim to the plenitudo potestatis by invoking a universal responsibility based on salvation history and divine and natural law in a way that became a model for secular princes claiming absolute power.11 However, such claims not only collided with the papacy’s narrow limits for enforcing norms effectively; in addition to the enforcement deficit, the Catholic Church shared a pronounced structural diversity with the secular institutions of the early modern period. Not dissimilar in principle to the privileges in secular “composite monarchies”—such as the royal charters in favour of the East India Company—the papal privileges endowed the Church under the Portuguese Padroado with a special legal position that allowed the Portuguese authorities to take action against the missionaries sent from Rome.12 Comparable conditions existed in the area of the Patronato Real of the kings of Castile. Furthermore, the protection which the kings of France and Navarre exercised over the French missions challenged the papal claim to primacy in practice, although it lacked a basis in canon law comparable to the Iberian patronages. While the French missionaries and vicars-apostolic recognised the jurisdiction of the Roman Propaganda Fide in principle, the privileges of the Gallican Church still indirectly shaped the mission churches in Asia founded by French clerics. The ecclesiastical orders also had more or less extensive privileges, including the Society of Jesus, whose hostility the Discalced Carmelite Innocenzo di San Leopoldo deplored, as described at the outset of this contribution. The extensive exemption of the Jesuit missions from the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Fide was justified, among other

9

10 11 12

“blacks” in their churches as early as the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Catholic priests were allowed to proselytise freely among the “blacks”, while any attempt at conversion of an English person raised the suspicion of high treason. See on this, using the examples of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, the Congregatio episcoporum et regularium, and the Congregatio immunitatis: Menniti Ippolito, 1664. Un anno della Chiesa universale. Even Thomas F. Mayer, who emphasised Pope Urban VIII’s personal control over the Holy Office and his role in erecting an “absolutely monarchical state”, simultaneously underlined the limits of the tribunal’s capacity to act outside the Papal State in cities such as Naples, Venice, and Florence (Mayer, The Roman Inquisition). On the finances of the Holy Office, see Maifreda, I denari dell’inquisitore. Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice; id.: “Il ‘sovrano pontefice’”. On the limits of the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Fide as a result of secular rights of patronage, see Pizzorusso, Governare le missioni, p. 106–117.

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things, by the affirmations of special devotion to the pope, which were paradigmatically expressed in the Jesuits’ fourth vow.13 The early modern papacy was able to achieve recognition of its superior position on a symbolic level to a greater extent than ever before. The Roman Curia often succeeded in this because it found ways to integrate or neutralise the variety of local practices that potentially stood in conflict to its claim to superiority without eliminating them. Dispensational practices implied formal recognition of papal authority while simultaneously allowing for the continuation of deviant practices. Where such solutions did not seem appropriate, the Curia Congregations even made a habit of refraining from making decisions altogether. The formula “nihil esse respondendum” then stood at the end of elaborate bureaucratic procedures. For a long time, practices that were in principle unacceptable from the Roman perspective, such as those of “communicatio in sacris” with “schismatic” and “heretical” Eastern churches, were only judged in individual cases, while a general ban was not issued until 1729.14 The controversies over the Chinese and Malabar rites smouldered for more than one hundred years before Benedict XIV attempted to end them with papal decrees in 1742 and 1744, respectively. If one focuses not only on these final decisions, but also on the long phases of ambiguity that preceded them, it becomes clear that the Roman Curia in the early modern period was anything but willing to make quick decisions.15 Recognition of the discrepancy between the scope of the papal claim to truth and the limited possibilities for enforcing it reinforced the tendency of cardinals and popes to avoid controversial decisions. This inclination was moreover anchored in the papacy’s dependence on competing noble factions and foreign princes.16 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese Crown remained far more assertive in Asia than the papacy due to its patronage rights and its presence on the ground. The papacy did not question the Padroado as such. What was increasingly disputed, however, were the patronage claims that the Portuguese Crown derived outside its dominions from the fact that the outer borders of the archbishopric of Goa and its dependent bishoprics had been kept open in accordance with the missionary expectations from when they were first established. For in the course of the seventeenth century, Dutch and English advances at the expense of the Estado da Índia created more and more “holes” in the fabric of the Portuguese Padroado. The following reflections

13 On the relations between the Society of Jesus and the Propaganda Fide, see Pizzorusso, “Le pape rouge et le pape noir”. 14 My reflections on this point can be found in: Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 607–625. See also Birgit Emich’s contribution to the present volume on the same topic. 15 See also Sidler, Heiligkeit aushandeln, p. 465–468, p. 476–478, on the practices of decision-making of the Congregation of Rites in processes of the canonisation of saints. 16 On the latter point, see Ago, Carriere e clientele, esp. p. 158.

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build on the hypothesis that it was these very “holes” that created the conditions allowing for the limited successes achieved by French and papal missionaries in early modern South Asia. By focusing on Catholic missionaries as priests of the “Portuguese” communities which came under English rule, this chapter points to the fact that what was later to become the British Empire also had Luso-Indian origins.

2.

The East India Company and its Catholic Clergy

In the extensive literature on Catholic missionaries in Asia, the question of coexistence with Protestants has so far hardly been explicitly raised.17 Valuable insights into the history of Catholic communities in the early period of English rule are still provided by some studies from the colonial period that are rich in source material.18 Even the most recent studies share with these older works an emphasis on the perspective of the East India Company as a Protestant authority, beside which the massive Catholic LusoIndian presence only occupies a subordinate place as the object of English confessional policy.19 In terms of methodology, they thus fall far short of recent research on English Catholicism, which has shed light on the agency of the Catholic laity and clergy through its focus on the practices of cohabitation.20 The most significant obstacle standing in the way of a renewal of Company research is its inability to go beyond the English language source material to draw on the rich records of Catholic church institutions (especially those of the religious orders, the Missions étrangères de Paris, and the Propaganda Fide). Catholic missionary histories have occasionally referred to interactions with the English and the Dutch,21 but the accounts of papal and French missionaries about the circumstances of their lives in contact with “heretics” did not lend themselves 17 The author of the present contribution has examined this question with a focus on the Safavid Empire: Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 377–498. A recently edited volume examining the interactions between Jesuits and Protestants considers the early modern contacts relating to the Protestant East India Companies only very marginally: see Cañizares-Esguerra, Maryks and Hsia, Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants. Délio de Mendonça’s contribution on India briefly considers the beginnings of Protestant mission in the eighteenth century and the resulting practices of demarcation: “Protestant and Jesuit Encounters”, p. 137–158. 18 Esp. Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1. Frank Penny, a former chaplain of the Church of England, whose work comprises three volumes covering the time period up until 1861, also considers the history of the local Catholic church. 19 For instance Stern, The Company-State, p. 100–118 (chapter 5: “The Most Sure and Profitable Sort of Merchandice”: Protestantism and Piety); Guite, “The English Company and the Catholics”; Smith, Religion and Governance. 20 The following two works are representative of this branch of research: Questier, Catholicism and Community; Walsham, Catholic Reformation. 21 For instance, Josef Metzler discusses in his contribution to the Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum the situation of the vicars-apostolic who held ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Malabar and

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

to the staging of religious orders and other church actors within the framework of conventional missionary historical narratives. Too pronounced were the compromises that the missionaries had to make. Nor could their achievements be measured by the number of conversions, for their activities primarily comprised the pastoral care of the existing Catholic Luso-Indian communities that had formed since the sixteenth century under the Portuguese Padroado in the Estado da Índia and beyond its tiny settlements along the coasts of South Asia. However, it is precisely the fact that the clergy devoted themselves primarily to the pastoral care of the Luso-Indian communities that makes them such an interesting object of study, for they link the history of global Catholicism with that of the early English presence in South Asia. As early as the 1980s, Sanjay Subrahmanyam pointed out that the Portuguese communities in the Bay of Bengal and on the southern Coromandel Coast, which were located far from the dominions of the Estado da Índia, retained a far greater importance as commercial actors in the late seventeenth century than had previously been assumed.22 Those who were commonly referred to as “Portuguese” there in the second half of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century were people who had at most distant relations, if any, with Portugal. These included casados who were described as “white”, but above all “black” Topasses, who defined themselves as “Portuguese” and distinguished themselves from the rest of the Indigenous population through their names, their use of language, and certain items of clothing (especially the wearing of hats), as well as the practice of Catholic religious rituals.23 The English and Dutch East India Companies (VOC) built in different ways on this “hybrid” Portuguese presence along the coasts of South Asia. In contrast to the VOC, which seized important positions from the Estado da Índia by force, the poorly capitalised and militarily weaker English East India Company mostly relied on peaceful means in the seventeenth century. The founding of Fort Saint George (later Madras) in 1639 in the immediate vicinity of São Tomé of Mylapore was made possible by a concession from a local ruler. The formerly Portuguese Bombay came under the authority of the English Crown as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry in 1661; the island was passed on to the East India Company as early as 1668. The English were few in number in these localities and depended on the services of Luso-Indians as seamen, soldiers, and go-betweens with knowledge of the country, while the LusoIndian communities, for their part, knew how to take advantage of the opportunities

Bombay instead of the bishops under Portuguese patronage: Metzler, “Propaganda und Missionspatronat”, p. 220–228. 22 Subrahmanyam, “Staying on”. Compare id., The Portuguese Empire, p. 206–222. Halikowski Smith, Creolization and Diaspora, emphasises the importance of Portuguese Creoles in Southeast Asia, which has been overlooked until very recently. 23 Hespanha, Filhos da Terra. On the Topasses in Southeast Asia see Andaya, “The ‘Informal Portuguese Empire’”.

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that opened up for them in the English settlements. Therefore, the decline of São Tomé in the second half of the seventeenth century, for instance, cannot be equated with the economic decline of the Luso-Indian families who had settled there. After 1639, the East India Company succeeded in making Fort Saint George the centre of a city whose population was to rise to 100,000 by the end of the seventeenth century, according to numbers given by the Company.24 This came as a result of the comparatively advantageous conditions of settlement under Company rule. These included the opportunity for the free practice of religion, which the East India Company granted to both non-Christians and Catholics in all its settlements, although it defined itself as a Protestant authority.25 In Madras, a Catholic “Portuguese Church” was built in the inner fort area—later referred to as “white town”—as early as 1642, which was several decades before the construction of the Protestant English Saint Mary’s Church in a comparably prominent location between 1678 and 1680. In Bombay, the treaty concluded before Catherine of Braganza’s marriage to Charles II of England guaranteed the continued existence of the four Catholic parishes stemming from Portuguese times, while the English Saint Thomas Church was not consecrated until 1718. In the settlements of the East India Company, the small English communities, which were predominantly composed of Protestants, were outnumbered by far by the Catholic Luso-Indian communities. Around 1700, there were barely more than 1,000 people of English origin in Asia, and the vast majority of those were male.26 Yet even the most conservative estimates of the number of Luso-Indian Catholics in Bombay in the first half of the eighteenth century place their number at around 5,500. Out of the approximately 100,000 inhabitants of Madras in the early eighteenth century, about 15,000 may have been Luso-Indian Catholics, but only about 150 were of English origin.27 The Catholic “Portuguese” who were influential and wealthy resided until the expulsion of 1749 in the inner fort area, which increasingly came to be known as “white town”; the large remainder lived in the “gentoo” or “black town”.28

24 Stern, The Company-State, p. 85. Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant, p. 243, also estimates the number of inhabitants of the “black town” in the early eighteenth century at approx. 100,000. 25 On this with regard to Bombay, see Ames, “The Role of Religion”. 26 Veevers, “Gender”, p. 192. 27 In 1724 the procurator of the Propaganda Fide wrote that there were 15,000 Catholics in Madras (Bernardino Campi to Cardinal [Giuseppe] Sacripanti, Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Madras, 25 January 1724 [APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 17, fol. 186r]). The number of inhabitants of English origin is cited according to Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant, p. 243–245. 28 Yet conversely to Carl H. Nigthingale’s assertion, the differentiation according to skin colour did not replace categorisation according to religion; speaking of a “secularization of urban spatial politics” (Nightingale, Segregation, p. 72) eclipses the fact that in 1749, British rulership placed Catholics—not inhabitants of other skin colours—under the general suspicion of treason.

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

Such figures fit the image of the East India Company as an actor highly dependent on its Asian environment, as portrayed in recent Company research (most recently by David Veevers in his study on the Asian origins of the British Empire).29 For example, the Company had no choice but to recruit ship crews and soldiers from the Catholic Luso-Indian communities, which remained connected to the Estado da Índia in terms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This is where the East India Company made its move. While it never questioned the public worship of its Catholic subjects and in some cases even supported their churches financially, it preferred to have non-Portuguese clergy as priests serving the Luso-Indian parishes. Immediately after the founding of Fort Saint George, Andrew Cogan, who was the East India Company’s agent there, entrusted the pastoral care of the Luso-Indian community to a French Capuchin, Ephrem de Nevers, who had previously planned on travelling onwards to Pegu (in present-day Burma). The Capuchin consecrated his “Portuguese Church” to Saint Andrew the Apostle in recognition of the English agent’s protection. In Bombay, in 1720, Discalced Carmelites from the Italian Congregation of their order took over the four Catholic parishes from the Portuguese clergy who had been expelled by the English. Behind the scenes, the Discalced Carmelites had purposefully presented themselves to the East India Company as a loyal alternative to the Portuguese clergy. In 1718, the vicarapostolic of the Mughal Empire Maurizio di Santa Teresa had obtained the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Bombay until further notice, because he claimed in his correspondence with the Propaganda Fide that the English were preventing the archbishop of Goa from exercising his jurisdiction.30 The Capuchins in Madras and the Discalced Carmelites in Bombay oversaw parishes whose Catholic population outstripped the number of Catholics attending the mission churches elsewhere in Asia which have received far more attention from historians. Yet the missions under English protection are a worthwhile object of research, not only because of these numbers, but also because they were zones of contact between different spiritual and secular actors of European origin. They can be viewed as a microcosm in which the competition between three centres of early modern global Catholicism and the associated problems of trans-confessional relations can be studied. In Madras and Bombay, mostly Protestant Englishmen, who were more or less closely connected to the East India Company, interacted with several distinct categories of Catholic clergymen:

29 Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire. 30 General Congregation 19 August 1720 (APF, Acta, vol. 90, fol. 474v–475r). The formal exemption from the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Goa was rejected by the Propaganda Fide in 1720 and again in 1723 (General Congregation 19 January 1723 [APF, Acta, vol. 93, fol. 24v–25r]). By contrast with the English East India Company, the Dutch VOC actively encouraged Protestant missionary pastors to proselytise among those who had been baptised by Catholic priests. See Parker, “Better the Turk than the Pope”, in part. p. 181.

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– Regular and secular clergy from the Portuguese Estado da Índia; – French Capuchins and secular priests from the Missions étrangères de Paris in association with the French Compagnie des Indes orientales who were in transit; – Members of Italian religious orders and occasionally Italian secular clergy in close connection with the papacy. These clergymen were connected to Portuguese, French, and Roman authorities, respectively.

3.

Material Needs and Dependencies

In 1604 Clement VIII sent a small group of Discalced Carmelites, who were members of the newly founded Italian Congregation of this order, to Persia. This marked the beginning of the post-Tridentine papacy’s efforts to establish itself not only as the symbolic but also as the organisational centre of the mission that sought to intensify piety among Christians and to spread the faith among unbelievers by way of the deployment of individual missions from Rome and, in 1622, the formation of the Propaganda Fide. In practice, however, the papal mission remained a baroque veneer of legitimacy, as an examination of the finances of the Propaganda Fide impressively demonstrates. A comparison with Volker Reinhardt’s research on the finances of Scipione Borghese shows that the income and expenses of a single cardinal-nephew, stemming from a family rising through the ranks into Roman high aristocracy, exceeded those of the later Propaganda Fide many times over. A staggering forty to fifty percent of the Congregation’s expenditure was used to stage the missio as an undertaking of the papacy in the city of Rome, where the Propaganda Fide, with its Collegio urbano and Tipografia poliglotta, was housed in a palace specially built by two particularly distinguished architects—Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini—on the Piazza di Spagna. This representative building, alongside other projects, such as the frescoes of the Sala Regia of the Quirinal Palace and the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi on the Piazza Navona, contributed to staging the papacy’s claim to universal authority over spiritual matters in the aulic and urban spaces of Rome. The missions were considered to be the most significant expression of this claim. Behind such baroque veneers of legitimacy stood the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, an institution that financially supported only the smallest part of the missions from its stato temporale. In 1679, for example, a mere 400 scudi from the stato temporale of the Propaganda Fide flowed into the missions in the East Indies and China. Eighty years later, in 1760, this sum was five times higher, but at a mere 2019 scudi it remained extremely modest.31

31 Concerning the finances of the Propaganda Fide, see Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 39–49.

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

The failings of the Propaganda Fide in financing the missions in Asia were partially made up for by actors whose influence the reform papacy claimed to limit: secular patrons and protectors, as well as the religious orders themselves. What all the missions—including those of the Jesuits under the Portuguese Padroado—had in common, however, was that such financing alone was not sufficient for the survival of their settlements. Therefore, the latter had to generate a varying part of their resources on site themselves.32 In particular, the missionaries sent to Asia from Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were left to fend for themselves while en route as well as after arriving at their destination. Compared to those who reached India under the Portuguese Padroado and worked there from Goa, they were few in number. As a rule, they could count neither on the transport and communication infrastructures of the Estado da Índia, nor on financial support from within that context. Moreover, they had to avoid falling into the hands of Portuguese authorities, since otherwise they might be sent back to Europe because their activities in Asia undermined Portuguese patronage claims. In the seventeenth century, the situation for French clergy who travelled to Asia under the protection of their king was similar to that of the missionaries of the Propaganda Fide. Individual French Capuchins who were sent to the Ottoman Empire and Persia around 1630 at the instigation of Père Joseph of Paris moved on from there to India, where they first established a mission in Surat and then in Fort Saint George/Madras. French ships were not available to them for their journeys at that time, nor could they count on the support of merchants of French origin. When they made arrangements with the English and the Dutch on site in order to facilitate their travels by ship within Asia, the Capuchins anticipated what subsequently became widespread practice. As a result of the very limited success of the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, which was established in 1664, the situation for the French Capuchins and for the priests of the Missions étrangères de Paris, founded in 1658, did not evolve greatly after the 1640s. The limited commercial and maritime presence of the French East India Company meant that the priests of the Missions étrangères de Paris also often remained dependent on “good correspondence” with Protestant ship captains, merchants, and companies.33 In 1643 the Propaganda Fide discussed for the first time a report of a Capuchin friar who emphasised the advantages of travelling on English and Dutch ships. At this time,

32 The current state of my archival research indicates a lack of suitable sources for an investigation of the finances of the missions discussed in this contribution. Yet there are some recent publications that shed more light on the economies of the missions in Asia which until now have attracted very little scholarly attention. For a pioneering study on the economy of the Jesuit missions, see Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, as well as the survey by Vermote, “Finances of the Missions”. On the Discalced Carmelites as missionaries in Persia, see Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 539–573. The following volume contains contributions focusing on various missions: Vu Thanh and Županov, Trade and Finance. 33 See Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 429–432.

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the cardinals avoided making a decision on this proposal (as they would do again in 1646 and 1647), which must have been astonishing to the Congregation. Either they were not convinced of its feasibility or they did not want to get involved with “heretics”.34 In fact, however, both the East India Company (less frequently the Dutch VOC) and its local officials, as well as English interlopers, were often willing to allow non-Portuguese Catholic missionaries to travel on their ships within Asia, despite the confessional differences. The decisive factor here was that the missionaries were neither under the Portuguese Padroado nor in contact with other political or commercial competitors. Since the Papal States did not pursue territorial expansion or commercial goals, it was easiest for clergymen who were directly associated with Rome to find opportunities to travel on English ships or to be hospitably received in English trading posts. Accordingly, it was not so much confessional reservations as commercial, political, and military antagonisms that increasingly stood in the way of the practice of “good correspondence” between French clergy and English Protestants. In the first half of the eighteenth century, French clergymen travelling on English ships became a rarity. Finally, in 1749, after the end of the French occupation of Madras, all but a few Catholics were expelled from the “white town” of Fort Saint George, and the coexistence of French Capuchins and company servants, which dated as far back as 1642, came to an abrupt end.

4.

Better “Heretics” than the Jesuits or the Portuguese

In the Indian context, the confessional “rhetoric of intolerance” fed the strident antiPortuguese rhetoric of the religious sent out by the Propaganda Fide. While they praised the English “heretics” as protectors, they singled out the Portuguese, and among them especially the Jesuits, as dangerous third parties, and lambasted them as enemies of the pope and the Roman Church, and even as servants of the devil. The latter was implied by the Discalced Carmelite Anastasio di Santa Maria when he vividly described the unbearable stench emanating from the corpse of the archbishop of Goa, which had turned black and deformed as it was being carried to the cathedral for burial. He went on to say that none of this could be explained by natural causes. In contrast, Anastasio di Santa Maria praised the courtesy and favour of the English towards the members of his order as an expression of divine providence against the enemies of the Church—the Portuguese—who falsely claimed the title of Catholics. In his view, the Portuguese lacked respect for the pope as head of the Church and as a princely ruler, while the English at least respected the pope as a “great prince”. For Anastasio di Santa Maria,

34 Congregation 1 June 1643 (APF, Acta, vol. 15, fol. 338v).

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

the English were “heretics” but nonetheless men of honour who did not hand over the religious seeking protection under their flag to the Portuguese.35 While in Bombay Discalced Carmelites attacked the Portuguese clergy’s position, in Madras it was mainly Theatines and secular clergy from Cardinal Legate Maillard de Tournon’s entourage who accused the Portuguese—again especially the Portuguese Jesuits—of disobedience to the pope. One Theatine of English provenance, John Milton, even dubbed the Portuguese clergy the “chiefs of disobedience” (“capi della disubbidienza”).36 The Theatines hoped that the English governor of Madras, “their great friend” (“lor grande amico”), would give them the parish rights over the trading post of Cuddalore/Fort Saint David (about 170 km south of Madras), which the East India Company had acquired in 1690.37 The Theatines offered their services to the English governor in order to avoid falling under the jurisdiction of the local Portuguese bishop of São Tomé of Mylapore. Although the Propaganda Fide repeatedly confirmed the subordination of the Theatines to the local bishop,38 the Theatine John Milton emphasised in correspondence with the East India Company his order’s independence from the bishop’s jurisdiction and thus from the Padroado.39 Unlike the Discalced Carmelites in Bombay in 1720, the Theatines in Fort Saint David and Madras did not enjoy lasting success. The fact that the relationship between the non-Portuguese clergy in Madras and the clergy of São Tomé remained marked by jurisdictional antagonisms did not always preclude polite personal contact. In 1717, the procurator of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Madras, Giuseppe Ignazio Cordero, reported that the administrator of the bishopric of São Tomé, the Franciscan observant António das Chagas, tolerated “the spiritual misery of these countries” (“le miserie spirituali di questi paesi”) as a result of the orders of the Portuguese court against the Holy See. As far as he was concerned, however, Antonio das Chagas treated him “always with courtesy and generosity” (“sempre con cortesia e libertà”).40

35 Relazione de’ successi della nostra missione del Gran Mogol, written by P. Anastasio di Santa Maria OCD, n.p., n.d. (AGOCD, 268/a/1 and 2); [P. Anastasio di Santa Maria OCD] to P. ? OCD, Karwar, 16 November 1713 (AGOCD, 269/d/5). 36 P. John B. Milton CR to [P. Tomaso Schiara, Procuratore generale delle Missioni Teatine, in Rome], Madras, 15 January 1712 (APF, SOCG, vol. 586, fol. 281r). 37 P. Tomaso Schiara, Procuratore generale delle Missioni Teatine, to the Propaganda Fide, n.p. [Rome], n.d. [1714] (APF, SOCG, vol. 586, fol. 452r/v). 38 General Congregation 3 July 1714, Sommario and decision on point 44 (APF, SOCG, vol. 583, fol. 411v–412v, 414v). 39 P. John Milton CR to the English East India Company, Bencoolen, 26 October 1712 (BL, IOR, H/59, p. 1–6). See also Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 231–232. 40 Giuseppe Ignazio Cordero to [Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripanti, prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith], Madras, 22 September 1717 (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 13-2, fol. 914r/v).

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On the whole, the Portuguese were hostile to clergy who were seen as intruders in their jurisdiction. The proximity of the Propaganda Fide missionaries to the “heretical” English was held up as convincing proof of their lack of orthodoxy. One Portuguese Franciscan claimed, for instance, that the Propaganda Fide missionaries were considered luminaries of Christianity in Rome, although they were its greatest opponents on the ground.41

5.

Catholic Company Churches

Against the backdrop of the double antagonism between the papacy, French Protection, and Portuguese Padroado on the one hand, and between the East India Company and the Estado da Índia on the other, lasting relationships between non-Portuguese Catholic clergy and English authorities developed in places like Madras and Bombay. In these localities, as well as in other smaller English trading posts, Catholic Company Churches emerged. Detached from any connection with the Estado da Índia, these provided the framework for Luso-Indian community organisation under English rule. Like the promotion of the Protestant “English church”, the East India Company’s toleration of different faiths was connected to a claim to rulership that extended over the concerns of the various religious communities insofar as these were relevant to the Company.42 What the East India Company expected of “its” Catholic priests is illustrated by the oath which the governor and council of Bombay demanded of the vicar-apostolic on assuming his episcopal jurisdiction in 1720. Maurizio di Santa Teresa pledged never to act against the honour and dignity of the British Crown or against the interests of the East India Company, to obey the orders of their governor, and to practise the Roman Catholic religion in its original form without any alteration.43 The last of these pledges can be understood as a response to the criticism levelled by the Discalced Carmelites against the Portuguese clergy, but at the same time it also marked the claim of a Protestant authority to a kind of superintendence over internal church affairs. As priests of the Catholic parishes, the Discalced Carmelites in Bombay and the Capuchins in Fort Saint George were to help integrate the Luso-Indian communities into the regime dominated by the East India Company. Maurizio di Santa Teresa’s successor as vicar-apostolic, Pietro d’Alcantara della Santissima Trinità, knew what he had to promise the President of Bombay in 1733 if, like his predecessor, he wanted to receive a stipend of 40 rupees from the Company: he affirmed that he wanted to prove himself as

41 Report by José da Conceição, provincial OFM, to Frederico Guilherme de Souza, Governor of the Estado da Índia, Goa, 22 December 1784, edited in: Meersman, Annual Reports, p. 235–236. 42 See Stern, The Company-State, p. 103–104. 43 For the oath of the vicar-apostolic and further documents from 1720, see Forrest, Selections from the Letters, vol. 2, p. 11–12.

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a “faithful subject” and “vigilant guardian and guarantee of the loyalty and allegiance of all the Roman Catholics of this island” to the British Crown and the “Honourable Company”.44 As a matter of fact, the priests not only administered the sacraments of their church, but they also assumed important functions in the governance of the LusoIndian communities. They acted as agents of social discipline. For example, in Bombay in 1724, a Luso-Indian soldier was punished with 39 lashes outside the entrance of one of the “Portuguese” churches on the basis of a judgment rendered by the East India Company. Thereafter, he was handed over to the priest in charge of the parish for better instruction.45 In Madras, the Capuchins were responsible for various types of notary work in their community.46 The English preference for clergy to be dependent on the East India Company applied to both the Chaplains of the Church of England and the Catholic clergy. This aligned with the Anglican understanding of the unity of secular and ecclesiastical authority. At the same time, this was the price for the religious patronage that the East India Company granted to various religious communities. In this the Company followed the example of local rulers—above all the Mughals.47 Whereas in Bombay, episcopal jurisdiction was formally transferred from the archbishop of Goa to the vicar-apostolic with the approval of the Propaganda Fide, the de facto exemption of the Catholic Company Churches from having to submit to the authority of the local Portuguese bishop in Madras came as a result of the informal interactions of English authorities and non-Portuguese clergy. At Fort Saint George in 1642, the agent and council of the East India Company claimed as theirs the decision over who might administer the sacraments to the Catholics living under their rule; the Capuchin Ephrem de Nevers alone was to perform this task as “pastore degli Cattolici”.48 The East India Company’s claim to dominion in matters of church government manifested itself in the rejection of the authority of local Catholic bishops and religious superiors. When the East India Company acquired the fortress of Fort Saint David and nearby Cuddalore in 1690, the governor and council of Fort Saint George claimed the authority to appoint Catholic priests in these localities, rather than deferring to

44 Memorial by Pietro d’Alcantara della Santissima Trinità OCD, vicar-apostolic, considered by the president and council of Bombay on 19 January 1733 (BL, IOR, P/341/7°, p. 38–42, here: p. 41–42, printed in: Materials towards a Statistical Account, vol. 3, p. 528–529). 45 Fraas, They Have Travelled Into a Wrong Latitude, p. 232, footnote 176. 46 Ibid., p. 217; Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 238–237. 47 On this see Carson, The East India Company and Religion, p. 15–16, p. 21. 48 Memoria data dalli Cappuccini di Madraspatan al Vescovo di Heliopoli [François Pallu] per esser presentata alla S. Congregazione de Propaganda fide, n.p. [Madras], n.d. [likely 1665/1666] (APF, SOCG, vol. 230, fol. 137r/v). In 1665/1666 François Pallu stayed in Madras for ten months on his way back to Europe. It is likely that the Capuchins knew that Pallu was on his way to Rome at that point in time (Baudiment, François Pallu, p. 180–182). During an earlier stay in 1663, Pallu was on his way to Southeast Asia (ibid., p. 144–145.).

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the Portuguese bishop of São Tomé of Mylapore. They opted for Italian Theatines, who sought to evade the jurisdiction of the Portuguese bishop.49 When the bishop in turn appointed a vicar for the church of Cuddalore in 1694, the governor of Fort Saint George rejected any alien claim to jurisdiction: “I ought to deal plainly with you, that no foreign episcopal authority can be admitted within the limits of our jurisdiction, and that you are not Governor or Bishop of Cuddalore no more than of Madras; [...].”50 The East India Company’s reluctance to tolerate jurisdictional claims by superior church officials eventually also affected the vicar-apostolic in Bombay. While the Company had favoured the first two office holders, Maurizio di Santa Teresa and Pietro d’Alcantara della Santissima Trinità, in order to curtail the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Goa, it denied their successors the right to settle in Bombay for a long period of time. Interestingly, the activities of the Discalced Carmelites as parish priests were never restricted. The governor and council of Fort Saint George showed comparable reservations in relation to the religious superiors of the French Capuchins in Madras. How they envisaged the process of appointing a superior became apparent when the local incumbent died in 1708. At that time, the three remaining Capuchins asked the governor and council to continue to grant them their protection. They did not name a candidate for the vacant office, thus placing the decision in the hands of the governor and council. It is likely that an oral agreement preceded this exchange. The Company representatives, in any case, appointed a signatory of the letter in question.51 The directors of the Company in London, for their part, confirmed this choice and at the same time called on the governor and council to continue to keep such appointments in their own hands in the future: “[...] always keep these appointments or the power in your own hand, whereby you will have the greater authority over those ecclesiastics to keep them within bounds, and [cause them to maintain] a suitable deportment towards the Government, and engage them to your interest, and thereby all their dependents.”52 In Bombay the cooperation of the Discalced Carmelites and the English authorities against the Portuguese Padroado in 1720 created space for a Roman papal mission. In Madras, on the other hand, the French Capuchins held their own against their competitors hailing from Italy. The activity of Italian Theatines there remained episodic in character, just like that of the procurators of the Propaganda Fide, the first of whom, Giuseppe Ignazio Cordero, had belonged to the entourage of Cardinal Legate Maillard de Tournon. The relationship between the Capuchins and the procurators of the Propa-

49 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 220–223. 50 Nathanael Higginson, Governor of Madras, to the bishop of São Tomé of Mylapore, Consultations, 7 April 1694, printed in: Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 222–223. 51 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 226. 52 Despatch of the directors of the East India Company to the governor and council of Madras, 9 January 1709, printed in: Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 226.

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ganda Fide reveals another area of tension: that between the French Capuchins and the clergy sent out by Rome. In contrast to the clergy under the Portuguese Padroado, the French clergy, who had been travelling in the Middle East and Asia under the protection of their king since the seventeenth century, recognised the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Fide. As the French presence in Asia increased, however, tensions began to rise. Alongside the fierce anti-Portuguese rhetoric, now came anti-French rhetoric from the Italian Propaganda Fide missionaries, who, again, denounced any resistance to papal authority. According to Bernardino Campi, who was in Madras in the 1720s as procurator of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the Capuchin Thomas de Poitiers disliked the missionaries who were directly dependent on the Propaganda Fide, because “he believes that all those who are sent from Rome are spies.”53 The English dealt with such antagonisms between Catholic clergy in various ways depending on the situation. At times they played clergy of different affiliations off against each other; in other cases, they cultivated close relations with members of one order to thus limit conflicts among the Company’s Catholic subjects. In Bombay, the Discalced Carmelites of Rome benefited from these tactics, while in Madras the Capuchins of France won out. The assessment of the latter by members of other orders and secular clergy was correspondingly ambivalent. Clergy on the move reported on the hospitality of the Capuchins, who granted them accommodation in their hospice and helped them organise their onward journey. In 1718, for example, four Italian Discalced Augustinians finally found an opportunity to travel on an English ship to Canton in Madras, after having waited in vain for ten months in Pondicherry to continue their journey to China. They attributed this favourable outcome to the Capuchin Thomas de Poitiers, who had made their case “with all his might to this Lord Governor, his great friend” (“a tutto suo potere appresso questo Signore Governatore suo grande amico”).54 The good relationship between the Capuchins and Italian clergy came to an end when the latter envisaged a permanent stay in Madras. Particularly difficult was the relationship with the procurators of the Propaganda Fide, whose tasks included maintaining relations with the English authorities. It is notable that these procurators in Madras in the 1710s and 1720s consistently described the English governors—Edward Harrison, Joseph Collet, Francis Hastings, and Nathaniel Elwick—as “friends”. If any problems arose from the English side, they were viewed as a result of intrigues spun by the Capuchins, who were well connected locally. Particularly well documented are the relationships of a number of Theatines to Joseph Collet, who served on behalf of the East India Company as deputy governor of the 53 Bernardino Campi to Cardinal [Giuseppe] Sacripanti, Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Madras, 29 August 1723 (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 16-2, fol. 868v). 54 P. Roberto Barozzi e Compagni [Agostiniani scalzi] to the cardinals of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Madras, 2 July 1728 (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 19, fol. 487r).

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trading posts on Sumatra from 1712 to 1716 and as governor of Fort Saint George from 1716 to 1719. In 1715, the Theatine Giovanni Gaetano Comini, who served on Sumatra during Collet’s tenure, wrote to his brother in Italy describing how the English “favoured”, “protected”, and “liberally supported” the Theatines. Now that he had to travel to Madras in a few days, Comini had been given money for purchases for the church and for his needs during the journey, and he had furthermore been recommended to the ship’s captain so that he would travel free of charge to Madras and then back to Sumatra. Joseph Collet had also written a letter of recommendation to the governor of Madras “ex corde”, or “from the heart”.55 What is striking about these descriptions is that the clergymen expressed the advantageous situation under English rule predominantly in terms of personal entanglement—of protection and friendship—and hardly ever referred to freedom. In the language of the missionaries and their superiors, “freedom” had a negative connotation, referring above all to exemption from values and norms.56 The missionaries only spoke of freedom of conscience when discussing the demands they placed upon themselves.57 While the Theatines, Capuchins, and Italian secular clergy were unanimous in attesting to Collet’s “protection” and “friendship”, they ignored the governor’s specific position in the English religious context and the ideological foundations of his behaviour towards the Catholic clergy. From Comini’s point of view, the favour shown gave rise to the expectation of a rapprochement between Collet and the Roman Church. In reality, however, the “protector” and “friend” was not only a Baptist, but also counted himself as part of an anti-Trinitarian minority within the broad spectrum of Baptist communities. As deputy governor in Sumatra and later as governor in Madras, he nevertheless presided over the local “English church”. Citing the Holy Scriptures as the sole guide to his actions, Collet condemned “all Tyranny, Ecclesiastick and Civil” that imposed articles of faith on other people under threat of temporal punishment.58 As the local “head of the Church”, he therefore banned the public reading of the Trinitarian Athanasian Creed,

55 P. Giovanni Gaetano Comini CR to P. Carlo Comini CR, Bencoolen, 14 December 1715: “L’Inglesi, che sono i signori di questo luoco, ci vedono di buon genio, ci favoriscono, ci protegono, e ci sostentano con liberalità” (AGT, Mss. 125: Letteri spettanti agl’interessi delle Missioni Teatine spedite a Roma, fol. 39v–40r). 56 The Discalced Carmelite Innocenzo di San Leopoldo in 1722 advised sending only “Religiosi di tutta qualità” to Bombay because the island belonged to the “English gentlemen” and the religious would otherwise fall “to any type of freedom” (P. Innocenzo di San Leopoldo OCD to Cardinal [Giuseppe Sacripanti, prefect PF], Karwar, 22 January 1722 [APF, SOCG, vol. 638, fol. 282r/v]). 57 Accordingly, in 1663 the Propaganda Fide demanded “libertà di coscienza” for Catholics in the territories which the Dutch had wrested from the Portuguese (General Congregation 10 April 1663 [APF, Acta, vol. 32, fol. 103r/v]). 58 Joseph Collet, governor of Fort Saint George, to Rev. Nathaniel Hodges, Fort Saint George, 28 August 1718 (edited in: Dodwell and Collet, The Private Letter Books, p. 192).

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

as prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer.59 He equally condemned the Reformed Synod of Dort (1618–1619) and the Council of Trent as human inventions that did not have their origins in Holy Scripture: “The authority of a British convocation does not weigh one grain of Pepper with me, nor have I more regard to St. Athanasius than to the Council of Trent or Synod of Dord. I firmly believe what is reveal’d in the Holy Scriptures but acknowledge no other Authority.”60 With his scripture-based plea for a “liberty of conscience” that included Catholics and non-Christians, the anti-Trinitarian Baptist Collet went well beyond the “tolerance of practical rationality” that otherwise characterised the relationship between the East India Company and the Catholic clergy.61 This “tolerance” meant that denominational differences were put aside to such an extent that they no longer interfered with everyday coexistence. In keeping with this, the East India Company not only guaranteed the freedom of religion for Catholics in its laws, which were issued in 1669 after the taking of Bombay, but also limited religious controversy by punishing physical and verbal assaults against the adherents of other faiths.62 The Company thus put into words a norm of behaviour that was valid well beyond Bombay. This is illustrated by the report of a Theatine discussing a voyage from Madras to Malacca on an English ship in 1726. In this letter to his religious superiors in Rome, the Theatine did not dramatise his own achievements as a missionary in confessional controversy. Instead, he voiced his displeasure that the English captain of the ship wanted to argue each day with the two clergymen eating at his table. The Theatine emphasised that this behaviour violated the norms of respectful correspondence between people of different confessions by referring to the negative reactions of the other “heretical” ship officers.63

59 Joseph Collet, governor of Fort Saint George, to Adam Holden, [Fort Saint George], 19 September 1716 (edited in: Dodwell and Collet, The Private Letter Books, p. 138). 60 Joseph Collet, governor of Fort Marlborough, to Rev. Moses Lowman, Fort Marlborough, 3 January 1715 (edited in: Dodwell and Collet, The Private Letter Books, p. 115). See also Joseph Collet to [his brother Samuel Collet], n.p., n.d. [likely Fort Marlborough, 3 January 1715]: “[…] I am daily more and more confirm’d in the principles of Natural Religion and in the divine authority of the old and new Testament […]; but I acknowledge that the determination of a General Councill, the joynt Opinion of all the Fathers, the decrees of a Convocation, and the Acts of a British Parliament all put together are of no weight at all with me in matters of Faith” (edited in: ibid., p. 111). 61 I use the term as outlined by Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 269–280. 62 Company’s Laws for Bombay, 1669, edited in: Fawcett, The First Century of British Justice, p. 17–28, here p. 19–21. 63 P. Francesco Maria Sagariga CR to P. Redanaschi, Procuratore generale delle Missioni Teatine, Chiundabundo, 29 April 1726: “con tutto, gl’altri officiali ancorche eretici conoscendo l’impertinenza del Capitano e dall’altra parte la nostra modestia, restavano edificatissimi, et essi medesimi ci persuadevano di fugire simili discorsi” (AGT, Mss. 126, fol. 120r/v; original: Mss. 124 [127–129]).

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6.

Trans-Confessional Sociability

The highly specific situation of Catholic clergy and laity under Protestant authority not only had a bearing on the local laws governing church affairs, but also led to Catholic missionaries regularly socialising with English “heretics”. As men of status, the Catholic clergy took part in the interaction rituals that produced and reproduced the social order in the settlements of the East India Company. For example, when the Discalced Carmelite Maurizio di Santa Teresa served as vicar-apostolic in Bombay, he attended a festive midday meal every Sunday in the residence of the English governor and took his place in the circle of “gentlemen and merchants”. On these occasions, even the news of the election of a new pope is said to have become the subject of respectful conversation among men of rank. The vicar-apostolic received the news of the election of Pietro Francesco Orsini as pope under the name Benedict XIII from the English governor, as he explained in his letter of congratulations to the newly elected pope. The Englishman had apparently met him at the entrance to the dining room, taken him by the hand and told him: “Monsignor, I have good news for you, we have a Holy Pope, and he referred to Your Holiness first with the name he bore as Cardinal and then the name as Pope.”64 Lower-ranking clergymen were also involved in trans-confessional sociability between men of status. Missionaries of different affiliations often accused each other of socialising with the English. Usually, the accused countered such criticism of excessive proximity with the “heretics” by emphasising the benefits of “good correspondence” for the mission. For members of mendicant orders, such as the Discalced Carmelites in Bombay and the Capuchins in Madras, signs of worldly distinction provided a particularly sensitive focal point for criticism. In 1720, for example, an Italian from Lucca, in the service of the East India Company in Madras, wrote to a member of the Propaganda Fide complaining that the Capuchins in Madras were behaving like “gentlemen and merchants” (“gentiluomini e mercanti”) instead of clergymen. According to him, the priests let themselves be carried by porters when they went to someone’s sickbed to hear their confession, and in the evenings they let themselves be seen in a horse-drawn

64 Maurizio di Santa Teresa OCD to Pope Benedict XIII., Bombay, 24 January 1726: “Quello che maggior consolacione mi hà aportato, è che la prima nuova che habiamo hauto della di lei Elleccione ci fù data dal Sigr Generale della Compagnia Inglesa nel Indie Orientali protestante, qualle in Giorno di Domenica alla presenza di tutti li suoi Gentilhomini, e mercanti, essendo io andato per vistarlo, et assistere alla di lui mensa, come facio per di lui ordine tutte le Domeniche, mi venne a ricevermi alla porta della Sala, et presomi per la mano dissemi Monsigr tengo una bona nova da darli et è habiamo un Papa Santo, et nominomi la Persona di Vostra Santità del di lei nome para Cardinale, et poi di quello che prese elletto somo Pontefice, cosa in vero che mi diede somo contento, vedendo lodati li meriti di Vostra Santità, anche da Protestanti, che tutti quelli Signori mostrarono somo contento, et si congratularono meco” (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 18, fol. 47r).

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

carriage.65 This criticism must be viewed in the context of the antagonism between the Propaganda Fide procurator and the Capuchins. Moreover, the Discalced Carmelite friars and the vicar-apostolic in Bombay, who often did not see eye to eye although the latter was a member of the same order, covered each other with accusations in their correspondence with the Propaganda Fide and their religious superiors. According to an anonymous Notizia del stato temporale e spirituale written by a member of the order between 1738 and 1745, the close relations with the English seduced the religious. With very few exceptions, they now pursued the lifestyle of gentlemen, instead of submitting to their vows of poverty: they cut their beards, and wore shoes and good clothes. The note went on to say that their clothes only retained the shape and colour of the order’s customary habit, and their house was furnished in a stately manner. They often conversed with the English, and behaved more like not-so-pious laymen than like respectable clergymen.66 The point of reference for such criticism was the extremely strict normative order that had emerged as a result of the Theresian reform of the Carmelite Order, as well as the efforts of the Roman Curia to reform the regular clergy. Therefore, the fact that the religious themselves frequently reported that they were treated with great respect locally as a result of their pious lifestyle does not necessarily have to be read as a euphemistic contradiction. Just like the clerics in other pluri-religious contexts,67 the Discalced Carmelites who worked in India under the rule of the East India Company presented the respect they were shown by those of other faiths as evidence of their personal qualities, which they associated with their specific way of life as observant members of a mendicant order. A Discalced Carmelite in his correspondence with the Propaganda Fide described the vicar-apostolic Maurizio di Santa Teresa as a “holy man”. Furthermore, “the Lord General of Bombay, together with his whole court, esteems and loves him”, and he entrusted the government of the Christians of Bombay to the Discalced Carmelites and not to members of other orders as a result of the vicar-apostolic’s “good manners and holiness”.68

65 Francesco Demetrio Calamatti from Lucca to a Cardinal, Madras, 12 January 1720 (APF, SOCP, vol. 29: Scritture originali delle Congregazioni particolari dell’Indie Orientali dall’anno 1718 al 1720, fol. 419r/v). 66 Notizia del stato temporale e spirituale della nostra missione nell’Isola di Bombayno, n.p., n.d. [the references to the capture of Salcete by the Marathas and the vicar-apostolic still residing on the island would suggest a point in time between 1738 and 1745] (AGOCD, 268/f/3). 67 On the cross-denominational composition of mourners at the funerals of missionaries as a sign of the high esteem in which they were held, see Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 482–484. 68 P. Innocenzo di San Leopoldo OCD, to [Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripanti, Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Karwar, 22 January 1722: “[…] basta dir che il Signor Nostro Vescovo è un huomo santo, per questo il Signor Generale di Bombaym lo stima, ed ama con tutta la sua corte, e per causa de’ suoi buoni costumi, e santità ci diede a governar la Christianità di Bombaym […]” (APF, SOCG, vol. 638, fol. 283v).

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The English appreciation for the Discalced Carmelites put confessional differences into perspective when it came to social interactions. Maurizio di Santa Teresa’s successor, Pietro d’Alcantara della Santissima Trinità, emphasised how the English “esteemed and loved the Discalced Carmelites [...] as if there were no difference of religion between us and them”.69 Conversely, around 1740, missionaries accused Pietro d’Alcantara of sharing with the English a series of ideas that were completely unknown to the Catholic faith, claiming, for example, that everyone could be saved through their own religion.70 We know that during his time as vicar-apostolic in Bombay, Maurizio di Santa Teresa not only took part in civil celebrations of the English colony, such as the jubilee of the coronation of King George I, but also that he consented to being shown around the recently completed Protestant Church of Saint Thomas by the governor at a time when the English had gathered there to pray. His Portuguese opponents therefore accused him and his fellow Carmelites of heresy. They claimed that, as “English Priests”, the Discalced Carmelites were teaching children “the heretical Christian doctrine” and that they held Mass differently than the Portuguese religious.71 This accusation is reminiscent of the charges brought against the French Capuchin Ephrem de Nevers by the Inquisition of Goa seventy years earlier. The remainder of this chapter will discuss this Inquisition trial with a particular focus on the interaction between various Catholicisms and the English at Fort Saint George/Madras.

7.

Accommodation and Trans-Confessional Religious Practices: Ephrem de Nevers and the Inquisition of Goa

In 1642, the agent and council of Fort Saint George entrusted the pastoral care of the Luso-Indian population to the Capuchin Ephrem de Nevers. They thus took advantage of the potential opposition they assumed would arise between French priests and the Portuguese clergy to consolidate their own authority in ecclesiastical matters immediately after founding Fort Saint George. Yet, beyond matters of secular church governance, the local English also interacted with the competing Catholicisms on points 69 Negotio tocante l’Isola di Bombain, authored by Pietro d’Alcantara della Santissima Trinità OCD, vicarapostolic, n.p., n.d. [1732] (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 21, fol. 49v). 70 Notizia del stato temporale e spirituale della nostra missione nell’Isola di Bombayno, n.p., n.d. [the references to the capture of Salcete by the Marathas and the vicar-apostolic still residing on the island would suggest a point in time between 1738 and 1745] (AGOCD, 268/f/3). See also P. Giuseppe Francesco di San Teodosio OCD to the secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Bombay, 27 January 1734, stating that the vicar-apostolic had “committed various terrible crimes against the dogma as well as the Catholic discipline” (“commessi vari, ed enormi crimi tanto spettanti al dogma come alla disciplina Cattolica”) (APF, SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 21, fol. 507r). 71 P. Innocenzo di San Leopoldo OCD, to [Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripanti, Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith], Karwar, 22 January 1722 (APF, SOCG, vol. 638, fol. 283r).

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

of doctrine. This emerged clearly when Ephrem de Nevers was lured to São Tomé of Mylapore in 1649. There he was arrested and abducted to Goa. The trial before the Inquisition there culminated in a remarkably lenient verdict in 1651. This favourable outcome most likely came as a result of the protest and general pressure applied by the papacy, the French, and the English. Father Ephrem was released from prison after publicly abjuring his errors on three points: the rejection of visual depictions of the Trinity, the recognition of the priesthood of the Anglican clergy, and the rejection of the adoration of the cross (latria).72 According to the promotor of the Inquisition in Goa, the Capuchin had adopted “heretical” errors in the course of his “political friendship” with the English.73 Indeed, the analysis of Ephrem de Nevers’ Apologia [...] contra invidos, which he wrote in 1649 while in Portuguese custody, confirms that his ecclesiastical practice was intended to foster a mutual understanding with the English. This extensive text, written entirely in Latin, has so far gone largely unnoticed. It is, however, particularly interesting, since the Capuchin emphasised the common ground he saw with the English even while he was in Portuguese custody defending himself against the accusation of heresy. After his arrest in São Tomé, he was confronted with the following accusations: it was said that he had often prayed together with the English in Madras, that he had consented to children of Catholics being baptised by an Anglican priest, that he had stated that an Anglican priest was just as good as a Catholic one, that he had not taken part in any of the celebrations for Saint Thomas in São Tomé, that he had translated Bible texts into the vernacular for the sermon, and that he had covered up altarpieces during Mass and removed a sculpture of the crucified Christ from the altar.74 In Goa, the Capuchin was accused not only of adopting Protestant “heresies”, but also of referring to the advantages of his French homeland, where there was no Inquisition and therefore everyone could live according to his conscience.75 In his Apologia, Ephrem de Nevers rejected some of the accusations as inaccurate; on other points he justified his approach. Father Ephrem relativised the confessional opposition to the English with references to the practices of other missions, as well as with a selective reading of the decisions of the Council of Trent. In conversation with a Dominican, he had emphasised the differences between Anglicans and Calvinists. In

72 On the Inquisition process against Ephrem de Nevers, see esp. Ames, “The Perils of Spreading”; id.: “Trade and Inquisition”. Cf. Richard, “Ephrem de Nevers”; Vink, “Church and State”, p. 36–43; Aranha, “‘Glocal’ conflicts”. 73 Libelle donné par le promoteur de l’Inquisition de Goa contre le P. Ephrem de Nevers, 4 November 1650 (MEP, vol. 348, p. 3–16). 74 Apologia fratris Ephrem Nivernensis Missionarii Capucini contra invidos, n.d. [1649, see p. 18: “Hoc anno 1649”] (MEP, vol. 348, p. 17–48, here p. 22). 75 Libelle donné par le promoteur de l’Inquisition de Goa contre le P. Ephrem de Nevers, 4 November 1650 (MEP, vol. 348, p. 3–16, here p. 7, 11).

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contrast to the latter, the Anglicans had preserved the sacrament of ordination and thus the episcopate and priesthood when they separated from Rome. Ephrem de Nevers argued that his statements on this issue had been misinterpreted with ill will or ignorance to give rise to the accusation that he had said that an Anglican priest was just as good as a Catholic priest. While disputing the wording of the statement put in his mouth, he reiterated—while still in Portuguese custody—his estimation that it was “probabilis” that Anglican priests possessed the actual quality of priests. To justify himself, Father Ephrem referred to the Catholic treatment of the “schismatic” and “heretical” Eastern Christians in the Middle East whose priests were nevertheless accepted as true by the local missionaries. When they entered their churches, they therefore took part in the Eucharist consecrated by priests of churches that had broken away from Rome. In Father Ephrem’s view, the same should apply to the Anglicans.76 He was right insofar as a final papal decision against the validity of Anglican ordinations was still pending in 1649. It was not made until 1896. The Capuchin made an effort to align Catholic practices with the expectations of the Protestant audience in the English trading posts. In order to do so, he reverted on some issues to the positions of reformers within the Catholic Church. Some of these ideas had found their way into the decisions of the Council of Trent. This was, for instance, the case for the question of how to deal with images or liturgical drama in the church. Even before his arrest, the Capuchin had told the Portuguese Capitão Geral of São Tomé that the corresponding decree of the Council of Trent was his guideline for dealing with images. Furthermore, he had expressed the view that images—unlike the Sacraments or the Ten Commandments—were items that could be adapted to local circumstances and allowed or omitted accordingly. He went on to state that since the local converts were all descendants and relatives of “pagans”, they worshipped the Christian statues given to them as if they were idols. In order to avoid Muslims equating Christians with “pagans”, he concluded that only painted images should be used, not sculptures.77 Against the background of the Council of Trent, Ephrem de Nevers criticised the practice of the local Portuguese church. In 1644, he took part in the Corpus Christi procession in São Tomé of Mylapore and claimed to have seen how the members of the Confraternity of the Rosary and even clergy gossiped and laughed during the procession. 76 Apologia fratris Ephrem Nivernensis Missionarii Capucini contra invidos, n.d. [1649] (MEP, vol. 348, p. 17–48, here p. 31–33). It is possible that the Capuchin did not know that the Holy Office and the Propaganda Fide had rejected the admissibility of such practices of communicatio in sacris with “schismatics” and “heretics” on various occasions. Or perhaps, like many missionaries in the Middle East, he simply ignored the decisions which, prior to 1729, consistently referred to individual cases. On this, see Windler, Missionare in Persien, p. 589–597. See also Santus, Trasgressioni necessarie, p. 169–196. 77 P. Ephrem de Nevers OFM Cap to Manuel de Mascarenhas de Almada, Capitão Geral de S. Thomé, Madras, 1 May 1648 (MEP, vol. 348, p. 69–84, here p. 75–82). Father Ephrem does not use the term “adiaphora”, but in his argument he uses the same distinction otherwise associated mainly with the Jesuits in China and South India.

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Confronted with such impiety, he left the procession and henceforth celebrated the feast in his own church. He further expressed his indignation at a play performed on the occasion of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary in the cathedral of São Tomé that was attended by the crew of an English ship anchoring in the port of São Tomé. The Capuchin justified his indignation with reference to the prohibitions taken by the Council of Trent, particularly since the play was witnessed by Protestant spectators. These spectators expressed their horror at what they had seen the following day in the presence of Father Ephrem in Fort Saint George. According to the Capuchin, the local English agent defended him on this occasion, and affirmed that the priest himself had not enjoyed the play and was very much against those who had.78 Competing claims to patronage and protection and differing dogmatic positions collided in the disputes concerning Ephrem de Nevers. The case came before the Propaganda Fide in 1650 accompanied by a supplication from the Procurator General of the Capuchins, in which he denounced the imprisonment of the religious in Goa under “hollow pretexts”.79 Following his sentencing by the Inquisition in Goa and his return to Fort Saint George, Ephrem de Nevers sought support for his positions in France and in Rome. The Sorbonne confirmed his statements as orthodox.80 The Propaganda Fide, for its part, decided in 1652 to write to the archbishop of Goa to ensure that he would no longer allow the harassment of apostolic missionaries.81 The English had previously even sought to force the release of “their” Capuchin, by taking the highest-ranking clergyman of São Tomé of Mylapore into custody. Their plan had been foiled, however, by the timely escape of their prisoner. The fate of Ephrem de Nevers shows simultaneously how the competition between different early modern Catholicisms could affect the life of a missionary, and how such an agent might navigate between multiple ecclesiastical centres. Here it was not merely issues of jurisdiction that were at stake, but also questions of doctrine. The Capuchin ultimately succeeded in mobilising support from France and Rome against the inquisition of Goa. Yet later disputes in Fort Saint George show that Ephrem de Nevers actually modified confessional boundaries in a way that made his ecclesiastical practice attractive to the English. In 1662, at the instigation of the Protestant Chaplain William Isaacson and some of the English factors, the directors of the East India Company banned the Capuchins from, among other things, baptising English children and visiting the sickbeds of English patients.82 Thomas Chamber, the agent at Fort Saint George, came to the defence of the religious, emphasising, on the one hand, their importance

78 Apologia fratris Ephrem Nivernensis Missionarii Capucini contra invidos, n.d. [1649] (MEP, vol. 348, p. 17–48, here p. 38–39, p. 41–42). 79 General Congregation of the Propaganda Fide, 6 September 1650 (APF, Acta, vol. 19, fol. 415v). 80 MEP, vol. 349, p. 241; BNF, Mss. fr. 6231. 81 General Congregation of the Propaganda Fide, 18 March 1652 (APF, Acta, vol. 21, fol. 33v–34r). 82 Penny, The Church in Madras, vol. 1, p. 25–33.

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for the “Portuguese” soldiers in the service of the East India Company. On the other hand, he also referred to the “crimes” of which Father Ephrem had been accused by the Goa Inquisition. In particular, his statements “against praying to saints and carved images” seemed to cast him in a positive light from a Protestant point of view. Chamber argued that since then, these “crimes” committed by the priests had only increased in severity, “for upon all occasions of christnings, burialls, and weddings, they come to our divine service and heare preaching and praying according to the manner and institution of the Church of England”. He stressed that if any Capuchins now fell into the hands of the Portuguese, they would certainly be burned.83 The flexibility of confessional boundaries was a scandal for the Portuguese Inquisition and the Protestant Chaplain alike, while it simultaneously secured the Capuchins the esteem of the English agent. This can be better understood by considering how the agent was embedded in local networks. Thomas Chamber was married to a “lady from the Indies”.84 During the tenure of his predecessor, Henry Greenhill, Chamber had enriched himself enormously as a member of both Indian and Luso-Indian networks. Since his appointment as agent in 1659, he based his rule over Madras on these same networks, as David Veevers has recently emphasised.85 Trans-confessional religious practices were thus shaped by the composite structures of early modern Catholicism on the one hand, and of the English and Indian monarchies, on which the East India Company depended on the other.

8.

Conclusions

The present chapter has led us into a socio-cultural microcosm in which a specific “Company Catholicism” emerged out of the interactions between the global claims of the Portuguese, Roman, and French Catholicisms, the local practices of missionaries and laymen, as well as the demands of the English East India Company and its local representatives. This “Company Catholicism” was characterised by a far-reaching exemption from the superordinate Catholic ecclesiastical authorities and an ecclesiastical practice that was attractive to some Englishmen due to the modification and relativisation of confessional boundaries. It was, however, for this very reason that it also provoked countermeasures from the English. The fact that missionaries of the Propaganda Fide had to place themselves at the mercy of the “heretical” English and designated them as their only protectors vis-à-vis the Portuguese and Jesuits illustrates the limits of papal influence in Asia. The papal missions were baroque veneers supporting the papacy’s claims to legitimacy. Behind 83 Thomas Chamber, 24 May 1661, cited in: Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, vol. 1, p. 181–184, quotations on p. 183. 84 Nocentelli, Empires of Love, p. 140. 85 Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire, p. 83–87.

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Early Modern Composite Catholicism from a Global Perspective

them were people whose everyday lives forced them to adapt their practices in ways that stood in stark contrast to their confessionally defined “missio”. Faced with a lack of financial resources and a lack of protection from Catholic secular actors, the papal missionaries in Asia felt compelled to exploit the gaps in the topography of secular church patronage, which grew larger over the course of the seventeenth century thanks to the advance of the Protestant East India Companies. These missionaries stood in opposition to the secular authorities of the Estado da Índia and to the Portuguese clergy and, to some extent, to the clergy under French protection. All the while, they discursively distinguished themselves from the “heretical” English and at the same time maintained close relations with them. The term “polycentricity” can be used to describe the dynamics of competition which sometimes manifested themselves in the lives of missionaries with dramatic consequences (e. g., the case of the Inquisition trial against Ephrem de Nevers). In order to grasp the contemporary understanding of the structures of rulership, however, it seems to me to make more sense to focus on the “layered” and composite character of early modern Catholicism. Such an approach follows the conceptual example of research concerned with secular early modern monarchies. As a result, here I have proposed speaking of a “composite Catholicism”. Instead of focusing primarily on the (multiple and competing) centres of power, this terminology guides our attention to the multilateral dependencies of subaltern actors and to their various spaces for action characterised by their often far-reaching autonomy and their simultaneous hierarchical embeddedness. At the same time, “composite Catholicism” emphasises the diversity of early modern Catholicisms and the fact that highly autonomous subaltern actors—such as the clergy of the Estado da Índia or the Society of Jesus—legitimised their privileges with their services to the one Catholic Church and the pope as its monarchical ruler. In view of the relationships between Catholic missionaries and their “heretical” and secular counterparts—the East India Company and the Englishmen associated with it—this opens up illuminating possibilities for comparison that build on the recent research on the East India Company as a “company-state”. In the case of the East India Company, these “layers” meant that the sharp English rejection of “popery” and “papists” had limited effects on their local practices of rulership in India until the first half of the eighteenth century. Similar “layers” emerged on the Catholic side when local missionaries defined their relationships with “heretics” who were also their protectors. Paolo Prodi showed many years ago that the pope as head of the Church claimed a symbolic authority that was in principle far more absolute than that of secular rulers.86 This impression, however, should not obscure the inner diversity of “layered” and “composite” early modern Catholicism. As is well known, popes only became infallible in the second half of the nineteenth century, shortly after the British Parliament had

86 Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice; id., “Il ‘sovrano pontefice’”.

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stripped the East India Company of its claim to rulership in India and transferred it to the Crown. Here, too, one might fruitfully investigate the parallel developments in the ecclesiastic and secular realms that allowed the sovereign nation-state to replace early modern “composite monarchies” as the normative standard.87 Translated by Regine Maritz

Bibliography Archival Sources Archives des Missions Étrangères de Paris, Paris (MEP) − vol. 348, 349. Archivio Storico de Propaganda fide, Rome (APF) − Acta, vol. 15, 19, 21, 32, 90, 93. − SC. Indie Orientali e Cina, vol. 13-2, 15-2, 16-1, 16-2, 17, 18, 19, 21. − SOCG, vol. 230, 583, 586, 638. − SOCP, vol. 29: Scritture originali delle Congregazioni particolari dell’Indie Orientali dall’anno 1718 al 1720. Archivum Generale Clericorum Regularium Theatinorum, Rome (AGT) − Mss. 124, 125, 126. Archivum Generale Ordinis Carmelitarum Discalceatorum, Rome (AGOCD) − 268/a/1 and 2, 268/f/3, 269/d/5. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (BNF) − Mss. fr. 6231. British Library, London (BL) − IOR, H/59, P/341/7°. Printed and Edited Sources Dodwell, H. H., and Clara E. Collet (eds.). The Private Letter Books of Joseph Collet Sometime Governor of Fort St. George, Madras. London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1933. Fawcett, Charles. The First Century of British Justice in India: An Account of the Court of Judicature at Bombay, Established in 1672, and of Other Courts of Justice in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, from 1661 to the Latter Part of the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1934. Forrest, George W. (ed.). Selections from the Letters, Despatches, and Other State Papers Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat. Home Series, vol. 2. Bombay: Printed at the Government Central Press, 1887.

87 Cf. Raedts, “The Church as Nation State”.

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Materials towards a Statistical Account of the Town and Island of Bombay, vol. 3: Administration. Bombay: Printed at the Government Central Press, 1894. Meersman, Achilles OFM. Annual Reports of the Portuguese Franciscans in India 1713–1833. Lisbon: Centro de estudos históricos ultramarinos, 1972. Literature Ago, Renata. Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca. Rome/Bari: Editori Laterza, 1990. Alden, Dauril. The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Ames, Glen J. “The Perils of Spreading the True Faith in Asia: Fr. Ephraim de Nevers and the Goa Inquisition.” In Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 22 (1996), p. 81–94. Ames, Glen J. “Trade and Inquisition: Fr. Ephraim de Nevers, M. Dellon and the Challenges Confronting the French in India, ca. 1650–1677.” In Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 28 (2002), p. 113–126. Ames, Glenn J. “The Role of Religion in the Transfer and Rise of Bombay, c. 1661–1687.” In The Historical Journal 46 (2003), p. 317–340. Andaya, Leonard Y. “The ‘Informal Portuguese Empire’ and the Topasses in the Solor Archipelago and Timor in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 41 (2010), p. 391–420. Aranha, Paolo. “‘Glocal’ Conflicts: Missionary Controversies on the Coromandel Coast between the XVII and XVIII Centuries.” In Evangelizzazione e globalizzazione: le missioni gesuitiche nell’età moderna tra storia e storiografia, edited by Michela Catto, Guido Mongini, and Silvia Mostaccio. Città di Castello: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 2010, p. 79–104. Baudiment, Louis. François Pallu: Principal fondateur de la Société des Missions étrangères. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne et ses fils, 1934. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Robert Aleksander Maryks, and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (eds.). Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018. Carson, Penelope. The East India Company and Religion, 1698–1858. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012. Elliott, John. H. “A Europe of Composite Monarchies.” In Past & Present 137 (1992), p. 48–71. Fraas, Arthur Mitchell. “‘They Have Travelled Into a Wrong Latitude:’ The Laws of England, Indian Settlements, and the British Imperial Constitution 1726–1773.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2011. Glickman, Gabriel. The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009. Guite, Jangkhomang. “The English Company and the Catholics of Madras in the Age of Religious Conflicts in England, 1640–1750.” In Studies in History 28/2 (2012), p. 179–201. Halikowski Smith, Stefan. Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya, 1640–1720. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011. Heijmans, Elisabeth. The Agency of Empire: Connections and Strategies in French Overseas Expansion (1686–1746). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2020.

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Hespanha, António Manuel. Filhos da terra: Identitades mestiças nos confins da expansão portuguesa. Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2019. Love, Henry Davison. Vestiges of Old Madras 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office, and from Other Sources, vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1913. Maifreda, Germano. I denari dell’inquisitore: Affari e giustizia di fede nell’Italia moderna. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2014. Mayer, Thomas F. The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, c. 1590–1640. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Mendonça, Délio de. “Protestant and Jesuit Encounters in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Robert Aleksander Maryks, and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2018, p. 137–158. Menniti Ippolito, Antonio. 1664. Un anno della Chiesa universale: Saggio sull’italianità del papato in età moderna. Rome: Viella, 2011. Mentz, Søren. The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660–1740. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005. Metzler, Josef. “Propaganda und Missionspatronat im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum, 1622–1972, vol. 2: 1700–1815, edited by Josef Metzger. Rome/Freiburg im Breisgau/Vienna: Herder, 1973, p. 180–235. Nightingale, Carl H. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Nocentelli, Carmen. Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Parker, Charles H. “‘Better the Turk than the Pope’: Calvinist Engagement with Islam in Southeast Asia.” In Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, edited by Ulinka Rublack. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 177–195. Penny, Frank. The Church in Madras: Being the History of the Ecclesiastical and Missionary Action of the East India Company in the Presidency of Madras in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 1. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1904. Pizzorusso, Giovanni. “Le pape rouge et le pape noir. Aux origines des conflits entre la Congrégation de ‘Propaganda fide’ et la Compagnie de Jésus au XVIIe siècle.” In Les antijésuites. Discours, figures et lieux de l’antijésuitisme à l’époque moderne, edited by Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Catherine Maire. Rennes: PUR, 2010, p. 539–561. Pizzorusso, Giovanni. Governare le missioni, conoscere il mondo nel XVII secolo: La Congregazione Pontificia de Propaganda Fide. Viterbo: Edizioni Sette Città, 2018. Prodi, Paolo. Il sovrano pontefice: Un corpo e due anime. La monarchia papale nella prima età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Prodi, Paolo. “Il ‘sovrano pontefice’.” In La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, edited by Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1986, p. 195–216.

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Questier, Michael C. Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Raedts, Peter. “The Church as Nation State: A New Look at Ultramontane Catholicism (1850–1900).” In Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church History 84 (2004), p. 476–496. Richard, Francis. “Ephrem de Nevers et Zénon de Baugé, premiers auteurs français d’ouvrages catholiques en tamoul.” In Moyen Orient & Océan Indien 6 (1989), p. 151–163. Santus, Cesare. Trasgressioni necessarie: ‘communicatio in sacris’, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità cristiane orientali (Levante e Impero ottomano, XVII–XVIII secolo). Rome: École française de Rome, 2019. Sidler, Daniel. Heiligkeit aushandeln: Katholische Reform und lokale Glaubenspraxis in der Eidgenossenschaft. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 2017. Smith, Haig. Religion and Governance in England’s Emerging Colonial Empire, 1601–1698. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Staying on: The Portuguese of Southern Coromandel in the Late Seventeenth Century.” In The Indian Economic and Social History Review 22 (1985), p. 445–463. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2 2012. Veevers, David. “Gender.” In The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750, edited by William A. Pettigrew, and David Veevers. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019, p. 187–210. Veevers, David. The Origins of the British Empire in Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Vermote, Frederik. “Finances of the Missions.” In A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, edited by Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018, p. 367–400. Vink, Marcus P. M. “Church and State in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Asia: Dutch-Parava Relations in Southeast India in a Comparative Perspective.” In Journal of Early Modern History 4/1 (2000), p. 1–43. Vu Thanh, Hélène, and Ines G. Županov (eds.). Trade and Finance in Global Missions (16th–18th Centuries). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021. Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1740. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Walsham, Alexandra. Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. Windler, Christian. Missionare in Persien: Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert). Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2018.

