Early Modern Church History

This collective volume focuses on the fabrication of saints and holy patrons in baroque Europe. It studies the reason for their multiplication, but also the limits of their official recognition and the failure of many cults. It explores how the devotion towards holy patrons helped legitimizing earthly institutions. Among others, it explores how cults were used to suggest a unity between the dynasty and territories. The title of this rich collective volume is somewhat misleading because the book explores the history of sacred patronages not only in Habsburg territories, but also in Poland-Lithuania and in non-Habsburg Italian principalities and republics. The main emphasis lays on baroque Bohemia, an area of which the editor Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux is an eminent specialist. The volume raises a number of issues. First, it studies sanctity in its different dimensions. According to Ducreux, much has been written recently on "state saints", but holy patronages often had also other functions: they legitimated dynasties, local identities, religious orders, and moral conceptions, among others. To pick out one example, in the volume, Sara Cabibbo and Magdalena Jacková show the plurality of functions that the cult of John of Nepomuk fulfilled in Sicily and Bohemia.

Devotional manuals and catechisms organize time. They structure days, weeks, months and years according to liturgical rhythms and daily prayers; they prescribe particular exercises for particular hours of the day and meditative programmes for eight- or ten-day retreats. Such guidelines hinge on the idea that a purposeful investment of earthly time will secure eternity. This chapter examines the temporal tension between liturgical time and daily chores, between prayer and pastime, between time and eternity.

A penchant for retreat permeates baroque devotion. Prayer is key, and withdrawal from the world corroborates sincere prayer. Some believers retreat to the cloister for an exis­tence of permanent absorption, but believers are generally enjoined to retreat for a few days annually to follow a devotional program, or for moments of prayer across the day. While verbal prayer is seen as a basic expression of devotion, mental prayer is generally deemed more efficacious, demanding as it does the believer's full attention. Chapels, chambers, and gardens are privileged sites of devout absorption; prayer books, rosaries, and devotional images sustain the inward turn; manuals teach the practice; and written and drawn portraits show those who master it. This chapter presents the ideal of devo­tional retreat in prayer as well as some of its spatial, spiritual, corporeal, and material corollaries.

Over the years, technology has been used as a medium for spreading the gospel from as far back as New Testament times, with the coming of the social media, many finds it easy to interact and to share stories. Evangelism which is sharing the gospel of Christ to the world, the church is yet to harness the potential of using social media to evangelized, this paper adopt a simple statistic to point out the effectiveness of using social media to reach out to thousands who uses social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, twitter, Instagram, WeChat, Snap-Chat and the rest on a daily basis.

Il lungo cammino della Chiesa alifana attraverso l’età moderna: la misteriosa morte di monsignor Caracciolo, il terremoto del 1688, il trasloco del seminario diocesano da Castello a Piedimonte, il ritrovamento delle spoglie di San Sisto I, in un racconto di ampio periodo che getta nuova luce sulla storia di un intero territorio. I vescovi di Alife (Domenico Caracciolo, Giuseppe de Lazara, Angelo Maria Porfiri, Gaetano Ivone, Pietro Abbondio Battiloro, Egidio Antonio Isabelli, Carlo Rosati, Innocenzo Sanseverino, Filippo Sanseverino, Francesco Ferdinando Sanseverino) disvelano gli aspetti complessi del proprio rapporto con i feudatari- in particolare con i Gaetani di Laurenzana, signori di Piedimonte- e la condotta di un clero regolare, ma anche secolare, non sempre irreprensibile.

Devotions in early modern England, public or private, were central to the everyday lives of clergy and laity alike. Yet such practises were routinely transformed by men and women who did not just record but reconfigured their piety through writing. From accounts of fasts, feasts, and thanksgiving days; prayers and sacred songs; covenants and confessing of sins; narratives of conversion, baptism or burial; biblical graffiti; repetition of sermons; conferencing and conventicles. English citizens, individually and communally, and on either side of the confessional divide, had a regimen of acts that were to be performed and perfected during their lifetimes. This one day conference aims to investigate how print and manuscript cultures coalesced and collided in their re-presentation of post-Reformation devoutness.

‘Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript’ is a major one day multi-disciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Warwick’s English Department in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, The Humanities Research Centre and the Early Modern Forum. Contributions are invited from established scholars and postgraduate students alike. Publication of a selection of papers is envisioned. Themes for papers may include (but are not limited to): literary, visual. political, theological, historical, material, musical, polemical or any other treatments of the topics of devotional writing in print or manuscript in the context of reformation-era England.

These may include:

Piety of the Household/Neighbourhood
Children, Catechism and Memory
Temptation/Possession/Conversion Narratives
Fasts/Feasts/Thanksgiving Days
Prayer Books/Church Books/Book of Sports
Psalmody versus Hymnody
Playhouses, the Pulpit, and the Theatre of the Word
Sick-bed/Death-bed Accounts (ars moriendi)
Godly Missives and Communal Correspondences
Martyrology/Hagiography
Religious Iconography/Graffiti/Objects
Biblicism versus Fanaticism
Spiritual Manuals and/or Cases of Conscience

This paper sheds light on a nearly forgotten Early modern Franciscan manual containing meditations on the Passion on a weekly basis and its author, Giacomo da Beligioso, a member of the Reformed Custody of Pavia. A survey shows that this work had, under two different names, twelve editions ranging from 1610 to 1793, which were mainly published in Turin. After a presentation of the characteristics of these editions, as to the developments of their contents and illustrations, the editio princeps of this book finds a more thorough analysis in the context of contemporary Catholic and—more specifically—Franciscan spiritual literature. As a result, whereas this manual proved to be a valid example of a Franciscan affective approach to the Passion in the early 17th century, its editorial success—as much as the traceable effective readership throughout two centuries—is somewhat surprising, given the changed spiritual climate during the Catholic Enlightenment period.

Wedding in Paris (1572): An Eighteenth-century Hungarian Manuscript on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

On the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, thousands of French Huguenots were massacred in Paris. One of the victims was their leader, admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572). His martyrdom was narrated in a short story which was translated into Hungarian with the title “Wedding in Paris” by a student from Debrecen, József Pap in 1766. The manuscript is kept at the Library of the Reformed College of Debrecen. One of the sources of this document was Jacobus Augustus Thuanus’ work, Historiarum sui temporis. This study interprets the historical background of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and its eighteenth-century Hungarian reception, and highlights that Coligny is shown as a Huguenot martyr in the text. The main purpose of the translator was to comfort the members of the Reformed Church and set an example for them during the period of the “bloodless counter-reformation” in eighteenth-century Hungary.

Homenaje a d. Quitín Aldea Vaquero. Resumen: San Ildefonso es una de las figuras con mayor repercusión religiosa durante la Edad Moderna en la ciudad de Zamora. En el presente estudio pretendemos desentrañar las vinculaciones existentes con la devoción a este Santo por parte de la Compañía de Jesús, así como las peregrinaciones realizadas por parte del domicilio de Salamanca perteneciente esta Orden religiosa a los restos corporales de San Ildefonso. Utilizando la documentación inédita del Colegio de Salamanca situaremos al jesuita Pedro Jerónimo Fernández de Córdoba y las razones institucionales de su elección para mediar en los conflictos surgidos entre Zamora y Toledo por la custodia del Santo Cuerpo episcopal.

L'Archivio Vescovile, il maggiore dei complessi documentari dell'Archivio Storico Diocesano di  Sansepolcro, possiede un interessante fondo diplomatico, denominato "Pergamene", composto da 425 documenti, membranacei e in piccola parte cartacei, che coprono l'arco cronologico 1022-1987. L'elenco di consistenza ne indica la segnatura e la data.

Text to the slides, respectively, here: https://www.academia.edu/39397695/
Текст на слајдове,  овде: https://www.academia.edu/39397695/
Улога украјинских братства у Конфесионализациjи Срба у Хабзбуршког Империjи : историографија од Мита Костића кроз Јарослава Исаjвича до недавног истраживање
Brotherhoods on the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands were civil associations of the citizens since the late 16th century, thus not church but secular organisations. Their impacts on the culture of Slavic peoples, were living in the Habsburg Empire, are still less researched, while on the other hand, the role of Vienna is their national awakening was over-emphasised. However, the Orthodox Serbs, and the Uniate Rusyn-Ukrainians even (in less ratio) the Orthodox Rumanians, too, imported their books from the Ukrainian and (in smaller part) Belarusian typographies, which typographies were owned and managed by the brotherhoods. It was already mentioned by Mita Kostić, the famous Serbian historian, already in the first part of the twentieth century. Then the great expert of brotherhoods, Ukrainian academician Yaroslav Isaievich published a lot of papers on the Serbian-Ukrainian contacts, too. These brotherhoods played significant role in the shaping of the national identity of the Serbs and of other Slavic peoples in the Habsburg Empire; by the book-migration. These cultural contacts inspired the processes of unfolding the new forms of religiosity, too; those processes nowadays are named as “confessionalisation” by the new paradigm in the history of churches. Kostić devoted his university doctoral thesis to the book-import already in the beginning of the 20th century, which was defended at the Vienna University. Then he published monographs on the Serbian-Ukrainian contacts, which were re-published again nowadays. Isaievich evidenced by archival sources, that the Serbs not only purchased the books but they were provided by donations of the brotherhoods as well. The Serbs were welcomed guests by the Orthodox brotherhoods, not only on the territory of “Nova Srbija” (about which it was much written by Kostić) but also in the nearer territories, as in Lviv. Morevover. Since the brotherhoods were civil organisations of the citizens, these cultural contacts provided the civil-courage in the religiosity, too; while the Muscovian contacts provided the conservation of the Tsarist totalitarian wing of the Orthodoxy. The Serbs had their civil self-government of the church communities – the “sabor” of the adult and married men. It makes the contacts between Ukrainian Orthodox brotherhoods and the self-governed Serbs more significant. – This paper focuses on the book-migration as a special part of these contacts. There are more than one thousand old Printed Cyrillic books in various church collections of the contemporary Hungary. The 80% of these books are of Ukrainian origin. (The few Belarusian books are of great significance because they are rarities.) These books were printed under “western” influences. Between “Muscovia” and the Western territories of the "Slavia Orthodoxa", a significant divergence can be pointed out, due to the political and aesthetical diversities. Guseva&Kamenieva (1976) highlights: the books were printed in Ukrainian (and Belarusian) territories, distinguished by their quality, engravings, illuminations, also prefaces and afterwords, too. By these liturgical books of Ukrainian (and Belarusian) origin, influences of the European  mainly Polish  baroque and new ideas in the religious culture, too, came to the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom, thus to the Orthodox Serbs and the Greek-Catholic (Uniate) Carpathian Rusyn-Ukrainians. Author of this paper gives a survey of the history of investigations on the old books in Hungary; and gives contributions by his works in various archives, made during his thirty-year research activity.