Catholic Sovereigns Research Articles

Religious fervour in the Cyclades (1823–1842): seers, discoveries of holy objects, and Protestant missionaries

This article examines a wave of divine interventions on four Cycladic Islands (Tinos, Naxos, Syros, and Santorini) in the 1820s and 1830s. The aim is to understand the social dynamics that created a specific atmosphere of religious fervour in the Aegean during that period and to build an idea of lay practice and lay reaction to the arrival of a Catholic sovereign and Protestant missionaries. Missionaries provided islanders with a new lens for looking at and questioning their own traditional religious practices. However, instead of rejection, their intervention brought about renewed commitment and zeal. In an attempt to prove the superiority of their own religion, Orthodox from the Cyclades started to unearth icons, crosses, and bones at the very moment that they were accused by Protestants of superstition.

Confessional Pluralism in Habsburg Transylvania

The metamorphoses of pluriconfessional space in 19th and 20th centuries of Transylvania's lead to the composition, definition, evolution and interrelationship of ethnic and religious confessions. These can be studied, analyzed and researched both historical and religious point of view as well as political, geographical, socio-cultural and psychological point of view.Topics such as the confessional pluralism and identity discourse, great personalities of the main religions in Transylvania, the development of religious education and inter-confessional cooperation of the intellectual elite are some of the issues related to religious identity in the studied period. These can be related to the interdependence of the ethnic identity in Transylvania around the 1848's Revolution and to the national status of minorities in Habsburg Transylvania.The role of large collections and libraries in Habsburg Transylvania is an aspect insufficiently analyzed and the study of religious concepts which didn’t belong to that religion accepted into the Habsburg Empire is a new topic which can be analyzed from psychological, social and cultural point of view.Hungarian Kingdom was a Christian country governed by a Catholic sovereign. For this reason, De Propaganda Fide Congregation acted in Transylvania and Hungary, areas which had been under Turkish influence. The first mission of the Congregation began in October 1629, when the Italian Franciscan Vincenzo Pinieri da Montefiascone arrived in the County of Zemplén.In 1632, the Congregation sent other Italian Franciscans in Upper Hungary. Their activity in these areas was very intense, thus the Franciscans have played an important role in their mission to convert the people to Catholicism.After 1760, Maria Theresa forbade the Jesuits to hold intellectual monopoly and censorship of books, these being achieved by the state through an aulic committee named Studien-und Bücher-Zensur-Hofcommission. After 1773, when the Jesuit order was dissolved, the state could control also universities.

