Counter-Reformation Research Articles

양식론의 입장에서 바라본 가톨릭개혁기 이탈리아 회화의 상승지향성

미술사를 연구하는데 있어서 스위스의 미술사학자 하인리히 뵐플린이 제시한 ‘양식’의 문제는 특히나 바로크 미술양식을 구분하는데 있어서 항상 중요한 텍스트의 위치를 차지해왔다. 중세에서 르네상스로 변화하는 시대에 있어서 이탈리아의 회화는 마사초로 대표되는 크나큰 양식상의 변화를 가져왔고 이러한 진보는 이어서 바로크로 넘어가는 시기에도 다양하게 일어났다. 마르틴 루터의 95개조 반박문이 발표된 이후로 북유럽에서부터 거칠게 불어온 종교개혁의 바람은 종교적인 주제를 다룬 성화 및 예술작품의 제작에도 기본적인 변화를 가져왔다. 이에 맞서는 로마 가톨릭교회는 보다 충실하게 자신들의 교리를 강화하는 것으로 대응했으며 이 과정에서 종교적 이미지를 다루는 방법에 대해 가브리엘레 팔레오티 주교나 카를로 보로메오 주교 등은 강력하고도 실천적인 방법을 제시한 책들을 출판하기도 했다. 종교개혁과 가톨릭개혁기의 종교화에서 나타나는 여러 변화들 중에서 주목할 만한 것은 회화 내의 방향이 수평에서 수직으로 변한다는 것이다. 특히 중세나 르네상스시기에 가장 활발하게 다뤄졌던 소재인 ‘신성 대화’는 이제 ‘성모 승천’의 주제로 상승지향적인 변화를 가져왔다. 또 한 가지, 종교개혁 세력에 맞서기 위해 로마 가톨릭이 내세운 것은 성모 마리아에 대한 신성화 작업이었다. ‘수태고지’를 비롯한 다양한 테마들이 기존의 수평적 형태에서 상승지향적인 수직적 형태로 변화했으며 특히 ‘무염시태’같은 소재는 더욱더 특별하게 다뤄졌다. 성모 신성화 작업이 진행됨에 따라 성모가 단순히 예수 그리스도를 태어나게 한 존재에서 벗어나 실제적으로 인간계와 천상계를 이어주면서 복을 전달해주는 매개자로서의 역할도 하게 되었다. 이렇게 수평에서 수직으로, 아래에서 위를 향하는 상승지향적 형태로의 종교화의 양태적 변화는 건축이나 조각 같은 인접 장르에서도 덩달아 일어나기 시작했고 이러한 변화는 단순히 매너리즘, 또는 바로크라는 형식으로 정의하기 어려운, 그야말로 독특한 ‘가톨릭개혁기 회화’라는 영역을 구축하였다.

The Contested Appropriation of George Gervase's Martyrdom: European Religious Patronage and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance

AbstractFrom the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen professed as Benedictine monks in mainland Europe began returning to their homeland. Until that point, the Catholic mission to England had been run by secular clergy and Jesuits, relationships between the two clerical parties growing increasingly troubled over how the Catholic Reformation should be implemented in England. The arrival of the Benedictines saw the offering of a “third way” to England's proscribed Catholics. Yet with the various missions dependent on lay Catholic resources and support both in England and in mainland Europe, it was necessary for the Benedictines to justify their presence in this often fraught environment. As such, they forcefully laid claim to contemporary English Benedictine martyrs against rival claims by other clerical groups. These battles for validation reached a new level of intensity following James I's serving of the Oath of Allegiance. This article explores how competing groups of English missionary clergy sought to justify their presence in England. Taking the case of two conflicting images of the executed George Gervase, it argues that the contest for martyrs sheds new light on the ways in which martyrdom was exploited by different groups; it also contributes to debates about the Oath of Allegiance, which was threatening to derail the wider Catholic Reformation across mainland Europe. By placing these clashes over English religious identity in both domestic and international contexts, the article makes evident that events on the peripheries of mainland Europe affected discussions at its center.

Al principio fue… Jesús recogiendo sus vestiduras y sus fuentes literarias de inspiración

Hasta ahora el tema que nos ocupa, el de Jesús recogiendo sus vestiduras después de la flagelación, había partido de la consideración de su rareza dentro de la iconografía religiosa y de su carácter especialmente atípico en lo que se refiere a la imaginería pasionista. Se pretende aquí establecer las relaciones iconográficas entre el modelo de estudio y aquellas fuentes literarias que lo inspiraron a lo largo de de los siglos, con el objetivo de ampliar su margen de producción mas allá de los límites de la Contrarreforma, y romper con la tradicional idea de Cristo recogiendo sus vestiduras versus barroco

Rural Seigneurs and the Counter Reformation: Parishes, Patrons, and Religious Reform in France, 1550–1700

This article examines the role of lay seigneurs in religious change in the French countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Catholic Reformation and a period of socioeconomic change in land ownership and exploitation. The focus here is on middling and lesser lords—the rough equivalent of the English gentry, who held land in a single province or evenpaysand had a frequent presence in their parishes—rather than the great nobles who operated at a national level. Brittany is used as a case study, for it was a province rich in rural lords and because relatively good source material survives. It is argued that seigneurs were important patrons of religious innovation in the countryside, particularly in the parish church. They were rarely innovators themselves, but they lent support and resources to the introduction and maintenance of new devotional practices. Lords worked closely with clergy, sharing their aspirations and ideas. Four areas were particularly prominent in eliciting their support: appointment of clergy, support of missionaries, new devotional practices, and funding of building projects and liturgies in parish churches. These combined family strategies of enhancing social status and individual means to salvation which were indivisible in the world of the lay rural nobility. It was from a traditional understanding of lordship that patronage of religious reform stemmed.

Post‐Reformation Priesthood in England: Taking the Past into the Future

AbstractThis paper explores ways in which the identity of the secular priesthood in England and Wales has been shaped by its particular historical experience. Five themes are proposed: the creation of the concept of mission in the post‐Reformation world; the combination of isolation and independence that became characteristic of recusant priests; the emergence of new ways of relating to church structures that priests were forced to find; the distinctive fraternal identity that was nurtured in a variety of ways throughout the penal times and the period of the Catholic Revival; the revolutions in relationships with the laity. These themes are pursued through the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐centuries when the meaning and experience of them changed as the emphasis shifted to buildings and organisations. The twentieth century experience of priesthood in a parish context created possibilities for expansion, which masked issues and problems already rising to the surface. Both the challenges and the opportunities of the recusant way of life became stifled. A fixed model of the church made change difficult to contemplate. The loss of an historically shaped sense of priestly identity is explored as part of the explanation for the contemporary loss of confidence and direction within a shrinking presbyterate.

Theological Renewal after the Council of Trent? The Case of Jesuit Commentaries on the Summa Theologiae

As part of the Catholic reform after the Council of Trent, the Jesuits Francisco de Toledo, Gregorio de Valencia, and Gabriel Vázquez further developed the theological innovations of the School of Salamanca. Their commentaries on the Summa Theologiae (ca. 1563–1604) are marked by a creative retrieval of Aquinas and other theological sources as well as by openness toward current questions. This new method of theological argumentation related past authorities and articulations of the faith more effectively to the present, in order to better preserve the ecclesial community through time.

Fighting Eve: Women on the Stage in Early Modern Italy

The Catholic revival in the sixteenth century coincides with the opening of the commedia dell’arte stage to women, leading to progress for female performers. However, the presence of women in the commedia dell’arte immediately shows contradictions and disagreements with the teaching of the Catholic Church. At this time, women were depicted as an emblem of Catholic morality: they were supposed to be devoted mothers and wives and their life was confined within the domestic household. In my paper, I analyze how difficult it was for women to prevail against religious and cultural prejudices and gain respect and recognition as actresses. My aim is to point out how the presence of women on the stage brought about a revolution for women’s role in Western culture offering a freedom of expression against traditional moral patterns and giving female performers a chance to demonstrate cleverness and professionalism.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and the French Catholic Reform

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and the French Catholic Reform

Un prélat français de la Renaissance: Le Cardinal de Lorraine entre Reims et l’Europe ed. by Jean Balsamo, Thomas Nicklas, Bruno Restif