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Simon Ditchfield, Linda Nolan

Appropriation and Agency in the Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion

1.

Some Preliminary Comments

In 1996, William B. Taylor published the book Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico in which he reframed the relationship between the two protagonists of his title in order to allow for a degree of reciprocity to coexist with what was undeniably a power dynamic of inequality. For Taylor, the parish was a relationship between people as well as between the latter and the divine. Although the church building was the seat of the priest’s authority as backdrop and frame for the ritualised theatre he performed when hearing confession, celebrating mass or delivering a sermon, the parish was to be found: […] not so much in the church itself as in the succession of people who built, paid for, maintained, used and rebuilt it; who prayed, rejoiced, wept, witnessed, confessed, learned, delivered sacraments, instructed, punished and had words there. The parish is, above all, located in the relationships among these people over time, but it also involves people who were outside or only occasionally ventured into its visible boundaries.1

Taylor also reminded his readers that not infrequently, no one was in charge: neither the priest nor his parishioners.2 Borrowing Ashis Nandy’s insight in his work on colonial and postcolonial India, Taylor reminds us the degree to which colonialism was a ‘shared culture’ in which the colonized accommodated and appropriated rather than simply submitted; relationships were transacted, contested and reformulated, not stationary or crystallised; and frontal assaults by either side were rare. Fighting their own battles for survival, his Indians were participants in westernization more often than desperate opponents of it.3

Similarly, according to the American historian, the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica did not only resist attempts made by Christian priests and missionaries to convert them; they much more frequently made it work for themselves. This can be seen in the cult of 1 Taylor, Magistrates, p. 3. 2 Taylor, Magistrates, p. 3. 3 Taylor, Magistrates, p. 6. Cf. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.

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saints, nowhere more strikingly than how the cult of St James the Great, better known as Santiago, pre-eminent patron saint of Spain, was appropriated and reshaped. Although from the start, he was the very symbol of Spiritual Conquest and Indian submission, “the gulf between official explanation and local understandings” soon grew and made way for creative reinvention.4 In particular, having no large domesticated animals before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Indigenous people of Mexico were especially attracted to the saint’s horse. Horses appeared prominently in Indigenous pictorial representations of the Conquest early on, such as in the illustrated Lienzo (canvas) of Tlaxcala or the illustrated Florentine Codex (book XII). Both dating to the late sixteenth century, horses are invariably shown ready to charge into battle with teeth bared and legs raised.5 In fact, horses were widely considered by the Mexica peoples to have the capacity to act independently of their riders, to talk to them and even bear firearms. By the eighteenth century, the animal had become, to all intents and purposes, a wonder-working saint in its own right. For example, if a woman had difficulty in giving birth, an offering would be made to Santiago’s horse rather than to the saint. An example of a (not entirely dissimilar) process of appropriating a saint’s attribute in order to reshape their cult and make it more relevant to new audiences was the cult of St Joseph, which enjoyed a new lease of life in Brazil as St Joseph of the Boots (San João de Botas) in a colony where settlers, particularly gold miners flocking to the Minas Gerais from the 1690s, had to travel great distances for their work. Also as Christ’s stepfather, who led Mary and Jesus safely on the flight to Egypt, Saint Joseph represented a suitable protector.6 Such insights guide much of what follows, since we would like to restore as much agency as possible to the peoples and religious objects, not only the faithful laymen and women, but also bishops, priests and missionaries, and not only outside Europe, who played a part in shaping, sometimes obstructively, the spread of Roman Catholicism to the “four parts of the world” into which early moderns divided the globe. Notwithstanding the degree to which many local churches and the majority of religious orders were permitted to keep their existing liturgies, so long as they could prove two centuries of uninterrupted usage, there was also the first attempt made to impose a universally valid standard wherever the Roman rite was followed.7 The publication of the revised texts of the first two liturgical office books, the breviary and the missal, in 1568 and 1570 respectively, was bookended at the start by the printing of the Canons and Decrees

4 See Taylor, Magistrates, p. 272–277 for what follows (quotation at 273). 5 For the Lienzo see: http://www.mesolore.org/tutorials/learn/19/Introduction-to-the-Lienzo-de-Tlaxcala. A modern edition and English translation of the Florentine codex (with transliterated Nahuatl parallel text) is available as: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex. 6 See for example the polychrome wood sculpture attributed to Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho (1738–1814) from São Paolo reproduced in Whistler, Opulence and Devotion, p. 79. 7 Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History, p. 17–114; Ditchfield, “Romanus et Catholicus”.

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Appropriation and Agency

of the Council of Trent (1564) and of the new Roman Catechism (1566), both of which all priests were required to own copies of; and at the other end, bookended, as it were, by the papal reform of time itself in the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, which in a correction made to the cumulative drift of its Julian predecessor, moved the date forward by ten days in 1582.8 Moreover, as well as doing justice to this attempt to universalise or regularise the particular, local liturgies led by Rome, which was unprecedented in its scope and ambition, we propose also to give due emphasis in what follows to actions made—both voluntarily and involuntarily—to particularise the universal, i. e., ground precepts drawn up by Rome by primarily local actors. These included not only would-be imposers of top-down authority such as bishops, inquisitors and lay magistrates and rulers, but also those often reluctant takers of authority; from parish priests to their parishioners (not a few of whom, even in the Old World, were experiencing for the first time unprecedented demands to engage with religious orthodoxy as well as orthopraxy).9 In addition, it should be noted how missionaries and neophytes were engaged in a process of conversion which resembled, more often than not, a conversation, and, furthermore, one frequently fraught by misunderstandings and mutual incomprehension.10 Such an approach necessarily complicates both the traditional, binary narrative of spiritual conquest and Indigenous resistance beyond the borders of pre-Reformation Christendom, and the narrative of the incremental yet ultimately inevitable Christianisation of the “Other Indies”. Instead, our story puts in place an explanatory model which allows not only for more agency on the part of the missionised and catechised, but also calls for a greater appreciation of the role played by the experience of attempts to convert non-Christians in both the West and East Indies. This was relayed by a veritable tsunami of written accounts: from informal letters to missionary reports; hagiographies of heroic missionaries and often illustrated histories of exoticised peoples which poured off the printing presses of Western Europe, to be devoured by an insatiably curious and increasingly varied reading and listening public.11 By means of such reports, we would argue, there is a meaningful sense in which it might be argued not that the Old World converted the New (since it largely failed to do so, aside from a handful of 8 The revised liturgical books were completed with the 1596 issue of the Pontificale romanum, which contained rites and ceremonies used exclusively by bishops, and by the Rituale romanum of 1614, which included all the prayers and formulas for the administration of the sacraments except for the Mass. 9 For excellent case studies of two bishops who tried to follow the model envisaged by the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (1564), Carlo Borromeo (archbishop of Milan, 1564–1584) and Gregorio Barberigo (bishop of Padua, 1664–1697) see, respectively: De Boer, The Conquest of the Soul; and McNamara, The Bishop’s Burden. 10 Hsia, Companion. 11 A comprehensive survey of such literature is far beyond the capacities of one author; however, a single historian has done just that in relation to reports of Asia written by Europeans, being helped by an assistant only in the final volume: Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe.

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islands and coastal settlements beyond the Americas, where pandemics rather than priests determined the eventual Christian victory), but conversely, that the New World converted the Old by educating the inhabitants of Europe in what was at stake when attempting religious conversion to (Roman Catholic) Christianity.12 Not too dissimilar thoughts were clearly in the mind of the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta (1539–1600) in writing his influential missionary manual, De Procuranda Indorum salute, in Peru during the 1570s, when he observed that if you think the Indigenous Indians of the Americas are wild, you should go and read Bede’s ecclesiastical history of England!13 In other words, he clearly believed that what they—New World Indians—now are, we (Western Europeans) once were. The following thus aims to do justice to the “dance of agency” performed by all parties in the making of Roman Catholicism into the first world religion.14 However, necessarily, within the space of a single essay, what follows will limit itself to a selection of case studies pointing readers to the potential of such an approach for the altogether bigger task of rewriting the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion. If we are to capture something of the choreography of these unequal encounters, however, and understand more completely how Roman Catholicism came to be understood (and misunderstood) by peoples of both the New and Old Worlds, we will need to engage critically with the materiality of the connections made (and unmade) by all parties concerned.15 In particular, as Zoltán Biedermann warned us, we must not allow the vocabulary of encounter and connectivity to obscure the fact that “however fascinating the prospect of ‘domination without dominance’ might be […] domination was itself an established fact across whole swathes of the New World, restricting Native American agency.”16 To an unprecedented and unexpected degree, engagement with the “material turn” has caused us to rethink what we mean by “appropriation” or even “agency”. As Caroline Bynum notes, the increase in velocity of “turns” has “sometimes propelled us from one turn to another so quickly that we hardly have time to consolidate the advantages of a new emphasis.”17 The flood of new publications on material culture and agency provide ample sustenance, but while we take in the bounty, we risk leaving behind or passing 12 For an outline of this argument, see Ditchfield, “Catholic Reformation”. For the argument that the 1576 epidemic in Mexico actually empowered the Indigenous Christians and was, in fact, responsible for the rebirth of the Church see: Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead. 13 De Acosta, De procuranda Indorum salute, p. 224. Though completed by 1576, this manual was not published until 1588. 14 Pickering, “Material Culture”. 15 For a useful collection of essays on this burgeoning field, see Ivanič, Laven, and Morall, Religious Materiality. 16 Biedermann, “(Dis)connected History” p. 30–31. See Biedermann’s important monograph: (Dis)connected Empires. 17 Bynum, “Epilogue”, p. 247.

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too quickly over the work of people who are part of our intellectual, methodological DNA.18 Even if disciplines, and especially art history, have become more inclusive of objects and sources previously ignored or underused, there is still the reality that not all objects yield the same stories, even when they are made of the same materials. When discussing religious materiality, Bynum notes that wax ex-voto are not the same as wax birthday candles.19 Within art history, such an argument has already been made in support of art objects that yield rich stories.20 While the various “turns” have led to new fields opening up, the temptation to pick (or get picked by) good objects is still there.

2.

Beyond the “Material Turn”?

David Morgan’s The Thing about Religion is the latest chapter in the “material turn” of scholarship: “new materialism”, which seeks to push human interests from the centre of our focus on how both agency and causation are to be understood.21 In other words, Morgan refuses to make a dualistic distinction between human knowledge and the universe at large. Following Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), he regards things “as active, evolving, unfinished networks of many participants”, or “actants” as ANT theorists put it (in order to avoid privileging human actors or imposing subjective agency on inanimate things).22 According to Morgan, “Thing Power” encompasses, in the religious context, also the intangible, such as angels, ancestors or ghosts, because people are touched, moved and frightened by them.23 According to this logic, materiality is agency. Or to put it another way: We cannot understand the relevance of materiality to the study of religion unless we learn to look beyond the idea that matter is a dead, passive, neutral substance manipulated by the sovereign subject of the human mind. Materiality is not like pliable clay or cookie dough in which we impress our will. It is how the world pushes back against us, bends or shatters our ideas, joins with us to make something bigger or longer lasting than our bodies. Agency does not belong to human beings but is shared by all kinds of things. Tools are things people make

18 In addition to the 2019 collection edited by Ivanič, and Laven, and Morrall cited above, n. 15, see also: Findlen, Early Modern; Göttler and Mochizuki, The Nomadic Object; Richardson, Hamling, and Gaimster, The Routledge Handbook; Corry, Howard, and Laven, Madonnas and Miracles; Cole and Zorach, The Idol in the Age of Art. 19 Bynum, “Epilogue”, p. 250. 20 Crow, The Intelligence of Art. 21 Morgan, The Thing About Religion, p. 49. 22 On ANT, see: Latour, Reassembling the Social. 23 Morgan, The Thing about Religion, p. 6.

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to extend the efforts of their bodies. But everything that composes our worlds exerts influence on us by interacting with our bodies, whether it was fashioned to do so or not.24

Morgan’s taxonomy is useful to “think with”.25 The selection of case studies in this chapter was, in part, originally informed by Morgan’s taxonomy, but what follows has been thoroughly revised, with case studies both removed and added to. The question remains: to what extent did early modern Catholics and, in some cases, Indigenous converts believe that sacred objects possessed agency, and how did this shape how the people under consideration here appropriated objects considered holy by the missionaries or go-betweens they encountered? Indeed, can we even know this? The goal then is to see whether or not such a reconsideration of agency and materiality really does help us to understand the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion in the early modern period, and whether, by extension, it is worth our trying to rehabilitate “appropriation” as a critical term. We concur with Morgan’s statement: “Agency is the result of an assemblage, a constellation of interactive components, which includes attitude or disposition.”26 However, for the sake of clarity, we need to state further that we define agency, and in particular material agency, as dependent on networks of objects, people, and places. This is referred to as “assemblage theory”, a development of ANT noted above, and is grounded in the belief that an isolated object does not generate meaning in and of itself.27 As William Taylor has noted in his more recent study of miracle-working shrines throughout New Spain: “Places were not so much settings or containers of activity as ongoing creations from accumulating experiences, memories, and meanings.”28 What interests us are the historically specific conditions and views about appropriation and agency of objects in the early modern period. The selection of objects discussed in the following case studies is meant to highlight the networks and historically specific conditions of beholding. Some objects have been gained from recent scholarship, while others come directly from the early modern written record. Sometimes objects pick us. How objects are united by means of ceremony, ritual, familial ties, gift exchange, place, and more, gives agency.

24 25 26 27 28

Morgan, The Thing about Religion, p. 9. Morgan’s categories of agency are external, ritual, mimetic, inherent, instrumental, and aesthetic. He adds, seemingly almost as an afterthought, “religious belief ”. Morgan, The Thing about Religion, p. 20. Van Oyen, “Material Agency”, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119188230.saseas0363. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders, p. 3.

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3.

Migratory Madonnas

The second edition (1672) of the Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus contained written accounts of no fewer than 1,200 images of the Virgin venerated worldwide (including forty shrines in China, the Indies, and the New World) and is the end result of over a century of promoting the image of the Virgin in various parts of the growing Christian world.29 Although issued under the name of a single scholar, chapter XIII of the (unpaginated) preface to the 1672 edition of his Atlas, the so-called “Peritia libri”, (which might be literally translated as: “expert books”), proudly listed his Jesuit informants and claimed that he had some 2,000 letters in his possession arising out of this collaboration. For this edition, these informants were no fewer than 274 in number and were listed geographically according to their residence, Jesuit province by province. There were twenty-four European provinces listed in total, (though, owing to the issue of royal patronage, none were from the Assistency of Portugal and only seven from the Assistency of Spain).30 There is no confusing the global focus of Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus, since four prints were included in the 1672 edition, each one showing people of each continent (Europe, Asia, America, and Africa) looking up in awe to the Virgin Mary.31 When Heinrich Scherer came to put together a new edition in 1702, he added fold-out maps, including one of the four parts of the world overseen by the Blessed Virgin Mary (Fig. 1).32 The Jesuits thus confirmed the idea of a polycentric spread of Christianity in the early modern period, even if the reality was somewhat messier. In contrast, when we look at records for the official crowning of miraculous images of the Madonna kept by the Chapter of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the global turn comes more slowly. Only on 22 March 1681 was a decree issued that permitted the Chapter to approve the crowning of Marian images outside of Rome, although the crowning(s) occurred mainly on the Italian peninsula.33 The first phase of official crowning beyond Italy, starting in the early eighteenth century, included Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.34 Only in 1740 did the crowning of miraculous images turn global when the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico was approved by the Chapter of Saint Peter’s Basilica.35 Of course, devotion to this Mexican acheiropoeton miraculous image on cloth can be dated

29 Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus. It should be pointed out, however, that of the 1,200, only a total of 40 shrines from outside Europe were thought worthy of mention: 14 in India, 7 in Chile, 6 in New Spain (plus 5 in Mexico itself), 3 each in New Granada (modern day Columbia, Venezuela and Equador) and China, plus one each in Brazil and the Philippines. 30 Delfosse, “L’Atlas Marianus”, table 1 on p. 136. 31 Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus. 32 Scherer, Atlas Marianus. 33 BAV, ACSP, Mad.Cor. 28, fol. 8r. 34 BAV, ACSP, Mad.Cor. 29. 35 BAV, ACSP, Mad.Cor. 29, fol. 13v.

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Fig. 1 Preface image from Scherer, Heinrich. Atlas Marianvs sive Praecipuae Totius Orbis Habitati Imagines et Statuae magnae Dei Matris Beneficiis ac Prodigiis Inclytae Succincta Historia Propositae et Mappis Geographicis Expressae. Munich: Bencard, 1702. Call number: G114.S4 Cage v.1.

earlier.36 In distinct contrast with the earlier Roman miraculous images, the Madonna of Guadalupe had its physical, miraculous origin story not in the papal capital, and not even in Europe, but in colonial Mexico. The “original” Madonna of Guadalupe in Spain, the black Madonna sculpture, was believed to have been carved by Saint Luke and transferred from Rome to Spain by Gregory the Great.37 The Madonna of Guadalupe, the miraculous image of the Virgin that appeared on the cloak of Saint Juan Diego is of course Mexican. The influence of this miraculous image in Mexico, which rose up from such a thriving centre of devotion thousands of miles from Rome, could, however, not be ignored by the Chapter of the mother church of Roman Catholicism. According to Pietro Leone Bombelli’s Raccolta (1792), the first copy of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Rome was by the artist Giovanni Correa di Murcia, known in modern literature as

36 William Taylor points out that the earliest documented references to the shrine date to the 1550s rather than the 1530s, when the alleged miraculous imprinting of her image on the cloak of her Indian seer, Juan Diego, was believed to have taken place (in 1531). See Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders, p. 46. It should also be noted that the first written account of Diego’s miraculous encounter was only published in 1648. Sánchez, Imagen de la virgen Maria. 37 Peterson, Visualizing, p. 21.

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Appropriation and Agency

Fig. 2a Salus Populi Romani. 6th century (?), panel. Dimensions: height 117 cm; width 79 cm. Rome, Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Fig. 2b Hieronymus Wierix, Salus Populi Romani Madonna. Before 1600, engraving. Dimensions: height 13,8 cm; width 8,9 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

Juan Correa (1646–1716), for the church of Saints Ildefonso and Thomas of Villanova, where this Madonna is still located today (near Piazza Barberini).38 The paths to turning the world Christian were two-way streets. Depending on who is writing the history or creating the practice, the global turn happened at different moments. Our next example, the so-called Salus Populi romani icon, also focuses our attention on Rome. According to pious legend, this image was not painted by human hand, but by Saint Luke with divine assistance. It was installed in the early seventeenth century in the Cappella Paolina in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (Fig. 2a and 2b). As with the image of the Madonna of Guadalupe, it was considered an acheiropoeton, owing this avocation to the tradition that Pope Gregory I (the Great, r. 590–604) had this particular icon carried around the city in 590 CE, an act thought to have brought a period of plague to an end. However, it is sometimes called simply the Virgin of Saint Luke, or

38 Bombelli, Raccolta delle Immagini della Beatissima Vergine. For Juan Correa, see Villaseñor Black, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph, ad indicem.

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Fig. 3 Madonna and Child. China, Ming dynasty, 16th to early 17th century, coloured ink on silk scroll. Dimensions: height 120cm; width 55cm. Chicago, Field Museum, Accession number: 116027.

perhaps most often, the Madonna of the Snow, owing to its location in the church Santa Maria Maggiore, the first basilica dedicated to Mary in Rome, whose location on the Esquiline Hill was believed to have been the result of a miraculous snowfall traditionally dated 5 August 354 CE. In 1569, the Jesuit superior general Francisco Borja received permission from the chapter of the Basilica, with help from pope Pius V (r. 1566–1572), to have an official copy made of the icon, after which an engraving by the Flemish artist Hieronymous Wierix was made and circulated by Jesuit missionaries throughout the globe.39 According to Gumppenberg, Borja’s official copy was the first one made, when in fact other, earlier copies had been carried out, but mention of these others was omitted from the official Jesuit story to promote the importance of Borja’s copy, which had been approved by no less prominent a figure than Carlo Borromeo while he was archpriest of S. Maria

39 Borja’s copy still survives at the church of S. Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. Noreen, “The Icon”, p. 662, p. 667–668. For a more detailed discussion of the copies of the Salus Populi, see Mochizuki, Jesuit Art, p. 118–138.

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Maggiore.40 Additional copies of the Marian icon were made and distributed to Jesuit churches outside Rome, including in Naples, Palermo, Bavaria, and Lorraine.41 What appears to be a Chinese copy of the Salus Populi Romani icon, with the Virgin painted full length onto an eight-foot-long silk scroll, is now held in the Field Museum, Chicago, where it has been since their curator of Asian anthropology, Berthold Laufer, brought it back from China in 1910 (Fig. 3). Although its curators are no longer completely certain that this particular example can be dated to the late Ming period and therefore contemporary to the time spent at the Beijing court by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), it does seem more likely than a later attribution, which possibly was made by its subsequent owners to avoid the charge that the image could be associated with a missionary religious order which was officially banned for a period in the seventeenth century. Regardless, whatever the precise dating of this particular example, we do have it on the missionary’s own account that he gave a copy of the icon to the Wan Li Emperor in 1601.42 The Emperor then gave the image to his mother, the dowager emperor Ci Sheng, a devout Buddhist, who offered daily prayers and burned incense before the image, which she venerated as a Western representation of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, “bringer of sons”, associated with compassion and fertility.43 Interestingly, the overlapping symbolism of the Virgin with Guanyin led to a fascinating case wherein Chinese carvers of ivory tusks clearly borrowed conventions from representations of the Virgin, which they made for the mainly Spanish Christian market in the Philippines (Fig. 4a), for Guanyin, which were designed for Chinese consumption (both on the mainland and amongst the large Chinese community that had settled in the Parian district just outside the city walls of Manila). This can be seen from the juxtaposition of the two similarly sized statues (Fig. 4b and 4c). However, formal comparisons can only get us so far. There is the need to get into the “period eye” (Baxandall) of the objects per situation.44 Bynum notes that cross-cultural comparison can be productive when each case study is given space to reveal the particular.45 The reciprocity, and in turn, appropriation, is what contributed to the successful integration of the Madonna type into the new idiom of local styles and material manufacture. Copies of the Salus Popoli Romani icon were also sent to Goa in India. These arrived in 1578. One version, painted by the Jesuit artist Manuel Godinho, was hung in the Jesuit church in Agra. There is even a contemporary account of Emperor Akbar’s enthusiastic

40 41 42 43 44

Noreen, “The Icon”, p. 662–663. Noreen, “The Icon”, p. 666. Cf. Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, p. 207. Ricci, Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesù e Cristianità nella Cina, p. 348. This is the title of part II of Baxandall, Painting and Experience, p. 29–108 (the pagination is taken from the second edition of 1988). 45 Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology”, p. 341–368. See also: Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes.

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Fig. 4 Fig. 4a, left: The Virgin and Child. Hispano-Filippino, ca.1700–1720, partly gilt ivory. Dimensions: height 25,2 cm: width 9 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Accession number: 1459–1902. Fig. 4b, middle: Figure of Guanyin. China, Ming dynasty, ca. 1580–1640, lacquered and gilt ivory. Dimensions: height 26,4 cm; height incl. base 29,2 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum. Accession number: 274–1898. Fig. 4c, right: Bodhisatttva Guanyin. China, Ming dynasty, 16th century, ivory. Dimensions: height 24.8 cm; height incl. base 26 cm; 5.1 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession Number: 12.219.1.

reaction to it found in a letter written in 1580 from the Jesuit Father Francisco Henriques to his confrere Lourenço Peres: The first thing he (the emperor Akbar) did was to go into the Church …. On entering he was surprised and astonished (pasmado e attonito) and made a deep obeisance to the picture of Our Lady that was there, from the painting of St. Luke, done by (Jesuit) brother Manuel Godinho, as well as to another beautifully executed representation of Our Lady brought by Fr.

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Appropriation and Agency

Fig. 5 Mughal Madonna. India, school of Manohar, ca. 1590–1595, ink, watercolour and gold on paper. Dimensions: height 7,5cm; width 5,7cm. London, Victoria & Albert Museum. Accession number: no. IS 133:81/B-19647.

Martin da Silva from Rome, which pleased him no end.” […] and then he left to praise them to his captains who waited outside. He was so taken up that he came in again with a few of his intimates and his chief painter and other painters, of which he has many excellent ones, and they were all wonderstruck and said that there could be no better paintings nor better artists than those who had painted the said pictures.46

Although Godinho’s icon does not survive, miniatures made at the Mughal court give an idea of how the artists translated images of the Virgin Mary into the local idiom. An image attributed to the School of Manohar (c.1590–1595) depicts the Virgin as an Indigenous beauty with highly arched eyebrows and almond eyes (Fig. 5). In a similarly small format (at 7.5 cm high and 5.7 cm across) is the exquisitely rendered miniature also attributed to the School of Manohar, now catalogued as “Madonna and Child in

46 Correia-Afonso, Letters from the Mughal Court, p. 31. The original text may be found in Wicki, Documenta Indica, p. 16. See also Bartoli, Dell’historia della Compagnia di Giesù., p. 617. Cf. Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, p. 60.

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Fig. 6 Madonna and Child in a Domestic Interior. Attributed to India, Manohar (active ca. 1582–1624), early 17th century, black and coloured ink and gold on paper. Dimensions: height 24,3cm; width 14,8cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession number: 1970.217.

Domestic Interior” and currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Fig. 6). Rather than viewing such images as evidence of Emperor Akbar’s sincere interest in converting to Christianity—the interpretation of course favoured by the Jesuit missionaries—or even simply as an indication of the strong influence of Western visual vocabulary on Indigenous artists bedazzled by Renaissance modelling and one-point perspective, the art historian Mika Natif prefers to view them as evidence of “transcultural” selective borrowing, rather than passive appropriation, of Western images and motifs at the service of the pro-active Mughal policy of S.olḥ-e koll (“universal

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conciliation” or “peace with all”).47 This was a strategy that placed art at the disposal of a ruler whose religiously pluralistic empire, in which the Islam of Akbar and his immediate family was very much in the minority, required a careful balancing act between the diverse ethnic and religious groups that made up the Mughal Empire.48 Moreover, according to Natif, the key to Akbar’s apparent veneration of and interest in the images of the Virgin Mary is to be found in the writings of Abū l-Faḍl ibn Mubārak, the Emperor’s official chronicler and author of the Akbar Nama (or History of Akbar), who likened her to Alan Guo’a (Alan-Qo’a/Alanqoa/Alanquwa), believed to be the ancestor of Chinghiz Khan—Akbar’s own distant forbear—and who had been impregnated by Divine Light.49 At one point in the History of Akbar, its author explicitly associates Mary with Alan Gho’a: “if you listen to tales of Mary, then incline likewise to Alanqoa”.50 In this way Akbar and his son Jahangir used images of Mary—who, lest it be forgotten, is the only woman identified by name in the Qurʾān, where she is mentioned no fewer than seventy times, being venerated as Maryam, mother of the prophet Isa (Jesus)—as a way of drawing attention to their dynasty’s divine lineage. One particularly fine example of Mughal artistic appropriation of such Marian imagery, which in this case is clearly beholden (if not directly) to the Salus Populi Romani icon, is a watercolour miniature with silver and gold on paper measuring originally just 11 x 15.3 cm, which comes from the St Petersburg Muraqqa‘ (Album) of Persian and Indian miniatures. According to Natif, the relevant detail here (the absence of the Christ child’s hand gesture of blessing in the Mughal image of the Madonna of Saint Luke, surrounded by angels) should not be seen as resulting from a mistake or an inability to copy the original correctly, but as a deliberate choice made to transform Christ the Messiah into Isa, son of Maryam.51 The Jesuits commissioned from their own Marian champion, Peter Canisius, a work on the cult of Mary that specifically addressed the issue of whether replicated images were disqualified from being considered “by Saint Luke”.52 As both Kristin Noreen and Mia Mochisuki have discussed, Canisius concluded that such reproductions were legitimate so long as they had been copied from genuine prototypes.53 Federico Borromeo also supported the validity of copies, considered especially valuable for preserving damaged images.54 The growing consensus during the late sixteenth and seventeenth

47 48 49 50 51 52

Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, p. 26–28, p. 32–35, p. 56–62. Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, p. 67, p. 98, p. 152, p. 162, p. 164, p. 180, p. 187, p. 198, p. 199, p. 263. Abū l-Fażl, The History of Akbar, p. 217, p. 219. Cfr. Natif, Mughal Occidentalism, p. 62–63. Abū l-Fażl, The History of Akbar, p. 219. Natif, Muslim Occidentalism, p. 60–61. Cf. Habsburg, The St Petersburg Muraqqa‘, p. 62, p. 131 (plate 37). Canisius, De Maria Virgine incomparabili, p. 697; Canisius, Commentarium de verbi Dei corruptelis, Book 5, Chapter 12, p. 761. See Mochizuki, Jesuit Art, p. 113–133; Noreen, “The Icon”, p. 665–666. 53 Mochizuki, Jesuit Art, p. 132. 54 Borromeo, Sacred Painting and Museum, p. 44.

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centuries was that praying before a copy was equal to being in front of the original in Rome, because one was not praying to the image itself, but rather, to the Virgin in heaven.

4.

Water, Wax, & Silver: Materials of Circulating Sacramentals and Votives

Rituals of consecration and tactile interaction with relics are considered to give objects power. Altars, buildings, and liturgical objects are seen as both consecrated and blessed, relics of saints and Christ seen as imbued with divine power. Certain objects, referred to collectively as sacramentals/sacramentalia, are widely circulated and available to Roman Catholics: rosary beads blessed by or touched by a relic, scapulars with images of the Madonna of Mt Carmel, crucifixes, and holy water are the most common.55 In the early modern period, the most popular of the sacramentals were wax agnus dei: disks made on Easter Saturday out of the candles left over from the pope’s Easter celebrations of the previous year, which were embossed with an image of the lamb of God and blessed by the pope.56 Such objects also acted as common currency to grease social relations in the Roman Catholic world. The English Dominican friar Thomas Gage, who travelled extensively in New Spain, wrote how in 1625 when he and his travel companions left San Juan de Ulloa near Veracruz for Mexico City, they thanked their native hosts with special gifts: “And thus we took our leaves, giving unto the chief of them some beads, some medals, some crosses of brass, some Agnus Dei, some reliques brought from Spain, and to every one of the town an indulgence of forty years.”57 Paul Nelles has detailed the importance of agnus dei as tools for the Jesuits in the spread of Catholicism.58 Their water resistance made them ideal talisman for seafaring Jesuits and other travellers, who used them to attempt miraculous calming of raging seas. Their malleability made them ideal for division and sharing with others. Nelles notes that the Roman-ness of their manufacture and their associations with baptism made them prized when distributed by the Rome-based Jesuits. When the Jesuits used them to appeal to Indigenous potential converts in New Spain and elsewhere, the gifts of agnus dei (and other sacramentals) were only trusted when received directly from Jesuits’ hands. In other instances, their

55 For examples, see Corry and Howard, Madonnas and Miracles, p. 83–85 (medals), p. 94–97 (rosaries), p. 123–125 (Agnus Dei), p. 128–135 (crosses and reliquary pendants). 56 Traditionally, they were consecrated by the pope in the first year of his pontificate and then every seven years after that, should the pope’s reign last that long. Kuntz, “Liturgical, Ritual, and Diplomatic Spaces”, p. 90, p. 92–93. Cf. for their role in domestic devotion: Cooper, “Investigating the ‘Case’ of the Agnus Dei”, p. 220–243; Muller, “The Agnus Dei, Catholic Devotion, and Confessional Politics”, p. 1–28. 57 Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies, p. 55. 58 See Nelles, “Devotion in Transit”.

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Appropriation and Agency

domestication and miraculous status gave the agnus dei a deeply personal and local meaning for users that was unrelated to their Roman origin. For Nelles, “Agnus Dei belonged to a category of religious objects whose significance and sacred power was activated through movement.”59 The fact that their manufacture increased significantly at the time of Pius V (r.1566–1572) points to their importance to a Church that was undergoing unprecedented geographical expansion, even as it was being contested as never before, being challenged not only by the Protestants, but also by the Ottomans, whose naval defeat at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 was one of the first media events of the early modern period with “global” resonance.60 According to Anne Lepoittevin, who has looked at their Roman production from 1563 to 1700, this trend became still more accentuated in the following century.61 As her starting point, she takes Pius V, whose first Easter saw just over 5,000 kilos of wax (5,091 kilos) being re-purposed to make agnus dei. Under his successor Gregory XIII (r. 1572–1585), this more than doubled (12,338 kilos). This figure was not exceeded until 1692, when Innocent XII (r. 1691–1700) blessed disks made from 12,673 kilos of wax from paschal candles.62 In the time of Pope Alexander VII Chigi (r. 1655–1667), agnus dei were produced with an expanded repertoire. A list of subjects and sizes of agnus dei from the Chigi archive in the Vatican library records over a hundred different depicted images (on the obverse side from the Paschal Lamb) in varying sizes and formats, ranging in subject from the New Testament and early Christian and medieval saints, to more recent holy figures, including “San Carlo” Borromeo and “Santa Francesca Romana”, and important icons of the Madonna, such as the Madonna of Loreto and the “Madonna della Vallicella”.63 The list of subjects has much in common with collections of relics kept in churches. The 1630 Apostolic Visitation to the church of Saints Michael and Magnus, located near Saint Peter’s Basilica, records an extensive collection of stone relics from sacred mountains, houses, and tombs, many identified with Holy Land sites of stories depicted on the agnus dei, including the Annunciation and the Crucifixion.64 Pope Alexander VII is often noted for his ambitious architectural projects, such as the Cathedra Petri designed

59 60 61 62 63 64

Nelles, “Devotion in Transit”, p. 186. Hanß, “Lepanto in the Americas”, p. 1–36. Lepoittevin, “Picciolini, Picolini et Piccioli”, p. 87–117 (see table 3 on p. 103–104). In 1592, 1677, and 1690, the weight of wax used in the making of agnus dei exceeded 10,000 kilos. BAV, Chigi.L.I.9, fol. 365r–366r. AAV (Archivio apostolico Vaticano; formerly ASV: Archivio segreto Vaticano), Misc.Arm.VII, vol. 113, fol. 1094r–1094v: “Reliquie. De Lapidibus: Montis Calvarij, Montis Sion, Montis Synai, Montis Oliveti, Montis Tabor, Sepulchris B.e Virginis, Loci in quo Xp.us fuit captus[…] (fol. 1094v) Loci ubi Elia dormiebat, Loci in quo Crux Sancta fuit inventa…Loci Conversionis Sancti Pauli Apostoli, Praesepis Xpi, Sepulchris Sanctoris, Loci in quo Maria Virgo Angeli Salutationem accepit […]”.

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by Bernini, and the colonnade in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica.65 What is less recognised is Alexander VII’s role in augmenting and finishing work started by his immediate predecessors. The expanded subjects of the agnus dei are the miniaturised monuments, like less resistant ancient coins, that helped to spread the faith. As the agnus dei departed the papal capital in carefully packaged consignments, appreciative devotional tribute remained behind. The altars containing miraculous icons, especially of the Virgin and of recently canonised saints, such as Carlo Borromeo, were surrounded with votive offerings, including painted votive panels, wax and silver votives of various shapes, jewellery made from gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones, clothing, and silver lamps.66 Local and foreign nobles and members of the clergy also donated costly liturgical vestments. The inventories of churches and supporting documentary evidence related to miraculous images detail the types of objects left and sometimes even the people who made the donations. The donations came from both near and far. At the site of the church of Madonna dei Monti, a miraculous image of the Madonna became the object of devout attention in 1580, which led to the church’s construction.67 It was begun on 23 June 1580 by Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto, who was also the protector general of the adjacent Catechumen House (Casa dei Catecumeni), an institute which provided refuge and instruction for converts from Islam and Judaism.68 A history of the church written in 1583, dedicated to Cardinal Sirleto, notes the miracles that occurred at the site and the votives left there.69 Nobles in Rome, Palermo, Turin, and further away in Spain gave precious offerings to the church. Clelia Farnese (d. 1613), wife of Giorgio Cesarini, after recovering from an illness, donated “in addition to ex voto … gold veils for chalices, beautiful cushions, embroidered clothing for the Madonna, chasubles, brocade altar frontals, and other things still visible today.”70 An inventory of Madonna dei Monti contained in the records of an official Apostolic Visitation itemises the devotional offerings left at the church, including those

65 See the essay by Kuntz, “Liturgical, Ritual, and Diplomatic Spaces”; cf. Also Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII. 66 See the forthcoming book by Nolan, provisionally titled Tangible Devotion. 67 For the history of the icon and the church, see Corrubolo, La Chiesa di Santa Maria ai Monti; and Ciappi, Compendi delle heroiche, et gloriose attioni et santa vita di Papa Gregorio XIII. 68 For Sirleto, see essays in Clausi and Luca, Il ‘Sapientissimo Calabro’; on Sirleto and the Casa dei Catecumeni in Rome, see Mazur, Conversion to Catholicism, p. 21–25. 69 Pifferi, Storia dell’origine, p. 65–98 lists the miracles from 1580–1583; p. 63–65 note the votive offerings from specific nobles. 70 “L’illustrissima Signora Clelia Farnese moglie del Signor Giorgio Cesarini essendo cosi malata che si temeva per la sua vita, riconoscendo che poteva essere aiutare più da Dio che dagli uomini si votò alla Madonna Santissima dei Monti e guarita, per gratitudine della grazia ricevuta, altre all’ex voto, donò alla Madonna veli d’oro per i calici, bellissimi cuscini, vesti ricamate per la Madonna, pianete, paliotti di broccato e altre cose che si vedono ancor oggi”. Pifferi, Storia dell’origine, p. 63.

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specifically placed at the icon of the Madonna.71 In addition to a silver crown, the icon was surrounded with pearls, gold chains, a coral and gold bead necklace, crosses, veils ornamented with garnets and pearls, ribbons, and other items.72 An exceptional note in the inventory states how silver lamps were made from the melted silver votives left by people at the site.73 Like the wax agnus dei, the material was malleable and, in this case, acted as a unifying currency. The memory of the votives left by devout people gave such lamps a powerful status: the gratitude of those who had been blessed by Divine intervention joined forces in the lamps and continued to honour the Virgin Mary. The Jesuits understood the importance of people’s capability to adapt, and thus they themselves adapted to the circumstances they encountered with equal facility. For example, in missionary fields such as Japan, they accommodated themselves to elite practices, particularly as they related to non-verbal communication as offered by dress codes or liturgical textiles.74 Objects used during mission work could also be adapted. One of the most widely used sacramentals, Holy Water, could be adapted, for instance, by means of tactile contact. The use of the Jesuit-specific Xavierwasser to effect miraculous cures amongst the sick was an adapted sacramental specific to the Jesuit order, as was first brought to the notice of Anglophone scholars by Trevor Johnson in 1996, in his descriptions of rural missions led by the Jesuits in the Upper Rhine Palatinate in 1721 and 1722.75 The sacramental Xavierwasser had been put into contact with medals of Saint Francis Xavier that had been blessed in proximity to the relic of the saint’s arm, the only part of his body that made it to Rome; the rest remained in Goa and is still there today. As Johnson notes, the Jesuits also made use of Ignatiuswasser; on one occasion during the Jesuit mission to the Eifel in 1736, the peasantry sprinkled Ignatius water on their fields in order to deal with a plague of caterpillars.76 One witness at the canonisation trial of Francis of Sales (1567–1622; canonised 1665) testified to the curative properties of

71 AAV, Misc.Arm.VII, vol. 63, fol. 35r–37v. The inventory is contained in a file from the time of Pope Alexander VII (1655–1667), but the inventory dates to sometime after 1596 as it notes Cardinal Lorenzo Bianchetti, who had been a member of Sirleto’s household but did not receive the cardinal’s hat until that year. 72 AAV, Misc.Arm.VII, vol. 63, fol. 37v: “All’immagine della Madonna Santissima, una corona…d’argento …con due filzette d’perle…fettucce turchine…un filo di perle…un veletto di perle tramezzato con granatine, un altro velo…tramezzato con bottoncini d’oro…una collana di coralli tramezzata con bottoncini d’argento…”. 73 AAV, Misc.Arm.VII, vol. 63, fol. 35r: “Sei candelieri grandi d’argento fatti con l’argenti di voti che erano in chiesa…”. 74 Zampol d’Ortia, “The Dress of Evangelization”. 75 Johnson, “Blood, Tears, and Xavier-wasser”, p. 183–202. 76 Johnson, “Blood, Tears, and Xavier-wasser”, p. 197. Cf. Greenwood, “Founder, Healer, Blessed, Saint”, p. 294. Greenwood recounts two miracle cures effected by Ignatius-water: one not far from Antwerp in 1628 and the other in Acerra, near Naples in 1764.

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water she had ingested that had been altered by a drop of the canonisaton candidate’s blood or a thread of his clothing.77

5.

Christs Made and Found

In his book Theatre of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain, William Taylor presents an atlas of no fewer than 498 shrines and miraculous images from colonial-era Mexico. Of these, 238 are of Christ on the Cross, with over a tenth of depictions of the cross said to be natural images formed in trees or, as in the case of the stone cross of Querétaro, found in other natural settings.78 As the title of the book suggests, Taylor is particularly interested in shrines and images as places of activity and performativity—of anticipation, motion, heightened emotion, consolation and drama. In other words, such shrines or images need to be understood “in terms of finding, making and maintaining a place in the world”, with the significant proviso that, as noted above, “places were not so much settings or containers of activity as ongoing creations from accumulating experiences, memories and meanings”.79 To just take one example, if one looks carefully at the print shown here (Fig. 7a), one can see that its proud owner has written that it “touched the original image” of the Cruz de Piedra in Querétaro, Central Mexico.80 Although this is a late example, from the 1760s, when the Spanish Capuchin friar Ajofrín travelled through Mexico, it reflects a practice dating back to at least the sixth century CE of placing brandea—strips of cloth—in contact with the tombs of the Apostles in Rome in lieu of sending body relics to petitioners, even powerful ones.81 Our next example is a three-foot-high crucifix, the so-called Christ Appeared (Cristo Aparecido) (Fig. 7b), which is carved from the native maguey plant. According to legend, it appeared one day in 1543 at the door of the Augustinian priory in the Indian pueblo of Totolpan (located in the northernmost corner of the state of Morelos in south-central Mexico). It provoked its first custodian and champion, the Augustinian friar Antonio de Roa, to extreme public penance, including physical mortification at the reluctant hands of the Nahua-speaking locals. By transforming himself into a living crucifix, as

77 78 79 80 81

Duffin, Medical Miracles, p. 160, p. 252 n. 104. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders, p. 202–204. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders, p. 3. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders, p. 421 Fig. 7.7. Cf. Pope Gregory the Great’s reply in a letter from 594 CE to the request from the Empress Constantina for the head of Paul the Apostle for a new church dedicated to him she was having built in the imperial palace in Constantinople. In addition to telling her how death had befallen those who had tried to open such tombs, in its place the pope sent her filings taken from the chains that had once been used to bind the Apostle. See Gregory the Great, Registrum epistularum, p. 248–250.

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Appropriation and Agency

Fig. 7a Print of miraculous stone cross of Querétaro with note above: ‘Tocada à su sacra original’. Francisco de Ajofrín, Diario del viage que por orden de la Sagrada Congregacion de Propaganda Fide hice a la America Septentrional […] 1767, p. 383. Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia.

hypothosised by Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Roa sought to catechise the local Indians into realising that Christ had died also for their sins.82 She goes on to explain that “Roa’s public self-mortifications […] were deliberately intended to model appropriate devotion to representations of the Cross and to the crucifix more specifically.”83 The next illustration (Fig. 8) is taken from the frontispiece to Book II of the slightly later Historia eclesiastica Indiana, from 1596, by the Franciscan missionary Gerónimo de Mendieta. It shows a friar, bottom left, brandishing a rosary in one hand and in the other, a stick that he is using to point towards the Crucified Christ. Note that the preacher’s eloquence is such that his audience is looking not at Christ, but at the friar instead. In her account of the cult of Cristo aparecido from the sixteenth century to the present day, Scheper Hughes complicates the accommodation versus resistance narrative: evangelization, for her, “is best comprehended somewhere in the murky terrain between conquest and conversation.”84 She continues by emphasising the degree of resistance encountered by Roa: the Indians resisted “his efforts to associate the crucifix with physical pain, spiritual suffering, and human sinfulness.”85 Indeed, throughout her account, Scheper Hughes insists on the following: “suffering, compassion, pity and 82 83 84 85

Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 50. Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 59. Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 65. Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 80.

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Fig. 7b Cristo Aparecido (“Appeared Christ”) in situ, Totolapan, Mexico. Image: private collection.

remorse were not the definitive emotions mediating collective devotion to the Cristo Aparecido.”86 This point is reiterated and underscored in her description of the modernday celebration of the main annual fiesta for him on the Fifth Friday in Lent, at which the people of Totolapan do not mourn the death of Jesus, but come together to celebrate their beautiful, living “santo” with expressions less of penance and pain and more of warmth, tenderness and love. The Nahua word for “cross” meant “the wooden beam which gives sustenance to our lives’ and is composed from the root word for corn.”87 This linguistic association of the cross with corn was also expressed by the cristos de caña, hollow sculptures of Christ literally made from a paste made of corn pith and orchid glue using Indigenous techniques (Fig. 9). Described by William Taylor as “arguably the most important native artistic engagement with Christian imagery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Mesoamerica”, their lightness made them ideal for carrying in processions. Moreover, Taylor notes how their very material—maize—linked Christ’s progression from birth, passion, death and resurrection with the regeneration of the sacred food plant. In the case of one of the most famous surviving such crosses, El Cristo de Mexicaltzingo, it was reported in 1949 that the chest cavity and upper arms: “were formed around pages of sixteenth-century community tax records in native style and substantial fragments of Nahuatl texts in roman script that recount the Passion

86 Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 216. 87 Scheper Hughes, Biography, p. 78. Cf. Taylor, “Cristos de Caña”, p. 286–287.

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Appropriation and Agency

Fig. 8 From: Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiastica Indiana, Book II. Mexico 1596. Image: private collection.

of Christ”.88 There can surely be few more eloquent demonstrations of the creative appropriation of the supreme Christian symbol of the crucified Christ.

6.

Mobility & Polycentricity: The Holy House and Madonna of Loreto

The inherent agency of the Holy House of Loreto is undeniable. The home where the Virgin was born and raised in Nazareth and where she was encountered by the Angel Gabriel who told her she was pregnant with Christ, took flight from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, before landing in 1295, after stops at Tsrat in Dalmatia as well as nearby Recanati, in the central Italian hilltop town of Loreto. No other relic moved to so many locations (with help from angels), was replicated (both house and cult image), and established devotional centres throughout the expanding Catholic world. Prefiguring the Holy House of Loreto are the models of the Holy Tomb of Christ that proliferated throughout Europe during the late medieval and Renaissance

88 Taylor, “Cristos de Caña”, p. 287. Cf. Carrillo y Gariel, El Cristo de Mexicaltzingo.

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Fig. 9 Corn-stem Christ. Mexico, 1601-1700, corn stem and paste. Dimensions: cross height 10.8cm; width 69cm. Madrid, Museo de America. Accession number: 2007/04/01.

period. However, those buildings are not always replicas.89 The tomb of Christ, nearly inaccessible in Jerusalem during the early modern period, never went on the run. The Holy House of Loreto’s origin story is invested in mobility: the house mobilised to mark sites in the various locations before settling down in its current location. The ensuing replicas of house and sometimes cult image had as their models the freely accessible original house and cult image in Loreto, Italy. The Holy House of Loreto’s global reimagining has recently been studied by Karin Vélez.90 The tale that Vélez has to tell is one of movement, with the main vectors the Jesuit missionaries who, in emulation of their founder Ignatius, whose affection for the cult was written into the Society’s DNA, undertook pilgrimages to the Holy House from Rome. The Jesuits therefore gave due weight to what was regarded the premier shrine to the Virgin anywhere on the globe. Shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century, the Madonna of Loreto put the Salus Populi Romani icon into second place in the first edition of the Atlas Marianus (1657) by the Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg

89 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, see ibid., p. 56–60, p. 168–169 for Leon Battista Alberti’s version that follows the dimensions of the original but not the appearance. 90 Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto.

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Appropriation and Agency

Fig. 10 Melchior Haffner, frontispiece (“Mediatrx Caeli et Terrae”). 17th century, engraving. Dimensions: height 33 cm. From: Gumppenberg, Wilhelm. Atlas Marianus quo sanctae dei Genetricis Mariae Imaginum Miraculosarum Origines Duodecim Historiarum Centurijs Explicantur. Munich: Ioannis Iaechlini, 1672.

(1609–1675), which included an image of the Madonna cult statue.91 In Gumppenberg, the Holy House and its global mission were also depicted on the frontispiece, which portrays the traditional iconography of the flying Holy House (Virgin with Christ child sitting on the house, which is being flown by angels), with a partially visible globe of the world below (Fig. 10).92 In 1644, a copy of the Madonna of Loreto was officially given a crown by the Chapter of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The image stood in Rome.93 By the end of the seventeenth century, there were numerous images of the Madonna di Loreto in Rome and beyond, both replicas of the original cult image and artistic renderings of the miraculous story.94 The summary of the will of Alessandro Sforza, Count of Borgonovo near Parma, whose endowment to the Chapter of Saint Peter’s Basilica paid for the gold crown, mentions

91 Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus, sive de Imaginibus Deiparae per Orbem Christianum Miraculosis. 92 Gumppenberg, Atlas Marianus, Quo Sanctae Dei Genetricis Mariae Imaginum Miraculosarum Origines Duodecim Historiarum Centurijs Explicantur. 93 Bombelli, Raccolta delle Immagini della Beatissima Vergine, p. 101–104, print on p. 100. The sculpture was located in the church of San Michele in Via Ripetta at the time of the crowning. It was later moved to the church of S. Salvatore in Lauro.  94 See both Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto, chapter 6, and Harpster, “The Sacrilege of Soot”, p. 99–127.

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the possibility of crowning the Madonna of Loreto in question.95 Decisions to crown images of the Madonna fell to the Chapter. The first Madonna related to the Loreto sanctuary standing outside Italy was crowned in 1713 at Tersatto (Trsat) in Dalmatia (modern-day Croatia), one of the stop-offs of the flying house before it arrived in Loreto.96 The Madonna in Trsat is a Saint Luke image, painted on cedar panel and sent by Pope Urban V (r. 1362–1370) to the church shortly after it was built.97 The sculpture inside the house in Loreto was already crowned, a pre-official crowning. In 1496, after being saved from the plague, the town of Recanati had offered the statue a gold jewel-encrusted crown that was never to be removed, a rule ordered by Cardinal Girolamo Basso delle Rovere and approved by Pope Julius II as well as by later popes.98 There was thus no need for the Chapter to confer the honour of crowning on an image already so famous. Loreto was already an important devotional centre. But there is another important aspect to the crowning of the Roman copy: it clearly legitimised the replica of the original. There were numerous examples of the Madonna of Loreto subject in Rome, and around the world, when the Jesuit priest Concezio Carocci wrote his pilgrim guide to the most important images of the Madonna in Rome (1729).99 The spread of the cult of Loreto was in great part thanks to the Jesuits, as noted above. Carocci selected a “copy” of the Loreto image to visit in Rome, apparently due to the image’s convenient location: it was the one nearest the church of the Gesù, at the ancient Forum of Trajan. Carocci describes the votives left at the site, and notes the house’s relics in relation to the image,

95 Bombelli, Raccolta delle Immagini della Beatissima Vergine, p. V: “[...] il frutto di un anno per una sola Corona da porsi in capo ad una delle più celebri immagini della Cristianità, come di Loreto, o della SS. Annunziata di Firenze, o simili, sia in suo arbitrio il farlo. Cosi per testamento rogato in Parma a’ 3 Luglio 1636”. 96 BAV, ACSP, Mad.Cor.28, fol. 35v: “Dell’immagine di Maria detta la Madonna di Monte Tarsatto che si venera nella chiesa di PP Riformati de S. Franc. in Dalmazia sotto la Diocesi di Segni. 1713”. The first Madonna di Loreto crowned outside Rome but still in Italy was at Spoleto in 1696. See ibid. fol. 4–6 for the index, 1681–1751. 97 BAV, ACSP, Mad.Cor.28, fol. 35v: “Indi sopra le vestige dove se pose la medesima Santa Casa nel detto Monte Tarsatto vi fu eretta una Cappella, ed in questa l’anno 1367 Urbano V vi fece collocare un immagine di Maria Vergine dipinta da S. Luca Evangelista in tavola di cedro, mandata li da Roma”. 98 Angelita, Historia della Translatione della S. Casa della Madonna à Loreto, p. 45, emphasises that this was to be a crown for the statue, not a painting: “[…] fecero fare una corona di purissimo oro, ornata di pretiose pietre, e la posera sopra la testa di quella statua della sacratissima Vergine […]”. Torsellini, Historia Lauretana, p. 63 [sic p. 71]. 99 Carocci, Il Pellegrino guidato alla visita delle immagini più insigni della B. V. Maria in Roma, p. 120–121: “Una delle immagini, di cui più ella si compiaccia, con mostrarvisi prodigiosa tanto, tanto liberale, si è quella di Loreto: e per questo medesimo che è tale, ve ne sono per tutto il Mondo e le Chiese, e le Copie. Sicché se non possiamo riverirla in Cielo, e colà in Loreto, la riveriremo qui nella Copia della principal Copia. Di quella ne parlammo diffusamente anno. In Roma vi ne ha più d’una; ma io scelgo la più vicino a noi, quella alla colonna Traiana”.

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suggesting that the combination of image and relics were what brought people to the church.100 He calls the image “the copy of the key copy”. However, Carocci’s icon was not a direct copy of the well-known cult statue, but rather a copy of traditional images representing the story of the flying house.101 Early fifteenth-century paintings depicting the history of the miraculous flight of the house were painted on the exterior of the portico that formerly surrounded the Holy House; these were possibly the source of many fifteenth-century prints and paintings.102 The cult statue inside the Holy House became the key image related to the cult of the Madonna of Loreto. But the traditional image of the history of the flying house still lingered; for Carocci, it was the primary devotional image. The spread of the cult of the Holy House and the Madonna di Loreto, in various forms, was decentralised and in part even accidental. As Vélez notes, it was “the work of unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists and unsolicited cataloguers.”103 The Jesuits became vectors for the spread of the construction of replicas of the Holy House containing various styles of icons, as well as for founding missions dedicated to the House throughout the Americas. Vélez counts five replica chapels built by the Jesuits: one in Canada (at Lorette-among-the-Huron, just outside Quebec); one in Baja California; and three in Mexico. Another four were found in frontier missions (in Canada, Baja California, Paraguay and Bolivia). However, notwithstanding the leading role played by Jesuit priests in the spread of this cult, Vélez makes the important point that the devotion was a grassroots affair, sponsored by pious laity and converts: Movers ranged beyond French, Spanish, Portuguese, and central European Jesuits to include Monquí pilgrims from the Baja California, Moxos House builders in Bolivia, Huron female mission leaders in Canada, Inka procession organizers in Peru, Slavic migrants in the Adriatic basin and German atlas makers.104

100 Carocci, Il Pellegrino guidato alla visita delle immagini più insigni della B. V. Maria in Roma, p. 133–135, quote on page 135: “Gittate pur via tante Tavolette votive, tante Gambe di cera, di argento, tanti Archibugi spezzati & basta questo miracolo continuo, per tutti e per venerarla con ogni divozione, e per isperarvi ogni grazia. E può dirsi che questa chiesa di Roma, sia la stessa che di Loreto, almeno inadeguatamente. Andiamo tutti a venerar questa Santissima Immagine, e questa particella di Santa Casa”. 101 See Bombelli for a print after the icon. Bombelli, Raccolta delle Immagini della Beatissima Vergine, p. 110–115. Bombelli incorrectly notes (p. 115) that the image was crowned by the Chapter in 1760, while the print on p. 110 notes the correct date of 1660. 102 Angelita, Historia della Translatione della S. Casa della Madonna à Loreto, p. 33; Santarelli, The Holy House of Loreto, p. 399–400. 103 Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto, p. 7. 104 Vélez, ibid.

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Vélez concludes her study by comparing early modern Catholicism to Wikipedia. Both are “additive”, based on grassroots participation and enthusiasm: “not just trained authorities sitting far away in some elite metropolitan center.”105 It is thus fully appropriate that Heinrich Scherer’s edition of the Atlas Marianus of 1702, as we have seen (Fig. 1), contained a pull-out map of the world presided over by the Blessed Virgin Mary.

7.

Featherwork Takes Flight from the New World to the Old, and Heads East and West

In recent years, a particular Indigenous New World art form that was adapted for use in Christian ritual and worship and transported—in not insignificant quantity—to the Old World has grabbed the attention of scholars: Amerindian featherwork.106 The art form was adapted for this use by the Spaniards very soon after their initial conquest of the Central and South American mainlands. Featherwork had been a prestigious Indigenous art form closely related to the power and prestige of the Aztec rulers. A powerful symbol of its deployment by Christian missionaries and their patrons for equally prestigious commissions is the fact that the earliest mission workshop, located at the school of San José de Belén de los Naturales (designed to give male children of the Mexican elite a Christian education, and attached to the convent of San Francesco in Mexico City from 1527), was built on the very site of the aviary attached to the court of Motecuhzoma II. It was this aviary that had helped to supply the coloured feathers essential for the uniquely iridescent quality of the featherwork.107 The technique of feather mosaics involved gluing cut feathers to a backing of paper or cloth. Although stiffer backing was also originally used to enable feather paintings that could be hung on walls or carried in processions, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi maintains that the more flexible backing was favoured for Christian vestments by the new market, and that from the start, featherwork in colonial Mexico was seen simply “as another textile type” that offered a striking alternative to the more usual woven silk or embroidery.108 The high status of the exclusively male artisans dedicated to this craft of featherworking is reflected 105 Vélez. The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto, p. 246. 106 An essential study on this, with an extensive bibliography, is: Russo, Wolf, and Fane, Images Take flight. A recent inventory of extant featherwork from Mesoamerica, most of with religious subject matter, includes no fewer than 158 items whose location is definitely known (ibid. p. 435–455). Cf. Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church, p. 115–174. 107 Stanfield-Mazzi notes that only after the Aztec ruler Ahuitzotl (r. 1486–1502) had conquered areas around the Basin of Mexico was it possible to access more exotic feathers than those belonging to turkeys, herons and ducks. “Fine and richly colored featherwork of the type encountered by Spaniards in 1519 was thus a relatively recent phenomenon, a contemporary and imperial art of its time.” See Clothing the New World Church, p. 125. 108 Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church, p. 115.

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in their being called amanteca, a Nahuatl word that came to be identified with skilled workers in general.109 The earliest extant featherwork mosaic depicting a Christian subject to have come down to us is, appropriately enough, a product of the above-mentioned workshop. The so-called Mass of Saint Gregory mosaic records the miracle of the appearance of Christ as Man of Sorrows in response to a prayer from Pope Gregory, who sought to convince a doubter of the veracity of Transubstantiation. Measuring fifty-six by sixtyeight centimetres, its wooden frame suggests that it was intended as a feather painting rather than a liturgical cloth. The presence of the frame is reinforced by the arrangement of an inscription surrounding the image, which runs: “Composed in the great city of Mexico for the Supreme Pontiff Paul III by the Lord Diego [Huamitzin, son-in-law of Motecuhzoma II and governor of Mexico City] under the care of the Friar Minor Pedro de Gante in 1539.”110 The Franciscan friar Peter of Ghent (ca.1479–1572), himself a member of the elite (as the possible illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I Habsburg or one of his circle), was one of the first missionaries to arrive on the Mesoamerican mainland. Peter was the founder of the Convent of San Francisco and was a champion of policies involving the education of members of the Aztec elite in the Christian faith. This also involved their learning Indigenous arts, such as featherwork, so that they might deploy them to promote the religion of their new overlords. As a Franciscan, Peter was wedded to the optimistic narrative that saw in the mass conversion of the Indigenous peoples of the New World a presage of the fulfilment of the prophecy (Matthew 24:14) that all peoples of the earth would be converted to the True Faith before the End. Although it ultimately remains a conjectural rather than a conclusive interpretation, given the context outlined above, it does not seem unreasonable to posit the notion that the feather painting was a gift to the Pope specifically in recognition of the Bull Sublimis Deus of 1537, in which the pontiff declared: “the Indians are truly men and […] they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.”111 This argument becomes yet more persuasive, I believe, if one takes into account the fact that Emperor Charles V, motivated by the desire to preserve his exclusive rights of ecclesiastical patronage in 109 For a detailed sixteenth-century account of the working methods of the amanteca, see: Sahagún, The Florentine Codex, book 10, p. 83–97. 110 “Paulo III Pontifici Maxima/en magna Indiaru[m] urbe Mexico/Co/[m]Posita D[omi]No Didaco Guberna/Tore Cura Fr[atr]is Petri A Gante Minoritae A.D. 1539”. See Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church, p. 142–143 (Fig. 3.14). An image of the feather painting can also be found on the website of the Musée des Amériques (formerly Musée des Jacobins): https://musees-occitanie.fr/oeuvre/la-messe-desaint-gregoire/ [last accessed: 22 March 2022]. The object, which was in private hands until it appeared at a Paris auction in 1985, was first discussed in: Mongne, “La Messe de Saint Grégoire du Musée d’Auch”, p. 38–47. 111 https://www.papalencyclicals.net/paul03/p3subli.htm. Cf. Estrada de Gerlero and Martínez, “The Mass of Saint Gregory”, p. 258–260.

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the New World, successfully lobbied the same pope to revoke the bull the following year. Pope Paul III needed imperial support for his alliance against the Turks and for his desire to convene a Church Council (which was eventually convened in Trent several years later). Above all, he needed Charles’s agreement not to block the marriage of his son, Pier luigi Farnese, to the Emperor’s illegitimate daughter, Margherita, so that he could establish a new territory for his dynasty: the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. Although revoking the Bull did not represent a straightforward volte-face as far as papal or imperial policy vis-à-vis the Indians was concerned, as pointed out by Lewis Hanke long ago, nonetheless one thinks straightway of Emperor Charles’s promulgation of the New Laws of 1542, which sought to protect the Indians from being exploited by the holders of rights over Indian labour: the notorious system of encomienda.112 The featherwork gift would have acted as an eloquent reminder of the validity of the original papal position with respect to Indian potential for genuine conversion to Christianity as outlined in the Sublimis Deus. Of particular interest to readers may be the fact that this feather painting is not a straightforward, albeit skilful, translation of the original likely monochrome print from the Habsburg Netherlands.113 Indeed, as Gerhard Wolf notes, perhaps the most striking innovation with respect to its Old World prototype is two pieces of fruit placed at the edge of the stone sarcophagus to the immediate right of the figure of Christ.114 They are easily identified as pineapples. Non-native to the Mexica Indians, a wine (pulque) was made from the fruit that was used in sacrifice rituals; it could therefore be compared with the wine of the Eucharist. Moreover, Wolf continues, the pineapples, which are in the position usually occupied by the vessels of Mary Magdalene, “allude to a tactile relation to the body of Christ, and the pineapple is its simile—carnosa, epinosa e dulce (fleshy, thorny and sweet)”.115 On the other side of the altar, just to the left of the pope—and therefore in a corresponding position that the pineapples have to Christ, has been placed the papal tiara, whose honeycomb structure is not dissimilar to that of the fruits. This may have been an allusion to the large bronze pinecone of classical Roman origins that at the time was about to be moved from the courtyard in front of Old Saint Peter’s in Rome to a new location near the Belvedere courtyard. As Wolf pointedly puts it: “does not the tiara of the Mass of Staint Gregory from early Christian Mexico seem like a Petrine pigna corresponding to the Christological piña?”116 Images of the St Gregory Mass are also found on the reverse of two of the seven surviving featherwork mitres now preserved in museums (although Stansfield-Mazza emphasises that there were likely to have been many more such items in circulation,

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Hanke, “Pope Paul III and the American Indians”, p. 65–102. Parshall, and Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking, p. 250–252. On this and the following, see: Wolf, “Incarnations of Light”, p. 82, p. 84–85. Wolf, “Incarnations of Light”, p. 84. Wolf, “Incarnations of Light”, p. 86.

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even if not quite so expensively conceived).117 From the outset, these examples were perhaps more trophies to be admired and treasured rather than liturgical vestments to be worn (which of course explains their survival). However, in two cases at least, we know that they were indeed used by the prelates to whom they were gifted. One of these, now in Vienna, was previously owned by Pedro de la Gasca, bishop of Palencia, Spain, whose crest was added to the mitre’s lappets.118 In 1554, la Gasca gave it to Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol for his Kunstkammer at Ambras Castle. In the case of the mitre today preserved in the Cathedral Treasury in Milan, we know that the original was first gifted to Pope Pius IV (r. 1559–1566), who then gave it to his nephew, Carlo Borromeo, on the latter’s appointment to the Archbishopric of Milan in 1564.119 We also know from one of his biographers that Borromeo wore the feathered mitre at least once, on the occasion of a penitential procession.120 Moreover, Lia Markey suggests that for the famous collector of exotica, Cardinal Ferdinando Medici (1549–1609; cardinal from 1562; grand duke of Tuscany from 1589), the fact that he included his feather mitres in his Roman inventory, suggests that for him they were for wearing and not merely for putting on display.121 Such featherwork did not simply journey from the New to the Old World; it was also proudly shown off by European missionaries as far afield as East Africa and northern China. For example, in 1569, a group of Jesuits set out to Mozambique to offer its ruler, King Monomatopa, rich gifts from Philip II. These gifts included a feather painting of the Ecce Homo.122 The high estimation enjoyed by featherwork at the imperial court in Beijing during the reign of the Emperor Wan Li (1572–1620) is also well known.123 The direct connection drawn between such desirable artefacts and Mexico may be seen from Map of Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth (Kunyu wanguo quantu), printed in 1602 by Zhang Wentao of Hangzhou and engraved by the astronomer and geographer Li Zhizou (1565–1630), who collaborated with the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610).124

117 For the following, see Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church, p. 149–165. Cf. Russo, Wolf and Fane, Images Take Flight, p. 312–317 and figs. 62, 77, 78. Other surviving featherwork mitres in Europe were from the beginning in princely collections, namely, the Escorial of Philip II and the collection of Ferdinando de Medici in Palazzo Pitti. 118 Stansfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church, p. 150 (Fig. 3.16a and 3.16b). 119 See Fig. 3.18 in Stanfield-Mazza, Clothing the New World Church, p. 150. Cf. Russo, Wolf and Fane, Images Take Flight, Fig. 77 (p. 112). 120 Stansfield-Mazza, Clothing the New World Church, p. 153. Also the mitre held in the Escorial shows evidence of wear on its lower edges (ibid., p. 165). 121 Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence, p. 83. 122 Cummins, “The Indulgent Image”, p. 203–225, p. 290–292. 123 Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p.189. Cf. Bailey, “Religious Orders and the Arts of Asia”, p. 98. 124 An excellent digitised copy of the map has been made available by the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll251:8823.

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On the section of the map depicting Central America one finds the following statement: “The Land of Mexico produces bird feathers of all colours. The people collect them and make them into paintings. The landscapes and human figures [they do] are all marvellous.”125

8.

Conclusion: The Free Jazz Dance of Agency

It has been our intention in this chapter to provide readers with a selection of case studies in order to show how the unprecedented geographical spread of Christianity in the early modern period gave various actors the opportunity to engage with its visual and material culture in dynamically (and sometimes dizzyingly) different ways. Returning to the questions asked near the start: To what extent did early modern Catholics and, in some cases, Indigenous converts believe that sacred objects possessed agency? And how did this shape the ways in which those studied in this chapter appropriated objects considered holy by the missionaries, and go-betweens, they encountered? Indeed, can we even know this? In some instances, it is knowable. Mobility, malleability, material presence, miraculous power and other characteristics of objects are clearly dependent upon and shaped by the historical actors who encountered, made and/or used them. Accordingly, considering questions of agency and materiality does help us to understand the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion in the early modern (or indeed any other) period. Fruitful pathways going forward would have researchers be more inclusive and mindful of people, places, and types, sizes and shapes of objects. At the same time, there is a need to dive deeper into primary source materials, both published and archival, to let the histories emerge. As noted above, the processes and avenues that made the spread of Christianity as the first global religion possible were polycentric. They did not develop at the same pace, and they were dependant on the back-and-forth flow of actors and objects. A centre to periphery model cannot apply here. The multiple “centres”—which of course were “local” to their inhabitants, as well as being, at the same time, “peripheral” to others—pushed back in protest or incomprehension as often as they deferred to Rome for approval. By looking at the networks and interactions of objects, people, and places in all their (sometimes smudged) specificity, historical conditions sometimes emerge clearly enough to be analysed. It will be helpful if researchers learn to tolerate such messiness and appreciate how history presents itself, rather than pushing pre-determined categories onto the past. As noted above, it is useful to think with the ideas of Morgan. But the past itself is what we truly want to think with, if that is even possible. 125 See Russo, “A Contemporary Art from New Spain”, p. 60. The corresponding section of the map can be found in panel five at: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll251:8823/p16022coll251:8821?child_ index=5&query=&sidebar_page=2.

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Greenwood, Jon. “Founder, Healer, Blessed, Saint: Collecting and Interpreting Miracles in the Early Modern Iberian World.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Johns Hopkins University, 2016. Hanß, Stefan. “Lepanto in the Americas: Global Storytelling and Mediterranean History.” In Journal of Early Modern History 25 (2021), p. 1–36. Habsburg, Francesa von, The St Petersburg Muraqqa‘: Album of Persian and Indian Miniatures from the 16 th through the 18th Century and Specimens of Persian Calligraphy by ‘Imād al-Ḥasanī. Milan: Leonardo d’Arte, 1996. Hanke, Lewis. “Pope Paul III and the American Indians.” In Harvard Theological Review 30/2 (1937), p. 65–102. Harpster, Grace. “The Sacrilege of Soot: Liturgical Decorum and the Black Madonna of Loreto.” In Contamination and Purity in Early Modern Art and Architecture, edited by Lauren Jacobi and Daniel M. Zolli. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, p. 99–127. Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia. A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia (ed.). A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2018. Ivanič, Suzanna, Mary Laven, and Andrea Morall (eds.). Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Johnson, Trevor. “Blood, Tears, and Xavier-Wasser: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Palatinate.” In Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800, edited by Bob Scribner, and Trevor Johnson. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, p. 183–202. Jones, Pamela, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield (eds.). A Companion to Early Modern Rome, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019. Krautheimer, Richard, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655–1667. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Kuntz, Margaret A. “Liturgical, Ritual, and Diplomatic Spaces at St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palace. The Innovations of Paul IV, Urban VIII, and Alexander VII.” In A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492–1692, edited by Pamela Jones, Barbara Wisch, and Simon Ditchfield. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2019, p. 75–98. Lach, Donald F. Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols in 9 parts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965–1993. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 Lepoittevin, Anne. “Picciolini, Picolini et Piccioli. La Fabrique Romaine des Agnus Dei (1563–1700).” In Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 183/3 (2018), p. 87–117. Markey, Lia. Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2016. Mazur, Peter. Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy. London/New York: Routledge, 2016.

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McNamara, Celeste. The Bishop’s Burden: Reforming the Catholic Church in Early Modern Italy. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2020. Mochizuki, Mia M. Jesuit Art, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2022. Mongne, Pascale. “La Messe de Saint Grégoire du Musée d’Auch.” In Revue du Louvre 5–6 (1994) p. 38–47. Morgan, David. The Thing About Religion. An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 2021. Muller, Aislinn. “The Agnus Dei, Catholic Devotion, and Confessional Politics in Early Modern England.” In British Catholic History 34/1 (2018), p. 1–28. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2010. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Natif, Mika. Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters Between Europe and Asia in the Courts of India, 1580–1630. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018. Nelles, Paul. “Devotion in Transit: Agnus Dei, Jesuit Missionaries and Global Salvation in the Sixteenth Century.” In The Mechanics of Mobility in the Early Modern World, edited by Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023, p. 185–214. Nolan, Linda. Tangible Devotion, forthcoming. Noreen, Kirstin. “The Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome: An Image and its Afterlife.” In Renaissance Studies 19/5 (2005), p. 660–672. Ostrow, Steven F. Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome. The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Parshall, Peter, and Rainer Schoch (eds.). Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public. Washington DC/Nuremberg/New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005. Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. Visualizing Guadalupe. From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Pickering, Andrew. “Material Culture and the Dance of Agency.” In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 192–208. Richardson, Catherine, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 2017. Russo, Alessandra. “A Contemporary Art from New Spain.” In Images Take flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane. Munich: Hirmer, 2015, p. 23–63. Russo, Alessandro, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane (eds.). Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700. Munich: Hirmer, 2015. Sahagún, Bernardino de. The Florentine Codex: General History of the Things in New Spain, translated by Arthur J. O Anderson and, Charls E. Dibble, 13 vols in 10. Santa Fe: School of American Research/Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1959.

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Santarelli, Giuseppe. The Holy House of Loreto. Loreto: Edizioni Santa Casa, 2017. Scheper Hughes, Jennifer. Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Scheper Hughes, Jennifer. The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Spence, Jonathan D. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1985. Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya. Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. Taylor, William B. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Taylor, William B. “Cristos de Caña.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures, vol. 1, edited by David Carrasco. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 286–287. Taylor, William B. Theater of a Thousand Wonders. A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Trusted, Marjorie. Baroque & Later Ivories. London: V&A, 2013. Van Oyen, Astrid. “Material Agency.” In The Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Sciences, edited by Sandra L. Lopez Varela. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781119188230.saseas0363. Vélez, Karin, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern world. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Villaseñor Black, Charlene. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Whistler, Catherine. Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art, cat. 58. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2001, p. 79. Wolf, Gerhard. “Incarnations of Light: Picturing Feathers in Europe/Mexico, ca.1400–1600.” In Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane. Munich: Hirmer, 2015, p. 65–99. Zampol d’Ortia, Linda. “The Dress of Evangelization: Jesuit Garments, Liturgical Textiles, and the Senses in Early Modern Japan.” In Entangled Religions 10 (2020), https://doi:10.13154/er.10. 2020.8438.

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Ines G. Županov

Religious Accommodation Historicity, Teleology, Expansion

1.

Introduction

Developed in the field of theology before being re-purposed by the humanities and social sciences, the concept of religious accommodation is among the longest enduring concepts in the study of history. It began its epistemological career in both Jewish and Christian texts that were grappling with Greco-Roman ethical and linguistic concerns. There, it figured as a tool for understanding God’s plan for humanity, the origins and management of social and cultural diversity, and historical change.1 Tied to providential history throughout late antiquity and the medieval period, it was at the core of many vigorous theological discussions generated within rabbinical and Christian monastic communities. At stake there was the authenticity of the Bible as the work of God rather than a work of human will and of historical construction. Among the first influential arguments was St Augustine’s proposition that some parts of the Bible had to be read from not only a literal but also a contextual, rhetorical and even allegorical perspective.2 In the longue durée, this model of analysis had the strongest impact on secular and historicist forms of reading. Hence, from the exclusive circles of religious specialists and exegesis scholars, this model of reading the Bible percolated into humanist readings of history, as in the famous case of Lorenzo Valla’s clarification of the Donation of Constantine.3 From the sixteenth century onwards, religious accommodation mutated from a theological and hermeneutic concept into a practical strategy that was employed in the encounter between European and non-Christian cultures. In missionary and colonial contexts, the practice of religious accommodation preceded theological deliberation and, most of the time, ended in local as well as global controversies, some of them well known, like the Malabar and Chinese rites quarrel.4 In what follows, I will first address, in the most general terms, hermeneutic and rhetorical accommodation, both of which have a history that is much too long and

1 2 3 4

Funkenstein, Theology; Benin, Footprints of God. Ginzburg, “Letter Kills”. Giard, Lorenzo Valla; Fubini, Humanism and Secularization. For the latest publication on the Malabar and Chinese rites quarrel in the global perspective see Županov and Fabre, Rites Controversies.

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winding for me to address fully here, but both of which became a point of reference for missionary religious accommodation in early modern plural Christianity. Accordingly, in the second and larger part of the chapter, I will focus in more detail on religious accommodation in mostly Jesuit missions in the early modern world, in light of the virulent disputes within missionary orders and within global Christianity. In recent years, historiography has paid increasing attention to missionary accommodation in Asia, especially in China and India. There are many reasons for this renewed interest, even beyond Catholic hagiographies or the polemical and derogatory Protestant histories of the Jesuit missions in Asia. One reason for this is an effort to understand the expansion of early modern Catholicism from the point of view of new converts and non-European Catholic elites. Even when the missionaries remain major actors, the story is not about their triumphs but rather about the negotiated space they shared with both their converts and detractors. Instead of highlighting missionary expansion, this approach focuses on the appropriation of Catholicism by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic convert communities. Even the concept of accommodation is avoided expressis verbis in order to tease out other images or concepts and to fit the actual process and outcome of religious and cultural encounter. New concepts such as syncretism, métissage and hybridisation—or more neutral, even poetic terms, like Nicolas Standaert’s image of “texturing a textile”—are ways to avoid the older concept of accommodation.5 Nevertheless, pioneering works on missionary accommodation in China by David E. Mungelo and Jonathan Spence remain important predecessors of more recent writings, such as those by Claudia von Collani, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Eugenio Menegon, Ana Carolina Hosne and many others.6 Historiography of missionaries in India that focuses on culture and religion in a nonpartisan mode and within a larger social framework is less developed than in the Chinese geographical context. Among the new cultural historical approaches are writings by Paolo Aranha, Margherita Trento, Ananya Chakravarti, Will Sweetman and Ines G. Županov, in dialogue with some good recent Jesuit-centred books on accommodation written by Jesuit scholars. The most important new development is conversation across historiographical fields that were formerly separated by geography. Previously, religious accommodation was not discussed in the history of American missions, because the old thesis was that there simply was none. But from the pathbreaking book by Sabine McCormack to the work of Guillermo Wilde, a series of new publications have brought to light the continuous accommodation between Christianity and local cultural practices in the Americas and elsewhere.7

5 Standaert, “Christianity”. 6 Mungello, Chinese Rites Controversy; Spence, Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci; Hsia, Jesuit in the Forbidden City; Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars; Hosne, Jesuit Missions to China and Peru. 7 Castelnau-l’Estoile, “Francisco Pinto”; Perczel, “Accommodation Strategies”; Olar, “Orthodoxy and Politics”; Wilde, “Writing Rites”; Brosseder, “Secularizing the Andes”.

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2.

Hermeneutic Accommodation

Both Christian and Jewish hermeneutic accommodation from the medieval period concerned uniformity and diversity in the field of theology. The question theologians tended to ask was how God’s infinitude could be accommodated to human finitude: how the universal could be accommodated to the particular. Also called divine accommodation, it was directly connected to exegeses of scriptural passages in which God condescends to speak in the language of man: scriptura humane loquitur (dibrah Torah ki-leshon bnei adam).8 The language of man is, in a word, imprecise; it is full of idolatrous phrases and practices from before the acquisition of the divine Commandments. The twelfth-century Jewish theologian Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides, proposed in his Guide for the Perplexed the most original theory of divine accommodation. There, he contrasted the idolatries of the ancient world, which he attributed to the mythical Sabians, with Jewish law. He explained biblical anthropomorphisms by referring to phrases such as the “hand of God”, which does not mean, according to Maimonides, that God had a body. In the process, according to Amos Funkenstein, Maimonides discovered “contextual reasoning”, or the historicity of an event (or datum) that can be understood only through a reconstruction of its original context.9 As a historian of medieval science, Funkenstein was interested in the relationship between divine (universal) law and the laws governing nature and the particular. Maimonides’s theory, also called “divine cunning”, presupposed that divine wisdom would descend to the limited earthly matter and human world and work through them in order to achieve its own ultimate ends.10 The early Christian thinker St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), in his explanation of why Jewish customs were now condemned by the Christian God, drew upon classical Roman literature, in particular Cicero’s (106–43 BCE) notion of appropriateness in De Oratore.11 Thus: “the rhetorical notion of the appropriate, the fitting, allowed Augustine to sustain simultaneously the ideas of divine immutability and of historical change.”12 Augustine’s crucial temporalisation of Cicero’s rhetorical concept eventually paved the way for Jesuit missionaries to add a spatial dimension: the principle of accommodatio allowed missionaries to transcend the contingencies not only of time but also of space, in spreading the Christian message. After Augustine, Christian scholastics, particularly Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), assimilated

8 https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/leshon-bnai-adam-1.12745, Leshon bnei Adam is a Talmudic expression meaning today “laymen’s terms”. 9 Funkenstein, Theology. 10 Socher, “Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness”, p. 6–29; Weston and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities; Moyn, “Amos Funkenstein”, p. 143–166. 11 Guérin, “Philosophical Decorum”. 12 Ginzburg, “Style”, p. 110–112.

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the classical, early Christian and Maimonidean theories. In his discussion of sacrifice as having literal as well as figurative or allegorical meanings, Aquinas interpreted its literal meaning as divine worship and its allegorical meaning as the prefiguration of Christ. Accommodatio thus involved negotiating the tension between the universal and eternal law of the Christian God and the necessarily contingent, limited nature of the humans who received that law. In concrete terms, it involved the willingness of the missionary to adapt to, or even adopt, the cultural practices of his flock that he deemed free of any idolatrous subtext. Subsequently, the concept of divine accommodation experienced a revival among early modern philosophers: namely, Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) providentia; Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) “invisible hand”; Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) geheimer Plan der Natur; and G.W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) List der Vernunft (the cunning of reason).13

3.

Rhetorical Accommodation, Adiaphora and the Jesuits

For Renaissance humanists, the concept of accommodation had a narrower meaning, that of adapting one’s writing to a particular audience. Defined as a completely secular strategy among men, it nonetheless shaped the first Jesuits’ ministries, according to John O’Malley. In particular, it opposed the universalist and essentialist approach by Aristotelian medieval scholasticism based on singular time and place to a contingent hic et nunc. O’Malley claims that the “modern” religious vision rooted in personal and cultural accommodation not only can be found in literary giants such as Erasmus, Montaigne and Shakespeare, but also that the Society of Jesus, as an institution, belonged to the very same movement.14 According to Stephen Toulmin, the Jesuit expulsion and suppression had to do with the baroque triumph of the “quest for certainty” (to cite John Dewey), supported by rigoristic universalism, which displaced an earlier rhetorical flexibility and grew hostile to the Jesuit preference for the particular.15 Toulmin’s conclusion is that Jesuit conflicts over probabilism, casuistry and the Chinese rites controversy can be reimagined as the expression of a paradigmatic or epistemic shift. Both O’Malley and Toulmin frame the paradigm as based on early accommodation to the particular and local, against the “objectivity” of the universal, general and timeless, which came as a response to the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. The Jesuits were, therefore, at the centre of a cultural conflict in which they came to support diversity against uniformity.16

13 14 15 16

Benin, “Cunning of God”, p. 190; Benin, Footprints of God. O’Malley, First Jesuits; Schloesser, “Accommodation”. Toulmin, Cosmopolis. Skinner, “Past in the Present”.

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“Rhetorical accommodation” was, according to O’Malley, the basic principle of Jesuit ministry in the early modern period. When speaking of this accommodation, we must also introduce concepts and practices that operated in its less prestigious contexts—concepts like Nicodemism, adiaphora (indifferent things), dissimulation/ simulation, equivocation and mental reservation.17 These were all tools of accommodation, or strategies of representing reality without telling the complete and accurate truth, especially in cases where there were immediate threats to one’s life. In a word, accommodation came with a price. Interestingly, however, O’Malley remains silent on these. First Delio Cantimori and then Carlo Ginzburg argued that Nicodemism was an important part of religious dissent in the sixteenth century. Division between Protestants and Catholics fostered various forms of dissimulation, while the theologians on both sides of the religious barricades reached back into the European past, through historical accounts, in search of suitable tactics. With the rediscovery of “pagan” (sc. Greek and Roman) and Christian antiquity, the concept of “adiaphoron” developed by Cynics and Stoics migrated into scholasticism and inspired the early Protestants—Luther and Calvin among them—to defend “liberty” in the face of the papacy’s “tyranny” and ceremonial excesses.18 What did the medieval Christian adiaphorists want? The dispute turned around a debate, starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, over the distinction between “sacraments” and “sacramentals”. The former were considered as instituted by Christ himself; the latter were added later and judged “not necessary” for salvation. Luther’s and other reformers’ interventions targeted specifically the ceremonial excesses in church rituals. As the French theologian Pierre d’Ailly (1351–1420) warned earlier on during the Western Schism (1378–1417), the church was overrun by an “evil of superfluity”.19 Luther and d’Ailly both argued for the necessity of paring down the accumulation of church ceremonies and of simply declaring them “indifferent” (adiaphoron), or not necessary, for salvation—a human invention to help the weak when they try to comprehend and worship the true God. According to Perez Zagorin, it was the pressure to conform that created a “submerged continent” of dissimulation, by which early modern people tried to articulate particular political and confessional views and feelings.20 The distinction between the inner space of conscience and the outer space of social appearance and performance led to the self-fashioning manuals of how to live and thrive in a particular political milieu, from Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe to Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, in which

17 Tutino, “Jesuit Accommodation”. 18 Cantimori, Eretici Italiani del Cinquecento e altri Scritti; Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo; Balserak, Divinity Compromised; Street, “John Calvin on Adiaphora”. 19 Huizinga, Autumntide of the Middle Age, p. 230–232. 20 Zagorin, Ways of Lying, p. 14.

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advice is given to the political elite of the time about how to act and relate to one another in accordance with social hierarchy, propriety and personal ambition. The principle of accommodation was often conveyed by verbs like assimigliarsi or by images of personal transformation following a role model.21 And it remained a key concept in describing the changes in cultural and literary practices of the late medieval and early modern European world. How, then, under the pressure to accommodate and conform, did a sense of the individual subject reappear, as if through the cracks? Jacob Burckhardt first raised this question in 1860, and ever since, it has been the object of critique and revision. Recently, Virginia Cox has emphasised the performative nature of individualism and individuality.22 Indeed, accommodation and dissimulation are performative as much as textual strategies, and they were two pivots around which individual consciousness developed in early modern Europe, nurtured by religious diversity and the instability of moral categories.

4.

Religious Accommodation in Jesuit Missions

The Society of Jesus appeared in the 1540s with the large-scale project of bridging the gap that, in the religious context, had sundered the inner spiritual core of the individual and the outer performative self. The Jesuits achieved this (or at least, tried to achieve this) by anchoring a sense of inner certainty in the face of outer multiplicity through a pledge of obedience, where one acted as if one were a corpse (ac cadaver). The Jesuits thought that the individual subject grew out of the subjection to self-imposed rules that would cause one to act as if he or she were simply obeying a divine command. In other words, Jesuits believed that one is a true subject or individual only when one’s inner generator is powered by the divine will. The rules written down in foundational texts—namely, the Constitutions and Spiritual Exercises—were considered manuals for “our [Jesuit] way of proceeding”, since the rules were taught by their very founder, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), who was subsequently canonised.23 At the heart of the Jesuit worldview are Spiritual Exercises, a pre-Tridentine composition largely completed by 1540 and published in 1548 with the approval of the Pope. The Exercises primarily address the individual subject as the arena of God’s labour in the world. Ignatius shared this early modern subjectivist turn with his religious contemporaries. Luther, for example, focused on the individual’s faith, and Calvin on

21 Machiavelli, The Prince; Castiglione, Book of Courtier. 22 Cox, “Performance of Identity”. 23 Friedrich, “Government and Information-Management”; Friedrich, Jesuiten; Fabre, “L’institution du texte fondateur”.

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Religious Accommodation

the individual’s predestination, while Loyola focused on the individual’s discernment.24 However, the most important precept for the Jesuits was “to save oneself while saving others”.25 It was the Jesuits’ early engagement with missions, both in Europe and overseas, among non-Christians and heretics that sharpened the initial project by Loyola and the founding fathers, rendering it instantly global and cosmopolitan. The Society of Jesus had been approved just around the time Francis Xavier arrived in Asia and started his proselytising campaign. Most of the decisions that defined the interior structure and functioning of the Society of Jesus were put in place with missionary experience in mind, as well as the first feedback that arrived from East and West. The principle of accommodation was enshrined in the founding texts in many different ways, but the scope and form of the practice can be traced only in the Jesuits’ vast correspondence and in treatises and books referring to rites controversies.26 Exchanging letters was a key requirement of the Society, outlined even in its Constitutions, with particular emphasis on communicating with those who were isolated and far away from other fellow Jesuits. The title of Part 8 of the text explains this as “Help[ing] toward uniting the distant members with their head and among themselves.”27 From the initial letters that Francis Xavier wrote while traveling through Asia on his ten-year apostolate, we can see how his missionary proselytising approach changed as he travelled further away from the Portuguese colonial territories. Missionaries who came after him within the Portuguese Padroado network and were posted outside of Goa and along the coasts of India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and China mostly adapted their approach to specific terrain among the fishermen, traders or at the royal courts of the Muslim or non-Christian kings. All Catholic missions beyond the frontiers of Iberian colonial administration and without secular support engaged in some sort of accommodation, since the societies and cultures presented a serious problem of disparitas cultus concerning marriage contracts, in addition to other questions like the linguistic translation of sacraments and sacramentals. The problem the missionaries faced, for which they solicited the opinion and guidance of Rome, were cases of conscience: what can be permitted and allowed into the Christian language, customs and cult. These questions filtered into Rome and were handled by the Jesuit Curia and later on by the Propaganda Fide in the same undecided way as almost all other questions. In fact, Rome systematically failed to provide proper guidance.28

24 25 26 27

Schloesser, “Accommodation”, p. 354. Fabre, “L’institution du texte fondateur”. Županov and Fabre, Rites Controversies. Loyola, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, p. 285; Nelles, “Jesuit Letters”, p. 44–72; Ditchfield, “Baroque Around the Clock”, p. 1–25. 28 Windler, “Going Local”, p. 124–150. Prieto, “Perils of Accommodation”, p. 395–414.

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A Jesuit Visitor, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), whose experience in Japan was with a polygamous society and who was without the help of Roman theological opinions, proposed, after a series of local consultations, a policy of dissimulating in favorem fidei. This became, in effect, something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy. His “method” for Japan, chiselled out in direct opposition to his Jesuit predecessor Antonio Cabral, consisted of allowing select Japanese cultural forms into Christian life and cult (although this remained subject to debate), so as to “make Christianity Japanese”, in today’s parlance. 29 Valignano’s method was derived from the Constitutions, according to which Jesuit dress had to conform to local custom, but his accommodation strategy presupposed that the Japanese and Chinese possessed a superior civilization and political order based on natural law.30 He also instructed the Jesuits in China to do the same; Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) became the first to put this method into practice.31 The principles were: learning Indigenous languages, studying non-Christian sacred books if there were any, identifying honourable elites whose habitus the missionaries would adopt or emulate in presenting both their own selves and the spiritual law they were bringing. The accommodation incarnated Ignatius’ famous formula entrar con el otro para salir consigo (enter with the other and let the other come out by himself [or with oneself]), or Paul’s “be Jew to the Jews and Roman to Romans”. Of course, behind this strategy was a Jesuit belief that all classical ancient societies had received the “Glad Tidings”, but that the message had been lost in the course of history. Thus, Jesuits were required to query Chinese classical writers to find a fertile breach through which to access the shared “truth”. As is well known, Ricci disagreed with Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), who thought that it was Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist priests who were the closest to Christianity. His choice reflected the religious climate of late Ming China, in which the Jesuits were initially understood by the Chinese Mandarins of Zhaoqing as belonging to the Buddhist sect. Ruggieri, who studied Mandarin in Macau, published a catechism titled Tianzhu Shilu (1584), the first catechism in Chinese characters, in which he presented himself as Tianchu seng, a monk from the land of Buddha—that is, India. Ruggieri left China in 1588, and between 1589 and 1593 Ricci refurbished his own persona and the missionary project for the China mission. Upon Valignano’s approval in 1593, Ricci grew a beard, stopped cutting his hair and began arduous research into the Confucian classics until he could present himself as a scholar of Confucius, whose personal ethics and morality he also learnt to admire. By 1610, newly arrived Franciscan and Dominican missionaries saw Confucian rites as nothing but an idolatrous cult of ancestors, not a set of civil practices, as the Jesuits claimed. 29 Vu Thanh, Devenir japonais. 30 Schütte, Valignano’s Mission; Valignano, “Historia del pricipio y progresso de la Compañía de Jesús”. 31 Spence, Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci; Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City; Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins and Friars.

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Ricci remained persuaded that Mandarin literati played the precise role in Chinese society that the Jesuits should one day play. Accommodation was, accordingly, seen as a temporary policy until Christianity started to sprout roots inside Chinese society. That is the meaning of “coming out by oneself ”. In the late twentieth century, anthropologists working with what they called “uncivilised” people—still living as hunters and gatherers—pleaded with authorities to give these people “breathing space” to adjust.32 These humane, if misguided, thoughts are comparable to those of the Jesuits who practised accommodation seeing their strategy as il modo soave. This method, or “way of proceeding”, can be seen as a form of tolerance by which Italian Jesuits distinguished themselves from Portuguese members. And in fact, the Italian Jesuits saw this as such. The visibility of Jesuit accommodation is mostly due to the intense discussion and internal rift that the method provoked in Asia, Rome and around the globe. More than anything, accommodation became notorious for being at the centre of the more-than-a-century-old quarrel among the Jesuits themselves, between Rome and Portugal and between Jesuits and other missionary orders. In the eighteenth century it came to be known as the “Chinese and the Malabar rites quarrel”. And it was around this time that the method was given the name of accommodation.33 In fact, use of the term before this theological debate was only sporadic. The recently edited volume on “rites controversies” in the global context, argues that the practice of accommodation was, on the contrary, ubiquitous across all Jesuit missions.34 Recently, moreover, inspired by the scholarship on the rites quarrel, Will Sweetman has argued that the Lutheran mission in Tranquebar, the closest neighbour of the famous Jesuit Madurai Mission in South India—the site of the rites quarrel—also tacitly practiced accommodation by tolerating caste divisions.35

5.

Four Theoretical Arguments/Practical Strategies

Since there is a growing historiography concerned with the details and events in China and India that comprise the narrative arc of accommodation and the resulting rites quarrel, at this point I will address only four common theoretical arguments that the Jesuit missionaries made on the basis of their concrete practices. Jesuits, who were the major initial protagonists in the Chinese missionary field, developed their arguments in response to criticism coming from the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries. Just like the Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) in India, they theorised their accommodationist

32 33 34 35

Clifford, Returns, p. 65; Broome, Aboriginal Australians, p. 119. Rajamanickam, Roberto de Nobili. Županov and Fabre, Rites Controversies. Sweetman, “Accommodation of Caste”; Sweetman and Županov, “Rival Mission”, p. 624–653.

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efforts when challenged by other missionaries. Social hierarchies and national identities within the Jesuit order were also seen as fuelling the early debates.36 The first argument relates to linguistic and literary learning: A missionary had to immerse himself into the missionary target culture, preferably “high” and “noble” culture, and had to examine “scientific” books, if there were any.37 Definitions of what is high, noble and scientific in a given society may vary depending on the missionary acquisition of more detailed knowledge and on individual taste. In fact, in the Tamil linguistic and cultural setting from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, Jesuits developed three different ideal Tamil-Christian literary styles, depending on their target convert communities. In China, a model based on Confucian literati replaced an earlier one, which had been based on Buddhist religious practices.38 The second is the emulation of social and cultural roles: the transformation or imitation of the local model of priesthood with respect to dress, comportment, food and speech. The Brahmanical model was one of the first developed in the Madurai mission, before other models like paṇṭāracāmi and pulavar emerged.39 Interestingly, there were mission territories where the Jesuits had to perform and underscore their European identity by wearing black cassocks. Most of the frontier Catholic missions of the Portuguese Empire, at the Mughal court or at the Kandy court in Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century, had political duties attached to them, with missionaries considered to be Portuguese envoys.40 A third strategy or argument can be called semiotic transubstantiation: the point of this was to identify concepts and practices that corresponded, by similitude or intention, to Christian meanings and were thus to be filled subsequently with Christian connotations in the process of translation or transculturation. For example, in South India, tampirāṉ acquired the meaning of Christian God in the sixteenth century, in addition to various other meanings such as king, master, and Śaiva monk. But in the seventeenth century it was replaced in Jesuit catechisms with caruvecuraṉ or sarvēśvara, probably under the influence of Thomas Stephens, a Jesuit writer in Goa, who used the same Sanskritderived word in his Marathi and Konkani translations.41 The wine for the mass was substituted with grape juice, because alcohol had a negative connotation in Tamil society. Obviously, there was a lot of trial and error, or “experimentation”, as I called it in my 1999 book, Disputed Mission.42

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Županov, “Aristocratic Analogies”. McManus, Empire of Eloquence; McManus, “Jesuit Humanism”, p. 737–758. Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City. A non-Brahman Śaiva priest and a Tamil poet, respectively. Flores, Hum curto historia de Ceylan; Županov, “Borderlands of Knowledge”, p. 443–461. Tiliander, Christian and Hindu Terminology, p. 92; Xavier and Županov, Portuguese Empire, p. 225. Županov, Disputed Mission.

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The fourth are historical or historicist arguments: The major thrust in favour of accommodating to non-Christians came from the argument that the early Christians from antiquity based their customs and ceremonies on Roman, Greek and Jewish social and even religious customs. Sabine MacCormack has argued that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish understood the Incan empire—which they destroyed—through the lens of Roman history.43 Most of the missionaries in Asia used examples from antiquity to frame their contemporary experience. Roberto Nobili compared the ceremonies of the Brahmans in South India to “pagan”, Jewish and early Christian customs.44 Accommodation first happened in the early centuries of the Christian era, it was argued, so why not also apply it to peoples such as the Chinese, Japanese and Indians, whose culture was on the same level as that of the Romans’ and Greeks’? Even a Jesuit, José de Acosta (1540–1600), who positively did not care for accommodation, admitted that the Chinese and Indians who possessed letters, state and culture required a different approach than that used with stateless barbarians.45 In recent years, the comparison between Ricci and Acosta with respect to their different attitudes toward native cultures has been the subject of scholarly discussion. Thus, for instance, Joan-Pau Rubiés has remarked that Acosta’s view of native cultures was more rigorist than Ricci’s, because he regarded native rituals as thoroughly inspired by the devil. Ana Carolina Hosne has compared Ricci’s accommodationist strategy to Acosta’s idea of Hispanicisation or acculturation, famously exemplified by his remark in De procuranda indorum salute that the Andean natives needed to be taught how to be human before they could be taught how to be Christians. The differences between Ricci and Acosta, however, are stark when it comes to their missionary methods. Ricci spent almost three decades among the Christian communities, first in the Guangdong province and later in the imperial capitals of Nanjing and Beijing, transforming himself into a Mandarin, such that in a famous incident at the banquet in Nanchang, a Mandarin gave Ricci the supreme compliment of publicly announcing that he did not look foreign, save for his face. Acosta, by contrast, never spent any meaningful amount of time among Amerindian communities, and he never learned any Indigenous languages, such as Quechua or Aymara.46 By the eighteenth century, Jesuit treatises regarding the customs and manners of the “pagan” world—in explicit comparison with European antiquity—became their own literary sub-genre, later reclaimed by the French philosophes and other anti-Jesuit writers. Thus in 1724, a Jesuit missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, published his Mœurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, which earned him the title

43 44 45 46

MacCormack, Wings of Time. Rajamanickam, Roberto de Nobili on Indian Customs. MacCormack, Religion in the Andes; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man. Rubiés, “Concept of Cultural Dialogue”, p. 246; Hosne, Jesuit Missions, p. 76; Prieto, “Perils of Accommodation”.

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of founder of comparative ethnology and religion.47 As one of Lafitau’s fiercest critiques, Voltaire ridiculed missionary efforts to see the ancient Greeks in the Americans.48 Interestingly, however, the philosopher was, at the same time, ready to believe in the antiquity of South Asian Indians and ready to accept that the Ezour-vedam (a missionary catechism) had been the most ancient Brahman sacred text.49 In brief, given that accommodation occurred in the ancient pagan and Christian pasts, why could it not also occur in the Christian present? Indeed, such were the doubts (dubia) that started flooding into Rome and the Jesuit Roman Curia as missionaries occupied new terrains across the world in the sixteenth century. The major fear was the validity of sacraments, especially those related to marriage.50 The unification and standardisation of rules and practices of the post-Tridentine church raised difficult questions, and responses were urgently required. Tepidly allowing case-by-case accommodation that slipped through the cracks of an incomprehensive Papal decision was an easy, if temporary, solution. Recently, Cesare Santus has argued convincingly that one of the burning doubts about communicatio in sacris between the Catholic and Orthodox churches was part of the same rites quarrel that raged in overseas missions.51 Jesuit missionaries’ theorising on accommodating orthodoxy to Catholicism and allowing Catholics in the Ottoman empire and in Persia to assist liturgical celebrations and receive sacraments in nonCatholic churches made it possible to amalgamate the same questions of “idolatry” and “atheism” as appeared in quarrels relating to ceremonies of the Confucian or Brahmin literati. If the Catholic Church is spacious enough to tolerate non-Christian “political” gestures and ceremonies, along with social divisions (so went the argument), why not apply the same logic to Orthodox Christians? This was a thorny question for the Roman theologians, and one to which, as usual, no clear-cut resolution was provided. In fact, the question arose in India in the early sixteenth century when the Jesuits encountered “ancient” Christians who claimed that they had been converted by St Thomas the Apostle. Confronted by the long Christian past, the Jesuits were forced to historicise religion in a way that brought them, for a moment, close to the Protestants. It was precisely by arguing with the help of concepts like accommodation and adiaphora that they tried to assert their Catholic orthodoxy.

47 48 49 50 51

Motsch, Lafitau. Voltaire, Essai, p. 30. Rocher, Ezourvedam. Broggio, Castelnau-L’Estoile, and Pizzorusso, “Administrer les sacrements”. Santus, “L’adoration de Naaman”.

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6.

Religious Accommodation in India

6.1 Christian to Catholic The so-called “Saint Thomas Christians” (cristãos de São Tomé), or Nasrani in their own appellation, encountered the Portuguese in the early years of the sixteenth century on the west coast of India in a spirit of Christian brotherhood and with mutual delight. A community that claimed to have been converted by the Apostle St Thomas, but whose actual presence is attested by sources dating from the ninth century, the Christians as well as their imported Syrian bishops both saw the Portuguese as welcome newcomers to the otherwise religiously and socially segmented, but nonetheless balanced, political old regime in what is today the Indian state of Kerala.52 The friendship quickly turned sour for economic, political and religious reasons. Not only did the Portuguese think that their Indian brethren ought to sell pepper to them at a lower price than to the Muslim merchants—or else they ought not sell pepper at all—but they also presumed that Christianity should speak, pray and celebrate liturgy in the Portuguese manner. What ensued was a permanent quarrel between Catholic prelates and missionaries, and the Saint Thomas Christians, who tried to enforce their independence and protect their Syrian bishops. These “foreign” bishops had guaranteed the community’s sacrality for at least half a millennium before the arrival of the Portuguese. Jesuit missionaries who were sent to administer Saint Thomas Christians from the middle of the sixteenth century were the first to reflect on how to accommodate to post-Tridentine Catholicism the various Eastern Christian liturgical rites brought by the Syrian bishops.53 The accommodation that spilled out into the Malabar rites controversy in India started right then and there, as an intra-Christian quarrel. The Jesuit missionaries’ social and spiritual engineering in Asia clashed, almost immediately, with the Portuguese designs for imperial expansion. The religious Padroado system was attached to the Estado da Índia to bolster colonial administration and to help with ruling the scattered colonial enclaves. In particular, starting in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Empire had already lost any hope of conquering the territory in Asia as the Spanish conquistadors had done in the Americas, the Jesuit missionaries insisted, expressis verbis, that they were not Portuguese. This was, of course, an integral part of their accommodation strategy, but the Portuguese as well as the Jesuits who had been born and trained in Portugal considered it an insult and sacrilege. As mentioned above, accommodation always starts with semantics. Old names filled with new meanings versus new names replacing old ones—this dilemma was resolved only in practice. Thus the Tamil name commonly used to describe the Portuguese,

52 Mundadan, Sixteenth century traditions; Cunha, “Confluence and Divergence”; Županov, “One Civility”. 53 Mecherry, Testing Ground.

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Parangi or Firangi, was rejected by the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili, who declared (in Tamil) in the second decade of the seventeenth century that he was not a Parangi but a Roman. He also insisted that he was a Brahman because the word means “learned” and he was a raja because it means “aristocrat” or “noble”. This was a typical semantic accommodation tactic that was used universally and was well justified by St Paul’s injunction to be “Roman to the Romans”. Sartorial disguise or lack thereof (depending on the occasion) had been prescribed by the Jesuit Constitutions. The first two Jesuits who started the mission in England in 1580, Robert Persons (1546–1610) and Edmund Campion 1540–1580), were dressed, respectively, as an army officer and as a jewel merchant.54 Roberto Nobili donned a sannyāsi dress and Matteo Ricci a silk mandarin garb, while a missionary at the Mughal court wore a black cassock. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the ecclesiastical authorities in Goa were the right hand of the Portuguese secular administration, which was pretentious but weak. Informed about Nobili’s refusal to identify with the Portuguese provoked scandal and soul searching among the ecclesiastical authorities.55 It was part of unfinished Church business, since just a decade and a half earlier, the archbishop of Goa, Dom Frei Aleixo de Menezes (1559–1617), an Augustinian friar, travelled south to Kerala and summoned a Church synod in 1599 in the church of Udayamperur/Diamper, with the intention of bringing the Saint Thomas Christian community in line with Catholic liturgy, sacraments and sacramentals.56 By the end of his stay in the region, he barely escaped with his life, once the Saint Thomas Christian elders realised what his solemn pronouncements in an unknown language were about. The Synod of Diamper was, in fact, the first effort to target the idea of Jesuit accommodation, which Francesco Roz (1559–1627), a Catalan Jesuit, was slowly and unwittingly putting into practice in the sixteenth century. Roz’s missionary actions were developed along the lines of Jesuit instructions to proceed in the mission. He started learning ancient Syriac because it was used by the bishops and the monks imported from the Middle East, who for centuries had administered sacraments to these “antique” Christians and who had been indispensable for this practice. In fact, as Roz understood, it was the language itself that conveyed the sense of religious efficacy and sanctification.57 However, both Jesuits and the Franciscans who had arrived before them, but had been chased away, decided that the Christianity of the Saint Thomas Christians also fit the definition of “heresy”. After Dom Frei Aleixo de Menezes left in a hurry, never to return, Francisco Roz tried to remedy the situation by summoning another synod and by improving morale. For this purpose, he enlisted his former students at the Jesuit college in Vaipikotta he had opened for Saint Thomas Christian boys to prepare them 54 55 56 57

Kilroy, Edmund Campion. Županov, Disputed Mission. Županov, “One Civility”. Perczel, “Accommodation Strategies”.

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for priesthood. These newly formed Christian priests learnt ancient Syriac and were able to read and write in the language, in addition to learning Latin and Catholic Church literature. These “accommodated” Saint Thomas Christian priests—incidentally, recruited from traditionally less prestigious and non-priestly families—became a cornerstone of the Catholic community of Saint Thomas Christians. In the long run, Roz’s accommodation effort created a foundation for multiple fractures within the Saint Thomas Christian community. Some returned to “pristine” eastern Syrian rites and accepted only bishops from the Middle East, while others wavered, fractured again, and re-joined the Catholic community until the nineteenth century, when the Protestants brought some of these factions into their own fold. 6.2 Christianity for South Indian Elites In a different social and cultural context, away from the coast and inland, in the heart of the Tamil country, Roberto Nobili, often considered to be the first Jesuit to employ accommodation, relied on Francisco Roz’s help and advice.58 Since Nobili became the hero of accommodation, just as Matteo Ricci had been in China, it was not until recently that less visible facilitators, like Roz or Alberto Laerzio—a Jesuit superior who permitted Nobili to reform the mission in the manner of Valignano and Ricci—have attracted the attention of the historians. However, it was the permission of Alberto Laerzio (1557–1630), for instance, that had been crucial. For, at the same time, he had refused to give a different Jesuit permission to do the same in the Mysore mission, because, he claimed, the accommodation would be very costly. According to the Consulta of the theologians in Kochi that took place in 1610, each Jesuit in Madurai practicing accommodation required for his upkeep 300 patacas to pay the salaries of 5 bearers (washermen), a door keeper, a cook, and a Tamil teacher, among others.59 Nobili, for instance, had renounced meat and alcohol, and had recruited his cook from the Brahman caste. The missionary had to live as a recluse and was not allowed to speak directly to lower castes. He was dressed in a particular garb that identified him as Brahman sanyasi. Accommodation, therefore, required a whole army of local catechist helpers, who lent credibility to the Jesuit priest when he followed the local model of priesthood.60 The Portuguese ecclesiastical authorities found the play-acting required by Jesuit missionary accommodation both disingenuous and insulting to their national honour. Many Portuguese Jesuits agreed. For this reason, accommodation was perceived as a threat, even to the Society of Jesus itself.

58 Županov, “One Civility”. 59 Laerzio, Relação da consulta. 60 Trento, “Śivadharma or Bonifacio”.

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What followed was at least two decades of debate among the Portuguese church officials, Jesuits in India, the Jesuit Curia in Rome and the papacy. The question boiled down to whether Christianisation was the same as Portugalisation. The Jesuits in Rome answered “no”, and so did the papacy, which saw this debate as a wake-up call to take Christianisation into its own hands, instead of leaving it, as before, in the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish imperial patronage of missions. The papal takeover occurred just a year after Nobili won the case and got permission in 1621 to continue as he had before. A year later the Roman Congregation of Propaganda Fide officially came into being. The Society of Jesus paid a heavy price for championing the method that became famous during the eighteenth-century Malabar and Chinese rites quarrel. The rituals and customs that came under scrutiny were certain visual signs, such as a tuft of hair (kuṭumi), a Brahman thread and other outward signs signalling one’s membership in the Brahman caste. Nobili argued that they were purely social and should be allowed for new converts. On the other hand, by preserving “signs” of social status or honour, he did not even mention, let alone suppress, signs of social dishonour. The Parreas—or Parayars, formerly called “untouchables” and now known as Dalits—would remain Christian Dalits in this scheme. Some theologians raised their voices against this kind of social discrimination among the Christians, but most of their attention was focused on “rituals”—like smearing one’s forehead with ashes (that contained cow dung)—that veered too close to idolatry. On this point, Catholic and Protestant theologians mostly agreed. The Jesuits lost the battle. 6.3 Christian Universalism Found and Lost Unlike the Portuguese and Spanish kings, who thought that Jesuits were meddling in their “political” affairs in the colonies, the French king not only saw the Jesuits as unproblematic, but even considered them to be agents of the belated French expansion in the East. When the order was disbanded by the Papacy in 1773, the French Jesuits in Pondicherry were simply incorporated into the Missions Étrangères de Paris, their former archenemies. In fact, most of them remained in place and preserved their archives for at least another century and a half, before they were moved to France. The Goan Jesuit archives, on the other hand, were quickly scattered and sold off. The Jesuits themselves were sent back to Portugal in chains. After the return of the Jesuits to their former missions in the nineteenth century, they transformed their own historiography of “nostalgia” and “failure” into one of the heroic struggle they had faced in the missions, sometimes against other Catholic and Protestant missionary agents. Thus the Madurai mission was recreated from the 1830s onwards as a heroic and tragic endeavour, particularly with reference to one of the missionaries, João de Brito (1647–1693), who had died a gory martyr’s death in the late seventeenth century. He became the symbol of accommodation and its tragic end at the hands of

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the non-Christian kings and antagonist Catholic missionaries, like the Capuchins in Pondicherry and Madras, who strongly opposed Jesuit strategies. A non-hagiographic life of Brito is still lacking in scholarship, although Margherita Trento and Paolo Aranha have presented some new materials and sophisticated analyses of Brito’s martyrdom, as well as the role it played in the Malabar rites quarrel.61 What was obscured by these debates among the Catholics concerning the quality and identity of their converts and of their Christianity was the fact that in the early modern period, all Catholic missions accommodated themselves, to some extent, to the customs and rituals of the societies in which they operated. Accommodation was never a one-way street. In addition to the specific geo-political, economic and historical context, it depended on the agency of those who accepted it as a cultural and social—a spiritual—promotion. In fact, solutions for how to accommodate often depended on indigenous “advice”. Thus, a yogi or a sannyāsi told Nobili how to alter his appearance and behaviour. His Brahmanical model was, even during his lifetime, considered less effective—being too restrictive socially—than another model, that of a Śaiva priest, a paṇṭāram. It was in this role that João de Brito breathed his last. Finally, at the very end of the Jesuit Madurai experiment, another Italian proposed a different formula. Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi turned himself into a Tamil Christian poet-scholar, a pulavar. Even if he did not convert masses, as he hoped he would, his poetry welded together the Tamil Catholic community in a way that we are only now beginning to understand, thanks to Margherita Trento’s recent dissertation.62 Beschi’s linguistic and poetic accommodation was a work of genius, but the political turmoil of the mid-eighteenth century cost him the patronage of Chanda Sahib (formerly Husain Dost Khan), who was a son-in-law of the Nawab of the Carnatic Dost Ali Khān (r. 1732–1740) and was an important political actor in the Kaveri Delta from the 1730s until his death in 1752. Despite Beschi’s linguistic and literary genius, his works remained within the domain of Tamil literature rather than becoming, as he had hoped, a powerful conversion tool. One can safely say that in the eighteenth century, all Catholic religious orders practiced some sort of accommodation—as did, according to Will Sweetman, some Protestant churches. Rigoristic universalism, a Christian-based myth to which Protestant and Catholic missionaries aspired, fell apart in the missionary field. Missionaries paid it only occasional lip service. Like the advice of anthropologists of the late twentieth century, the devil was in the details, and each universal category had its particular local basis.

61 Saulière, Red Sand; Aranha, “Les meilleures causes”; Trento, “Witnessing Martyrdom”. 62 Trento, Writing Tamil Catholicism.

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6.4 Rites Controversy Unrolled The French Jesuits who arrived in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century, under the patronage of the French king and of the Rome-based Propaganda Fide, and in direct defiance of the Portuguese Padroado, did not have to look far for their detractors, whom they found in Pondicherry, a French settlement on the Coromandel coast.63 The French Jesuits and Capuchins resided mostly in commercial enclaves along the Indian coast. They all avoided territories that were held under direct Portuguese administration, whether secular or ecclesiastical. However, in the early eighteenth century, the Jesuits crafted their Mission du Carnate, a territory that extended to the north and inland, in imitation of the Madurai mission under the Portuguese Padroado, which continued to be an example of accommodation. The Capuchins, on the other hand, positioned themselves as opponents of the Portuguese Padroado, of accommodation strategies, and of the Jesuits.64 Denouncing Jesuit accommodation did not stop the Capuchins from practicing it in their own way, however. The French Capuchin Ephrem de Nevers (1607–1695) left paintings in his church, but threw out the sculptures so as not to offend Anglican sensitivities, since his church was in Madras, which was ruled by the British and under the vigilant eye of the Anglican church.65 The Catholics in São Tomé, a Portuguese settlement next to Madras, were not happy and finally kidnapped the French Capuchin, sending him to face the Inquisition in Goa.66 In Pondicherry, the opposition to accommodation finally gained traction, with the initially weak presence of Missions Étrangères de Paris—another missionary order of secular priests with connections to the Propaganda Fide and to the French king—and with the arrival in 1703 of the papal legate Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon, who came to investigate the rites question in India and China. Tournon’s negative opinion about Jesuit accommodation instigated the Malabar and Chinese rites quarrel.67 While it may appear that Goa, as a Portuguese colonial enclave, remained staunchly against accommodation, pragmatism prevailed when necessary. Despite intolerant attitudes, the destruction of temples and mosques, and the Inquisition, which had been directed first against the New Christians and later against “idolatry”, a new set of regulations was put into place in the eighteenth century, when Goa acquired Novas Conquistas, a group of seven municipalities of Goa and Daman that were added to the Velhas Conquistas (Old Conquests), the original municipalities. In the New Conquests,

63 64 65 66 67

Agmon, Colonial Affair. Heijmans, Agency of Empire, p. 80; Lach and Kley, Asia, p. 849. On Nevers, see the contribution by Windler to this volume. Aranha, “Les meilleures causes”. Mungello, Chinese Rites Controversy; Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism, p. 135; Županov and Fabre, Rites Controversies; Collani, “Jesuit Rites Controversy”, p. 891–917.

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different religious groups—described by one scholar as “a composite Hindu-Muslim society”—were allowed to practice their cults in their temples and mosques just as before.68 Even earlier, in seventeenth-century Goa, Jesuits practised literary (rhetorical) accommodation. While Roberto Nobili defended himself against the accusation that he had become an idolater and Brahman himself, another Jesuit working in Goa, the Englishman Thomas Stephens (c. 1549–1619), had already produced an impressive literary corpus in Marathi, the high poetic language of the region, and in Konkani, a local vernacular. As in all the Jesuit missions around the world, from Brazil to China, vernacular grammars and translations of large and small catechisms were the first linguistic interventions that accommodated the Christian message from Portuguese and Latin to previously non-Christian languages. Both Tupi and Tamil were subject to grammaticalisation already in the late sixteenth century. José de Anchieta’s Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil was published in Coimbra in 1595 (first edition 1589), although it was written in 1555 for the purpose of teaching Tupi to the missionaries. His contemporary on the Fishery Coast in South India, Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), left in manuscript form the grammar that he had composed in instalments from the 1540s. He was also known to have taught Tamil to the first missionaries.69 However, the true works of poetic transcreation or accommodation appeared in the early seventeenth century, a full half century after the missionary engagement. In Goa, in 1614, Thomas Stephens wrote his famous epic in the locally prestigious Marathi, Discurso sobre a vinda de Jesu Christo (“Discourse on the coming of Jesus Christ”), also known as Kristapurana. He not only translated it, but also adopted a literary meter, ovī, which had been used by Sant Eknath, a Varkari saint-poet (1533–c. 1599).70 His choice of language and genre of poetry was intended to teach, delight and confirm the faith of converted Saraswat Brahmans in Margão. As Clifford Geertz famously theorised, accommodation always requires a “model” of the community (or reality) from which to craft the tools for acting successfully within it. Stephens, who also acted as advisor to Nobili when he passed through Goa, chose Saraswat Brahmans, the local economic and spiritual elite. The publication of the Kristapurana—in Latin script on account of the lack of Devanagari types—was well received among the Jesuit and ecclesiastical authorities, even though the text itself had an occasional “pagan” flavour, as Ananya Chakravarti and Alexander Henn have remarked. In Tamil country, Roberto Nobili, advised by Stephens and Roz, thought he was just applying the same technique of using the local language and poetic idiom to clothe a Christian message. The differences in approach between these Jesuit missionary outliers were many, but 68 Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa, p. 2; Assayag, At the Confluence of Two rivers. 69 Chakravarti, Empire of Apostles; Županov, “Borderlands of Knowledge”; Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars; Hein and Rajan, Earliest Missionary Grammar of Tamil. 70 Stephens, Christian Puránna of Father Thomas Stephens of the Society of Jesus.

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probably the tipping point for the quarrel was the fact that Nobili did not only engage in poetic accommodation, but also transformed his own body into an accommodation tool. By taking up the role of a Brahman, he crossed the red line. The very ambiguities on which Christianity had built its universalist appeal, and with which Christianity had appeared to non-Christians, disintegrated when Nobili came to literally embody a Brahman sannyāsi. 6.5 Brahmans into Christians into Portuguese A century later in the long history of accommodation in India, yet another type of accommodated embodiment emerged, the exact opposite from the earlier form: Brahmans embodying Christians. It was in the first decade of the eighteenth century that a new religious order was founded in Goa, Congregação do Oratório de Santa Cruz dos Milagres, also called Milagristas, Padres Bragmanes or simply Oratorians. The members of the order were exclusively Goan Saraswat Brahman Catholic priests, who in addition to practising piety, had a fervent desire to become missionaries.71 In fact, Goan Catholic priests had already been sent to the Canara region and, later on, to the Madurai mission in order to take care of the scattered Christian communities there, despite not being formally part of any missionary order.72 Reading between the lines of their hagiographer-historian, Sebastião de Rego—himself a Goan Saraswat Brahman Catholic priest—we can see how discrimination against Rego’s nação (caste or lineage) was the reason the authorities declined the Goan Christians’ request to form an order and be sent to the mission.73 By becoming missionaries, Goan Oratorians tried to efface the stigmatised heathen past that was associated with all “cristãos da terra” in the Portuguese territories. In no way did they think of themselves as products of accommodation, and they were not considered as such by the Portuguese. In fact, their ancestors had been converted by force in the sixteenth century since they had only two options: either to convert or to run inland to the territory under the sultan of Bijapur. Two centuries later, these elite Goan Christians—like their ancestors, who were elite Hindus—not only felt that they were of “noble” blood comparable to a few “noble” Portuguese fidalgoes in Goa, but also that they were better and purer Catholics than all other Christians in the enclave (the Portuguese in particular).74 Financially supported by their families, a small group of Goan Saraswat Brahman Catholic priests embarked on their own on a mission with the ambitious goal of converting and returning Sri Lanka back to the Catholic fold. The Portuguese loss of Sri 71 72 73 74

Rego, Cronologia da Congregação do Oratorio de Goa, Cod. 51-VII-33, fol. 61. Sorge, Matteo de Castro; Xavier, “Matheus de Castro”. Xavier, “O lustre do seu sangue”. Xavier, “O lustre do seu sangue”.

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Lanka (Ceilão) had been a painful memory of defeat already for half a century, feeding various irrational theories and proposals for its reconquest.75 In a gesture comparable to their Catholic heroes—from Saint Francis Xavier, whose corpse lay in the church of Bom Jesus in Goa, to João de Brito, who had been martyred in the Marava country in the south Tamil country—the Oratorians travelled secretly to Sri Lanka in disguise as local merchants. For the Catholic Saraswat Brahmans, this was an occasion to prove the purity of their faith and their willingness to shed their aristocratic blood should they be martyred by the Dutch who controlled the lowlands of the island. A decade into their mission, they succeeded. The king and the pope approved their order, since it did not cost them anything and the missionaries were coping just fine on their own. In turn, the families of the Oratorians in Goa and in Portugal wholeheartedly supported them, since their missionary rank flagged the highest possible status of their community (caste). Without theorising their mission strategies—in fact, precisely by neglecting to do so—the Oratorians employed accommodation, self-consciously and pragmatically, on every occasion and tailored it to different social and cultural contexts. Thus they assumed the various strategic roles of a washerman, “a Portuguese”, a coolie (porter), a physician, a Brahman, a gentile, a royal translator, a yogi, a spy, etc. In the lowland Dutch-held territory, they decided to place “dark skinned” priests dressed as coolies while at the royal court in Kandy those of lighter complexion, as Portuguese “envoys” dressed in Oratorian black cassocks.76 And just like most Jesuit missionaries, they died in and for their mission. José Vaz (1651–1711), the most famous of all, was canonised by the Church in 1995.77 However, it was another Oratorian, Jacome Gonçalves (1676–1740), who was probably even more important for the upkeep and success of the mission.78 He turned out to be a linguistic prodigy who learnt Sinhala, Tamil and Pali in order to confront both Buddhist and Hindu religious specialists. He also left a massive literary output of Catholic literature in Tamil and Sinhala, translating and trans-creating Biblical stories from Latin and from Stephens’s Kristapurana in Marathi, a case of accommodation from one South Asian language imbued with Christian imagery to another. Linguistic and literary accommodation, therefore, went on naturally and tacitly in the missionary field even during and after the Malabar and Chinese rites quarrels were raging among the Catholics.

75 76 77 78

Flores, Hum curto historia de Ceylan. Young, “Carpenter-Preta”. Županov, “Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise”. Fernandopulle, Critical Study of the Sinhala Works; Perera, “The Life of Fr Jacome Gonsalves”.

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7.

Afterthought: Accommodation and Religious Facts

In the early modern period, the universalist imperial expansion of the European Catholic powers required religious specialists to pacify all kinds of resistance on the ground from the people who were being dispossessed: not only of their land, but also of their souls, language and imagination. The Papacy, with its own universalist claim, had been fatally weak and short-sighted, politically and geographically, in acquiescing to support Iberian imperial expansion. Faced with an extreme diversity of missionary engagement in Asia, the Society of Jesus resurrected and repurposed hermeneutic and rhetorical accommodation, turning it into a social and cultural strategy. Paradoxically, on the ground, the strategy soon appeared as potentially detrimental to the political and national interests of the Portuguese crown. Instead of promoting the Portuguese way of life along with its particular Christian practices, the Jesuits, who were mostly of Italian origin, instead propagated the distinction between being Christian and being Portuguese. Portuguese social customs, perceived as dirty and polluting by both Chinese and Indians, were defined as “social or political customs” or “indifferent” and thus not binding for the new converts. The concept of adiaphora was used in the theological debates that ensued; the Jesuit argument consisted of distinguishing between the “political” and the “religious”. This was also the way to open a “third space” (in Homi Bhabha’s terminology), in which Christianity could exist without European customs and as part of a plural Christian world. Finally, what were the consequences of the rites quarrel for the future of religious facts?79 This notion, which took root in French scholarship, has come from Regis Debray, who was asked by the then minister of education, Jack Lang, to reflect on how to discuss religion in secular contexts without excluding anyone. Interestingly, the rites controversy, avant la lettre, cleared the way for religion to become a fact or object of study just like any other object, defined more precisely and, particularly, in relation to what religion is not. In the eighteenth century, with the rites quarrel and the arguments given by pro-accommodation missionaries and theologians, “pure religious and salvific acts and signs” retreated, shrinking in comparison to social and cultural signs and expression. At least for a while. Accommodation has been, and perhaps still can be, a method used to expand a universal religion in the service of empire. But paradoxically, in the process, accommodation particularised cosmopolitan religion, breaking it down into distinctive sub-sets or sub-sects. Indeed, it enabled and justified a plurality of religious expression and then, as it defended itself qua methodology, it diminished the scope and sphere of what were considered to be “religious facts”.

79 Azria and Hervieu-Léger, Dictionnaire.

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Some Reflections on the Social History of Religious Tolerance in Spain, Portugal, and their Atlantic Empires

1.

Introduction

The topic of religious toleration had long been essentially a field of intellectual history. Its historians traditionally concentrated on western or central Europe—France, England, the Netherlands, the Swiss cantons, and Germany—and in a number of outstanding books, these nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians tended to see this history as a triumphant march of either secular rationalism or Christian charity toward the liberal ideals of progress and individual freedom, which they cherished.1 Viewing the medieval era with its crusades, expulsions of minorities, and persecution of heresies as essentially a period of intolerance, they sought the origins of religious tolerance in the Protestant Reformation or in the Enlightenment. They centred their narratives on the writings of a series of breakthrough thinkers, such as Castellio, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, and Voltaire, or on political raison d’état traditionally associated with pragmatic considerations such as economic benefits, or political accommodations such as the Edict of Nantes (1598) made after the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, or the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that brought an end to the period of the Thirty Years War.2 Over time, the list of authors who suggested forms of toleration was expanded and included classical and medieval predecessors, and increasingly attention was given to civil and ecclesiastical laws that regulated relations between religions. Nonetheless, the focus remained on the ideology of toleration or intolerance primarily in northern and central Europe. In this somewhat celebratory historiography, little attention was given to the history of religious toleration or religious plurality in non-European polities, such as the Ottoman empire. Mughal India, or Ming China, and Catholic southern Europe with its Inquisitions was mostly ignored, or simply employed as a prime example of continuing fanaticism and intolerance and their long-term intellectual and political

1 For example, Hartpole Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence; Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration; Lecler, Histoire de la tolerance. 2 There are a number of very useful reviews and analysis of the now rapidly expanding historiography of toleration. See for example, Oberman, “The Travail of Tolerance and Intolerance”, p. 13–32; Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment”, p. 607–636; Haefeli, “Toleration”, p. 253–262; Guggisberg “The Defense of Religious Toleration and Religious Liberty”, p. 35–50; Walsham, “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence”, p. 181–190.

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costs.3 This Eurocentric “history of ideas” approach produced major accomplishments, and it still has its advocates and practitioners. But the history of religious tolerance has not been without its limitations and its etymological, chronological, methodological, and epistemological challenges.4 Despite our present positive perception of religious toleration as a basic human right, during the European Middle Ages and in the early modern period, the tolerance of other religious beliefs was often looked upon far more critically as the sufferance of error or concession to false belief and heresy. Today, it is perhaps seen as a fundamental aspect of a liberal ideology, with its origins often associated with either the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, or the Enlightenment, beginning in the late seventeenth century with John Locke and reaching its apogee in the late eighteenth century. During the early modern period, however, religious tolerance was seen as perhaps necessary to avoid some greater evil, but still for many, a philosophical or theological position that called for correction, condemnation, or castigation because it threatened social order and peace. Even some of the early humanist advocates of religious tolerance like Erasmus saw toleration as a policy preferable to the use of force that could eventually result in the desired religious unity, and thus as a measure that was not an end in itself, but a way of achieving an anticipated goal. There were other problems as well. Etymologically, the Latin tolerare, the basis for the word in most European languages, implied sufferance. The idea of religious “toleration” suggested putting up with something wrong or disagreeable, and thus it implied the power of the state, or of the religious majority, to permit those beliefs or to deny them. It was a concession, not a right. Thus, toleration in the sense of state or religious majoritarian policy was not the opposite of intolerance, but a lesser form of restriction, a dispensation to avoid some greater evil such as civil war or economic loss. It had little to do with our contemporary concept of “freedom of religion” as a right. Theologically and morally, policies of toleration or of religious exclusion usually raised questions about essential Christian doctrinal principles such as libero arbitrio, freedom of conscience, or about the justice of the use of force in matters of faith.5 Such questions and disputes opened the doors to confessional differences and debate among theologians and intellectuals, but also to various forms of doubt and scepticism throughout societies, doubts that persisted during the medieval period and intensified during the Reformations of the

3 The exception was the work of Henry Kamen in his general study Nacimiento y desarrollo de la tolerancia en Europa moderna and in articles such as “Toleration and Dissent”, p. 3–23, where it is argued that in comparative terms, Spain, which basically avoided the witch-hunting excesses of the sixteenth century, tended to be more tolerant than most of northern Europe. 4 An excellent example of this continuing approach is Zagorin, Idea of Religious Toleration. 5 Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment”.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

sixteenth century.6 To answer the questions of how, why and when “toleration” became accepted as a positive term and a desirable goal that implied freedom of conscience and the equal status of religions before the law has been the underlying objective, to some extent unfinished, of much of the study of religious toleration. Here, the challenge of methodology and epistemology arises. As the Swiss historian of toleration Hans Guggisberg reminded us, rather than viewing the medieval and early modern learned exponents of religious toleration as the lineal ancestors of present attitudes, we need always to recognise that their political, cultural, and religious contexts, audiences, and objectives often differed from our own. The essential and still relatively unanswered question of the “history of ideas” approach to toleration is this: how and under what circumstances did the authors and their writings change governmental and popular attitudes? As historian J.H. Plumb stated: “Too much attention, it seems to me is paid to the monopoly of ideas among the intellectual giants, too little to their social acceptance.”7 It is in that context that a new approach to the history of toleration should be seen. By the 1980s, a virtual “Copernican Revolution” in religious history was taking place. Historians of religion moved away from a concentration on institutional and ecclesiastical matters, with a focus on the clergy and theology in a strict sense, to a history of piety or belief that examined the attitudes, values, practices, and sentiments of the laity, not only of the majority, but of minorities and dissidents as well. Of course, a wide range of topics were addressed in this movement, but among them was the history, meaning, and practice of freedom of conscience and religious toleration, topics that in the study of Christianity already had a long and venerable genealogy. Although I was familiar with the writings of Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, Bob Scribner and others, since I was not trained as a historian of religion, I was only vaguely aware of this general transformation. As a student of Iberia and its empires, however, I was familiar with the extensive literature about Christian relations to Jews and Muslims in medieval Iberia, and about the role of the Inquisition in the hardening of religious identities and enforcement of Catholic exclusivity in Iberia during the early modern Catholic Reformation. In the early 1980s, I experienced something of a transformative moment one night while reading Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, in which its obscure protagonist, the Friulan miller Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, explained his cosmology to inquisitors, stating that while he was, of course, a Christian, if he had been born a Turk, he would have found his salvation in their faith, because, as he insisted, “God loves us all.” How remarkable, how “modern,” I thought, and how unlike what I had been led to believe was the attitude of early modern Christians about religion, religious identity, and salvation. Ginzburg’s book became a classic, the model

6 See, for example, Tracy, “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers”, p. 37–60; Richard Tuck, “Scepticism and Toleration”, p. 21–35. 7 Plumb, Reason and Unreason in the Eighteenth Century cited by Porter, Creation of the Modern World, p. 12.

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example of microhistory as a method.8 It also made Menocchio famous; he became a household reference for the historian. But there was criticism of the book too; that Menocchio’s opinions and dissident ideas were singular and idiosyncratic and could not be generalized, nor should they be understood as part of a more generalized “popular culture,” however it was defined. It was almost two decades later, while working on Spanish Inquisition documents in the National Archive in Madrid, that I began to encounter many similar statements made by people expressing ideas about other religions that were similar to Menocchio’s. Some of them were clerics, lawyers, doctors, or other people with university training, but more often they were workers, tradesmen, bakers, and soldiers, or simply what might be called the common folk, some of whom were at least literate, but some who were not. Among them were Conversos or Moriscos, the converts from Judaism and Islam and their descendants, but there were also English, Flemish, French, and Italian travellers, some of whom had been influenced by Protestant thought, and there were, surprisingly, many Spanish “Old Christians” of unquestionable Catholic origins who also shared these ideas. Their positions varied: some were relativists who thought one religion was as good any other since God had made them all; others were universalists who thought all religions might be valid; still others were simply indifferent about religion in general. Also present were people who doubted all religions, with a few so sceptical that today we would call them atheists.9 But, I would emphasize that many thought themselves good Catholics, some holding that force in matters of free will was unjustified, others believing that the motives of the Inquisition were corrupt, and many who simply disagreed with settled dogma on soteriology and questioned the Church’s exclusive claim to be the only path to salvation. Why, in the many works on toleration, the ones that always mentioned Spinoza, Locke, and Rousseau, was there usually no reference to these faceless nobodies? And why was I finding them in the supposedly intolerant world of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, that is, in countries long held to be the very epitome of intolerance and examples of the negative effects of religious bigotry and exclusions? My curiosity was piqued, and I spent much of the following decade writing a book on the subject. It emphasized the considerable evidence of popular resistance to the Catholic idea of there being no possibility of salvation outside the Church (nulla salus extra ecclesiam), this resistance often expressed by variants of the common expression or refrain: “Each person can be saved in his or her own law” (cada uno se puede salvar en su ley).10

8 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. 9 In the early modern Hispanic world, “atheism” had a broader meaning and included not only those who denied the existence of God, but also blasphemers, epicureans, libertines, Machiavellians who put raison d’état before moral considerations, as well as those who we might classify as agnostics. See Graciano, Diez lamentaciones. 10 Schwartz, All Can Be Saved.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

Drawing on a few cases from that book and from materials that I and others have uncovered since its publication, this essay summarizes some of my findings and conclusions. It was only as my book went to press (late 2007) that I discovered that other scholars such as Alexandra Walsham (2006) and Ben Kaplan (2010) were also writing social histories of religious toleration in other places. Despite using quite different sources, they were sometimes reaching quite similar conclusions that amounted to a rewriting of the existing history of toleration in Western Europe, emphasizing not the idea of toleration, but rather, its everyday practice and experience.11 Some evidence of this social history of toleration had already been done for other countries, cities, or regions in Europe. I cited it in a concluding chapter entitled “Rustic Pelagians,” a term that Anglican ministers had used to describe and criticize parishioners who did not seem to care much about the religious beliefs of their neighbours, so long as they caused no harm or trouble. That chapter suggested that the attitudes of religious tolerance within a regime of official intolerance that I had found in the Iberian empires could be found in many places in early modern Europe. While this growing wave in the social history of toleration seemed to be running against the well-developed current of the theological and philosophical history, long in the hands of the intellectual historians, all of us who were surfing on this new wave were indebted to our predecessors, some of whom had already realized that the history of religious toleration was neither lineal nor unidimensional, nor was that history to be to be found only in learned texts.12 The great French Jesuit scholar Joseph Lecler, in his magnificent Toleration and the Reformation (1955), wrote a traditional intellectual history, but he was perceptive enough to realize that something was missing from his work. Lecler pointed out that the great thinkers who had written on toleration were all part of a “social milieu,” and that that whole “milieu” was already aware of the same issues; as he put it, “history and sociology overlap in the study of tolerance.” He was implying that Erasmus, Spinoza, Voltaire and others had codified and synthesized, but they had never been alone. Lecler’s observation leads to the final objective of this essay, which is to raise questions about the relationship between the “popular” vs. the “learned” or theological origins of religious tolerance, and the dynamics or trajectory of their influence on each other. In doing so, I will incorporate some of the new research on toleration, especially in the Iberian world, that has appeared in the last decade, as well as respond to some of the criticisms of my “controversial” (a euphemism for erroneous) approach to a social history of religious tolerance based on the use of questionable Inquisition documents. In doing so, I hope

11 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, provided a pan-European approach, while Walsham, Charitable Hatred, provides an excellent example of a deep study of one country, offering some conclusions that might be generalized. For a perceptive general discussion of the historiographical changes in the study of toleration, see Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment”, and the useful bibliographical guide provided by Spohnholz, “Toleration”. 12 See for example, Zagorin, Idea of Religious Toleration, the edited volumes of Laursen, and Nederman on toleration such as Beyond the Persecuting Society.

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to suggest some directions that further research on the question of religious tolerance might take.

2.

Religion in Early Modern Iberia

The forced conversions of Jews and Muslims and the subsequent expulsions of practicing Jews and Muslims, and eventually (1609) of the Moriscos (converts from Islam), and then subsequent discrimination against the remaining descendants from converts from those faiths through “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) restrictions, all seem to make the Iberian kingdoms and their overseas empires the very models of intolerance. While other empires—the Roman, the Mughal, the Ottoman, and the Ching—developed strategies of inclusion for other religions as a basis of imperial expansion, the Iberian empires made Catholic religious unity the sine qua non of citizenship and the key to state power. In the Iberian monarchies—Castile, Aragon, and Portugal—the maintenance of political unity and Catholic orthodoxy of the community became essential objectives of a state policy upheld by the Church, through its episcopal authority, through its missions, and especially through the tribunals of the Inquisition.13 None were allowed to question orthodox Catholic belief openly, and when in the 1780s some “enlightened” critics did so publicly, the Inquisition responded sharply that “intolerance is a fundamental law of the Spanish nation; it was not created by the common people and they should not be the ones to end it.”14 Despite the overwhelming evidence of religious intolerance and the institutional and social marginalization of the converts from other faiths, from the fifteenth century onward there is also considerable evidence that a certain kind of religious relativism could be found throughout the Iberian world. This was codified in the popular and often repeated refrain, mentioned also above: “cada uno se puede salvar en su ley” (Each person can be saved in his or her own law). This was a saying that never appears in the refraneros, the published collections of popular sayings, controlled as they were by the censors of state and Church, but with variations it often appeared in Inquisition edicts and in trial records. It appears to have been a constantly repeated saying, often reformulated with slight variation, by men and women from a variety of backgrounds; illiterate laborers and peasants, soldiers, mariners, merchants, artisans, and occasionally

13 Of course, Spain and Portugal were not exceptional in the belief that religion provided the strongest basis of unity for the state. The idea was widely held in Early Modern Europe. As Charles I of England stated, it was, “the only firm foundation of all power.” See Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 98. 14 “La intolerancia es una ley fundamental de la nación española; no fue establecida por la gente del común, y no deben ser ellos quienes la proscriban.” See García Cárcel and Moreno Martínez, Inquisición, p. 314. See also García Cárcel, “The Other Forms of Tolerance”, p. 75–102.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

some clergymen (especially Franciscans) as well.15 It was heard from the mouths of Moriscos and Conversos anxious to defend their former faith, or to affirm the validity of the lives and souls of their ancestors, but also from Old Christians who dissented from the Church’s dogmatic position that there was no salvation outside the Church, or who remained unconvinced, or were at least confused by the ancient and seemingly intractable Christian theological debate about the relative roles of divine grace, natural law, and good works in the process of salvation. For these dissenters, religion and “law,” or theology, were conflated. Belief and ethics were one, and they held that those who lived according to natural law or held to God’s precepts, even in another religion, would also be saved. This was a kind of permissive soteriology that had the effect of neither condemning nor demonising the “other,” and as such it threatened and undermined the considerable programs of state and Church to assure unity through orthodoxy.”16 Many of these dissenters believed, like Menocchio, that “God loves us all.” Some were religious relativists who thought there might be many truths, while others were pragmatists like the Morisco Gaspar Vayazan, who told the Inquisitors of Murcia in 1567 that he believed in all three laws, that of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that of Mahoma, and that of Señor Moisés, “for if one of them let him down, he could fall back on the others.”17 There were convinced Catholics who felt that discrimination and force in matters of conscience were uncharitable and against Christ’s teachings. Why, asked André Lopes, an Old Christian peddler from Evora, Portugal, in the 1620s, did the Inquisitors wish to make the Conversos Christians by force if God did not want them to be Christians in the first place?18 And there were still others for whom no religion was valid. For them, there existed only birth and death. Such scepticism was not necessarily born of deep philosophical doubt or reflection. A Morisco on his way to Gandía, when asked which law was best, Christianity of Islam, answered that “he had no law [religion] in his heart because he was too poor to permit himself such a luxury.” This is a response that should at least caution us about the supposed centrality of religious identity and belief in the lives of everyone in the early modern era.19

15 Hayes, “The Collecting of Proverbs in Spain before 1650”. 16 In 1641, a Spanish governor of Chile in negotiation with the Mapuche Indians told them that once they became Christians, they would share the same heart and faith with the Spaniards, but that until then, there could be no real union because between nations, diversity of belief and prayer would always divide them. See Boccara, “Génesis y estructura de los complejos fronterizos euroindígenas.” 17 “[...] tenia y creyia en tres leyes, la de Nuestro Señor Jesu Xpo, y la de Mahoma, y del Señor Moysen porque si la una le faltasse, no le faltasse la otra.” AHN, Inquisición Libros 2022. 18 ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, maço 64, n. 608. The case is discussed more fully in Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, p. 112–114. 19 Bramon, Contra moros y judíos, p. 194. See also, Martín Casares, “Cristianos, musulmanes y animistas en Granada,” p. 207–221. Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy”, p. 241–280 warns us not to project modern sensibilities and cosmologies on early modern opinions, and suggests rather like Febvre in Le problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle before her, that disbelief was virtually absent from early modern cosmologies.

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The idea that all could be saved was defined by ecclesiastical authority as a “proposition,” a doubt about dogma that was potentially heretical, and as such, in need of correction. These expressions of uncertainty took many forms: scepticism about the power of the saints or the symbol of the cross, doubts about the virginity of Mary, disbelief in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or the Devil, questioning that the state of marriage was less pleasing to God than the celibacy of the clergy, rejection of the idea that sex between unmarried men and women was a mortal sin, and sometimes criticism of the policies of the state and Church toward religious minorities or dissidents. After the great persecution of the converts from Judaism in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the suppression of Erasmian thought and Protestantism, and the decision to enforce the reforms of the Council of Trent, the Spanish Inquisition tribunals made the suppression of these propositions among Old Christians a major objective of its operations. In tribunals such as those of Toledo, Galicia, and Lima, trials for propositions constituted over a third of all prosecutions before 1700. But the ideas were even more widely diffused than these figures imply, since the Conversos and Moriscos who expressed them were usually being prosecuted not for propositions, but as Jewish or Islamic apostates, while foreigners who held such ideas were usually indicted as “Lutherans,” the common term for Protestants.20 Thus they were not counted in the quantitative tabulations of prosecutions for propositions. Unfortunately for them, they were usually punished far more harshly as a result.21 The sources of ideas about the validity of all faiths were varied. At some point, Moriscos were thought particularly prone to this position, as argued in a Valencian report of 1560. The Inquisition, in its edicts of faith, warned the faithful to beware of such ideas from converts from Islam especially.22 There were, in fact, Islamic concepts such as fitra, or innate human religiosity that was moulded “accidentally” by the coincidence of birth. Our parents determined our religion. There were Qurʾān passages that could be interpreted in this way, such as Qurʾān 5.59: “To each of you God has prescribed a Law and a way. If God [had willed], He would have made you a single people. But God’s purpose is to test you in what he has given each of you, so strive for the pursuit of all virtues, and know that you will all return to God [...]”23 Moriscos under the pressures of conversion used such concepts to explain their resentments. Luis Borico Gajo was

20

21 22 23

Nevertheless, statements like this one give me cause to be sceptical about the impossibility of disbelief well before the eighteenth century. Belgian scholar Werner Thomas generously provided me a hundred cases from his database of people prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition as Protestants in which the accused made statements about the validity of all faiths or in favour of religious tolerance. I did not include these cases in All Can Be Saved. See Thomas, Los protestantes y la Inquisición en España, p. 478–483. Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos, p. 105, cites the case of a Morisco, Francisco Zenequi, who in 1583 was tried by the Valencia Inquisition for holding to the belief that each can be saved in his own law. See the summary in Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, p. 87–89. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, p. 65; Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

expressing the frustration of many when he complained that God had not done his job (ofício) well, making some people Christians, some Moors, and some Jews; if God had wanted them all to be of one faith, He should have made them so.24 Some simply wanted to be left alone to enjoy freedom of conscience, to live, as the inquisitors recorded it, “each in his own sect.” People were aware of alternatives. A Morisco reminded the Inquisitors in 1587 that in Ottoman lands, Christians were allowed to worship as they wished and that the result was more peace for all.25 Conversos also held on to the idea that the Old Mosaic Law had been a good one and remained valid. While adopting Christian concepts of salvation foreign to Judaism, they continued to emphasize the validity of their former faith. Some took a relativist position that all the faiths were made by God, and thus all were valid, others came to have doubts about the validity of any religion. Such scepticism and questioning was not limited or particular to Conversos, as the rich historiography of the Sephardic diaspora in Amsterdam and northern Europe sometimes suggested. Whatever the rationale for universalist, relativist, or sceptical ideas among the religious minorities, these ideas were broadly shared by the Old Christian community as well. There was a long medieval theological tradition of debating the validity of natural law, “perfect ignorance” (never having the true faith revealed), and the possibility of salvation outside the Church. Although Aquinas’ position, namely, that the Church was the universal path that alone leads to the liberation of the soul, had triumphed by the fourteenth century, it had to be reconciled with the concept of salvation available to all mankind. And so a series of apologetic arguments developed, founded on the idea that, while God could be recognised by natural theology and human reason, sin prevented salvation by this path. Earlier theologians had lost the debate and were declared heretics: theologians like Origen (185–254 CE), who believed that eventually a merciful God would save all (the heresy of apocatastasis), or the English monk Pelagius (354–420 CE), who emphasized salvation by good works. Nonetheless, there were aspects of their positions that had never been put to rest entirely.26 We can observe the remnants of such thought in texts like the poet Dante’s canto 19 of his Paraiso, which asked: what justice could there be for a blameless infidel on the banks of the Indus to suffer eternal damnation? What fault is it of his?27 Two centuries later, in 1575, Stefano Mendache di Alcamo told the Inquisitors of Sicily that Muslims living well according to their own law would not go to Hell, but to

24 AHN, Inquisición Libros 2022, exp. 2: “que Dios no habia hecho bien su ofício en hacer que unos fuessen xtianos y otros moros y otros judíos sino que todos habian de ser unos [...].” 25 AHN Inquisición Libros 988, fol. 352v; AHN Inquisición Libros 937, fol. 16, both cited in Green-Mercado, “The Mahdi in Valencia”, p. 11. 26 Oligari, Gratia et certâmen. See also, António Vitor Ribeiro, “Crise e consciência”, p. 117–145. Ribeiro underlines a growing scepticism and pyrrhonism by the close of the seventeenth century among the literate, but there is considerable evidence of such thought in earlier times as well. 27 Lopez, “Dante, Salvation, and the Layman”, p. 37–42.

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Limbo. When asked where he got this idea, he said he had read it in the poet Dante, that he had read and understood the poet’s questions.28 The theologians had not made the issue of free will and grace disappear. It lingered on. Francisco Martínez, a Franciscan in Seville told his brethren in 1604 that “any infidel negative or contrary to the faith, like the Moor or the Japanese, keeping natural law, can be saved, only needing to say to God, ‘Lord, if I knew a better way or Law, I would follow it.’”29 Even the widely-read Dominican Domingo de Baltanás had suggested that “works make the man,” going so far as to suggest in his Concordancias (1555) that children who died before baptism, or those who lived by natural law or in the old Mosaic law could by their “intention and faith” (voto y fe) be saved, and thus it was unthinkable that God would do less for those who had lived within the Church.30 But theological debate and questioning was not the only source of doubt. Iberia’s peculiar multi-religious and cultural traditions of recognition and uneasy accommodation also made their contribution.31 While relationships between the three religions were, by the fifteenth century, usually hostile, even so, on the personal level, interactions between individuals, families, and communities contributed to an uneasy sentiment of live and let live, and sometimes even to feelings of cultural relativity and admiration. Bartolomé Espín, a cloth merchant from Córdoba, in a discussion about the bad weather and shortages in Spain, said that God sent good weather and abundance to the Moors and pagans, because “they lived in their law better than we do in ours,” adding that, “they love and care for each other while we wish to beat each other, and if we loved one another and kept God’s law, He would provide His mercy.”32 There were Castilians who objected to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and to the war against Muslim Granada. “How do you expect it to rain” asked a drought-stricken farmer from Soria in 1480, “when the king is going to take away the Moors’ homes when they have not done him any harm?” When told that war against them was necessary to spread the true faith, the farmer replied that no one really knew which of the three monotheistic religions was best.33 In Portugal, voices were raised against King Sebastião’s 1578 campaign in North Africa: “Only God knew if this war was just or unjust, because the Muslims are also his creatures,” said Manuel Rodríguez, an Alentejan Old Christian. A New Christian

28 Renda, La inquisizione in Sicilia, p. 385. 29 Nine of his brother Franciscans denounced him for his misunderstanding of theology. See Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, p. 137. 30 De Baltanás, Concordancias de muchos passos dificiles de la divina historia. See also, Huerga, El proceso. 31 The literature on Iberian Convivencia is extensive. For a perceptive recent overview, see Fancy, “What was Convivencia?” 32 Gracia Boix, Autos de fe y causas de la inquisición de Córdoba, p. 377. See also Nierenberg, Communities of Violence. 33 Edwards, “Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500”, p. 3–25.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

woman, Lianor Martins, argued that the king had erred in his wars against the Muslims by not allowing each person to live in his or her own law.34 Sometimes these expressions of sympathy in the face of the Inquisition’s “pedagogy of fear” were bravely spoken and deeply felt. There were persons who were willing to speak out against what they perceived as practically misguided policies and against both God’s design and the principles of Christian charity. Fernando de Lucena, a public scribe from Mahón in the Balearic islands had told his friends during a discussion of some people tried by the Toledo Inquisition that “the good Moor should die as a Moor, the Jew as a Jew, and the Christian as a Christian.” When someone lamented that those condemned for Judaizing had stubbornly rejected the cross to the very end and, so were burnt alive, Lucena defended them, arguing that they had not abandoned their faith and had died “like good soldiers, never taking a backward step.” Here was undisguised admiration for the constancy of belief. For this, he was denounced by his friends. The idea that Jews dying for their faith were martyrs like the Christians who had died for theirs was expressed from time to time, not only by Conversos, but by Old Christians as well.35 These propositions were carried by the Spanish and Portuguese to new lands as the empires expanded. A simple man like Tomé de Medina, a pastry chef in the mining city of Potosí in Upper Peru, argued in 1582 that God had created the Muslim, Jew, and Lutheran in their own religions and undoubtedly expected that they would be saved in them. If he had been raised in one of those laws, Medina said, he (like Menocchio) would find salvation there, “for all of them are good.”36 In a well-studied and moving case, an Old Christian woman by the name of María de Zárate, who was married to a New Christian merchant in Mexico City, told the Inquisitors: “God the Father did not get angry at those who served God the Son, and God the Son did not get angry at those who served God the Father.” She continued by saying that in cases of doubt, the safest thing was to serve God the Father, without ever mentioning the Holy Spirit.37 Aside from Moriscos and Conversos, certain other segments of the population also drew inquisitorial attention for relativist ideas about salvation. Renegados, former captives in North Africa or the Ottoman lands, always reconciled with the Church upon return to Christendom by stating that in their hearts they had never abandoned the true faith. But some had developed a certain cultural sensitivity and even admiration for the Islamic world and were later denounced for saying that the Muslims were religious or

34 Marçal Lourenço, “Para o estudo da atividade inquisitorial no Alto Alentejo”, p. 109–138. 35 The martyrdom of Isaac de Castro Tartas, captured in Brazil and executed in Lisbon, a martyrdom that reverberated through the Sephardic communities, is especially interesting since he was also an advocate of universal religious tolerance. See the work of Bodian, “From the Files of the Portuguese Inquisition”, p. 231–246; Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses. 36 AHN, Inquisición Libros 1027 (Lima), fol. 237r–239v. 37 Wachtel, “Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America in the Seventeenth Century”, p. 149–172.

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charitable, or that they too had their holy men, and that by living well in their law, they too could find salvation. Similar statements were also made by foreigners—Flemings, Italians, Greeks, and especially the French, who, of course, merited special concern as potential “Lutherans.” Juan Viñas, a farmer from Toulouse, in an argument with friends asked how it was possible that with all those Protestant dukes, counts, doctors, and ladies in France, all were condemned? When told they all were damned, he gave the same response made by many: “What do you know about who will be saved and who is lost? Only God knows.”38 The presence of these ideas among foreigners undercuts to some extent the argument that such opinions were the peculiar heritage of Spain’s Convivencia, and they imply that popular attitudes of religious tolerance could be found across Europe, a tolerance based on a common sense understanding of Christian doctrine, and perhaps some residual of the medieval doctrinal debates.39 Spain and Portugal at various times were willing to make concessions on freedom of conscience when seeking diplomatic, political or commercial arrangements. But what makes Iberia exceptional is the fact that since there were no longer any resident religious minorities, and thus little apparent economic advantage to be gained from them, expressions of popular religious tolerance cannot be directly linked to immediate material or political considerations.40 When such politique objectives with regard to Conversos seemed to be suggested by the Count-Duke of Olivares in the 1630s, they were met by stiff resistance from sectors of the nobility and the Inquisition, eventually contributing to his downfall. In the face of these ideas, the position of the Inquisition was firm. There was only one true faith; all others were false, and all other religions were merely sects. Salvation was only possible through baptism within the Church. This message was broadcast widely, but it encountered stubborn, persistent, practical, and permissive resistance, sometimes based on a reading or (mis)understanding of scripture that allowed for the salvation of all humankind. The Inquisitors responded subtly. The offending propositions were sometimes considered heretical—but not always. Punishments of uneducated Old Christian offenders tended to be lenient—fines, penance, instruction. Only occasionally did they involve exile or whippings. Clergy and literate offenders as well as converts and their descendants were more likely to be accused of heresy and treated more harshly. But despite the fact that prosecutions for propositions decreased after the mid-seventeenth 38 AHN, Inquisición Libros 2022, exp. 26. 39 A number of reviews of ACBS wrongly stated that I believed the medieval experience of the contact of three religions had made Iberia particularly inclined to tolerant attitudes. While I believe that experience contributed to such attitudes, at various points in the book and especially in the concluding chapter, I emphasized that these attitudes were widely shared across Europe. For recent work centred on northern Europe, see Christman, “Ideology, Pragmatism, and Coexistence”, p. 7–27. 40 In Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, it is argued that such attitudes were the natural result of Convivencia, and that under the Inquisition’s pressure they disappeared among Old Christians and survived only among converts and other marginal groups. The charges against non-Spaniards and the many eighteenth-century cases against these propositions argues against his position.

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century, the ideas lingered. In 1701 Inocencio de Aldama, a twenty-eight-year-old vagabond from Alava with a good education and broad experience as a soldier in the Mediterranean, was denounced for saying that “all can be saved.” He defended himself before his judges, and although he was willing to accept their correction on most matters, on the matter of faith, he told them that not even the “doctors of Salamanca” could dissuade him from his belief that “ all can be saved in the law they profess [...] we all come from the same trunk from which different shoots spring forth, and all of them bear fruit, and so too are all the laws and sects.”41 Exasperated by his reasoning, the Inquisitors finally placed him in a mental hospital.42 Is it possible to characterize those who believed in salvation for all, or at least were willing to concede that only God knew who would be saved? The idea was found among both converts and Old Christians. It was not limited to Spaniards or to Portuguese; a significant number of Flemings, Italians, Greeks, French, and others were also tried for this idea. Most of them were men, but some women also appear in the trials. Many of them had travelled: they had voyaged to the Indies, taken the king’s pay in the famous Spanish infantry tercios, served in the Mediterranean, had been captives or renegades, or had circulated around Spain during the annual harvest cycle. Many had seen other lands and other ways, but if they had travelled, so too had many of the people who denounced them. Travel or cosmopolitanism itself did not explain doubts about dogma. Many who expressed doubts, in fact, were not peasants or laborers but tradesmen and people from the middling sectors. While the occasional clerics or friars with a dissident soteriology seemed to be drawing on earlier theological debates, most of the laity appear to have reached their conclusions without reference to a specific theological position—although occasionally some did mention popular works of devotion, like those of Fray Luis de Granada or Domingo de Baltanás. It seems that many could read and write but did not have a university education or theological training. They were literate and they used their skill to access learned culture to which they always brought their own reading and understanding. They may have represented a subculture—more travelled, more cosmopolitan, better read, and more independent-minded—but mixed among them were always individuals who did not fit the patterns of mobility or literacy and yet had still come to believe that “each person can be saved in his or her own law.” I would emphasize, however, that whatever they heard or read, they could think for themselves. Consider Andrés Fernandes, an Old Christian from Portuguese Alentejo

41 “[...] que todos procedimos de la misma sepa de que salían diferentes sarmientos que daban fruto y así era todas las leyes y sectas y que todos se salvan en la que quisiesen profesar como la guardasen cumplidamente” AHN, Inquisición Libros 2845 (Murcia). 42 I would note here that there are a number of famous and well-studied Inquisition cases in which, like that of Aldama, the accused was thought to be mad or mentally deficient, or feigning madness. In all of them, the accused expressed some degree of religious toleration or openness to the possibility of the validity of other faiths. See, for example, Nalle, Mad for God, or the case of Mateo Salado in Lima (1578).

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who self-denounced himself and told the Inquisitors of Evora in 1583 that he had heard a sermon four years earlier in which the curate had said that only with baptism was salvation possible. Nevertheless, he believed that given the greatness of God and the existence of so many Moors, Turks and gentiles, that God, who had created them all, surely would not want them all in Hell. We do not know if he confessed his doubts motivated by desire for clarification, or in fear of being denounced, but it is clear that he had his well-reasoned doubts, seemingly based on his Christian belief in a merciful God.43 Finally, it should be emphasized that prior to 1750, the people who had these doubts and reservations about aspects of dogma and about the exclusive validity of the Church were a minority. They did not represent a party or a movement. They were individuals who simply shared a “proposition.” As such, their immediate threat to the established order of religious intolerance was relatively small. Nonetheless, the Inquisitors understood quite well that their desire for “freedom of conscience” might in the long-term have effects that could shake the existing social and political order.

3.

America: Salvation and Liberty

In the case of Iberia and the overseas empires that Spain and Portugal created, we see that these dissident ideas could survive or even flourish in a multi-ethnic and multicultural environment. The Americas after 1492 presented various kinds of eschatological hopes as well as challenges to orthodoxy. Papal grants served both Castile and Portugal as the basis of sovereignty, and in both empires, the conversion of the pagan peoples became the acknowledged task of both crown and altar. Various Catholic authors saw in the availability of millions of new adherents to the Church—through the conversion of the Indians—as a compensation for what had been lost to the Church in Europe by the Reformation. A Franciscan friar, Jerónimo de Mendieta, saw a divine plan in this situation, and he specifically noted that this happened after “the Catholic Monarchs had cleaned all of Spain that for so many years had been contaminated by these two sects (Jews and Muslims) who had dishonoured and offended our Christian religion.”44 The creation of a universal Church bringing the inhabitants of the New World under the yoke of the true faith seemed a real possibility to the first generation of missionaries. But the size of America, its pagan inhabitants, its conditions, and its distance from centres of authority also created threats to that hope. The policy of intolerance and religious unity was strictly applied in the New World. Restrictions on the immigration

43 ANTT, Inquisição de Évora, livro 10, fol. 250v–252v. Cited in Marcocci, I custodi dell’ortodossia, p. 305–306. 44 De Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica Indiana, p. 17–18, cited in Filippi, “Laberintos del etnocentrismo jurídico-político”, p. 318–343.

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of Conversos and Moriscos began in 1510 and were repeated in 1518 and 1522, and a whole system of passports and registry was constructed to regulate and prohibit the passage of heretical individuals, categories of people, or even ideas to America. But as early as 1506 there were complaints that Conversos were consistently violating the restrictions. Converts from Judaism or Islam or foreigners who might be Protestants presented a threat to the orthodoxy of the empire, especially in an environment where the faith was still new among the Indigenous peoples of America. Thus, for political and economic reasons, but always with a religious motive as well, punishments of foreigners were usually stern. But America also presented the challenges of “liberty,” by which was meant a lack of restraint, sexual and moral license, freedom from the obligations of dependency and rank, freedom from tax obligations, and sometimes, by implication, freedom of conscience. As early as 1516, father Bartolomé Las Casas had called for the establishment of an Inquisition because of such threats, and in the eighteenth century, Jesuits in the Rio de la Plata argued that not one, but two or three Inquisition tribunals were necessary in that region, if “Spain did not want in its dominions that each person live in the Law that they wanted.”45 The possibility of linking “libre albedrio” (free will) with “freedom of conscience,” that is, religious freedom, was an inherent theological and philosophical problem. In the context of the New World, however, it might also have the effect of becoming linked to the freedom of the Indians from their tribute obligations or of African slaves from their servitude. The explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quirós alerted the Spanish crown in the 1590s that an English fleet had embarked for Chile, where it hoped to join forces with the stubborn Araucanian Indians. From there, he warned of dire consequences, because the English planned to declare “liberty of conscience, and freedom for all the Indians and Blacks of America.”46 Whether the warnings of Queirós were real or imagined, they reveal his perception of where the fissures in the society lay and the threat that freedom of conscience triggered for those in authority. Thus a major challenge came not only from the traditional threats, namely, the marginalized descendants of religious minorities or from foreign interlopers, but also from a Spanish and Portuguese Christian laity seeking the “liberty” that the New World presented. Credulities and incredulities, local practices and “superstitions” had been transferred to America, and so, too, heterodox soteriology. While there were many conquerors and colonists who exploited Indigenous peoples and believed they had no souls to be saved, for others the traditional attitudes about the monotheistic faiths of the Mediterranean were now extended to other peoples and beliefs. Ysabel de Porras, a Spanish woman in Cuzco, told her friends that before the Spaniards came to Peru,

45 Medina, Historia del tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición de Lima, p. 332–333. 46 Archivo General de Simancas [AGS], Estado 228: “[...] para juntarse con los indios araucanos y pregonar desde allí libertad de conciencia y libertad a todos los indios y negros de América [...].”

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the Indians had also gone to heaven. Lázaro Aranha, a Brazilian mestizo who had lived among Indians and participated in the 1560s in a millenarian movement, believed that “there is a God of the Christians, a God of the Moors, and a God of the gentiles.” He also doubted immortality and said that “only coal beneath the ground is immortal.”47 While such ideas are sometimes ascribed to Converso rationalism or the influence of Averroes, Aranha seems to have arrived at them through simple materialism.48 These ideas might even be extended to Africans as well. While there had been clerical advocates of the humanity of Africans and the need to bring them to the faith through gentle instruction and good treatment, more radical positions were also possible. Mateo Salado (Matheus Saladé), a French resident in Lima who lived by pillaging Inca burial grounds, was a man with heretical Protestant tendencies and little constraint on voicing them. An admirer of Erasmus and Luther, critical of the ecclesiastical establishment and its greed, dubious about the existence of Purgatory, he also claimed that all slaveowners were damned, and the pope that permitted the slave trade which took the Africans from their lands must have been drunk at the time. Some thought him mad, others saw him as impenitent. He was burned at the stake in 1573, but his opinions were not entirely unshared, even though it is difficult to document their existence. Andrés de las Cuevas, a carpenter from Jaén, for example, was another man of heretical thoughts and a blasphemous mouth who in the 1620s resided in Cartegena de Indias, a centre of the slave trade. He was at war with all authority and believed that the lands of heretics were ruled better than those of Spain. He did not believe that slavery was justified by the conversion of Africans and the saving of their souls. He attacked slavery and the slave trade frontally and believed that Africans could find salvation in their own way. “They should be allowed to live in their law and in their own lands where they were raised. The king does this for his own self-interest and for no other good intention.”49 Such statements reveal an unease with the social conditions and hierarchies of the colonies and also a willingness to question the authority of the Church.

4.

From Tolerance to Tolerationism

In the eighteenth century, the popular ideas of religious tolerance continued to be expressed, but these ideas were now increasingly joined by a rising chorus of more systematized arguments coming from elsewhere in Europe. Publications like Locke’s Letter on Toleration (1689) and Voltaire’s Letters on England (1726) began to advocate freedom of conscience as a positive aspect of civil society. They and the later philosophes

47 Capistrano de Abreu, Primeira visitação do Santo Ofício, p. 283–285. 48 See Marquez Villanueva, “Nascer y morir como bestias”, p. 11–34. 49 I provide more detail on Cuevas in Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, p. 164–167.

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like Diderot and d’Alembert were far less interested in religion as truth, and they tended to see it as a practical support for civil society and as an ethical compass.50 Their ideas also penetrated Iberia. In Spain, there was a noticeable shift in Inquisition prosecutions, whereby those accused of these relativist or universalist propositions tended now be persons of education (ilustrados) and some social projection: lawyers, merchants, clerics, military officers, tradesmen, and city officials. A man like the Peruvian Pablo de Olavide, an enlightened judge and administrator who rose in the Spanish bureaucracy, was a case in point. A collector of books, and advocate and admirer of the ideas of the philosophes, he was tried in 1766 for a variety of subversive ideas, including doubts about the exclusive validity of the Church, the belief that Socrates had also found salvation, and that anyone who fulfilled his or her obligation to the state and lived morally within their religion would be saved. His trial and sentence for irreligion, libertinism, and formal heresy was a warning to all of the “frenchified” (afrancesados)—those who had fallen under the influence of dangerous French ideas.51 Although we do not have a careful accounting for the whole eighteenth century, prosecutions for propositions rose again; from 1780 to 1820 they made up 46 percent of all the cases tried by the Spanish tribunals. Most of these were traditional ideas that had been around for centuries, like those expressed by Manuel Pereda, who told the Sevillian Inquisitors that “since the majority of people are infidels and the followers of sects, and the Catholics are so few, if the former are condemned for their religion, then God is a tyrant who must enjoy condemning them.”52 By this time, however, the Inquisition was linking theological questions with political ones, censoring publications, limiting the circulation of books, and seeking to stem the tide of its old enemies who were now adorned with new names; “encyclopaedists,” “libertines,” “freethinkers,” “freemasons,” “indifferentists,” and “tolerationists.” State and Church viewed all of them as purveyors of the “poisonous doctrines of liberty, independence, and toleration.” “Tolerationism” (tolerantismo), or indifferentism, became the pejorative term that symbolized the new age after the French Revolution. It defined religious tolerance as a direct attack on revealed religion. For all the defenders of monarchy and the Ancien Régime, religious tolerance, freedom of conscience, and disbelief came to represent the worst aspects of secularism, often associated with the current enemies of the true faith—the frenchified, the libertines, the freemasons, the Jews, and the atheists. But if the Inquisitors and those who supported the Old Regime had looked carefully at the records of those tribunals of the faith, they could have seen that there had been a long tradition of such ideas in early modern Iberia and its colonies, among all sorts of

50 The works of Jonathan Israel emphasize the importance of the “radical” Enlightenment in the development of positive attitudes toward religious toleration and its broad social acceptance as a right rather than a concession. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment. 51 On the development of doubt and incredulity, with a focus on France, see Cavaillé, Déniaisés. 52 Alejandre and Torquemada, Palabra de hereje, p. 76–77.

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people. Although for those who hoped to transform the societies of Spain and Portugal and for whom “intolerance” and “Inquisition” had become the symbols of a world they hoped to change, the Napoleonic invasions and forced French reforms generated winds of nationalism that cooled their ardour for freedom of conscience. While many of the reformers became advocates of economic, political, and social changes, they refused or were slow to liberalize the restrictions on religious toleration.53 That change would come to Spain, Portugal, and their former colonies only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

5.

Criticism and Paths for the Future

This story I have suggested for the Iberian world of a long, rather ignored history has not convinced everyone. This questioning of the exclusive validity of Catholicism as the only path to salvation, and even of religion itself, with its emphasis on popular culture and perceptions, has been met with a series of methodological, epistemological, and interpretative objections. First, there is the methodological question of the validity of Inquisition records themselves. Given the Inquisitors’ objectives and their inherent prejudices, can these records be a trustworthy source? The disparity of power between the Inquisitors and the accused, or witnesses, and the institutional tendency to force evidence or testimony into predetermined categories surely calls for caution and scepticism in the use of these sources. Statements by the accused in the trials cannot be considered “holographic autobiography,” as Lu Ann Homza has reminded me. Inquisition records, like many sources of popular culture, do suffer from the “Bahktinian problem”—filtering ideas through the prism and language of learned observers or those in authority.54 Still, Inquisition sources were meant only for internal use, and the Inquisitors and their theological advisors really wished to know the origins and sources of heterodox and heretical ideas. So, I believe that read with care and attention to context, they retain their value as a key to the thinking of the accused, the accusers, and the Inquisitors.55 Then too, there has also been a growing parallel literature that emphasizes tolerant attitudes and practices based on non-Inquisitorial sources. The principal example of this is found in the work of the late Trevor Dadson, whose books on the integration of Moriscos in a community in Castile and their acceptance by their neighbours, even when they illegally returned after their expulsion in 1609, has reopened many questions

53 Eastman, “The Ruin of the State is Freedom of Conscience”. 54 Homza, “Attitudes, Alterity, and Law”, p. 409–411. 55 The question of the validity of Inquisition resources and their epistemological challenges has been specifically addressed by García Cárcel, “¿Son creíbles las fuentes inquisitoriales?”, p. 96–110.

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Some Reflections on the Social History

about the policies of religious exclusions and the extent to which these were universally accepted and enforced.56 A second critique has been the dismissal, by many, that statements of doubt, scepticism, indifference, or universalism do not indicate any tendencies toward religious tolerance, but rather reflect the opinions of mostly unlettered people who were ignorant of the theological implications of their sentiments and interpretations.57 Therefore they were not expressing sentiments of tolerance, but only naiveté or theological unsophistication, or they were only advocating tolerance out of materialistic concerns and personal self-interest. In other words, dissidence and heterodoxy on the question of the Church’s claim that it provided the only path to salvation was not a result of belief or principle, and thus, implicitly, orthodoxy was only due to religious conviction. An extension of this argument is that the Inquisition was simply a mirror that reflected the society’s attitudes, a “child of its time,” and that its political, financial, and theological interests had little role in stimulating or directing society in the matter of religious exclusivity, or in its obligation as protector of the faith. We have, however, an enormous and growing historiography that has documented the Inquisition’s use of sermons, autos de fe, publications, and political influence in the Iberian royal courts and in Rome itself to protect and extend its influence and prerogatives. Rather than simply a “mirror,” the Inquisition formulated, provoked, and articulated opinions and often mobilized support for its interests based not only on its theological concerns. There is much evidence that not only religious minorities or heterodox thinkers criticized its actions and procedures, but so did many people, both lay and clerical, who considered themselves to be faithful and true members of the Roman Catholic Church.58 From a seemingly contrary position, a number of historians of religion believe that rather than concentrating primarily on the beliefs of a relatively uninformed laity,59 I should have devoted more attention to the theological debates taking place within the Church itself on matters of “natural law,” soteriology, or the comparative issue of grace vs. works, all so important to the process of early modern confessionalization.60 How these debates might have been reflected in “popular” attitudes and opinions remains an open question. These critics are surely correct that such research is necessary, but I would argue that to have done so would have made my study far more conventional and return it once again to the realm of intellectual history. By doing so, this may have also implied the hypothesis that learned discourse was the driving force behind the creation

56 Dodson, Tolerance and Coexistence. An earlier, much longer version with accompanying documentation was published as Los moriscos de Villarubia de los Ojos. 57 Marcocci and Paiva, História da Inquisição portuguesa. 58 I mention here only two quite different books of a growing literature. Pastore, Il vangelo e la spada; de Mattos, A inquisição contestada. 59 John Coffey, “European Multiconfessionalism”, p. 340–364. 60 For example, see the learned reviews of All Can Be Saved by Marcocci and Sales Sousa.

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of these opinions. This, in fact, remains a crucial question in the study of toleration: what was the relationship between the practice of coexistence and ideas on tolerance and intolerance? This was the problem that Carlo Ginzburg called the issue of “circularity,” the interaction and reciprocity of ideas between the dominant and subordinate classes and their cultures.61 Did ideas always flow downwards? Was the general population, the common folk, always an uncritical receptor? A historical case I encountered after publishing my book was illuminating. Francisco Ruiz [or Razin], a French weaver living in Guatemala, was tried for heresy (1640–1642). He was called before the Inquisitors in Mexico because he had told people that religion was all about taking people’s money, and he had jokingly said that “the greatest of the prophets and most esteemed and respected among the six or seven hundreds of them was Mohammed, because he was the richest.” Ruiz, like Menocchio, went on to claim that each person thinks he or she is correct in the religion they follow, which suggested that no one could be sure. He also noted that “the scholars or intellectuals mislead the simple folk.”62 It was this kind of underlying desire for freedom of conscience (to think for himself) and distrust of theologians and intellectuals that had made me doubtful about the call to return this topic to its traditional home in intellectual history, or to search for its roots in classical philosophies or theological debates. Indeed, these are mostly absent in the recorded testimonies that have survived.63 We modern scholars are not alone in our concern with the problem of circularity. The inquisitors themselves were also curious to know how those accused of heterodox or heretical opinions had acquired their ideas about salvation. What impressed me was how few of those accused of these deviant ideas about soteriology mentioned a text or sermon that had influenced their opinion, even though literacy and book ownership was not uncommon.64 There are a couple of mentions of Dante, or Luis de Granada, but these are far outweighed by references to “natural law,” to the idea of God’s magnanimity, or to the need for Christian charity and the biblical admonition to love one’s neighbour. Thus, the issue of whether this issue was influenced from above or below remains a crucial question.

61 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. XII. 62 “[...] cada uno piensa acierta en la ley que sigue y que la gente de letras engaña a la simple”, Francisco Ruiz trial, Huntington Library, Mexican Inquisition Papers, HM 35120. 63 Wootten. “Lucien Febvre”, p. 699–700. Wootten, like Lecler (1955), recognised that it was difficult to recapture popular oral tradition that was “lost almost beyond recall”. In Wootten’s study of unbelief, he pointed out that we do not know if learned texts defending aspects of Christianity were written to refute some published or manuscript text, or if they were responding to “the things that unbelievers were saying”. Trial investigations, despite their epistemological challenges, provide one of the few avenues to recover those traditions. 64 Nicholas Griffiths, “Popular Religious Scepticism and Idiosyncrasy”, p. 95–128.

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Religion and heterodoxy in the Iberian world had a long and distinguished historiography. I had been aware of theological and humanistic arguments for freedom of conscience and opposition to the use of force in matters of individual belief, such as those of the Aragonese physician and humanist Miguel Servet (1509?–1553), and of the broad impact of Erasmus in Spain that the Inquisition targeted and sought to suppress in the sixteenth century.65 The study of this deep vein of learned scepticism, doubt, and tolerant attitudes has greatly expanded in the last decade, as historians have begun to explore a range of aspects related to heterodox thinking. This has happened despite many in the field still concentrating principally on political, theological, or philosophical writings, and sometimes dismissing popular expressions of these sentiments as simple “confusion.”66 Rather than viewing the idea that salvation in an alternative religion might be possible as a form of religious tolerance, another approach has been the rediscovery of doubt as a central issue in early modern thought. Scepticism had long been recognised as an important aspect of medieval and early modern thought, and the debate over its importance, initiated by Lucien Febvre’s old classic on the ontological impossibility of disbelief, has been re-examined in a more critical fashion as a result.67 Although Richard Popkin’s classic The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) did not include Spain and Portugal, there were scholars in those countries who had laid a groundwork of interest in the subject.68 Recent studies of the Luso-Hispanic world have reopened the question and deepened our understanding of the theological and epistemological issues at stake.69 An important aspect of this movement has been finding the contemporaneous humanist exemplars of classical scepticism. We now have a growing number of studies on the classical intellectual origins of such thinking in Neoplatonism, Averroes, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism, as well as in atheism, or as an origin of the doubt about dogma lying beneath the attitudes I have found expressed—in

65 Bataillon, Erasmo y España. See for example the essays in García Cárcel and Serrano, Historia de la tolerancia and especially the earlier essays by García Cárcel and Moreno, “La Inquisición y el debate sobre la tolerancia en Europa”, p. 195–213; García Cárcel, “Las otras formas de la tolerancia en la España moderna”, p. 25–46; García Cárcel, “The Other Forms of Tolerance in Early Modern Spain”, p. 75–102. 66 García Cárcel, “Las otras formas de la tolerancia en la España moderna”, p. 42. 67 Wootton, “Lucien Febvre”. 68 For example, the early critical work of Menéndez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, first published in Madrid 1880–1882 and now best consulted in the facsimile edition, and that of the anthropologist Baroja, Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa. 69 Although there were important earlier studies on doubt and disbelief in Iberia, the last two decades have seen a great deal of new work: García-Arenal, “De la duda a la incredulidad en la España moderna”, p. 51–64; Ribeiro, “Crise e consciência”, p. 117–145; Pastore, “Doubt in Fifteenth-Century Iberia”, p. 283–303; García-Arenal, “What Faith to Believe?”, p. 53–74; Fuchs and García-Arenal, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe.

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Paulist forms of interior Christianity.70 These studies have surely enriched the field, but they do not explain how these ideas were circulating among the population in general, if at all. Moreover, scepticism or doubt did not necessarily lead to religious tolerance. We need only to reflect on Voltaire’s essay on the Jews to recognise that. Still, I would argue that while doubt about aspects of dogma or about religion was not in itself tolerance, it was an attitude that made such tolerance a logical next step, whether for philosophical or pragmatic reasons. Why that step was not taken in Iberia at the beginning of the nineteenth century—despite the deep roots of scepticism there, and the political and philosophical changes taking place in Europe and their influence on Spain and Portugal and their colonies—has become a recent focus of study and revision, studies that are seeking to explain the conflicting tendencies of liberalism and religious intolerance that persisted in Spain and Portugal until the late twentieth century.71

6.

Conclusions

Reflecting back on my decade of research and writing about the social history of religious toleration in the Iberian world, and what I have learned subsequently from the new wave of interest on this topic, I would like to highlight some of conclusions I have reached. First of all, although religious identity was constantly emphasized in the early modern era, it did not have the same importance to everyone. Not only were there believers and non-believers, there were also degrees of belief, doubt, and scepticism. This point is important, because the truly indifferent were unlikely to take the risk of revealing themselves and probably escaped the Inquisition’s notice. Only those who were serious in their objections, or who were careless enough to mention them in public, were denounced. That suggests that the known cases are the tip of a much larger iceberg of dissidence and non-conformity. Moreover, I think there is considerable evidence that religious and other identities were much less stable than we have been urged to believe. We have many cases of individuals torn between religious and ethnic or proto-national identities. We have

70 For example, Stone, “Why Europeans Stopped Reading Averroes”, p. 77–95; Pastore, “Pyrrhonism and Unbelief ”, p. 90–106; Durin, “El epicureísmo y las heterodoxias españolas”, p. 177–191; Pastore, “Doubt in Fifteenth-Century Iberia”, p. 283–303. On Pauline Christianity and the heresy of the alumbrados, see Pastore, Un’eresia Spagnola; Stuczynski, “Converso Paulinism and Residual Jewishness”, p. 112–133. 71 For an excellent overview, see Feros, Speaking of Spain, p. 189–231. On the question of religious tolerance in this period, see for example Domínguez, “Reformiso cristiano y tolerancia”, p. 113–173; Dominguez, “Intolerancia religiosa en las Cortés de Cádiz”, p. 155–183; Sebastián, “Tolerance and Freedom of Expression in the Hispanic World”, p. 159–166. On Portugal and Brazil, see, Rocha, “Não se fazem mais excomunhões que prestem nos dias de hoje”.

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examples of others who shifted from one religion to another and then back again, or who even moved within professions of the same religion (e. g., from Franciscan to Dominican). Identities were not fixed in this age of pretenders, fakes, and dissimulators. The examples are myriad: Martin Guerre; the false kings, the Sebastians and the Dimitris; Christian captives and renegades in Barbary; and the many former New Christians who had become New Jews and who later returned from Hamburg, Livorno, or Amsterdam to live or die in Spain or Portugal, “the lands of Idolatry.” 72 Then too, there was the problem of religious dissimulation—the need for Nicodemism, the hiding of true religious conviction as practiced by Conversos and Moriscos in Spain, Protestants in Italy, or Catholics in England.73 Getting to true belief or its absence remains a difficult epistemological challenge for historians. This instability of identity, religious or not, was not a singular problem of the Conversos as some have suggested. I would add that scepticism and religious doubt was not only a Christian problem. Spinoza’s writings attest to that, but the roughly contemporaneous debate between the Iberian Conversos Isaac Orobio de Castro and Juan del Prado also reveals that problems existed in the Iberian Jewish communities as well. Castro became an ardent practitioner and advocate of rabbinic Judaism and an intellectual opponent of Prado, a sceptical pariah, who was later exiled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community.74 Curiously, however, as university students together in Spain when both were still ostensibly Catholics, they had expressed their common adherence to the wide-spread idea that “each could be saved in their own law,” a concept that seems to have been crossing many religious frontiers. Nevertheless, despite the general patterns of the movement toward religious toleration in the eighteenth century, I believe that the admonition to consider and understand the local, regional, and national differences in the use and meaning of the concept is a valid one.75 I would argue that many of the common people in the Iberian world who expressed a desire for freedom of conscience and expressed scepticism about the exclusive validity of the Church were not very “grudging” or “reluctant” in their desire to concede religious tolerance.76 Perhaps unlike England, France, or Germany, in Spain and Portugal, where there were no easily identifiable religious minorities, there was less to fear from such an attitude of tolerance. In Iberia, Erasmian or Protestant tendencies had been throttled early, and there was no possible alternative majoritarian

72 Aside from cases I presented in All Can Be Saved, some of the books that have influenced my thinking about shifting identities are Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre; Bercé, Le roi caché; Hermann, No reino do desejado; Valensi, Fables de la mémoire; Bennassar, Los cristianos de Alá; Graizbord, Souls in Dispute. 73 Eliav-Feldon and Herzig, Dissimulation and Deceit. 74 Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism; Wilke, Isaac Orobio. 75 Haefeli, “Toleration”, p. 255. 76 Walsham, “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence”, p. 307.

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Christian confession. When, however, the issue surfaced in the nineteenth century during the transition to constitutional monarchy in Spain or to the independence of the former colonies in America, there was far less sympathy for freedom of religion, at least from the political class. To a large extent, a defensive intolerance remained. Still, many of the early modern people in the Iberian world had been sincere in their expressions of dissidence and desire for intellectual and religious freedom; they were not simply expressing dissident ideas and opinions that others had formulated. By the eighteenth century, dissidents understood that freedom of conscience meant the liberty to decide what they believed for themselves without the threat of coercion. They thus looked beyond their borders (sometimes confusedly) to places like England, Jamaica, Holland, or Germany, places where that sort of liberty seemed to be a reality.77 They were not members of a formal community or movement, at least in their origins, and in many ways and experiences, they were much like their more conformist and orthodox neighbours. They nevertheless came to hold individual opinions about right and wrong, coexistence, religion, and even the existence of God. How to weigh and explain their dissidence against the xenophobia or paranoia of their neighbours or in relation to the institutional intolerance of the State and Church seems to me a continuing challenge in the history of religious tolerance.

Bibliography Archival Sources Archivo General de Simancas [AGS] − Estado 228. Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid [AHN] − Inquisición Libros 937, 988, 1027 (Lima), 2022, 2845 (Murcia). Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon [ANTT] − Inquisição de Évora, maço 64, livro 10. Huntington Library, San Marino − Mexican Inquisition Papers, HM 35120.

77 Here I am responding to Walsham, “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence”, p. 186, who argues that “freedom or liberty of conscience of which contemporary writers spoke was freedom to obey the will of God and liberty to resist the influence of Satan and embrace the true faith.” Although that may have been true for some theologians, and assuredly religion weighed heavily on early modern attitudes, there is much evidence that freedom of conscience had a far more provocative meaning for many people. In the Luso-Hispanic world, it meant to be left alone in matters of belief and conscience without the threat of punishment, and as such, it was often condemned by civil or religious authority, but still greatly desired by many people. By the eighteenth century, this was an issue of great debate. See Ramírez-Araujo, “El morisco Ricote y la libertad de conciencia”, p. 278–289; and Scott Eastman, “The Ruin of a State is Freedom of Conscience”.

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Spohnholz, Jesse. “Toleration.” In Oxford Bibliographies, 2014, https://www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0109.xml?rskey=lP5aEN &result=1&q=+Spohnholz#firstMatch. Stone, Harold. “Why Europeans Stopped Reading Averroes: The Case of Pierre Bayle.” In Alif. Journal of Comparative Poetics 16 (1996), p. 77–95. Stroumsa, Sara. Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rāwandī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and their Impact on Islamic Thought. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 1999. Stuczynski, Claude B. “Converso Paulinism and Residual Jewishness: Conversion from Judaism to Christianity as a Theologico-Political Problem.” In Bastards and Believers. Jewish Converts and Conversion from the Bible to the Present, edited by Theodor Dunkelgrün and Paweł Maciejko. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, p. 112–133. Thomas, Werner, Los protestantes y la Inquisición en España en tiempos de Reforma y Contrareforma. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001, p. 478–483. Tracy, James. “Two Erasmuses, Two Luthers: Erasmus’ Strategy in Defense of De Libero Arbitrio.” In Archiv für Reformationgeschichte 78 (1987), p. 37–60. Tuck, Richard. “Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century.” In Justifying Toleration. Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, edited by Susan Mendus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 21–35. Valensi, Lucette. Fables de la mémoire. La glorieuse bataille des trois rois. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Wachtel, Nathan. “Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America in the Seventeenth Century.” In The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering. New York: Berghahn, 2001, p. 149–172. Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Walsham, Alexandra. “Migrations of the Holy: Religious Change in Medieval and Modern Europe.” In Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44/2 (2014), p. 241–280. Walsham, Alexandra. “Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence: The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation.” In Archiv fūr Reformationsgeschichte 108 (2017), p. 181–190. Wilke, Carsten (ed.). Isaac Orobio. The Jewish Argument with Dogma and Doubt. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Wootten, David. “Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period.” In Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), p. 695–730. Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

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Connected Histories and Eastern Christianities

1.

Introduction

From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered around the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political dynamics in the Middle East. In fact, this phenomenon had its roots in confessional changes in the early modern period. From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians in the Ottoman Empire set out for distant and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia, and even the Americas. Scattered across diverse urban centres such as Paris, Leiden, Seville, and Rome, Eastern Christians created new lives for themselves as alms-collectors, correctors in print-shops, ad hoc translators, merchants, and priests. They lived under Westernised names that obscured their origins, and they were armed with a wide range of documentation that attested to their ongoing connections with the communities they left behind in the Ottoman Empire. Consider, for example, three lives that taken together reflect the wide horizons of Eastern Christianity in the early modern world. In 1668, a priest from Mosul called Elias of Babylon travelled with Spanish officials and missionaries as far as Peru, where, he says, he went to convert the natives to the “true faith” of Catholicism. In his company for at least some of this journey was another priest from Elias’s community, Simon of Ada. Simon’s travels would in fact take him in the opposite direction, travelling east to Pondicherry, where he would spend thirty years of his life supporting the work of Jesuit missionaries there. What neither could have known was that in the worlds they had left behind, their own communities were reacting in different ways to the social and political impact of conversion to Catholicism of a growing number of notable individuals and families. Nor could they have known that other Eastern Christian communities were also experiencing similar changes from a rather different separate set of encounters with Protestantism. For example, consider the experiences of Joseph Georgirenes, a Greek archbishop from Samos, who in the 1670s travelled across England in an attempt to establish an Anglican church for Greeks in London. In this way, the history of Eastern Christianity in the early modern world was first and foremost a history of communities

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impacted by internal and external developments, taking place as much in the Ottoman Empire as in the distant lands to which Eastern Christians travelled.1 Until fairly recently, scholars have overlooked the importance of such stories of movement and circulation to our wider understanding of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period. This is because traditional approaches to the history of Eastern Christianity have stopped short of connecting the writings, experiences, and lives of Middle Eastern Christians into a single analytical framework that links the Ottoman Empire to the wider world. Instead, existing scholarship is fragmented and divided along linguistic, national, and scholarly lines. Moreover, a centuries-old division of labour between philologists and historians has meant that the history of Eastern Christianity has paid more attention to specific texts and individuals rather than to the transnational, historical phenomenon of Eastern Christian mobility and migration in this period. As a result, even the most basic questions have yet to be answered. Where were Eastern Christians in the early modern world? Why did some individuals travel to certain lands and not to others? Indeed, what motivated Eastern Christians to leave the Ottoman Empire in the first place? These questions naturally open up a set of wider issues about intellectual, cultural, and religious change in the early modern period. For example, what roles did Eastern Christians play in the circulation of ideas and practices in the age of European reformations? What strategies did Eastern Christians adopt to create new lives for themselves abroad? How conspicuous was their presence in the reform movements that consumed Europe in the early modern period, and how did Catholic and Protestant reformers position themselves vis-à-vis Eastern Christianity? Answers to such questions require a transnational and global approach to the study of Eastern Christianity. By exploring what connected history can offer to these questions, this chapter offers a view of what one pathway can tell us about a fundamental question concerning the nature and identity of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period: Was there a core set of beliefs, practices, and experiences that united Eastern Christians in the early modern world?

2.

Previous Approaches to the Study of Eastern Christianity

In spite of the existence of a vast global archive of sources, our knowledge of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period remains surprisingly limited in its chronological and geographical aspects. In part, this reflects the fact that most scholars who command the requisite philological skills have tended to focus on the late antique, early medieval, or contemporary history of Middle Eastern Christians. In particular, the past three

1 For detailed accounts of these individuals, see Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon”, p. 51–93; id., “Migration from Within and Without”, p. 153–173; and id., “Moving Stories”, p. 244–280.

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decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in the relationship between Eastern Christianity and early Islam as pioneered by such scholars as Peter Brown, Michael Cook, Patricia Crone, Sidney Griffith, and Fred Donner.2 Modern historians, for their part, have tended to produce excellent studies of interfaith initiatives, religious persecution, and the humanitarian challenges facing Christians in the Middle East today, but too often without sufficient attention to the early modern history of these same communities.3 Moreover, there are imbalances in the treatment of specific communities within Eastern Christianity over others: the historiographical neglect of Arabic and Syriac-speaking Eastern Christians, for example, is especially striking when compared with the enduring fascination of scholars with Byzantium and Greek Orthodoxy.4 Perhaps one of the most profound challenges facing the field is a conceptual one, a challenge that shapes not only the pathways we use to study Eastern Christianity, but even the very terminology we deploy to characterise its history. Despite the ubiquity of the term, it remains unclear what is gained in the assumption that there is some sort of implicit unity within the great array of communities gathered together under the umbrella of “Eastern Christianity”. In a different context, Françoise Micheau has argued persuasively that there is good reason to see the existence of a core set of “Eastern Christianities”.5 Yet at the same time, when taken to its extreme, the basic premise of the existence of a world of Eastern Christianity carries the risk of distorting the specificity and local contexts of everyday life among the diverse Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire. This conceptual challenge becomes even more complicated if we consider the diversity of Ottoman Christians across specific contexts of geography, language, demography, theology, manuscript cultures, and liturgical traditions. What exactly do we mean when we say that two communities as different from each other as the Melkites of Syria and the Copts of Egypt “became Catholic” in this period? Moreover, did conversion to Catholicism mean the same thing, say, to an East Syrian woman living in Mosul as it did to an Orthodox priest living in Aleppo? In other words, how did the process of “becoming Catholic” interact with local traditions, practices and histories, each of which necessarily varied from one community of Eastern Christians to another? Faced with such questions, connected history offers an especially useful pathway for the study of Eastern Christianity. It also goes some way towards correcting certain scholarly approaches that have limited our understanding of Eastern Christianity in the

2 See, for example, Brown, The World of Late Antiquity; Cook and Crone, Hagarism; and, more recently, Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque; Donner, Muhammad and the Believers. 3 See, for example, Hassan, Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt; Makari, Conflict & Cooperation; Pacini, Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East. 4 See, for example, Iorga, Byzance après Byzance; Runciman, The Great Church; Harris, Holmes, and Russell, Byzantines, Latins and Turks. 5 Micheau, “Eastern Christianities”, p. 371–403.

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early modern period in several ways. Firstly, scholars have tended to restrict themselves to local and nationally-oriented studies of particular Eastern Christian communities, such as the Copts of Egypt, the Maronites of Lebanon, or the Chaldeans of Iraq.6 While undoubtedly an important contribution to our knowledge of the period, these studies are incomplete because they tend to ignore interactions that took place between specific communities within Eastern Christianity.7 In part, much of the existing scholarship emphasises the doctrinal differences that separate particular Eastern Christian churches from each other, while ignoring the fact that many of these communities shared a common vernacular in the language of Arabic (e. g. the Maronites, Melkites, and Arab Orthodox of Lebanon and Syria; the Copts of Egypt; and the West and East Syrians of Iraq) and, for some, the historical and liturgical use of Syriac (e. g. the Maronites, West Syrians, and East Syrians).8 When it comes to the interactions that occurred between these communities and the wider world, existing scholarship has focused mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 Apart from a few exceptional studies of Catholic missions in the Ottoman Empire, we know very little about how Eastern Christians interacted with societies in Europe, India, Russia, or the Americas in this period.10 Secondly, our knowledge has been misguided by an outmoded conception of Christians as a “second-class”, minority population in the Islamic world.11 This idea is more a reflection of twentieth-century discourses than early modern ones, and the consequence is that Eastern Christianity has been relegated to the margins of Ottoman history. When approached at all, Eastern Christians are too often studied through the prism of “Islamic” history, almost as if they made no history of their own. Thus, rather in the manner of minorities (such as Jews in early modern Europe), the Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire have been studied primarily in terms of their impact on the majority Islamic population.

6 See, for example, Armanios, Coptic Christianity; Mouawad, Les maronites, chrétiens du Liban; Naby, Assyrians of the Middle East; Teule, Les Assyro-Chaldéens; and regional approaches like Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World. 7 For the most important exception to this trend, see Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient. 8 For an overview of the different Eastern churches, see Angold, The Cambridge History of Christianity, esp. part III on “Eastern Christianities”. 9 See, for example, Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East; Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven; Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England. 10 Exceptional studies of the early modern period include Gemayel, Les échanges culturels entre les Maronites et l’Europe; Chick, A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia; Frazee, Catholics and Sultans. 11 The idea has its roots in the Islamic concept of the dhimmī, that is, the protected status of non-Muslims living in Islamic societies. It has been the basis for misguided speculation about the place of Christians and Jews in everyday life in Islamic societies, for example in the classic work of Yeʾor, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam. For the Ottoman context, see Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.

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Beyond these methodological issues, there is also a distinct set of contexts related to sources that has so far made a connected history of Eastern Christianity elusive. On the one hand, Eastern Christianity has been the subject of scholarly interest since at least the eighteenth century, beginning with the earliest efforts of European orientalists to study the literature and religious culture of Eastern Christianity. The Vatican scholar Joseph Assemani, himself a Maronite, was the first to endeavour to provide a corpus of writings by Eastern Christian writers in his massive work, the Bibliotheca Orientalis, published in Rome in the 1720s.12 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, bibliophiles and philologists built on the foundation laid by Assemani, publishing encyclopaedic works that sought to chart the entire literary production of Eastern Christianity in Arabic, Syriac, and Karshuni (Arabic in Syriac script).13 Yet even these priceless resources pose challenges for use in a critical way: Graf ’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, for example, is unprecedented in the scope of authors, texts, and communities included in its analysis, yet its usefulness is marred by the inconsistent methods that Graf used for classifying and organising his material, as well as the pro-Catholic bias evident in his analysis.14 While some attempts have been made to update these classic works, it has long been recognised that we are still very far from knowing the answers to basic and fundamental questions about what was written by Eastern Christians in the early modern period, and when, where, and by whom it was written. Indeed, in the past three decades, there have been two major calls for a “new history of Christian Arabic literature” by one of the world’s leading authorities on Eastern Christianity, first in 1982 and again in 1999.15 These calls have not yet been answered fully. The resources available to scholars today also remain in disarray. We still lack critical editions of most of the works written in this period: histories, travelogues, saints’ lives, translations of European works, and much more. During the early twentieth century, several catalogues were published of Middle Eastern manuscript collections, which significantly increased our knowledge of the holdings of libraries that were otherwise inaccessible to most scholars.16 Indeed, most scholars continue to rely extensively on these catalogues today, in some cases resorting to extracting bibliographical, linguistic, and textual evidence from them without directly consulting the manuscripts referred 12 Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana. 13 The most important of these were Cheikho’s Catalogue des manuscrits des auteurs arabes chrétiens depuis l’Islam; and Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur. 14 See, for example, Kilpatrick’s comments in “Brockelmann, Kaḥḥâla & Co”, esp. p. 36–40. 15 Samir, “Pour une nouvelle histoire de la littérature arabe des Chrétiens”, p. 259–286, and id., “L’avenir des études arabes chrétiennes”, p. 21–43. 16 For some of the most important examples, see Cheikho and Khalifé, Catalogue raisonné des manuscrits historiques; Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts; Wright, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts; Armalat, Catalogue des manuscrits de Charfet; Scher, “Notice sur les manuscrits syriaques”, p. 331–362, p. 385–431; Günzburg, Rosen, Dorn, Patkanof, and Tchoubinof, Les manuscrits arabes, karchounis, grecs, coptes, ethiopiens, georgiens; Scher, Catalogue des manuscrits syriaques et arabes.

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to in these works. And yet, many of these catalogues are unscientific and incomplete. Those that have been published (many still circulate only in handwritten lists) were only printed in small print runs, which makes it impossible for scholars to use them in a critical and comprehensive fashion.17 They are also outdated: the collections described in these catalogues have since been reorganised, dispersed and, in some cases, destroyed as a consequence of the long history of war, turmoil, and political change in the Middle East.18 Faced with the tragic disappearance of this literary and cultural heritage, several digitisation projects have recently sought to recover and preserve these collections in digital formats. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), for example, has carried out one of the most extensive digitisation projects of manuscript collections across the Middle East and North Africa.19 As a result of such efforts, we now possess a more complete picture of the sources than were available to earlier generations of scholars. Nevertheless, these newly digitised sources remain in the possession of several different organisations, of which some lack the resources to use these sources as the basis for a wide-ranging, critical history of Eastern Christianity. The consequence is that only piecemeal work has been carried out on these new sources, much by lone scholars or small groups of specialists in Eastern Christian Studies. These scholars have produced excellent work, characterised by an acute philological sensitivity to the texts, as well as a keen sense of the wider literary traditions and genres of Eastern Christianity. Were it not for this robust, well-developed tradition of scholarship, it is fair to say that we would know almost nothing about Eastern Christianity in the early modern period. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for this field to engage more fully and critically with wider questions about the nature of religious and cultural change in the early modern period. Intellectually, organisationally, and practically, the history of Eastern Christianity in the early modern world remains too isolated. It is a history turned, almost literally, inwards upon itself, with the consequence that other scholars have not grasped the extent of the interconnectedness of this “Eastern” history with the history of “Western” Christianity (and Europe) in this period.

3.

The Case for Connected History

Faced with this variety of sources, contexts, and research questions, there are several pathways that scholars have taken in the past towards the study of Eastern Christianity.

17 Only two libraries in Europe, for example, hold a copy of an important twentieth-century history of the West and East Syrian churches, Nas.rī, Kitāb dakhīrat al-adhhān fī tawārīkh al-mashāriqa wa-l-maghāriba al-Suryān, which includes references to unique manuscripts not described anywhere else. 18 On this subject, see the report by Al-Tikriti, “Stuff Happens”, p. 730–735. 19 For a sense of the organisation’s work, see the website for The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at http://www.hmml.org.

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Two in particular have had a profound influence on the study of Eastern Christianity: the history of missions and ecclesiastical history. Studies of the history of Catholic missions in the Middle East have a long pedigree going back to classic works written in the early and mid-twentieth century, often by members of the missionary orders themselves. These works have tended to emphasise, on the one hand, the central role played by Catholic missionaries on the ground in the conversion of Eastern Christian communities to Catholicism and, on the other, the general impetus and momentum given to their actions by the post-Tridentine formation of global Catholicism. In this way, the story of early modern Eastern Christianity has often become a part in a much larger narrative of the rise of global Catholicism. However, if we can judge by the most recent works emerging from this trend, there is much to suggest that the story of Eastern Christianity—even when viewed through the prism of the history of missions—was a much more local, diverse, and granular experience than is suggested by the sometimes triumphant narratives of global Catholicism that emanated from contemporaries during the period.20 In some ways, a mirror image of the influence of the history of missions has been that of ecclesiastical history, particularly the large body of work carried out by scholars who were often themselves members of the Eastern Christian communities about whom they write. Perhaps the best known of such groups is a circle of scholars centred around the Arabic journal Al-Mashriq, which was a ground-breaking Eastern Catholic journal set up in Lebanon at the end of the nineteenth century.21 Recent works have demonstrated the extent to which scholars like Louis Cheikho, Paul Sbath, and others in this period constructed a vision of Eastern Christianity that reflected in many ways a distinct set of twentieth-century preoccupations for Eastern Catholics.22 It is difficult to disentangle the approach of ecclesiastical history—particularly when written by Eastern Christians themselves—from the community-oriented goals of their work. The history of Eastern Christianity that has emerged from this approach has tended to focus almost entirely on issues of theology, rite, and ritual practice, centred normally around questions relevant to union with Rome, in a way that seems disinterested in the contingencies and unpredictable possibilities that lay at the heart of all historical developments. For this

20 For this recent important body of work on the specificity of the experience of different missions in different sites, see, among others, Amsler, Badea, Heyberger, and Windler, Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia; Windler, Missionare in Persien; and Kümin and Tramontana, “Catholicism Decentralized”, p. 268–287. 21 See, for example, Bell Campbell, The Arabic Journal, Al-Mashriq: Its Beginnings and First Twenty-Five Years under the Editorship of Louis Cheikho. 22 Parker, “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging”, p. 1420–1445; Schmidt, “Louis Cheikho and the Christianization of Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Ascetic Poetry”, p. 339–373; Gianni, “Paul Sbath’s Manuscript Library”, p. 381–420.

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reason, this sort of ecclesiastical history shares the problems that Alexandra Walsham has identified in another context when she asked, How do we conceptualize and explain religious change […] without perpetuating distorting paradigms inherited from the very era of the past that is the subject of our study? How can we do justice to historical development over time without resorting to linear grand narratives that have their intellectual origins in the very movements that we seek to comprehend?23

What has been particularly useful for the study of Eastern Christianity has been the recent acknowledgment by many scholars of the importance of place, context, and location in the study of Christianity more generally. In 2017, for example, Dorothea Weltecke described several models that offered different ways of visualising medieval Christianity.24 One of these involves the idea of “local Christianity” as developed elsewhere in this volume, which in the context of Eastern Christianity has the advantage of forcing scholars to focus on particular sites in a way that transcends facile approaches to some flat “Ottoman” context. Instead, such an approach acknowledges that two distinct sites, say Mosul and Cairo, may have both been Ottoman, but still present very distinct economic and social conditions, political organisations of power, and local modes of cohesion. Also revealing in Weltecke’s formulation are those models of Christianity that she refers to as the “bamboo forest” and the idea of “networks”. In particular, the “bamboo forest” “organises medieval Christianity in a synchronic way and displays organisational affiliation” while also raising “the question of the before and the after”. In the third model she invokes, that of networks, Weltecke is keen to emphasise “different nets of communication, partly of an organised, partly of a spontaneous and informal nature”. Moreover, she insists on how these networks “could become precarious or even completely break down.” In other words, networks were “fragile, ever changing, depended on personal contacts and had no centre”. Hers is a view of networks that insists on the “decentral” nature of Christianity while recognising its “entangled” character. Such an approach resonates with what are the most productive aspects of connected history as a pathway that helps us make sense both of the connectedness of Eastern Christianity and its specificity and rootedness in different sites and communities. Of course, connected history has come to stand in as a sort of shorthand for a set of approaches that share some resemblances. Within this broad camp, one can distinguish between at least two main trends. The first is an approach that focuses on understanding relationships between different geographies, that is, on issues of space as a way of connecting analyses of different locations, for example, through comparative history or a close study of the modes of interaction that linked different sites (e. g., media,

23 Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy”, p. 241–280. 24 Weltecke, “Space, Entanglement and Decentralisation”, p. 333.

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circulation, communication, transport, and so on). In place of this focus on comparison or relationships between sites, a second approach includes such things as histoire croisée, a history of entanglements, and, of particular relevance to early modernists, the idea of “connected history” as developed in the works of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the clearest statement of which remains his 1997 article “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia”.25 In this article, Subrahmanyam offered an alternative to comparative approaches to history while also suggesting that his own method of connected history had a close relationship to prevailing ideas of microhistory.26 What is most relevant in Subrahmanyam’s articulation of connected history is the extent to which this approach to the past seeks to recover connections that emerge, not from the outside—through models that build relationships between different geographical sites—but rather, through the close philological work of bringing together multiple archives in different languages within a single framework of analysis. For the purposes of this chapter, it is helpful to identify some key features associated with Subrahmanyam’s idea of connected history, which I draw here from some recent reflections he gave himself on the subject on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the article’s publication.27 In characterising the uses of connected history, Subrahmanyam emphasised the following four aspects: 1. Connected history seeks to reconfigure space and reimagine geographies beyond the conventional containers used within certain fields for historical analysis. 2. Connected history involves the multiplication of sources, texts, and archives, which the historian brings together in critical ways to study a specific subject. 3. Connected history reflects a desire to challenge broad-sweeping, civilisational stereotypes and claims that are implicit in certain fields. 4. Connected history reflects a desire to go beyond methodological nationalism. Taking these four qualities as constitutive of a certain practice of connected history, the rest of this chapter seeks to show the potential value of this pathway to our understanding of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period. It does so first by linking connected history to other recent developments in historical writing; second, by providing a case study of what connected history looks like when it comes to the study of manuscript sources; and finally, by giving an assessment of some recent works that have sought to incorporate the use of connected history into the writing of a new history of Eastern Christianity.

25 Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories”, p. 735–762. See also Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; and Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison”, p. 30–50. 26 See, for example, Ghobrial, “Introduction”, p. 1–22. 27 “Connected Histories: Twenty-Five Years Later: A One-Day Symposium”, organised by Giuseppe Marcocci, Exeter College, University of Oxford, 24 June 2022.

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4.

Towards Connected Histories of Eastern Christianities

Recent developments in the study of Eastern Christianity suggest there is much to be gained from the methods of connected history, particularly as it builds on the momentum of several important developments in historical writing over the past three decades. Firstly, the political challenges facing Middle Eastern Christians today have led to an increased awareness of the need for a better understanding of their history.28 In 2010, for example, a roundtable discussion in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, widely regarded as one of the most important journals of Middle Eastern history in the English-speaking world, called on scholars to “reintegrate Christians and Christianity into Middle Eastern studies as a critical part of the narratives of the region.”29 As such, a growing consensus has emerged around the notion that the history of the Middle East cannot be written without a greater focus on the history of Eastern Christianity. Secondly, a growing interest in European–Islamic exchanges has brought an increased awareness of the roles played by Eastern Christians as intermediaries between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Recent scholarship has emphasised how Eastern Christians were active in the early modern period in the production of European orientalist knowledge, the printing of Middle Eastern texts, and even as informants about the beliefs and practice of Islam.30 The result of such pioneering work has been an exciting rediscovery of the importance of Eastern Christianity to wider narratives in European history such as the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Enlightenment, and European trade networks.31 Thirdly, specific national historiographies have developed in important ways that have increased our understanding of the scope and breadth of the Eastern Christian presence in the early modern world. For example, we now have a better sense than ever before about the presence of specific communities of Eastern Christians in early modern Europe. French scholars have documented how Eastern Christians began new lives

28 This is especially evident in the recent publication of several single-volume histories aimed at a general public, such as Bailey and Bailey, Who are the Christians in the Middle East?; O’Mahony and Loosley, Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East; Heyberger, Les chrétiens au Proche-Orient. 29 Akram Khater, Paul S. Rowe, Bernard Heyberger, Nelly van Doorn-Harder, and Febe Armanios all participated in this Roundtable Discussion “How does New Scholarship on Christians and Christianity in the Middle East Shape How We View the History of the Region and Its Current Issues?” 30 See, for example, Bevilacqua, “The Qurʾan Translations of Marracci and Sale”, p. 93–130; Hamilton, “An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters”, p. 123–150; Heyberger, Orientalisme, science et controverse; and Toomer, Eastern Wisdom and Learning. 31 See, for example, Mulsow, “Socinianism, Islam and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship”, p. 549–586; Heyberger, Hindiyya, mystique et criminelle; Heyberger and Walbiner, Les européens vus par les libanais à l’époque ottomane; Hamilton and Westerweel, The Republic of Letters; Hamilton, de Groot, and van den Boogert, Friends and Rivals in the East.

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for themselves as scribes, translators, and copyists in libraries in Paris, and they have shown how these activities fit into a wider pattern of alms-collecting and mobility across southern Europe.32 This French historiography reinforces the picture painted by earlier studies on the Maronite College in Rome, as well as more recent scholarship on the place of Eastern Christianity in Renaissance intellectual culture.33 Moreover, this renewed interest in Eastern Christians parallels an exciting, fascinating and growing body of knowledge about Muslims in early modern Europe.34 Spanish scholars have shown the roles played by Eastern Christians with regard to Catholic anxieties about Moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity).35 But the historic presence of Arabic manuscripts in Iberia has also meant that Eastern Christians were active there, as in France, as keepers of some of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts preserved in Spain.36 Looking beyond Europe, Indian historians have long known of the historical relations that connected the Eastern churches in the Ottoman Empire to the Saint Thomas Christians of south India.37 But recently, an extensive, systematic study of the Syriac holdings of libraries in India, carried out by István Perczel, has expanded our knowledge of these relations and, notably, of how these exchanges were renewed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.38 Similarly, we now know more than ever before about how global networks of alms-collecting enabled Eastern Christians to travel as far as India and the New World in search of funds, but also how these patterns of movement fed back into developments taking place in the Ottoman empire.39 Taken together, these developments have contributed to the emergence of an impressionistic but very exciting view of the potential for a truly connected history of Eastern Christianity. Because connected history is in so many ways a set of reflections about the use, discovery, and accumulation of sources from different archives, it is also important 32 See, for example, Richard, “Un érudit à la recherché de textes religieux venus d’Orient”; Heyberger and Verdeil, Hommes de l’entre-deux. 33 See, for example, Raphael, Le role du Collège Maronite romain; Carali, Fakhr ad-Dīn II, principe del Libano e la Corte di Toscana; Hamilton, “Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship”; and Baskins, “Popes, Patriarchs, and Print”. 34 See, for example, Dakhlia and Kaiser, Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe; Harvey, Muslims in Spain; and for Britain, Matar, Islam in Britain. 35 See, for example, the role of Eastern Christians in the affair of the “lead books of Sacromonte” in GarcíaArenal and Rodríguez Mediano, Un Oriente Español; and Amelang, Parallel Histories. 36 The first scientific archivist of the Arabic collections of the Escurial, for example, was Miguel Casiri, a Maronite from Lebanon. See, for example, his Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis, in conjunction with Torres, “Pablo Hodar, Escribiente de Árabe en la Biblioteca Real”, p. 209–235; and Gemayel, “Būlus al-Haddār”, p. 281–294. 37 See, for example, Baum and Winkler, The Church of the East, p. 112–134. 38 For details of the project, see http://www.srite.de. See, also, Perczel, “Classical Syriac as a Modern Lingua Franca”, p. 289–321; Desreumaux, Briquel-Chatonnet, Perczel, and Thekeparampil, “The Kerala Manuscripts on CD-Rom”, p. 245–256. 39 Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon”, p. 84–85; and id., “Stories Never Told”, p. 259–281.

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to note here that the intensive study of documentary sources in several archives has turned up a body of unknown and fascinating first-hand narratives written by Eastern Christians, which offer a direct and often poignant window into their experiences abroad. They include such works as the account of a journey made to Russia in the 1650s by a Patriarch of Antioch, the experiences of a Maronite in Paris at the start of the eighteenth century, the travels of a Damascene scholar in eighteenth-century England, an Iraqi priest in eighteenth-century Rome, and several other works left behind by anonymous Eastern Christian travellers in Europe. These works survive today in collections in both Europe and the Middle East, a testament to connected history’s interest in how documents were often produced in contexts that brought together different languages, cultures, and practices of documentation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the rise of global history has provided a new framework for understanding the connections between Europe, the Middle East, and the wider world. The impulses behind this change have come from several directions. Scholars working from within European history have increasingly acknowledged the extent to which commercial, artistic, intellectual, and architectural developments in Europe owed something to interactions taking place with the Middle East.40 Ottoman historians have also turned their attention towards the study of Ottoman contacts with the worlds beyond the empire’s frontiers—Europe and the Mediterranean world, to be sure, but also contacts further afield in India, China, and the New World.41 As a result, global history has encouraged scholars to focus on the study of diaspora groups, gens de passage, and go-betweens, all of which are subjects that resonate perfectly with connected history’s ambition to reconfigure spaces that we think we know in the past.42 It is no surprise, then, that a poignant call was made as recently as 2010 by Bernard Heyberger, one of the most important scholars in the field, for a “connected history” linking “Eastern Christians, Islam, and the West”.43 In this way, a connected history of Eastern Christianity becomes a pathway not only to a better understanding of early modern Christianity, but also to answering much wider, fundamental questions about long-term changes in the position of the Middle East within the wider world.

40 See, for example, Jardine and Brotton, Global Interests; Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar; MacLean, ReOrienting the Renaissance; Howard, Venice & the East; Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qurʾan; Belting, Florence and Baghdad; Goody, Renaissances. 41 See, especially, Goffman, The Ottoman Empire; Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It; Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration; Krstiç, Contested Conversions to Islam. 42 See, for example, Moatti and Kaiser, Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne; Rothman, Brokering Empire; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. 43 Heyberger, “Eastern Christians, Islam, and the West”, p. 475–478.

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5.

The Pathway in Practice

Given connected history’s ambition to bring together multiple archives in conversation with one another, it may be helpful here to give a detailed account of what connected history enables when it comes to a specific aspect of the history of Eastern Christianity, namely, the study of manuscript cultures. On the most basic level, the approach obliges scholars to integrate the widest array of languages, sources, and historiographies into a single framework. With a few notable exceptions, it has historically been rare for scholars of Eastern Christianity to use sources from both Europe and the Ottoman Empire in a systematic way.44 Even among scholars in Eastern Christian Studies, many specialists tend to be competent in either Arabic or Syriac, but not both. In its insistence on the most expansive approach to sources, therefore, connected history obliges intense collaboration between scholars working across a wide range of European- and Middle Eastern-language sources. In the case of Eastern Christianity, this means bringing into a single analytical framework sources that were originally written in Arabic, Syriac, Karshuni, Turkish, Armenian, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Latin. Secondly, the emphasis on the reconfiguration of space, but also on the specific process through which documents were normally produced, or co-produced, by people working in different languages demands a critical approach to how these sources are used. In practice, this means that scholars of Eastern Christianity must avoid the impulse to simply extract evidence or “facts” from sources; rather, they must look for particular ways in which individuals, texts, and contexts overlapped and interacted with each other. This way of working is crucial to understanding the layers of connections that linked Eastern Christians to each other: they read each other’s writings, they knew of one another from their former lives in the Ottoman Empire, and they even travelled together and met each other in the new societies in which they lived. The opportunities they found, the strategies they used, and the stories they told: all of these things built on one another, from one generation to the next. And so the methodology of “connected history” becomes crucial to understanding Eastern Christianity as a chain of linked individuals who shared a common connection to one another, despite their geographical location. Even with the wide range of sources obliged by connected history, there remain important silences and gaps in the documentary record when it comes to understanding how Eastern Christians conceived of their own identities, histories, and memories in the early modern period. Of particular relevance to the study of Eastern Christianity is the relatively restricted use of printing in the Middle East until the late nineteenth century. This has had the consequence that early modern sources for Eastern Christianity 44 The important exception is Bernard Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient; but see also the more recent work of his student, Aurélien Girard, for example his “Les manuels d’arabe en usage en France”, p. 12–26.

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sometimes exist today only in nineteenth- and twentieth-century manuscript copies. Moreover, the copying of early modern manuscripts in the twentieth century was often refracted through the interests of scholars and copyists whose own preoccupations sometimes clouded their selection, edition, and publication of early modern sources.45 As a result, a critical connected history of Eastern Christianity obliges scholars to engage in fundamental ways with the documents produced in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a way of informing our understanding of the earlier period of Eastern Christian history. To give an example, the Church of the East in modern-day Iraq sent its own missionaries eastwards to Central Asia and China in the seventh century; memories of this missionary tradition lived on among Iraqi Christians in oral storytelling and popular culture well into the nineteenth century.46 Details of these cultures of storytelling are rare in early modern sources, yet they are regularly encountered in the correspondence, ethnographies, and testimonies written by European missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. In this way, connected history seeks to understand how layers of memory can be used to explore wider questions about notions of history, identity, and community in early modern Eastern Christianity. Finally, the rejection of methodological nationalism that is so central to the original ambitions of connected history has important implications for basic ideas about the dissemination of scholarly work and, in particular, the question of relevant audiences when it comes to dissemination of the history of Eastern Christianity. Where earlier approaches tended to focus on conversations taking place between scholars working in Eastern Christian Studies, recent attempts to recast early modern history in a global context have shown in poignant ways how our understanding of the period is radically changed by the integration of the study of Eastern Christianity. Whether it is the place of Eastern Christians in the Republic of Letters or the extent to which the Middle East offered a space for a process of “global Reformation”, it is clear that the history of Eastern Christianity is one that must become intelligible to wider audiences of historians. In this way, the pathway of connected history paves the way for positioning the history of Eastern Christianity at the heart of a constellation of narratives in European, Islamic, and global history in the early modern period.

6.

First Impressions

The final section of this contribution draws on several recently published works to offer an initial impression of the view of the past that emerges from the use of connected

45 El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics; Celeste Gianni, “Paul Sbath’s Manuscript Library”. 46 See, for example, Baum and Winkler, The Church of the East.

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history as a pathway to the study of Eastern Christianity. It does so with particular reference to the collaborative research conducted by a team of scholars who worked within a five-year ERC-funded project called “Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World”, which was based at the University of Oxford from 2015 to 2020. The “Stories of Survival” project sought to transcend geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries in its endeavour to recover the connections that linked Eastern Christians residing in the Ottoman Empire, Europe, India, Russia, and the Americas. On the most basic level, the use of connected history contributed to the reconstitution of a “lost archive” of Eastern Christianity, one that brought together multiple (and often unstudied) archives into a single analytical framework. In particular, the project sought to recover the importance of the sources of Christian subjects of the sultan that had long been scattered in monastery libraries in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq. Almost unknown and inaccessible to scholars, these sources were given new life through the efforts of a wave of European- and American-funded digitization projects. However, even this wave of digitisation stopped short of enabling scholars to bring these new materials together to write new histories of Eastern Christianity. Building on these efforts, the “Stories of Survival” project placed its focus on a core set of sources comprising Arabic and Syriac manuscripts written between the years 1500 and 1750. To this end, a database was constructed into which manuscripts were organised into three main categories: (1) manuscripts, (2) persons (e. g., copyists, authors, owners, readers, etc.), and (3) institutions or sites where manuscripts were copied. Over the five years of the project, the nearly dozen members of the team completed records for over 5,200 manuscripts in addition to 1,200 persons. The creation of a database, however, was not a goal in itself; rather, the project sought to build a truly connected history from the array of granular evidence derived from the close study of thousands of manuscripts. The empirical information gathered during this process, and the ability of a database to organise this information into a set of relationships, provided the raw materials needed to build upwards from details in the manuscripts a truly connected history of the cultures of copying, production, readership, and preservation across Eastern Christian communities scattered across a huge number of sites across the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, this information brought into a single field of inquiry the study of Arabic, Syriac, and Karshuni literature in conjunction with a wide range of evidence from archival and printed works in European languages. In doing so, connected history offered a way of linking individuals, texts, and contexts within a transnational framework stretching across Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, India, and the Americas. Needless to say, this was the sort of work that could only be accomplished through the collaborative efforts of a multi-lingual team of researchers with direct access to a wide range of archival material. This too—collaboration—is a central element in the pathway of connected history.

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Armed with this expansive range of archives, sources, and documents, it becomes possible to see how connected history paves the way for answers to three main questions in the history of Eastern Christianity. First, the project’s publications explored a central question about the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations on Eastern Christianity: what was the significance of Eastern Christianity to the European religious changes of the early modern era? This is a question that necessarily focuses on issues of translation, reception, and the consequences of the European Reformation on the East. In what ways did Protestant and Catholic reformers use Eastern Christianity in their own polemics against each other? Through which media did the ideas of the Reformation circulate to a wider audience of Eastern Christians? How did particular institutions, such as the Maronite College in Rome, missionary households in the Ottoman Empire, and trading companies contribute to the exchange of ideas, practices, and religious beliefs between Europeans and Eastern Christians? Faced with such questions, connected history was especially useful for enabling the project to focus on individual moments in the long history of interactions between European Catholic and Protestant reformers, on the one hand, and individuals and sites within Eastern Christianity, on the other. As a result, the approach revealed a constellation of moments in which it was clear that Eastern Christians were engaging on their own terms with specific developments in the Reformation, for example through the translation of Protestant works into oriental languages, the establishment of Eastern Christian churches with the support of European patrons, and even the rewriting of Eastern Christian histories in a way that was in keeping with the expectations of European Catholics and Protestants.47 The second main question of the project examined the ways Eastern Christians’ experiences abroad related to confessional developments taking place in communities in the Ottoman Empire. This issue focuses on wider macro-questions related to the mechanisms that enabled the physical movement of Eastern Christians across the early modern world, but also on the distinct processes of conversion and confessional change that took place locally in Eastern Christian communities. What is especially striking here is how connected history enables what seems to be first and foremost a history of religious change, to engage with wider aspects of social, intellectual, and economic history, as seen for example in a set of works that linked confessional change in Eastern Christianity to wider trends in travel, pilgrimage, alms-collecting, and networks of scholarly exchange.48 It is also clear from these works the extent to which connected processes of document production in mercantile and bureaucratic contexts contributed

47 See, for example, Parker, “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging”; Ghobrial, “Moving Stories and What They Tell Us”; Parker, “Yawsep I of Amid”, p. 121–152; Ghobrial, “Catholic Confessional Literature in the Christian East”, p. 383–399; Parker, “On the Margins of Empire”, p. 429–450. 48 Ghobrial, “The Archive of Orientalism”, p. 90–111; id., “The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri”, p. 310–331; Krimsti, “Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm’s Account of His Journey”, p. 202–244; Graf, “Cheating the Habsburgs and Their Subjects?”, p. 229–253. Beyond the project, there are many excellent examples

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to the movement of specific individuals, whose mobility was enabled by specific documents of identification and strategies for using them. In this way, connected history carries us very far from a previous generation of scholarship that stopped at the frontiers of the history of missions or ecclesiastical history. Finally, the third question to which connected history offered important answers is related to how individual Eastern Christians made sense of their own place in the world, and how this imagination was expressed in written, visual, and printed culture. With this question, the analysis shifts its attention from long-term explanations of historical change to granular, contextual snapshots of the past that are so critical to the micro-historical aspect of connected history, at least in the version pioneered by Subrahmanyam. Here, the project identified the multiple motivations that encouraged Eastern Christians to leave the Ottoman Empire—for example, political threat, economic hardship, religious conversion—as well as the various trajectories of individual lives once they settled into new societies. Moreover, the emphasis on memory, record-keeping, and the history of archives has revealed the extent to which the history of Eastern Christianity in this period cannot be imagined without considering other modes of belonging, especially issues of family, kinship, and even tribal identity.49 In this way, a connected history of Eastern Christianity has revealed itself to be as much about the connections between individuals and families as about specific geographical sites. Beyond the history of early modern Christianity that emerges from the pathway of “connected history”, it is worth also mentioning the extent to which doing history in this way has important consequences for the methodologies of both global and Middle Eastern history. On the one hand, connected history has always involved a set of deeper questions related to the practice and future of early modern global history. As a field, “global history” is now at more risk than ever of becoming a catch-all phrase for several highly divergent types of history, ranging from micro-histories of objects, to so-called “big” or “deep” history written at the level of planetary change. The intellectual future of the field has been a subject of great concern for practitioners and critics alike, and these debates revolve around significant differences in opinion over the appropriate methods, sources, and goals of global history.50 In this way, writing a connected history of Eastern Christianity offers a sort of test case for one of the most pressing conceptual

such as Glesener, “Gouverner la langue arabe”, p. 227–267; and Fahmé-Thiéry, Heyberger, and Lentin, D’Alep à Paris. 49 Parker, and Maxton, “Archiving Faith”; Krimsti, “The Lives and Afterlives of the Library of the Maronite Physician Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb”, p. 190–217; Zaki, “From a Pilgrim to a Resident”, p. 219–262; Minov, The Marvels Found in the Great Cities; Croq, “From Amida to Famagusta via Cairo”, p. 235–256; Rassi, “Scribal and Commentary Traditions at the Dawn of Print”, p. 402–437. 50 See, for example, Bayly, Beckert, Connelly, Hofmeyr, Kozol, and Seed, “AHR Conversation”; Adelman, “What is Global History Now?”; Drayton and Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History”; Ghobrial, “Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian”.

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challenges facing global history today, that is, how is it possible to link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday life to macro-narratives of global change. At the same time, connected history has had a second impact in terms of persuading scholars of the importance of incorporating Christian sources, traditions and subjects into the approaches used by scholars working more generally in the field of Middle Eastern history. To some scholars—and certainly the general public—the term “Middle East” has often been synonymous with the Muslim world. Yet up until quite recently, Christians formed a significant portion of the population throughout the region. In some areas, they even formed majorities during the pre-modern period. Nonetheless, Christians continue to feature only in the smallest of cameo roles in the general surveys of “Islamic history” published from the mid-twentieth century onwards. When they have been the focus of sustained academic study, it has tended to be in the field of “Eastern Christian Studies” and outside larger narratives grounded in the history of the Middle East. To this end, a connected history of Eastern Christianity offers an important corrective that situates Christian communities deep within the local contexts of the Ottoman world in which they lived. No longer a Christian archipelago within a sea of Ottoman Islam, connected history opens the possibility for thinking about a shared process of confessional change taking place among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in an important way that has developed momentum in recent years.51

7.

Conclusion

This chapter has tried to demonstrate the utility of a certain form of history based on the accumulation of multiple archives and source traditions into a single analytical framework. In doing so, this chapter has argued that this type of connected history offers a vision of Eastern Christianity which is more revealing than traditional approaches to the subject, particularly those that have focused in the past on the history of missions or ecclesiastical history alone. Moreover, I have tried to suggest that this approach to connectedness resonates well with two wider trends emerging in the study of early modern Christianity more generally, namely the acknowledgment of the “decentral” nature of Eastern Christianity as described by Weltecke, and the imperative flagged by Walsham about the need to explain long-term historical change within Christianity. Connected history offers a pathway to understanding not only the size, shape, and texture of Eastern Christianity—from an internal and external perspective rooted in both the Ottoman Empire and the world beyond its frontiers—but also the major transformations that characterised the history of Eastern Christianity from the sixteenth 51 See, for example, Grehan, Twilight of the Saints; Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East; Krstić and Terzioğlu, Entangled Confessionalizations; Krimsti and Ghobrial, The Past and its Possibilities in Nahda Scholarship.

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to the twentieth centuries. It is a pathway that carries scholars across the arbitrary divisions of periodisation, while enabling us to obtain a capacious view of what it meant to be an Eastern Christian in the early modern world, as much to those who belonged to the community as to those who did not.

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Cook, Michael, and Patricia Crone. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. London: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Croq, Alice. “From Amida to Famagusta via Cairo: The Syrian Scribe Yūsuf ibn Sbāṭ in His Eastern Mediterranean Context c. 1350–1360.” In Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 33/3 (2021), p. 235–256. Dakhlia, Jocelyne, and Wolfgang Kaiser. Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe: Passages et contacts en Méditerranée. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013. Desreumaux, Alain, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, István Perczel, and Jacob Thekeparampil. “The Kerala Manuscripts on CD-Rom: A Joint Indian-French-Hungarian Mission.” In Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (2004), p. 245–256. Donner, Fred. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010. Drayton, Richard and David Motadel. “Discussion: The Futures of Global History.” In Journal of Global History 13/1 (2018), p. 1–21. El Shamsy, Ahmed. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Elmarsafy, Ziad. The Enlightenment Qurʾan: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam. Oxford: One World, 2009. Fahmé-Thiéry, Paule, Bernard Heyberger, and Jérôme Lentin. D’Alep à Paris: Les pérégrinations d’un jeune Syrien au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Sindbad, 2015. Faroqhi, Suraiya. The Ottoman Empire and the World around It. London: Tauris, 2004. Frazee, Charles A. Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. García-Arenal, Mercedes, and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano. Un Oriente Español: Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. Gemayel, Nasser. Les échanges culturels entre les Maronites et l’Europe: du Collège Maronite de Rome (1584) au Collège de ‘Ayn-Warqa (1789). Beirut: Gemayel, 1984. Gemayel, Nasser. “Būlus al-Haddār, alias Pablo (Paulo) Hodar, moine Antonin maronite (1720–1780).” In Parole de l’Orient 27 (2002), p. 281–294. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “Stories Never Told: The First Arabic History of the New World.” In Journal of Ottoman Studies/Osmanlı Araştırmaları 40 (2012), p. 259–281. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory.” In Past and Present 22 (2014), p. 51–93. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “The Archive of Orientalism and Its Keepers: Reimagining the Histories of Arabic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe.” In Past and Present Supplement 11 (2016), p. 90–111. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “Migration from Within and Without: In the Footsteps of Eastern Christians in the Early Modern World.” In Transactions of the RHS 27 (2017), p. 153–173. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: an Arabic Teacher in Early Modern Europe.” In The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017, p. 310–331.

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Ghobrial, John-Paul. “Moving Stories and What They Tell Us: Early Modern Mobility Between Microhistory and Global History.” In Past and Present Supplement 14 (2019), p. 243–280. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian.” In Past and Present, Supplement 14 (2019), p. 1–22. Ghobrial, John-Paul. “Catholic Confessional Literature in the Christian East? A View from Rome, Diyarbakir and Mount Lebanon, ca. 1674.” In Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th –18th Centuries, edited by Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2022, p. 383–399. Gianni, Celeste. “Paul Sbath’s Manuscript Library: Conceptualizing the Library of a Syrian Catholic Priest between Europe and the Middle East in the Early 20th Century.” In Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 13 (2022), p. 381–420. Girard, Aurélien. “Les manuels d’arabe en usage en France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime.” In Manuels d’arabe d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (France–Maghreb, XIX e –XXI e siècle), edited by Sylvette Larzul and Alain Messaoudi. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2013, p. 12–26. Glesener, Thomas. “Gouverner la langue arabe: Miguel Casiri et les arabisants du roi d’Espagne au siècle des Lumières.” In Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2021), p. 227–267. Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Goody, Jack. Renaissances: The One or the Many? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Graf, Georg. Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, 5 vols. Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944–1953. Graf, Tobias. “Cheating the Habsburgs and Their Subjects? Eighteenth-Century ‘Arabian Princes’ in Central Europe and the Question of Fraud.” In The Habsburg Mediterranean, 1500–1800, edited by Stefan Hanß and Dorothea McEwan. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2021, p. 229–253. Grehan, James. Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Griffith, Sidney. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Hamilton, Alastair. “Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship.” In Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, edited by Anthony Grafton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 225–250. Hamilton, Alastair. “An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters: Josephus Barbatus or Abudacnus the Copt.” In Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994), p. 123–150. Hamilton, Alastair, Alexander H. de Groot, and Maurits H. van den Boogert (eds.). Friends and Rivals in the East: Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Levant from the Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2000. Hamilton, Alastair, Maurits H. van den Boogert, and Bart Westerweel (eds.). The Republic of Letters and the Levant. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2005. Harris, Jonathan, Catherine Holmes, and Eugenia Russell (eds.). Byzantines, Latins, and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Harvey, Leonard Patrick. Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614. Chicago, 2005. Hassan, Sana. Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Heyberger, Bernard. Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la réforme catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVII e –XVIII e siècles). Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994. Heyberger, Bernard. Hindiyya, mystique et criminelle (1720–1798). Paris: Aubier, 2001. Heyberger, Bernard, and Carsten-Michael Walbiner (eds.). Les européens vus par les Libanais à l’époque ottomane. Beirut: Ergon, 2002. Heyberger, Bernard, and Chantal Verdeil (eds.). Hommes de l’entre-deux: parcours individuels et portraits de groupes sur la frontière de la Méditerranée (XVI e –XX e siècle). Paris: Rivages des Xantons, 2009. Heyberger, Bernard. “Eastern Christians, Islam, and the West: A Connected History.” In International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010), p. 475–478. Heyberger, Bernard (ed.). Orientalisme, science et controverse: Abraham Ecchellensis (1605–1664). Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Heyberger, Bernard. Les chrétiens au Proche-Orient: de la compassion à la compréhension. Paris: Payot, 2013. Howard, Deborah. Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Jardine, Lisa and Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Joseph, John. The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2000. Khater, Akram. “How Does New Scholarship on Christians and Christianity in the Middle East Shape How We View the History of the Region and Its Current Issues? Introduction.” In International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010), p. 471–488. Kilpatrick, Hilary. “Brockelmann, Kaḥḥâla & Co: Reference Works on the Arabic Literature of Early Ottoman Syria.” In Middle Eastern Literatures: Incoporating Edebiyat 7.1 (2004), p. 35–51. Krimsti, Feras. “The Lives and Afterlives of the Library of the Maronite Physician Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb (c. 1702–1775) from Aleppo.” In Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9 (2018), p. 190–217. Krimsti, Feras. “Arsāniyūs Shukrī al-Ḥakīm’s Account of His Journey to France, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy (1748–1757) from Travel Journal to Edition.” In Philological Encounters 3–4 (2019), p. 202–244. Krimsti, Feras and John-Paul Ghobrial (eds.). The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship. Special issue in Philological Encounters 6/3-4 (2021). Krstiç, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Krstić, Tijana, and Derin Terzioğlu (eds.). Entangled Confessionalizations? Piscataway: Gorgias, 2022. Kümin, Beat, and Felicita Tramontana. “Catholicism Decentralized: Local Religion in the Early Modern Periphery.” In Church History 89 (2020), p. 268–287.

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Makari, Peter E. Conflict & Cooperation: Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. New York: Cornell University Press, 2008. Masters, Bruce. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. MacLean, Gerald M. Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Micheau, Françoise. “Eastern Christianities (Eleventh to Fourteenth Century): Copts, Melkites, Nestorians, and Jacobites.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5, edited by Michael Angold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 371–403. Minov, Sergey. The Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands: A Representative of ‘Aǧā’ib Literature in Syriac. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021. Moatti, Claudia, and Wolfgang Kaiser (eds.). Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et d’identification. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2007. Mouawad, Ray Jabre. Les maronites, chrétiens du Liban. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Mulsow, Martin. “Socinianism, Islam, and the Radical Uses of Arabic Scholarship.” In Al-Qanṭara 31.2 (2010), p. 549–586. Naby, Eden. Assyrians of the Middle East: The History of a Christian Culture and Community in Persia. London: Tauris, 2011. O’Mahony, Anthony, and Emma Loosley (eds.). Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East. London/New York: Routledge, 2010. Pacini, Andrea. Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East: The Challenge of the Future. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Parker, Lucy. “The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging: Catholicism and the Church of the East in the Sixteenth Century.” In English Historical Review 133.565 (2018), p. 1420–1445. Parker, Lucy. “Yawsep I of Amid (d. 1707) and the Invention of the Chaldeans.” In Les chrétiens de tradition syriaque à l’époque ottomane, edited by Bernard Heyberger. Paris: Geuthner, 2020, p. 121–152. Parker, Lucy. “The Interconnected Histories of the Syriac Churches in the Sixteenth Century.” In Journal of Ecclesiastical History 72/3 (2021), p. 509–532. Parker, Lucy. “On the Margins of Empire: Confessionalization and the East Syrian Schism of 1552.” In Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries, edited by Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2022, p. 429–450. Parker, Lucy and Rosemary Maxton. “Archiving Faith: Record-Keeping and Catholic Community Formation in Eighteenth-Century Mesopotamia”, Past and Present (2022), https://www. academic.oup.com/past/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtab037/6565365. Perczel, István. “Classical Syriac as a Modern Lingua Franca in South India between 1600 and 2006.” In Modern Syriac Literature 21 (2009), p. 289–321.

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Raphael, Pierre. Le rôle du Collège Maronite romain dans l’orientalisme aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles. Beirut: University of Saint Joseph, 1950. Rassi, Salam. “Scribal and Commentary Traditions at the Dawn of Print: The Manuscripts of the Near Eastern School of Theology as an Archive of the Early Nahḍa.” In Philological Encounters 6 (2021), p. 402–437. Richard, Francis. “Un érudit à la recherche de textes religieux venus d’Orient, le docteur Louis Picques, 1637–1699.” In Les Pères de l’Église au XVII e siècle: actes du colloque de Lyon, 2–5 octobre 1991, edited by Emmanuel Bury and Bernard Meunier. Paris: Édition du Cerf, 1993, p. 253–275. Rothman, E. Natalie. Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Samir, Khalil Samir. “Pour une nouvelle histoire de la littérature arabe des Chrétiens.” In Orientalia Christiana Analecta 218 (1982), p. 259–286. Samir, Khalil Samir. “L’avenir des études arabes chrétiennes.” In Parole de l’Orient 24 (1999), p. 21–43. Schmidt, Nora. “Louis Cheikho and the Christianization of Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Ascetic Poetry.” In Philological Encounters 6 (2021), p. 339–373. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” In Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997), p. 735–762. Tannous, Jack. The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Teule, Herman. Les Assyro-Chaldéens: chrétiens d’Irak, d’Iran et de Turquie. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Torres, Maria Paz. “Pablo Hodar, escribiente de árabe en la Biblioteca Real, y su relación con dos falsificaciones del XVIII.” In Al-Andalus Magreb 6 (1998), p. 209–235. Toomer, Gerald J. Eastern Wisdom and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and CrossCultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Walsham, Alexandra. “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” In Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.2 (2014), p. 241–280. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” In History and Theory 45.1 (2006), p. 30–50. Weltecke, Dorothea. “Space, Entanglement, and Decentralisation: On How to Narrate the Transcultural History of Christianity (550 to 1350 CE).” In Locating Religions: Contact, Diversity, and Translocality, edited by Reinhold Glei and Nikolas Jaspert. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017, p. 315–344. Windler, Christian. Missionare in Persien: Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im globalen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert). Cologne: Böhlau, 2018.

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Yeʾor, Bat. The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, translated by Miriam Kochan and David Littman. Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Zaki, Vevian. “From a Pilgrim to a Resident: The Marginalia of Yuwākīm al-Ghazzī in the Manuscripts of Mt. Sinai.” In Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 73/3-4 (2021), p. 219–262.

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Eugenio Menegon

Local Religion in the Early Modern Period Chinese Christianity as a Case Study

1.

Introduction

The notion of “local religion” as an academic concept in English applied to the early modern period found one of its earliest and most articulate expressions in William Christian’s 1981 book Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain, a notion later condensed and systematized in Christian’s 1987 entry on “Folk Religion” in Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion. Despite this terminological variation, the entry could well have been entitled “Local Religion.”1 In his study on early modern Spain, Christian drew on his own sociological and anthropological research in the Iberian countryside (Cantabria) during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but his thinking was also nourished by contemporary anthropological and historical scholarship.2 He found that it was often in the countryside that traditional religious ideas and practices from the medieval and early modern periods survived the longest. As he wrote in Local Religion’s introductory chapter: In the villages, towns, and cities of Central Spain (and, I suspect, in most other nuclear settlements of Catholic Europe) there were two levels of Catholicism—that of the Church Universal, based on the sacraments, the Roman liturgy, and the Roman calendar; and a local one based on particular sacred places, images, and relics, locally chosen patron saints, idiosyncratic ceremonies, and a unique calendar built up from the settlement’s own sacred history.3

1 Christian, Local Religion; Christian, “Folk Religion”, p. 371–373; and reprinted with minor changes in Jones, Eliade, Adams, Kitagawa, Marty, McBrien, Needleman, Schimmel, Seltzer, and Turner, Encyclopedia of Religion, p. 3150–3153. Cf. Green, “Local Religion”, p. 713–715. 2 See William Christian’s first book detailing his anthropological fieldwork in 1968–1969, Person and God in a Spanish Valley. A reflection on p. 91 illustrates the debt he owed as a historian in later years to his early anthropological experience: “My subsequent work elsewhere in Spain took me back in history to understand a similar level of religiosity from documents. My knowledge of the present in this valley provided questions for the past in other places. I can still feel the thrill of recognition I had when I first read the relaciones topograficas of Philip II. It seems to me that the work of historians is unnecessarily impoverished when they are unaware that their living contemporaries still do things similar to what they describe in past societies.” 3 Christian, Local Religion, p. 3.

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This view does not apply to Catholicism alone. As Christian wrote in his 1987 encyclopedia overview, “folk” religion is in fact nothing but “local” rural religion, a form of “peasant religiosity” within Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Daoism or other religions across the globe, a religiosity that provided and often continues to provide people with “ways to deal with the local natural and social world, as well as the wider social, economic, and political network of which they are part.”4 As he pointedly observed, the local context of this “peasant” religious practice is crucial to understanding its full significance, which could otherwise seem universal. Moreover, the concept is socially and spatially supple (especially in reference to premodern times): local religious practices and ideas were shared by peasants and city dwellers and by all classes, and could even extend to broad intersocietal or international exchange systems, while remaining locally rooted.5 The criteria that helped define local religion, as proposed by Christian, were thrashed out in debates among historians, anthropologists, and religious studies specialists in the 1970s and 1980s. This was, in part, a facet of the discussions on the nature of popular culture in early modern and modern times. The French Annales school and the generation of mostly British Marxist scholars who began publishing in the early 1960s made the study of European popular culture a new tool for historical understanding, contributing to the explosion of cultural history. These scholars saw the history made by the nobility, the church, and the bourgeoisie as a stunted, one-sided story. Reconstructing the mentality of the “subaltern classes” (E.P. Thompson’s so-called “History from Below”) became a priority: peasants, artisans, itinerant merchants, healers, vagabonds, bards, actors, occult specialists, and other wanderers left traces of their existence in a whole range of sources that escaped the usual cataloguing. This required the historian to have a new open-mindedness and to use methods belonging to other disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnography, art history, and more.6 In 1978, Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe summarized a wide variety of previous scholarship and offered an overview of what he called the “common stock” of European popular culture. In a chapter entitled “Traditional Forms,” Burke wrote: The approach adopted in this chapter will be morphological. Its purpose is to describe the principal varieties of artefact and performance in European popular culture, and the formal conventions of each. It is concerned with the code rather than the messages (a cultural code which has to be mastered before the meaning of individual messages can be deciphered). It attempts to provide a brief inventory of the stock or repertoire of the forms and conventions of

4 Christian, “Folk Religion”, p. 371. 5 Ibid. 6 Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.

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popular culture […]. In any one region this stock or repertoire was fairly limited. Its riches and variety are apparent only when the inventory is extended to the whole of Europe; when this is done, the variety is so bewildering as almost to hide the recurrence of a few basic types of artefact and performance. They are never quite the same in any two regions, but they are not all that different either: unique combinations of recurrent elements, local variations on European themes.7

The section of Burke’s book cited here was entitled “Structures of Popular Culture,” and indeed its language is markedly structuralist, including concepts such as morphology, formal conventions, code, stock, repertoire, types, recurrent elements, and—the most revealing of all—“local variations on European themes.” This was a historian’s rephrasing of the fundamental debate on unity and diversity in culture that has been at the core of anthropological discussions for a long time. Christian, the anthropologistturned-historian, embraced the unique context of each place, while recognising larger collective connections at the national and international level. Burke, a more traditional historian, tried to bring order to what he saw as a bewildering variety of local diversity by discovering broader patterns or codes. In the 1980s and 1990s, historians working on extra-European cultures explored similar themes and adopted similar analytical grids within the debate on cultural unity and diversity in their probing of the peculiar conditions of each case study and culture. It would be impossible to offer an exhaustive survey here (my bibliography includes a selection of studies organised by region). Rather, I will use examples from my own field of expertise, Chinese studies, and show its responses, starting in the mid-1980s, to larger discussions on the nature of popular culture and religion, and ultimately on “local religion.” In 1987, a group of anthropologically trained China scholars, following the lead of early modern Europeanists, began to use the concept of cultural hegemony outlined by Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s to analyze late imperial Chinese society, specifically to assess the relationship between elites and “subordinate classes.” Aiming “to examine the operation of folk ideologies in the continuous creation and recreation of Chinese culture; and to expand the theoretical reach of the concepts of hegemony and ideology, which have thus far not been much tested in the literature on China,” they observed how officials consciously manipulate popular ritual, enforce the performance of state-mandated ceremonies, set forth orthodoxy on magical healing and filiality, point up (through police control) the relative social status of occupational groups, and shape families through business

7 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 91. Italics mine.

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regulation. The populace, in response, recasts its rituals, layers new meanings over the symbolism of the state cult, enacts alternative social hierarchies, and ironically resists state economic meddling through withdrawal into state-sanctioned kin solidarity.8

These hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes were particularly effective during China’s late imperial period (1500–1911). The approach of these scholars can be effectively summarized as a critique of the concept of hegemony, considered as a form of “passive” or “automatic” domination, and with a certain emphasis on the active role of the state and various social classes in dominating or resisting domination. They identified a set of popular beliefs that the central state, in its attempts to reshape local societies, failed to penetrate. The reference was specifically regarding insurgent movements, such as the millenarian White Lotus tradition, partly inspired by Buddhism, or the nineteenth-century Taiping (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), rooted in Christianity. These scholars highlighted the complexity of the process of hegemony and resistance, and its localized variations: even the strongest cases for a dominant hegemony do not assume its dominance, but try to show how such ideas become convincing in daily life; and even the strongest cases for alternative ideologies and resistance look to the conversation of such resistance with the ruling discourse. Chinese hegemony consists of more than just the elite statements that are most easily available to us; it consists as well of the complex interrelationships of all groups in the society, and it becomes broadly powerful only when it is part of people’s daily lives.9

In the mid-1980s, a less “dialectical” stance between China’s elites and popular strata was offered by historian David Johnson in the landmark volume Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Johnson attempted to account for unity and diversity within Chinese popular culture through a theoretical framework once again based on Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and “structures of domination,” this time filtered through the writings of British Marxist historians such as Raymond Williams, Edward P. Thompson and others, but without adhering to their Marxian agenda.10 In Gramsci, popular religion was one of the keys with which to interpret popular culture, and for Johnson it played an important role too. While drawing a dividing line between elites and subaltern classes somewhat deeper than proposed by Burke for Europe, and rejecting the idea of “bi-cultural and bi-lingual” educated men who were concurrently part of both educated and popular culture, Johnson recognised a degree of ideological homogeneity provided by neo-Confucianism that was common to all classes. Different degrees of education,

8 Gates and Weller, “Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies”, p. 6. 9 Ibid., p. 16. 10 Johnson, “Chap. 2. Communication, Class, and Consciousness”, p. 34–72.

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Local Religion in the Early Modern Period

economic positions, and roles in the “value communication” system of late imperial China formed the hierarchy of China’s social groups. In the essays of Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, the subversive potential of popular culture was downplayed and the unifying power of state-endorsed ideologies was highlighted. The emphasis on the effectiveness of the Chinese élite’s “structure of domination,” which found its strength in the “hegemonic weapons” of written culture and in the laws of ritual, could indeed lead to a downplaying of the autonomy of popular culture. As mentioned, religion played a central role in popular culture. Unlike institutional religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism), however, localized cults did not have a clergy, a defined pantheon, canonical sacred texts, or precise ritual rules. Despite this, local religiosity was not limited to the poorer and unlettered classes. In fact, local religious beliefs could more accurately be defined as an integral part of a common Chinese cultural background from remote antiquity (ancestor worship, cults of local divinities) that was transversally present in all social groups and expressed in many local forms. This was the case, despite the traditional conception that long divided Chinese religious practices and ideas between “high” and “low” traditions, influenced by the ancient Confucian categorization of elite and popular rituals as first systematized by the political philosopher Xunzi (298–238 BCE). Partly based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, specialists today seem to have reached a consensus that “popular religion” as an “entity” does not exist; it must be hypothesized as an “activity” and studied in local contexts. People’s daily lives are always localized, and studies on national-level ideologies in comparative perspective across the Chinese empire have increasingly been enriched and nuanced through research on local cases, with a more intensive and refined use of local primary sources within what historian Peter Bol has dubbed the “localist turn” in Chinese middle and late imperial history (tenth to nineteenth centuries). This turn was reflected in the production by Chinese intellectuals and religious specialists of locally-focused geographic gazetteers, literary collections, temple records, and religious scriptures, and expressed “changes in the ways literati conceptualized the locality,” fuelling a powerful discourse of local identity from the late fifteenth century to the twentieth century.11 This elite discourse was never removed from a sense of local belonging pervading society at large, which was communicated through long-standing oral traditions. Religious rituals were among the most powerful expressions of localism, a fact that is borne out by the veritable explosion in Chinese local religious history in recent years.12

11 Bol, “The ‘Localist Turn’ and ‘Local Identity’”, p. 1–50. 12 For overviews of recent religious historical scholarship in China, see the following two landmark volumes: Lagerwey and Marsone, Modern Chinese Religion I; Kiely, Goossaert, and Lagerwey, Modern Chinese Religion II. Specifically on local religion, cf. DuBois, “Local Religion and Festivals”, p. 372: “the geography of everyday life for most Chinese peasants has historically been a very small, but also very intimate world of walkable villages and markets. Local society developed not only its own variations on general customs

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Most of this research has focused on the post-Song period (thirteenth century onward), since during that dynasty a profound change in religious activities seems to have taken place, spurred by state interference in popular cults, the emergence of a socially diverse urban population, and the dissemination of printed texts. Until at least the 1100s, the voices we persistently hear in the sources are those of the Confucian elite and the Buddhist and Daoist clergy. But during the Southern Song dynasty, the components commonly associated with the concept of local or folk religion coalesced to reformulate an autonomous tradition. The Song state favoured the canonisation of local deities, and a new type of religious specialist, unaffiliated with the Buddhist or Daoist clergy, made its appearance. This local religion also found favour among Confucian literati, despite persecution, since segments of the elite sincerely shared beliefs in spirits, divination, and many practices associated with local folk religion. Fortunately, sources useful for the reconstruction of local religion and culture in late imperial times (sixteenth to twentieth century) abound as a consequence of the Song printing revolution and of modern fieldwork. Evelyn Rawski has identified a number of these sources: research campaigns carried out by ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists on Chinese society, particularly before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; oral histories collected by foreign and Chinese scholars; government documents in the Ming–Qing archives in Taiwan and Beijing; collections of documents from intermediate and peripheral government bodies, preserved in local archives and libraries; essays in biji 筆記 (jottings) collections, written by literati and containing information on local customs; local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方誌); collections of dialect literature, ritual works and regional theater, folk poetry and proverbs (chengyu 成語); inscriptions on stelae; sectarian scriptures (baojuan 寶卷 or “precious scrolls”); almanacs and divinatory material, technical manuals, encyclopedias, moral treatises, travel guides, contracts; iconographic materials (paintings, prints, talismans, etc.) and architectural studies revealing new aspects of past material culture (housing, town planning, etc.); studies of eating habits; and more.13

2.

Christianity in China as Local Religion

Christianity is today increasingly seen as part of the religious history of China, though scholars of Buddhism, Daoist, Confucianism, and other native traditions have long looked askance at it, as at Islam, as a foreign and even imperialist teaching. In fact, Buddhism was also a foreign religion in China, but the process of “sinicization” has and traditions, but also an affective sense of community. Either alone or in conjunction with surrounding communities, villages create their own religious culture, formulating unique traditions, prayers, and rituals.” 13 Rawski, “Problems and Prospects”, p. 416–417.

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Local Religion in the Early Modern Period

had simply more time to transform it into a Chinese religion. In my 2009 monograph Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China, I have hopefully helped put to rest the idea that Christianity is an extraneous object in Chinese history.14 Some of the very same sources mentioned above, useful for reconstructing the world of China’s local religion, can also be used to uncover the story of Chinese Christianity. This new, more open attitude is part of a broader scholarly shift. Over the last thirty years, scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the social and ritual life of Christian communities across the globe, beyond early modern Europe, using the concept of “local religion.” William Taylor, for example, adopted this concept when describing the kind of Christianity found in eighteenth-century Mexican parishes, offering a summary of the state of scholarship on the topic up to the mid-1990s.15 Many others have followed suit (see the bibliography). As for China, the historiography of the Catholic mission has traditionally revolved around the impact of Christianity and “Western knowledge” brought by the missionaries (religion, sciences, arts, technology) upon literati and court circles in late imperial China. In the last two decades, however, this research paradigm has been both refined and broadened to a great extent. Despite an earlier, long-standing tradition which gave almost exclusive attention to Western sources and the deeds of foreign missionaries, new scholarship has endeavored to contextualize the scientific and artistic accomplishments of the Jesuits in China by studying works written in Chinese by missionaries, converts, and opponents, as well as the social circumstances of scientific interactions at the center and the periphery of the empire. The Western and Chinese scholarship presented in the Handbook of Christianity in China (2001) edited by Nicolas Standaert and Adrian Dudink, as well as the bird-eye view of the “Jesuit phase” of Chinese science in Benjamin Elman’s On their Own Terms (2005), both reflect this shift, which continues unabated.16 Much of this scholarship on the interaction of Christianity with Chinese thought, religion, society and institutions in the Ming and Qing periods has been influenced by a paramount preoccupation with the internal transformation of Christianity under pressure from what Erik Zürcher called the “cultural imperative” of Confucian orthodoxy. Zürcher famously wrote that “no marginal religion penetrating from the outside could expect to take root in China (at least at the social level) unless it conformed to [the Confucian] pattern that in late imperial times was more clearly defined than ever. Confucianism represented what is zheng 正 ‘orthodox’ in a religious, ritual, social and political sense.”17 In other words, as Liu Kwang-ching also observed, religions could

14 15 16 17

Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars. “Issues of Local Religion” in Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred, p. 47–73. Standaert, Handbook; Elman, On Their Own Terms. Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation”, p. 41; for his view of orthodoxy, see Zürcher, “A Complement to Confucianism”, p. 71–92; Standaert, Handbook, p. 639–640.

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peacefully coexist with the established social order in China only if they conformed to the “moral orthodoxy” of Confucianism, embodied in the rituals (lijiao 禮教) of the imperial institutions and the kinship system. This coexistence represented a balance of “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy.” Liu specified that “orthodoxy,” as a socio-ethical system of belief, encompassed both elite and popular milieus and was based on the “Three Bonds” (i. e. the subordination of the subject to the monarch, child to parents, and wife to husband), a triad that supported state institutions and the patriarchal organisation of kinship. Ancestral rituals were the central institution of orthodox socio-ethics in the kinship system, and one of the universal elements in the life of most Chinese. Even popular cults were co-opted to buttress the values of this official orthodoxy.18 The corollary to this vision is that Christianity could take root in China only by becoming “Confucianized” and by engaging the Confucian elites. According to this view, it was imperative for missionaries and Christians to attempt to reconcile with Confucian ideological and social dictates whenever Christian tenets were at odds with them. This was indeed reflected in the strategy of early Jesuit missionaries and their converts. In responding to the accusations of heterodoxy levied by élites and the Chinese state against Christianity for its non-canonical scriptures, its advocacy of a celibate priesthood, and so on, early missionaries and converts embraced the main tenets of the moral system of Confucianism and validated the political order of China. Through this move, they could proclaim the orthodoxy of Christianity and contrast themselves with the other religious traditions of China, considered heterodox by a portion of the educated. Behind this effort was also the hope that slowly Christianity could change those elements of the Confucian worldview that were deemed incompatible with Christian theology and moral practice. What Christianity became in the late Ming, however, did not necessarily conform to the plans of the missionaries. Zürcher himself, who concentrated on the mission of the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) in the southern province of Fujian, came to the conclusion that the late Ming Chinese converts “created a marginal religion of a very characteristic type that has to be studied by itself, as an Indigenous religious movement that may be called ‘Confucian monotheism.’”19 Eschewing a direct presentation of the figure of Christ, which the missionaries themselves had not emphasized in their catechisms, many Christian literati conceived of Christianity as an alternative spiritual

18 See Kwang-ching, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, passim. These ideas, and the meaning of heterodoxy, were most systematically explored in Yang’s classic Religion in Chinese Society, p. 192–217. Cf. also Dudink in Standaert, Handbook, p. 504–505, for a summary of discussion of Confucian orthodoxy and its relationship to Christianity as heterodoxy. 19 Zürcher, “Jesuit Accommodation,” p. 33. Italics mine.

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Local Religion in the Early Modern Period

system supplementing deficient aspects of Neo-Confucianism.20 Nicolas Standaert also argued from a different angle that, although the foreign element did not completely disappear in the eyes of the Chinese, the “Teachings of the Lord of Heaven,” as Catholicism is called in Chinese, became a “syncretic” Chinese religion. Standaert maintained that converts elaborated complex Confucian-Christian theological explanations for their new faith, trying to harmonise Catholic dogma and Neo-Confucian ideas. They learned the doctrine in Chinese translation and brought their own cultural baggage to the process of interpretation. Some of them then created new ideas that failed to faithfully conform to Catholic orthodoxy. Standaert called this doctrine “a new Christian orthodoxy,” a system following internal principles of coherence based on a highly selective process of “inculturation.”21 The scholarship discussed above has addressed the transformation of Christianity into a Chinese religious movement among the mobile, higher echelons of literati converts. However, by concentrating on this “Confucian Christianity” and its textual tradition, past scholars viewed the matter mainly from a doctrinal point of view, and across the empire. This focus limited most research to a small number of prominent scholarly converts, especially in the late Ming, and resulted in the neglect of lower social strata and the world of “practiced religion” (ritual and devotion) in which they locally lived. At the level of commoners and lower gentry in the different locales of China, the “Confucian monotheism” of prominent literati converts did not occupy the place of honour. Zürcher himself, in fact, acknowledged that “Christianity was not just an intellectual construct but a living minority religion, a complex of beliefs, rituals, prayer, magic, icons, private piety, and communal celebration. In that whole sphere of religious practice Christianity was by no means a semi-Confucian hybrid; in fact, it came much closer to devotional Buddhism than to Confucianism.”22 Using records produced in

20 See Erik Zürcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity”, p. 614–653. This view was also shared by Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou, who, as an intellectual historian, showed less interest in sociological and ritual dimensions. Such emphasis on intellectual history led Mungello to emphasize the “Confucianisation” of Christianity in the thought and writings of Christian literati (a point well-taken), while he underestimated the fact that even converted literati adhered to a rather orthodox Catholic position in matters of ritual and devotion; see Dudink, “Review”, p. 196–213. On the presentation of Christ (Christology) by the late-Ming Jesuits Ricci and Aleni, see Criveller, Preaching Christ in Late Ming China. Although missionaries did present the image of the crucifixion and the life of Christ in their catechetical works, Chinese literati converts in their own writings did not emphasize the figure of Jesus Christ, but rather that of the “Lord of Heaven,” corresponding more to an image of “God as king.” 21 Standaert, Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian, p. 223. Inculturation is a Catholic theological term that indicates the “reshaping” of a new message (usually religious) in terms of the receiving culture. 22 Quotation from Zürcher, “Confucian and Christian Religiosity” p. 650. See discussions on “levels of response” in Erik Zürcher, “The Jesuit Mission in Fujian in Late Ming Times: Levels of Response”, in Vermeer, Development and Decline and Standaert, Handbook, p. 634–636; on social stratification of converts, see Standaert, Handbook, p. 386–391.

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late Ming Fujian, Zürcher offered a “model” of Christian life more integrated into the local social and religious landscape. While he saw some Christian rituals and religious practices as typically Christian, others were “cross-cultural hybrids,” in the sense that they shared both Christian and Chinese Indigenous roots. He, for example, researched a rare collection of Christian miracle stories (A Mirror to Encourage Self-Cultivation, Lixiu yijian 勵修一鑑), identifying the concerns that loomed prominently in the religious experience of Fujianese converts: exorcism of evil powers, cases of miraculous healing, supernatural rescue from worldly disasters, strange qualities of auspicious objects, supernatural revelation of texts, and revival from temporary death.23 Many of these concerns and phenomena were common in Chinese folk religion and are still. Moreover, preoccupations with personal salvation and the afterlife, although based on different ontological and theological models, were shared by Christians and lay Buddhist practitioners. These characteristics of “popular Christianity” led Zürcher to qualify it as “an indigenous complex of beliefs and practices that was only marginally controlled by the foreign missionaries, and that by its amalgamation with popular ‘heterodox’ cults and rituals easily could become the target of suspicion and repression [by the government].”24 Zürcher also pointed out that “the modern reader is tempted to view [Christian] beliefs and practices [dealing with the supernatural] as characteristic of popular, non-elite Christianity, but that would be quite wrong. Also on the level of Christian literati, the supernatural and the miraculous were fully accepted.”25 If to this we add that the missionaries themselves shared with most Chinese literati and commoners many of the same presumptions about the supernatural world, then we will come to the conclusion that no clear-cut boundary between popular and elite religiosity can be sharply drawn, a conundrum that has been at the core of much discussion in the study of religion for decades.26 After having devoted most of their energy from the 1980s to the mid-2000s to reconstructing the doctrinal and theological creations of Chinese Christian literati (“Confucian monotheism” or “Tianzhu-ism,” in Zürcher’s words), researchers started to pay more attention to the ritual and devotional side of Christianity, and the daily life of the Christian communities, which comprised the vast majority of converts at any time. The examination of the social, ritual, and spiritual dimensions of “Chinese-Christian life” has today become one of the most interesting subfields within the study of Christianity

23 Zürcher, “The Lord of Heaven and the Demons”, p. 359–375; cf. also Boin, “When the Twain Met”, p. 58–76; Standaert, “Chinese Christian Visits”, p. 54–70. 24 Zürcher, “The Lord of Heaven and the Demons”, p. 373. 25 Zürcher “Confucian and Christian Religiosity”, p. 643. 26 The use of “popular” applied to religion has been a contentious issue, both in the study of pre-modern Europe and China. I have summarized the debate in Menegon, “Le fonti per la storia della cultura popolare nella Cina tardo-imperiale” and Menegon, “Popular or Local”, p. 247–307; see also Teiser’s chapter “The Problem of Popular Religion” in his Introduction to Lopez, Religions of China in Practice, p. 21–25.

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in China. Such examination borrows methodological and theoretical frameworks from the larger field of the study of Chinese local religions, particularly those traditions that were seen as heterodox by the Chinese state. The most innovative research on local Christianity shows that rituals, devotions, and beliefs in the same set of supernatural realities were shared by Chinese converts in different social groups who belonged to the same Christian community (christianitas).27 By looking at practices and beliefs in terms of “local community,” we shift attention away from the broad elite/popular dichotomy and focus instead on locality. This interpretive move addresses an important characteristic of Christianity in China, namely, its embedment in kinship and place. Christianity had obviously a regional, empire-wide and global reach, as well as a stock of symbols proper to its own tradition, but in the Chinese countryside the survival of Christian practices and beliefs was guaranteed by kinship networks at the local level, rather than by looser supra-regional networks. The Christian communities of China did connect in a larger “cultural and symbolic system,” competing with, but also accommodating, existing Chinese cultural systems; yet at the basic level they found strength in localized kinship ties, even during periods of official suppression. Thus, the ultimate “glue” in many Christian communities was the family.28 Yet, when thinking “local” we must resist the temptation to generalize: each region of China produced different forms of Christian communities (some more cohesive than others) that reflected local social arrangements. Precisely because Christian communities experienced a diverse range of historical developments linked to their local contexts, in my own research I have employed the idea of “local religion” to describe the historical process through which peculiarly Christian practices (e. g., rituals, prayers, or uses of religious symbols) and values (e. g., perpetual virginity, celibacy, anti-idolatric attitudes) imported by foreign missionaries became part of the daily religious and social experience of Chinese Christians living in specific places during the Ming and Qing periods. Local Christianity in turn describes a community of people performing Christian rituals and adhering to some rules of conduct influenced by Christian values in a local context, rather than a reified religious system.29 This focus on the locale does

27 The Latin concept of christianitas indicates a group of people sharing the same Christian faith. It also indicates the physical locales with a church or missionary residence; see Standaert, Handbook, pp. 536–537. 28 On regional cultural and symbolic systems in China, see Seiwert and Xisha, Popular Religious Movements. 29 There is a vast literature on what in Chinese has been often termed bentuhua 本土化, translated as “indigenisation” [of Christianity]. Most of this literature stems from theological debates among Protestant scholars in China and the West. Recently, the terms “globalization” (quanqiuhua 全球化), “localization” (difanghua 地方化) and “glocalization” (quanqiu-difanghua 全球地方化) have been employed to describe the contemporary articulation and opposition between global capitalism and cultural messages, on the one hand, and the local dimension, on the other hand. Lozada 2001 has applied the concept of localization to a contemporary Catholic community in Guangdong. For an overview of the literature on globalization/ localization and its implications for Christian-Chinese theology and the history of Christian theology in China, see Pan, “Jiaoli jiangshou zhi quanqiudifanghua: cong ‘Wanwu zhenyuan’ yu ‘Sanshan lunxue ji’

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not entail an erasure of social stratification in the community. However, it counters the tendency to privilege elite arenas (sojourning officials, higher-degree holders, the imperial court) over local actors, including not only lower social strata (commoners), but also the lower fringes of the local elites. Such an approach also highlights the singular historical experience of each locale.30 Zürcher’s revised definition of Christianity at the level of the lower gentry and of commoners appropriately describes the social gamut of a local christianitas: “a minority religion practiced in small communities of largely illiterate or semi-literate believers.”31 Literacy is, to a certain extent, the discriminating factor, and it closely follows social stratification. Most members of the Christian communities were illiterate or had a minimal knowledge of characters. They were farmers (of varying degrees of prosperity), small businessmen, and artisans, together with their family members, including a large percentage of women.32 The label of illiterate obviously cannot be applied to the lay leaders of the communities (mainly men), who were sometimes holders of gentry lower degrees in the imperial examination system, and who lived off inherited land, found occupation as schoolmasters or local government clerks, or engaged in small businesses. Moreover, a select number of women belonged to the same lower-gentry milieu of community leaders, and they may have had rudimentary literacy, such as the ability to read and recite texts. Nevertheless, the social position of these people at the lower fringes of the local elite and their conventional mental outlook did not separate them dramatically from the rest of the community. This social picture of the Christian community is better drawn in terms of localization than in terms of a “popular-vs.-elite” dichotomy. Chronological “local histories” of Christianity in China (including the early modern period) have been written since the beginning of the twentieth century.33 However, while the chronicles by missiologists or missionaries in generations past have, with rare exceptions, concentrated on the ecclesiastical structure of the missions, more recent works have tried to focus on the religious and social life of the Christians themselves,

30

31 32 33

yu ‘Shensi lu’ tan dangdai jiaoli jiangshou de chujinghua wenti 教理講授之全球地方化: 從《萬物真 原》 《三山論學紀》與《慎思錄》談當代教理講授的處境化問題 - Chinese lay Catholics and the Catholic movement: Speaking about the inculturation problems of catechesis from ‘Wanwu zhenyuan’, ‘Sanshan lunxue ji’ and ‘Shensi lu’”, p. 339–372. My discussion here concerns the Catholic missions in the period before the Opium Wars. I am aware that studies touching on the topic of Christianity in specific locales in the nineteenth century already exist. With few exceptions (e. g., Wiest, “Lineage and Patterns of Conversion in Guangdong”, p. 1–32), however, such studies are mainly interested in the reaction of the state and the local power structures to Christian activities, and not so much in the internal developments of the communities. For examples, see Bays, Christianity in China, passim. Standaert, Handbook, p. 634. Standaert, Handbook, p. 391. For a list of such histories, see Standaert, Handbook, pp. 573–574.

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Local Religion in the Early Modern Period

and to “localize” it in the social, religious, and economic context of a region. Besides using rare Chinese sources by converts on “popular Christianity,” this newer literature has probed the topic mainly through a critical reading of missionary sources and imperial government memorials. In addition to the studies already mentioned on Fujian, Western scholars have conducted research on Shandong, Jiangnan (including the cities of Hangzhou and Changshu), Sichuan, Shanxi, and northern China.34 The works of Tiedemann and Entenmann have been among the earliest, for example, to situate Christianity in its respective local contexts (i. e. Shandong and Sichuan). Tiedemann, for example, found that the growth of Christianity in the late Kangxi period (1700s–1720s) in western Shandong was a result of the combination of local official malfeasance and the role of Catholic missionaries as local power brokers. Thanks to the emperor’s protection of the court Jesuit missionaries, Franciscan friars in Shandong acquired enough leverage to be able to offer local converts some protection from rapacious officials, and some members of the lay Buddhist “White Lotus” groups even employed the newly acquired Catholic identity as a cover for their “heterodox” beliefs. Entenmann, on the other hand, attributed the flourishing of Christianity in eighteenth-century Sichuan to the situation of that recently settled province as a “frontier society” relatively free from official control, and where kinship networks were fragmented due to the immigrants’ fresh arrival in the region. The fellowship offered by heterodox religions, including White Lotus traditions and Christianity, was thus important in providing these deracinated immigrants with a sense of community. Therefore, the historical experience of different Christian communities varied according to local circumstances. Among Western scholars, Entenmann offered early on the most integral picture of a cluster of regional communities, their organisation and social composition, although the limits of space imposed by his articles and the kind of sources employed only allowed him to outline the social and religious dimension of Sichuan Christianity in broad strokes. One of the major insights of Entenmann’s research (which was inspired by the pioneering work of Daniel Bays) was the recognition that once a Christian community was established in a locale, it tended to survive as a tolerated part of the local religious panorama over long stretches of time (in most cases up to the present day), in spite of periodic government suppression.35 Entenmann and especially Laaman have also shown how 34 On Shandong: Tiedemann, “Christianity and Chinese ‘Heterodox Sects’”, p. 339–382; Mungello, The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong; on Jiangnan: Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou; Golvers, François de Rougemont; Xiaojuan, “Christian Communities and Alternative Devotions in China”; Brockey, Journey to the East; Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs; on Sichuan: Entenmann, “Catholics and Society”, p. 8–23; on Shanxi: Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales; on northern China: Laamann, Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China. 35 Although others had sporadically commented on this phenomenon, Entenmann stated it most clearly early in “Catholics and Society,” p. 23: “By the mid-eighteenth-century Catholicism had become a popular religion [emphasis by E.M.] with roots in Chinese society. The foreign provenance of the religion did not seem particularly important to its adherents, their neighbours, or even the authorities. […] Chinese

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pre-existing religious traditions (especially lay Buddhism) were important in making Christianity an accepted fixture of local religious life. Finally, Brockey’s exploration of seventeenth-century Jesuit lay institutions in Jiangnan has shown the importance of European-style confraternities in offering standardized religious instruction and in shifting religious responsibilities to local leaders, a possible factor in the resilience of the region’s communities in the eighteenth century. In my own 2009 book Ancestors, Virgins and Friars I did not attempt to offer a model applicable to all Christian communities in pre-Opium War China. Rather, by taking a micro-historical approach, and combining textual study and fieldwork, my study of the Dominican communities of Fuan and its vicinity in northeastern Fujian (known as Mindong) between the seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century not only offered a richer, more detailed picture of the chronological development of this given community, but also a depiction of the peculiarities of its sociology, its ritual and devotional practices, and its moral-ethical values. In the case of Mindong, this approach was facilitated by at least three main factors. First, the territory of the Dominican mission historically covered the relatively small county of Fuan (today Fuan Township). This meant that the social, religious, cultural, and economic environment of the region was relatively homogenous and that Christian records could more easily be associated with specific places, families or institutions than is possible in larger mission territories. Second, Christianity in Mindong had an uninterrupted history of almost four hundred years. This meant that Christianity in Mindong, especially in the district of Fuan, became embedded in local Christian families and lineages over many generations. Moreover, these communities never lacked priests, except for brief periods. Therefore, the process of localization became particularly evident and could be observed in fine detail and chronological perspective. Third, this mission happened to be well documented. From the 1630s to the late 1940s, foreign and Chinese Dominican priests regularly sent reports on the state of their communities to the headquarters of the Province of the Holy Rosary located in Manila. Complemented by other sources (e. g., Qing dynasty documents preserved in the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing and in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, gazetteers, genealogies), these records offered a multifaceted picture of Christian activities in this region of Fujian. My book was chronologically limited to the period between the arrival of the Dominicans in the early 1630s and the 1860s, when the implementation of the unequal treaties allowed missionaries to gain free access to

Catholics usually lived in peace with their non-Christian neighbours. When conflict arose between them, the Catholics’ membership in an illegal religion gave their adversaries an advantage in the dispute. Yet such strife was generally caused not by religious differences but merely reflected the ordinary economic and social conflicts of eighteenth-century China.” Cf. similar conclusions about the nineteenth-century experience in Bays, “Christianity and the Chinese Sectarian Tradition”, p. 33–55.

