Simon Ditchfield

Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Maps 1. Introduction Part I. Liturgy: 2. Reform of liturgy and the reinvention of historia sacra 3. Hagiography as liturgy in a local context: the ecclesia placentina riformanda Part II. Sanctity: 4. Early Christian martyr 5. Aristocratic hermit 6. Well-born nun 7. Lay helper of the urban poor 8. Visionary shepherdess 9. Saintly pontiff Part III. History: 10. Historia sacra as redemptor ecclesiarum italicarum 11. The ecclesiastical roots of national historiography: Ferdinando Ughellis Italia sacra Bibliography Index.

Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World

This article was extensively revised and expanded while I was holder of a British Academy Research Leave fellowship (2006 – 8). I would like to thank the academy for their financial support. This essay is dedicated with affection and gratitude to Sofia Boesch Gajano, who has done so much to enable the rethinking of saints and sanctity in all periods of history. Versions of this paper were presented to audiences in Cambridge, Rome, St Andrews, York, Berlin, and London. I am grateful to all present on these occasions for their courteous interest. In particular, I am indebted to the following for their assistance, comments, and questions: Alex Bamji, Fabio Barry, Sofia Boesch, Philip Broadhead, Peter Burke, Stuart Carroll, Bruce Gordon, Giuseppe Guazzelli, Bridget Heal, Mark Jenner, Roger Mettam, Andrew Pettegree, Miri Rubin, Ulinka Rublack, Heinz Schilling, and Nancy Siraisi. I would also like to thank members of the editorial board of this journal, particularly Francoise Meltzer, and Jas’ Elsner for their stimulating and helpful comments. Finally, I would like to express my profound gratitude to John Arnold for his personal encouragement and stimulating comments, as well as for patiently reading through the whole text at several stages of its revision and making numerous suggestions for its improvement. (Now that’s what I call friendship!) Both he and Adam Morton, whose eagle eye saved me from several errors, helped me to see what I was trying to do. Obviously, the errors of commission and omission which remain are my responsibility alone. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 1. See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997). 2. ‘In effect, demonology was a composite subject consisting of discussions about the workings of nature, the processes of history, the maintenance of religious purity, and the nature of political authority and order. Inevitably, its authors took up particular intellectual positions in relation to these four major topics of early modern thought. Quite simply, their views about witchcraft depended on concepts and arguments drawn from the scientific, historical, religious, and political debates of their time. Equally, by theorising about witches, they made important contributions to

Sacred history : uses of the Christian past in the Renaissance world

PART I: CHURCH HISTORY IN THE RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION PART II: NATIONAL HISTORY AND SACRED HISTORY PART III: USES OF SACRED HISTORY IN THE EARLY MODERN CATHOLIC WORLD

Journal of Early Modern History: Editorial

The early modern period of world history (ca. 1300-1800) was marked by a rapidly increasing level of global interaction. Between the aftermath of Mongol conquest in the East and the onset of industrialization in the West, a framework was established for new kinds of contacts and collective self-definition across an unprecedented range of human and physical geographies. The Journal of Early Modern History, the official journal of the University of Minnesota Center for Early Modern History, is the first scholarly journal dedicated to the study of early modernity from this world-historical perspective, whether through explicitly comparative studies, or by the grouping of studies around a given thematic, chronological, or geographic frame.

What's in a title? Writing a history of the Counter-Reformation for a post-colonial age

eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item.

Discovering how to describe the world then and now: A review article.

The three books under review offer the opportunity to consider attempts to write the history of the wider world from the Renaissance to the present day. Although they are vastly different in focus: from a selection of travel narratives and histories; volumes from a multi-authored reference work to the study of a single street; what they all have in common is their comparative methodology and their extended engagement with non-European cultures. The review endorses Christopher Bayly’s contention that we are all global historians now, only some of us don’t know it. To misquote Benedetto Croce: ‘all history is contemporary (but also comparative) history’.

The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia by Liam Matthew Brockey (review)

T carefully argued and richly contextualized study of the Portuguese Jesuit André Palmeiro (Lisbon, 1569–Macau, 1635), inspector of the Society’s missions in India and the Far East, consciously makes use of the unfashionable genre of life-and-times biography to make two polemical points. The first is that it is necessary to remember that the Society of Jesus, which in recent decades has come to be seen as standing for everything that was ‘“modern” about the early-modern age, was not an undifferentiated Zeitgeist but made up of individuals who often were to be found on both sides of the many controversies of the age (not excluding the strategy of cultural accommodation with which the Society’s missions are perhaps most closely associated). In Brockey’s words, one should not forget they were “a community representative of the rich variety of early modern Catholic piety and preoccupations” (p. 19). Second, Brockey excoriates the tendency of much recent scholarship to misuse the term global and to see the members of the Society as “harbingers of globalization” (p. 428). Instead, by restoring “depth and texture to the men of the early modern Society of Jesus” (p. 19), the author seeks to show how pragmatism was king, heroism in short supply, and failure more common than success. “Alas, no,” Brockey writes in his conclusion, “It was not the world that became more connected because of the Jesuits; rather, it was the Society that, owing to the limitations of communications in early modernity, became more thinly stretched as it spread out across the world” (p. 429). Emblematic of this was the definitive loss of the Japanese mission by the mid-seventeenth century, which, as Brockey memorably puts it, “lies at the eastern terminus [of] ... this panorama of Jesuit dead ends” (p. 432). The latter included the failed missions of Ethiopia, Agra, Tibet, Sri Lanka, the

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (review)

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism--all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformations protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science--as the source of all truth--necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

What Did Natural History have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta Sj (1540–1600) in the Americas *

At the southern foot of the Palatine Hill in Rome, a little more than one hundred metres due west of the triumphal arch erected by the emperor who is associated more than any other with the Christian conversion of the Old World — Constantine the Great – there stands another arch. Relocated from its original position at the eastern foot of the Palatine, more or less directly across from the biggest remaining ruin in the forum — that of the Basilica of Maxentius — it formed the monumental entrance to one of the most important botanic gardens in sixteenth-century Europe — the Orti farnesiani , which were given their definitive shape between 1565 and 1590. I propose that this second arch has reason to be considered as occupying a similar symbolic significance for the conversion of the New World.

Giving Tridentine Worship back its History

Question: What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? Answer: You can negotiate with a terrorist! As well-known, humour - by juxtaposing like with unlike - can make a serious point, concisely and memorably, and this quip, too, has a serious import. To begin with, the source for this joke was an Oratorian priest As will become clear, this is of more than passing significance - aside, that is, from the fact that their founder, St Philip Neri was well-known for his use of humour to mortify the spirit of his favourite disciples. For my principal concern in this paper is with ecclesiastical erudition (something of an Oratorian speciality during this period) and its relationship to the shape, content, and practice of Christian worship.