Results of the Reformation: Ritual, Doctrine and Religious Conversion

Abstract

In contrast to traditional visions of violence, war, and oppression, accounts of religious toleration and accommodation, although perhaps grudging and on the local level, are beginning to be brought to the fore of European histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These studies usually examine areas with significant religious minorities, and reveal that common people were cognizant of different religious beliefs and practices, and actively engaged in religious debate within the community.1 Despite the cooperation and relations between faiths, lines drawn between religious communities still existed, if blurred or often crossed. And in this milieu of competing religious identities and communities, there were still those who deliberately chose the path of conversion; consciously giving up one spiritual identity for another.Inquisition trials of reconverts to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, found in Italy, demonstrate that the majority of converts conceived of themselves as exchanging religious identities.2 In the seventeenth century, from the Catholic Church's perspective, being a Protestant constituted a crime that was solely within the Inquisition's jurisdiction to prosecute. Therefore, any Protestant wishing to become a Catholic would have to be tried, sentenced, and given a penance by the Inquisition. Only after making a full abjuration of their criminal errors and performing the assigned penance could converts become Catholics in good standing. The documents that form the basis of this paper, then, are the inquisitorial records generated by this official conversion process.The surviving records I examine in this paper, found in Florence and Rome, described conversion experiences that occurred over the course of the seventeenth century; the records found in Florence begin as early as 1638 and end as late as the 1690s, while those from Rome begin in the 1680s and continue until 1709.3 The records are incomplete, therefore making it difficult to calculate definitively the total number of converts the Holy Office dealt with every year, or over the course of the seventy years discussed here. The records that do survive, however, indicate very small numbers of converts.Furthermore, the converts themselves were atypical in seventeenth-century European society, since they were non-Italians who migrated to Italy and then converted to Catholicism. As a part of the trial procedure, inquisitors were required to record each defendant's name, place of origin, previous heretical beliefs and errors, and motive for conversion; only then could the defendant made a complete abjuration and be assigned a penance. Inquisitors often included additional important information, such as the defendant's age, family background, and travel experiences, especially as these factors pertained to the defendant's motive for conversion. This information reveals that, not surprisingly considering the precondition of mobility, most of these converts were male, and relatively young; under ten percent of the trials examined here involved women, and the vast majority of defendants were under the age of thirty-five.The records of these trials, therefore, describe the circumstances in which an individual, usually young, male, and definitely mobile, born and raised in a Protestant religious tradition, chose to convert to Catholicism. This paper, then, will discuss a confluence of several religious interstices; I intend to discuss the specific concepts defendants formulated to explain the attraction of Catholicism in several broad categories, most of which express the ritualistic, and therefore social, aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism as it was practised. The motivations behind conversion also highlight the performative nature of religious identity in early modern Europe. These converts conceived of religion, and religious identity, as a series of actions they performed in a ritualistic setting.4 The doctrinal discussions and the converts' own contributions to the conversion narrative will be discussed concurrently, along with their ritualistic concerns, in order to display the intellectual interplay between inquisitors and converts, for both of whom ritual possessed powerful connotations and stimuli. …