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the Chinese hinterland, and to purchase properties there, thus dramatically changing the dynamics of power between the Christian communities and local society at large.36 Most recently, the wave of new research from Anglophone countries and continental Europe on early modern local Christianities in Asia has yielded a volume collecting case studies from Persia, Turkey, Palestine, India, China, Japan, and Tibet, further cementing the strength of “local religion” as academic concept in comparative perspective.37 Chinese scholars in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have focused on detailed examinations of the life of missionaries and converts in specific provinces, on the reactions of Chinese society in local contexts, or on the work of specific missionary congregations. Here are some examples: Fujian province has been an object of research for Lin Jinshui (formerly at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou) and his student Zhang Xianqing (Xiamen University). In his 2009 monograph, significantly focused on local officialdom and kinship lineages (Officials, Lineages and Catholicism. A History of the Rural Church of Fuan in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries), Zhang offered a complementary analysis of the northeastern Fujianese Christian communities to that found in my own Ancestors, Virgins and Friars. Besides using Chinese imperial archival documents and Western-language histories of the mission, Zhang conducted fieldwork and gathered rich local materials (genealogies, local publications, local archival sources, etc.), and interviewed local Christians. His work showed the concrete workings of the “localization” of Christian practices and values within lineages, according to different patterns closely linked to lineage structures. It also illustrated how pre-existing lineage rituals and values were adapted to Catholicism and its rites and proved that “Catholic lineages” coexisted with traditional lineages. Huang Yi-long (formerly at Tsinghua University, Taiwan) studied the Christian community of Jiangzhou in Shanxi, including the creation of a “Confucian-Christian” moral synthesis at the local level. Kang Zhijie (Hubei University) explored the longue durée history of a rural community in Hubei. Ma Zhao (formerly at the Institute of Qing History, Renmin University, Beijing, now at Washington University in St. Louis) worked on patterns of official control of Christianity in the early to mid-Qing period, using archival sources and selecting certain regions as representative of local specificities in the development of Christian institutions and Qing bureaucratic responses. Li Ji (University of Hong Kong) and others chronicled the adaptation of the Missions Étrangères de Paris to local societies in Sichuan and Guangdong. Liu Qinghua (Central China Normal University) investigated in detail the Beijing parish of the French Jesuits in the long eighteenth century. Generally speaking, this scholarship by Chinese scholars has mainly concentrated on the reaction of local society (e. g., lineages) to Christian activities, on official control, or on the life of 36 Some work on modern and contemporary Catholicism also has implications for an understanding of the historical development of localized Christian communities in late imperial times; for examples, see the bibliography below. 37 Amsler, Badea, Heyberger, and Windler, Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia.

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rural and urban missionaries and Christian literati and other converts. It has paid less attention to the internal life of local Christian communities, including the aspects of religious fellowship and ritual.38 The publication of collections of primary sources from the Qing archives on the history of pre-Opium War Christianity, as well as catalogues and compilations of Chinese materials from European archives since the late 1990s, are offering to scholars new materials to explore the life of local communities and their rituality, which together with Christian materiality has received increasing attention.39

3.

Conclusion

In 2001, the editors of the Handbook of Christianity in China. Volume One: 635–1800, recognised that at that time, “there … [was] hardly any research on the topic [of popu-

38 Lin, “Ai Rulüe yu Mingmo Fuzhou shehui 艾儒略与明末福州社会 [Giulio Aleni and Fuzhou’s Society in the Late Ming]”, p. 56–66, p. 99; Huang, “Ming–Qing Tianzhujiao zai Shanxi Jiangzhou de fazhan ji qi fantan 明清天主教在山西絳州的發展及其反彈 [Development of and reactions to Catholicism in Jiangzhou, Shanxi, during the Ming and Qing periods]”, p. 1–39; Kang, Shangzhu de putaoyuan: E xibei Mopanshan Tianzhujiao shequ yanjiu (1636–2005) 上主的葡萄園：鄂西北磨盤山天主教社區研 究 (1636–2005) [The Lord’s vineyard. Study of the Catholic community of Mopanshan in northwestern Hubei, 1636–2005]; Zhang, Guanfu, zongzu yu Tianzhujiao: Shiqi-shijiu shiji Fuan xiangcun jiaohui de lishi xushi 官府、宗族与天主教：17–19世纪福安乡村教会的历史叙事 [Officials, lineages, and Catholicism: a history of the rural church of Fuan in the 17th –19th centuries]; Zhang, Diguo qianliu: Qingdai qianqi de Tianzhu jiao, diceng zhixu yu shenghuo shiji 帝国潜流：清代前期的天主教、底层 秩序与生活世界 [Imperial undercurrents: Catholicism, commoners, and the living world in the early Qing period]. Ma, “Qianlong chao difang gaoji guanyuan yü chajin Tianzhujiao huodong 乾隆朝地方 高級官員與查禁天主教活動 (Provincial high officials and the activities of suppression of Catholicism during the Qianlong period)”, p. 55–63; Li Ji, ed., Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and China; Qinghua, Une paroisse à la Cité impériale. 39 Documentary Collections: Zhongguo di yi lishi dang’anguan 中國第一歷史檔案館 [First Historical Archives of China], Qing zhong qianqi Xiyang Tianzhujiao zai Hua huodong dang’an shiliao 清中前期西 洋天主教在華活動檔案史料 [Historical materials on Catholic activities in early Qing China], 4 vols.; Standaert et al., eds., Xujiahui zangshulou Ming-Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian 徐家滙藏書樓明淸天主教文 獻 [Chinese Catholic texts from the Zikawei Library], 5 vols.; Standaert et al., Xujiahui cangshulou Ming Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian xubian 徐家匯藏書樓明清天主教文獻續編 [Chinese Catholic Texts from the Zikawei Library. Second Series], 34 vols.; Standaert and Dudink, eds., Yesuhui Luoma dang’anguan Ming-Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian 耶穌會羅馬檔案館明清天主教文獻 – Chinese Christian Texts from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, 12 vols.; Standaert et al. (eds.), Faguo guojia tushuguan MingQing Tianzhujiao wenxian 法國國家圖書館明清天主教文獻– Chinese Christian Texts from the National Library of France – Textes chrétiens chinois de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 23 vols. Catalogues: Chan, Chinese Books and Documents; Dudink, Raini, and Hongtao, Catalogue of Chinese Documents in the “Propaganda Fide”; Ceccopieri, Il fondo “cinese” della Biblioteca Casanatense. Research on rituality: Standaert and Dudink, Forgive Us Our Sins; Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals; Hongfan, ’Ite Missa Est’—Ritual Interactions.

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lar/local Christianity].”40 Fortunately, from the initial abstract model of Christianity’s development in the late Ming offered by Zürcher twenty-five years ago, we have come a long way in the study of local communities, their ritual-devotional life, and their geographic and social contexts. A search of recent literature on pre-1800 Christianity in China in the Chinese Christian Texts Database (CCT-Database; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) testifies to this. This new work is recognising and evaluating the diversity of local communities. The Sichuan mission described by Entenmann, or the cases of extreme syncretism between Christianity and other local religions in isolated Christian communities of northern and central China, as discussed by Laaman, present a rather different picture from the more homogenous situation of the compact Mindong mission studied by Menegon and Zhang. Only after in-depth work on local communities is accomplished will regional patterns become more easily discernible. This new trend has been gathering strength, partly aided by the emergence of digital humanities approaches, and the possibility of mapping regional differences through geographic and prosopographic projects like the China Historical Christian Database, 1550–1950 (CHCD) at Boston University (USA), and other similar work.41 The growing interest and research on local communities is finally revealing in richer detail what scholars had been commenting on in general terms for a long time, i. e., the importance of the village community and of the family in the rural context of Chinese Christianity. This seems to have been particularly true for Catholicism since the seventeenth century, but it also reflects the reality of rural Protestant communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Owen Lattimore described a Catholic village in the 1920s in this way: “The Catholics begin with the land, which is the heart of the Chinese people, and aim less at the soul of the individual than at the life of the community. The principle seems to be that if you build up a Catholic community, family by family, grounded on the Church, instead of gathering a lot of stray sheep, here a son and there a brother and there a grandmother, then the individual in the community will have the same chances of Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory as the individual in a Catholic community in Europe or America.”42 This general observation was valid not just for the early twentieth century, but also for earlier times. This interest in localization and kinship, however, is not just an internal shift within the field of Christianity-in-China. Rather, it should be seen as part of a movement to historiographically position Christianity within the broader research field of “Chinese

40 Standaert, Handbook, p. 636. 41 The Chinese Christian Texts Database is available at https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/chinese-studies/english/ cct; and the China Historical Christian Database at https://chcdatabase.com/. For a recent article on regional printing and diffusion of Christian literature in late imperial times, employing digital humanities methods, see Standaert and Van den Bosch, “Mapping the Printing of Sino-European Intercultural Books in China”, p. 130–191. 42 Lattimore, High Tartary, p. 49, as quoted in Madsen, China’s Catholics, p. 50–51.

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religion.” The most innovative scholars, in other words, are attempting to break away from a history centred on foreign missionaries, perceived by most China scholars as tainted by imperialism and “foreignness,” and move towards a history of Chinese Christians as fully Chinese historical subjects in late imperial and modern times. Christian communities thrived within the structures of traditional Chinese society (although they also frequently encountered opposition, and subsequently dwindled), and included in their ranks people of several classes. Thus, this process of historiographical “normalization” seems to better reflect the historical record, at least for the countryside and the period before the Opium War (but even beyond it, as recent scholarship has shown). Another important historiographical shift is the association of Christianity with “heterodox religions.” This label is obviously elite- and state-imposed, but it has its merits. By clustering Christianity with other religious traditions, the label encapsulates what empirical research is indeed showing: that Christianity had a ritual and even magic appeal among the Chinese similar to that of other traditions. While not entirely new (de Groot was the first to make the association of Christianity with “sects” in his Sectarianism and Religious Persecution, published in 1903), the idea that Christians are simply another heterodox group in the eyes of the Chinese state and elites makes them more similar to existing popular local religions than the missionary tradition would have wanted. Ironically, especially in Mainland China, the study of Christianity is often conducted in institutes that isolate the “Great Traditions” from the lived religious traditions of the countryside, reproducing the theological and doctrinal differences created by clergies and state. But those theological distinctions, upheld by the clergy, become less important when we observe exorcisms, healing, miracles and the like as experienced by local people. Christianity can then be seen as yet another “heterodox” group that, in its own peculiar ways, straddled the divide between family ethics and rituals in the “Confucian tradition,” and sectarian beliefs and rites forbidden by the state. The study of the liturgy, devotionality and socio-ritual life of late imperial Christian communities has helped refine this picture of Christianity as part of the Chinese religious landscape. This research is revealing subtle transformations of Christian rituals to suit local needs, but also shows how local Chinese were attracted to Christian rituals in their Counter-Reformation form. This suggests that the religious experience of Chinese Christians in local contexts was shaped by a constant negotiation among Chinese cultural imperatives in the plural (including Confucian ones, but also “heterodox” ones, like needs for exorcism and healing); Christian liturgical and theological imperatives, determined by missionaries and church policies; and Christian ritual and devotional elements, congruent with existing needs and religious traditions, and thus attractive for the Chinese. Christian religious experience in China’s regional cultures should be seen as a balancing act within this tension among diverse elements, and should be compared to similar experiences in the rest of Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa.

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A Select Bibliography on ‘Local Religion’ by Region in Early Modern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia European & Mediterranean Cases Christian, William. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Driessen, Henk. “Local Religion Revisited: Mediterranean Cases.” In History and Anthropology 20 (2009), p. 281–288. Kümin, Beat, and Felicita Tramontana. “Catholicism Decentralized: Local Religion in the Early Modern Periphery.” In Church History 89 (2020), p. 268–287. Nikolaidis, Theodossios. “‘Local religion’ in Corfu: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” In Mediterranean Historical Review 29.2 (2014), p. 155–168. Scott, Amanda L. The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Latin American Cases Larkin, Brian R. “Beyond Guadalupe: The Eucharist, the Cult of Saints, and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City.” In The Catholic Historical Review 104.2 (2018), p. 223–267. Leavitt-Alcántara, Brianna. “Intimate Indulgences: Salvation and Local Religion in EighteenthCentury Santiago de Guatemala.” In Colonial Latin American Review 23.2 (2014), p. 252–279. Megged, Amos. Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico. Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill, 1996. Nesvig, Martin Austin (ed.). Local Religion in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2006. Taylor, William B. Magistrates of the Sacred. Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth Century Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, Chapter 3: Issues of Local Religion, p. 47–75. East Asian Cases Blair, Heather. “Buddhism as a Local Religion.” In Buddhism: Oxford Bibliographies Online, edited by Richard Payne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, revised 2015. Chang, Hsun and Benjamin Penny, eds. Religion in Taiwan and China: Locality and Transmission. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Ethnology, 2017. Dean, Kenneth, “Local Communal Religion in Contemporary South-east China.” In The China Quarterly 174 (2003), p. 338–358. DuBois, Thomas David. The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005 Hymes, Robert P. Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Johnson, David. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.

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Katz, Paul R. “Spirit-writing Halls and the Development of Local Communities: A Case Study of Puli (Nantou County).” In Min-su ch’ü-i / Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore 174 (2011), p. 103–184. Knapp, Keith N. “Review Essay: Chinese Local Religion in Late Imperial and Modern Times.” In Religious Studies Review 42.1 (2016), p. 3–8. Lagerwey, John, “Du caractère rationnel de la religion locale en Chine.” In Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 87.1, (2000), p. 301–315. “Local Religion in Tokugawa History.” Special Issue in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 28.3,4 (2001). Online Bibliography of Western Language Publications on Chinese Popular Religion (1995 to present) compiled by Philip Clart, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Leipzig: https://home.uni-leipzig.de/clartp/bibliography_CPR.html Overmyer, Daniel L. Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The Structure and Organization of Community Rituals and Beliefs. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009. ter Haar, Barend J., “Local Society and the Organization of Cults in Early Modern China. A Preliminary Study.” In Studies in Central & East Asian Religions 8 (1995), p. 1–43. Examples of German-language Contributions: “Lokale Religion” Auffarth, Christoph. “Die frühen Christentümer als Lokale Religion.” In Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 7.1 (2003), p. 14–26. Kippenberg, Hans G., and Brigitte Luchesi (eds.). Lokale Religionsgeschichte. Marburg: diagonalVerlag, 1995. Seiwert, Hubert. “Orthodoxie und Heterodoxie im lokalen Kontext Südchinas.” In Lokale Religionsgeschichte, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 1995, p. 145–155. Šterbenc Erker, Darja. “Religiöse Universalität und lokale Tradition: Rom und das Römische Reich.” In Die Religion des Imperium Romanum: Koine und Konfrontationen, edited by Hubert Cancik and Jörg Rüpke, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 2009, p. 75–97

Bibliography Amsler, Nadine. Jesuits and Matriarchs. Domestic Worship in Early Modern China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. Amsler, Nadine, Andreea Badea, Bernhard Heyberger, and Christian Windler (eds.). Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: Patterns of Localization. London/New York: Routledge, 2019. Bays, Daniel. “Christianity and the Chinese Sectarian Tradition.” In Ch’ing-shih wen-t’i 4/7 (1982), p. 33–55. Bays, Daniel (ed.). Christianity in China. From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

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Menegon, Eugenio. “Le fonti per la storia della cultura popolare nella Cina tardo-imperiale: alcuni documenti nell’Archivio Romano della Compagnia di Gesù.” In Lo studio delle fonti per la storia cinese, edited by Maurizio Scarpari. Venice: Cafoscarina, 1995, p. 63–88. Menegon, Eugenio. “Popular or Local? Historiographical Shifts in the Study of Christianity in Late Imperial China.” In Dong-Xi jiaoliu shi de xinju: Yi Jiduzongjiao wei zhongxin 東西交流史的 新局 : 以基督宗教為中心 [New Directions in East–West Relations: The Case of Christianity], edited by Ku Wei-ying 古偉瀛. Taipei: Taiwan chuban zhongxin, 2005, p. 247–307. Menegon, Eugenio. Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Mungello, David. The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Mungello, David. The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Palmer Thompson, Edward. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1963. Pan Fengchuan 潘鳳娟. “Jiaoli jiangshou zhi quanqiudifanghua: Cong ‘Wanwuzhenyuan’, ‘Sanshan lunxue ji’ yu ‘Shensi lu’ tan dangdai jiaoli jiangshou de chujinghua wenti 教理講授之全 球地方化: 從《萬物真原》與 《三山論學紀》與《慎思錄》談當代教理講授的處境化 問題 [Chinese lay Catholics and the Catholic movement: Speaking about the inculturation problems of catechesis from ‘Wanwuzhenyuan’, ‘Sanshan lunxue ji’ and ‘Shensi lu’.” In History of Catechesis in China, edited by Staf Vloeberghs, Patrick Taveirne, and Ku Wei-ying. Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute/Leuven University Press, 2008, p. 339–372. Rawski, Evelyn. “Problems and Prospects: Sources and Materials.” In Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew Nathan, and Evelyn Rawski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 399–418. Scarpari, Maurizio (ed.). Lo studio delle fonti per la storia cinese. Venice: Cafoscarina, 1995. Seiwert, Hubert, and Ma Xisha. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003. Standaert, Nicolas. Yang Tingyun, Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China. Leiden/New York/Copenhagen/Cologne: Brill, 1988. Standaert, Nicolas. “Chinese Christian Visits to the Underworld.” In Conflict and Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia. Essays in Honour of Erik Zürcher, edited by Leonard Blussé and Harriet T. Zurndorfer. Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill, 1993, p. 54–70. Standaert, Nicolas, et al. (eds.). Xujiahui zangshulou Ming–Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian 徐家滙 藏書樓明淸天主教文獻 [Chinese Catholic texts from the Zikawei Library], 5 vols. Taipei: Fangji chubanshe, 1996. Standaert, Nicolas (ed.). Handbook of Christianity in China. Volume One: 635–1800. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2001. Standaert, Nicolas, and Adrian Dudink. Yesuhui Luoma dang’anguan Ming–Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian 耶穌會羅馬檔案館明清天主教文獻 [Chinese Christian texts from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus], 12 vols. Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2002.

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Standaert, Nicolas and Adrian Dudink, (eds.). Forgive Us Our Sins: Confession in Late Ming and Early Qing China. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 2006. Standaert, Nicolas. The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Standaert, Nicolas, et al. (eds.). Faguo guojia tushuguan Ming–Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian 法國 國家圖書館明清天主教文獻 [Chinese Christian texts from the National Library of France / Textes chrétiens chinois de la Bibliothèque nationale de France], 23 vols. Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2009. Standaert Nicolas, et al. (eds.). Xujiahui cangshulou Ming Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian xubian 徐 家匯藏書樓明清天主教文獻續編 [Chinese Catholic texts from the Zikawei Library. Second Series], 34 vols. Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2013. Standaert, Nicolas, and Nora van den Bosch. “Mapping the Printing of Sino-European Intercultural Books in China (1582–c.1823).” In East Asian Publishing and Society 12/2 (2022), p. 130–191. Taylor, William. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996. Teiser, Stephen. “Introduction.” In Religions of China in Practice, edited by Donald Lopez Jr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 3–37. Tiedemann, Rolf Gerhard. “Christianity and Chinese ‘Heterodox Sects’. Mass Conversion and Syncretism in Shandong Province in the Early Eighteenth Century.” In Monumenta Serica XLIV (1996), p. 339–382. Vermeer, Eduard B. Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17 th and 18th Centuries. Leiden/New York/Copenhagen/Cologne: Brill, 1990. Wiest, Jean-Paul. “Lineage and Patterns of Conversion in Guangdong.” In Ch’ing-shih wen-t’i 47 (1982), p. 1–32. Yang, Ch’ing-k’un. Religion in Chinese Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Yang, Hongfan. ’Ite Missa Est’—Ritual Interactions around Mass in Chinese Society (1583–1720). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021. Zhang Xianqing 张先清. Guanfu, zongzu yu Tianzhujiao: Shiqi-shijiu shiji Fuan xiangcunjiaohui de lishi xushi 官府、宗族与天主教：17-19世纪福安乡村教会的历史叙事 [Officials, lineages, and Catholicism: A history of the rural church of Fuan in the 17th –19th centuries]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009. Zhang Xianqing 张先清. Diguoqianliu: Qingdai qianqi de Tianzhu jiao, diceng zhixu yu shenghuo shijie 帝国潜流：清代前期的天主教、底层秩序与生活世界 [Imperial undercurrents: Catholicism, commoners, and the living world in the early Qing period]. Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2021. Zhongguo di yet lishi dang’anguan 中國第一歷史檔案館 [First Historical Archives of China] (ed.), Qing zhong qianqi Xiyang Tianzhujiao zai Hua huodong dang’an shiliao 清中前期西洋 天主教在華活動檔案史料 [Historical materials on Catholic activities in early Qing China], 4 vols. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003.

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Zürcher, Erik. “The Lord of Heaven and the Demons. Strange Stories from a Late Ming Christian Manuscript.” In Religion und Philosophie in Ostasien, edited by Gert Naundorf, Karl-Heinz Pohl, and Hans-Hermann Schmidt. Würzburg: Königshausen-Neumann, 1985, p. 359–375. Zürcher, Erik. “A Complement to Confucianism: Christianity and Orthodoxy in Late Ming China.” In Norms and the State in China, edited by Huang Chun-chieh and Erik Zürcher. Leiden/New York/Cologne: Brill, 1993, p. 71–92. Zürcher, Erik. “Jesuit Accommodation and the Chinese Cultural Imperative.” In The Chinese Rites Controversy. Its History and Meaning, edited by David Emil Mungello. Sankt Augustin: Steyler Verlag, 1994, p. 31–64. Zürcher, Erik. “Confucian and Christian Religiosity in Late Ming China.” In The Catholic Historical Review 83/4 (1997), p. 614–653.

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Polycentric Order Formation Political Hesychasm in Wallachia and Moldavia, 1300–1500

1.

Introduction

How does mysticism become the movens, or mover, in the formation of a transregional order? What does mysticism have to do with politics, given that ascetics and mystical experience are often associated with the rejection of, or withdrawal from, the world? What must happen on the theoretical-systematic or historical level for mystical contemplation to trigger political action? For the case of hesychasm (ἡσυχασμός), which shuns the distractions of the world in its desire for equanimity (ἀπάθεια, aequanimitas), these questions are particularly decisive. The term “hesychasm”, derived from the Greek “hesychia” (ἡσυχία, meaning “stillness”, “silence”, “tranquillity”), describes the ancient ascetic–mystical practice, in some Eastern Christian monastic circles, of heart prayer and the rhythmic inner invocation of Jesus’ name. The hesychast’s mystical goal is the vision of God in his uncreated energies. Hesychasm is by no means a new topic to scholars of theology and religious studies; numerous monographs, articles, anthologies and essays have been published on the subject.1 Hesychasm has even made it into film (Ostrov, 20062 ) and the metal scene (the band Hesychast 3 ) and has been featured on internet blogs, YouTube and Facebook. J.D. Salinger’s book Franny and Zooey (1961)4 , once number one on the New York Times bestseller list, testifies to the hype surrounding hesychastic spirituality, in particular the connection between hesychastic heart prayer and yogic meditation. One can even speak of a “globalised spirituality” going beyond the confessional-specific borders of the Orthodox traditions and moving into alien religious contexts.5 Numerous scholars have affirmed the interest in hesychasm in both the East and West: Kallistos Ware, John Meyendorff, Georges Florovsky, and, in the non-Orthodox confessional areas: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Gerhard Podskalsky, and Fairy von Lilienfeld. Indeed, no discussion about the Orthodox Church and its lived piety can avoid hesychasm. Described by Gerhard Podskalsky as an “element of endurance”

1 2 3 4 5

A small selection offered by Toti, La preghiera. Director Dimitri Lungin, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0851577. See the official website https://hesychast.bandcamp.com. Salinger, Franny and Zooey. Johnson, Globalisation, p. 46–87.

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(Element der Beharrung),6 this form of spirituality has been the animating spirit for the entire “Orthodox Commonwealth” (Paschalis Kitromilides7 ) since the fourteenth century.8 In the following, after theoretical and methodological considerations regarding the concept of “polysystem” and its relationship to the heuristics of “polycentricity”, I shall turn to the state of the art in political hesychasm research. I will then describe the complex dynamics of interconnection in the Orthodox world that led to the complex processes of transregional order formation. My thesis is that the transition from spiritualmystical hesychasm to policies and politics made visible the emergence of a polysystemic order that welded together the Orthodox traditions into a cohesive cultural space (that of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy). I illustrate this order, or polysystem, on the basis of, firstly, political hesychasm; and secondly, the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which were key political and economic centres, and their synergy with the spiritual-hesychastic centre of the “Holy” Mount Athos (Ἅγιον Ὄρος, Hagion Oros)—the Eastern Orthodox monk and monasteries community that has had an autonomous republican status (Ἀθωνικὴ Πολιτεία, Athonike Politeia) since time immemorial—and with the ecclesiastical-administrative centre, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This symbiotic pattern led to the emergence of a transregional order holding together the huge polysystem of the Orthodox world that spanned from Moscow to Jerusalem and, farther, to Mount Sinai. Before moving on to illustrate this phenomenon, I shall discuss the concept of “polysystem” and its relevance for “polycentricity”.

2.

Polysystem and Polycentricity

Polycentricity, as a set of heuristics, is not new to studies of the various configurations of religious plurality. Klaus Koschorke’s work on the polycentricity of global Christianity, which came about through mission and re-mission, is well known.9 The question remains whether the global and plural display of Christian groups and denominations can truly be regarded as a phenomenon of polycentricity, or whether it is nothing more than common religious plurality as has always existed in any (world-)religion. Polycentricity has also been employed by Pedro Cardim and others in the historical analysis of early modern forms of rule and power. They have used the term “polycentricity” to describe the interwoven globalised structures of maritime empires such as Spain and Portugal.10

6 Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie, p. 36. 7 Kitromilides, Orthodox Commonwealth, in connection with the “Byzantine Commonwealth” of Obolensky, Byzantine Commonwealth. 8 Grigore, Neagoe Basarab, p. 152–156. 9 Koschorke, “Strukturen”; Koschorke and Hermann, Structures. 10 Cardim, Monarchies. For a short overview, see Cardim, “The European”.

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The newly established Frankfurt research group POLY—whose first results are published in this volume—puts the heuristics of polycentricity at work in understanding both religious and political phenomena as dynamically interconnected spheres.11 In my opinion, polycentricity should go in a direction that is fundamentally different from the simple assessment of plurality. The approach to historical forms of transregional and non-statist orders that were polycentrically enlivened—as is the case for the Orthodox world as generated by political hesychasm—might benefit from the unjustly ignored concept of “polysystem”. Although originally intended as instrumentarium in the study of cultural and social orders, these heuristics have been fully developed in literary, and particularly translation, studies. In the 1970s, the Jewish scholar Itamar Even-Zohar (b. 1939) applied polysystem theory to translation studies based on Russian formalism, which at the beginning of the twentieth century argued for the autonomy of language and literature, and which was the basis for structuralist and post-structuralist literary criticism, like that of Mikhail Bakhtin.12 At the outset, it was nothing more than an elaboration and clarification of the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) structuralism in anthropology and social studies, which described cultures as systems of interconnected elements. Even-Zohar considered Saussure’s system to be an overly static entanglement of mechanically interdependent material data compiled by simple procedures of empirical data-collection and understood exclusively in their substantiality.13 In response, EvenZohar proposed the concept of “polysystem” to show that data constituting a system are not positivist material assets or elements, but rather achieve their relevance from the function they serve in a polysystem of relations; their functions transform irrelevant “things” into system-relevant data.14 The elements of the polysystem are, therefore, interconnected functionalities. This interconnection is constantly shifting, in both time and space. Compared to Saussure’s, Even-Zohar’s polysystem is not a closed, static, and immutable link between empirical data, but rather, an open, dynamic, and shifting system consisting of multi-layered, relating, overlapping, and hierarchically organised (sub)systems.15 A semiotic system can be conceived of as a heterogenous, open structure. It is, therefore, very rarely a unisystem but is, necessarily, a polysystem—a multiple system, a system of various

11 “Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY)”, https://www.geschichte.uni-frankfurt.de/92594738/Polycentricity_and_Plurality_of_Premodern_Christianities__POLY. 12 Even-Zohar, “Polysystemic”, p. 11. For Russian formalism, see Shuttleworth, “Polysystem”, p. 420; Osadnik, “Formalism”. 13 Even-Zohar, “Polysystemic”, p. 10. 14 Even-Zohar, “Polysystemic”, p. 9. 15 Shuttleworth, “Polysystem”, p. 419.

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systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent.16

Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory is—and this is the thesis I strongly defend here—preeminently appropriate for historical studies, because it is interested in diachronicity, the time aspect inherent to polysystems that manifests itself in processes of change, variations, and evolution.17 A polysystem is, therefore, the result of polycentric dynamics. At this point, in speaking of a polysystem’s polycentricity, I deviate from Even-Zohar’s view, which stipulated a single centre for a polysystem. The synergy of multiple centres leads, as I hope to show with the example of political hesychasm, to the coagulation of orders and coherent cultural areas. These consist of overlapping polycentric interrelations and functions of different elements, i. e., centres. Polycentricity has to do with organisation and, implicitly, with power. It orders, structures, and institutionalises loose plurality, transforming it into a polysystem. The simple observation that a polysystem has multiple centres with different functions leads to the realisation that polycentricity has to do with the organisation and hierarchy within a polysystem, and thus with power and authority. Polysystems are organised and ordered in polycentric processes: polycentric dynamics are their life, if I may put it that way. In particular, religious orders—or more precisely political-religious orders—which are eminently transregional, crossing political boundaries, are and must be polysystems coagulated in polycentric dynamics. The models of polycentricity that Birgit Emich elaborates in the present volume by applying Walter Christaller’s theory of “central places” to post-Tridentine Catholicism are also applicable to Orthodox Europe, taking into account, of course, the regional and historical contextual particulars. After a short discussion of the state of the art of political hesychasm research, I shall thus illustrate the historical formation of the “Orthodox world” from the viewpoint of interconnections and mobility based on the biography of the reformer monk Nikodemos of Tismana, who contributed to the religious, political and cultural integration of the Principality of Wallachia in the polycentric order of the so-called “Orthodox Commonwealth”.

3.

Political Hesychasm: State of the Art

Compared to the genuinely religious phenomenon of hesychasm, as a monastic devotional practice, and to the enormous theological literature it inspired, the situation of the historiographical concept “political hesychasm” is quite different, given that it is virtually

16 Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Theory”, p. 290. 17 Even-Zohar, “Polysystemic”, p. 10–12.

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unknown. The expression was first used by the Russian Byzantinist Gelian Prokhorov (1936–2017). Some German scholars of hesychasm in the 1980s also noted that this originally purely mystical practice later became a political issue, but this observation remained marginal in historiography.18 First of all, the approaches of religious studies to political hesychasm should be addressed. Although Prokhorov used the concept at the time to describe the socio-political impact of hesychasm in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Byzantine Orthodox society,19 today it is mainly used to describe contemporary Russian realities. It denotes the strong involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was and still is deeply influenced by hesychasm, in the politics of the state before and after the October Revolution.20 In this sense, the term serves for Russian authors as a point of distinction from—indeed as a polemic against—the West. The latest manifesto of political hesychasm is, for example, the document Social Doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church published in 2000. It accentuates the spirituality and mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy in contrast to the secularised, materialistic, individualist, and egoistic West.21 For influential contemporary Greek theologians such as John S. Romanides (1927–2001) or Christos Yannaras (b. 1935), political hesychasm constitutes the ideology necessary for establishing a neo-Orthodox front against the challenges of Western modernity and post-modernity (Enlightenment, rationality, secularism, liberalism, human rights, Eurocentrism, colonialism, post-colonialism, critical hermeneutics, deconstructivism, etc.). This clearly betrays a Russian influence, and indeed, the two Greek scholars in question were strongly influenced by Russian antiWestern discourses like those of George Florovsky (1893–1979) and Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), two Russian exile-theologians who accused the Christian Latinitas of Entfremdung from the Christian spirit of the Early Church and the Church Fathers.22 Important aspects of methodology and inquiry in religious studies—such as scientific distance and neutrality towards the connection between mysticism and politics in their historical manifestation—unfortunately remain marginal in all of these approaches. What kinds of historical developments transform a mystical practice into a political agenda? To what extent are political hesychasm and the resulting order part of a European history of religion? Within the culture and network of the Imperium Romanum—which was split in the period in question into the Eastern Roman and Western Roman Empires—we are faced with a religion that is (1) publicly significant,

18 Prokhorov, “L’hésychasme”. For political hesychasm in Germany, see Lilienfeld, “Hesychasmus”, p. 283–284. 19 Krausmüller, “The Rise”. 20 Müller-Schauenburg, “Hesychasmus”. 21 Petrunin, Политический. It is also masterly discussed in Stöckl, “Political Hesychasm”. 22 Payne, Political Hesychasm; Hagemeister, “Katechon”; Makrides, “Political”, p. 48.

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(2) written and institutionally organised, (3) legally standardised, and (4) for multitudes of believers, practically and existentially relevant—these being the parameters set by the German scholar of religion Jörg Rüpke for a cross-continental Europäische Religionsgeschichte.23 The dynamics of political hesychasm have shaped the continent not only religiously and socio-culturally, but also (geo-)politically. It suffices to think of the much-quoted statement of the Byzantine Megas Doux Loukas Notaras (1402–1453) that in Constantinople, he would rather have the turban of the Turks than a Latin mitre.24 This expressed a general attitude of rejection culminating in the isolation and definitive destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as the consolidation of the Turkish Ottoman dominion in South-Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region. And to give another example of the macro-political relevance of political hesychasm, with its antiWestern polemical potential, I recall the contemporary Russian ideology of the so-called “nuclear Orthodoxy”. This sees the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union and of today’s Russia as the God-blessed weapons of the true believers against the demonic West.25 In historical studies, “political hesychasm” continues to be a term used to describe politico-religious aspects in the so-called “Byzantine Commonwealth” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which included not only the political subjects of Byzantium, but also the adjacent cultural and political spheres. The dissemination of hesychasm in South-Eastern Europe contributed above all to the crystallisation of an Orthodox identity under the guidance of the Constantinople patriarchs. By way of example, although existing since the ninth century, the Byzantine literary genre of lists of doctrinal errors of the “heterodox” Latins not only increased after the fourteenth century, but also included the central question of hesychastic-palamitic theology26 concerning divine energies (which I shall outline below).27 The main aim of patriarchal politics seems to have consisted in providing the Orthodox world, amidst a crumbling Byzantine state, an alternative infrastructure for unity and identity and for piloting it through the complicated times of Ottoman expansion. This alternative has been described by scholars as political hesychasm. After the hesychastic synods in Constantinople (the last in 1351) and the final victory of the hesychastic party, one can observe a strong “hesychastisation” of public ecclesiastical offices. Patriarchal and metropolitan sees and the major abbeys in Constantinople or

23 24 25 26 27

Rüpke, “Europa”, p. 12–13. Babinger, Mehmed, p. 101. Hagemeister, “Katechon”, p. 22. From the Byzantine theologian and archbishop of Thessaloniki Gregorios Palamas (1296–1359). Kolbaba, Byzantine; Blanchet, “Les listes”. From the sixteenth century, we have two such lists, both authored by Manuel of Corinth (d. c. 1530), rhetor of the Great Church (Grigore, “Glaubensgutachten”).

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on Mount Athos were filled with supporters of the hesychastic party.28 As was to be expected, factors of temporal power were soon part of the picture. The “hesychastic spirit”, as the epitome of authentic Orthodoxy in contrast to both the Latins and the Byzantine latinophrones (Latin-minded), thereafter not only shaped Byzantine social and cultural life. It also played a role in the politics and religious policies of other Balkan powers, which after 1361 had to operate in the complex context of Ottoman expansion in Europe, the papal mission, and the Constantinople Patriarchate’s aggressive centralism.29 As we shall see, monastic networks and communication channels also played a significant role in these dynamics. The monasteries were the places where a spiritual master gathered and formed pupils in the hesychastic practices of asceticism and mysticism, after which these pupils were sent into the world to preach those teachings in lay communities or to establish new monasteries, where further generations of hesychasts were formed. These were efficient mechanisms, as we shall see, for implementing “Orthodoxy” in the different territories of Eastern Christianity, especially where Dominican and Franciscan missionaries were active. Political hesychasm was not about shifting power and influence between emperor and patriarch in favour of the latter, as has been assumed by some important scholars of Byzantine studies. It was also not a simple competition for pre-eminence, as in the Western model, namely, the struggle between regnum and sacerdotium,30 although this may have played a role to a limited extent, if one compares the jurisdictional and geographical range of the emperor’s sphere of influence, on one hand, and of the patriarch, on the other. But given that the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the patriarchs exceeded by far the political dominion of the Byzantine emperors, which on the eve of the fall of Constantinople was actually limited to the capital city and a handful of scattered small territories, one might speak of a decalage of power in favour of the patriarchs. Nonetheless, at the symbolical and theological level, as well as in the ecclesiastical edifice of the late Palaiologian period, the public consciousness of the emperor’s primacy in the Byzantine polity remained untouched.31 It is in this complex field of forces that an alternative order based on religious uniformity came to be established—an alternative, so to speak, to the shrinking political boundaries and institutional infrastructure offered by the Byzantium’s state-apparatus. That this order was not conceived by the temporal factors as a rival to the imperial power, but as a complementary aid in the survival of Byzantium is exemplified by the simple fact that on every occasion possible, the emperors employed the wide influence and prestige of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to build up an alliance-system among the

28 Tinnefeld, “Faktoren”, p. 100–101. 29 Sherwan, Empires. 30 Bréhier, “L’investiture”; Dagron, Empereur; Guran, “L’origine”, p. 409–415; Angelov, Ideology, p. 373–374, p. 415. 31 Laurent, “Les droits”; Blanchet, “L’élection”; Macrides, “Emperor”.

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Orthodox rulers that would be capable of keeping the Ottomans at bay. This, of course, proved to be a utopian plan. In this sense, it is evident that religious transregional orders—like the Orthodox Commonwealth held together by political hesychasm—are only partially dependent on political-imperial organisms. This is highlighted by the fact that the Orthodox world successfully survived three imperial orders: the Byzantine, the Ottoman, and the Russian Tsarist. One should be aware of the power of political hesychasm in its programmatic and actively pursued universality, trans-regionalism and trans-culturalism. In a multifaceted, if unsystematic, monograph, the Russian Church historian John Meyendorff has demonstrated this power of hesychasm in the context of Russian state-building.32 Indeed, the transition period from Byzantine to Ottoman religious infrastructures, which lasted from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, provided the conditions for a new polycentric and transregional alternative order that was able to hold together and integrate, not only religiously but also culturally (and to some extent politically), millions of Orthodox believers in a vast area from Moscow to Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. In this regard, I tend to understand order as the “structure of various elements that stand in a specific interrelation to each other and organise social groups or even whole societies”.33 On the one hand, order is always “produced, confirmed, and modified actively”, in specific historical contexts; on the other hand, order emerges “on the ground of an already existing order”, because “there is no such thing as a nonpreconditioned order (voraussetzungslose Ordnung).”34 It is precisely these dynamics of (re)structuring that are of particular interest in the case of political hesychasm, which emerged in the last years of the Byzantine theocracy. They synthesised the long theological tradition of the East, and used the structures of the Byzantine imperial Church to animate a post-Byzantine transregional order in the Ottoman state which was neither Orthodox nor Christian. With their constructive and unifying function, mobility flows created complex forms of solidarity and a sense of belonging to the vast Orthodox community. The historian of South-East Europe Konrad Petrovszky has pointed out that it was precisely through the various forms of mobility—of monks, endowments, goods, practices, etc.—that a sentiment of belonging became widespread in the communication area of the so-called “Ottoman Orthodoxy”. Belonging to Orthodoxy was driven by the integration policies of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which had to fight against the strong centrifugal tendencies of individual patriarchates (Tarnovo in Bulgaria, or Peć in Serbia) or metropolitan sees (such as Moldavia, Kiev, or Moscow). The integrative efforts of the Constantinople patriarchs could only benefit from the Ottoman conquest of South-Eastern Europe, since

32 Meyendorff, Byzantium. 33 Frie and Meier, “Ordnungen”, p. 2. 34 Ibid., “Ordnungen”, p. 2.

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Fig. 1 Wallachia at the beginning of the 16th century. Map developed by Mihai-D. Grigore.

the Ottomans strengthened the administrative-centralising function of the patriarchate for all Christians in its jurisdiction, thus enhancing their own political influence at the international level.35 As mentioned above, this jurisdiction extended to Moscow and thus far beyond the political borders of the Byzantine and, later, the Ottoman Empire. It provided favourable conditions for the rise of a transregional cultural area of the Orthodox traditions, held together in particular by ecclesiastical monastic networks circulating ideas (hesychastic spirituality), norms (canon law, synods), goods (books, icons) and practices (liturgies, artistic styles, calligraphy schools). However, this would not have been imaginable without the infrastructure ensured by the Ottoman rule. We speak, therefore, of whole

35 Petrovszky, Geschichte, p. 25–29; Papademetriou, Render.

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transregional areas of cultural symbiosis (Kommunikationsräume) or, specifically in our case, of the Orthodox Commonwealth’s polysystem. This was polycentrically dynamized in the interplay of different centres: institutional (the patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem), mystical-spiritual (Mount Athos, the hesychastic centre of Paroria, and the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai), and political or economic (Bulgaria, Serbia, the Danube Principalities, the Kievan Rus, and the Moscow Grand Duchy). A whole normative order takes shape on account of political hesychasm. Normative orders form “justificatory orders” (Rechtfertigungsordnungen) based on legitimising narratives that emerge from intertwined moral or religious values and norms. These justificatory orders consequently legitimise themselves from such normativity. Furthermore, they generate normativity on their own in a dynamic, auto-poietic way.36 Accordingly, members of the hesychastic party tackled the problems of their time by articulating an “Orthodoxy” based on the spiritual and mystical illumination that was offered by hesychastic asceticism and that justified their involvement in world affairs, namely, the pastoral care for the soul-salvation of millions of Orthodox believers. At the same time, belonging to this transregional “Orthodoxy”, independent of political borders, generated values and norms that coordinated the action not only of ecclesiastic but also social and political actors. Thus, auto-poietically, it was Orthodoxy itself that created Orthodoxy. The structures that emerged in the systemic order of political hesychasm, and that to some extent can still be observed in ecclesiastical and cultural terms today, proved to be more effective than the politically centralised infrastructure of the Byzantine or later the Ottoman Empire, whose boundaries these hesychastic structures exceeded by far due to their integrative power. We can, therefore, speak of two models of integration in Orthodox Europe of that time: imperial social, ethnic and territorial integration through central administration, on the one hand; and polycentric religious and spiritual integration through mobility and cultural synergy, on the other. These types are, to be sure, entangled and not always easily separable. To offer a preliminary conclusion to this section, we can say that the dynamics of political hesychasm consist of the synergetic polycentrism of ecclesiastical-institutional, theological-spiritual, and political-economic centres. The resulting order, however, remains primarily a religious one, because it organised and protected its world with a careful awareness of divine transcendence, against all immanently secular instances endangering the salvation of souls (e. g., “Latin heresy”, “the rule of the Hagarenes”). Political hesychasm, nonetheless, remains an open process that has not yet been systematically investigated. This is what I will sketch in the following section, on the basis

36 Forst and Günther, “Herausbildung”, p. 7.

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of the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in their interdependence with other centres of the Orthodox world.

4.

Political Hesychasm in a Trans-Regional Perspective

In fourteenth-century Byzantium, a conflict arose over the mystical view that one could attain a vision of God through consistent asceticism. The dispute, which began as a theological debate among the empire’s intellectual elites, rapidly took on a political relevance that was reflected not only in theological polemics in the form of treatises and pamphlets, but also in political action. There were two factions confronting one another. On the one hand were the so-called “Byzantine humanists” under Thomistic-scholastic influence. The best known of them was Barlaam of Calabria (c. 1290–1348). They emphasised the absolute transcendence and incomprehensibility of God’s essence (οὐσία, substantia). Accordingly, a “vision of God” was by no means possible, especially not in the way the hesychast monks claimed. Politically, many adherents of this party (also out of fear of the Ottoman threat) advocated a rapprochement and even union between the Byzantine Imperial and the Latin Papal churches. On the other side were the “monkish Platonists”, who held to the possibility of a vision of God, but only under certain circumstances. Most popular among them was the archbishop of Thessaloniki Gregorios Palamas (1297–1359). Palamas and the “Palamists” spoke of seeing God not directly, in his very essence, but indirectly, in his energies and actions, which were thought to be uncreated and inseparable from God’s substance but nonetheless still perceivable by human sensory faculties in the created cosmos. The energies flowed out of God’s absolute secluded and hidden being like heat irradiating from a flame; the heat was considered inseparable from the flame but still distinct from the flame itself. In these energies, recognisable by an improved and purified Christian, one could approach and experience God himself. The uncreated energies bridged the absolutely transcendent being of God with the immanent creation, for they were the pro-actively and dynamically self-revealing being of God. The hesychasts suggested that through meditation and the rhythmic, mantra-like repetition of Jesus’ name, one could come to the contemplation of God in his uncreated light, as was seen in the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor.37 This represented for those practising hesychasm the outmost unio mystica, the peak of illumination (φωτισμός, ἔλλαμψις,

37 “And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (Mt. 17:2).

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illuminatio). Politically, the hesychasts, the majority being monks, were radically antiLatin and against any form of Church union.38 The imperial court and the Ecumenical Patriarchate became, as mentioned above, caught up in the dispute. A series of so-called “hesychastic councils” between 1341 and 1351 condemned as unorthodox Latin heresy the denial of the possibility of seeing God. In particular, the educated emperor John VI Kantakouzenos (1341/1347–1354) campaigned politically and theologically for the success of hesychasm and the anti-Latin party. Hesychasm was ratified as dogma and included in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy in 1368, the official and normative collection of all dogmata regulating the Eastern Orthodox faith.39 Hesychasm became, therefore, institutionally relevant insofar as it was officially sanctioned in a formula fidei, which had to be signed by the future autocrats at every imperial coronation. Patriarchs and metropolitans of the most important ecclesiastical centres also had to sign this formula of faith.40 From now on, hesychasm was regarded as the epitome of Orthodoxy, as an authentic Orthodox lifestyle and as an identificatory ethos separate from Latin heresy. Hesychasm gained, furthermore, influence in the other Orthodox cultural areas of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Serbia and the metropolitan see of Kiev, especially, proved themselves to be highly dynamic hesychastic bulwarks. The most important representatives of hesychast spirituality were canonised: for instance, Palamas himself in 1368, nine years after his death, became one of the greatest saintly figures in the Christian East, still considered one of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy’s major Church Fathers.41 After hesychasm had been enforced, members of the hesychastic party assumed key positions in the Church and held political offices at the Byzantine court. For example, between 1350 and 1400 five highly active hesychasts held the patriarchal dignity: Isidoros I (1347–1349), Kallistos I (1350–1354, 1355–1363), Philotheos Kokkinos (1354–1355, 1364–1376), Neilos (1380–1388), and Antonios IV (1383–1397).42 The momentum set in motion by the hesychastic patriarchs’ intense activity, which resulted in an alternative order to the waning Byzantine state, can be described as “political hesychasm”. From their point of view, this was a philanthropic form of care for millions of Orthodox Christians, whose salvation and lives were seen as threatened by either the Latin mission or the Ottoman “yoke”. The new agenda was implemented through, among other things, an offensive policy of administrative centralisation, which intended to put all the Orthodox ecclesiastic

38 Beck, Kirche, p. 322–332; Wendebourg, Geist, p. 11–64; Gunnarson, Mystical, p. 81–96; Podskalsky, Photios; Kapriev, Philosophie, p. 253–262; Müller-Schauenburg, Erfahrung, p. 240–259; Russell, “Controversy”, p. 494–508. 39 Gouillard, “Le Synodikon”; Lauritzen, “Layers”. 40 Voordecker, “Remarques”; Mureșan, “Isihasmul”, p. 4; Gahbauer, Dogmengeschichte, p. 159–168. 41 Beck, Kirche, p. 712. 42 Meyendorff, Byzantium, p. 112–118; Rigo, “Athos”.

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bodies of South-Eastern Europe under the jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarchs. In the course of these efforts, the autocephalies of the Serbian and Bulgarian patriarchates were cancelled. In the context of Lithuanian state building under the Grand Duke Vytautas (1392–1430), the highly politicised fifteenth-century dispute over the Kiev metropolis can also be regarded as part of these centralisation endeavours.43 Consolidation at both the institutional level (through dogmatisation, canon law normativity, founding of new metropolitan sees, autocephaly, annulment of competing patriarchates, or monastic reform) and the economic level (through trans-regional philanthropic and endowment networks) went hand in hand with theological doctrine, which sometimes took on the characteristics of veritable ideology and hegemonic discourse of power. Such large-scale policy was possible only because it could build upon a solid material base, which was largely provided by the principalities of the Lower Danube, Wallachia and Moldavia. For a long time after the foundation of the metropolis in Wallachia in 1359, the metropolitan see and the bishoprics of the country were occupied by Byzantine-Greek hierarchs sent from Constantinople. In Moldavia, on the other hand, there was an almost twenty-year-long schism with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as the Moldavian princes would not accept the Greek hierarchs sent from Constantinople and instead insisted on Moldavian office-holders.44 Wallachia and Moldavia represent two important actors in political hesychasm. Emerging as autonomous state entities in the contact zone of Western and Eastern Christianity and taking the form of principalities—more exactly, “lordships” or “voivodates”, with Wallachia taking this form in 1330 and Moldavia in 1359—not only did these two territories change allegiances between Hungarians, Poles, Ottomans, and Russians, but their Lords also practised a complex pendular policy that vacillated between Eastern and Latin rites before definitely settling in the second half of the fourteenth century on the adoption of Orthodox faith and the establishment of metropolitan sees under the jurisdiction of Constantinople (Wallachia in 1359, Moldavia in 1386). After that, they were active participants in the life of the Orthodox Commonwealth and of European Christianity. As just a few examples: their hierarchs signed the decisions of the hesychastic synod of 1347 in Constantinople; they took part in the delegation of the Kiev metropolitan Gregorios Tsamblak (c. 1365–1420) at the sessions of the Council of Constance in 1418; and they were actively debaters at the union Council of Ferrara and Florence in 1438–1439. I mentioned above the metropolitans and bishops of Wallachia (and later also of Moldavia) who came from Mount Athos or Constantinople. The princes of Wallachia and Moldavia were in direct contact with hesychastic circles. Nicholas-Alexander (1352–1364) and Neagoe Basarab (1512–1523) of Wallachia are counted among the disciples of two influential hesychast masters, Gregorios Sinaites

43 Prinzing, “Längeschnitt”, p. 65; Rohdewald, Götter, p. 126–128; Preiser-Kapeller, “Union”. 44 Cotovanu, “Alexis”; Cotovanu, “Deux cas”; Șerbănescu, “Mitropolia”, p. 479–484.

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(c. 1255–c. 1346) and Patriarch Nephon II of Constantinople (1486–1488, 1497–1498, 1502), the latter also briefly metropolitan of Οὐγγροβλαχία (sc. Wallachia).45 In my opinion, the potential of “political hesychasm” as a heuristic instrument lies in the discursive association of mysticism and politics, this illustrating the power of spiritual convictions in shaping worldly life and macro-politics. Theological arguments about the hesychasts, understood as co-operators in the creation of God’s work, eschatologically legitimised and ideologically strengthened the dynamics of political hesychasm. Such views were probably capable of motivating many hesychasts to leave hermitic seclusion and face the provocations of the world. A “hesychastic international” emerged (internationale hésychaste, as the Romanian historian Alexandru Elian once called it46 ). “We wander for the sake of our Lord”, proclaims the vita of the fourteenth-century Saint Romylos, a disciple and companion of the famous hesychastic “star” Gregorios Sinaites.

5.

An Example of Polycentricity through Mobility: Nikodemos of Tismana

We possess only late sources about the probably Serbian monk Nikodemos of Tismana (c. 1320–1406): the travelogue of the Syrian deacon Paul of Aleppo (written sometime after 1657), and the synaxarion47 for Nikodemos’ celebration day on December 26. Important related information, especially about the establishment of monasteries in Wallachia, can be found in sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as chancery deeds of Wallachia, decrees of the Hungarian kings, and various letters.48 Nikodemos was, at some point, a monk on Mount Athos in the hesychastic centre of Hilandar. Later he spent a brief period of time in the kingdom of Vidin, where he established an unknown number of Orthodox monasteries. After the Hungarian offensive against Vidin in 1366, Nikodemos fled to Wallachia as part of the retinue of the Orthodox metropolitan Daniel of Vidin. In his new home, Nikodemos acted on behalf of the ruler, Lord Vladislav I Vlaicu (1364–1377), to erect an Orthodox infrastructure after it was decided in 1359 by the country’s ruling elites to adopt the Eastern rite, that is, to reject the Latin faith. On the border with the Hungarian kingdom, Nikodemos founded the monasteries of Vodița and Tismana in 1372 and 1376 as exempt monasteries (ἀυτοδεσποτείαι, σταυροπήγια). The aim was to counteract the Catholic mission in the region and, by integrating the Orthodox faith into the territory, also to expand the dominion of the Wallachian lords.49

45 46 47 48 49

Mureșan, “Philothée”, p. 336. Elian, “Byzance”, p. 199. συνάγειν, bringing together; the term here refers to some kind of hagiographic resume. Lăzărescu, “Nicodim”, p. 238–253. Academia, Documente, VIII–X. See also Păcurariu, Istoria, p. 306–307; Săsăujan, “Activitatea”, p. 473–486; Grigore, “Glaubensgutachten”, p. 256–257.

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Fig. 2 Southeast Europe in the 15th century. Map developed by Mihai-D. Grigore.

The monastaries of Vodița and Tismana were established with generous funding from the Wallachian princes and served their political goal of permanently integrating the Banat of Severin (terra Ceurin), juridically a non-hereditary fief in possession of the Hungarian crown, into the Wallachian domain. Through an exemption, the monastaries had been paradoxically removed from the direct grasp of the temporal power and stood directly under the Ecumenical Patriarch, the hesychast Philotheos Kokkinos. In a pompous ceremony, the patriarch demonstrated this by bestowing quasi-episcopal powers on Nikodemos by giving him the title “archimandrite” (ἀρχιμανδρίτης), a highly prestigious title for Orthodox priest-monks. This signalled Wallachia’s role in the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s struggle against the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries in South-Eastern Europe. This is also suggested by the appointments of provincial metropolitans from the entourage of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, such as the Athos monk Hariton and Anthimos Kritopoulos, the Patriarchate’s former dikaiophylax (civil and canon law counsellor). In his “mobile” biography, Nikodemos of Tismana thus not

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only made use of the efficient networks of the hesychastic, ecclesiastical–administrative, political, and economic centres of the Orthodox Church, he also contributed to them.50 In 1375 Nikodemos took part in a delegation whose task was to negotiate a reconciliation between the Serbian and Byzantine Orthodox Churches, which had been in schism since 1346. Lazar Hrebeljanovic, the zhupan of Serbia (1371–1389), sent an embassy to Constantinople consisting of Nikodemos of Tismana, abbot Isaiah of Hilandar, and Theophanos Protos, the “chair” (πρώτος) of the monastic community of Athos.51 This highlights how monastic factors were interwoven with ecclesiastical administration and political circles, leading to complex networks of strategies, interests, and means. On one side, the Serbian despot, under pressure from both the Ottomans and the Hungarians, needed the support of other Orthodox rulers, support that was unfortunately precluded by his schismatic status. (At the time, the Serbians had been excommunicated for already thirty years.) There was hence an urgent need for reconciliation. On the other side, the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Lord of Wallachia were interested in a strong Orthodoxy against the Latins: the Patriarch, because of his quarrels with the Pope for canonical jurisdiction; the Voivode of Wallachia, because of the Hungarian crown’s aggressive attempts to subjugate the principality and, among other things, convert the Wallachians to the Latin faith. The Ottomans, whose dominion was passed by the delegation without any obstacle, favoured an Orthodox buffer zone with the Hungarians, since after 1361 all of the Balkan states became tributaries of the sultans. As mentioned above, even after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a strong Ecumenical Patriarchate capable of bringing all Orthodox believers under its jurisdiction was perfectly in line with the policy of the Sublime Porte.

6.

Conclusions

First and foremost, I hope to have shown here that the polycentricity of the Orthodox world was shaped above all by interactions between functionally diverse centres. These included closely interconnected spiritual-hesychastic centres (such as Mount Athos), ecclesiastical–administrative and canonical centres (such as Constantinople), and political or economic centres (such as Wallachia and Moldavia). Secondly, these centres were in antagonistic confrontation with the centres of another politico-religious order (also a polysystem), that of the Latinitas, where the papacy had also organised its power and exercised its rule polycentrically already since the Middle Ages. In these conflicting polysystems, Constantinople, Mount Athos, Wallachia and Moldavia were

50 Cotovanu, “Alexis”; Cotovanu, “Deux cas”; Falangas, Présences, p. 73–78. 51 Lăzărescu, “Nicodim”, p. 264–267.

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hence opposed by other centres, those of Rome, the Bosnian and Hungarian missionary centres, or the Hungarian and Polish crowns. In another example of polycentric dynamics, polysystems stabilise themselves by creating local centres in their jurisdictions. For example, the aforementioned monasteries of Vodița and Tismana not only had a missionary function, they also had a dominionbuilding one, crucial not only for Wallachia, but also for the distant Ecumenical Patriarchate. Yet another example was the practice of establishing metochia (μετόχια), a kind of dependant priory, which enabled the monasteries of Mount Athos to prosper materially, especially during the Ottoman period, through “branches” in Wallachia and Moldavia.52 The metochia were like their mother-monasteries: self-administrating monk-communities that were hesychastically oriented and coenobitically organised around a spiritual master. Spirituality, administration, and economy were thus closely intertwined. Likewise, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, especially after the fourteenth century, showed an increased tendency towards establishing exarchates, i. e., entire bishoprics directly subordinated to the patriarch. An example of this was the exarchate of Peri in northern Transylvania during the fourteenth century.53 I have used the example of Nikodemos of Tismana to illustrate the tensions and struggles for pre-eminence that arose between centres within one and the same order or polysystem. The polysystem theorist Even-Zohar has shown how different layers in a system (in our case, the various hesychastic centres) are in constant competition for dominance. The periphery gives stimuli to the centres of power, which in turn stimulate the evolution of the polysystem. Polysystems are, if we follow Even-Zohar, hierarchical and thus allow “centrifugal vs. centripetal motion”, whereby “phenomena are driven from the centre to the periphery while, conversely, phenomena may push their way into the centre and occupy it.”54 In our example of political hesychasm, however, I believe it is clear that this quite mechanical schema can hardly describe the complexity of an entire polysystem. The polycentricity animating the polysystem of the Orthodox world consisted of multiple centres sending reciprocal impulses to each other, centres that simultaneously fulfilled specific functions for organising and creating order in the polysystem. As discussed above, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s centralisation policy culminated, among other things, in the annulment of the autocephaly of the Bulgarian and Serbian Patriarchates of Tarnovo and Peć, respectively. This implies that the periphery of a polysystem does not necessarily push its way to the centre, but the “periphery” allows centres to emerge and thus to become “central”. From 1204 until the end of the fourteenth century, the political and economic centres of the Orthodox world were the late Byzantine state, Bulgaria and

52 Chitwood and Grigore, “Stiftungswesen”, p. 96–97. 53 Nistor, Istoria, p. 215. 54 Even-Zohar, “Polysystemic”, p. 14; Shuttleworth, “Polysystem”, p. 420.

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Serbia. After that, Wallachia and Moldavia rose as political and economic centres. In the middle of the sixteenth century they in turn lost their political pre-eminence—despite remaining economically influential—to the Muscovite Grand Duchy. We thus witness an astonishing complexity in the Orthodox polysystem, which must be understood in terms other than the polarity of “centre–periphery”. EvenZohar’s observations on the struggle for dominance within polysystems are undisputedly correct. An additional fundamental nuance is needed however: this competition often seems to occur between centres having the same function—in our case, between the centres of Church administration (the Patriarchates of Constantinople, and Tarnovo and Peć) or between centres of politico-economic influence (Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia, the Kievan Rus and the Muscovite Grand Duchy). We can, however, also observe tendencies of collaboration, complementarity and reciprocal aid between our polysystem’s differently functioning centres. In this regard we are able to assess the interactive effectiveness of a polysystem. Interaction can be seen, on one hand, as conflicting competition for dominance, but on the other, as synergy of reciprocity and collaboration toward a shared set of interests. Such processes contribute to the emergence of coherent orders or polysystems. Despite considerable disagreement and even conflict between the Roman Curia and the Hungarian and Polish crowns, no one seriously questions the membership of these two centres of power in the Latin Papal Church. Likewise, Wallachia and Moldavia belonged to the Orthodox world throughout their history, although they often consciously cultivated excellent relations with the Curia and established Latin bishoprics and mission centres in their dominions.55 The narrative of harmony must be regularly questioned by pointing to the conflicts and tensions arising between centres; nonetheless, such conflicts give polysystems impulses that stimulate their polycentric dynamics. Studies have shown that not only the capital Constantinople exercised power and rule in Byzantium, but also various centres throughout the empire, centres that were closely interconnected, but also experienced confrontation and, in some cases, competition.56 Even after the fall of “New Rome”, such centres or new ones continued to organise the Orthodox transregional order inside and outside the Ottoman dominion, thus inserting the so-called “Orthodox world” into the broader trans-Ottoman context. Diachronically this extended into the nineteenth century; synchronically it integrated a huge area spreading from Moscow to Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and as far as Mount Sinai. In view of this epoch-wide range of integrative phenomena in the formation of orders, I am compelled to conclude my contribution here with a question, whose answer might also elucidate why this study on the “Middle Ages” appears in a volume of “early modern” history. Can heuristic tools like “polycentric polysystems”, which are meant to

55 Grigore, “Space”, p. 35–36. 56 Lilie, “Bedeutung”, p. 55–62.

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describe complex dynamics in their historical diachronicity, lead us in non-Western contexts, like that of the European Orthodoxy (which lacked either a “Middle Ages” or an “early modernity”), to reconsider historiography’s own chronological categories and delimitations and, implicitly, to move beyond Eurocentrism?

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Koschorke, Klaus, and Adrian Hermann (eds.). Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity/Polyzentrische Strukturen in der Geschichte des Weltchristentums, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. Kolbaba, Tia M. The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Krausmüller, Dirk. “The Rise of Hesychasm.” In Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5: Eastern Christianity, edited by Michael Angold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 101–126. Laurent, Vitalien. “Les droits de l’empereur en matière ecclésiastique: L’accord de 1380/82.” In Revue des Études Byzantines 13 (1955), p. 5–20. Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” In Studia Ceranea 7 (2017), p. 121–128. Lăzărescu, Emil. “Nicodim de la Tismana şi rolul său în cultura veche românească I (până la 1385).” In Romanoslavica 11 (1958), p. 237–285. Lilie, Ralph-Johannes. “Die ökonomische Bedeutung der byzantinischen Provinzstadt (8.–12. Jahrhundert) im Spiegel der literarischen Quellen.” In Hinter den Mauern und auf dem offenen Land: Leben im Byzantinischen Reich, edited by Falko Daim and Jörg Drauschke. Mainz: RGZM, 2016, p. 55–62. Lilienfeld, Fairy von. “Hesychasmus.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie 15. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1986, p. 282–289. Macrides, Ruth. “Emperor and Church in the Last Centuries of Byzantium.” In Studies in Church History 54 (2018), p. 123–143. Makrides, Vasilios N. “Political Theology in Orthodox Christian Contexts. Specificities and Particularities in Comparison with Western Latin Christianity.” In Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges—Divergent Positions, edited by Kristina Stoeckl, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotle Papanikolaou. London/New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 25–54. Meyendorff, John. Byzantium and the Rise of Russia. A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Müller-Schauenburg, Britta. Religiöse Erfahrung, Spiritualität und theologische Argumentation: Gotteslehre und Gottesebenbildlichkeit bei Gregorios Palamas. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2011. Müller-Schauenburg, Britta. “Hesychasmus und Starzentum.” In Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), edited by Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz 27.05.2014. http:// www.ieg-ego.eu/muellerschauenburgb-2014-de. Mureșan, Dan Ioan. “Isihasmul şi prima etapa a rezistenţei la deciziile conciliului florentin în Moldova (1442–1447).” In Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Historia 44/1–2 (1999), p. 3–57. Mureșan, Dan Ioan. “Philothée Ier Kokkinos, la Métropole de Hongrovalachie et les ‘Empereurs de la Terre’.” In Istorie bisericească, misiune creștină și viață culturală, vol. II: Creștinismul românesc și organizarea bisericească în secolele XIII–XIV, edited by Emilian Popescu and Mihai Ovidiu Cățoi. Galați: Arhiepiscopia Dunării de Jos, 2010, p. 335–406. Nistor, Ion I. Istoria Românilor, vol. 1. Bucharest: Biblioteca Bucureștilor, 2002.

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Obolenksy, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. Osadnik, Waclaw, Ewa Horodecka-Cross, and Kaweski Marusia. “Russian Formalism and the Polysystem Theory: Links between Their Thoughts on Translation and the Notion of Untranslatability.” In New Zealand Slavonic Journal 1995, p. 141–158. Păcurariu, Mircea. Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, vol. 1. Bucharest: Ed. Institutului Biblic, 1991. Papademetriou, Tom. Render unto the Sultan. Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Payne, Daniel P. The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political Hesychasm of John Romanides and Christos Yannaras. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011. Petrovszky, Konrad. Geschichte schreiben im osmanischen Südosteuropa: Eine Kulturgeschichte orthodoxer Historiographie des 16 und 17. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. Petrunin, Vladimir V. Политический исихазм и его традиции в социальной концепции Московского Патриархата, St. Petersburg: Aleteyia, 2009. Podskalsky, Gerhard. Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821). Munich: C.H.Beck, 1988. Podskalsky, Gerhard. Von Photios zu Bessarion. Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende Bedeutung. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003. Preiser-Kapeller, Johannes. “Zwischen Union, Konversion und Konfrontation: Polen, Litauen und die byzantinische Kirche im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert.” In Jahrbuch des Wissenschaftlichen Zentrums der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 3 (2010–2012), p. 93–113. Prinzing, Günter. “Längsschnitt—Kirchengeschichte.” In Geschichte Südosteuropas. Vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Konrad Clewing and Oliver Jens Schmitt. Regensburg: Pustet, 2011, p. 61–65. Prokhorov, Gelean M. “L’hésychasme et la pensée sociale en Europe Orientale au XIVe siècle.” In Contacts. Revue Française de l’Orthodoxie 31 (1979), p. 25–63. Rigo, Antonio. “Il Monte Athos e la controversia palamitica dal concilio del 1351 al Tomo Sinodale del 1368: Giacomo Trikanas, Procoro Cidone e Filoteo Kokkinos.” In Gregorio Palamas e oltre: Studi e documenti sulle controversie teologiche del XIV secolo bizantino, edited by Antonio Rigo. Firenze: Olschki, 2004, p. 1–177. Rohdewald, Stefan. Götter der Nationen. Religiöse Erinnerungsfiguren in Serbien, Bulgarien und Makedonien bis 1944. Cologne: Böhlau, 2014. Rüpke, Jörg. “Europa und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte.” In Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus, vol. 1, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg, Jörg Rüpke, and Koko von Stuckrad. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009, p. 3–14. Russell, Norman. “The Hesychast Controversy.” In The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 494–508. Salinger, Jerome D. Franny and Zooey. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961.

