Two recent trends in scholarship necessitate a reevaluation of the persistent myth of a unitary, teleologically secular Enlightenment. The first is the recognition that a unitary Enlightenment with a preordained set of goals is a later ideological construction. A second trend problematizes the relationship between religion and Enlightenment by pluralizing the Enlightenment, thus making more space for the “religious” motivations and inspirations of so many of the men and women typically denominated as “enlightened.” This chapter explores the ambivalent relationship between the popes and a “Catholic Enlightenment” that was engaged in theology, secular scholarship, and political and societal reform. On one hand, the papacy is often cast as the primary enemy of enlightened Catholicism. And yet Italy, and indeed Rome itself, boasted very significant enlightened Catholic intellectuals, rulers, and networks throughout the eighteenth century, including, arguably, certain popes. This chapter seeks to make sense of this seemingly paradoxical situation.

The chapter examines recent historiography on the Papal States and considers the different stages of its territorial formation, from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic era. Throughout the early modern period, the Papal States maintained their composite nature; characterized by territories with strong traditions of local government, extensive feudal powers, and by the inheritance of duchies that had belonged to dynasties that had become extinct, as happened in the cases of Ferrara and Urbino. These characteristics of the papal dominions strongly determined the nature of Roman government in the localities. Control of law and order and the financial administration, themselves synonyms of “good government,” and determining factors in maintaining the consent of those under papal authority, received expression in the adaptation of norms and practices to local conditions, as can be seen in the dense correspondence between the relevant Roman Congregations and the local officers, governors, and legates.