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How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analogous to that of a secular state – except that it lacked powers of physical enforcement, a solid financial base (aside from short periods) and a bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber. Through the discipline of Applied Diplomatics, which investigates the structures and settings of documents to solve substantive historical problems, The Power of Protocol explores how such a demand for papal services was met. It is about the genesis and structure of papal documents – a key to papal history generally – from the Roman empire to after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, and is the only book of its kind.
Ruling Peacefully provides the first in-depth study of this influential and paradoxical figure. Gonzaga emerges as a complex personality whose interests as the representative of a northern Italian ruling family could just as easily lead him to support reform in the Catholic Church as to hinder it.
These twenty-three essays, presented by students, colleagues, and friends to Thomas A. Brady, Jr., the Sather Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, explore the historiographies of the Reformation from the fifteenth century to the present and study the social and cultural history of religion from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, especially in Germany but also in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and colonial Mexico. Contributors include: Dean Bell, Peter Blickle, Christoph Burger, Roger Chickering, Constantin Fasolt, Kaspar von Greyerz, Bernd Hamm, Craig Harline, Joel Harrington, Susan Karant-Nunn, Greta Kroeker, Amy Leonard, Marc Lienhard, Terence McInt...
In Educating the Catholic People, Salomoni offers a new perspective on the pedagogical, institutional, and political innovations introduced in Italy by religious teaching congregations between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
“Focuses not just on . . . the pope’s response to the Holocaust, but on [his] life and papacy . . . as a whole . . . A refreshingly balanced approach” (Catholic Courier). Written by one of the foremost historians of Pius XII, this present biographical study—unlike the greater part of the vast and growing historiography of Pope Pius XII—is a balanced and nonreactive account of his life and times. Its focus is not on the pope’s silence during the Holocaust, though it does address the issue in a historical and objective framework. This is a biography of the man before and during his papacy. It probes the roots of his traditionalism and legalism, his approach to modernity and reformi...
Maurice Finocchiaro considers the trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition in 1633, weighing up the views of both sides and presenting an account that incorporates historical context, science, theology, and philosophy. He also considers the legacy and continuing cultural afterlife of this remarkable episode in the history of science.
Debates over the legacy of Pope Pius XII and his canonization are so heated they are known as the “Pius wars.” Soldier of Christ moves beyond competing caricatures and considers Pius XII as Eugenio Pacelli, a flawed and gifted man. While offering insight into the pope’s response to Nazism, Robert A. Ventresca argues that it was the Cold War and Pius XII’s manner of engaging with the modern world that defined his pontificate. Laying the groundwork for the pope’s controversial, contradictory actions from 1939 to 1958, Ventresca begins with the story of Pacelli’s Roman upbringing, his intellectual formation in Rome’s seminaries, and his interwar experience as papal diplomat and Va...
Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera is the history of a Muslim colony in the southern Italian city of Lucera during the Middle Ages. Author Julie Taylor draws on a vast array of primary sources, unpublished manuscripts, and archeological data to provide a detailed account of the lives of Muslims against the backdrop of the social and political complexities of medieval Lucera. Taylor's work illuminates the legal and social status of Muslims in Christendom and the contributions made by Muslims to the economy and defense of the kingdom of Sicily, and it also yields noteworthy insights into Muslim-Christian relations. Muslims in Medieval Italy is a thoroughly researched and absorbing account.
In Exiles in a Global City, Clare Carroll explores Irish migrants’ experiences in early modern Rome (1609-1783) and interprets representations of their cultural identities in relation to their interaction with world-wide Spanish and Roman institutions. This study focuses on some sources in Roman archives not previously considered by Irish historians. The book examines a wide array of cultural productions—Ó Cianáin’s account of O’Neill’s progress from Ireland to Rome, Luke Wadding’s history of the Franciscan order, the portraits at S. Isidoro, the first printed Irish grammar, the letters of Oliver Plunkett, the records of a hospice for converts, Charles Wogan’s memoir, and reports on the national college—for how they transformed emerging senses of an Irish nation.
While the Spanish Inquisition has laid the greatest claim to both scholarly attention and the popular imagination, the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 and a key instrument of papal authority, was more powerful, important, and long-lived. Founded by Paul III and originally aimed to eradicate Protestant heresy, it followed medieval antecedents but went beyond them by becoming a highly articulated centralized organ directly dependent on the pope. By the late sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition had developed its own distinctive procedures, legal process, and personnel, the congregation of cardinals and a professional staff. Its legal process grew out of the technique of inquisitio for...