Counter-Reformation Research Articles

The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich Lehner (review)

The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich Lehner (review)

HOLISTIC EDUCATION IN THE EUROPEAN SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD

The article presents a historical-pedagogical analysis of the content and development of the humanistic idea of holistic education in the European socio-cultural space during the Early Modern Period. It traces the value-based interpretations of the idea of holistic education within both secular (Renaissance humanism) and religious (Christian humanism) worldviews of the early modern era. The study reveals that the concept of holistic education was formulated within the philosophical and cultural discourse of Renaissance humanism. It is noted that the Renaissance ideal of holistic education was based on three key components: first, the virtues of broad erudition, intellectual culture, and the art of rhetoric; second, moral principles focused on the ideals of goodness, virtue, modesty, and personal inner culture, as well as Christian priorities of love and compassion; third, the recognition of the individual as the highest value, grounded in the dignity and rights of the person, and the idea of comprehensive and harmonious development of one’s abilities and talents. This also includes the Renaissance virtues of active engagement, initiative, industriousness, persistence, and the appreciation of physical beauty and courage. It is shown that the institutionalization of the idea of holistic education was carried out through the educational activities of Protestant gymnasiums, Jesuit colleges, brotherhood schools, and other educational institutions founded in the context of Protestant Reformation, Catholic Reformation, and religious reforms in the East Slavic lands. The article outlines the civilizational and human-creative significance of the concept of holistic education for the formation of modern European civilization.

Circulation of books, manuscripts, and ideas between Hungary and Italy. Cultural transfers in the environment of György Klimo, Bishop of Pécs (1751-1777)

The period between 1750 and 1800 witnessed a significant transformation in the modernization of Hungarian culture and literature. The members of the ecclesiastical elite, who had completed their studies at the Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum in Rome, played a pivotal role in this process; they emerged as key figures in the Catholic renewal upon their return to Hungary following their studies in Rome. Their contributions extended beyond the revitalization of the Hungarian Catholic Church and religious life, encompassing the reconstruction of bishoprics, the establishment of educational institutions and libraries, and the publication and dissemination of both religious and secular literary works. This dissemination of knowledge was also closely intertwined with the influential court in Vienna. On the one hand, the rich heritage of ancient Rome played a crucial role in reshaping the baroque tradition. High-ranking clerics began to take a keen interest in the historical context of their immediate surroundings, initiating local excavations and conducting research in the Vatican Archives. On the other hand, they were greatly influenced by the vibrant culture of contemporary Rome, including Catholic reform efforts, the patronage of the Roman aristocracy, and the volumes of recent Italian literature. This paper explores the cultural influence of Bishop György Klimo of Pécs through an analysis of his correspondence with members of the ecclesiastical aristocracy in Rome and Vienna. Notably, Klimo made significant contributions to the spreading of Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s ideas in Hungary. He also played a pioneering role in disseminating knowledge by being the first among his contemporaries to open his personal library to the public. Furthermore, he commissioned research at the Vatican to compile a comprehensive history of his diocese. By examining Klimo’s endeavors, we gain valuable insights into the transformative influence of Roman culture on the Baroque tradition in Hungary. Moreover, the analysis sheds light on the distinct and organic development of the Italian line within Hungarian culture.

Saving Sanctity: The Roman Inquisition and the Initial Prosecution of Girolamo Cardano

The impact of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform movement on the ecclesiastical censorship of science, philosophy and magic has been an enduring theme in the historiography of early modern Italy. In this paper, I consider how the Church’s desire to defend the truth of miracles from Protestant criticisms on the one hand and their efforts to centralise the process of verifying miracles on the other affected the investigation of philosophical works. Taking the case of Girolamo Cardano, whose works were the subject of intensive investigation by the Catholic Church from the 1570s, I examine the issues that censors flagged as points of concern. One recurring theme was the fact that his accounts of the cosmos appeared to offer natural explanations for miracles and the actions of the martyrs. Although the intellectual problems raised by Cardano’s work were far from new, I suggest that the events of the sixteenth century raised their salience with Church authorities.

Book Review: Rebuilding St Paul’s Outside the Walls: Architecture and the Catholic Revival in the 19th Century

Book Review: Rebuilding St Paul’s Outside the Walls: Architecture and the Catholic Revival in the 19th Century

Vernacular Catholicism in Ireland: The Keening Woman

The relationship between popular vernacular Catholicism and the more official liturgical variety has varied over centuries. Following the subjugation of Ireland by the late 17th century, and the institution of anti-Catholic proscriptions, the number of priests available became more restricted. Religious observation subsequently centered on holy days and local sacred sites including healing wells, many of them dedicated to saints. Always central figures in death rituals, women who mourned the dead—“keening women”—were so called because they lamented the dead through a combination of voice and song. We will show how the songs relate to a deep liminal spirituality that existed semi-independently of official Church norms, and how the voice served to establish their position. In the Catholic revival of the late nineteenth century, such forms were ousted by European modes of worship, but persisted at the margins, allowing us insight into their previous vigor.

The Sublime Divinity: Erotic Affectivity in Renaissance Religious Art

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting’s capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality.

