Title: Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World. Edited by KATHERINE VAN LIERE, SIMON DITCHFIELD, and HOWARD LOUTHAN.
Abstract:Ecclesiastical history, according to the Oratorian Cesare Becilli, writing in the 1630s, ‘always accompanies sacred doctrine, not as a waiting-woman but as an ally and indeed perhaps an elder sister’....Ecclesiastical history, according to the Oratorian Cesare Becilli, writing in the 1630s, ‘always accompanies sacred doctrine, not as a waiting-woman but as an ally and indeed perhaps an elder sister’. This wonderful, meticulously researched collection of essays tracks the changes but also the continuities in the role of ‘sacred history’ in an age typically characterized as one of intellectual and religious transformation. It is a story of paradoxes. Critical scholarship and new philological methods bolster confessional apologetics alongside ‘questionable scholarly practices’ (p. 6); medieval sacred histories are both reviled and imitated; and martyrologies and saints’ lives, patriotic histories, and even antiquarian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, or Portugese relic-hunting missions to south India, can form part of the same culture of historical sensibility. What emerges from these richly detailed surveys and case studies is that the ecclesiastical history of the period was not in any slavish sense a ‘waiting-woman’ in the service of theology, but that it was an entangled aspect of the early modern quest for truth in all its singularity. In that sense, history and theology were conceived as perfect allies. On the one hand, Renaissance histories could be what Simon Ditchfield calls ‘prayers in prose’: they might be designed and read as spiritual exercises or (as in the case of Cesare Baronio) aids to liturgical devotion. On the other, they could easily function as confessional polemic—and we are reminded that the development of libraries and archives in this period (including Bodley’s library at Oxford, and the Vatican archive) was linked to confessional apologetics. Yet even where historiography served such agendas, Renaissance historians might still be held to a high standard of scholarly integrity, in terms of the authenticity of their sources and the quality of their interpretation. At their best, early modern ecclesiastical historians were certainly not crude polemicists or dogmatists.Read More
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot