Download or read book Conversion to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy written by Peter A. Mazur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conversion took on a new importance within the Catholic world, as its leaders faced the challenge of expanding the church's reach to new peoples and continents while at the same time reinforcing its authority in the Old World. Based on new archival research, this book details the extraordinary stories of converts who embraced a new religious identity in a territory where papal authority and Catholic orthodoxy were arguably at their strongest: the Italian peninsula. Through an analysis of both the unique strategies employed by clerics to attract and educate converts, and the biographies of the men and women—soldiers, aristocrats, and charlatans—who negotiated new positions for themselves in Rome and the other cities of the peninsula, a new image of Italy during the Counter-reformation emerges: a place where repression and toleration alternated in unexpected ways, leaving room for negotiation and exchange with members of rival faiths.

Download or read book Catholic Spectacle and Rome s Jews written by Emily Michelson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.

Download or read book Trent and All That written by John W. O'Malley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counter Reformation, Catholic Reformation, the Baroque Age, the Tridentine Age, the Confessional Age: why does Catholicism in the early modern era go by so many names? And what political situations, what religious and cultural prejudices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to this confusion? Taking up these questions, John O'Malley works out a remarkable guide to the intellectual and historical developments behind the concepts of Catholic reform, the Counter Reformation, and, in his felicitous term, Early Modern Catholicism. The result is the single best overview of scholarship on Catholicism in early modern Europe, delivered in a pithy, lucid, and entertaining style. Although its subject is fundamental to virtually all other issues relating to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, there is no other book like this in any language. More than a historiographical review, Trent and All That makes a compelling case for subsuming the present confusion of terminology under the concept of Early Modern Catholicism. The term indicates clearly what this book so eloquently demonstrates: that Early Modern Catholicism was an aspect of early modern history, which it strongly influenced and by which it was itself in large measure determined. As a reviewer commented, O'Malley's discussion of terminology opens up a different way of conceiving of the whole history of Catholicism between the Reformation and the French Revolution.

Download or read book Converts to Catholicism in Early Modern Italy written by Peter A. Mazur and published by Lund Humphries Publishers. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Saints and Signs written by Massimo Leone and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saints and Signs analyzes a corpus of hagiographies, paintings, and other materials related to four of the most prominent saints of early modern Catholicism: Ignatius of Loyola, Philip Neri, Francis Xavier, and Therese of Avila. Verbal and visual documents – produced between the end of the Council of Trent (1563) and the beginning of the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623) – are placed in their historical context and analyzed through semiotics – the discipline that studies signification and communication – in order to answer the following questions: How did these four saints become signs of the renewal of Catholic spirituality after the Reformation? How did their verbal and visual representations promote new Catholic models of religious conversion? How did this huge effort of spiritual propaganda change the modern idea of communication? The book is divided into four sections, focusing on the four saints and on the particular topics related to their hagiologic identity: early modern theological debates on grace (Ignatius of Loyola); cultural contaminations between Catholic internal and external missions (Philip Neri); the Christian identity in relation to non-Christian territories (Francis Xavier); the status of women in early modern Catholicism (Therese of Avila).

Download or read book A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome written by Matthew Coneys Wainwright and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of groups and individuals in Rome who were not Roman Catholic, or not born so. It demonstrates how other religions had a lasting impact on early modern Catholic institutions in Rome.

Download or read book A Convert s Tale written by Tamar Herzig and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d’Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. A Convert’s Tale explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

Download or read book The Bishop s Burden written by Celeste McNamara and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1563, the Council of Trent published its Decrees, calling for significant reforms of the Catholic Church in response to criticism from both Protestants and Catholics alike. Bishops, according to the Decrees, would take the lead in implementing these reforms. They were tasked with creating a Church in which priests and laity were well educated, morally upright, and focused on worshipping God. Unfortunately for these bishops, the Decrees provided few practical suggestions for achieving the wide-ranging changes demanded. Reform was therefore an arduous and complex process, which many bishops struggled to accomplish or even refused to undertake fully. The Bishop’s Burden argues that reforming bishops were forced to be creative and resourceful to accomplish meaningful change, including creating strong diocesan governments, reforming clerical and lay behavior, educating priests and parishioners, and converting non-believers. The book explores this issue through a detailed case study of the episcopacy of Cardinal-Bishop Gregorio Barbarigo of Padua (bp. 1664-1697), asking how a dedicated bishop formulated a reform program that sought to achieve the Church’s goals. Barbarigo, like other reforming bishops, borrowed strategies from a variety of sources in the absence of clear guidance from Rome. He looked to both pre- and post-Tridentine bishops, the Society of Jesus, the Venetian government, and the Propaganda Fide, which he selectively emulated to address the problems he discovered in Padua. The book is based primarily on the detailed records of Barbarigo’s visitations of rural parishes and captures the rarely-heard voices of seventeenth-century Italian peasants. The Bishop's Burden helps us understand not only the changes experienced by early modern Catholics, but also how even the most sophisticated plans of central authorities could be frustrated by practical realities, which in turn complicates our understanding of state-building and social control.

Download or read book Food Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe written by Christopher Kissane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a three-part structure focused on the major historical subjects of the Inquisition, the Reformation and witchcraft, Christopher Kissane examines the relationship between food and religion in early modern Europe. Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe employs three key case studies in Castile, Zurich and Shetland to explore what food can reveal about the wider social and cultural history of early modern communities undergoing religious upheaval. Issues of identity, gender, cultural symbolism and community relations are analysed in a number of different contexts. The book also surveys the place of food in history and argues the need for historians not only to think more about food, but also with food in order to gain novel insights into historical issues. This is an important study for food historians and anyone seeking to understand the significant issues and events in early modern Europe from a fresh perspective.

Download or read book Conversions written by Simon Ditchfield and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Download or read book Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy written by David Gentilcore and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Italian Protomedicato tribunals, Colleges of Physicians, or Health Offices (jurisdiction varied from state to state) required charlatans to submit their wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order to set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. The licensing of charlatans became an administrative routine. As far as the medical magistracies were concerned, charlatans had a defineable identity, constituting a specific trade or occupation. This book studies the way charlatans were represented, by contemporaries and by historians, how they saw themselves and, most importantly, it reconstructs the place of charlatans in early modern Italy. It explores the goods and services charlatans provided, their dealings with the public and their marketing strategies. It does so from a range of perspectives: social, cultural, economic, political, geographical, biographical and, of course, medical. Charlatans are not just some curiosity on the fringes of medicine: they offered health care to an extraordinarily wide sector of the population. Moreover, from their origins in Renaissance Italy, the Italian ciarlatano was the prototype for itinerant medical practitioners throughout Europe. This book offers a different look at charlatans. It is the first to take seriously the licences issued to charlatans in the Italian states, compiling them into a 'charlatans database' of over 1,300 charlatans active throughout Italy over the course of some three centuries. In addition, it makes use of other types of archival documents, such as trial records and wills, to give the charlatans a human face, as well as a wide range of artistic and printed sources, not forgetting the output of the charlatans themselves, in the form of handbills and pamphlets.

Download or read book The Counter Reformation and the Catholic Reformation in Early Modern Europe written by Michael A. Mullett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1984 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Jews and the Reformation written by Kenneth Austin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judaism has always been of great significance to Christianity but this relationship has also been marked by complexity and ambivalence. The emergence of new Protestant confessions in the Reformation had significant consequences for how Jews were viewed and treated. In this wide-ranging account, Kenneth Austin examines Christian attitudes toward Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning, arguing that they have much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities—and have important implications for how we think about religious pluralism today.

Download or read book Forced Conversion in Christianity Judaism and Islam written by Mercedes García-Arenal and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam explores the legal and theological grounds through which Christians, Jews, and Muslims sanctioned and reacted to forcible conversion in premodern Iberia and related settings.

Download or read book The Many Faces of Early Modern Italian Jewry written by Martin Borýsek and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish population of early modern Italy was characterised by its inner diversity, which found its expression in the coexistence of various linguistic, cultural and liturgical traditions, as well as social and economic patterns. The contributions in this volume aim to explore crucial questions concerning the self-perception and identity of early modern Italian Jews from new perspectives and angles.

Download or read book Compel People to Come In written by Autori Vari and published by Viella Libreria Editrice. This book was released on 2020-03-11T12:37:00+01:00 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Compelle intrare”: since the time of St Augustine, St Luke’s words in the parable of the Banquet have served as a justification for forced conversion to Christianity. Challenging this tradition, in 1686 Pierre Bayle denounced how a literal interpretation of the parable had led to a long line of crimes, and argued that “nothing is more abominable than obtaining conversion by coercion”. In recent decades, scholarly research on conversion in the Early Modern Age has increasingly focused on intriguing aspects such as the fluidity of converts’ identity and their crossing of borders – both geographical and confessional. This book takes a different perspective and brings the focus back to the dark side of conversion, to the varying degrees of violence that accompanied Catholic missionary activities in the non-European World in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays collected here examine three areas where, sometimes visibly, sometimes much more subtly, the violent aspects of conversion took shape: doctrine, missionary practice, and the conversion narratives. Investigating the connection between violence and conversion is a way to reflect not only on the early modern world, but also on that of the present day, when conversion – including by coercion – has yet again become a significant issue.

Download or read book The Papal States in the Mediterranean World written by Francesco Lacopo and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates the relationship between Counter-Reformation Catholicism and the Jewish, Muslim, and Eastern Orthodox inhabitants of two of the early modern Papal States' major cities: the papal capital of Rome and the major port city of Ancona. In Rome, the early modern popes promoted aggressive policies of conversion, as the city was the theatrum mundi that served to represent the successes and failures of global Catholicism. In contrast, the papacy needed to refrain from driving non-Catholic commercial agents away from Ancona, necessitating a regime of toleration. The period under investigation (1543-1622) was one of expedient accommodation of Ancona's religious diversity. When non-Catholics converted to Catholicism in early modern Ancona, they often did so on their own terms rather than as a result of coercion. This study draws on baptismal registers, papal taxation records, notarial documents, correspondence from religious orders, and other sources scattered across archives in Italy, the Vatican, and the United States. The research questions are the following: How did local actors mold the ways the popes wielded power as territorial princes and as universal pastors? How did the Papal States' diverse communities respond to the papal impetus to enforce Catholic identity? And what do we mean when we speak of the early Papal States and Italy writ large given their regionally- and religiously-diverse histories? I reveal the limits of the popes' power as it interacted with local social, economic, and cultural contexts in a period of rising social discipline and papal absolutism. Central themes in this dissertation include immigration, (in)toleration, and cultural encounter. Women and men arrived in Ancona and the rest of the Papal States from across the world, from Persia to the Caribbean and from across the Mediterranean, and converted for purposes including social assimilation, commercial benefit, and manumission from slavery. Many others outside of Ancona were coerced by the Inquisition and other Catholic authorities. In response to the early modern conversionary phenomenon, missions known as case dei catecumeni (catechumen houses) pioneered missionary strategies. These strategies informed and were molded by missions in other world regions. Each catechumen house also reflected local contingencies. In Ancona's case, commercial agents crucial to the financial wellbeing of the Papal States resisted conversion and even leveraged their commercial importance to gain papal support for their non-compliance. As a socially- and confessionally-diverse Adriatic port, Ancona was typical. But its typicality made it exceptional in the theocratic Papal States. Rome, on the other hand, was unusual in its extreme intolerance. By displacing Rome as the sole subject of study, this dissertation shows how the Papal States operated by many of the same economic and social rules as other early modern states, despite being a theocracy. This dissertation utilizes three distinct methods. At its foundation is a quantitative analysis of hundreds of converts' baptismal records and census documents spread across multiple archives in the former Papal States. Collating age, gender, former religion, conversion frequency, and other data points produces reasonably accurate profiles of convert populations in Rome and Ancona. These profiles reveal that Ancona saw less frequent targeting of vulnerable demographics for baptism and less outright coercion. The second method builds on the first, and involves reading baptismal records, notarial documents, and letters for substantive qualitative information. Narratives about converts in register entries permit the construction of prosopographies to illustrate personal convert experiences with conversion, toleration, and intoleration. A third level is analysis focuses on lengthy accounts of religious minorities' lives from Inquisitional proceedings, correspondence, and other documents. These highly personal accounts show that many religious minority individuals and families were investigated by Catholic authorities. But unlike in Rome, Ancona's Inquisitorial efforts rarely resulted in conversion, since the city's distance from Rome and proximity to the Adriatic permitted more opportunities for dissent and resistance and, when necessary, escape. Chapter One discusses the development of religious toleration and intoleration in Italy and the Mediterranean, and dedicates special attention to the changing place of religious conversion in the broader context of the Reformation world. Chapter Two establishes Rome as a foundation for comparison with Ancona. The papal capital's landscape of religious conversion is exceptionally well-documented, shows the ideal world of the Counter-Reformation popes as opposed to Ancona's world of expediency, and offers opportunities for additional breakthroughs such as a deep analysis of the first conversions to occur in the Roman casa dei catecumeni. Chapter Three dissects Ancona's history of toleration and accommodation through the vast corpus of early modern town council decrees, papal bulls, and other administrative sources. Chapter Four then turns to the often surprisingly qualitative Ancona baptismal registers and compares these sources to similar records housed in Rome's archives. Ancona's baptismal registers have never before been subject to systematic study. Chapter Five triangulates conversion and toleration in Ancona within the broader Catholic missionary world, largely through the archives of the Italian Inquisition, and outlines areas for future study.