Reconsidering the British Revolutions of 1688

Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, by Scott Sowerby. Harvard Historical Studies, No. 181. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013. x, 404 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts, edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, No. 16. Woodbridge, UK, Boydell Press, 2013. x, 315 pp. $115.00 US (cloth). These are two important books that focus on what for many years was the less studied political upheaval of Britain's seventeenth century: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Scott Sowerby's is a monograph derived from his Harvard doctoral thesis. Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor, both products of Cambridge, edited the collection of essays that promises to provide new insights on the final crisis of the last wholly British ruling dynasty. The monograph is about causes, the collection is concerned with contexts. The former takes a decidedly English perspective, while the latter deliberately attempts to enhance our understanding of 1688-89 by looking beyond England for explanations and consequences. The editors of the collection suggest that recent years have seen explosion of interest in the 1688 Revolution; this is probably an oblique reference to Harris's 2006 monograph (Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720, London) and Steven Pincus's 2008 veritable doorstopper, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven). Pincus's provocative argument, that 1688 was a revolution of essentially secular-minded commercial interests seeking to topple a monarch, James II, who aimed to modernize the English state in the =absolutist mode of Louis XIV, is countered directly by Sowerby several times. But Sowerby's agenda is far more ambitious than simply overturning Pincus's thesis. Making Toleration is an attempt at historical excavation and revisionism that wants us to rethink what we know about late Stuart England's political culture (p. 34). Sowerby claims to have uncovered evidence in over 130 archives and libraries of a political movement that was the key casual factor generating the revolution of 1688: the repealers. The repealer movement's chief sponsor was none other than James II. The movement's aim was to reshape the English polity by enacting liberty of conscience for all Christians. In order to achieve this ambition, Parliament would need to repeal the statutes penalizing religious dissenters, both Protestant and Catholic, as well as the laws that barred nonconformists from civil and military offices. The activities of the repealers generated political opposition, which morphed into a counter-movement; the Glorious Revolution was largely the result of the tussle between these two movements from the spring to the autumn of 1688. The revisionist component of Sowerby's book involves portraying the king as an aggressive but not authoritarian (let alone tyrannical) reformer. For example, the imprisonment of seven bishops who refused to read the king's second Declaration of Indulgence was not undertaken, Sowerby argues, to cow the clergy into accepting toleration, but instead resulted from the king's impatience: he wanted the trial of the bishops over before Parliament met. The book puts religious concerns at the heart of the 1688 Revolution. Repealers and anti-repealers had different visions of what sort of Christian polity England was to be. Moreover, confessionally-based fears, especially popular anti-popery, were crucial for mobilizing support for the overthrow of James II in England and carrying on the war against France in the 1690s. Toleration was granted in 1689 because, Sowerby contends, the Convention Parliament wanted to keep radicals loyal to the revolutionary Williamite regime during the war, not as a reward to moderate nonconformists for recently refusing the embrace of the departed Catholic sovereign. …

Rousseau, Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century natural law tradition

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty.

Isabel the Queen: Life and Times

The quincentennial celebration of Queen Isabel’s death in 1504 has generated a flurry of publications on her life and reign. Most of these (Pérez Samper, Fernández Álvarez, Atienza, Navascués Palacio, Javierre, Val Valdivieso, Edwards and Mayo, Checa Cremades) have added few new insights into her controversial, yet critical, ascension to the crown of Castile and the delicate interplay of politics, religion, and factional wars that dominated her time in power. Others (Weissberger, Boruchoff, Ruiz, Valdeón Baruque) have carved new and promising pathways of scholarship on the subject. Liss’s new edition of her 1992 classic is not innovative, but it does consolidate its place among the most complete biographies of the Catholic sovereign to date, rivaled only by Tarsicio Azcona’s.Liss’s monumental study is heavily focused on the complex political arena of fifteenth-century Castile and its myriad of dynastic and personal conflicts. After a quick glance at the reign of Juan II (1404 – 54), the book moves chronologically from Enrique IV through Juana “la Loca” (1479 – 1555), centering, logically, on the figure of Isabel. Suitably structured around the three major stages in Isabel’s life — princess, queen, and leader of a future empire (falling short of calling her empress, albeit the inference is clear) — Isabel the Queen craftily and intelligently pulls the reader into the life journey of a complex personality. Drawing a more distant connection to the previous 50 years, back to the reign of Pedro I (1350 – 69), would have helped clarify Isabel’s role within the realms of the Trastamaran dynasty and the royal house of Portugal.Although it uncovers many of Isabel’s ploys and manipulative political stratagems, Liss’s book exudes a favorable and overly cautious picture of the Catholic queen. The abundant contradictions that defined Isabel and characterized her reign are either treated tentatively or avoided altogether. For instance, the book presents but doesn’t explore in depth the ambiguities surrounding Isabel’s religiosity, never reconciling “her saintly piety” with her “religious fanaticism.” Furthermore, the treatment of the union of Castile and Aragon through marriage makes no clear attempt to explain how each of the kingdoms preserved its legislative, administrative, and fiscal autonomy, which is of crucial importance to correctly understand power negotiation between Isabel and Fernando. Liss does probe into the private side of Isabel, offering a few insights of the psychological influence of her mother, Isabel of Portugal, examining the dynamics of her relationship with her half brother Enrique IV, and giving an acceptable account of how the personal misfortunes of her progeny shaped the psyche of an aging queen. Nevertheless, the reader is left longing for a more in-depth psychological portrait of Isabel’s complex mind. To this date, we lack a good psychological study of the queen that would satisfactorily explain many of the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of her nature, such as the combination of feminine virtue and manly stamina or her subjugation to Fernando while being inclined toward self-rule in Castile. Gender analysis has proven to be of utmost importance in the examination of female sovereignty in the latter years of the Trastamaran dynasty, when the restoration of a strong, absolutist, male-centered monarchy in the Visigothic tradition was seen as the only solution to political and social instability. This falls out of the scope of Liss’s biography but has been addressed in more-innovative studies by Weissberger and Boruchoff.Though considerably expanded and impeccably edited, the 19 original chapters of the 1992 edition remain basically the same. There are still instances where the sources are not clear, although the notation is more thorough and lucid than in the first edition. Liss resourcefully incorporates material from modern biographies, particularly those by Tarsicio Azcona, Gonzalo Chacón, Suárez Fernández, and Ladero Quesada, but there is still no sound evidence of archival research. She maintains a heavy reliance on the official accounts of court chronicles, especially Enríquez del Castillo, Alonso de Palencia, Hernando del Pulgar, and Diego de Valera. All things being equal, Isabel the Queen’s first edition was the first serious attempt, timid but patent, to enlighten historiographical material with the literary and religious discourses of the time. Liss felicitously reminded us of the powerful influence that the chivalric code of romances and courtly literature had in Isabel’s life and politics. A further incorporation of other discourses, such as literary, artistic, religious, or economic, and the examination of the iconography and symbology of pictographic, sculptural, and architectural representations, as well as the consideration of material culture to supplement official records, would prove invaluable in our understanding of history.All in all, Liss’s new edition stands as a solid and detailed account of Isabel’s complex personality, her shrewd political savvy, and her tremendous influence in the shaping of premodern Spain and the staging of what would become a powerful empire.

Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (review)

Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts. By Jeffrey Collins. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp.xxii, 355. $85.00.) Pius VI (r. 1775-1799), born Giovanni Angelo Braschi, was fated to be the last pope to practice papal patronage of the arts in the grand tradition of his Renaissance and Baroque predecessors. Caught between the ancien regime and the age of revolution, he died a political prisoner in France after the installation of the short-lived Roman Republic, his sad demise seemingly inextricable from that of the old order. His life perhaps eclipsed by the circumstances of his death, Pius's pontificate has only now received the attention it deserves from art historians in Jeffrey Collins's excellent study of his patronage. Beautifully written, well organized and illustrated, and meticulously researched, Collins's book offers a balanced account not only of Pius's many important commissions, but also demonstrates how the pope used various kinds of artworks and monuments to promote his policies and to disseminate a carefully crafted image of himself. Well aware of the potential pitfalls of patronage studies, the author is cautious not to overestimate the patron's share, reserving discussion for the role of artists and advisers chosen to fall in line with the pope's programs. He also gives ample space to the critical reception of Pius's projects from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century. While Collins's purpose in studying the Braschi pope is avowedly that of recuperation and reintegration, his contribution goes beyond the history of art by contextualizing Pius's commissions within the larger issues of his challenging papacy. The book is divided into six chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion. In the first chapter Collins introduces the conservative Braschi and discusses his rise to power as well as the challenges, both internal and external, that he faced as pope. These included controversy over the recent dissolution of the Jesuit order; the poor economy and corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy of the Papal States; ongoing power struggles with other Catholic sovereigns; and the spread of Enlightenment thought that questioned the very foundations of Christianity. Pius responded with policies and programs for reform, such as the famous reclamation of the Pontine marshes, and, as Collins demonstrates in chapter two, with imagery representing the pope as a beneficent monarch, religious reformer, and enlightened patron of the arts. …

The Irish Dimension of the British Kulturkampf: Vaticanism and Civil Allegiance 1870–1875

‘There were about ten million Catholics in the British dominions, and, properly considered, Queen Victoria was one of die great Catholic powers of Europe. She reigned over more Cadiolics man some Catholic Sovereigns’. This was the claim of an Irish member of parliament in advocating equality of Catholic education with Protestant at the great meeting held by Cardinal Cullen in the Marlborough Street ‘Cathedral’ in Dublin in January 1872. The meeting was intended to demonstrate the unanimity of laity and clergy in the demand for denominationalism in the National Schools system and the rejection of mixed schools. On the same day the opposition to Cullen's policy was expressed by die Radical John Roebuck in an address given in Sheffield, in the course of which he argued that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 had merely been a dissembling attempt by the Liberals to dupe Dissenters and Radicals and bind diem to Mr Gladstone. It had not brought religious peace to Ireland. ‘Were not the whole body of the Cadiolics, headed by Cardinal Cullen, still determined upon attaining their old end, which was supremacy of the Cadiolic Church in Ireland?’ At the Dublin gathering Cullen quoted J. S. Mill on die danger of a state monopoly in education and roundly condemned the government's policy of mixed education as a scheme which die Protestant Archbishop Whately had admitted was the only way of weaning the Irish from the abuses of popery. The organ of Irish nationalist opinion, The Freeman's Journal, rallied support by denouncing Lord Hartington for resisting the logic of die argument that Irish education of Cadiolic children should be handed over to ‘the priests and people of Ireland’: English Protestants were insincere in favouring a denominational system for Scotland while treating Catholic education for the Irish as subversive of civil and religious liberty.

Moratín's Circle of Friends: Intellectual Ferment in Spain, 1780–1800

Moratin’s Circle ofFriends: Intellectual Ferment in Spain, 1780-1800 JOHN DO WLING Juan Antonio Melon, in some “disorderly notes” on the life of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin, mentions how there developed around Moratin during the 1780’s a coterie of half a dozen young men in their twenties. Besides Melon and Moratin, they were Pedro Estala and his fellow Piarist Padre Navarrete, Leon de Arroyal, and Juan Pablo Forner. The relation of Moratin, Melon, and Estala, especially in later years, has always been known; but the group as a whole has not been studied in literary or intellectual history. Moratin and Forner have been treated separately, but their relationship has not been clarified. Leon de Arroyal was, it would seem, intentionally assigned by government authorities in his own lifetime to an obscurity from which he has emerged only in the last decade. I myself must set aside Padre Navarrete. He has not been satisfactorily identified, and he seems not to have distin­ guished himself in the intellectual life of this time.1 The period 1780 to 1800 embraces the young manhood of these intellectuals. For Moratin it means the period from the age 165 166 / JOHN DOWLING of twenty to forty, and it was more or less the same age for the others. Juan Pablo Forner died at the age of forty-one, before the new century began. Historically, the period covers the final years of the reign of Carlos III; the new reign of Carlos IV and his consort Maria Luisa, who are known to us so well through the paintings of Goya; the trauma of the French Revolution; and the rise of Manuel Godoy, a man seven years younger than Moratin, to the pinnacle of his power. Melon and Leon de Arroyal were walking one day in 1781 in the Calle de Alcala near the point where it intersects the Paseo del Prado. There they encountered two young Piarists, Pedro Estala and Padre Navarrete, in the company of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin. Estala had known Melon at Salamanca, and he intro­ duced him to his friend Leandro. “I found Moratin taciturn and reserved,” Melon recalled, “but I could tell that he took a liking to me. . . . Among all of us,” he continued, “a friendship was estab­ lished which lasted all our lives.”2 At the time, Moratin was twenty-one years old. His father had died the previous year, and he was living at home with his mother and working as a jeweler at his uncle’s shop in Madrid. He had published his narrative poem La toma de Granada por los Reyes Catolicos {The Capture of Granada by the Catholic Sovereigns; 1779), which was printed at the expense of the Royal Spanish Academy because it was awarded the accessit, sl sort of second or consolation prize, in a contest. Pedro Estala was a Manchegan from the town of Daimiel be­ tween Manzanares and Ciudad Real. Two of his brothers became Dominicans, and he was a Piarist friar, an escolapio in Spanish. He was born in 1759 and hence was a year older than Moratin. We may suppose that he and Navarrete taught at the Escuelas Pias de San Fernando in the Calle de Lavapies, although neither pious devotion nor teaching boys seems ever to have loomed large in Pedro Estala’s life. Juan Antonio Melon became Moratin’s closest friend. If the age he gave the French police in 1827 was correct, he was born in 1763 and hence was three years younger than Leandro.3 Moratin Circle ofFriends I 167 Oldest of the group was Melon’s friend Leon de Arroyal, who was about twenty-six when he met Moratin. Arroyal, who had also studied at Salamanca, had that year of 1781 published his first book, a devotional in Castilian verse translation of the short office of Our Lady according to the Roman Breviary.4 The sixth member did not join the coterie until the end of the following year 1782. He was Juan Pablo Forner. He was about the same age as Arroyal, and the two had been fellow students at Salamanca. Later, Arroyal married Rita Piquer, a cousin of Forner ’s mother. In...

