This volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly and critical work being done on forms and practices of early modern Catholicism at the intersection of intellectual history and cultural materialist methodologies. The ambitious overarching project traces adventures in the post-Tridentine Church's complexly held position as the privileged locus and arbiter of truth in a cultural habitus increasingly marked by intra- as well as inter-confessional plurality and emerging forms of knowledge production. Tellingly, the editors’ introduction makes clear that the assembled case studies and analytical accounts of theo-political conflict and mitigation (or strategic temporizing) take a concerted interest in teasing out the manifold ways in which the task at hand turned not so much on the question of truth per se as on the question of credibility and finding the optimal means to produce and disseminate engines of credibility under newfound challenges.
One of the volume's aims is to amplify critical understanding of the blind spots in the residual claims of the secularization thesis—the grand narrative that too facilely identified early modern Catholicism as a unitary and retrograde opponent of the emergent shapes of modernity and consequently gave short shrift to what the abundant archival evidence suggests: that virtually every level of the post-Tridentine Church's scaffolded hierarchy became involved in what the editors call “a deeply praxeological approach to credibility” (13). This approach, as the wide-ranging contributions to the volume make clear, entailed not only robust engagement with “the new epistemic ambitions of modern science” (15) but also ingenious repurposing of established concepts in scholastic thought and moral theology to address evolving conditions of uncertainty.
Mindful of the editors’ caveat not to expect the particular range of topics to present an exhaustive picture of an avowedly dynamic and often circumspect phenomenon (the shift from the “what” and “whether” of the magisterium's purchase on truth to the “how”—that is, the conditions under which credibility was sought and sustained), this reader found the ensemble of topics to be satisfyingly anchored to what could be called a conceptual kinship structure: a coherent interest in examining scenes of engagement where the Church nourished the aura of its nominal theo-political centrality by assimilating, attenuating, disavowing, or disguising challenges that arose not only from disputes at vulnerable locations (e.g., how to be a Catholic Copernican in the Spanish Netherlands, as Steven Vanden Broecke's essay vividly relates) but also conflicting gauges of judgment within the core body of ecclesial administrative precepts (exemplified in Brendan Röder's absorbing account of petitions involving deadlocks over which criteria should prevail in deciding whether an individual with a physical impairment should be disqualified from clerical office: in what amounted to a distorted echo of contemporary Eucharistic debates, medical expertise on the occult etiologies—and “truth”—of a given anomaly was pitted against ecclesial attention to public perception and the ensuing risk of scandal).
In addition to the just-mentioned items, particularly persuasive contributions to the volume include Rudolph Schuessler's lucid overview of the deployment of probabilism in early modern moral theologians’ prescient interest in what analytic philosophy would later identify as conditions of reasonable disagreement, which finds contrapuntal extensions in Marco Cavarzere's ethnographically oriented approach to the uses of casuistical (and probabilistic) reasoning in addressing the operative function of oaths on false gods in the colonial networks of cross-cultural trade. In an adjacent vein, Cecilia Cristellon's essay carefully unpacks the casuistical virtuosity deployed by the Benedictine Declaration of 1741 to address, with prudential discretion, the problem of mixed marriages in the Northern and Southern Low Countries. It is no accident that several of the essays incorporate aspects of early modern casuistry into their modes of analysis, for the casuistical strand of moral theology seems organically connected to the dynamic negotiations between theory and practice in the domain of truth that inform the volume's stated project. The editors acknowledge as much, by pointing out the range of practices—such as “equivocation, deletion, dissimulation, and modes of conflict” (16), all within the province of casuistry—that could have been marshalled as organizing categories for the volume.
Instead, the volume opts for three high-concept categories: “Accommodating,” “Performing,” and “Embedding.” The gerundive / participial resonance of the terms feels intuitively right, and the introduction glancingly situates each term in plausible historical contexts, while it also acknowledges the indistinct boundaries separating the categories. Indeed, it was often hard to know why a given essay was placed in one section rather than another. My sole complaint with the volume turns on this matter, and by this I do not mean that the wrong categories were chosen, but rather that their theoretical inspiration was not adequately engaged. The introduction begins with a promising nod to the critical legacies of Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour. But the introduction eschews offering a substantive account of how the volume's emphasis on “a deeply praxeological approach to credibility” (13) includes investments in de Certeau's influential focus on the rhetoricity of strategies and tactics in social practice. Nor does the introduction situate Latour's legacy—presumably his contributions to actor-network theory—in meaningful detail or specific relation to the contributors’ work. (The concluding essay, by Rivka Feldhay, offers the sole sustained engagement with Latour's legacy and its relevance to the volume, in the context of a fascinating account of the place of pre-classical mechanics in the development of early modern ideas of the sovereign state in relation to papal authority.) Crucially, the introduction does not offer expository insight into how, precisely, a dialogic grasp of de Certeau's and Latour's work offers fertile methodological ground for cultivating new forms of literacy into the archive on early modern Catholicism's efforts to remain both contemporary and transhistorical in its cultivation of credibility, if not truth. In this one regard, a missed opportunity.