Reviewed by: Un prélat français de la Renaissance: Le Cardinal de Lorraine entre Reims et l’Europe ed. by Jean Balsamo, Thomas Nicklas, Bruno Restif Brian Sandberg Un prélat français de la Renaissance: Le Cardinal de Lorraine entre Reims et l’Europe. Edited by Jean Balsamo, Thomas Nicklas, and Bruno Restif. [Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance, No DXLVI.] (Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2015. Pp. 472. $66.00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-600-01889-0.) Charles de Lorraine, cardinal de Lorraine and archbishop of Reims, became one of the principal leaders of the Catholic reform in France during the mid-sixteenth century. A member of the Guise branch of the Lorraine dynasty, Charles de Lorraine (1524–1574) personified a Renaissance prince and a reforming prelate during a tumultuous period of religious change and confessional division. His religious and political engagement in the first two decades of the French Wars of Religion (1559–1629) made him a controversial and polarizing figure. Un prélat français de la Renaissance. Le Cardinal de Lorraine entre Reims et l’Europe offers a historical portrait of the cardinal de Lorraine from various perspectives. This collective volume publishes twenty-five essays by historians, art historians, literary scholars, and other specialists on the cardinal de Lorraine and his historical context. The volume produces a nuanced view of the cardinal as a religio-political leader and a literary and artistic patron (Jean Balsamo, Bruno Restif). Several essays treat the documentary record and historiographical literature on the cardinal de Lorraine (Vladimir Chichkine, Isabelle de Conihout, Antoine Pietrobelli, Claude Langlois, Jean-Marie Le Gall). Charles de Lorraine served as archbishop of Reims and also played numerous other clerical roles. He embodied a reforming bishop, transforming his diocese of Reims into a major center of Catholic reform (Bruno Restif). Isabelle Balsamo assesses the archbishop’s artistic patronage in the cathedral of Reims, while Patrick Demouy focuses on the devotional activities and penitential processions that he encouraged. The cardinal promoted Catholic reform throughout the kingdom by sponsoring Jesuit missions in France and supporting other religious orders (Madeleine Molin). Joseph Bergin analyzes the “ecclesiastical empire of the Guises,” focusing particularly on the cardinal de Lorraine’s role as abbot of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, where royal family members were interred. As archbishop of Reims, Lorraine crowned three French kings and engaged in religious politics in order to promote Catholic reform in the kingdom. The cardinal and his brother—François de Lorraine, duc de Guise—advised the young François II during his short reign (1559–1560). Charles de Lorraine maintained a broad clientele in the province of Champagne and beyond through his benefices and urban associations (Mark Konnert and Mark Greengrass). Charles de Lorraine’s attitudes toward heresy gradually shifted between the 1540s and 1570s. Theologian Claude d’Espence provided the young cardinal with spiritual guidance, but the he later fell under suspicion of heresy (Peter Walter). The cardinal promoted a religious reform program based on religious harmony and Christian unity in the mid-sixteenth century (Alain Tallon). Lorraine later organized a major theological discussion between Catholic and Calvinist theologians at the Colloquy of Poissy (1561), but the meeting utterly failed to produce any theological [End Page 352] compromise between the increasingly divided confessions (Max Engam-mare). The cardinal de Lorraine seems to have gradually embraced strict anti-heresy policies, pressing for executions of Huguenots who had participated in the Conspiracy of Amboise and justifying massacres of Protestants. Calvinist writers such as François Hotman demonized the cardinal as a “tiger” and a “viper” for his “cruelty and avarice” toward Protestants. Hugues Daussy traces the crystallization of this negative image of the cardinal. Lorraine engaged in European politics through relationships in Germany, Italy, Scotland, and the Netherlands (Eric Durot, Matteo Provasi, Federica Veratelli, Jules Versele, and François Pernot). The cardinal de Lorraine conducted several diplomatic missions and acted as one of the main negotiators for the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 (Thomas Nicklas). He participated in the papal conclave for the election of Julius III, and his brother, the cardinal de Guise, took part in two additional conclaves (Alain Cullière). Yet, electoral...

Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 by David Wyn Jones

Reviews 286 rendition of Kraus’s drama or of Michael Russell’s roughly simultaneous translation of Die letzten Tage would be a fruitful endeavour. But this reviewer cannot find any major faults in this first complete English translation. If there are moments where the drama seems almost too contemporary — where the parodies of journalistic spin or bureaucratic newspeak feel all too imitative of our own epoch — this cannot be solely attributed to the translators’ intentions, but rather to the prescience of the drama itself. Ari Linden University of Kansas Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900. By David Wyn Jones. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. 2017. x + 277 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1-78327–107–8. David Wyn Jones’s new book enters a crowded market. Notwithstanding periodic attempts at revisionism, Vienna remains musicologically pivotal. The secondary literature is predictably vast, and the impulse to augment it shows no signs of dissipating. Music in Vienna’s novelty resides in its underlying idea: it comprises three case studies, each centred on the turn of a century, which reconstruct Vienna’s musical economy. The first concerns the relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and its musical infrastructure in the decades around 1700; the second tracks this infrastructure’s migration into aristocratic hands 100 years later; the third explores the influence of the bourgeoisie around 1900. In this respect, the book is really a narrative of what economists might call modernization: Vienna’s musical history reflects feudalism’s decline and the rise of a market economy propelled by industrialization and liberalization. Two further tripartitions support this narrative. Wyn Jones’s chronology reflects a division into Baroque, Classical and Modern style periods, in which respect its task is more complex for 1700 than it is for 1800 and 1900, since, unlike Viennese Classicism and Modernism, the Austrian Baroque still lives in the shadows of its Italian, German, English and French counterparts. Simultaneously, he narrates the contraction of Viennese political identity: in 1700, music is indentured to Habsburg authority; after 1800, it mirrors the politics of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, provoking the emergence of a more specifically Austrian identity; and for 1900, Wyn Jones posits a more highly developed Viennese identity, presaging the Empire’s ultimate collapse after the First World War. The book’s impressive resource of documentary evidence — including records detailing the changing composition of the imperial Hofkapelle, the copying and publishing industries, the structure of musical institutions and the repertoire they helped to maintain — allows an historical picture to grow out of the documentary traces of Vienna’s cultural economy. Although the resulting narrative is occasionally dry (what the account of the Hofkapelle’s personnel and structure gains in thoroughness it arguably loses in vitality), there is no contesting the weight of scholarship that underpins it. Reviews 287 The methodology’s drawback is that historical detail often obscures larger debates. Although Wyn Jones erects his conceptual scheme very clearly, its application is practical rather than theoretical, serving more as a framework for historical information than a platform for historiographical speculation, which means that opportunities for critical speculation are missed. Comparison of 1700 and 1800 for example affords a chance to critique Tim Blanning’s idea, expounded in The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), that eighteenth-century history charts the demise of representational culture and the emergence of the public sphere. Although Wyn Jones distances himself from Blanning’s French paradigm, he nevertheless implicitly confirms the perception that the Hofkapelle’s liturgical and ceremonial music was above all an expression of imperial authority (for example, p. 27). The Empire’s disparate character did not diffuse artistic expressions of political authority, but shifted their locus towards the projection of religious identity, engendered in the concept of pietas austriaca, the Habsburg affiliation with counter-reformation Catholicism. This notion also informed secular music: the cycle of courtly operas, composed for the fixed events of Fasching, the imperial name days and birthdays of the Emperor and Empress, invariably expressed the virtues of pietas austriaca in secular form, funnelled symbolically through the personality of the Emperor, about whom all operas were ultimately composed (p...

Enlightenment and Religion in German and Austrian Literature by Ritchie Robertson

