Simon Ditchfield (York) 'Rome calling? Rewriting the Catholic Reformation for the 21st century'

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Abstract

For longer than I have been a professional historian, Benedetto Croce’s lapidary ‘all history is contemporary history’ has been my watchword. Since I found myself, almost by accident, as an historian of religion, it has been a trusted beacon as I have navigated my way between the Scylla of ‘Trent Classic’ (aka Counter-Reformation) and the Charybdis of ‘Trent Lite’ (or Catholic Reformation). In order to understand the history of early modern Roman Catholicism for what it actually was: a period of religious change which involved, to a greater or lesser extent, all four parts into which the world was then conceived and understood from the European perspective, we need to make central to our understanding, the dynamic of reciprocity within a forcefield of inequality in which often no one was in complete charge.

 

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York. He is a world authority on the history of early modern global Christianity, and the author of dozens of acclaimed publications, including Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. He was the editor of the Journal of Early Modern History from 2010 to 2021 and is a co-editor, most recently, of A Companion to Early Modern Rome, 1492-1692 (Leiden, 2019) and A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered (Oxford, 2022). He is currently completing a book on The Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion.