Church History, Censorship, and Confessionalization

Abstract

This chapter begins by examining the interrelationship of history and theology. From the Reformation onwards, church history presented a challenge to each confession in its own right. Protestants re-invented the prevailing models of church history; Catholics responded by underlining the uninterrupted continuity of the apostolic traditions. The second section of the chapter concentrates on the genre of papal biography, reviewing the various contemporary authors who wrote on the subject. By editing and continuing the humanist Bartolomeo Platina’s standard papal biographies from the fifteenth century, Panvinio put himself in the position of being considered the most important authority on papal history. The censorship of historical works by Catholic theologians is then discussed by comparing the cases of other important authors including Carlo Sigonio. The chapter investigates the question of the extent to which Panvinio’s unpublished Church History (Historia ecclesiastica) was an expression of the confessionalization of historiography. There follows a discussion of the censorships of several of Panvinio’s works, including that of his history of papal elections carried out by the Spanish jurist Francisco Peña and the German Jesuit Jakob Gretser.