Engineering the Sacred; Administrating the Soul: the Plurality and Pluralization of Early Modern Catholicism in Roman Censorship of Sacramental and Devotional Writings 1643-1713

• Applicant: Bruno Boute, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273676372

This Proposal wishes to investigate the dynamics of plurality and pluralisation in non-pluralist communities in Early Modern Europe. Inspired by paradigm shifts in post-Durkheimian Anthropology and in Organisation Sociology, it aims at tracking religious plurality within early modern confessions: not as a phenomenon on the fringes but as a mediator of religious change on par with urges towards uniformisation privileged in scholarship. Religious practices and rites, the central theme, should be a case in point. The orthopractic turn in early modern Catholicism, the obsession of authorities with correct sacramental and devotional practice, might well have been a strategy to cover up the failure to achieve doctrinal unity in disruptive debates on Divine Grace, Infallibility, the Immaculate Conception etcetera. Because this orthopractic turn, and the polemics it triggered, was largely conducted via the printing presses, sacramental treatises, devotional mass literature, confraternity books, printed theses etcetera offer the researcher an exquisite vantage point to verify this hypothesis.The decades between 1643 and 1713 constitute a quintessential moment in the polemics of Jansenism, Quesnellianism, Quietism. These polemics are not the central focus, although they provide a wealth of information. The line of approach is constituted by practices that developed in tandem with a quickly evolving book culture: censorship, more specifically the highly institutionalised censorship exercised by the Roman congregations. Recent historiography has viewed censorship not merely as a means of social disciplining, but also as a cultural and cognitive practice. Sources drafted in the context of preventive and repressive censorship offer a rare insight in texts and in writing processes pertaining to religious practices and rites.This line of approach offers, firstly, specific analytical advantages in a research project that focusses on religious practice in a so-called orthodoxic religion. Secondly, it furnishes an extraordinarily rich body of sources preserved in various archives of the Holy See. And, thirdly, it introduces a specific research population: papal censors and (other) bureaucrats that were active in the Congregations of the Inquisition, the Index, and other ministries of the Roman curia: participants to an expert culture who considered themselves administrators of a rigid hierarchy within a monolithic Church Militant.In line with its premises, this project therefore aims at investigating whether and how these bureaucrats of the Faith paradoxically might have facilitated or fuelled plurality and pluralisation in early modern Catholicism(s). This Habilitation project (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Birgit Emich, Chair for Early Modern History, Frankfurt) is therefore to be situated at the crossroads of cultural history, religious history, and the history of science and ideas.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants