Eloise Davies

Taking as its starting point the well-known English effort to ‘convert’ Venice to Protestantism in the wake of the Venetian Interdict controversy (1606–7), this article explores the ways in which early modern conceptions of conversion varied according to context. Drawing on evidence relating to Venice, England, Ireland and the Jesuit missions to China, it traces how divergent understandings of religious change shaped – and were shaped by – confessional controversy. The idea of ‘conversion’ posed particular conceptual difficulties as a description of inter-confessional transfer, and this article probes the implications of these difficulties for religious and political debate.

Two high-profile events called attention to the threat the Papacy posed to temporal authority in early seventeenth-century England: first the Gunpowder Plot (1605), in which Catholics attempted to blow up the English Parliament, including the king, and then, shortly afterwards, the Venetian Interdict controversy (1606–7), a dispute over papal objections to the autonomy of Venetian laws. The English Ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), and his chaplain, William Bedell (1571–1642), saw these twin crises as an opportunity to further the cause of 'Reformation' in both countries. They cultivated close links with the leaders of the Venetian anti-papal party, including the celebrated theologian Paolo Sarpi and his close associate Fulgenzio Micanzio. These connections developed into a broader network which spread from London via Geneva and Paris. This dissertation draws on printed and manuscript sources (including a number of new finds) to trace the strength and influ...

Catherine of Siena (1347‐1380) is well known as a saint and mystic with a colourful biography. Recent scholarship has begun to recognise Catherine's substantial political contributions. She wrote letters to notable political figures including Bernabò Visconti and Pope Gregory XI, and also brought her influence to bear in person, visiting numerous Tuscan cities as well as Avignon and Rome. There has been little investigation, however, into the relationship between Catherine's writings and major political discourses of the period. This article offers evidence that Catherine should be viewed within the bonum commune tradition of high medieval political thought. Like other Dominican political thinkers of the period, Catherine was particularly interested in the concept of caritas, which she used to justify her involvement in political disputes such as the War of the Eight Saints (1375–8) between the papacy and Florence, and the disputed papal elections of 1378. Recognising that the content of Catherine's writings was political as well as spiritual provides an important counterpoint to accounts of late fourteenth‐century Italian political thought which give excessive prominence to 'secularising' humanists. This study also challenges lingering assumptions that the political thought of the early Renaissance must be studied through a narrow (and male) canon.

Pamela M. Jones’s chapter on vitae written about saintly cardinals and Jean-Pascal Gay’s on cardinals and theology, though the former is more focused on the construction of Life-writings by different authors and the latter on the cardinalate as an object of theological study and the number of cardinals who had formal training in theology. This is not to take anything away from the volume or from Jones’s and Gay’s excellent essays. Rather, it seems important to ask how cardinals participated in the broader currents of early modern piety and efforts at reform, especially if we consider these questions, in the words of one chapter, ‘in relation to their ecclesiastical positions’ (p. ). Some cardinals were reform-minded bishops, both before and after their elevation to the cardinalate (most famously Carlo Borromeo, but also Giovanni Morone, Gregorio Barbarigo and many others); others were the driving force behind reform at ecumenical councils, and not just as legates; and still other...

In 1698, less than a decade after the Toleration Act, a blasphemy law was passed in England. No convictions were ever brought under the Act, and it has been largely neglected by historians. Yet, for all its apparent insignificance, the Blasphemy Act is an instructive episode in post-1688 politics, which sheds light on the political realignments of the post-revolutionary decade. The language of the blasphemy debates was theologically sophisticated, rooted in Calvin’s understanding of blasphemy as distinctively malicious, and it is clear that the contours of the extra-parliamentary Trinitarian controversy were a source of division in Westminster too. The Blasphemy Act was one means by which the Williamite bishops, under pressure from both the dissenter-dominated moral reform movement and High Church advocates of Convocation, tried to reassert the court’s moral leadership. But the significance of the dispute was not limited to ecclesiastical politics; the story of the Blasphemy Act was...

Catherine of Siena (1347‐1380) is well known as a saint and mystic with a colourful biography. Recent scholarship has begun to recognise Catherine's substantial political contributions. She wrote letters to notable political figures including Bernabò Visconti and Pope Gregory XI, and also brought her influence to bear in person, visiting numerous Tuscan cities as well as Avignon and Rome. There has been little investigation, however, into the relationship between Catherine's writings and major political discourses of the period. This article offers evidence that Catherine should be viewed within the bonum commune tradition of high medieval political thought. Like other Dominican political thinkers of the period, Catherine was particularly interested in the concept of caritas, which she used to justify her involvement in political disputes such as the War of the Eight Saints (1375–8) between the papacy and Florence, and the disputed papal elections of 1378. Recognising that the content of Catherine's writings was political as well as spiritual provides an important counterpoint to accounts of late fourteenth‐century Italian political thought which give excessive prominence to 'secularising' humanists. This study also challenges lingering assumptions that the political thought of the early Renaissance must be studied through a narrow (and male) canon.

This is the self-archived accepted version of the paper.
Published version of the paper now available open access here: https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12633