Religious Orders and Religious Identity Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1420-1620
Summary The aim of this project is to investigate how Europe’s main missionary orders (the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Capuchins and the Jesuits) helped construct a confessionalised, disciplined religious identity within Catholic Europe between the early fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. It breaks with established scholarly traditions on confessionalisation practices that situate the beginnings of this phenomenon in the second half of the sixteenth century, as a Catholic reaction to the Reformation against the background of a decadent late medieval Church. Instead, this project aims to prove that the roots of this phenomenon should be sought in the religious reform programs developed within the major religious orders since the beginnings of the fifteenth century. The project also questions a scholarly tendency to single out the Jesuit model of missionary engagement as paradigmatic by comparing its missionary profile with those of the other most important late medieval and early modern missionary orders. This project will proceed from a comparative analysis of normative discourses in dominant genres of religious instruction and confessional self-understanding, namely: 1. sermons and comparable homiletic productions through which the confessionalised disciplined religious subject was given shape; 2. catechistic texts produced in the context of the formation of the confessional Catholic subject; 3. types of history writing that functioned as narratives of missionary self-understanding within the main religious orders; 4. missionary guidebooks and treatises in which confessional missionary objectives were dealt with in more general and abstract terms. These were all genres with wide-reaching edifying goals, geared to the transformation of normative social practices and offering strict guidelines for living a virtuous Christian life. The project will show how Europe’s main religious orders used the normative discourses in these genres to develop truth regimes with clear-cut principles of in- and exclusion: teaching the populace how to distinguish between good Christians and the internal and external enemies of the Christian commonwealth (such as heretics, Jews, witches, and Islamic ‘unbelievers’).
Institutional Setting The project will be developed at the Department of History, Radboud University Nijmegen, under the auspices of the Institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies, within its research line Culture, Religion and Memory.
Structure of the Proposed Research Project 1 (Postdoc Researcher): ‘The homiletic construction of a disciplined religious subject’ Project 2 (PhD 1): ‘Catechistic programs for the laity’; promotor: P.G.J.M. Raedts. Project 3 (PhD 2): ‘Narratives of missionary self-understanding within the religious orders’; promotor: P.G.J.M. Raedts. Project 4 (synthesis, Dr. B. Roest): ‘Overarching missionary objectives within the religious orders’ All projects will be conducted from the Radboud University Nijmegen. Participants will visit libraries and research institutes in Europe and Canada (Toronto), and consult project advisors both in situ and by e-mail.
Description of the Proposed Research
1. Research Question and Status Quaestionis This project investigates in a comparative diachronical fashion how normative discursive developments within Europe’s main missionary orders - the Dominicans and Franciscans (missionary orders of the later medieval period), and the Capuchins and Jesuits (missionary orders of the sixteenth century) - helped construct a disciplined religious subject within Catholic Europe, between the break-through of the Observance as a pastoral movement in the early fifteenth century and the implementation of counter-reformatory policies in the decades following the Council of Trent. The project breaks with scholarly traditions that present religious disciplining and religious identity formation as the outflow of counter-reformatory confessionalisation. It contextualises the emergence of the Jesuits and the Jesuit missionary profile, while assigning other important missionary orders their proper place in the religious developments before and after the Council of Trent.
Research on religious identity formation leading to a confessionalised disciplined religious subject is dominated by Reformation and Counter-Reformation historians, who situate this phenomenon in the second half of the sixteenth century and after, in the context of Protestant and Catholic competition. Such historians single out rules on religious life and conduct leading to clear-cut Protestant and Catholic confessional identities (Reinhard, 1981 & 1995; Zeeden, 1985; Schilling, 1995). Confessionalisation as a concept is also used by cultural historians inspired by Michel Foucault’s studies on sexuality and punishment, to describe phenomena of psychological submission linked with ‘technologies of self-hood’, and gendered role-assignments (e.g. Braun & Vallance, 2003; Ogilvie, 2006). Like the work on religious confessionalisation stricto sensu, this research tends to privilege the Early Modern and the Modern period, even though some of its practitioners, touched by vestiges of Norbert Elias’ civilization thesis, recognize prefigurations in late medieval and Renaissance court society and monasticism (Knox, 1991; Gillingham, 2002). Recently, mechanisms traditionally associated with confessionalisation processes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation have been traced back to patriarchal tendencies and guided forms of self-disciplining in the late medieval period (as in Bast, 1997; Andor & Tóth, 2001; Little, 2006), or even earlier, to the twelfth century (Van ‘t Spijker, 2004). This would suggest that the study of enforced religious identity formation and aspects of psychological submission should not be limited to developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. More important still has been Berndt Hamm’s proposal, reacting against the impressionist studies by Jean Delumeau on culpabilisation, to interpret sixteenth-century confessionalisation from chronologically wider perspectives of ongoing ‘normative centring’ (Normatieve Zentrierung). He proposes this as an overarching concept to understand the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a single period, in which religion and society were subjected to fundamental forms of authoritative standardisation. (Hamm, 1993 & 2004). The late medieval output of different textual genres geared to the construction of devout religious personae (cf. Bange, 2000; Roest, 2004) shows that it is not necessary to confine the search for confessionalisation mechanisms, understood as forms of religious self- definition and normative centring, to the Early Modern period. Many elements of religious identity formation nowadays associated with the Catholic Reformation have their origin in longstanding medieval developments that include the so-called ‘Reformation of the Twelfth century’, implementations of the catechistic program presented at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the mendicant apostolate and the flowering of penitential movements since the thirteenth century. Yet, in line with Berndt Hamm, there are good reasons to maintain that, from the early fifteenth century onwards, such mechanisms of religious identity formation translated into a more permanent normative ‘confessional’ engagement in the double sense of the word – confessionalisation as a distinct Catholic confessional identity (vis-à-vis heretics, Jews, and Islamic ‘unbelievers’) and as a wider phenomenon of normative centring of beliefs and behaviours within the European population. Although many groups were involved in the design and implementation of these mechanisms, the actual shape of the proposed religious models and their impact within European society were to a large extent steered by the preaching and confessional practices, and by models of Catholic perfection put forward by the Observant branches of the religious orders after the reform Council of Constance (1414-1418) (Elm, 1989; Prodi, 1994; Chittolini & Elm, 2001; Belitto, Christianson & Izbicki, 2008). Around that time, the Observant branches of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in particular reclaimed the pastoral engagement for which these orders had once been renowned, to become major taskforces in the ongoing conversion of Europe in the face of perceived omnipresent threats. In this process they transformed their overall missionary outlook, form and content of preaching, and produced a massive body of religious instruction literature, which has not yet been studied in any depth. Although Observant Dominicans and Franciscans were not the sole actors – the importance of German Augustinian congregations, high-profile Carmelite and Carthusian religious authors, or the Modern Devotion movement in the Low Countries cannot be denied – the comparative size of the Dominican and Franciscan Observant movements, their pan- European pastoral organisation and the overall impact of their pastoral mission, makes them the most visible and influential forces among the regular clergy, just as in the early modern period the Capuchins and Jesuits outshone in numbers and impact other new religious orders with a pastoral mission such as the Theatines and the Barnabites (cf. De Molen, 1994). From ca. 1420 onwards, the Observant religious orders experimented with edificatory instruments, which they tested on novices and professed members, and honed to perfection for application at large. Observant friars provided guidelines for being a ‘true’ Christian, in opposition to ‘false’ Christians and an array of domestic and foreign enemies of faith, through recipes for everyday behaviour and comportment, and through the promotion of public and private manifestations of faith. Thus all aspects of lived experience were brought under religious oversight. (Paton, 1992; Mormando, 1999; Polecritti, 2000). Counter-Reformation historiography singles out the Jesuit order as the model of organised religion in the Counter-Reformation Church, and presupposes a breach between late medieval forms of Catholic identity formation and post-Tridentine confessionalisation processes. Both assumptions deny the diversified contribution of other orders alongside the Jesuits, as well as the impact of Observant mendicant religious engagement on the pastoral, confessional and missionary programmes developed during and in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. Hence the rationale for our project on normative discursive developments within Europe’s main missionary orders, to evaluate their contribution to the construction of confessionalised disciplined religious subjects within Catholic Europe between the early fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.
2. Methods and Theoretical Context This project aims at a comparative analysis of normative discourses in genres of religious instruction. It deals with texts not commonly reckoned among the ‘great works’ of the West- European tradition studied by Intellectual Historians, or among the complex literary texts preferred by New Cultural Historians. Instead it scrutinises normative texts without much intrinsic ‘originality’, but therefore all the more influential. All of them had wide-reaching edifying goals geared to the transformation of normative social practices and offering guidelines for living a virtuous Christian life. Our approach ties in with recent discussions concerning the goals of ‘post-linguistic turn historiography’. These emphasise historical aspects of discourse formation, problems of practice and lived experience, and the way in which discourse formation is connected with institutions and social practices through which regimes of ‘valid’ knowledge and truth are created. From this perspective, meaning creation remains rooted in the subjective perspective of historical beings, but historical experiences of the world emerge from within categorical grids and semiotic codes that are difficult to transcend (Bevir, 1999; Biernacki, 2000; Cabrera, 2001; Spiegel, 2005). Our project perceives religious identity formation by Europe’s missionary orders as a discursive intensification of normative categories, projecting truth regimes with clear-cut principles of differentiation, in- and exclusion. These regimes, interpreted as manifestations of Hamm’s concept of normative centring, comprised a normalisation of doctrinal positions, and proposed clear formats for what being a devout Christian entailed. Such formats were never just inscribed on the minds or bodies of the implied audience, but were always transformed in the reception process. In short, while positing the importance of symbolic orders of religious expression, we acknowledge situational qualities of understanding with which people made sense of their world and engaged in meaningful religious action.
3. Innovative Character and Scholarly Interest This project is innovative, first, in that it breaks with dominant tendencies to describe confessionalisation and religious identity formation processes as the outcome of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. This project proposes instead to treat the period running from the Observant initiatives in the 1420s to the full implementation of the Tridentine program in the early seventeenth century as one meaningful unit. A second innovative aspect results from its contextualisation of the Jesuit impact. Historiography on the religious orders in the Counter-Reformation Church privileges the Jesuit order and its models of mission and education. The way in which the Jesuits built upon and reacted against models developed in the older missionary orders, notably the Dominicans and the Franciscans, has not received any in-depth treatment. This project will mend this lacuna in historical scholarship. In the third place, this project will challenge traditional order historiography still dominated by scholars with links to these orders. These scholars treat intellectual transformations and modes of religious performance within each order solely as functions of intra-order historical development. This project’s comparative approach will put the respective ‘uniqueness’ of orders in a proper historical perspective. Finally, this project reveals the importance of a comparative historical approach towards texts that are either ignored or studied within the specific domains of sermon studies, missiology and religious studies. It highlights the usability of such texts for questions pertaining to the religious and intellectual transformations of Europe that are normally studied with sources associated with humanism and Renaissance intellectual life.
4. Prehistory and Embedding The project builds upon earlier research by members of the staff at Nijmegen. It follows through reflections by faculty members on the formation of the Christian persona through education and lived religiosity (esp. Raedts 1997; Bange 1986 & 2000), as well as the scrutiny of genres of religious formation in the Franciscan order (Roest, 2004), and research into fifteenth- and sixteenth- century forms of religious Observance (Roest, 2009). The project feeds on the attention devoted to religious heritage within the research institute Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies (HLCS) at the Nijmegen Arts Faculty, under the banner of the research programme Culture, Religion and Memory. The project benefits from the intellectual support-structure offered by the HLCS, and profits from its policy to disseminate research results at conferences and via aligned publication outlets. On a national level, the project benefits from the umbrella provided by the National Research School of Medieval Studies. To boot, the main applicant and the envisaged author of the synthetic monograph will both use their extensive international contacts (with for instance the Franciscan Institute (St. Bonaventure University), the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (both in Toronto)) to enhance the project’s quality and overall visibility.
5. Coherence and Surplus Value Programmatic Approach In view of the generic structure of the orders’ literary output and their catechistic, pastoral and missionary concerns, we have distinguished four sub-projects, three of which study particular literary genres via which the orders contributed to the formation of religious identities, namely genres focused on identity formation in a pastoral setting (projects I & II, on works of homiletic instruction and catechistic writings respectively), and genres devoted to missionary identity formation within the orders (project III: narratives of missionary self-understanding). The fourth sub-project deals more generally with the development of comprehensive missionary conceptions, and synthesizes core elements of the three other approaches. Hence the sub-projects are complementary, allowing for comparison and fruitful discussions among the participants, and enhancing the ultimate outcome.
Sub-Projects
I. The homiletic construction of a disciplined religious subject (Post-Doc project) The first sub-project addresses the ways in which a confessionalised disciplined religious subject was given shape in the homiletic output of the orders. This means analyzing forms of preaching and homiletic rhetoric among a representative sample of Dominican, Franciscan, Capuchin, and Jesuit master preachers with a universal license (as opposed to the much larger group of homiletic practitioners who never reached this distinction), focusing on a representative selection of Advent, Lent and Easter sermon cycles preached and published within the period. This sub-project builds methodologically upon Delcorno (1989 & 1996), Mouchel (2001) and Roest (2004), to develop an explanatory hermeneutics for our understanding of chosen homiletic styles. It starts from the observation that, from Bernardino of Siena OFM (d. 1444) and Antoninus of Florence OP (d. 1459) onwards, Observant preachers and their successors in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe broke free from the scholastic ‘sermo modernus’ approach, downplaying the link between liturgical readings and the sermon’s main theme as well as the logical connection between word and thought central to scholastic communication models. They re-oriented their preaching towards a more catechistic model by tailoring their sermons to perceived problems and needs of everyday life, infusing them with gender-specific prescriptive codes and motivational strategies to mould the religious, social, economic and sexual behaviour of the individual, the household, the neighbourhood, the community and the state. These preachers pushed their message in prolonged preaching tours during the Lent/Easter and Advent seasons, covering, in recurring sessions, all major population centres (frequently by invitation of the local urban authorities). Many such sermons exhibit the conviction that Christians could be reached by generating a shared discourse of religious experience, in which the preacher sometimes offered himself or venerated fellow-practitioners (as in Giacomo della Marca (d. 1476)’s sermon in honour of Bernardino of Siena) as models for the implied audience. These sermons issued dire warnings about the penalties of religious transgression and stressed the iniquities of the omnipresent enemies of faith (notably heretics, witches, Jews and the ‘infidel’ Turks). They also tried to draw in the public with a variety of rhetorical strategies and constructed a social reality with comforting boundaries between purity and danger that evoked a partisanship between the preacher and his audience. Ample evidence exists for a clear link between the homiletic strategies found in the works of these preachers, with their wilful demonstration of erudition (not simply in the fields of biblical study and canon law, but also in the fields of Latin and Greek patristic and classical literature), and the ‘new’ humanist communication models espoused by contemporary humanists like Guarino and Vegio, Erasmus and Vives. Hence, this sub-project will also advance our understanding of different realms of lay and religious rhetoric in the period of European Humanism, and help us to gauge the importance of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century homiletics as a tool of religious mass communication, with repercussions for our perception of Christianity as a religion of the Word, long before an evangelist Protestantism would make that a corner piece of its religious mainstay. Due to the complex generic fluidity of the sources and the necessity to engage with humanist rhetorical strategies and intricate issues of late medieval and Renaissance moral theology, this sub-project lends itself for realization by a post-doctoral researcher. The post-doc will be able to draw upon the Nijmegen expertise regarding mendicant sermons and the contacts in the field of late medieval and Renaissance sermon studies. Yet the post-doc will need to have the capacity to straddle a complex body of sources with peculiar characteristics and a complex ‘Sitz im Leben’ in the overlapping worlds of Renaissance theological and humanist scholarship. Ultimately, this project will result in an important monograph and spin-off publications that re- instate the sermon as a fundamental religious and literary genre in the Renaissance world of letters and as one of the most pervasive mediums of communication through which the religious orders tried to implement their edificatory objectives.
II. Catechistic programs for the laity (PhD project) This sub-project aims to compare the catechistic programmes for the laity produced in the context of the formation of the confessional Catholic subject by authors from the orders, focusing on the techniques of normative centring and confessionalisation used in these texts. Here too, the analysis will start from a partial source inventory (Roest 2004). Contrary to received opinion, which singles out the publication of the successful Triple Catechism (1555- 1558) by the Jesuit Peter Canisius as the main starting point of catechistic renewal in the Catholic Church, mainly in answer to the Augsburg Confession and the Protestant catechisms of Heidelberg and Geneva, it is clear that forms of catechistic instruction through designated manuals go back to earlier periods. Already during the aftermath of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) a number of bishops and archbishops set up catechistic programs, with as early highlights those created by Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), Eudes Rigaud (d. 1275) and John Pecham (d. 1292). Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, both academic theologians and mendicant preachers devoted considerable attention in their theology handbooks and pastoral texts to expositions of the articles of faith, the sacraments, the Pater Noster, the virtues and vices, and the Decalogue (e.g. the Erklärung des Vaterunser ascribed to the thirteenth-century Franciscan novice master David von Augsburg, and Ramon Llull’s popular Catalan Doctrina pueril (1274–1282)). By the early fourteenth century the word ‘catechism’ itself made its appearance alongside of more general titles, such as Doctrina Christiana (see Guiral Ot’s Cathecismus Scolarium Novellorum of 1338). With the onset of Observant reforms, the emphasis on catechistic instruction took a new turn, partly inspired by Jean Gerson’s Opusculum Tripartitum de Praeceptis Decalogi, de Confessione et de Arte Moriendi (1408), and partly in conjunction with the mendicant emphasis on religious instruction within a homiletic context. As corroborated by Harmening’s foundational study on catechistic sources in Bavarian libraries (Harmening, 1987), and Boockmann’s re-appraisal of German fifteenth-century texts of religious instruction (Boockmann, 2000), the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century production of catechistic texts was substantial, and formed a cornerstone of Catholic religious instruction long before the decrees of the Council of Trent and Canisius’ catechistic works inaugurated a further normalization of catechistic teachings in reaction to Reformation accusations and initiatives. This project will show how various fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century catechistic texts written by members of the regular clergy, such as Dietrich Colde’s Kerstenspieghel and Conrad Clinge’s Catechismus Catholicus, had a near-perennial afterlife and, together with the early sixteenth-century Italian Scuole della dottrina cristiana (Turrini, 1982; Grendler, 1984), influenced not only core-elements of Catholic catechistic teaching in the aftermath of the Council of Trent, but also had an impact on the production of Franciscan and Jesuit illustrated catechisms for use in the New World and Asia (so-called Catecismi con jeroglíficos). It is the goal of this sub-project to chart the developments in catechistic instruction in the worlds of Observant and Counter-Reformatory Catholicism, and to show how models of lay perfection put forward in the orders’ manuals for living a true Christian life mirrored differences in emphasis between the orders as well as new confessional realities. As the sub-project on preaching, this sub-project will take up various gender-specific modulations of personhood, but with specific attention to the current issue of patriarchal tendencies in Reformatory confessionalisation processes (Bast, 1997; Rummel, 2000). Thus, it will provide much-needed answers to important questions raised in historical writing. This project can be realised as a three and a half year PhD project. It does not aim towards a comprehensive analysis of all available catechistic materials, but will develop its argument on the basis of those selected specimens that had a noticeable presence on the European book market, indications for which are available in catalogues and source editions. The outcome will be a PhD dissertation suitable for publication and at least one spin-off article.
III. Narratives of self-understanding within the missionary orders (PhD project) This sub-project comprises a comparative analysis of the narratives of self-understanding of the orders in apologetics and history writing. It will show how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century order historians used the heritage of their religious past and the experienced essence of their religious life to present their legitimacy in relation to dominant ideals of Catholic religious perfection in the period following the break-through of the Observant movement up and until the crystallisation of counter-reformatory Catholicism. The main sources for this analysis are order chronicles, key hagiographical texts and polemical historical treatises written in the orders’ self-defence. The researcher will exploit these sources in an innovative comparative fashion, distinguishing the narrative strategies and dominant themes developed, consciously and unconsciously, by order historians and religious apologists in order to stress the central identity of their order and its pastoral roles regarding both religious and lay persons. This analysis builds methodologically on Roest 1999, in order to account for the specific generic and typological propensities underlying the composition and evocative message of these types of literature, thus allowing the researcher to differentiate between essentialist formal characteristics dependent upon inherited generic traditions, and more revealing modes of emplotment and exemplary narrative elements relevant for our overall research question. Additional innovative aspects – aside from the project’s contribution to our insight in religious self-formation – comprise 1.) a comparative analysis of these types of sources beyond the institutional framework in which they are commonly read, and 2.) their contextualization within the wider field of Renaissance historiography, which thus far has neglected nearly completely such institutional histories, since they do not fit into the established paradigms of ‘humanist’ historical writing. (Cf. Kelley, 1970 & Fryde, 1983). The project can be completed in three and a half years, resulting in a PhD-thesis suitable for publication and at least one additional article. Overall, the sources are relatively well-disclosed and manageable, the bulk being available in accessible editions, due to the orders’ ongoing interest in their own history (Roest, 2003). The researcher will also be able to draw on the main applicant’s knowledge of the primary sources, and on his knowledge of historiographical traditions regarding order history and representations of medieval and Renaissance religious institutions.
IV. Overarching missionary objectives within the religious orders (Synthetic study, Roest) This sub-project deals in more general and abstract terms with the main developments in Franciscan, Capuchin, Dominican and Jesuit missionary objectives before the foundation of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622). This project compares the fundamental missionary objectives within the orders through an analysis of existing guidebooks composed in the context of missionary training, normative statements in order rules and statutes about pastoral missionary engagement in and beyond the Christian realm, propagandist statements in the context of missionary polemics (which became prominent in all orders during the second half of the sixteenth century), treatises on missionary anthropology developed in order seminaries and finally a representative set of missionary field-documents, such as letters and diaries. Diachronically it addresses changing notions of Catholic mission in the orders between the Observance and the Counter-reformation, relating them to the historiographical reflections on confessionalisation and religious identity formation, as well as to current discussions in more specialised studies in Mission History (Andor & Tóth, 2001). Over the years, the latter has become a large field with quite an independent tradition, with a much more global and anthropological perspective, bound up with matters of race, alterity, the confrontation of ‘primitivism’ and the like. This project will apply insights from this field to see how central catechistic and pastoral conceptions of the orders related to realities they faced once they left Christian territory, but also how missionary experiences abroad interfered with longstanding conceptions of pastoral engagement at home. The latter was also increasingly described in terms of mission, especially in relation to the desired re-conversion of Protestant Europe. Synchronically, this project seeks to find the distinguishing elements among missionary goals and instruments within the various orders, each of which aimed at specific results among the targeted Christian and non-Christian populations. It will tackle ingrained historiographical tendencies to signal ‘essential’ characteristics of missionary endeavours within the religious orders, especially as they have been cultivated in the order-specific historiography to date, such as the alleged peaceful Franciscan and Capuchin stances (Cf. Vadakkekara, 2003), over and against the alleged doctrinal security of the Dominicans and the so-called ‘accommodative’ missionary pragmatism of the Jesuits, which would have found its classical expression in Matteo Ricci’s and Nicholas Trigault’s De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas (1615) (Mungello, 1989; McCoog, 2004). Parallel to this, this project will address to what extent mission in Counter- Reformatory context became Counter-Reformation insurgency, less interested in re- conversion of individual Protestants than with regime change in Protestant countries (such as England and the Dutch Republic). It will also show how mission in the wider sense of the word was bound-up with the so-called ‘innere Konfessionalisierung’ and inquisitorial action in regions where the Catholic faith maintained or regained the support of secular authorities (Northern Italy, France, parts of the Empire, and the Southern Low Countries) (Prosperi, 1996; Madionia, 2002). This sub-project deals with the fundamental missionary ambitions of the main missionary orders (approaching their various goals and objectives from their more universal missionary point of view), thereby tackling directly a number of issues that touch on all other sub-projects. It will also deal in-depth with normative discursive developments relevant for the ideological construction of confessionalised disciplined religious subjects, also in relation to current historiographical tendencies, and it will address the major theoretical parameters that guide the project as a whole, providing the necessary synthesizing element. The envisaged researcher for this sub-project (Roest) can build upon his thorough acquaintance with missionary texts from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century within the Franciscan and Capuchin contexts, and from his current research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missionary reports in other orders and congregations. In collaboration with the main applicant, he will take responsibility for the coaching and supervision of the other participants, and make sure that the various sub-projects will be developed within a research atmosphere of ongoing collaboration and mutual support.
V. Concluding workshop The project will be concluded with an international workshop, to be held in March 2014 at the Radboud University Nijmegen, in which the project participants will present the major results of their research and in which project advisors and other invitees will reflect on the project’s parameters, outcome and venues for further research.
Summary for Non-specialists (Dutch) Dit onderzoeksproject onderzoekt de manier waarop de belangrijkste religieuze orden met missionaire doelstellingen (namelijk de dominicanen, de franciscanen, de kapucijnen en de jezuïeten) tussen het begin van de vijftiende en het begin van de zeventiende eeuw vorm gaven aan een gedisciplineerde religieuze identiteit met confessionele trekken. Het onderzoek breekt met een lange traditie, die het doorzetten van zogenaamde confessionaliseringstendenzen waarmee vorm werd gegeven aan specifiek katholieke (en protestantse) identiteitsgemeenschappen behandelt als een fenomeen van de tweede helft van de zestiende eeuw. In die traditie worden confessionaliseringsmechanismen binnen de katholieke wereld direct gekoppeld aan de katholieke reactie op de Reformatie, tegen de achtergrond van een decadente laatmiddeleeuwse kerk. Dit project bewijst dat de wortels van katholieke confessionalisering teruggaan op de religieuze hervormingsprogramma’s die tot wasdom kwamen binnen de grote religieuze orden sinds het begin van de vijftiende eeuw (het tijdperk van de religieuze ‘observantiebeweging’), en dat vele aspecten die met zestiende-eeuwse antiprotestantse confessionalisering worden geassocieerd in een eerder stadium werden ontwikkeld om een deugdzame en doctrinair uitgebalanceerde katholieke identiteit af te grenzen tegen tal van interne en externe vijanden (ketters, heksen, joden, islamitische ongelovigen). Het project stelt ook vraagtekens bij de tendens om de jezuïetenorde en de door de jezuïeten ontwikkelde modellen van missionaire en pastorale activiteit als een nieuwe en paradigmatische ontwikkeling te zien binnen de katholieke kerk van de zestiende eeuw. Om de onjuistheid van die interpretatie te tonen wordt een grondige vergelijking getrokken met de missionaire en pastorale uitgangspunten en methoden van de andere grote missieorden actief binnen en buiten de katholieke wereld. Dit project is gebaseerd op een comparatieve en diachrone analyse van normatieve teksten waarin de orden hun idealen van religieuze instructie en confessioneel zelfbegrip vorm gaven. Dit betreft: 1.) vormen van preekliteratuur waarmee de ordepredikers poogden een gedisciplineerde en in toenemende mate geconfessionaliseerde religieuze identiteit op te leggen aan de bevolking; 2.) vormen van catecheselectuur die in de context van katholieke identiteitsformatie onder de bevolking werden verspreid; 3.) vormen van ordegeschiedschrijving waarin de religieuze orden zichzelf verdedigden en hun idealen en pastorale successen presenteerden aan de buitenwereld; 4.) missiehandboeken en traktaten waarin confessionele missionaire doelstellingen in meer algemene termen over het voetlicht werden gebracht. Het project zal aantonen dat Europa’s grote missieorden in de bestudeerde periode (vroege 15e-vroege 17e eeuw) de normatieve boodschap van deze genres gebruikten om allesomvattende ideologische presentaties te ontwikkelen van het deugdzame katholieke leven. Het project zal ook laten zien hoe dit gepaard ging met de ontwikkeling van duidelijke grenzen betreffende geloof en gedrag en met de ontwikkeling van een sterk normatieve boodschap aangaande het onderscheid tussen zuivere christenen en de vele interne en externe vijanden van de kerkgemeenschap.
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