Members of the Institute for Modern History participated in the organization and performance of the following panels at conferences of the German Association of Historians:
-
Glaubens-Fragen (Matters of Faith), 51st Deutscher Historikertag, Hamburg, 20–23 September 2016
- "Rhetorics of Certainty – Dynamic Knowledge: Negotiating Faith and Certainty in Premodern Europe", organized by Prof. Dr. Renate Dürr and Dr. Irene van Renswoude (Den Haag/Utrecht). [More]
- "Media – Senses – Objects: New Approaches to Matters of Faith in the Early Modern Period",
organized by Dr. Anne Mariss and Dr. Philip Hahn. [More]
Glaubens-Fragen (Matters of Faith), 51st Deutscher Historikertag, Hamburg, 20–23 September 2016
"Rhetorics of Certainty – Dynamic Knowledge: Negotiating Faith and Certainty in Premodern Europe", organized by Prof. Dr. Renate Dürr and Dr. Irene van Renswoude (Den Haag/Utrecht).
Could statements in matters of knowledge only be either right or false? Premodern rhetorical attempts to define certain knowledge, truth, and orthodoxy and to distinguish them from fantasy, fraud, and heresy convey this impression. From a modern viewpoint, this concept of certainty, implying eternal and fundamental validity, is often considered to be characteristic of the premodern era. The concept of ‘orthodoxy’ is inherently incompatible with the notion of truth as a social construct. It leaves no room for processes of adaptation and transformation, for ambiguity or even interaction with what was regarded as heterodoxy. In matters of knowledge, to put it briefly, change seems impossible. It can only appear as a breach with tradition or scientific revolution, hence a blow from outside against the rhetoric of certainty.
Similarly, the concept of ‘knowledge’ does not convey the idea of something preliminary. As the opposite to belief and unknowing, ‘knowledge’ seems to claim fundamental validity, too, at least from the perspective of those involved. Research into the sociology and history of knowledge have revealed these claims as illusory. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of certainty involved the evocation of a clear juxtaposition of codified and rejected knowledge. But what were the implications of declaring certain knowledge as ‘apocryphal’, which was received despite or perhaps because of this status? And what did this categorization mean for the concept of knowledge in general? In 2012, Martin Mulsow has proposed the term ‘precarious knowledge’ for certain strands of knowledge and its protagonists in the early modern period. This panel intends to demonstrate that this term has the potential to interpret ‘knowledge’ as dynamic.
Irene van Renswoude, Den Haag: What not to Read. Lists of ‘Suspicious’ Books before the Index (500–1500)
LCatalogues and lists that prescribed which books were good to read and which ones should be rejected circulated long before the Index of Forbidden books (1559). But what did the clause ‘to be rejected’ or ‘not to be received’ in medieval book lists precisely imply? Were those books that were classified as heretical, apocryphal or otherwise suspicious, actually banned from being read? Were they meant to be destroyed? Or were they rather allotted a special status? This paper will discuss the comments and annotations of readers in the margins of rejected texts, to see how the regulations in prescriptive book lists on ‘what not to read’ were interpreted and put into practice. It will demonstrate that the line between acceptable and unacceptable reading was in fact fluid and open to discussion.
Carine van Rhijn, Utrech: ‘A good day to move your bees’. Early Medieval Prognostic Texts between Fabula and Pastoral Care.
Prognostic texts, which follow for instance the cycle of the week or the moon to ‘predict’ every-day matters such as the harvest, the verity of dreams, the chances of surviving disease, or the character of a new-born child, survive in respectable quantities from Late Antiquity up into the Early Modern Period. Generally they have been interpreted as texts that move outside the realm of ‘real’ religion, either as folk belief, as superstition, as pagan remnants or even as magic. This paper is a case study set in the Carolingian period (s.VIII/IX), in which I would like to argue that, quite to the contrary, these texts were part of early medieval religious culture, and that they played a role in pastoral care if in the hands of the right people. The case of one manuscript will take us to the world of rural, lay communities, in which these texts may have functioned as a bridge between ideals of good Christian behaviour and the many demands of daily life for which Christianity had no fitting format.
Martin Mulsow, Gotha: Under the Surface of Certainty: ‘Catholic’ Doctrine around 1700
In the 17th century, ‘Doctrina catholica’ did not only mean the Catholic confession, but could also refer to the ‘all-encompassing’ teachings of the church fathers before the council of Nicaea. The authority of the church fathers remained unquestioned; their theology of ‘logos’, though, had by then become a matter of hot debates. Catholic theologians argued over whether the subordinatian version of trinitarian theology could be regarded as merely ‘not yet’ orthodox but on the way towards it, or whether it was in fact unorthodox and a played into the hands of the antitrinitarians. The Englishman George Bull developed a compromise, which had an influence on the Prussian Theologian Johann Georg Wachter, who in his unpublished ‘Theologia martyrum’ associated the teaching of ‘logos’ with Spinoza and the Cabbala. What do we make of Wachter? Was he a libertine who slowly turned into a Catholic, or a theologian well-versed in patristic teaching, who went astray into Spinozism? The fact that he refrained from publishing his ‘Theologia Martyrum’ shows that the dynamics of knowledge led him into precarious terrain.
Eric Jorink, Den Haag: The Ark and the Temple. Visualizing Biblical Constructions in the Dutch Republic (17th Century)
Elaborating on the work of the early commentators of the Bible, early modern scholars were increasingly fascinated by visualizing buildings and constructions as described in the Bible, such as for example the tower of Babel. However, what often started as deeply religious enterprise, turned out to be fraught with difficulties, both with regard to philological detail as well as to mathematics, new empirical data and sound reason. I will focus on Willem Goeree (1636-1711) a little known, but then famous Dutch architect, theologian, collector and self-appointed enemy of Spinoza, Adriaan Koerbagh, Isaac Vossius and other biblical critics. Goeree wanted to get rid of artistic fancy concerning biblical stories and, instead, tried to demonstrate the truth of the literal reading. His aim was to make the surveying ground texts consistent with his own orthodox views as well as with his great knowledge of the ancient peoples and of the Middle East. However, his reconstruction of the Ark and the Temple brought him dangerously close to the radical biblical critics.
Renate Dürr, Tübingen: Was Noah Chinese? Heterodoxy in the Christian Universalism of Jesuit World Chronicles of the 17th and 18th Centuries
This paper focuses on a chronological essay of the Jesuit Joseph Stöcklein from Graz, which he published in 1729 in his journal New World Messenger. Stöcklein was the first to answer the question as to whether Noah was Chinese with a clear yes, for he equated all Old Testament patriarchs with Chinese emperors from the earliest tradition. The question itself had been debated at least since the publication of the first history of China by Martino Martini in 1658; for decades, knowledge about the history and culture of China and Egypt had been a challenge to European scholars. Which methods offered certainty about the age of cultures? How could one make sense of the different versions of biblical history? And: Does one need to assume several origins of human history instead of one? Questions like these proved fundamental because the increasing input of knowledge from other continents threatened the concept of Christian universalism that had dominated notions of the world and of history across the confessions. Stöcklein’s answer seems to be a particularly eloquent plea for this Christian universalism –one which, as a by-product, also emerged as Chinese.
[Read the panel report (in German)]
"Media – Senses – Objects: New Approaches to Matters of Faith in the Early Modern Period", organized by Dr. Anne Mariss and Dr. Philip Hahn.
This panel explores the potential of different methodological approaches to ‘matters of faith‘ by looking at the media of instruction, the material culture, and the senses that could be employed in the process of producing ‘religious knowledge‘. In this way, we hope to contribute to explaining how people in the early modern period believed.
The concept of ‘religious knowledge‘ transcends traditional – and anachronistic – notions of a dichotomy between faith and knowledge in the premodern period. People produced ‘religious knowledge‘, i.e. knowledge derived ultimately from revelation, by constant re-appropriation, negotiation and transferral to new contexts. It could not only be acquired from texts, but also by looking at images, by the touching of objects, and by means of sensory perception in general. This means that the production of ‘religious knowledge‘ has to be interpreted from various methodological angles.
All three papers focus on aspects that do not fit into traditional narratives of religious history. Bridget Heal will analyse the exegetical role of illustrations in Lutheran editions of the Bible, which seems to disagree with the alleged word-centredness of Lutheranism. The importance of images for Jesuit pious practice, by contrast, is well known, but is generally ignored that they were embedded in a specific Jesuit material culture, as Anne Mariss will argue. Philip Hahn’s paper departs from the observation that late medieval sensory culture exerted a strong influence on early modern confessional cultures, and will ask how the role of the senses in ‘matters of faith‘ can be reinterpreted by employing a sensory historical approach.
Bridget Heal, St. Andrews: Learning to be Lutheran: Visual Images and the Creation of Confessional Consciousness in German Bibles
Bridget Heal will focus in her Vortrag on the role that Biblical images played in transmitting religious knowledge. The vernacular Bible lay at the heart of Protestant confessional culture. It was the engine that drove the transformations in religious life that occurred during the sixteenth century, and its texts have been much studied and celebrated. Yet from 1522/23 onwards, when Lucas Cranach the Elder illustrated the Apocalypse in Luther’s September and December New Testaments, images played an important role in shaping both the learned and the popular reception of those texts. The images were often much more than mere illustrations: they functioned as visual exegesis, determining, like glosses and other para-textual material, the interpretation of particular stories. Heal’s Vortrag will examine traditions of Lutheran Bible illustration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking not only at Vollbibeln but also at cheaper and more accessible experiments in visual pedagogy such as Bilderbibeln and Kinderbibeln. It will ask why a confession that derived its significance from the promulgation of God’s word came to accord images such an important role in the transmission of religious knowledge and creation of confessional consciousness.
Anne Mariss, Tübingen: ‘Finding God in All Things‘: Jesuit Practices of Piety in the Early Modern Period
Anne Mariss focusses on the question of how things played a role in early modern matters of faith. Material culture was central to the development, the formation and mediation of religious beliefs and pious practices. Therefore, recent research has emphasized the importance of a specific religious materiality: sensuousness, aesthetics and haptics were – contrary to older assumptions – important factors in processes of confession-building and the formation of spirituality in Catholicism as well as in Protestantism.
In her talk, Mariss examines which sorts of objects played a crucial role in Jesuit practices of piety. Since Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the fraternity, Jesuit piety was based on worldly experiences. To seek and find God in all things lay at the core of Jesuit spirituality and piety. So far, research has primarily paid attention to the scientific activities of the Jesuits in their missions in different parts of the world, but has neglected the meaning of things and material culture within this religious approach.
Philip Hahn, Tübingen: Sensible Faith: Towards a Sensory History of ‘Matters of Faith‘ in the Early Modern Period
Recent research into the ‘Christian materiality‘ and the sensory regimes and practices of early modern confessional cultures has blurred established stereotypes: Late medieval piety was not as ‘sensual‘ as traditionally assumed, Lutheranism was not only focussed on hearing, and the Reformed churches were not principally anti-sensual. Sensory historical research has, moreover, revealed that the sixteenth-century religious upheavals were influenced by ancient and medieval notions of the functioning of the senses, which were gradually superseded by newer theories in the course of the seventeenth century.
Rather than just confining oneself to a revisionist deconstruction of the sensory side of the transition from medieval to early modern times, though, one could take advantage of the sensory historical approach’s potential to reinterpret the relationship between perception and ‘matters of faith‘ in the early modern period. Above all, this means to acknowledge the inner logic of sensory perception instead of interpreting it as a symptom of religious culture. By means of a case study of an early modern town in the Holy Roman Empire, the paper will demonstrate the interplay between religious sensory cultures and other factors that influence the history of the senses like natural philosophical, medical, hygienic, and aesthetic ideas. For on the one hand, regarding the senses as ‘matters of faith‘ had an impact beyond the religious sphere, but on the other hand, the production of religious knowledge was influenced by the extent to which a society regarded the senses as reliable.