A Product’s Glamour . Credibility, or the Manufacture and Administration of Truth in Early Modern Catholicism

Summary

Abstract

This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deepseated uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume's focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume's sections and chapters.

Keywords: science studies, praxeology, history of uncertainty, early modern Catholicism, Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour

Is truth ‘out there’? The proposition has lost much of its evidence. The premise that ‘facts are sacred’ is under pressure from fake news, alternative facts, and scepticism about official science. Conversely, fingers are wagged at a postmodern relativism that is allegedly seeping into scientific research, particularly in the humanities, before intoxicating public debate in general. Historians, too, are eminently vulnerable to these accusations: the fluid, tangled realities and truths from the past often fail to meet the test of objectivity or ‘out-thereness’. And yet, history of science and science studies have also argued that both this eminently Western approach to the ‘out-thereness of truth’, and the alternative notion that ‘anything goes’, are rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge-making and, more broadly, in a ‘Euro-American’ ontology that is as local as anything. It is only inside this ontology, the argument goes, that the sacrality of facts and the ‘out-thereness’ of truth appear to be in jeopardy as soon one observes that, following the Latin etymology of the word, facta are fabricated.

It may be more productive to approach the simultaneously sacral and manufactured nature of facts as a paradox rather than an unsolvable postmodern contradiction: a treasure trove to penetrate the arcana of truth and the way in which it functions within precarious interpretive communities.