The relationship of Catholic hierarchies with the medium of printing has always been multifarious, and even in early modern times it was far more complex than most current studies maintain. This chapter attempts to draw a concise and unbiased picture of the papacy’s publishing and censoring practices from the 1460s to the 1630s. It starts with the arrival of the first printers in Italy on the outskirts of Rome and ends with the Galileo Galilei affair, analyzing all intervening attempts to use moveable type in support of papal policy and the development of the Index of Forbidden Books. Highlighting the interconnections between prohibition and promotion, it proposes a unified interpretation of these two lines of action rather than present them in opposition, as is often the case.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

During the sixteenth century, the King in Parliament terminated the jurisdiction of the Papacy in England and established by law the Church of England, with the King as its head. One task was to institute a new system of canon law for the national Church. Parliamentary statute provided for a commission to reform the canon law. In the meantime, pre-Reformation Roman canon law was to continue to apply to the Church of England if it was not repugnant to the royal prerogative and the laws of the realm. The commission was never appointed. The Roman canon law continued to apply on the basis of both statute and custom as part of the King’s ecclesiastical law. This chapter explores how the post-Reformation English ecclesiastical lawyers understood this continuing Roman canon law, its legal basis, and the role of the doctrine of reception in all this.

The era of the Reformation profoundly changed the papal institution. In Italy, it allowed for the assertion of primatial authority and a greater oversight of the Italian Church as well as a capacity to influence popular and elite culture through the medium of the Inquisition and the Index. Rather than attempting to achieve Italian liberty, it now strove to protect the peace and religious orthodoxy of the peninsula. In the wider European sphere, during this period the papacy effectively lost contact with most of Protestant Europe, but through an articulated system of nunciatures and, from 1622, through Propaganda Fide, it remained an important influence throughout the Catholic world, projecting itself as a peacemaker among secular powers, the foe of heresy and Islam, the upholder of the decrees of Trent – conceived, however, as a prescriptive set of disciplinary and doctrinal norms – and the defender of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and privileges.

This chapter analyzes interactions between the Mansfeld Regiment and its surroundings, including confessional conflict, fights, burials, and the regiment’s effect on local demographics. The Mansfelders were both Protestant and Catholic, but the regiment was quartered in a Catholic land. Its members fought with or plundered locals. However, its effects on baptism, marriage, and death rates in most of the areas I analyzed were ambiguous. The exception is tiny Pontestura: Not only was the effect of numerous armies magnified in such a small town, but wrongdoings there were less likely to come to the attention of the authorities. I also locate a woman who may have been the wife of the enigmatic regimental secretary Mattheus Steiner in local baptismal records, exemplifying that interactions between Mansfelders and locals were not solely hostile. This chapter examines military death rates, which were awful even outside of combat, and may find evidence of the great Italian plague of 1629–1631 in the deaths of soldiers and other marginal men.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s argument. It first shows how the association of Protestantism with modern freedom and German philosophy was an artifact of political and social debates in the eighteenth century, a German version of Butterfield’s famous concept of the “Whig” idea of history. It next explores the evolution of the term “Protestant” from the early days of the Reformation to the eighteenth century, concluding with the diversity of German Protestantism on the eve of the 1717 Reformation anniversary. Third, the Introduction discusses the intellectual contexts in which Protestantism and the Reformation were redefined, providing working definitions for such terms as "religion," "philosophy," "theology," and the "Protestant public sphere." Particular attention is paid to disputes over the boundaries of philosophy and religion in the context of Pietism, Wolffian philosophy, and eclecticism. Finally, the Introduction situates the book in the scholarly contexts of Enlightenment historiography, early modern European history and Church history, and the history of modern philosophy.

This chapter explores the impact of the Reformation on Jewish–Christian relations and the Protestant return to Hebrew Scripture. Documents show the beginnings of modernity and its offspring: toleration, emancipation and antisemitism.

This chapter provides essential historical and theological background for the emergence of Cambridge Platonism. It traces the fortunes of the Calvinist or Reformed (or less accurately ‘Puritan’) theological community in England, of which the Cambridge Platonists were members, through the civil wars and Interregnum, with a particular focus on controversy about predestination. It presents the major outlines of the Reformed doctrines of double predestination, election and reprobation, along with the rise of anti-Calvinist currents of thought like Arminianism and Laudianism, with a view to exploring the ways in which these theological disputes contributed to political tensions that gave rise to the civil wars. Finally, it explores the central role played by the Cambridge Platonists’ colleges of Emmanuel and Christ’s in the training of Reformed preachers and the dissemination of Reformed doctrine, with particular attention paid to Reformed attitudes to the study of philosophy and pagan thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

Through the energetic work of the reformer John Calvin, the small city-state of Geneva became the so-called Protestant Rome in the sixteenth century. Calvin created a morals court, the Consistory, which worked in conjunction with the city council to attack a wide range of ‘sins’, including illicit sexuality, defined as all sexual activity outside of marriage. In Calvin’s time, authorities pursued male and female fornicators (including fiancés) with the same rigour and on rare occasions sentenced adulterers to death. After Calvin’s death a double standard appeared in the treatment of adultery, most blatant in the fact that sexual relations between female servants and their married masters resulted in more severe penalties for the former than the latter. Same-sex relations were considered crimes against nature, but authorities adjudged those involving men much more severely than those involving women, probably based on a belief that sexual relations between male partners degraded them to the level of women. Although a few men were prosecuted for rape, religious and political authorities largely enhanced patriarchy; given the persistent numbers of people who were summoned, they clearly were also less successful in nurturing self-control among Genevans in their sex lives than in other areas of behaviour.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.