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This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe. It surveys the diversity of views about the structure and nature of the movement, pointing toward the possibilities for further research. The volume presents a series of comprehensive treatments on the process and interpretation of Catholic Enlightenment in France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Malta, Italy and the Habsburg territories. An introductory overview explores the varied meanings of Catholic Enlightenment and situates them in a series of intellectual and social contexts. The topics covered in this book are crucial for a proper understanding of the role and place not only of Catholicism in the eighteenth century, but also for the social and religious history of Modern Europe.
"Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time. Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda. In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again. Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.
The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology presents readers with accessible, translated selections from the writings of fifteen major Catholic Enlightenment authors. These early modern authors include women, priests, lay intellectuals, and bishops. Twelve of these figures are being brought into English for the first time. The purpose of the volume is to provide students, scholars, and interested non-specialists with a single point of departure to delve into the primary sources of the Catholic Enlightenment. This anthology shows the geographical and intellectual diversity of the Catholic Enlightenment, while also demonstrating significant threads of commonality in intellectual orientation. One strength of this volume is the geographical spread of the figures considered. Included are Catholic thinkers from England, the United States, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France, Portugal, and the Italian and German-speaking lands. Another strength of this volume is the breadth of subject matter treated – it features pastoral letters, mystical tracts, pedagogical treatises, political manifestos, and theological works. These texts elucidate Catholic Enlightenment views on topics such as the history of women’s education, liturgy and devotions, and the relationship between church and state. The co-editors, Ulrich Lehner and Shaun Blanchard, have assembled a team of international scholars from Europe and the Americas for this exciting project. Lehner is one of the central scholars behind the renewed interest in the Catholic Enlightenment. He co-edits the volume, contributes to the introduction, and introduces and translates two significant German-speaking figures. Shaun Blanchard, who has recently published a monograph on radical Catholic Enlightenment figures, also co-edits, contributes selections from two English-speaking figures and has completed the first English translation of a section of Lodovico Muratori’s landmark On the Regulated Devotion of a Christian since 1789.
A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Augsburg introduces readers to major political, social and economic developments in Augsburg from c. 1400 to c. 1800 as well as to those themes of social and cultural history that have made research on this imperial city especially fruitful and stimulating. The volume comprises contributions by an international team of 23 scholars, providing a range of the most significant scholarly approaches to Augsburg’s past from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. Building on the impressive number of recent innovative studies on this large and prosperous early modern city, the contributions distill the extraordinary range and creativity of recent scholarship on Augsburg into a handbook format. Contributors are Victoria Bartels, Katy Bond, Christopher W. Close, Allyson Creasman, Regina Dauser, Dietrich Erben, Alexander J. Fisher, Andreas Flurschütz da Cruz, Helmut Graser, Mark Häberlein, Michele Zelinsky Hanson, Peter Kreutz, Hans-Jörg Künast, Margaret Lewis, Andrew Morrall, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Barbara Rajkay, Reinhold Reith, Gregor Rohmann, Claudia Stein, B. Ann Tlusty, Sabine Ullmann, Wolfgang E.J. Weber.
Challenging the common assumption that the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was an essentially secular, irreligious and atheistic movement, this book critiques this standard interpretation as based on a narrow view of Enlightenment sources. Building on the work of revisionist historians, this volume takes the argument squarely into the theological domain, whether Anglican, Dissenting, Lutheran or deistic, whilst also noting that the Enlightenment deeply affected Roman Catholic and Jewish theologies. It challenges the stereotype of 'Enlightenment rationalism', and the penultimate chapter brings out the biblical and ecclesial roots of the image of enlightenment and reclaims it for Christian faith.
In spite of an upsurge in interest in the social history of the Catholic community and an ever-growing body of literature on early modern 'superstition' and popular religion, the English Catholic community's response to the invisible world of the preternatural and supernatural has remained largely neglected. Addressing this oversight, this book explores Catholic responses to the supernatural world, setting the English Catholic community in the contexts of the wider Counter-Reformation and the confessional culture of early modern England. In so doing, it fulfils the need for a study of how English Catholics related to manifestations of the devil (witchcraft and possession) and the dead (ghosts) in the context of Catholic attitudes to the supernatural world as a whole (including debates on miracles). The study further provides a comprehensive examination of the ways in which English Catholics deployed exorcism, the church's ultimate response to the devil. Whilst some aspects of the Catholic response have been touched on in the course of broader studies, few scholars have gone beyond the evidence contained within anti-Catholic polemical literature to examine in detail what Catholics themselves said and thought. Given that Catholics were consistently portrayed as 'superstitious' in Protestant literature, the historian must attend to Catholic voices on the supernatural in order to avoid a disastrously unbalanced view of Catholic attitudes. This book provides the first analysis of the Catholic response to the supernatural and witchcraft and how it related to a characteristic Counter-Reformation preoccupation, the phenomenon of exorcism.
The third volume of The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism examines the period from the defeat of the Jacobite army at the battle of Culloden in 1746 to the enactment of Catholic emancipation in 1829. The first part of the volume offers a chronological overview tracing the decline of Jacobitism, the easing of penal legislation which targeted Catholics, the complex impact of the French Revolution, the debates about the place of Catholics in the post-Union state, and - following the mass mobilisation of Irish Catholics - the passage of emancipation. The second part of the volume shows that this political history can only be properly understood with reference to the broader transformations that occurred in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The period witnessed the expansion of Catholic infrastructure (pastoral structures, chapel building, elementary education and finances) and changes in Catholic practice, for example in liturgy and devotion. The growing infrastructure and more public profession of Catholicism occurred in a society where anti-Catholicism remained a force, but the volume also addresses the accommodations and interactions with non-Catholics that attended daily life. Crucially, the transformations of this period were international, as well as national. The volume examines the British and Irish convents, colleges, friaries and monasteries on the continent, especially during the events of the 1790s when many institutions closed and successor or new ones emerged at home. The international dimensions of British and Irish Catholicism extended beyond Europe too as the British Empire expanded globally, and attention is given to the involvement of British and Irish Catholics in imperial expansion. This volume addresses the literary, intellectual and cultural expressions of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. Catholics produced a rich literature in English, Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh, although the volume shows the disparities in provision. They also engaged with and participated in the Catholic Enlightenment, particularly as they grappled with the challenges of accommodation to a Protestant constitution. This also had consequences for the public expression of Catholicism and the volume concludes by exploring the shifting expression of belief through music and material culture.
Malleable Anatomies offers an account of the early stages of the practice of anatomical modelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. It investigates the 'mania' for anatomical displays that swept the Italian peninsula, and traces the fashioning of anatomical models as important social, cultural, and political as well as medical tools. Over the course of the eighteenth century, anatomical specimens offered particularly accurate insights into the inner body. Being coloured, soft, malleable, and often life-size, they promised to foster anatomical knowledge for different audiences in a delightful way. But how did anatomical models and preparations inscribe and mediate bodily knowledge? How did they change the way in which anatomical knowledge was created and communicated? And how did they affect the lives of those involved in their production, display, viewing, and handling? Examining the circumstances surrounding the creation and early viewing of anatomical displays in Bologna and Naples, Malleable Anatomies addresses these questions by reconstructing how anatomical modelling developed at the intersection of medical discourse, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour display. While doing so, it investigates the development of anatomical modelling in the context of the diverse worlds of visual and material practices that characterized the representation and display of the body in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. Drawing attention to the artisanal dimension of anatomical practice, and to the role of women as both makers and users of anatomical models, it considers how anatomical specimens lay at the centre of a composite world of social interactions, which led to the fashioning of modellers as anatomical celebrities. Moreover, it examines how anatomical displays transformed the proverbially gruesome practice of anatomy into an enthralling experience that engaged audiences' senses.
We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.
Jansenism: An International Anthology is the first comprehensive anthology of Jansenist texts in English translation. Covering the full sweep of the Jansenist movement from the 1630s until the early nineteenth century, this anthology is a major asset to historians of early modernity, theologians, advanced and beginner students, and interested non-specialists. Readers of English can now directly hear the voices of the women and men, nuns and priests, and politicians and pamphleteers embroiled in some of the most dynamic controversies of early modern Christianity. While giving due attention to France, the anthology showcases the geographic breadth of Jansenism, from Portugal to Lebanon. Consequently, a team of translators have provided texts translated not just from French and Latin; selections from German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic also appear here. Blanchard and Yoder present a diverse range of texts, including letters, tracts, periodical excerpts, books, treatises, and synodal documents. These readings cover the controversies over divine grace and penance for which Jansenism is infamous, but they also show the widening scope of Jansenists' reformist concerns as the movement developed and changed. They address issues such as liturgical reform, devotion to Mary and the saints, politics, religious toleration, prayer, gender and the role of women in the Church, polemics, and ecclesiastical reform. The whole volume is introduced by an essay introducing Jansenism, exposing the important themes, summarizing the relevant scholarship, and contextualizing the content that will follow. Jansenism: An International Anthology provides the first port-of-call for the study of Jansenism in English. The anthology presents a diverse and rich selection of primary source texts and draws on the best recent research into the fascinating and controversial transnational phenomena called "Jansenism."