Reviews 280 (1995), although she discusses many more of Jelinek’s texts throughout her book. Each of the three main works receives its own section, in which some elements of the organization of a thesis remain: for example, each such section begins with a review of the secondary literature and continues with a summary of the text’s formal elements, its characters and its plot. From there the discussions vary appropriately and according to the text under discussion. The close readings are not exhaustive, but they illustrate Paulschin-Hovdar’s points well and display both convincing illustrations of her argument and a significant mastery of the scholarship on the texts and the prevailing interpretations. Throughout, the book presents additional references to historical events, contemporary Austrian politics and other works by Jelinek. Although the book is successful and without significant blemish in its overall arguments, it does have a few minor weaknesses. At times, early sections rely so extensively on Janz’s foundational book on Jelinek and on Mayer and Koberg’s biography of her that one wonders whether readers might not simply be directed to these works to cover basic elements of Jelinek’s work and life. Barthes’s concept of ‘myth’ becomes crucial to the book’s theoretical framework, yet Janz’s important work connecting Barthes to Jelinek comes to the fore in place of an independent assessment of connections between the two. Finally, the book largely overlooks many materials published in the United States, including the volume on Jelinek edited by Konzett and Lamb-Faffelberger, which includes essays on all three of Paulschin-Hovdar’s principal texts, and perhaps most notably Naqvi’s work on the rhetoric of victimhood, which includes a chapter on the very topic of Paulschin-Hovdar’s study — the victim myth in Jelinek’s work. A completely updated version of a thesis would have included such helpful relevant material. Ian W. Wilson Centre College Enlightenment and Religion in German and Austrian Literature. By Ritchie Robertson. Selected Essays, vol. 1. Cambridge: Legenda. 2017. 494 pp. ₤75. ISBN 978–1-78188–465–2. ‘I wanted to bring them together in order to give them a better chance of being read and also because they collectively represent, I hope, something more than the sum of their parts’ (p. 1). The author thus states two of the key aims of this collection of his essays from around thirty years of research. All the essays presented in the volume have appeared previously, but several only in disparate publications. In that sense, this represents a manner of ‘best of’ album for the scholarly world — with the promise of more to come and the knowledge, imparted by the ‘List of Publications’, that Robertson has ranged much more widely in his scholarly career than a single volume might suggest. Indeed, as stated in the editors’ preface to the series ‘Selected Essays’, of which Robertson’s Enlightenment and Religion in German and Austrian Literature is Reviews 281 the first volume, its aim is ‘to gather a coherent body of work as a tool for future research’, work that demonstrates the roter Faden of topics and methodologies across a career in research. Susan Harrow and Graham Nelson have, then, launched their series with an excellent choice. The volume encompasses twenty-seven chapters divided into four broad epochs from the early eighteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, bringing together wide-ranging themes relevant to the relationship between religion and enlightenment, with close studies of individual literary responses in a range of genres. The first part takes in the German Classical period, marking the effects of enlightenment thought and their implications for such matters as religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism and patriotism and the question of individual human agency as opposed to the control of higher (divine) powers. In part two, the focus lies on Austria and looks at the expression of enlightenment that, for political reasons, really differentiated itself from the enlightenment direction of the territories to the north. This section thus looks particularly at cultural memory, Catholic reform and the bureaucratic enlightenment under the influence of Josephinist policies. The third section on the nineteenth century takes up more explicitly the theme of...

Glowing With the Radiance of Heaven: Roman Martyrs, American Saints, and the Devotional World of Nineteenth-Century American Catholicism

The veneration of relics of the saints in U.S. Catholic history is a much-neglected topic. Partly because scholars are often uncomfortable with aspects of material religion, but also given that relics are, in the narrowest sense, remains of the dead, relics are too often assumed to be lifeless objects or the focus of a 'primitive' piety. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, popes such as Pius IX gifted the entire bodily remains of newly discovered early Christian martyrs from the ancient Roman catacombs to priests and bishops of the young United States. Likely inspired by the phenomenally successful international cultus of catacomb martyr St. Philomena, Spanish and German-born clergy stationed in America modeled devotion to these saints and their relics. This phenomenon, and the promotion of "Roman"-style relic veneration in general, is an aspect of a Catholic religious revivalism often missing from American religious historiography. The largely foreign-born population of nineteenth and early-twentieth century American Catholic faithful, who at the time had no native American saints of their own to venerate, welcomed the presence of these "immigrant" saints into both their public and private devotional spaces. In order to demonstrate the pan-American importance of relics in this period, this article focuses on the shrines of St. Vibiana (Anglo-Spanish California) and St. Victoria (German-American Midwest).

Об’єктивація гуманістичних ідей у культурі України XVII століття

The article is devoted to the analysis of culturological processes in the period of formation of the first national revival of Ukraine in the XVII century. Unlike previous historical periods, a human being and nature become the object of artistic and aesthetic research; the desire for artistic transformation of the real world becomes the stimulus of literature and art development. The need for knowledge, the development of positions, forms and methods of liberation of human mind from a dogmatic-religious outlook is manifested in the secularization of Ukrainian culture in the seventeenth century. West European Renaissance made a significant impact on the change of world-view conception in Ukrainian culture. On the territory of Ukraine various, sometimes opposing, influences were mixed – those from Byzantium and Western European countries; therefore, national culture was formed at the crossroads of Eastern and European cultures. We can trace two main directions in which Ukrainian Renaissance was moving: firstly, transformation of Greek-Byzantine Slavic spiritual traditions in the circumstances of Catholic counterreformation and the formation of the church union, and the second – the perception and transformation of European humanism in the Renaissance period. The period that came after the Middle Ages comprehensively disclosed a human being both in social and aesthetical artistic aspect, and the movement of humanistic ideas in Western and Eastern Europe has led to a deeper interest in human personality. Ukraine did not erode this process, and gradually formed a new human ideal, based on individual culture, spiritual freedom, and redefined the purpose of man in the world. The complex political and socioeconomic conditions of the seventeenth century in Ukraine required special, progressive at that time, characteristics of the development of culturological tendencies. The broad cultural national movement, whose roots were in the resistance to Polish – gentry oppression and the struggle against the Catholic church, brought about flourishing of book printing, the spread of education and scientific knowledge and the rise of anthropocentric worldview in art and literature. An important aspect of Renaissance thinking is the desire to thoroughly explore the real surrounding world, which brings the path to science and education. It is these discoveries of the Ukrainian Renaissance worldview that are gaining momentum in the spiritual culture of Ukraine in the seventeenth century.

Становление французской персоналистической мысли как философская реакция на цивилизационный кризис

DOI : https://doi.org/10.34017/1313-9703-2018-1(11)-16-27 In this article, the author substantiates that Personalism, formed in the 1930-s in France due to the endeavors of Maritain, Mounier and Berdiaiev, originated not like one of the forms of Modernism, which was a manifestation of the crisis, but as a philosophical response to the crisis phenomena at the turn of the 19th century. This crisis was bound with the utter secularization of all spheres of life in concomitance with anti-clerical and antichristian moods. The idea of Catholic revival kindled in the minds of the philosophers-personalists, who realized the civilizational scale of modern decline of social and cultural institutions, dehumanization and depersonalization in society and searched for a set of rules of thumb to surmount the crisis. Against the backdrop of the decay of philosophical thought, French personalists countered the idea of personalistic civilization, the structure and spirit of which are aimed at personal self-fulfillment, with the fascist and communist concepts, anti-personalistic by nature, that were inspired by the philosophy of Nitzsche and Marks and aspired not just to dominate the world but conduct civilization mission. It is evident that a signature plank of French Personalism is its pedagogical vector, determined by the development of personalistic concept of a human being, that would become part of the training program for the educational process within the framework of civilization. Its other feature, that had ramifications in the modern world, is the efforts exerted by philosophers of religion to unify peoples, both the faithful and atheists, around common personalistic values. The ideas of French personalists were implemented into social policy of the Catholic Church and became philosophical foundations of refocusing of Christian theology, declared at the second Vatican Council as an extremely important task of the course of the Catholic renewal (aggiornamento).

A Reforma e a religiosidade feminina em Goa entre 1721 e 1739

The present study aims to characterise Catholic Reformation in the Santa Monica Convent (1721-1739), a community of nuns under the aegis of the Hermits of Saint Augustine friars, focusing on their statutes, daily life, rituals, and rules, and to assess how mental prayer and perfective life were routinely questioned. The troubled relationships between the nuns and the Archbishop, D. Frei Inacio de Santa Teresa, during the whole period of his governance, are analysed. Several questions are enunciated, regarding vocation, discipline, and the vision of a Jacobean bishop. The statutes of the Real Convento de Santa Monica comprised the community’s discipline, but were they complied with? To model behaviours can be regarded as a long-ranged or as a short-ranged historical phenomenon? Disciplining was a personal or a group act of will? Did conciliar decrees overcome private interests?

‘To Whom Say You Your Pater Noster?’: Prayer on the Eve of the Scottish Reformation

ABSTRACTIn 1551, a resident English Dominican, Richard Marshall, sparked a fierce controversy in St Andrews, Scotland, by arguing in a sermon that the Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’, should be prayed to God only and not to the saints. According to John Foxe, the dispute led to much cursing, a regional synod, and one Franciscan fleeing the city in disgrace. The St Andrews quarrel was one of many controversies about prayer in sixteenth-century Europe. Why was prayer such a contentious topic? Scottish prayer controversies revealed a fundamental struggle between traditional and reformist views over the value of ritual in relating to God. Protestants like George Wishart, Catholic reformers like Marshall and Archbishop John Hamilton, and more radical ‘devotional humanists’ like the poet, Sir David Lindsay, proclaimed new understandings of prayer that undermined the structures of traditional devotion by pitting the personal and vernacular aspect of prayer against priestly Latin ritual.

