Kulturen des Christentums/Cultures of Christianity – serie

In the midst of a global pandemic, the Frankfurt POLY (Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities) Lectures on "Pathways through Early Modern Christianities" brought together a virtual, global community of scholars and students in the Spring and Summer of 2021 to discuss the fascinating nature of early modern religious life. In this book, eleven pathbreaking scholars from the “four corners” of the early modern world reflect on the analytical tools that structure their field and that they have developed, revised and embraced in their scholarship: from generations to tolerance, from uniformity to publicity, from accommodation to local religion, from polycentrism to connected histories, and from identity to object agency. Together, the chapters of this reference work help both students and advanced researchers alike to appreciate the extent of our current knowledge about early modern christianities in their interconnected global context—and what exciting new travels could lie ahead.

Early modern Catholicism was a “glocal” affair: global in aspiration yet diverse in its local manifestations. Saint-making was no exception. In the wake of the Council of Trent, the Roman Church developed complex bureaucratic procedures through which the papacy proclaimed the saints of the Church Universal. But these procedures remained contingent on Catholics’ active veneration of holy men and women before their formal canonization and the faithful’s willingness to reappropriate Roman saints locally once the papacy had reached a verdict. This volume brings together the work of leading international specialists to show how early modern sanctity was produced, framed, and spread: far from being imposed uniformly upon a global Catholic community by the Roman center, saints were the product of constant negotiations between the global Church and local Catholics living in the four corners of the early modern world.

This book shows how male members of Catholic religious orders fashioned themselves in their interactions with the sin-ridden “world” that they claimed to have renounced. Inspired by recent innovations in the cultural and social history of early modern Catholicism, the contributions explore regular clerics’ practices of symbolic communication, their role as mediators between universal beliefs and practices and particular cultures of piety, their position in social networks, their relationships with Protestants, and their interactions with women religious. In so doing, the book sheds new light on the variety of material and symbolic exchanges between religious orders and secular society.