Philip II and the Papacy

The view that Philip II was the secular arm of the Counter-Reformation still survives. It is based on the assumption that his own words and claims must be taken at their face value, and on the fallacy that because the religious motive was sometimes present in Spanish policy, therefore it was always present and was the most important motive. The popes he had to deal with took a different view. They considered that Philip II, like his predecessors, used his prestige as a Catholic sovereign to pursue objectives that were essentially political. A characteristic summary of the papal view of Philip II's foreign policy was given in 1589 with reference to his ambitions in France: ‘The King of Spain, as a temporal sovereign, is anxious above all to safeguard and to increase his dominions … The preservation of the Catholic religion which is the principal aim of the Pope is only a pretext for His Majesty, whose principal aim is the security and aggrandisement of his dominions’. It is true that Sixtus V had a deep and personal aversion to Spain and a low estimate of its king, but these opinions were not peculiar to one pope. There were conflicts between Philip II and almost every pope with whom he dealt, which makes it impossible to explain those conflicts in terms of personalities and points to some deeper and more permanent cause.

X.—Dryden's Conversion to the Roman Catholic Faith

Early in 1659, when the poet was twenty-seven years old, appeared Dryden's first serious contribution to English literature, the Heroic Stanzas consecrated to the Memory of His Highness, Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth. In the very next year, he hailed the restoration of Charles as a return of the Golden Age in the poem entitled Astræa Redux, and in the year following published a Panegyric on his Coronation. In November, 1682, he published Religio Laici, a carefully reasoned defense of the English Church. Less than five years later, in April, 1687, in the Hind and the Panther, we find him ardently espousing the cause of Rome; and during these five years a Roman Catholic sovereign had succeeded to the throne of England. James II had become king in February, 1685; and, if we may trust an entry in Evelyn's Diary, Dryden was already a Roman Catholic in the following January.

The Bulls Distributing America

When Columbus anchored in the Tagus River, March 5, 1493, he precipitated on Europe one of the most difficult questions with which the mind of man has ever grappled. It was this: By what title should the New World be held ? The Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella determined to hold what their Admiral had discovered. But the Spanish lawyers found great difficulty in proving their title under the Roman law, which alone would be accepted as conclusive by the other powers, because it did not recognize the right of discovery. The Roman law recognized the acquisition of property through the operation of either the jus gentium or the jus civile? Under the jus gentium, which alone was applicable in this case, property could be acquired: ist, by occupation, occupatio; 2d, by natural increase, as land formed by seas or rivers, accessio; 3d, by transfer, traditio. The only doctrine suitable to the purposes of Spain was that of “occupation,” which some eminent Roman lawyers incorporated not in the jus gentium but in the jus natura, as affirming a natural right.