Cardinal Reginald Pole: Questions of Self-Justification and of Faith

Cardinal Reginald Pole served as a papal legate for almost twenty years. He was a leading figure in the Catholic Reform movement, and a prominent political figure both in England and in Europe in his own right. Despite the survival of an unusually vast correspondence and his large literary oeuvre, Pole has remained an elusive figure, often disparaged; his achievements often dismissed; his stature as a leading figure of the century often diminished. How it was that by the middle of the sixteenth century Pole, a lone Englishman, was so pre-eminent in the religious affairs of Europe, especially as he had achieved this prominence in the teeth of the unrelenting hostility of his king and kinsman Henry VIII, who once had been his patron and greatest champion? Pole’s career is also an exemplar of how ignoble dynastic self-interests hampered the noble ambitions of genuine ecclesiastical reformers on both sides of the confessional divide at almost every turn in these early years of the Reformation. This article argues that Pole’s return to England in 1554 as legate a latere has often overshadowed consideration of the other elements of his service, both as a reforming cardinal-deacon, and as a legate a latere in other capacities. While these previous experiences shaped the character of his final legation in England, they also shaped the “Roman” character of the “Catholicism” that was to emerge in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Ecstasy as Polemic: Mysticism and the Catholic Reformation

In the 16th century, Protestants rejected the possibility of mystical encounters between humans and God. Catholics responded in various ways, but perhaps most forcefully by continuing to claim mystical experiences and by emphasizing extreme forms of mysticism. This paper analyzes how that rejection affected the development of Catholic mysticism at that time, especially in the case of Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–82), whose ecstasies were closely examined by the Spanish Inquisition, but were subsequently approved and promoted as exemplary of the truths professed by the Catholic Church.

Catholic Reform in Ireland in a European Context

456 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Catholic Reform in Ireland in a European Context Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin While exceptionalism is rightly considered a particularly hazardous form of historical explanation, the religious evolution of Ireland during the early modern period can be considered anomalous in European terms.1 First, within the wider family of European Catholicism, Ireland was unusual in that the majority of the island’s inhabitants continued to identify themselves as members of the Church of Rome, although for practically the entirety of the period the monarch of Ireland was Protestant. The closest analogy to this situation was probably the Dutch Republic immediately following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the inclusion of the Generality lands boosted the Catholic proportion of the Dutch population to between forty to fifty per cent. Elsewhere on the continent, however, Catholicism was the majority religion only in those areas where state power rested in Catholic hands, and often where that state power was highly aggressively deployed. Ireland represents a sharp contrast, therefore, with large areas of Scandinavia, most notably Norway, where little enthusiasm for an externally-imposed Reformation existed but where Catholicism nevertheless declined steeply in the face of state hostility. Even in polities such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungary and, to a lesser extent France, where the monarchy was restricted in its capacity to deploy outright coercion to promote adherence to Catholicism, the Church of Rome benefited from active support and partisanship rather than, as in the case of Ireland, facing harassment, restriction and hostility. Ireland as a special case This continued disjunction in religion between monarch and subjects also rendered the island unusual within the wider history of the continent’s confessional states. The early modern European state system was founded on a union of throne and altar in which religious dissidence was not only seen as a deadly threat to the stability of the body politic, but ius reformandi came to be seen as one of the most highly prized attributes of state sovereignty Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin Studies • volume 106 • number 424 457 by European monarchs. Pious princes also conceived it as their duty to promote the mission of the (approved) Church in their dominions and could take heart that this activity both rendered the polity more pleasing to the Almighty, and thus less likely to provoke a divine chastisement, while also isolating and weakening a potential fifth column of religious dissidents who might be driven to make common cause with an external foe in the interests of their deviant beliefs. The advantages conferred by control over the state coercive apparatus and patronage were enormous and allowed monarchs to accomplish some extraordinary metamorphoses. In Austria and Bohemia, the Habsburgs transformed Catholicism from the church of a threatened minority to the accepted religion of the vast majority of the population, while the Elizabethan regime successfully transmuted the religious allegiance of the majority of the English population, although in a manner which stored up significant issues for her successors. Ireland was certainly not a unique case of state confessional failure. Philip II’s attempts to reconfigure both the political and religious governance of the Netherlands provoked a revolt which ultimately saw the Habsburgs lose control over the seven northern provinces of what became the Dutch Republic. Strong resonances can be seen between the Dutch and the Irish experiences in that it can be argued that an original a-confessional cause, in the Netherlands the defence of local autonomy,2 in Ireland resentment of the militaristic state-building wars of the later Tudors, eventually polarised into religious conflict. Where Ireland differed from the Netherlands, however, was the sheer longevity, indeed the institutionalised instability, of the confessional conflict. Eighty years of war in the Netherlands eventually gave the Habsburgs free rein in the southern provinces while in the north an unusually tolerant western European society developed. While religious antagonisms remained potent, they did not represent a mortal threat to the continued viability of the Republic. In Ireland, by contrast, confessional hostilities continued to have the potential to threaten the stability of the entire kingdom to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Within the more narrow confines of the Atlantic archipelago...