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Săsăujan, Mihai. “Activitatea Sfântului Nicodim de la Tismana în contextul istoric sud-est european (a doua jumătate a secolului al XIV-lea).” In: Istorie bisericească, misiune creștină și viață culturală, vol. 2: Creştinismul românesc şi organizarea bisericească în secolele XIII–XIV, edited by Emilian Popescu and Mihai Cățoi. Galați: Arhiepiscopia Dunării de Jos, 2010, p. 473–486. Șerbănescu, Nicolae I. “Mitropolia Moldovei și Sucevei: Șase sute de ani de la prima mențiune documentară cunoscută a existenței ei (1386 – 1 septembrie – 1986).” In Biserica Ortodoxă Română de la primele întocmiri creștine pe pământ românesc la Patriarhat, edited by Mihai Ovidiu Cățoi. Bucharest: Basilica, 2015, p. 473–496. Sherwan, Natalie. “Empires Reshaped and Reimagined: Rome and Constantinople, Popes, and Patriarchs, 1204–1453.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 2016. Shuttleworth, Mark. “Polysystem Theory.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldana. London/New York: Routledge 3 1990, p. 419–423. Stöckl, Christina. “Political Hesychasm? Vladimir Petrunin’s Neo-Byzantine Interpretation of the Social Doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church.” In Studies in East European Thought 62 (2010), p. 125–133. Tinnefeld, Franz H. “Faktoren des Aufstieges zur Patriarchenwürde im späten Byzanz.” In Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 36 (1986), p. 89–115. Toti, Marco. La preghiera e l’immagine. L’esicasmo tardobizantino (XIII–XIV secolo): temi antropologici, storico-comparativi e simbolici. Milano: Jaca Book, 2012. Voordecker, Edmond. “Quelques remarques sur les prétendus ‘chapitres théologiques’ de Jean Cantacuzène.” In Byzantium 34 (1964), p. 619–621. Wendebourg, Dorothea. Geist oder Energie: Zur Frage der innergöttlichen Verankerung des christlichen Lebens in der byzantinischen Theologie. Munich: Kaiser, 1980.

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Ideologisation, Publicity, Politicisation, and the Regimes of Ecclesiality in Early Modern Catholicisms

1.

Introduction

Conflicts within early modern Catholicism, theological conflicts in particular, have long attracted the attention of historians. Part of the reason for this is because Catholics kept re-litigating these conflicts throughout the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, and also expected history to help settle them, since the new authority of historical documentation offered new arguments for the conflicting parties.1 Another reason is the fact that the type of partisanship structuring the relations between different groups within the Catholic Church survived into the modern era, despite being recast after the Revolutionary period. At least until the First World War, historical discussion of early modern intra-Catholic conflicts seems in effect to have been based on the remains of earlier conflict structures. Less attention has been attracted by the fact that conflict itself appears to have been a long-time feature of Catholicism. If one accepts the periodisation put forth by Paolo Prodi of the “Tridentine Era”,2 which might be more aptly called the confessional age of Catholicism, what is immediately striking is the extent to which theological conflicts appear as a defining trait of confessionalised Catholicism.3 While the history of these conflicts is certainly of major relevance for our understanding of early modern Catholicism, making sense of conflict itself and of its connection to confessionalisation is certainly a still more important endeavour. The aim of this chapter is therefore to provide contours and categories to make sense of the connection between conflict and confessionalisation and, in particular, to return

1 See, for instance, the connection between conflict and scholarship in the life and work of Ignaz von Döllinger; on this, see Bischof, Theologie und Geschichte. 2 Prodi, Il paradigma tridentino. 3 While acknowledging some of the criticism of the confessionalisation paradigm as valid, I stand by the view that a transnational and cultural history of confessionalisation answers most issues, and helps us to understand how multi-faceted the process was. See Kaufman, Konfession und Kultur. For an introduction and discussion in English of the recent state of this discussion, see the article in German History, “Religious History beyond Confessionalization”, p. 579–598. See also the contributions by Brady, Schilling, and Klueting on the concepts of confessionalisation and the “Second Reformation” in Headley, Hillerbrand, and Papalas, Confessionalization in Europe.

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to my earlier proposal for understanding partisanship in confessionalised Catholicism as ideologisation.

2.

Ideologisation and the New Regime of Publicity as Features of Early Modern Catholicism

One might argue that in early modern European Catholicism there is a clear trend towards ideologisation—at least if we define ideology in terms rendering it historically observable. The early work of the American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre provided us a definition of ideology with which historians can work.4 For him, any ideology has three key features: − The first is that an ideology attempts to delineate certain general characteristics of nature or society (or both), characteristics that do not belong solely to features of the changing world which can be investigated through empirical inquiry (in Christianity, for example, the God-created and God-maintained character of the world; in Marxism, the laws of dialectical change). An important related query is how the truth or falsity of such statements interact with the truth or falsity of scientific and historical claims. This is indeed a major issue for Catholicism at large, including the different styles of early modern Catholicism. − As the second feature, an ideology provides an account of the relationship between situations and how we ought to act in them—between the nature of the world and that of morals and politics. An ideology is concerned not only with how the world is and how we ought to act, but also with the connection between the two. As MacIntyre states, this “involves a concern, explicit or implicit, with the status of moral rules and of statements expressing evaluations”. Historians of confessionalisation and Sozialdisziplinierung will have no difficulty identifying how this became a particularly growing concern in Catholicism in the early modern era. − The third feature of an ideology is that it is not merely believed by the members of a given social group, but that it is believed in such a way as to partially define the social existence of the members of that group. For MacIntyre, any philosophy or sociology is, at least in part, an ideology. He insists that Christianity itself is one, and he would certainly think the same for Catholicism. For the historian, though, the above features are not historically stable. Furthermore, they can function as criteria for studying historical transformations such as those in Catholicism. Indeed, the relationship of Catholicism to the truth or falsity of scientific and historical claims has varied greatly over time (the first feature of an ideology in

4 MacIntyre, “The End of Ideology”, p. 3–11.

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MacIntyre’s definition). So has the connection between morals and cosmology and anthropology (as in the second feature). The third feature (belief as the defining feature of the social existence of a group of believers) might be seen as a defining trait of any given system of belief. And yet, if one thinks of belief itself as historically variable (not only in terms of content, but also in psychological terms and in terms of the actions that embody belief5 ), then how belief, including the intensity of that belief, defines particular groups has also varied greatly over time. Recent criticism of the concept of religion itself—or at least of an awareness of its construction as a category—should also prevent us from seeing this third feature of an ideology as being ahistorical. When I argue that ideology is a valid analytical concept for understanding early modern Catholicism, I do so because I feel that not only did each of these three features exist in early modern Catholicism, but also because I feel that Catholic confessionalisation in some way made each of these features essential for the individuals, groups, and institutions considering themselves part of the Catholic Church. Specifically, confessionalisation resulted in a growing conflict between theological truth and scientific and historical claims (that are not inherent to Christianity); a growing difficulty to reconcile the world as it presents itself with the new normative claims of confessional Catholicism; and above all, a change in the relationship of individuals and groups to the content of their belief, particularly in the relationship between doctrines and identities within the Church. For instance, I would argue that in the seventeenth century, in many ways the Society of Jesus became more ideological than it had previously been, and that also its adversaries also appear as excellent examples of a more ideological relationship to belief. Yet acknowledging and understanding the dynamics of ideologisation in early modern Catholicism does not come without some difficulties or even risks. The notion of ideology itself carries the risk of teleology, all the more so since it can easily fit into a theologico-political grand narrative of secularisation. Furthermore, the concept may become too bound up with the analysis of conflict in early modern Catholicism. Overemphasising this aspect can obscure other dynamics that were at play in early modern Catholic confessional culture. French historiography, especially if being written from the perspective of the history of literature, has been particularly prone to overestimating the importance of religious polemics. Yet ideology is not a sui generis dynamic, and it has to do with other trends that, more so than ideologisation, lend themselves to a socio-historical analysis. Indeed, the fact that Catholicism became ever more politicised and ideologised during the seventeenth century had certainly to do with general social changes: publicity and its transformation is the place where those social changes and the dynamics of ideologisation connect in early modern Catholic culture.

5 de Certeau, “Une pratique sociale de la différence”, p. 363–383; id., “What We Do when We Believe”.

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To speak of publicity also means confronting not only the characterisation of the public sphere and its history by Habermas but also the limits of this characterisation.6 I will not insist on these limits except for two that are directly connected to the history of Catholicism. First, Habermas contrasts the “public sphere of representation”, which he argues was typical of the Ancien Régime, with the “bourgeois public sphere”, which is characterized by the birth of critical opinion. By making the latter the end of the former, he simplifies the process that in the first place leads to the establishment of the former on the basis of the repression of a previous communal public sphere. It is largely teleological to see the shift as having been from a public sphere of representation to a democratic, bourgeois public space. This leaves unaddressed the fact that discussion of religious issues was central to the emergence of what Reinhart Koselleck has termed the “reign of criticism”.7 Another important matter for us here is the emergence of a hypostasised public that exercised a form of judiciary authority over the forum publicum, as well as the chronology of that emergence. While Kosseleck identified this as mostly an eighteenthcentury phenomenon, Helène Merlin has very convincingly shown that in the case of seventeenth-century France, this happened through the consolidation of the social world of literary authors and through claims to what Christian Jouhaud has called the newfound “powers of literature”.8 As I will try to show here, this emergence of the public finds some of its origins in the religious dynamics of the time, in particular the confessional recasting of French Catholicism. This also means that the seventeenthcentury French public also remained deeply embedded within the ecclesia, the Church, not merely as a set of institutions but as the community of those who identify or are identified as the faithful. How can focusing on the intersection between the public and the Church help us better understand the history of Catholicisms,9 including their differences and plurality, as well as the dynamics of ideologisation within them?

6 I am entirely convinced by the views on this presented by Van Damme in 2007 in “Farewell Habermas”; see also Wilson and Yachnin, Making Publics; and Rospocher, “Beyond the Public Sphere”, p. 9–28. 7 Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. 8 Merlin, Public et littérature en France; Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature; GRIHL, De la publication entre Renaissance et Lumières. English-speaking historiography has been remarkably blind to this new French history of publicity. As to how it connects to religious issues, see Gay, “Lettres de controverse”, p. 7–41. For an interesting view of the connection between religious debates and the public, see the seminal study by Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung. 9 I remain unconvinced that the expression “styles of Catholicism” (see for instance, O’Brien, Public Catholicism) is sufficient for addressing the internal diversity of Catholicism, particularly considering how strongly political and legal frameworks weighed on local and national Churches in the early modern period. I therefore prefer to pragmactically to speak of “Catholicisms” in the plural.

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3.

French Theological Controversies as Evidence of New Trends in Catholic Confessional Culture

While it is possible that our understanding of early modern Catholic confessional culture may be blurred if we focus too strongly on intra-Catholic conflicts, nonetheless, studying these conflicts offers significant insights into the place of the public, publicity, and publication in the history of the Church. The recent turn toward a more social and cultural history of these controversies has provided us important material in this regard. The intra-Catholic controversies in seventeenth-century France can be seen as both paradigmatic and highly specific, particularly if the following three dimensions of their publicity are considered: (1) the scope of that publicity, (2) the relationship of that publicity to the emerging power of literature, and (3) the disconnection it caused between polemics and theology. 1.

It is difficult to establish the scope of the publicity of religious controversies in seventeenth-century France precisely.10 Their main media forms (libels and pamphlets) would suggest that this publicity mostly occurred in urban environments, at the court or other centres of knowledge and power. The circulation of one of the most celebrated polemical texts, Pascal’s infamous and defamatory series of Lettres provinciales of 1656, seems to have been quite wide but also limited. Several publishers contributed to the endeavour of printing the letters. The publication’s Jansenist leaders regularly switched publishers to avoid intervention by the police, and printing was only done during the night. The first letters were handed out without charge, a fact that of course limited the circulation, at least until the publication became profitable. The fifth letter, which turned from questions about grace to the issue of casuistry, was the first one to be sold: it cost 2 sous and 6 deniers. The estimated print run of the first letter was around 2,000 copies. By the end of the campaign, with the seventeenth letter, the print run possibly reached 10,000 copies. Indeed, later circulation seems to have been quite large. The first collection of letters in 1656 was printed by Daniel Elzevier in Amsterdam and then imported by booksellers in France. Port-Royal worked on a second collection the same year; a third one came out in 1659. The literary sources that mention the circulation of the Provinciales also tie it to a mostly urban and courtly environment. (The salon of the Princess de Guéménée played a significant role in their circulation, and it was rumoured that the king himself had some of the letters read to him, while at the same time ordering his police to suppress them.)

10 On this, see Gay, Morales en conflit. All of the examples presented here can be found in that volume. On the Provinciales, see Jouslin, La campagne des Provinciales.

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The wide circulation of the Provinciales was certainly an exception, but it nonetheless shows how quickly and broadly the publicity of polemics changed in early modern France. The first controversy campaigns of the 1640s, which produced a large part of the Provinciales’ dossier, including Arnauld’s 1643 Théologie morale des Jésuites, remained largely confined to Paris and the milieu of the university: professors, students, learned men, and parliamentarians. With the Provinciales, a mere thirteen years later and even still limited mostly to Paris and the court, in the context of the aftermath of the Fronde civil war, the scope of polemics had already reached unprecedented intensity. Besides, the social scope of these polemics in Paris was much wider than has been previously thought. Indeed, in the 1660s, the actors in the religious controversies began to turn to media commonly used for political debates. In 1664, a new edition of the 1657 work of Jesuit apologetics by the Spanish colleague Mateo de Moya under the pseudonym of Amadeus Guimenius was published by the Jesuits in Lyons, where there is much less evidence of the widespread presence of polemical literature. They misread—or possibly overlooked—the situation in Paris, where both the university and the parliament seized on the opportunity to push their advantage against the Society of Jesus. The University censured several proposals in Guimenius’ work and the Parliament of Paris decided to have the text suppressed within its jurisdiction. Moreover, adversaries of the Jesuits in Paris printed a small placard claiming that the book Guimenius purported to be responding to never actually existed. The Jesuits answered in kind with a placard mocking the Sorbonne for attributing certain opinions to the Jesuits, though these were not theirs. While these campaigns again seem to have been limited to the area around the university, other media in Paris show a wider social penetration of these polemics. For example, after the 1660s, adversaries of the Jesuits began to produce poems and songs propagating their message.11 Polemical poems and songs were particularly widespread in the late 1680s and early 1690s regarding obligations to perform acts of charity towards God as well as the so-called “philosophical sin”.12 One of the most famous such ditties is the “dialogue between a Penitent and a Jesuit on philosophical sin” (probably from late 1689), which was sung to the tune of the well-known Christmas carol Or nous dites Marie. While its melody does not necessarily mean that the text had a wide social circulation, it seems that the poem was sung before the king. There is also evidence that the servants of the courtly and urban aristocracy were familiar with these songs and poems and recited them in Paris. Looking at more local stages, there is no doubt that the types of conflict found in Paris were also quite common in other parts of the kingdom, as were the ways they were

11 On the political use of songs in seventeenth-century France, see Ferretti, “Chanson et lutte politique”, p. 43–66. For the case of England, see McShane, “Drink, Song and Politics”, p. 166–190. 12 On “philosophical sin”, see Gay, “Stratégies polémiques et champ doctrinal”, p. 167–200.

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being disseminated. I will offer just one example of this. In the spring of 1677, in the southern town of Béziers, a Franciscan friar—“a zealous disciple of the pure doctrine of Saint Augustine”—preached in favour of the parish mass, stating that the chapels of the religious orders had been created only to “separate them from the people and not the people from their legitimate pastors.” He also taught from the pulpit that one did not satisfy the obligation of almsgiving by giving to the religious orders, and that on the contrary, giving alms to religious orders was a sin. This incensed his own confrères, who circulated a poem throughout the city described as “a rare sonnet of Capuchin poetry” by the editor of the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques. His defenders replied in a similar manner: with a sonnet. What is striking here is perhaps not so much the literalisation of these polemics, as the extent to which the actions of the conflicting parties resembled each other. Indeed, in the case of the above example, the first four lines of the second sonnet mirrored those of its predecessor, and thus the second assumes that the first was known. In partisan environments, common polemical practices become trans-partisan. This may have been all the more so in local environments, where the religious arguments were often linked to pre-existing social and political divisions. In the small town of Gimont in Gascogne, a brawl over a procession between the local secular clergy and the Recollects saw the conflicting parties trading insults that explicitly referred to the theological controversies of the time. As Bruno Boute has convincingly shown, a key reason for the growing conflicts within Catholicism was the saturation, so to speak, of the religious market, particularly in urban settings.13 Competition for support from the laity between religious orders and individual members of the clergy, overlapping with other reasons for social or economic conflicts (such as the religious orders’ connection to or disconnection from academic networks), certainly provided grounds for conflict. At each level—local, regional, “national”, European and even global—the actors in these religious conflicts (whether individuals or groups) interacted with an intensity based on the agency of each. A good example of this is provided by the protracted conflicts that took place in the diocese of Saint-Pons de Thomières from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century.14 The small town of Saint-Pons was typical for the clerical abundance and competition of the time: a cathedral clergy, a local rural clergy in the areas surrounding the town, and a convent of Recollects friars. The arrival in 1664 of Pierre-Jean-François de Percin de Montgaillard, a bishop with a penchant for polemics and strong Parisian and national ties, particularly with Jansenist networks, sparked a series of conflicts, particularly after he tried to restrict the ministry of the friars. Not only did many local clerics get involved in the debates, so did the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the Languedoc province, the French court, the Inquisitor

13 Boute, “Saving Truth”. 14 See Gay, “Comment l’œil de l’inquisiteur se perd dans un recoin de France”.

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and Vice-Legate of Avignon, and even the Roman Curia. Texts produced at the local, provincial, and Roman levels circulated throughout the length of the conflict. And as they circulated, their meaning regularly changed. Testimonies of local priests intended for the Parliament of Toulouse ended up in front of the consultors of the Holy Office. Montgaillard had his letters to neighbouring bishops circulated throughout France. The decrees of the Holy Office aimed at silencing the conflicting parties ended up as polemical tracts that were used by one side against the other. The new forms of publicity, therefore, served as cultural conditions for the connection between the competition between sections of the clergy on the one hand and religious polemics on the other. 2.

The relationship of the above publicity to the emerging influence of literature in France may be one of the reasons why theological polemics took on special forms in that country, at least in the seventeenth century, in comparison to how such controversies played out in Italy or even the Netherlands. In seventeenth-century France (an era described by Alain Viala in 1985 as the “birth of the writer”15 ), the dynamics of polemics were strongly interconnected with the solidifying of the social status of writers and with the affirmation of the newfound “powers of literature”. Albeit, this was not literature in our contemporary sense: Literature was rather an undetermined space where knowledge about history, law and (of course) theology circulated. In comparison to France, the theological controversies in the Netherlands seem to have been much more closely tied to the prominence of the University of Louvain and other scholarly institutions, which created an environment where censorship and self-censorship worked quite differently.16 The French Jansenists built on the newfound agency of writers. At the same time, authors on the literary scene saw the possibility of profiting from the opportunities presented by religious polemics. This aspect has perhaps received too little scholarly attention. By engaging in religious polemics, authors could enhance their qualifications and also construct patronage networks. While the most famous case in this regard is that of Pascal, Racine should also be mentioned. The intertextuality between Racine’s work and religious controversies may actually be stronger than literary studies have as yet acknowledged. One of his most famous plays, Phèdre, seems to have been an indirect attack against Jesuit casuistry, at least to a reader who is familiar with the rhetoric and contents of the related religious controversies. Phèdre was staged for the first time in 1677, at a time when the so-called Clementine Peace was breaking down. Oenone, 15 Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain. 16 For an overview, see Spiertz, “Antijansenisme en jansenisme in de Nederlanden”, p. 233–251. On the connection between theological debates and the sociology of the clergy, together with the weight of the University of Louvain, see Boute, Academic Interests.

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Phèdre’s twisted confidante and councillor, appears not only as a caricature of a bad councillor, but also of a bad confessor. This was only two years after Louis XIV chose François d’Aix de la Chaize as his trusted advisor. Of course, both Pascal and Racine were religiously and ideologically committed to the Jansenist movement, which may also explain their engagement in the religious controversies of the time. Yet, a too theological or ideological understanding of their literary commitment to the cause would misconstrue what the two authors considered the role of literature to be, and particularly how they saw its intersection with the Church. Other authors offer better examples of religious polemics intersecting with the literary scene and playing a significant role in the building of literary careers.17 For instance, Jean de La Fontaine’s Ballad on Escobar circulated widely and for a long time in Jansenist circles. The poem was written in 1664, at a turning point in La Fontaine’s career, after the fall of his former patron Nicolas Fouquet and after his own exile to Limousin, at a time when he was seeking protection from the duchess de Bouillon and Marguerite de Lorraine. But the intersection between literature and religious polemics is most apparent with Nicolas Boileau. Boileau contributed several epigrams in defence of Arnauld and against the Jesuits in the mid-1690s, at the peak of the arguments regarding philosophical sin and the obligation to make an “act of charity”. These epigrams remained very popular among Jansenists and can often be found in the manuscript collections of literary texts that circulated in the eighteenth century among sympathizers of the movement. With Boileau, the “literalisation” of polemics reached a new level. For example, he turned to genres that until then had seldom been used in religious polemics, building thereby a paratext of the polemical corpus itself. And further, he turned religious polemics into a proper literary game, a game disconnected from the ecclesiastical audience that had formed the horizon of polemics. Finally, while literary quarrels typically intersected with religious polemics only slightly, they do very much so in the case of Boileau. Indeed, his forays into religious controversies were related to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and his disputes with the author Charles Perrault within the Académie Française. His defence of Arnauld may have been an act of gratitude, since Arnauld had brokered the reconciliation between Boileau and Perrault in 1694. And in his own texts, Boileau certainly tries to show that there are intellectual connections between the quarrel and religious controversies, all of which dealt with the authority of the past. In the end, all involved parties acknowledged the inevitability of the connected literalisation and publicisation of religious polemics. In the debates of the 1640s and 1650s, the Jesuit strategy had mostly relied on disqualifying polemics in general, and more specifically, on disqualifying and condemning the strategy of relying on the “powers of literature” that their theological adversaries were using. They regularly argued that their

17 On this, see Gay, “Querelles connectées, querelles parallèles”, p. 217–236.

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adversaries were displacing theology from its proper place and pointed out the danger of making it accessible to the public (and most specifically, to a female public). Even when confronted by the success of Pascal’s defamatory Provincial letters pamphlets, they stuck by this strategy in their responses. While their adversaries regularly turned to the authority of the public, the Jesuits referred to the public’s lack of authority in theological matters. But this changed. By the late seventeenth century, the Jesuits acknowledged that their adversaries had bested them by betting on the cultural dynamics that they, for their part, had tried to sidestep and check. In 1694, one of the Jesuits’ best apologists, F. Gabriel Daniel, published the Entretiens de Cléandre et d’Eudoxe, a (belated) first truly literary attempt to respond to the Provinciales and account for their success. 3.

The difficulty the Jesuits had in acknowledging the inevitability of the publicisation and literalisation of religious controversies, contrary to their adversaries, certainly had to do with the fact that they were acting on several connected yet separate scenes, both geographically and culturally. One of the dated mistakes in the classical narrative about the religious controversies in France is that it often overestimates the impact that the public controversies had on theology itself. For the same reason, this narrative has misunderstood the defensive strategies of the Jesuits, who—more so than their adversaries—continued to actively produce and publish theological texts. Due to the Jesuits’ institutional commitment to academic theology, they could not accept theology being displaced by literary texts, although this is what some of their adversaries had accepted and were promoting. As I have tried to show, in contrast to the ideas of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians of theology, the impact of religious polemics on theology remained limited for a long time. Theologians continued to turn to texts that the actors in the theological debates had been largely deemed scandalous. The best example here is certainly the widespread use of Sanchez’s De matrimonio until the nineteenth century, despite the attacks to which the work was subjected.18 Theological rigorism was a limited movement: even if they seem critical of the casuistical tradition, few authors in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries parted from the conclusions of the casuists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Still in 1791 (i. e., long after the suppression of the Society of Jesus), Sorbonne theologians turned to the most authoritative casuists to solve the cases they were presented and to hand out conclusions. They did so with little regard for their bad reputation in the public sphere and in the literary space that bibliographers, authors of dictionaries, and polemicists elaborated. I would characterise this disconnect between the theological and literary scenes as the difference between controversies on the one hand, and polemics on the other.

18 On Sánchez, see Alfieri, Nella camera degli sposi.

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This is an aspect that historians have largely ignored. Nonetheless, it was actually quite apparent in the seventeenth century to actors on both sides. A good example of this is the case of Théophile Raynaud, today a little-known theologian who was, however, a major player in the European theological scene of the mid-seventeenth century. In his time, he was celebrated as the most prominent theologian of the day, promoted by the Jesuits as a second Bellarmine who had come to address the evils being confronted by his generation.19 Raynaud was very much a man of controversies: debates about both major and minor theological issues of the time constitute a great part of his writings. He was later reproached by anti-Jesuit bibliographers for being too impolite and aggressive as an author, i. e., for not being as “literary” as they thought he should have been. Despite his status, however, Raynaud never took part in the French polemical scene. One of the reasons for this was his strong misogyny: the publicisation of religious debates was also linked to the newfound agency of socially powerful women in French Catholicism. Indeed, Raynaud argued regularly for confining religious controversies to theologians. While writing harshly against the Jansenists and petitioning the Pope for the relaxation of the prohibition for theologians to discuss the de auxiliis questions, he never took part in the exchange of pamphlets and counter-pamphlets that created the space of religious polemics. This absence was also noted by those who did contribute to the public debates. In 1658, Nicole—in his annotated Latin translation of the Provinciales—tried to use several texts of Raynaud as evidence that the best among the Jesuits were critical of the order’s general relaxation and its idiosyncrasies. Honoré Fabri, a philosopher and theologian from Lyons, was entrusted by the Society to respond to Nicole. He noted that Nicole was playing with fire, and that he should be wary not to awaken the “sleeping lion” that was Raynaud. Yet the lion never woke up. Raynaud rejected the literalisation of theology through public polemics, seeing it as too closely linked to the changing cultural dynamics of the seventeenth century, dynamics he clearly saw as dangerous and connected to other destabilizing aspects occurring within Catholicism at the time. Raynaud saw the disconnect between controversies and polemics, i. e. between academic theology and publicized theology. He saw it, feared it, and tried—in his characteristic reactionary fashion—to fight it, but to no avail. It was only later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the triumph of literature would erase this seventeenth-century disconnect between the public and academic sides of the theological discourse in French Catholicism. It is clear that the Catholic confessional culture at the time was much less coherent due to this disconnect than classical historiography of confessionalisation would lead us to believe. Indeed, I would argue that one of the most prominent features of Catholic confessional culture, at least in France, was a true divide between the public and the academic. It finds its origin not only in the emergence of new media, but also in how confessionalisation

19 On all this see Gay, Le dernier théologien.

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promoted new cultural practices among writers and readers, clergy and laity, academics and non-academics, men and women of the elites, and even in wider social spaces. Even those who encouraged this divide, or tried to benefit from it, acknowledged and lamented it. In 1690, for instance, a writer in the Nouvelles Ecclesiastique rejoiced in the fact that ridicule was the best way to refute what he considered the heresy of “philosophical sin”, while at the same time lamenting that “it would be desirable if the world made less noise, and the Church more, against the sin of a philosophy, which is sad despite its merry maxims.” I would argue that this is a central statement, since it points to how this divide also brought about a sort of de-ecclesialisation of the emerging public sphere, one that those who engaged the public for religious reasons were actually actively promoting.

4.

The Politicisation of Early Modern Catholic Ecclesiality

It seems clear that the wider publicity of religious controversies, as well as the new forms this publicity took, was connected to two other processes taking place in early modern Catholicism, namely, politicisation and ideologisation. Yet the connection between publicisation and these other two processes is not straightforward. Nor can they be construed as mere by-products of one another. A simplistic approach would be to regard these processes as being directly connected: the engagement of Catholics with the emerging ecclesial public sphere resulting in the acculturation of political practices among them, this in turn resulting in a growing ideologisation of the Church, with actors identifying not only with sub-groups within the Church, but also sub-groups self-identifying with particular sets of ideas or even doctrines to differentiate themselves from other sub-groups. Of course, dynamics such as these can be found, dynamics that were closely connected to the theological controversies of the time. Paolo Broggio’s important and seminal 2009 study on theology and politics20 proposes a possible way for looking at the politicisation of early modern Catholicism. In his discussion of the socio-political dimensions of the theological controversies regarding de auxiliis, divine grace, and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, he shows how these issues also became objects of political and diplomatic disputes, even sometimes in the streets. He more than convincingly demonstrates how these two controversies are evidence of shifting geopolitical dynamics within the Catholic Church. The choice of Clement VIII to reserve judgment in the de auxiliis controversies to Rome, when the Spanish Inquisition was about to make a decision, was of great political significance

20 Broggio, La teologia e la politica; see before that his “Ordini religiosi tra cattedra e dispute teologiche”, p. 53–86.

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(particularly in the context of the new balance of power between France and Spain after the Edict of Nantes). The endorsement of Immaculism by the Spanish crown under Philip III and Philip IV appears to have been an attempt to apply pressure on the Holy See, and to compensate for the partial defeat of the de auxiliis Congregation. This was not merely geo-policiticisation of theology, but rather a phenomenon that went both ways, with theological victories also having a clear geopolitical dimension. Indeed, states from Madrid to Venice were starting to produce their own state theologians and theologies, fostering popular endorsement of these theologies, and letting geopolitical competition play out in the theological field. One cannot but wholeheartedly agree with the need to incorporate these crucial aspects into our narratives of early modern Catholicism. The only small caveat one might want to add is that they still conceptualise the political in a quite Whiggish manner. This presupposes the political, equating it with the State in mirrored opposition to the Church, instead of considering how political and ecclesiastical institutions interacted and influenced each other within a common space, a space where they cooperated and intersected, but also clashed, namely, within the Church itself. It is from this common space of the Church that “politicisation” took place, and that practices which developed principally around and about the action of civic institutions became more and more common. If one looks at politicisation in such terms, its importance for characterising early modern Catholicism becomes still clearer. Politicisation can and must be understood as something that goes beyond the influence of the political on the Church. It was also a feature of the regime of ecclesiality in early modern Catholicism. To understand this, one must clarify what is understood by ecclesiality and why analysing Catholicism in terms of ecclesiality is historically relevant. In an earlier publication, referring to Michel de Certeau’s “formalité des pratiques” I have defined “ecclesiality” as a state of the practices (and of the formality of these practices) by which, at a given time, all the personae (institutional or not, corporate or individual) who consider themselves as belonging to a ‘Church’ perform that belonging to a common ecclesial community and their relationship to each other in that common space that is Church.21

A major component of this performance is how these personae imagine the Church as the boundary of their practices. Ecclesiality thus defined, to put it differently, is the way a Church performs itself as a social space that remains, to some degree, distinct from the institutions governing and organising it, notwithstanding the importance of the role played by those institutions in that very self-performance.

21 Gay, “Lettres de controverse”, p. 7–41.

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If seen in these terms, both the intensity and publicity of the religious controversies in the seventeenth century seem to be clear evidence of the politicisation of Catholic ecclesiality. The self-performance of the Church by those who belonged to it, as well as the practices through which they performed the Church’s functions, all became more political, indeed, more formally political.22 This is where the disconnect between theology and polemics matters: polemical practices are chiefly connected to performance in a primarily political space. In seventeenth-century France, this occurred in three ways. (1) Use of the efficient model of political debate, in contrast to the controversy practices that had originated in the academic environment of the university. The rhetoric of a political debate does not aim at convincing, nor does it work based on a shared epistemology in which some sort of agreement on truth, or at least arbitration over truth, is exercised by a legitimate authority. Rather, political debate aims at tilting the social balance between partisan groups and at strengthening the underlying epistemology of each conflicting group’s discourse, i. e. their ideologies. It is no accident that the first major and successful polemics in the intra-Catholic controversies, namely, the Provinciales, appeared in 1656 in Paris. As Richard Golden already showed in 1981, there was a strong connection between the civil wars of the Fronde and the polemical campaigns of the Provinciales and the Écrits des cures de Paris.23 The success of the religious Mazarinades, of which the Provinciales were an example, relied on the cultural and political situation of Paris after the Fronde, both in terms of partisan conflict and in terms of the circulation of political tracts. (2) The agency of writers. While this is an agency that develops under particular cultural and economic conditions, it also depends strongly on the needs and support of political patrons. In our case, the political patrons of the various polemical writers also played a major role in the “religious Fronde” of the 1650s. (3) Displacement of epistemological authority, making the public the first arbitrator of religious controversies, with its own rules, instead of legitimate religious authorities, whose legitimacy is first and foremost either sacramental or intellectual. In the seventeenth century, religious controversies played a significant role in the mounting tension between two different conceptions of the public. On the one hand, the public was conceived as hypostasized, organicist, “ontotheological” and even “eucharistic”. Yet more and more, in part because of the impasse in the various religious controversies underway at the time, the public became the institutionalised amalgamation of the opinion of individuals.24 In this way, the publicity of religious controversies contributed to the politicisation of the ecclesiality of French Catholicism. The politicisation of the Church was itself a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of the “public sphere”.

22 de Certeau, “La formalité des pratiques”, p. 153–214. 23 Golden, The Godly Rebellion. 24 Merlin, Public et Littérature.

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5.

Localised regimes of Ecclesiality and their parameters

As the case of France shows, the politicisation of the Church was based on political, cultural, social, and even economic conditions. Moreover, this politicisation appears as geographically variable along these very social and cultural lines. It was therefore a quite local phenomenon. Tracking it in local environments has shown that the categories of publicity, politicisation, and ideologisation are useful parameters for analysing localised regimes of ecclesiality in early modern Catholicism. The transformations of the Society of Jesus provide in Europe a good example of this.25 The Society was a major actor in the kinds of politicisation of religious controversies that have been described by Paolo Broggio. Since the Jesuits identified with their theology of grace, the adversity that they encountered during the de auxiliis controversies turned Molinism into a common doctrine for the Society. While Jesuit esprit de corps largely preceded these controversies, the doctrinal statements provoked by these controversies became an essential element in that common spirit as well. From 1650 onwards, the Jesuits were faced with similar issues regarding moral theology. The doctrine of probabilism was widely shared among Catholic theologians until 1656, irrespective of their affiliation. Yet in 1656, in a move that had largely to do with competition between the Dominicans and Jesuits and their conflict over the theology of grace, the General Chapter of the Dominicans rescinded its earlier acceptance of probabilism and inaugurated a series of attacks against the Society of Jesus. This encouraged attempts at a strategic alliance between the Dominicans and Jansenists in several places in Europe.26 Faced with this appearance of a new polemical front, the Jesuits could have chosen to turn probabilism into doctrina nostra, as they had done with the Molinist and Suárezian theology of grace. But the Jesuit General Congregation never did so formally; it never went as far as the Dominican had in their 1656 general chapter. Nonetheless, the dynamics of the conflict gained strength, with the Jesuits effectively defending probabilism. There were of course not only intellectual dimensions to their involvement in the controversy, but also spiritual and pastoral ones. Notwithstanding, there was a strong dimension of identity that originated in the ideologisation of early modern Catholicism. When Pope Innocent XI tried to impose a change in policy by having the Jesuits elect an anti-probabilist General, Tirso González de Santalla, in 1687, this resulted in a major internal crisis in the order, one that nearly fragmented the order into a federation of more national groups of Jesuits. The above crisis is also evidence of the intensity and inevitability of the dynamics of politicisation in early modern Catholicism. Confronted with strong opposition in his attempt to change the theological culture of his fellow Jesuits, González de Santalla did

25 I am returning here to what I wrote in Jesuit Civil Wars. 26 Quantin, “Le rigorisme”, p. 23–43.

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not work through the traditional tools for discipline and regulation of dissent within the order, such as censorship. Instead, he structured a network of like-minded Jesuits who faced locally the same type of opposition he himself was encountering on a more global scale. He also turned to polemicists whom he tasked with defending his theology, his behaviour, as well as his style of governance. He used the issue of Jesuit commitment to probabilism as justification for his policy. In many ways, he addressed the Society of Jesus not only as a community, but also as a public. However, these steps encouraged his opponents to act in a similar fashion, which they did, circulating texts that challenged both the theological position of the General and his way of governing. The “Jesuit Civil Wars” of the 1680s and 1690s also bear witness to how many resisted the dynamics of politicisation that were affecting how the Jesuits performed their corporate identity as an ecclesial community. Indeed, many Jesuits challenged these changes. Although they could not retreat from the dynamics being produced by the conflict, they could still try to limit the conflict itself. The damnatio memoriæ that ended these crises after González’s death can be read as one such attempt to retreat from the dynamics affecting the localised regime of ecclesiality of the Society of Jesus. Hence, if ideologisation, politicisation and publicity can function as criteria for understanding the transformations of early modern Catholic ecclesialities, they can also be used for tracking differences between these ecclesialities in time and space. There are good reasons to believe that the differences in the styles of Catholicism, both where there were Inquisitions and where there were none, were significant in this regard. Indeed, as the studies of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jansenism in Italy have shown, the weakening of the regulating power of the Inquisitions and of their capacity to structure the public sphere certainly opened Northern Italian Catholicism to the same type of politicisation that had occurred in France decades earlier. This resemblance extends to the role of writers and the “public” in local Churches. A question that is still open is the degree to which Church actors and institutions were able to limit such changes and, particularly, the capacity of Rome to confront the fragmentation that these dynamics inevitably led to. Bruno Boute has recently convincingly argued that in the 1670s, Rome was still able to maintain an epistemological framework preserving a form of openness that helped foster unity within Catholicism, despite the intense politicisation at work at more local or corporate levels.27 Not only did Catholicism uphold diversity of opinions, but many actors in key institutional positions valued that diversity and fought to preserve it. Perhaps no other figure illustrates this than the mid-seventeenth-century Master of the Sacred Palace Raimondo Capizucchi, whom Innocent XI made cardinal in 1681. Up to his death, Capizucchi fought to preserve theological coherence, limit the politicisation of censure within the Inquisition, and maintain a space for a legitimate diversity of opinion.

27 Boute, “Saving Truth”.

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This stands in stark contrast to what happened in 1680 within the Inquisition. Under Innocent XI, several cardinals and theologians seemed to challenge the open epistemology that the Roman theologians had managed to preserve until then. Lorenzo Brancati di Lauria and Michelangelo Ricci both appear as diametrically opposed to Capizucchi in this regard.28 Both adopted a more ideological approach, endorsing stricter—and at times even more fragile—censorship, instead of preserving an open epistemological framework in which different styles of Catholicism could coexist. Under Innocent XI, the whole theological system of qualification seems to have broken down in the Inquisition. In the case of the censure of the so-called “philosophical sin”, for instance, the qualificators and cardinals continually changed the censure notes they attributed to the proposition that the Inquisition was deciding upon. These changes were based on the shifting strategy of interpreting the qualifications that each of the conflicting parties espoused. Even the ever-prudent and consensus-promoting Capizucchi first argued that the proposition did not deserve censure, only to later favour a censure of the proposition, “heretical as it stood” (hæretica ut iacet), in order to prevent the anti-Jesuit party from having too strong a victory.29 On another issue, Lorenzo di Lauria went so far as to invent a new conception of heresy itself, arguing that the note of heresy could be attributed not merely to a proposition that directly opposed Scriptures and settled dogma of the Church, but also to whatsoever opposed it indirectly. To him, as well as to many others in the circles of Innocent XI, ideological purity mattered more than limiting the effect that politicisation had within the Church. While ideologisation and politicisation were never embraced as strongly in the eighteenth century as they had been under Innocent XI, nonetheless the weakened Roman institutions undoubtedly had difficulties regulating them within the Church. And if they did manage to regulate them in some way, then it was certainly with little success, as the history of intra-Catholic conflict in eighteenth-century Italy attests. This was the case, I would argue, above all because Rome was incapable of addressing the consequences of the social and cultural changes that had reinforced the politicisation and ideologisation of early modern Catholicism. But this is a question for the future. It will require detailed research on eighteenth-century Catholicisms, research that would have to incorporate the categories of publicity, ideology, and politicisation. Indeed, these categories are essential for understanding how doctrinal conflicts reflected much more significant changes in Catholic confessional culture, and how confessionalisation transformed Catholic ecclesialities.

28 On Ricci and his role in religious controversies, see Bustaffa, Michelangelo Ricci; id., “Innocenzo XI e Michealangelo Ricci”, p. 57–74. 29 Gay, “Stratégies polémiques et champ doctrinal”, p. 167–200.

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1679–1713, Actes du colloque, Paris, 22–23 septembre 2011, edited by Silvio Hermann de Franceschi and Rémi Mathis. Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine, 2012, p. 167–200. Gay, Jean-Pascal. Jesuit Civil Wars. Theology, Politics, and Government under Tirso González (1683–1715). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. Gay, Jean-Pascal. “Lettres de controverse. Religion, publication et espace public en France au XVIIe siècle.” In Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 68/1 (2013), p. 7–41. Gay, Jean-Pascal. Le dernier théologien? Théophile Raynaud. Histoire d’une obsolescence (v. 1583–1663). Paris: Beauchesne, 2018. Gay, Jean-Pascal. “Querelles connectées, querelles parallèles? Les Anciens, les Modernes, et la controverse théologique sur la morale.” In Anciens et modernes face aux pouvoirs. L’Église, le Roi, les Académies, edited by Christelle Bahier-Porte and Delphine Reguig. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022, p. 217–236. Gay, Jean-Pascal. “Comment l’œil de l’inquisiteur se perd dans un recoin de France. L’affaire du diocèse de Saint-Pons devant le Saint-Office romain.” In L’Inquisition Romaine et la France, Juridiction, doctrine et pluralité des catholicismes européens à «l’âge tridentin», edited by Albrecht Burkardt and Jean-Pascal Gay. Rome: École Française de Rome, forthcoming. Gierl, Martin. Pietismus und Aufklärung. Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Golden, Richard M. The Godly Rebellion. Parisian “Curés” and the Religious Fronde. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. GRIHL (Groupe de recherches interdisciplinaires sur l’histoire du littéraire). De la publication entre Renaissance et Lumières. Paris: Fayard, 2002. Harrington, Joel. “Religious History beyond Confessionalization.” In German History 32/4 (2014), p. 579–598. Headley, John M., Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (eds.), Confessionalization in Europe 1555–1700. Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Jouhaud, Christian. Les pouvoirs de la littérature. Histoire d’un paradoxe. Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Jouslin, Olivier. La campagne des Provinciales. Clermont Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2007. Kaufman, Thomas. Konfession und Kultur. Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2006. Koselleck, Reinhardt. Kritik und Krise. Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt. Munich/ Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber Verlag, 1969. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology.” In Against the Self-Images of the Age, edited by Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978, p. 3–11. McShane, Angela. “Drink, Song, and Politics in Early Modern England.” In Popular Music 35/2 (2016), p. 166–190. Merlin, Hélène. Public et littérature en France au XVII e siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994. O’Brien, David. J. Public Catholicism. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Paolo Prodi. Il paradigma tridentino. Un’epoca della storia della Chiesa. Brescia: Morcelliana, 2010.

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Quantin, Jean-Louis. “Le rigorisme: sur le basculement de la théologie morale catholique au XVIIe siècle.” In Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 89 (2003), p. 23–43. Rospocher, Massimo. “Beyond the Public Sphere: A Historiographical Transition.” In Beyond the Public Sphere. Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, edited by Massimo Rospocher. Bologna/Berlin: Il Mulino/Duncker & Humblot, 2012, p. 9–28. Spiertz, Mathieu G. “Antijansenisme en jansenisme in de Nederlanden in de achttiende en negentiende eeuw.” In Trajecta 3 (1992), p. 233–251. Van Damme, Stéphane. “Farewell Habermas? Deux décennies d’études sur l’espace public”. In Les Dossiers du Grihl. http://journals.openedition.org/dossiersgrihl/682. Viala, Alain. Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985. Wilson, Bronwen, and Paul Yachnin (eds.). Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. People, Things, Forms of Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Judith Pollmann

Religious Identity in the Low Countries 1520–1650

1.

Introduction

The opportunity to contribute an essay to this volume on the keyword “identity” is both daunting and stimulating. Daunting, because it invites me to reflect on my use of this keyword in a more abstract fashion than I have done until now. I trained and worked in a scholarly environment in the UK and the Netherlands that does not force the student or scholar to put their theoretical cards on the table. Stimulating, because it encourages me to reflect on the development of my work in its broader historiographical context. In the three decades I have written about “identity”, I have often been asked what I mean by the term. My answer has been fairly simple. I use the term “identity” to describe who people think and feel they are. This is not to say that identity is just a personal matter. Ideas and feelings about the self emerge in a social context—that of communities and groups of which people feel themselves to be a part, as well as the labels and attitudes assigned by outsiders. Identity formation is therefore not just a personal but very much a social and cultural process—one that is affected by politics, religion and culture, as much as by issues such as socio-economic status, gender and ethnicity. When I trained as a historian in the 1980s, in the middle of the “cultural turn” in history, it seemed rather self-evident that identities were constructs, stories that we tell about ourselves and others. At that time, it was especially the construction of national identities that was attracting scholarly attention. Modernists, in particular, were excited by the idea that national identities were built on “invented traditions” which had been used to “imagine” national communities. Some early modernists were at that time working on the origins and deployment of ethnic stereotypes and this is also where I started. One of my first publications appeared in 1992 in a collection of essays on Feindbilder, “images of the enemy”, that was edited by Franz Bosbach. It was based on my MA dissertation in which I had studied pamphlets and propaganda songs to research the European roots of anti-Hispanism in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt.1 Having learned to accept the constructed and unstable nature of identity as a matter of course, at the graduate level I wanted to explore how this played itself out in lived experiences. I was and still am especially interested in identity formation in periods

1 Pollmann, “Eine natürliche Feindschaft”, p. 73–93.

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of rapid change at the level of the individual people who lived through these episodes, and this is what most of my work since has been about. I began by focusing on religious change, then moved on to studying how war, political change and memory affected identity formation; currently, I am exploring changing attitudes to old and new, to innovation and modernity. The religious, political and social identities I study tend to be under pressure, not just because of the spiritual, civic or ideological concerns of the individual, but also because people are being faced with political or religious changes that are not of their own making. That I began my career by studying the impact of religious change on identities was no accident. My interest in this type of low-level change emerged from my family history. I was born of Roman Catholic parents who, like many other Dutch people in their generation, were in the process of abandoning their faith, and had definitively done so around the time I took my first communion. As I grew up, I came to realize, however, that secularization had turned my parents into ex-Catholics rather than nonCatholics. My father would sing the litany with his siblings while doing the dishes at my grandmother’s home, and they would swap anticlerical jokes in a way that only Catholics do. Their Catholic upbringing meant that my parents shared memories of a frame of reference with their siblings and families, and in their social networks, a large part of which consisted of ex-Catholics like themselves. This involved, on the one hand, a common narrative about the world they were glad to have lost, but it also allowed them to retain a sense of belonging. Having encountered the individual and generational negotiating of change in my own family, as a history student I became curious about this phenomenon in the past, and that drew me to studying the Reformations. How had individual people, their families and their communities coped with the enormous transition that was the Reformation? In the process of researching this topic, it turned out that I was writing about identity. In this chapter, I will first take a closer look at our keyword, and its relevance for the study of the Reformations, before turning to religious identity as a problem in the study of early modern Christianity, the reasons why it is important to the history of the early modern Low Countries, and the methods by which I have tried to study it. In doing so, and as I have been doing in much of my work, I will draw frequent comparisons with France.

2.

Identity

Most of us use the term identity in one of three ways: to describe how people see themselves, how they imagine others, and how others imagine them. The current meanings of the term identity are ambiguous. In its original meaning, it means likeness, and so we still use it when we speak about identical twins or identity cards. From Immanuel Kant onwards, philosophical enquiry into the nature of the self, and the

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relationship between mind and body, led to the question whether older people were “identical” to the person they had been when young, and if not, what that tells us about the self. This question triggered a shift in the meaning of the term, with a new focus on ways in which we as “selves” are different from other humans.2 Modern usage of the word identity has some roots in the work of Sigmund Freud, but in its most influential guise it was the work of psychologist Erik Erikson. Among students of early modern religion, Erikson is best known for his 1958 book Young Man Luther, a psycho-historical study of Martin Luther. Whereas Freud’s work began with his role as a medical doctor who wanted to treat people with mental health issues, Erikson was interested in systematizing the study of the way human identity develops over time. He postulated that in the process of developing from one stage of our life to the next, we experience “identity crises”. There is a steady core to our “selves”, but this grows and changes in a dialectical process that makes us more mature and gives us the ability to move on and leave issues behind. To demonstrate this process, he turned to the biography of Martin Luther, in which, he argued, we could discern three such crises, of which his “Tower Experience” was of course the most famous. For Erikson, personal identity evolves not just as a result of family pressures and one’s individual life trajectory, but also under the influence of society and social groups. Thus, Erikson argued that it was the culture in which Luther had grown up, with its fear of a punitive God, of hell and long years in purgatory, that shaped his identity and identity crises, and which, in its turn, explained why society was “ready” for Luther’s ideas.3 Why did this notion of identity become so influential? In 1983 a very useful answer to this question was formulated by Philip Gleason. He argued that the conceptual appeal of identity was owing to its promise of understanding individuals in their relationship to society and vice versa. When young people in the 1960s rebelled against the status quo, Erikson’s youth psychology was quickly popularized. In Reformation history, we can see some of its influence, for instance, in the work of Steven Ozment, and his interest in the formation of young Protestants, like the Behaim boys. Some work was also done on the Reformation as a youth rebellion.4 In the meantime, however, there had also emerged another reading of identity, which was the product of sociologists who had redeveloped Freud’s ideas on identification to think about the process by which people come to appropriate one or more possible identities through the use of “reference groups” they do or do not want to identify with. This tradition was picked up by sociologists like Ervin Goffman, who had been studying the development of self-consciousness, and had become increasingly convinced that

2 Gleason, “Identifying Identity”, p. 910–931. 3 Erikson, Young Man Luther. On its reception, e. g., Zock, “Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther”, p. 61–75. 4 Moller, “Youth as a Force in the Modern World”, p. 237–260; Ozment, Three Behaim Boys. A recent reflection on the role of age and generations in the Reformation in Walsham, “The Reformation of the Generations”, p. 93–121.

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identity was created primarily by social pressures.5 In the sociologists’ reading, Gleason noted, identity was not “deep, internal and permanent”, as Erikson had argued, but “shallow, external and evanescent”. Gleason showed that this line of thinking was as relevant to public debate as Erikson’s. In the middle of the twentieth century policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic worried about the potential instabilities of personal and national identity, in the face of mass culture, totalitarian indoctrination and “brainwashing”. At the same time, the civil rights movement challenged the racist foundations of the identity politics that had led to the exclusion, oppression and marginalization of people of colour.6 By the late 1960s identity was a buzzword, such as memory was to be forty years later. This seemed to pose scholarly risks, partly because scholars used the term in different ways, partly because it was deployed so generically in public debate that the term rapidly began to lose meaning. In 1983, Gleason argued that historians should use the word identity with extreme caution. Had he written the article ten years later, I think he would have been less concerned. At that stage, the scholarly solution for the identity crisis surrounding the term identity had been found in social constructivism, which allows us to see that both personal and social identities can be experienced as stable and continuous while simultaneously being constantly in flux.7 As constructivist ideas began to spread across the social sciences and humanities, and were married to those of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, identity became identities, sex became gender, and nations became imagined communities. The impact of this “cultural turn” in history has been enormous.8 When the selection for the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe was made, for instance, concepts such as religion, identity, individual, sex, self, and body had not made the cut.9 Apparently they were deemed either self-evidently stable or irrelevant to historiography. Yet as a result of the cultural turn, categories that had so far been treated as ahistorical proved to have a relevant history too. In historical practice, they started to play a key role from the 1990s, and in the process they also transformed our view of the Reformations. That is not to say the term identity became less controversial. In an influential article published in 2000, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argued that the word was made to do too many things at once, and that we should distinguish between “identification”, “self-understanding” and “commonality”. Yet since in early modern European societies the understanding of the self is so closely tied to that of groups and communities, it seems to me that in the early modern history of religion, this division creates more

5 6 7 8 9

Goffman, The Presentation of Self. Gleason, “Identifying Identity”. Frijhoff, “Identiteit en identiteitsbesef ”, p. 614–634. Bachmann-Medick, “Cultural Turns”. Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.

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conceptual problems than it would solve. Thus for now, I use the terms identity and identity formation.10

3.

The Reformation Context

When I started graduate work around 1990, one of the most central and exciting debates revolved around the question to what extent, and by what standards, the Reformation could be judged to be a success. Textbooks such as Geoffrey Elton’s Reformation Europe (1963) presented the Reformation as “complete” by 1559. Studying the Reformation, in that take, meant to describe the work of the Protestant Reformers and the political consolidation that had led to the acceptance of Protestantism by rulers in northwestern Europe. The Counter-Reformation was then a phase that followed. Yet as social historians of early modern Europe became attuned to the differences between popular and elite culture, they began to ask how, and at what pace, new religious ideals had actually been diffused and accepted. It was historians of Catholicism who first explored such questions, perhaps not least because they considered them helpful to explain why the old church had been so slow to rally to the challenges posed by Luther. A 1963 book by Abbé Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du Moyen Âge, used new quantitative methods to assess the religious commitment of believers in fifteenth-century Flanders. He concluded they had a shallow understanding of doctrine, were committed to “superstitions”, and were lax both in their taking of the sacraments and in their morality.11 Inspired by Toussaert, Jean Delumeau in 1971 posed a similar question for France: how Christian had people actually been before the Reformation? After all, they were illiterate, and their priests were poorly trained and not celibate. Most people took communion only once a year. His “acculturation thesis” argued that the “Christianisation” of French Catholics had been a slow and mostly post-Tridentine process.12 In the 1980s and 1990s, the “cultural turn” turned such questions on their head. New scholarship encouraged us to study the believers who “identified” as Christians in the Middle Ages on their own terms, rather than to assess how medieval Christians performed by post-Tridentine standards. These had other ideas of what constituted a good Christian than post-Tridentine Catholics did a century later, while these, in turn, did not think like Catholics in the twentieth century.13 In England, Eamon Duffy encouraged readers to abandon the term Catholicism for medieval Christianity, and

10 11 12 13

Brubaker, Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’”, p. 1–47. Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux, la vie et la pratique religieuse. Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages”, p. 519–552. An early critique of this approach is found in Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth Century Champagne, p. 2; see also Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain.

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to use the term “traditional Christians” for those who remained committed to preReformation beliefs and practices.14 This did not, of course, resolve the question in what ways believers had come to accept change, a question which had by now also begun to preoccupy students of Protestantism. In a seminal article in Past & Present, Gerald Strauss argued in 1971 that it took very long for Lutheran norms and practices to be implemented and interiorised in Germany.15 Strauss arrived at such conclusions through the study of education efforts and visitations, the very same sources that were being used by students of Catholicism. In Germany, Walter Zeeden was the first to compare and note the similarities between Protestant and Catholic methods to indoctrinate believers. The discovery that the toolkit of Catholic and Protestant Reformers had in fact been very similar was all the more exciting because it chimed with the oecumenical trends of the time. Yet it also gained a new political edge. In France, Robert Muchembled suggested we should see both Catholics and Protestant Reformations fundamentally as efforts not just to Christianise, but also to discipline the lower classes; in Germany, Schilling and Reinhard analysed how political and religious interests conspired to consolidate and politicise confessional difference. How quickly could we expect such efforts to have succeeded?16 Comparing similarities as well as differences between Catholic and Protestant measures to effectuate change was a real breath of fresh air. Yet measuring their impact proved complicated. Scholars developed new ways to study what influence the Reformation of theology and institutions had in fact had on religious life on the ground, and on religious identities. New social history methods were tested to quantify changing religious expressions in wills, and the nature of bequests.17 The spending of money at pilgrimage sites and gifts for church building could be an indication of confessional commitment.18 Visitation reports were being mined for signs of resistance and obstruction, and the persistence of Catholic or “superstitious” practices. Scholars counted the number of clerical complaints in visitation records and cases of excommunication in consistory records.19 All this confirmed that reforming Europe had not been a swift process; it took many, many

14 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. 15 Strauss, “Success and Failure”, p. 30–63. 16 Zeeden, “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung”; Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne. A summary of Schilling’s and Reinhardt’s views of “Konfessionalisierung” in Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation; Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung”, p. 639–682. 17 For a discussion of this approach, see e. g. Alsop, “Religious Preambles”, p. 19–27. 18 E. g. Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, p. 48–56. 19 See for visitations, e. g., Vogler and Estebe, “La genèse d’une société protestante”. On the quantification of church discipline, see Kingdon, “The Control of Morals in Calvin’s Geneva”, p. 3–16; Schilling, “Reformierte Kirchenzucht als Sozialdisziplinierung”, p. 261–327. A review of this method is found in Pollmann, “Off the Record”, p. 423–438.

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decades before believers internalised the new confessional standards set by the reformers. In the new histories of the Reformations, therefore, the end date is no longer 1559 but 1648, or even later, at the start of the Enlightenment.20 In the process, however, the Reformations had also been recast as a top-down process that was driven by church and state, in which the role of individual believers was reduced to the question of whether they accepted or resisted change.21 To me, as a young scholar who was reading around for inspiration, this picture did not look altogether satisfactory. This was partly because I looked at it from a Netherlandish perspective rather than from the German or British. In the Low Countries, reformation ideas had initially emerged and spread as they had in France, from the bottom-up, in the face of fierce persecutions, and without consistent clerical input. It was evident that many believers were self-confident enough to exercise a great deal of religious agency; among those arrested for heresy between 1517–1566 were former priests and monks, but also weavers, bakers, hatmakers, and even middle-class women. Researchers from the Low Countries had already devoted considerable interest to studying the social profile of the first generation of Calvinists. As in France, they had done so by studying the victims of persecution as well as Reformed activists. This had helped to disprove arguments about Calvinism as the faith of either the poor, the bourgeois, or the nobility—adherents came from all those groups. But a lack of qualitative sources meant such analyses remained nevertheless quite schematic.22 In the Netherlands, moreover, it was evident that many of these lay believers were highly eclectic in their beliefs. Their interest in dissenting ideas very often did not lead to a clear confessional choice. It was usually their opponents who in the sources labelled them as martinists, Calvinists, anabaptists, spiritualists, libertines, or adamites. They themselves insisted they were just “Christians”.23 True, both in France and the Netherlands, persecution unwittingly resulted in the hardening of confessional differences.24 Work on religious exiles by Johan Decavele, Andrew Pettegree and Heinz Schilling has suggested that the faith of many eclectic believers became more distinctly Protestant while in exile. Exiles banded together in “Stranger Churches”, which themselves defined their theological and ecclesiological basis through the confrontation with other exiles as

20 Rublack, Reformation Europe runs to 1648; MacCulloch, Reformation. 21 Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation; Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung”. 22 Moreau, “La corrélation”, p. 286–301. Decavele, De dageraad van de reformatie in Vlaanderen; Duke, Reformation and Revolt. For France, see, e. g., Davis, Society and Culture; Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion; Heller, The Conquest of Poverty. 23 Duke, Reformation and Revolt; Trapman, “Le rôle des ‘sacramentaires’”, p. 1–24. 24 Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology.

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well as the host communities.25 Yet, there were also a considerable number of believers who themselves refused to choose between the new confessions, as Thierry Wanegffelen and Allan Galpern noted for France, and Juliaan Woltjer and others did for the Low Countries. These believers wanted to remain “Christians”.26 For the Netherlands, the existence of this phenomenon is easier to prove than in France, because it seems to have lasted longer. When the Dutch Revolt at last produced a state in which Protestantism was legalised, from around 1580, the Reformed churches acquired a monopoly on public worship, but the authorities did not follow this up with legislation to force people to actually attend this ‘public church’. Because “freedom of conscience” was enshrined in the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which developed into the constitution of the Dutch Republic, people could not be challenged in court for their religious ideas (this, incidentally, also virtually put an end to witch trials, although not to prosecutions for atheism).27 The Dutch Reformed churches, moreover, themselves only admitted those to the Lord’s supper who, as adults, had been prepared to subscribe to the Heidelberg catechism and the Dutch confession. But since these churches could only exercise discipline over members, many male believers, especially, never took the step to formally join the church, or only did so when they were middle-aged. To be sure, many non-members attended church, where they were known as liefhebbers or amateurs. Yet others opted to attend what started as Catholic, Mennonite and Lutheran house-churches, which were officially banned, but nevertheless were often tolerated by the authorities. While confessional subcultures evolved rapidly, they thus did so with virtually no positive government input.28 This was quite unlike the situation in France, where the regime became more and more adamant that one had to be a Catholic to be a loyal subject, and Calvinists were steadily marginalised long before the formal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 put an end to confessional coexistence.29 While ideas on confessionalisation as a politically driven, top-down process thus did not sit comfortably with the French or Dutch situation, in the 1990s Dutch scholars tended to assume that by 1650 voluntary church membership had nevertheless led to the emergence of a religiously segregated society, in which people identified so strongly with their churches that they tried to stay within their own confessional subculture.30 This is certainly how Dutch society had worked between 1880 and 1960, and in the

25 Decavele, De dageraad van de reformatie in Vlaanderen; Schilling, Niederlandische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert; Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt. This view is nuanced in Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration. 26 Galpern, Religions of the People; Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève; Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd. 27 Mout, “Limits and Debates”, p. 37–47. 28 Hsia and van Nierop, Calvinism and Religious Toleration. 29 Tallon, Conscience nationale. 30 In most scholarship this has remained implicit, but see Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs.

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world in which my parents and grandparents had grown up; historians tended to project this image back onto the past. Yet better local studies that emerged in the 1980s showed that commitment to these subcultures was by no means universal or stable. By 1620 only about 20% of the adult population of a city like Haarlem was a registered member of the Reformed churches, another 20% probably identified as Catholic, and there were 10% Lutherans and Mennonites; among the others were many liefhebbers, who attended church regularly but never joined, or deferred that decision until they were older. Some people shopped around between churches, and there were mixed marriages and conversions.31 Although it is clear that people tended to take religion as seriously as they had always done, it seems that they had taken advantage of the chance to exercise the right to choose their own type of confessional allegiance.32 Moreover, in everyday life and sociability, there prevailed what Willem Frijhoff in 1985 termed omgangsoecumene, a pragmatic acceptance of religious difference in everyday social interaction.33

4.

Studying Believers’ Identities

In the Dutch context, it is thus pertinent to ask, first, how and why people made these religious choices, and secondly, what happened to them if they did. Yet how to answer such questions? As we have seen, there had been attempts to create a social profile for sixteenth-century Calvinists especially. Yet this only went so far—indeed, booksellers were overrepresented in the Calvinist minorities in France and the Netherlands, for instance, yet that did not explain why some booksellers did, and others did not, end up opting to break with the church. In the seventeenth century, women were overrepresented in the membership of all Dutch churches, but this was as yet unexplained.34 When it came to studying individual decisions, the 1990s literature was still heavily reliant on two much older types of explanation—the one religious, the other related to socio-economic factors. The first considered religious choice as a process of conversion. In the Christian tradition there are of course two cultural scripts for describing a conversion—that of Paul, who had a sudden insight on the road to Damascus, and that of Augustine, which is about a long and arduous struggle.35 Both were used very frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe conversions to a more religious life within a confession.

31 Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie; Pollmann, “From Freedom of Conscience to Confessional Segregation”, p. 123–148. 32 The category of the liefhebber was highlighted in van Deursen, Bavianen en slijkgeuzen. 33 Frijhoff, “Katholieke toekomstverwachting ten tijde van de Republiek”, p. 430–459. 34 Pollmann, “Women and Religion”, p. 162–182. 35 Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine”, p. 3–34.

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Yet while Reformation scholars widely assumed that such “conversion” experiences had also driven people to change confessions, I noted that very few Protestant conversion narratives were actually written in order to account for a change of confession or a break with Rome. The few converts who wrote a conversion narrative, like Luther, tended to do so not as an end in itself, but as an explanation or excuse for something else. The most extensive account of Luther’s Turmerlebnis, for instance, emerged in the introduction to his collected works, in which he tells how many younger followers found it hard to understand why he had not made a clean break with Rome sooner. The story of the tower experience was introduced to explain how he had arrived at his theology.36 If and when sixteenth-century Protestants reflected on their decision to leave the old church, they tended to do so not in terms of conversion but as the result of a learning process; once they had been ignorant, but now they had become knowledgeable. This is very literally so, for instance, in the memoirs of Thomas Platter from Basel, whose quest to become literate fused with his decision to break with the old church.37 Such a development did not require one to kill the old Adam, or to become a new man; rather, believers could conceive of it as a way of growing up. They were like children who had “attained knowledge”. This had several advantages. First, it allowed them to retain some sense of continuity with their former selves, and perhaps also to retain the connection with their relatives and ancestors. After all, one of the most frequent and stinging questions traditional Christians could ask of dissenters was whether they believed their ancestors were in hell. Many Protestants solved this problem by arguing that their ancestors would be forgiven because they simply could not have known. Secondly, this type of reasoning also fitted the general rhetoric that Protestants used when addressing Catholic laypeople; these were not bad, but “ignorant” and “deceived”. Their beliefs were often dismissed as those of “little women” and the poor.38 The self-image of Protestants as more intelligent, educated, and literate was carried over into the second way of thinking about religious choice in the Reformation, that of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Protestants (and many Catholics) have argued that individual agency and spirituality was itself either cause or effect of Reformation thought, and was thus largely restricted to Protestants.39 This case was and is usually made with reference especially to the English Puritans, who also furnished the spiritual autobiographies that allowed Weber to study the “Puritan mind”. Yet as sources these are, in fact, not at all typical for first-generation Calvinists on the continent. These only began to write such texts in the second half of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Puritan and Pietist models. By that time, they no longer

36 Pollmann, “A Different Road to God”, p. 47–64. 37 Le Roy Ladurie, Le siècle des Platter. 38 Pollmann, “A Different Road to God”. More extensive comments on the “scripting” of personal religious experience in Pollmann, Memory, p. 18–46. 39 Pollmann, “Being a Catholic”, p. 165–182.

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described choosing a new confession, but a rebirth within the faith in which they had grown up.40 As an explanation for the conversion of first-generation Protestants, I found Weber of no help at all. With so few Protestant conversion narratives in evidence, how then can one study religious choices and their consequences? In my attempts to do so, I have usually stayed clear of institutional sources, but combined a number of approaches that often involved the study of non-institutional narrative sources such as diaries, chronicles, memoirs, letters and poetry, even if these did not fit traditional notions of spiritual life-writing. I was by no means the only scholar to start using such material in new ways. James Amelang pioneered it for artisans’ texts, Hans Rudolf Velten and Wiebe Bergsma for diaries, Susanne Rau for German chronicles, and Geoff Mortimer, Hans Medick and Benigna von Krusenstjern did so for the Thirty Years War.41 This material is not necessarily easy to use. Early modern diarists, chroniclers and memoirists did not see introspection or the recording of emotions as their prime goal and are often frustratingly silent on matters that we might deem private. Yet they are very informative both on what mattered to them, and on issues of practice. And by following them on that route, we can assess very well how they weighed the pros and cons of different religious positions. In the context of the urbanised Low Countries where literacy rates were exceptionally high, this is an approach that does not just reflect the voices of the elites. The rise of “microhistory” encouraged the use of sources on random but well-documented individuals from the past, to explore past patterns of thought. While these sources are of course not “representative”, they do allow us to probe and better understand some of the motives for patterns of action and speech that we see emerge more anecdotally, or in fragments, in other sources such as judicial records or consistories.42 My first major exercise in doing this was by studying Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641), an exceptionally well-documented humanist lawyer from Utrecht, who was baptised a Catholic in 1565, spent some time without religious affiliation, then joined the “libertine” Reformed church that his wife attended, and ultimately evolved into a hard-line Calvinist. In the process he never reflected in writing on that change himself, but it was quite possible to follow him during this development. Using his writings, I argued that a failed suicide attempt constituted crucial evidence to him that he was in God’s hand, but that this was unrelated to his confessional choice. In organised religion, he searched especially for a way to keep order in his world, a world in which everything else had changed as a result of the Dutch Revolt. This is also what made him so hard-line, at

40 Pollmann, “A Different Road to God”. 41 Bergsma, De wereld volgens Abel Eppens; Velten, Das selbst geschriebene Leben; von Krusenstjern, Medick, and Veit, Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe; Amelang, The Flight of Icarus; Rau, Geschichte und Konfession; Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts. 42 Pollmann, Memory, p. 18–46; Pollmann, “Archiving the Present and Chronicling”, p. 231–252.

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least in theory. It led me to conclude that “lay believers made their religious choices not just on the basis of doctrine, but weighed the different, and contradictory, benefits of religious continuity, godly living and harmony between the civic and religious elements of the social order.” With hindsight, some theoretical reading on identity might actually have helped me contextualise the discovery that I struggled to articulate while working on my doctoral dissertation, i. e., that religious identity formation is a religious process but not just a religious process. One of the great attractions of the studying of individuals is that it forces us to reintegrate the different branches into which the historical profession has split the object of its studies. Individuals are not just political, intellectual, economic, religious, gendered or local animals; they are all these things at once. Even if we study them because we are interested in their capacity as farmers, university professors or widows, we have to understand their other capacities as well.43

Perhaps we will eventually be able to build on the theorising of intersectionality, to better study and understand how different identities intersect to create positions of power or disadvantage. This might also help to account, for instance, for the role that notions of masculinity and femininity played in the spread of new religious ideas. My second major question about Buchelius was how he had managed to keep up emotive friendships with non-Calvinists, while simultaneously being a hard-line Calvinist in his own church. As a member of the consistory, he insisted on orthodoxy, yet with his non-Calvinist friends, he communicated in non-confessional terms, which focused on pietas and generic Christian values.44 The latter observation, especially, helped to explain the practical dimensions of the Omgangsoecumene that helped to keep the peace in the urban corporate culture that continued to flourish in Dutch towns. Guilds, militia companies and literary societies continued to function with a mixed religious membership. Whereas earlier scholars argued that Dutch society of the seventeenth century consisted of some tolerant and some intolerant people, Buchelius’ case and comparisons with some others suggested that many Dutch believers operated two norms for religiosity at once, one confessional, and another much more practice-based and generically Christian. They decided which one to use dependent on the setting and situation.45

43 Pollmann, Religious Choice, p. 10. 44 Pollmann, Religious Choice. 45 Pollmann, Religious Choice; Pollmann, “The Bond of Christian Piety”, p. 53–71.