“The primacy of labor over profits”: Thomas Mahony, the Beet Field Workers of Colorado, and Visions for a Consumerist Democracy, 1902–1957

Abstract During the first half of the twentieth century, ethnic Mexican beet workers in Colorado endured a daunting array of challenges that included dismal housing, meager wages, and a family labor system that forced children as well as adults to labor relentless hours in the sugar-beet fields. In response to these conditions, Catholic reformer Thomas Mahony promoted a vision of the American economy in which marginalized populations like the beet laborers would take their rightful place as healthy consumers and effective family providers. His vision was shaped by the Catholic social justice movement of the Progressive Era, as well as by a career in agricultural consumerism. From 1910 to 1913, for example, he served as director of exhibits for the Chicago Land Show, a position that immersed him in a world that marketed farm lands as idealized consumer commodities while rendering invisible the struggles of propertyless farm workers. When Mahony began his reform career a decade later, he strove to do exactly the opposite: make beet field workers as visible as possible in his blueprint for a vigorous consumerist democracy. At the same time, however, Mahony’s intense fears of radicalism overshadowed his reform impulses, reflecting profound tensions within the Catholic reform ethos that shaped him: a yearning for spiritual and social regeneration in constant battle with a dread of social upheaval. Mahony’s story therefore helps to illuminate the considerable potential of twentieth-century religious reform, even as his obsessive fears highlight the perils of antiradicalism in the U.S. West.

The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform, written by Stefan Bauer

The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform, written by Stefan Bauer

Renaud Adam, Rosa De Marco, and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Books and Prints at the Heart of the Catholic Reformation in the Low Countries (16th-17th Centuries)

Renaud Adam, Rosa De Marco, and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Books and Prints at the Heart of the Catholic Reformation in the Low Countries (16th-17th Centuries)

Review of John Tracy Ellis: An American Catholic Reformer

Review of John Tracy Ellis: An American Catholic Reformer

:The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment

:<i>The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment</i>

The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich L. Lehner (review)

The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich L. Lehner (review)

The Reformatio – and Deformatio – of Ritual: German Catholic Preaching on Ceremonies between the Later Middle Ages, Luther, and Trent

ABSTRACT Ritual performances and discourses counted among the most vital and visible signs of German Catholic renewal in the wake of Trent (1563) and especially during the Baroque era, and were crucial to the formation of Catholic identity after earlier decades of uncertainty. But Catholic preachers seized upon the centrality of ceremonies much earlier than scholars have understood, as is well attested by the lectionary sermons (postils) they published en masse after 1530. In these sermons they remained in dialogue with late medieval and humanist traditions, constantly criticized contemporary Catholic abuses, and sought to refute the charges of their Protestant opponents. When addressing ceremonies, Catholic divines preached in terms that encompassed both “Catholic Reform” and “Counter-Reformation,” and had worked out much of what we consider post-Tridentine ritual theory much earlier than we have thought. Prominent sermon authors included Johannes Eck, Friedrich Nausea, Johann Wild, Georg Witzel, Michael Helding, and Johannes Hoffmeister.

Channeling Erasmus in Communist Poland: Leszek Kołakowski, Vatican II, and the Reinvention of "Counter-Reformation".

Polish intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski proposed in the 1960s an innovative, now virtually forgotten, reimagining of a crucial concept in the history of Roman Catholicism: the idea of "Counter-Reformation." Kołakowski's lifelong affinity for early modern Europe's Catholic dissidents led him into dialogue in the era of Vatican II with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the leader of a movement of young Polish reformers who styled themselves "Catholic socialists." Seeing them as the bedrock of a new Catholic Counter-Reformation, Kołakowski sketched the role he hoped Poland might play in reinventing not only Catholicism, but religious life in the modern world.

The Economic Thought in the Counter-Reformation Age: Giovanni Botero and Antonio Serra

Although the centrality of the works of Giovanni Botero in the political literature of the first half of the seventeenth century is widely recognized, the role that the former Jesuit had in the economic thought of the Catholic Counter-Reformation has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. In fact, Botero’s works reveal that the existence of a mentality favorable to the development of productive and commercial activities was present and widespread even in the post-Tridentine period. In particular the theses expressed in Antonio Serra’s Breve trattato reveals clear affinity with Botero’s thought and in the same period in Spain the literature focused on similar themes in an attempt to counteract the decadence of the Iberian society. This article shows that the analyses by Botero and Serra are complementary and fully consistent with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, offering a different historiographical perspective on the relations between Catholicism and the genesis of capitalist economy.

Shaun Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II. Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform

Shaun Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II. Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform

John Tracy Ellis: An American Catholic Reformer by Thomas J. Shelley (review)

John Tracy Ellis: An American Catholic Reformer by Thomas J. Shelley (review)

:The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment

:<i>The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment</i>

학생들의 출신지를 통해 본 생시르 - Fleury Vindry의 Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr(1686-1793)를 중심으로

Saint-Cyr lies at the intersection of the Catholic Reformation and the aristocratic policies of Louis XIV in the late 17th century. As evidenced by the fact that it was founded with the administrative and economic support of the absolute monarch Louis XIV, Saint-Cyr was an expression of the political will of the monarch to ultimately hold sociocultural hegemony by fundamentally cultivating subjects who would obey to the national authority through women education which is both pious and compliant to the patriarchal order. In this sense, Saint-Cyr illustrates the correlation of politics and education during the French absolute monarchy. Based on Fleury Vindry’s Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr(1686-1793), this paper analyzes the origins of the students who enrolled at Saint-Cyr from its opening in 1686 to its closure in 1793. This analysis shows that, while there was a regional bias in the origins of Saint-Cyr’s students in the early days of Saint-Cyr, over time “fragmentation of recruitment” or, an even nationwide distribution from the most central to the most remote parts was shown. This suggests that Saint-Cyr was not a school to educate some girls of interested local noble families into cultured women, but rather functioned to nationally propagate the political goals of the absolute monarchy through women who would become “first teachers” for their children and virtuous wives for their husbands.