Preface

Preface Exactly what significance should be attached to the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 1517 protest? Luther could not foresee that his actions and those of his opponents would trigger a series of regional reform movements, culminating in the Catholic Reformation, that had multiple consequences both for western Europe and for the shaping of global Christianity. The short answer must be that historians will debate the question till kingdom come: the file, so to speak, will never be closed. What follows in this special issue of Studies comprises the contributions of distinguished Irish and British historians at the recent ‘Reformation 500’ conference held in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and St Patrick’s campus of Dublin City University, on 20–21 October 2017. This conference was jointly organised by the Church of Ireland Historical Society and the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland to mark the anniversary of the onset of the European reformations. Both societies, it need scarcely be said, aspire to achieve high academic standards as the means of engaging with the complex religious history of Ireland in a European context. The measure of these essays will be the extent to which they reflect such standards. In disentangling the many issues raised by the European reformations, certain things need to be borne in mind. To begin with, the vertiginous political and dynastic complexity of early modern Europe provided the immediate context of these reforming movements. Valois-Habsburg rivalries, particularly in Italy, impacted on papal politics, complicating and frustrating repeated attempts to convene a General Council of the Church to address reform. In this situation the Medici Pope, Clement VII, became a prisoner of a Hapsburg army in 1527 in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The king of France could make and unmake alliances alternately with the Turks and the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. To such an unstable mix could be added the growing Turkish threat in the western Mediterranean and in central Europe, the complexities of the Habsburg state itself, the rivalries of the Italian cities, not to mention the rivalries within the Roman nobility. Such a political environment, as well as frustrating Catholic reform, enabled the Protestant reformations to establish themselves in some German states and cities, while simultaneously imposing territorial limits on their extension. It needs to be borne in mind that Protestant reformers did not set out with Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Preface: Winter 2017/18 401 the intention of dividing the Church. They expected that reform would eventually embrace the entire Church. What is our past was once their future, the outcome of which was no clearer to them then than ours is to us now. Indeed, the concept of ‘the Reformation’ was only first applied to the history of the Church by Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff at the end of the seventeenth century, and even then he limited its application to the Lutheran movement. The fact that our perceptions of what transpired in the past are often filtered through our unconscious modern biases raises a host of hermeneutical issues. All sorts of notions linking the Protestant Reformation(s) to the rise of capitalism, science, freedom of conscience, the emergence of nation states, have little basis in fact. Such ideas tell us more about historians and their times than about history. One way of gauging such influences is the study of reception history of the sort that Dr Scott Dixon deals with in the first essay in these pages, which was the opening address of the conference. Among the misperceptions of the Reformation period is the idea that the late medieval Church was incorrigibly corrupt. Historians today have a more nuanced understanding of a Church that, for all its faults – and this is a common theme across the entire spectrum of medieval governance – was not lacking in vitality, intellectual and spiritual vigour, and popular engagement. The need for reform of some of its structures was widely acknowledged. Reforming our political institutions after the financial collapse in 2008 has not been achieved, in spite of the fact that we know that failure to do so risks condemning ourselves to repeated disasters. We are not so different from those who went before us. We are happily past the...