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5.

Catholic Violence and Catholic Identity

My dissection of Buchelius’ development was useful in rethinking the process of religious choice, as something that was neither social/political or religious, but both. In a Netherlandish context, the next question that now presented itself for further exploration was, first, to see what would happen if we were to read texts like those of Buchelius’ comparatively, and secondly, to see what light this might shed on the other side of the religious spectrum in the Low Countries, that of the people who had opted to stick with Catholicism. Whereas there was an established tradition of thinking about choices for Protestantism as an individual issue, this was not the case for Catholics. In the Low Countries, as elsewhere in Europe, Catholic historiography was shaped both by its clerical roots and by the abundance of institutional sources. For a long time, the interest in orthodox laypeople as religious agents was very limited, and where it existed, ecclesiastical archives proved not the best place to do research on the role of the laity.46 Inquisition archives, so exceptionally rich when it comes to researching dissent, are not necessarily the best place to study mainstream religion. My new focus on Catholics was also inspired by a growing interest in the history of religious violence. In France there was a tradition of seeing “religion” as the “cloak” for political and economic self-interest in the wars of religion, a position that is sometimes associated with the work of Henri Hauser, but that also goes back to the seventeenth century. Yet from the 1980s Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet were arguing that the popular violence in the French wars of religion was intrinsically religious, and was triggered by the presence of Calvinists in Catholic communities that were trying to protect the corpus christianum against the mostly symbolic attacks on their religious values by Calvinists. The conflicts in France, the Low Countries, and England that historians of the 1970s had studied as “revolutions” were now being recast as “wars of religion”.47 To scholars of the Netherlands, the work on France revived the question why there was so much less popular violence by Catholics in the Low Countries.48 These Catholics, after all, encountered as big a threat to their values as their co-religionists in France, when in the 1560s Calvinists began to break images and then to attack the clergy. As Peter Marshall has argued for England, it was not self-explanatory that traditional Christians self-identified as Catholics.49 That they should have mobilised as such was

46 Pollmann, “Being a Catholic”. 47 Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu; Holt, “Putting Religion Back”, p. 524–551. 48 Van Nierop, “Similar Problems, Different Outcomes”, p. 26–56; Woltjer, “Geweld tijdens de godsdienstoorlogen in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden: een vergelijking” , translated as Woltjer, “Violence during the Wars of Religion”, p. 26–45; Benedict, Marnef, van Nierop, and Venard, Reformation. 49 Marshall, “Is the Pope Catholic”.

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not inevitable. Calvinists, moreover, were not born as outsiders—most of them were ex-Catholics, who had many ties to others in their societies. Comparing the situations in France and the Low Countries, I noticed that much of the violence in France had in fact been headed by militant clerics, who for some time had been developing a new and much more aggressive ethos which they now used to mobilise the laity for the defence of community. In this reading it became the duty of “good Catholics” to fight Protestantism if the authorities failed to do so.50 In the Low Countries, by contrast, laypeople felt little commitment to come to the rescue of the clergy. As the Catholic chronicler Marcus van Vaernewijck recorded in the summer of 1566, Catholics in Ghent were unwilling to pay for the defence of churches, saying: ’tis their war, ’tis their business, the [Calvinists] are preaching against their soup bowl and avarice and other abuses, and many of the [Calvinist] preachers are runaway friars and monks, so it’s their own sort who are the source of this unrest and the errors, and it would be much more sensible for them to control and resist their own kind themselves […] but they want to urge others to fight while they themselves sit back comfortably, waiting to hear later how things have gone.51

Even after the great wave of Calvinist iconoclasm and rebellion in 1566, Catholics barely organised. In 1572, they did not mobilise to stop the violent Reformation of the rebellious cities in Holland and Zeeland, while around 1580, Calvinists were able to take control over a string of Flemish and Brabantine cities without eliciting more than passive popular resistance. This demanded an explanation, especially because after 1585, the Habsburg southern Netherlands would rapidly turn into a bulwark of militant Counter-Reformation piety.52 In my Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635 (2011), I used the writings of individual Catholics, mostly urban chroniclers and female poets, to chart how individual Christians initially rejected violent solutions to the problem of heresy because they continued to see their kinsmen and fellow citizens among the Calvinist crowds. Unlike in France, there was no clerical leadership to encourage confessional mobilisation. In the Netherlands the clergy had been told, as early as the 1520s, not to preach about heresy to the laity, because this might just put ideas into their heads. Instead, they preached that the laity should focus on its own sins and leave it up to clerics to sort out ecclesiastical matters.53 Contacts with French clergy were limited during the ValoisHabsburg wars, and there was a ban on studying in France, for instance. Moreover, clergy

50 51 52 53

Pollmann “Countering the Reformation”, p. 83–120. Pollmann, Catholic Identity, there p. 67. Harline and Put, A Bishop’s Tale. Pollmann, “Each Should Tend His Own Garden”, p. 29–45.

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in the Netherlands was preoccupied with a controversial plan to reform the bishoprics. For this reason, there was almost no effort to unite Catholics around their confessional identity. Only when the Flemish and Brabantine cities were forcibly reformed, around 1580, did traditional believers develop a greater sense of Catholic solidarity, and a heightened sense of antagonism towards Protestants. In Brussels, the patrician widow Katharyna Boudewijns wrote poetry in order to encourage mobilisation: You Catholics make sure that Calvin be chased away and Luther eradicated with their senseless ministers. Get on the move, you Calvinists, full of mutiny and discord. You’ve lived in Brussels all too long. Of your tyranny and thieving we have seen quite enough.54

When the Habsburgs reconquered the southern Low Countries in 1585, they heeded Boudewijns’ call to expel the Protestants. Even so, Protestants were given a grace period in which to decide whether they chose to reconcile with the church, or to sell their property and leave. About 100,000 Protestants went, at first mainly to cities like Frankfurt and Bremen, but later mostly to the Dutch Republic. For the subjects who remained, the Habsburgs used a familiar strategy to force closure to civic conflict, that had also been deployed in the French edicts of pacification and that eventually was to be part of Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes. The peace agreements, by which the Habsburgs overlords “reconciled” the cities, all began with an oblivion clause that legislated for a full amnesty and the “forgetting” of civic conflict and any previous war crimes. This forced all parties to accept the status quo, and allowed any subjects who were prepared to make their peace with the Catholic church and wanted to make a fresh start, to do so.55 Yet this Habsburg policy does not in itself account for the rapidity with which the Southern Netherlands from 1585 were to turn into a bulwark of Counter-Reformation. Habsburg state power as such had not notably increased, and the Tridentine agenda was not easy to implement in the war-torn provinces. One of the explanations I presented in my book was that the Habsburg regime sought the help of thousands of former Catholic refugees, who now returned to their homesteads. When in exile, Catholic elites, both lay and clerical, had found a safe haven in Cologne, Liège or Douai. There, Netherlandish Jesuits especially had begun to test new methods to actively involve

54 Cited in Pollmann, Catholic Identity, p. 123–124. 55 Pollmann, Catholic Identity, p. 159–175; on this strategy, see Pollmann, Memory, p. 140–158.

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lay men and women in the struggle against heresy, for instance, through the new confraternities. The Jesuits now furnished arguments that Catholic activists could use in everyday discussions with heretics, and offered new forms of sociability that encouraged joint resolve and action. This effort was to pay off also politically. As Geert Janssen has subsequently demonstrated, the Habsburg regime followed the advice of bishop Willem Lindanus to put these former exiles in charge of urban politics. This sealed a much closer collaboration between upper- and middle-ranking clerics and local Catholic leadership to rebuild the cities as self-identifying Catholic bulwarks against heresy, and to deliver thereby a new form of Habsburg leadership on the ground.56 Even so, the campaign could only succeed because, as a consequence of the wars and the local Calvinist regimes, there emerged a much greater sense of Catholic distinctiveness than had been in evidence twenty years earlier. This created room for a Counter-Reformation “from the middle”, in which laypeople and clerics could collaborate in new confraternities, in investments in sacred spaces, in rituals and in education. This process was to gather pace from 1598, when the Habsburg Low Countries passed into the hands of the “Archdukes”, the Infanta Isabella and her husband Albert of Austria. Luc Duerloo had shown that these royals treated religion as a key tool in winning the war in the heretical North and invited active involvement of the population by arguing that there was a “new covenant” between the Virgin Mary and their Netherlandish subjects, and that devotion could help win the war.57 Their message was amplified by Flemish artists such as Peter Paul Rubens—son of a one-time Protestant refugee—and Theodor Thulden. How successful they were is also evident from the large numbers who joined confraternities, flocked to new pilgrimage sites, and supported new devotions. It was also apparent in the resistance to Protestantisation that emerged in territories which were conquered by the Dutch Republic in 1620s and 1630s. Even in the Brabantine cities which had had a history of heresy in the sixteenth century, Dutch ministers now found it virtually impossible to get anyone to convert to Protestantism. No wonder that many of these strategies were subsequently copied by other Habsburg rulers, for instance in Bohemia.58

6.

Memory and Confessional Identity

When a truce was agreed upon in 1609 and the borders between the Dutch Republic and the Habsburg Netherlands opened, tens of thousands of Southern emigres flocked to Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels to see their families and their home towns. Most of them

56 Janssen, The Dutch Revolt. 57 Duerloo, “Pietas Albertina”, p. 1–18. 58 Louthan, Converting Bohemia.

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had not been back since the 1580s, and for many of them, it became a great deception, a shocking confrontation with a new type of Catholic piety, that was not at all what they remembered from their childhoods.59 In the process of working on the development of Catholic identities, I had noticed the important role that memory was playing in forging and maintaining the cultural fissure between the inhabitants of the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. Also inspired by work by Philip Benedict on the politics of confessional remembering in seventeenth-century France, in 2007 I developed a plan to study the role of memory in the creation of new political identities and notions of “Netherlandishness” as a result of the Dutch Revolt.60 With funding from NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, I could, for the first time, collaborate with a larger research team, and spent the years between 2008 and 2013 collectively studying different aspects of war memory and the influence they had. Although none of the members of the team focused explicitly on religion, the project had some major implications for understanding how religion, politics and personal memories interacted. Team member Jasper van der Steen, who worked on the emergence of a “national” public memory discourse in both North and South, was the first to note that whereas in the Habsburg Netherlands public memories tended to focus on the religious, in the Dutch Republic they tended to be secular. In Dutch public spaces, the memory culture hinged on the juxtaposition of “Spanish” cruelty and “Dutch” liberty and victimhood, the very same juxtaposition I had studied as the start of my career. Just as memories of the heretical past had been ousted in the cities of the Southern Netherlands, in the Dutch Republic the Revolt was framed as a war against a foreign enemy rather than as the civil war it had essentially been. References to providence and the divine remained quite generic. We would be wrong to see this as a sign of its modernity, however. Van der Steen’s explanation for this is that in a religiously pluriform society it was impossible to reach consensus on a national narrative about the past that was religious. And in tandem with the secular public memory culture in the Dutch Republic, there existed confessional memory cultures, some of them transnational, and within all religious communities. In all Dutch Christian communities, religious memories were defined by victimhood, martyrdom and exile.61 Team members Johannes Müller and Erika Kuijpers worked on the personal dimensions of war memories, which also had important religious dimensions. Müller explored how family memories of exile continued to be mobilised by new generations of Protestants to assert their credentials, and in some cases also became a source of pride and status for other members of their religious communities.62 Kuijpers did pioneering 59 60 61 62

Pollmann, Catholic Identity, p. 187–188. Benedict, “Divided Memories”, p. 381–405. Van der Steen, Memory Wars; Pollmann, “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld”, p. 154–175. Müller, Exile Memories.

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work on the study of personal memories of violence. Using insights regarding the premediation and re-mediation of memory and new psychological theory, Kuijpers showed how providential thought and miracles helped individuals make sense of memories of violence, loss, and pain. By emphasising the providential or miraculous nature of one’s own survival, or that of one’s own community, early modern believers were able to turn painful experiences into “secondary gain”. Together, we also identified this strategy in public memory, which helped explain how Catholics in the Southern Netherlands had somehow turned memories of the Reformed destruction of images into evidence for the triumph of Catholicism.63 The history of religious change in the Low Countries, as in France, demonstrates that it is helpful to think of the Reformation as a process in which people who had once had a shared identity developed new religious positions that could pit them against their ancestors, their neighbours and communities, as well as the state. Becoming a Protestant was rarely conceived of as a conversion, but as positioning oneself as a believer in the face of new ideas, social pressures, and changing political environments. Protestants may have turned into aggressive militants, but many also worried about breaking with the past and with those around them. They thus also developed strategies to paper over the cracks. Many traditional Christians who were attracted to Reform ideas also found there was much that argued against religious changes threatening the breakup of local communities, family ties, and ancestral loyalties. They did not automatically come to identify themselves as Catholics or anti-Protestant—or know what to do with that idea when they had. For traditional Christians, to turn into self-styled “good Catholics”, let alone to mobilise as such, took more than the presence of Protestants, decisions in Trent, or state policies. In the choice for Protestantism, too, local politics, leadership from the middle, and personal factors all had their role to play. The sort of religious strategies this involved for Catholics who ended up living in a clandestine subculture have since been wonderfully explored by Carolina Lenarduzzi, who has worked on the role of sound and touch, clothes and music among Catholics in the Dutch Republic.64 In the process of thinking about the individual experience of change, I have been well served by the notion of identity, as have many others. Both theoretically and in historical practice, we have learned to see identities as the fluid outcome of a dynamic between individuals and broader communities, imagined or otherwise. In the context of Reformation studies, identity has become important in the course of discussions about diffusion, the success or failure of reform processes, the agency of believers, and religious conflict. By the time I published my own synthetic study Memory in Early Modern Europe in 2017, my original questions about religious choice had broadened 63 Kuijpers, “Fear, Indignation, Grief, and Relief ”, p. 93–111; Kuijpers, “The Creation and Development of Social Memories of Traumatic Events”, p. 191–201; Kuijpers and Pollmann, “Turning Sacrilege into Victory”, p. 155–170. 64 Lenarduzzi, Katholiek in de Republiek.

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into a much wideranging interest in how early modern people negotiated change. Yet I believe we can take many of the methodological insights we gain when studying early modern religious identities straight to questions about the diffusion of other forms of change, innovation, or new knowledge. This will undoubtedly help us find better explanations for other transformations that took place in the societies and cultures of early modern Europe.

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Kingdon, Robert M. “The Control of Morals in Calvin’s Geneva.” In The Social History of the Reformation, edited by Lawrence P. Buck and Jonathan W. Zophy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972, p. 3–16. Krusenstjern, Benigna von, Hans Medick, and Patrice Veit (eds.). Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999. Kuijpers, Erika. “The Creation and Development of Social Memories of Traumatic Events. The Oudewater Massacre of 1575.” In Hurting Memories and Beneficial Forgetting: Posttraumatic Stress Disorders, Biographical Developments, and Social Conflicts, edited by Michael Linden, and Krzysztof Rutkowski. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013, p. 191–201. Kuijpers, Erika. “Fear, Indignation, Grief and Relief: Emotional Narratives in War Chronicles from the Netherlands (1568–1648).” In Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700, edited by Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 93–111. Kuijpers, Erika, and Judith Pollmann. “Turning Sacrilege into Victory. Catholic Memories of Iconoclasm, 1566–1700.” In Rhythms of Revolt, edited by Éva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William Pooley. London/New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 155–170. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Le Siècle des Platter, 1499–1628. vol.1, Le mendiant et le professeur. Paris: Fayard, 1996. Lenarduzzi, Carolina. Katholiek in de Republiek. De belevingswereld van een religieuze minderheid 1570–1750. Nijmegen: Van Tilt, 2019. Louthan, Howard. Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation. Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Allen Lane, 2003. Marnef, Guido. Antwerp in the Age of Reformation. Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577, translated by J. C. Grayson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 48–56. Marshall, Peter. “Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism.” In Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, edited by Ethan Shagan. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Moller, Herbert. “Youth as a Force in the Modern World.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 10/3 (1968), p. 237–260. Moreau, Gérard. “La corrélation entre le milieu social et professionnel et le choix de religion à Tournai.” In Sources de l’histoire religieuse de la Belgique: Moyen âge et temps modernes; Actes du colloque de Bruxelles, 30 nov.–2 dec. 1967. Leuven: Publications Universitaires de Leuven, 1968, p. 286–301. Mortimer, Geoff. Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Mout, Marianne Elisabeth Henriette Nicolette. “Limits and Debates. A Comparative View of Dutch Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In The Emergence of Tolerance

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in the Dutch Republic, edited by Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck and Jonathan I. Israel. Leiden/ New York/Cologne: Brill, 1997, p. 37–47. Muchembled, Robert. L’invention de l’homme moderne: sensibilités, mœurs et comportements collectifs sous l’Ancien Régime. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Müller, Johannes. Exile Memories and the Dutch Revolt. The Narrated Diaspora, 1550–1750. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. Nierop, Henk van. “Similar Problems, Different Outcomes: The Revolt of the Netherlands and the Wars of Religion in France.” In A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective, edited by Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 26–56. Ozment, Steven. Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Pettegree, Andrew. Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Pollmann, Judith. “Eine natürliche Feindschaft: Ursprung und Funktion der schwarzen Legende über Spanien in den Niederlanden, 1560–1581.” In Feindbilder. Die Darstellung des Gegners in der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, edited by Franz Bosbach. Cologne: Böhlau, 1992, p. 73–93. Pollmann, Judith. “A Different Road to God. The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century.” In Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, edited by Peter van der Veer. London/New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 47–64. Pollmann, Judith. Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: the Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–1641). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pollmann, Judith. “Women and Religion in the Dutch Golden Age.” In Dutch Crossing 24/2 (2000), p. 162–182. https://www.doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2000.11730780. Pollmann, Judith. “Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline.” In The Sixteenth Century Journal 33/2 (2002), p. 423–438. https://doi.org/10.2307/4143915. Pollmann, Judith. “The Bond of Christian Piety. The Individual Practice of Tolerance and Intolerance in the Dutch Republic.” In Calvinism and Toleration in the Dutch Republic, edited by Henk van Nierop and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 53–71. Pollmann, Judith. “From Freedom of Conscience to Confessional Segregation? Religious Choice and Toleration in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1750.” In Persecution and Pluralism. Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1700, edited by Richard Bonney and David Trim. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, p. 123–148. Pollmann, Judith. “Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560–1585.” In Past & Present 190 (2006), p. 83–120. https://www. doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtj003. Pollmann, Judith. “‘Each Should Tend His Own Garden’: Anna Bijns and the Catholic Polemic against the Reformation.” In Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007), p. 29–45.

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Pollmann, Judith. Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520–1635. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pollmann, Judith. “Being a Catholic in Early Modern Europe.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert Janssen, and Mary Laven. Ashgate: Farnham, 2013, p. 165–182. Pollmann, Judith. “Met grootvaders bloed bezegeld. Over religie en herinneringscultuur in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlanden.” In De Zeventiende Eeuw 29/2 (2013), p. 154–175. Pollmann, Judith. “Archiving the Present and Chronicling for the Future in Early Modern Europe.” In The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe, Special Issue of Past & Present 233 (2016), edited by Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham, p. 231–252. Pollmann, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 18–46. Rau, Susanne. Geschichte und Konfession: Städtische Geschichtsschreibung und Erinnerungskultur im Zeitalter von Reformation und Konfessionalisierung in Bremen, Breslau, Hamburg und Köln. Hamburg/Munich: Dölling & Galitz, 2002. Rublack, Ulinka. Reformation Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Schilling, Heinz. Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert: Ihre Stellung im Sozialgefüge und im religiösen Leben deutscher und englischer Städte. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1972. Schilling, Heinz. “Reformierte Kirchenzucht als Sozialdisziplinierung: Die Tätigkeit des Emder Presbyteriums in den Jahren 1557–1562.” In Niederlande in Nordwestdeutschland: Studien zur Regional- und Stadtgeschichte Nordwestkontinentaleuropas im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, Franz Petri zum 80. Geburtstag, edited by Wilfried Ehbrecht and Heinz Schilling. Cologne: Böhlau, 1983, p. 261–327. Schmidt, Heinrich Richard. “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung.” In Historische Zeitschrift 265 (1997), p. 639–682. Spaans, Joke. Haarlem na de Reformatie: stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620. The Hague: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1989. Spohnholz, Jesse. The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. Strauss, Gerald. “Success and Failure in the German Reformation.” In Past & Present 67 (1975), p. 30–63. Tallon, Alain. Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVI e siècle: essai sur la vision gallicane du monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Toussaert, Jacques. Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du Moyen âge. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1963. Trapman, Johannes “Le rôle des ‘sacramentaires’ des origines de la réforme jusqu’en 1530 aux Pays-Bas.” In Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 63 (1983), p. 1–24. Van der Steen, Jasper. Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566–1700. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015. Van Engen, John. “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem.” In The American Historical Review 91/3 (1986), p. 519–552.

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Velten, Hans Rudolf. Das selbst geschriebene Leben: eine Studie zur deutschen Autobiographie im 16. Jahrhundert. Heidelberg: Winter, 1995. Vogler, Bernard, and Janine Estèbe, “La Genèse d’une société protestante. Étude comparée de quelques registres consistoriaux Languedociens et Palatins vers 1600.” In Annales Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 31 (1976), p. 362–388. Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation of the Generations. Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, c. 1500–1700.” In Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (2011), p. 93–121. Wanegffelen, Thierry. Ni Rome ni Genève: des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 1997. Woltjer, Jan Juliaan. Friesland in hervormingstijd. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1962. Woltjer Jan Juliaan, “Geweld tijdens de godsdienstoorlogen in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden: een vergelijking’, in: Trajecta 3 (1994), translated as “Violence during the Wars of Religion in France and the Netherlands: A Comparison.” In Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 76, 1996, p. 26–45. Zeeden, Ernst Walter. “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe.” In Historische Zeitschrift 185 (1958), p. 249–299. Zock Hetty. “Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958). A Psychosocial Interpretation of Luther and Its Relevance for Understanding Religious Identity Formation Today.” In NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 76/1 (2022), p. 61–75.

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Alexandra Walsham

Generations Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations

1.

Introduction

Generation is an unusually rich and resonant term with multiple meanings. In English, its etymological roots lie in Anglo-Norman and Middle French. It describes the action and fact of bringing something into existence, in particular a living organism, whether an animal, plant or human being. It pinpoints a moment of creation and birth, and is a synonym for reproduction, procreation, and the propagation of species. At the same time the word also refers to both the process of generating, and the product of that process, the entity that is generated. In the medieval and early modern era, it could mean ancestry, lineage and descent, or an account of this in the form of a genealogy or pedigree, as well as family or breed. These definitions have drifted out of use and are now largely obsolete, but they were alive and well in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other senses of the term have proved more resilient, notably its use as a collective noun to describe a group of coevals. It is also a shorthand for the average period that it takes for children to grow up, become adults and have children of their own, which is generally understood to be around thirty years. In turn, “generation” is deployed as a rough measure of the passage of time. The semantic range the word carried in English our period finds parallels in other European vernaculars from Spanish and Portuguese to Italian, Dutch and German. In Latin, its closest equivalent is generatio, though progenies (offspring), genus (race), genesis (birth), saeculum (century) and seculum (age) also encapsulate some of its inflections.1 The term generation thus highlights the interconnections between three key themes: the origin of living things, the presence of social cohorts marked by a common position in time, and the mental frameworks by which we comprehend and periodise historical development itself. This essay considers its value as an analytical tool for investigating the evolution and pluralisation of Christianity in the early modern world. It explores the generation as a revealing lens onto the series of religious reformations that convulsed Europe between c. 1500 and 1750. It reflects on the historiographical trends that are fostering renewed interest in this topic and delineates the challenges and opportunities it presents, before turning to sketch some of the ways in which a generational perspective

1 ‘generation, n.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, https://www. oed.com/view/Entry/77521.

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adds new dimensions to our understanding of the institutional schism and theological revolution precipitated by the advent of Protestantism, as well as the broader cultural and social repercussions of the Reformation in subsequent centuries.2

2.

Historiographies of Reformation and Generation

Scholarship on the era preceding, during and after the European Reformations has been shaped by a range of methodological tendencies and disciplinary preoccupations over the last few decades. In a 2014 article that offered a critical appraisal of some of these, I began by asking this key question: How do we conceptualize and explain religious change in medieval and early modern Europe without perpetuating distorting paradigms inherited from the very era of the past that is the subject of our study? How can we do justice to historical development over time without resorting to linear grand narratives that have their intellectual origins in the very movements that we seek to comprehend?3

These are problems with which we continue to grapple. One of the hallmarks of my own work is an enduring interest in the continuities that tempered, mediated and even facilitated the religious transformations that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I have been drawn to subjects that allow me to probe how particular elements of culture persist against a backdrop of dramatic ruptures in belief, practice and experience and what purposes this serves. I have preferred formulations like “migrations of the holy” (itself borrowed from John Bossy’s Christianity in the West 4 ) that foreground slow, gradual and messy processes and their unforeseen side-effects. This is a trait that I share with a number of other Reformation historians of my generation. Products of our times and of our training, in our efforts to capture the ambiguities, complexities and ironies of religious transition over the longue durée, we have often privileged the forces of stasis, inertia, and creative compromise at the cost of acknowledging the impact of radical change and profound disjuncture. One principal reason for this is the intrinsic allergy towards historical narratives that smack of teleology and seem to be underpinned by self-congratulatory assumptions about progress towards modernity which has been bequeathed to us by post-modernism. Much recent work has firmly pushed back against these progressive paradigms: against the attractive tale of the decline of a

2 This essay summarises the approach in Walsham, Generations, for which see a fuller treatment of this theme. 3 Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy”, p. 241. 4 Bossy, Christianity in the West, p. 161–171.

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persecuting society and the “rise of toleration”, against the influential thesis about the “disenchantment” and desacralisation of the mental and physical world linked with Max Weber, and against the affirming story of the discovery of the “self ” and the flowering of subjective individualism. All, however, retain their attractions and still have their disciples, both within and beyond academic circles.5 During the last fifty years, the study of early modern Christianity has been swept by some significant winds of change. One of these is a shift from ecclesiastical history and historical theology to the social and cultural history of the Reformation, from the study of powerful institutions and canonical doctrines towards collective mentalities and symbolic actions. This is partly a result of a reorientation from legislative documents and prescriptive texts towards sources that allow us to reconstruct the reception of religious change at the grassroots and the agency of ordinary people who fomented, catalysed, and collaborated with it on the ground. It is also a consequence of the influence exerted by social science methodologies, especially anthropology and its attendant technique of microhistory. It both reflects and reinforces recognition that the Reformation did not occur overnight by church, state or royal diktat but was a protracted process that extended across a long period. It was not only driven from above but also sprang up from below, and its beginnings and endpoints cannot be identified precisely. Such work is animated by the conviction that religion is less a static body of dogma than a living, breathing tissue. Where once we all spoke of “popular religion”, now (inspired by the work of the American sociologist Robert Orsi and the church historian David Hall) we tend to refer to “lived religion”.6 We have moved beyond liturgy, worship and ritual to the spaces and buildings in which they took place and the material objects around which they revolved, as well as to the senses, emotions and bodily gestures that religion cultivated and provoked. To use Bourdieu’s term, these are the forms of habitus by which the values, norms and attitudes of particular confessional groups were reproduced.7 A second significant shift is the reaction against linear narratives to which I have already referred—the resistance to what, in the English context, is called “Whig history”. In respect of the Reformation, these narratives (especially in northern Europe) tended to see Protestantism as a midwife of modernity and Catholicism as an obstacle to it. They associated the former with the rise of a “rational” and interior religion stripped of

5 For toleration, see, among others, Kaplan, Divided by Faith; Walsham, Charitable Hatred; Kaplan, Reformation and the Practice of Toleration; Johnson and Koyama, Persecution and Toleration. On disenchantment, see Scribner, “Reformation, Popular Magic, and the Disenchantment of the World”; Taylor, Secular Age; Pohlig, Säkularisierungen in der Frühen Neuzeit; Walsham, “The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed”; Cameron, Enchanted Europe; Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment. On individualism and the self, see Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence”; Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self ; Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England. 6 Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street; Hall, Lived Religion in America; Ammerman, “Lived Religion”. 7 Bourdieu, “The Genesis of the Concepts of ‘Habitus’ and ‘Field’”.

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its accumulation of medieval “superstition”; instinctively connected it with the advent of capitalism and the demise of magic; and saw it as a stepping-stone to the Enlightenment. A sizeable body of scholarship has demonstrated the dangers and weaknesses of this perspective, not least its denigration of the Counter-Reformation as an essentially defensive and reactionary movement, both culturally and intellectually.8 The early modern world that has emerged from this revisionism is still an enchanted universe, as well as a deeply intolerant one, though it was also filled with contradictory currents and coexisting impulses. Recent rethinking of the history of doubt exemplifies these tendencies: instead of seeing this as the terminus of a longer term process of secularisation and dechristianisation, scholars such as Alec Ryrie and Ethan Shagan present belief and unbelief as twins, umbilically linked with each other and interdependent.9 Another salutary effect has been to turn a spotlight on the fact that the models of periodisation we still employ were rooted in the early modern era itself. The very concept of the Middle Ages was a creation of Renaissance writers and Reformation polemicists, for whom it served as a foil for the superior classical civilisation and pristine apostolic religion they sought to reconstitute in their own time.10 A third trend is the loosening grip of confessional history in shaping our understanding of the period. Where once religious history was dominated by engaged believers, now many of its practitioners are people without a faith or only residually aligned with institutional churches. They are people who study it with the mixed blessing of detachment and indifference. The eclipse, not to say death, of confessional and denominational history should not be exaggerated: a number of eminent and inspiring scholars still wear their theological convictions and religious sympathies clearly on their sleeves, including Brad Gregory, Eamon Duffy and Alec Ryrie.11 Nevertheless, celebratory narratives of triumph and heroic survival are out of fashion, along with the associated model of “success” and “failure”.12 The questions that now prevail reflect a studied reorientation away from what the great historian of English puritanism Patrick Collinson once called “vertical histories” towards more “horizontal” ones. The vertical histories of dissenting Christianity of which he spoke were afflicted by a form of pious tunnel vision. Indebted to traditions of martyrology and apologetic, they fostered an illusion of unbroken continuity between the past and present and ignored the lateral links connecting the members of particular

8 See esp. Schwartz, Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. 9 Ryrie, An Emotional History of Doubt; Shagan, Faith and Judgement from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. 10 Kelley, Faces of History, chapters 6–7; Greengrass and Pohlig, “The Protestant Reformation and the Middle Ages”. 11 For an incisive discussion of this trend, see Gregory, “The Other Confessional History”. 12 Strauss, “Success and Failure in the German Reformation”; Parker, “Success and Failure”; Haigh, “Success and Failure in the English Reformation”.

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Generations

churches and sects with those who adhered to different beliefs and creeds. This was a species of genealogy, which sought to locate origins and trace descent, at the expense of considering the ties and interactions that bound individuals theoretically divided by faith, including those of kinship, neighbourhood, occupation, and rank. It was an exercise in identifying ancestry and establishing pedigree, which produced a narrow and restricted vision of religious bodies and systems in order to buttress contested and partisan positions.13 A more recent scholarly trend attests to growing awareness of the limitations of these historiographical traditions, as well as the need to interrogate critically how they came into being. This is the displacement of predominantly synchronic by more diachronic approaches to the study of the past, which are attentive to how historical phenomena evolve over time and which scrutinise the construction of the interpretive lenses through which we view it. The current surge of interest in the memory of the Reformation is not simply a product of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s protest against indulgences in 1517. It also reflects the perception that this event was largely recognised and indeed invented in retrospect, in the realm of remembrance, and that we cannot escape the long shadows it casts.14 Judith Pollmann’s NWO funded project Tales of the Revolt: Memory, Oblivion and Identity in the Low Countries and my own Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative research grant on Remembering the Reformation are cases in point. Both direct our attention to the processes by which decisive religious junctures inserted themselves in the imagination, not merely in the early modern era but also in subsequent centuries.15 New studies of medieval and early modern temporality and regimes of time are another symptom of the same tendency.16 What might be called the archival turn in Reformation studies provides a further index. Historians such as Jennifer Summit, Jesse Spohnholz and Liesbeth Corens are placing archives, libraries, and museums under the microscope and demonstrating how far these repositories are responsible for creating and perpetuating particular versions of the religious past. The survival and preservation of books, manuscripts, images, and objects is not accidental, but an artefact of carefully crafted strategies of remembering and forgetting designed to shape how these competing movements for religious renewal would be interpreted by posterity.17 13 Collinson, “Towards a Broader History of the Early Dissenting Tradition”. 14 Marshall, 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation. 15 Kuijpers, Pollmann, Müller, and van der Steen, Memory before Modernity; Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe; Cummings, Riley, Law, and Walsham, Remembering the Reformation; Walsham, Wallace, Law, and Cummings, Memory and the English Reformation. 16 Champion, Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries; Dohrn van Rossum, History of the Hour. 17 Summit, Medieval Books in Early Modern England; Corens, Peters, and Walsham, Archives and Information in the Early Modern World; Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel. See also Corens, Peters, and Walsham, The Social History of the Archive, and Corens, Peters, and Walsham, Archives and Information in the Early Modern World.

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Here I build on the speculative suggestion made in my earlier essay that thinking in terms of cycles and generations may be a fruitful way of delineating religious change without falling into the trap of teleology.18 This helps us to recapture the dynamic process by which early modern Christianity splintered and reconfigured itself between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, not least because it was one of the ways in which contemporaries understood both the human lifecycle and the passage of history and time. It also serves to correct one consequence of several of the trends discussed above: a tendency to side-line and marginalise theology. It enables the writing of a social and cultural history of religion that takes ideas and beliefs seriously and that attends to their practical ramifications in piety and everyday life. The laboratory for my enquiry is the British Isles, where the Reformation was a stateled enterprise contingent upon a number of factors, including the genetic lottery that determined the succession of its ruling Tudor and Stuart dynasties. Incremental and idiosyncratic in character, it was shaped by factional court politics in combination with a mixture of theological influences, from Lutheranism under Henry VIII to the Swiss reformed and Calvinist traditions that displaced it during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, with the temporary return of Catholicism under Mary I in between. Its implementation extended across several generations and the struggle to refine, complete and reverse it continued for two centuries, precipitating the confrontations that led to civil war in the 1640s, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of a godly republic. It rumbled on after both the Restoration of 1660 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, which saw the ejection of the Catholic king James II. Historians have often deployed generational metaphors to describe this long and troubled Reformation. Christopher Haigh wrote of its “premature birth”, “difficult labour” and the “sickly child” it brought forth. Patrick Collinson described the painful Birthpangs of Protestant England. John Bossy saw the demise of the medieval church as a precondition for the creation for the post-Reformation English Catholic community, while the keynote of Eamon Duffy’s evocative The Stripping of the Altars is regret that this flourishing religious tradition was cut down in its prime.19 Nevertheless, historians have been slow to perceive the potential of a generational approach to religious change in the British Isles. Anthony Milton’s recent book on the mid-seventeenth-century battle for the Church of England speaks of its “second Reformation”, partly drawing inspiration from an older vein of German scholarship on this theme.20 But the full potential of the generation as a prism onto the religious developments of the period is yet to be recognised in this setting. It has likewise been largely overlooked in studies of Protestant

18 Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy”. 19 Haigh, “The English Reformation”; Bossy, The English Catholic Community, p. 11; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. 20 Milton, England’s Second Reformation.

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and Catholic reform in Continental Europe, with a few exceptions, such as an article on clerical tensions in Basel by Amy Nelson Burnett.21 Why? One reason is that it is widely assumed that generations as a form of imagined community are a by-product of modernity. More particularly, their emergence has often been connected with the apprehension that time was accelerating, prompted by the experience of revolutionary events. This reflects the influence of the pioneering social scientist theorists of generation, starting with Auguste Comte in the 1840s, but flowering more fully in the 1920s and 1930s with the work of François Mentre, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and especially Karl Mannheim, for whom the notion that a group of coevals might share a common outlook served as a useful counterpoint to the Marxist preoccupation with class.22 Further sociological studies of this category were inspired by the student revolts and youth movements of the 1960s, which were understood as age-related conflicts.23 It is a striking fact that most attempts to deploy it as a model for understanding historical change have focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The recent American Historical Review conversation on this topic includes only one early modernist, and the absence of a medievalist is conspicuous.24 It is in the context of the crises of the world wars and nationalist struggles for liberation and independence that the merits of this “fertile and troublesome” concept have most frequently been recognised. For scholars such as Robert Wohl, Mary Fulbrook and Roy Foster, it offers a route to comprehending the formation of a sense of solidarity in response to traumatic contemporary developments. It is the premise of Wohl’s study that generations are “not born; they are made;” Fulbrook and Foster similarly investigate them as, in large part, epiphenomena of identity and memory.25 The Göttingen graduate programme in Generationengeschichte led by Bernd Weisbrod has stimulated considerable interest in generational dynamics, including a 2013 collection of essays on the theme of History by Generations.26 Once again much of this work centres on the modern period, though Mark Häberlein, Christian Kuhn and others have begun to explore this concept in relation to the late middle ages and early modern era.27 Located in the present, generations simultaneously look back to the past and are angled towards the future. Slippery and challenging to find in our sources, in the cohort model that has dominated most recent studies of generations, they are typically

21 Burnett, “Generational Conflict in the Late Reformation”. 22 For a discussion of these theorists of generations, see Jaeger, “Generations in History”. 23 See, among others, Feuer, The Conflict of Generations; Esler, The Youth Revolution; Kriegel and Hirsch, “Generational Difference”. 24 George, Glaser, Jacobs, Joshi, Marker, Walsham, Wang, and Weisbrod, “AHR Conversation”. 25 Wohl, The Generation of 1914, p. 5; Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives; Foster, Vivid Faces, p. 6. 26 Berghoff, Jensen, Lubinski, and Weisbrod, History by Generations. 27 Häberlein, Kuhn, and Hörl, Generationen in spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Städten; Kuhn, Generation als Grundbegriff einer historischen Geschichtskultur.

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understood as “a form of dwelling in time and space” and as “a vehicle for thought and action”.28 Historians and sociologists alike have frequently separated out the strands of definition that relate to family, kinship, ancestry, and lineage. This is both anachronistic and limiting. The coexisting meanings of the term cannot be disentangled in contemporary thinking; nor should they be in scholarly inquiry. The genealogical, social and historical dimensions of generations must be examined in conjunction with each other. The sheer ubiquity of the word generation in what Naomi Tadmor has called “the social universe of the English Bible” makes it all the more surprising that its capacity to illuminate religious developments has been overlooked and ignored.29 It saturated Scripture, especially the Old Testament, which begins with Genesis and the generations of Adam and Eve. The gospel of Matthew is a genealogy of Christ’s succession from King David; Luke traces his natural ancestry to Abraham. Its presence is indicative of the frequent use of the Latin generatio in Vulgate to translate a range of Hebrew words whose exact sense was difficult to parse. It was similarly pervasive in the Book of Common Prayer. The entry on “generation” in the Canterbury minister Thomas Wilson’s Christian Dictionary, first published in 1612, listed eight definitions extending from origin and pedigree to community and history, chronology and eternity.30 A fundamental term for describing the process of begetting offspring, it was singularly relevant to the story of Christianity, which revolves around the supernatural conception of Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world. The bible and apocrypha also inspired a language of self-identification and polemical denigration that belies the lingering impression that generational consciousness is a modern phenomenon. The rest of this essay teases out the three strands of my recent work on this theme. The first concerns age and the lifecycle; the second ancestry and genealogy; and the third history, time and memory. My central argument, by contrast with Wohl’s, is that in early modern England, the Reformation generations were born as well as made.

3.

Age

Like generation, age as a fundamental word has a dual sense. It refers to a period of time and to a stage of life. Contemporaries conceptualised the progression of people from birth to death as a stepped pedestal up from infancy to adulthood and downwards towards decrepit old age (Fig. 1). The medieval trope of the “ages of man” remained a powerful allegory of human physical development as well as historical evolution and temporal progression. Often

28 Burnett, Generations, p. 125; Foster, Generation, Discourse, and Social Change, p. 23. 29 Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible. 30 Wilson, Christian Dictionarie, p. 188–189, p. 221, p. 223.

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Fig. 1 The Ages of Man: As in a map here many may perceive , how tyme creeps on til death his life bereave. London, late 17th century. Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library. Call number: ART Box A265 no. 1 (size L).

understood in cyclical rather than linear terms, sometimes this was conflated with the regular cycle of the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.31 The rich metaphorical potential of the associated polarity of youth and age explains why contemporaries harnessed it to describe the process of the Reformation itself, as well as to encapsulate the societal tensions to which it gave rise. Writing later in life, evangelicals like William Tyndale looked back to its first phase as a kind of childhood, preceding its maturity as a faith.32 In the mid-seventeenth century, by contrast, godly Protestants striving to perfect and purify it through further legislation and iconoclastic action were convinced

31 Burrow, Ages of Man; Sears, The Ages of Man. 32 Tyndale, “Prologe in to the thirde boke of Moses called Leviticus”, sig. A1v–2r.

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that it was still a toddler at best, and desperately in need of a remedial intervention. The preacher of one rousing fast sermon to Parliament in 1644 spoke of “the things now a doing” and the church’s new “travail” to bring forth the “child of Reformation”.33 The preceding century of Protestantism was, in his view, merely a miscarriage. Loyal members of the Church of England as established by law with Elizabeth’s succession in 1558 were more sanguine and, in the petitions they submitted in support of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer in the years preceding the outbreak of Civil War, remembered its forefathers, including the episcopal martyrs burnt at the stake by Mary I, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, with pride and affection.34 To them this hundred-year-old institution carried the affirming patina of age. These internal battles reflected the fragmentation of the English Reformation. They also paralleled the ongoing struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism about which was the earthly embodiment of Christian truth. From the outset, the Reformation had been conceived as a contest between antiquity and novelty and between old and new. Catholics castigated their opponents as upstart heretics who had invented an illegitimate and new-fangled sect; Protestants turned the tables and claimed that it was their faith that was the “olde religion”, unchanged from the Christianity described in scripture and practised in the apostolic era. They presented the Reformation as the rejuvenation of a venerable tradition that had been corrupted by the papacy and buried in oblivion during the Middle Ages.35 The allegation that Protestantism fomented intergenerational rebellion was another dimension of the polemical conflicts that punctuated its early phases as an illicit protest movement. Conservatives lamented the disobedience of children to parents and servants to masters and the tidal wave of youthful unruliness for which the gospel appeared to be responsible. There is indeed evidence that young people were prominent in the spasms of image breaking and carnivalesque mockery that accompanied its first stages in the reigns of Henry VIII and his son, and that adolescent converts broke ties with elders who condemned them for deserting the church in which they had been baptised. There are well documented stories of sons who presume to instruct their benighted mothers and fathers and plead with them to abandon the whore of Babylon.36 Some did prioritise allegiance to God over loyalty to their kith and kin and were prepared to suffer paternal punishment for the sake of Christ. The anguish they felt seeps from surviving records. But this was also a commonplace of contemporary literature that must sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. The bible taught people that conflict and discord within families and households was an eschatological sign (Luke 12: 52–53). Just as it had accompanied the first arrival of Christ in the world, so it foretold his second coming 33 34 35 36

Gower, Things Now a Doing. Maltby, “Petitions for Episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer”, p. 119, p. 141, p. 160–161, p. 165–166. See, for example, Kellison, Survey of the New Religion; Nicholls, Abrahams Faith. Brigden, “Youth and the English Reformation”.

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in their own times. It is telling that the same passages were invoked by Elizabethan Catholics, eager to justify the actions of young girls and boys who abandoned their parents and travelled overseas to enter foreign convents and seminaries and join the ranks of Jesuit missionaries, determined to work for the reconversion of England.37 They also accompanied the explosion of radical sects in the mid seventeenth century, when again youthful defiance was both fiercely condemned and celebrated as evidence of the dawn of a new age. Religiously precocious girls like eleven-year-old Martha Hatfield were lauded as prophetesses, out of whose mouths sprang stirring pronouncements.38 The Quakers revelled in exchanging their blood relatives for surrogate parents in what was later christened the Society of Friends. Young men such as James Parnell pitted themselves against older orthodox ministers in disputations that they publicly compared with the legendary clash between David and Goliath.39 Privately, the real emotional turmoil that many experienced as they navigated these generational tensions is etched in their correspondence and memoirs. If this was a feature of the repeated cycles of religious renewal that comprised the English Reformations, so too was the recurrent reassertion of patriarchal and gerontocratic values as charismatic enthusiasm gave way to institutionalisation. One symptom of this was an emphasis on education and indoctrination that manifested itself in England, as in Germany and other parts of Europe, in a proliferation of catechisms. By the late sixteenth century, clerical disillusionment about lay receptivity to the Protestant message had set in to such an extent that many parish preachers felt it necessary to produce texts to instruct “children in yeeres” as well as “children in understanding”. The infants for whom pastors produced “milk” were often elderly parishioners who had failed to internalise Calvinist tenets and who yearned nostalgically for a mythical “merry world” which the Reformation had swept away.40 Along with this went the revival of what became known as “family religion”. The idea of the household as a nursery in which to cultivate “a seed to serve the Lord, which shall be accounted to him for a Generation” became prominent in Protestant and puritan circles.41 It was a forum in which fathers and mothers nurtured the faith of their children through bible-reading, catechising, sermon repetition and the perusal of pious books. Envisaged as a microcosm of the state and as an emblem of human-divine relationships in the handbooks of “domesticall duties” that poured from the presses, it was believed to be a bulwark of the status quo. But it could also be a Trojan horse, within which dissident and separatist tendencies could flourish. The home was a rival

37 38 39 40

See Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England, esp. chs. 1–2. Fisher, The Wise Virgin. Parnell, Goliahs Head Cut Off with His Own Sword, p. 2, p. 12. Green, “For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”. See also Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning. 41 Henry, A Church in the House, p. 43.

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to the ecclesiastical establishment that constantly hovered on the boundary between a place of asylum and a seditious conventicle. It played a particularly vital role in the religious lives of persecuted minorities, for whom it served at once as a key to survival and as a hub for outreach. For Catholics, it became a sacred place within which hunted priests sheltered and the mass was celebrated; for Presbyterians like Matthew Henry ejected from their parish livings, the church and the house converged.42 A source of strength as well as irritation to the Church of England, the stress that so many religious movements of the period successively came to place on “family religion” attests to the process by which faith came to be thought of as a form of birthright, passed down the generations from parents to their children, who in turned handed it on to their children and grandchildren. As time progressed, churches and sects became more inward-looking and endogamous. Preoccupied with consolidation rather than proselytism, they urged their members to marry only fellow believers and to avoid fraternising with outsiders. While these tendencies should not be overstated and theory was often tempered in practice, a kind of social distancing came to be regarded as a crucial strategy for preventing haemorrhage and staving off decline and disappearance. For reasons to which I shall turn in the next section, the family was seen as key to the future of the faith. This did not prevent a continuing emphasis on the need for individual people to experience a form of internal regeneration that ravished the heart and the soul. Quakers called this “convincement”. Godly Protestants attached great importance to the idea, derived from Ephesians 4, of casting off the old man and becoming a new creature in Christ. This was a theme that operated somewhat in tension with their aversion to novelty and their insistence that their religion had the imprimatur of antiquity. Preachers spoke of those predestined to salvation as the “adopted” offspring of God, the chosen children whom he ingrafted into his family by divine grace.43 This process was also, rather contradictorily, described as a second nativity. Some even counted their age from the time of their “new birth”: Ignatius Jurdain, mayor of Exeter, died in 1640 in the 79th year of his life, but the 65th since his “effectual calling” to Christ.44 This reflected the conviction that there was a spiritual lifecycle through which individuals progressed as well as a biological one, and that these were not necessarily in kilter. What this meant was that some were advanced in faith but tender in years, including Nathaneal Mather of New England, whose tombstone described him as “an aged person that hath seen but Nineteen Winters in the World.”45 In turn, their numerical elders could be religiously backward: Thomas Brooks’ Apples of Gold (1657) declared that

42 43 44 45

See Walsham, “Holy Families”. Hieron, All the Sermons of Samuel Hieron, p. 314, p. 349. Clarke, The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, p. 407. Mather, Early Piety, Exemplified in the Life and Death of Mr. Nathanael Mather, p. 60. For the tombstone, see http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/images/fullpageimage.php?name=MMD1442.

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“it is no honour for an old man to bee in coats, nor for an old man to bee a babe in grace. An A.B.C. old man is a sad and shameful sight. What is more ridiculous than puer centum anorum, a childe of an hundred years old?”46 The Restoration minister Ralph Venning elaborated this theme at length in his treatise Christ’s School, which described four classes of Christians—babes, little children, young men, and fathers. The vast majority, he surmised, remained mere “babes”; only a tiny handful had advanced to the highest grade of faith and were “gray-hair’d in righteousness”.47

4.

Ancestry

Secondly, it is necessary to consider the ways in which ancestry and genealogy were entangled with religious change. Genealogy was a tried and tested polemical device for the simple reason that the religious conflicts of the early modern era were themselves rooted in disputes about the lineage of competing churches. “Where was your church before Luther?” was the common taunt levelled against Protestants by their enemies, who retorted by identifying his forerunners as a cloud of witnesses who had defied the papacy through the dark ages. The most famous English attempt to document the history of this brotherhood of believers was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.48 Catholics responded by underlining the lineal descent of their church from Christ and the medieval saints and modern martyrs who had continued the chain of succession from primitive times.49 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the publication of many satirical pictures depicting the origins of popery and heresy. These often took the form of family trees. “This poysonous tree planted in Rome”, the trunk of which is atopped by the famous papal ass, was a fold-out plate from a work of anti-Catholic controversy.50 Its counterpart is the “Protestants Petigrew”, a Continental print inserted in a translation by the Louvain exile Thomas Stapleton in the mid 1560s. It shows Luther and Katharina van Bora engendering Rotman, Melanchthon and Zwingli, from whom spring deviant, breakaway movements represented by leaves. These are ultimately identified as the spawn of the devil and Satan (Fig. 2). This image was copied out in a personal compilation now in the Bodleian Library and labelled the “tree of apostacie or roote of deathe”.51 The same

46 Brooks, Apples of Gold for Young Men and Women, p. 56. 47 Venning, Christ’s School, p. 379. See also Walsham, “Second Birth and the Spiritual Lifecycle in Early Modern England”. 48 Foxe, Actes and Monuments. 49 Parsons, Treatise of Three Conversions of England. 50 Barthlet, Pedegrewe of Heretiques. 51 Staphylus, The Apologie of Fridericus Staphylus, fold out plate following p. 254. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.th.b.1–2, vol.1, p. 798.

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Fig. 2 Fold-out plate of “A showe of the Protestants Petigrew”, in The Apologie of Fridericus Staphylus Counseller to the Late Emperour Ferdinandus. Antwerp, 1565. Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library. Call number: STC 23230.

visual and textual stereotypes were applied to the seventeenth-century sects such as the Ranters and Quakers.52 This iconography derived its resonance from the genealogical fever that gripped England, like the rest of Europe, in this era.53 This was a consequence of a social order in which the conventional criterion for determining rank and status, blood, was in the process of being challenged by wealth. If the impulse to trace and document one’s ancestry was often a mark of pretension, it must also be situated in the context of the

52 Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton, chapter 5. 53 See Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past, chapter 4; Eickmeyer, Friedrich, and Bauer, Genealogical Knowledge in the Making.

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renewed interest in the genealogies of Adam and Christ fostered by the Reformation. Underpinned by erudite theological exegesis, English bibles of the period carried pictorial diagrams summarising these.54 Such texts often became treasured possessions and heirlooms, annotated with notes of the births, marriages and deaths of the owner’s family. Some were determined to trace their own descent back to Noah or Japheth. The pedigree of Timothy Sullivan of Dublin starts with Adam, “our Protoparent”.55 Whether enshrined in specially commissioned vellum and parchment rolls, scribbled on scraps of paper, or embodied in stone and marble funeral monuments, genealogical instincts were inflected by religious convictions. Saint Paul had warned about giving heed to foolish pedigrees, but elsewhere Scripture provided a mandate for recording the names of worthy ancestors and the children with which God blessed family dynasties.56 Many devout Protestant gentlemen regarded this as a solemn duty. On the other side of the confessional divide committed Catholics gave expression to their piety in oil paintings that mimicked the potent motif of the Tree of Jesse. The Towneley family, for instance, was depicted at prayer around a crucifix, under a bower of vines that bear fruit in the guise of heraldic shields.57 The fate of past generations born in the time of popish “superstition” and darkness was a pressing pastoral question that vexed many. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Reformation had firmly severed the links between the living and the dead, who could no longer intercede for each other. Theoretically the dead thereby ceased to be an “age group”, whose passage through purgatory to paradise could be speeded up and smoothed through the mechanisms of intercessory prayer and alms deeds. Now all that grieving relatives could do was remember their deceased kith and kin. Medieval monuments and brasses were stripped of invitations to pray for their souls and of incriminating indulgences; new Protestant memorials dwelt on the exemplary qualities and virtues of the departed instead. One possible index of resistance to this development is the persistence of visions of dead parents and friends in the guise of ghosts. This was not just a feature of the immediate aftermath of the Reformation; it was a tendency that continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The emphasis that many preachers placed on the possibility of a joyful reunion with one’s loved ones in heaven is suggestive of the ongoing ties that bound the generations in this world and the next.58

54 55 56 57

Macfarlane, “The Biblical Genealogies of the King James Bible”. London, British Library, Sloane MS 761, fol. 1r, 13r, 23r. 1 Timothy 1:4. For the religious duty of recording ancestors, see Bernard, Ruths Recompense, p. 376, p. 471. “The Towneley Family at Prayer” (oil on panel, English School, 1593): Towneley Hall, Burnley Borough Council. 58 For the impact of the Reformation on beliefs about the dead, see Marshall 2002. For the dead as an age group, see Davis, “Ghosts, Kin and Progeny”, p. 92, p. 94.

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An equally tricky issue for Protestants was how far it was possible to save their own children. Reformed doctrine placed two major obstacles in the path of parents in this regard. The neo-Augustinian emphasis on original sin at the heart of Protestantism fostered a pessimistic view of human nature. It underscored the intrinsic depravity of humanity as a result of the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The frequency with which the Fall was discussed in sermons and commentaries on Genesis testifies to the force it exerted,59 as do diaries in which people regularly meditated on the extent to which they had been conceived in iniquity and were irrevocably stained by inherited sin.60 The regularity with which stylised images of this fatal event were reproduced on domestic objects, from wooden panels, lace mats, and wooden chairs to ceramic tableware, reflects how far these precepts penetrated popular piety and coloured attitudes towards reproduction and childbirth (Fig. 3).61 The doctrine of original sin was a discourse that contributed indirectly towards the crystallisation of early modern ideas about heredity and race.62 Original sin was intricately connected with the doctrine of predestination. Reformed theology ostensibly ruled out the possibility that mothers and fathers could do anything to prevent the damnation of their offspring. It technically denied that godliness could descend down the generations, even as it implied that sin was transmitted by the primal act of sexual intercourse. Ministers were compelled to admit that Christians were “born not of blood” but engendered through the grace of God alone, who had decided whether they were elect or reprobate before the beginning of time.63 This coexisted, however, with the conviction that God had made a covenant with the seed of Abraham and that the promise made in Genesis 17:7 remained in force. The official liturgy for baptism, the sacramental rite of “spiritual regeneracion”, encouraged the hope that infants would thereby be made “heyres” of his kingdom and of everlasting bliss.64 Preachers like William Hubbock consoled those mourning the premature death of their offspring by implying that the Lord extended his blessings to the children of godly parents, even if they perished before there was time to christen them.65 It implied that these were a

59 E. g. Calvin, Commentarie, p. 212–213; Bernard, Ruths Recompense, p. 414. 60 San Marino, Henry E. Huntington Library, MSSHM 15369 (Commonplace book of Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon), fol. 14v; Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V. a. 436 (Notebook of Nehemiah Wallington, 1654), pp. 1, 152, 372. 61 Walsham, “Eating the Forbidden Fruit”. For some examples, see London, Victoria and Albert Museum, T.17-1909 (lace mat, 1600–1650); W.39-1914 (wooden panel, c. 1600); Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, C.206-1928 (slipcoated earthenware plate, Thomas Toft, c. 1670–1685); New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2014.712.1 (delftware plate, London, c.1650). 62 Walsham, “Générations d’Adam”. 63 Hieron, All the Sermons of Samuel Hieron, p. 422. 64 Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer, p. 142–143. See also French, “Raising Christian Children in Early Modern England”. 65 Hubbock, An Apologie of Infants in a Sermon, “To the Reader”.

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Fig. 3 The Temptation of Adam and Eve. Delftware plate, London, c. 1650. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession number: 2014.712.1.

privilege of their birth and that salvation might be a matter of family descent. These trends found particular expression within congregationalist circles in New England, where the Halfway Covenant of 1662 accepted that the children of church members could be admitted to the ranks of the visibly elect by virtue of their pedigree. They fostered the view that the fertility and fecundity of the godly was a means of populating the world with true believers.66 The presbyterian divine Oliver Heywood recorded 66 children who had “proceeded out his loynes by a direct line” and 88 or 90 via the collateral line. He was surpassed by the puritan matriarch Mary Honeywood, who was said to have had 367 descendants living in the year preceding her death aged 93.67 The effect was to fuse families of blood with families of faith and to intertwine biological with religious ancestry in a manner that had wider ramifications.

66 See Cooke, “Generations and Regeneration”. 67 Heywood, Autobiography, Volume I, p. 105–109; “Mary Honeywood Aged 93” (engraving, late eighteenth century?): National Portrait Gallery, D28136.

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5.

Memory

Thirdly, I turn to the temporal and historical dimensions of the Reformation of the generations: to the ways in which it gave rise to imagined communities; to the incentive it provided to remember and record momentous events; and to the ways in which the generations helped to transmit and mediate our knowledge of the religious upheavals of the period. Contemporaries frequently drew on the language of generations to denounce their adversaries and to articulate their sense of being part of a special group of women and men shaped by scarring experiences in the past and charged with a responsibility to create a brighter future. They castigated their opponents and persecutors as a viperous, profane and perverse generation and described themselves as a chosen generation and even as the seed of God. It is revealing that generational discourse flourished in the 1650s, in the wake of the execution of King Charles I and at a moment when millenarian feeling peaked. In 1653, the Fifth Monarchist minister John Tillinghast published an extended exegetical text entitled Generation Work. As well as expounding at length on Revelation 16, this enunciated the idea that each age and generation had been allocated a distinct task by God and that such work differed from that pertaining to an individual’s social station or vocation.68 It outlined a view of historical development that was also implicit in Foxe’s apocalyptically inflected Actes and Monuments, in which Christian truth unfolded progressively so that the enlightenment of the posthumously condemned heretic John Wyclif was but a glimmering of the revelation afforded to Luther and Calvin, whose knowledge would in turn be superseded by those born in succeeding centuries. It roused the self-styled saints to help to usher in the long-awaited millennium. The perception that England was on the brink of a profound spiritual breakthrough and that ordinary believers were both the recipients of superior wisdom and divine instruments for advancing God’s will found frequent expression during these years of fervent speculation. Other Fifth Monarchist writers urged their brethren to rise up to ruin the whore and trample the beast and some felt inspired to take up the sword to carry out their “generation work”.69 Other nonconformists likewise deployed the term to exhort contemporaries to advance the project of reformation and repress abomination and vice. By the 1670s the phrase was also being applied within the Protestant mainstream in England and New England to urge the present and “rising generation” to diligently perform their duty to breed up godly families and ensure that the Lord’s gracious presence would be continued to their descendants.70 If the generational consciousness reflected in such statements was often future oriented, on other occasions it was a product of retrospective reflection on a glorious past

68 Tillinghast, Generation Work. 69 E. g. Canne, Truth with Time, p. 15, p. 55–72. 70 Mather, A Serious Exhortation to the Present and Succeeding Generation.

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Fig. 4 ‘The Reformation’. Engraving based on earlier print entitled The Candle is Lighted, We Can Not Blow [it] Out. London, c.1683. London, National Portrait Gallery. D23051.

and on heroic predecessors—from the lost generation of the Marian martyrs (who were visualised as a cohort facing the fire together) to the assembled ranks of the Protestant reformers (artfully gathered around the candle of the gospel, which the pope, the devil, a monk and a cardinal try hard to blow out), in defiance of the chronological facts. This frequently reprinted image became a symbol of the Reformation itself (Fig. 4).71 Sometimes generational identity was more present-centred, though this was often combined with a strong sense of obligation to posterity. Contemporaries called upon their religious brethren to demonstrate their thankfulness to God for past blessings, show themselves worthy of their present prosperity, take action to remedy sin, and convey the central values of their faith to those who succeeded them. The experience of rupture was a powerful stimulus to record-keeping. Manuscript sources reflect the imperative that many people felt to recall and commemorate the part that they and their forebears had played in the religious transformations and tumults that redefined the nation, and to catalogue the mercies and judgements it had received for the edification of later generations. Rose Hickman, a Protestant gentlewoman who had spent her early married life in exile in Antwerp and who wrote her memoirs in 1610 at the age of 85 “to be perused by her children and posterity”, is typical. These 71 For the martyrs depicted as a cohort, see Faiths Victorie in Romes Crueltie (engraving, London, c. 1620s): British Museum, 1855,0512.317. For the reformers at the table, see The Candle is Lighted, We Cannot Blow Out (London, c. 1620s): British Museum, 1907, 0326.31. See also Walsham, “Domesticating the Reformation”; Spaans, “Faces of the Reformation”.

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survive in several copies in the British Library, one of which is a transcription by her great-granddaughter.72 Such texts illustrate the manner in which personal and family memory was coloured by official narratives of the Reformation enshrined in such texts as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and patriotic histories of providential deliverance, and how it evolved over time. The same intermingling of the public and private applies in the case of Catholic writing, which was likewise shaped by the martyrological literature that circulated illicitly in manuscript and print, alongside relics. Selective remembering and partial forgetting were essential techniques in the reinvention of one’s former self. This in turn is a key index of the process by which generations are often created and recognised in retrospect. They are in large part artefacts of memory. Archives, libraries and museums are filled with items that attest to the vitality of intergenerational transmission in this period, as well as the webs that connected biological relatives with spiritual kith and kin. Medieval books of hours that doubled as genealogical registers are a measure of the gradual passage of individual families into the Protestant era. Their survival highlights the capacity of the family to temper and absorb the disruptive changes taking place around it.73 Protestant bibles and prayer books came to serve the same purpose. Affectionate inscriptions and embroidered bindings helped make them tangible touchstones and bridges to past generations, vectors of emotion and piety and badges of belonging. A monumental copy of a fifteenth-century Wycliffite translation of the New Testament in Cambridge University Library overtly advertises its status as an heirloom on one of the pages inside. This text was subsequently tooled in gold on its leather cover.74 As an inscription on one of the flyleaves reveals, Rebekah Fisher’s copy of the King James Bible was the gift of her father in 1678. In turn this was bequeathed to a later descendant named William, by his grandmother Sarah in 1787 (Fig. 5).75 Paintings, furniture and domestic tableware offer further insight into the interweaving of the human and historical lifecycles and of what Jan Assmann called communicative and cultural memory.76 Adam and Eve plates often commemorated marriages, and bore the initials of the happy couples in question. The familiar image of the reformers and the candle of the gospel appears on another produced in Amsterdam and dated 1692, which probably marked a private anniversary.77

72 Dowling and Shakespeare, “Religion and Politics in Mid-Tudor England”. 73 E. g. Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.vi.2 (The “Roberts Hours”, Flemish, late fourteenth/early fifteenth century), esp. fol. 109v. On this family and their books, see Connolly, Sixteenth-Century Readers, FifteenthCentury Books. 74 Cambridge University Library, Additional MS 6680, fol. 6v. See also Molekamp, “Of the Incomparable Treasure of the Holy Scriptures”. 75 The Holy Bible. London 1676. Folger Shakespeare Library copy, STC 265076.1. 76 Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory”. 77 See Fig. 3. For the Amsterdam charger, see British Museum, 1891,0224.3 (delftware, Dutch, 1692).

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Fig. 5 Book plate and inscription in Rebekah Fisher’s copy of The Holy Bible, Containing the Old Testament and the New. London 1676. Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library. Call number: 265076.1.

The presence of such texts and objects in public repositories is a measure of the breaking of the generational chain that ensured their preservation down the centuries, but it also reflects their transmutation into forms of public patrimony. Families of faith and blood have played a critical part in determining which traces of the early modern past have survived down the ages. They are among the “invisible technicians” that have created the archives and libraries on which we rely and stamped them with the confessional values that help to perpetuate the inherited historiographical paradigms within which we conduct our enquiries.78 Their efforts to dictate how their heirs would remember a period punctuated by divisive religious change are another feature of the reformation of the generations.

78 Shapin, “The Invisible Technician”.

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Conclusions

The concept of generation, then, fruitfully focuses our attention on the biological, social, and historical processes by which Christianity evolved in the course of the early modern period. It offers a way of recapturing the complex and elusive dynamic of continuity and change in a society in which cyclical and linear models of temporal progression coexisted. It suggests a diachronic approach that understands the past as an entity that operates in symbiosis with awareness of the present and apprehension of the future. It illustrates the need to reinsert theology into the social and cultural history of religion. And it provokes us to reflect critically on some of the larger epistemological and methodological issues at the heart of the historical discipline. Finally, it is worth commenting on the topicality and timeliness of this subject. The current resurgence of interest in it is a function of the fact that we are living through another moment in which powerful senses of generational identity, conflict, and difference are being forged. In the context of defining events and developments such as climate change, the global pandemic, rising international tensions and profound political disjunctures such as Brexit, it is not surprising that we are increasingly conscious of being part of a particular generation and of the role that the generations play in making history. Each generation writes its own history of generations.

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Parker, Geoffrey. “Success and Failure during the First Century of the Reformation.” In Past and Present 136 (1992), p. 43–82. Pohlig, Matthias. Säkularisierungen in der Frühen Neuzeit: methodische Probleme und empirische Fallstudien. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot GmbH, 2008. Pollmann, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Poole, Kirsten. Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ryrie, Alec. Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pess, 2019. Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Scribner, Robert W. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’.” In Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23/3 (1993), p. 475–494. Sears, Elizabeth. The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Shagan, Ethan H. The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgement from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Shapin, Steven. “The Invisible Technician.” In American Scientist 77/6 (1989), p. 554–563. Smyth, Adam. Autobiography in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Spaans, Joke. “Faces of the Reformation.” In Church History and Religious Culture 97/3–4 (2017), p. 408–451. Spohnholz, Jesse. The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never Was and the Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Strauss, Gerald. “Success and Failure in the German Reformation.” In Past and Present 67 (1975), p. 30–63. Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Summit, Jennifer. Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Tadmor, Naomi. The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007. Underwood, Lucy. Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed.” In Historical Journal 51/2 (2008), p. 497–528. Walsham, Alexandra. “Migrations of the Holy: Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” In Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44/2 (2014), p. 241–280.

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Credits Cover Illustrations

From left to right: 1 “Vaux Passional – Harrowing of Hell”, ca. 1503/04, illuminated parchment, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 482, folio 125 (CC0 1.0, public domain). 2 Illustrated Ethiopian manuscript from the Gunda Gunde Gospel, 1540, Walter Art Museum, Baltimore MD, USA, MS 850. folio 59v, image provided by the Walter Art Museum (public domain). 3 “Vaux Passional” ca. 1503/04, illuminated manuscript, National Library of Wales, Peniarth Ms 482D, folio 131 (CC0 1.0). 4 Ethiopian Orthodox Icon, late 17th or early 18th century (CC0 1.0). 5 Hans Baldung, “Christus als Gärtner”, 1539, colour on wood, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany, image provided by The Yorck Project (public domain). 6 “Apocalypse”, 19th-century fresco, Church of Saint Sophia, Weliki Novgorod, Russia, image copyright Messir (CC BY-SA 4.0). 7 Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, “The Sending Forth of the Twelve Apostles”, 1684, Walter Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, USA, MS 592, folio 25r, image provided by the Walters Art Museum (public domain). 8 Rembrandt, “The Supper at Emmaus”, 1648, oil on panel, Louvre, Paris, France, image provided by The Yorck Project (public domain). 9 “Transfiguration of Jesus”, 16th-century illustration from the Nestorian Evangelion, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Syriaque 344, folio 3–2v, image provided by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (public domain).

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