I approached this book with high expectations. The author is a prodigiously well read and amazingly productive scholar who, almost single-handedly, has put the Roman Catholic God back into the Enlightenment. Beginning in 2011 with his provocatively titled study Enlightened Monks: the German Benedictines 1740-1803, Lehner has taught us, to borrow the famous phrase of the British social historian E. P. Thompson, in his classic study: The Making of the English Working Class (1963), how not only: ‘the poor stockinger, the obsolete hand-loom weaver [and] the Utopian artisan’ need rescuing from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ but also Roman Catholic authors of all levels of ambition and achievement. In a succession of persuasive works, which Lehner has either co-edited or authored on his own, including notably: The Catholic Enlightenment: the Forgotten History of a Global Movement (2016) and Innovation in Early Modern Catholicism (2022), he has forced us to acknowledge the degree to which ‘Catholic enlighteners’, as he calls them, engaged with concepts and practices which have been traditionally associated with the secular enlightenment. Two of his examples are the historical and textual criticism of the Italian secular priest and librarian for half a century of the famous Este Library of Modena, Lodovico Muratori (1672-1750) and the numerous treatises of that pioneer of atomic theory, the Croatian Jesuit physicist and astronomer, Ruder (Roger) Boscovich (1711-1787). Moreover, for Lehner the language of the ‘Age of Reason’ was also spoken fluently by Roman Catholic enlighteners well beyond Western Europe, which he uses to argue that Roman Catholicism played its part too in that other vector of emerging modernity: globalisation. For example, the Mexican-born Jesuit, Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731-1787) wrote a four-volume history of ancient Mexico (1780-81) that compared Mexican culture to Greek civilisation which had been subjugated by the Turks just as Aztec culture had been trampled by the Spanish Conquistadors. Similarly, the Jesuit missionary to China, Joachim Bouvet (1656-1730), tried to give Christianity a Chinese face by arguing that the classic divination text, I Ching had prefigured the teachings of the New Testament.
However, when we turn to the book under review, on this occasion Lehner has most definitely ‘over promised’. The problems begin with the title, in which he categorically claims to be recovering for serious study ‘inner reform’; which according to Lehner is a previously understudied or even ignored aspect of the history of Roman Catholicism in the two centuries after the closing of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). For Lehner, ‘reform’ has been previously described and studied, above all, in institutional and political terms, as reflected in such paradigms as ‘confessionalisation’ and terms as ‘social discipline’. Instead, he proposes to focus: ‘entirely on the means of spiritual reform’ (ix, italics in the original). ‘Consequently, I analyze the spiritual resources early modern Catholics possessed, where they encountered them, and how they were used for inner transformation’ (ibid). To this end, Lehner undertakes, in a series of thematic chapters, a wide-ranging survey of normative texts: ‘usually produced by clergy, members of religious orders, confraternities, and in some cases laypersons’ (x). Something of the ambitious scale of Lehner’s undertaking can be seen from the fact that his bibliography of printed primary sources is almost eighteen pages long, (and the number of texts consulted, the majority of which are in German and Latin, somewhere in the region of 550-600). This is complemented by a further twenty-five pages of secondary works, (which are mostly limited to English and German, but also include some works in French, Spanish, Italian and even one in Portuguese). Taken together, this bibliography represents quite an undertaking and future scholars will be in Lehner’s debt for his having recovered for serious study what he clearly considers to be a ‘lost continent’ of religious literature together with the relevant secondary literature.
I would happily concede that he has definitely analyzed an impressive sample of the normative texts that were produced in the two centuries after Trent and also discussed where early modern Catholics might have encountered such texts, (and in a number of cases how they were intended to be used). Moreover, his choice of themes to explore and his attentiveness to diversity combined with a refusal to condescend to those on the receiving end of this unprecedented campaign to bring about spiritual renewal is invariably well-informed by the latest scholarship and unfailingly sensitive to context. However, he has barely begun to discuss how their contents were actually received and ‘used for inner transformation’ (ix). This is all the more frustrating since Lehner also follows up with the important point that: ‘The normative texts and practices… were, however, not blindly received’ (x). Such a study would have required sustained engagement with manuscript sources: including commonplace books, diaries, letter books, spiritual autobiographies, canonization and inquisitorial trial testimony, notes of sermons (made by their authors and their auditors) as well as, where they survive, copies of the texts he has so exhaustively listed as annotated by their users. Revealingly, no manuscript sources are listed in his bibliography (nor in his endnotes, unless one or two escaped my attention as I was distracted by the constant flicking back and forth to consult them). Given that Lehner claims to have accessed the ‘inner life’ of his subjects, I find such omissions nothing less than astonishing. Only in chapter 9, which deals with symbols and images, does Lehner begin to engage with how such sacramentals as Agnus Dei were actually used or how songs were sung and so contributed to the general soundscape of daily life; and chapter 10, which discusses uses of the rosary and popularity of the wearing of the scapular as the cult of Mary went into overdrive, do we start to explore reception and reinterpretation rather than simply the production and delivery of norms and practices. A suitable model for such a study of the lived experience of early modern Roman Catholics might be Alec Ryrie’s richly rewarding study: Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), but this is of course geographically much more circumscribed a study than that under review and its protagonists, in the main highly literate and much given to agonised introspection about whether or not they were among the Elect. However, I think that an attempt might still be made for what would perhaps inevitably be a much more impressionistic study of what it was like to be, think and feel Roman Catholic in the period after Trent. Moreover, I can think of few scholars better qualified than Ulrich Lehner to undertake such a task. Working back from the date of publication of the book under review (October 2022), it must have been mostly written (and even researched) in the time of Covid, with the associated closure of libraries and archives. So it would be unfair of me to criticise the book for failing to use manuscript sources. However, Lehner was unwise to claim that he has somehow accessed ‘the inner life’ of Catholic Reform without using them. Putting down this book after I had finished reading it, I felt rather like someone who had been asked to guess what a ready meal actually tastes like simply from reading the list of ingredients on the outside packaging.
