Abstract
Written by subject specialists, Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series has long been a reliable go-to resource for college students and other interested parties who need an authoritative, yet accessible overview of a dizzying array of topics, each presented as a primer which quickly brings readers up to speed with the latest scholarly developments in the field. It is fitting that the current volume on the Catholic Reformation has been penned by James E. Kelly of the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University who, just a number of months after publication, was appointed as the first holder of the Clare and Hawley Chair in the History of Catholicism. The new chair, within the Centre for Catholic Studies (CCS), is the first in the UK to be dedicated specifically to Catholic history.
The book is divided into seven chapters: Defining a new movement; The Council of Trent and new soldiers for Christ; Catholic Europe?; Missionaries and martyrs; Catholic living; Sensing and thinking Catholicism; and Legacies. In opening the volume, Kelly is keen to address issues of terminology. Noting that the term ‘Counter-Reformation’ has its roots in eighteenth-century Germany, which carried assumptions of ‘a Catholic passivity that morphed into a reactionary backward-looking counter-attack’, he wishes to emphasise that the term ‘Catholic Reformation’, by contrast, suggests a far more creative movement of Catholic renewal – and also a modernising movement (p. 3). Indeed, he argues that, notwithstanding the pivotal importance of the Protestant Reformation, ‘in terms of movements that went global and affected the most people, the Catholic Reformation is arguably the event in the early modern period’ (p. 5).
Of course the term ‘Catholic Reformation’ also allows for continuities between renewal movements in the late medieval period and reform impulses in the sixteenth century both leading up to, and flowing from the Council of Trent (1545–63). Kelly will point to the influence of figures such as Garcia de Cisneros, who was sent to reform the Benedictine house of Montserrat in 1500, on Ignatius of Loyola who was given Cisneros’s Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual to read when he visited Montserrat in 1522.
Just as all church councils through history have had their various interpreters, so it was with Trent. Kelly points out that Tridentine Catholicism was far from monolithic, and he offers Carlo Borromeo’s often uneasy relationship with the Jesuits as an example, which led eventually to Borromeo’s removal of the Society as administrators of the diocesan seminary in 1579.
Early modern Catholicism manifested itself in different ways depending on geographical location. Kelly shows how the Spanish understanding of the Catholic Reformation was ‘rooted in events and initiatives that significantly pre-dated the Council of Trent’, namely the end of Moorish rule in the Iberian peninsula in 1492 with the capture of Granada in 1492 and Spain assuming the mantle of a champion of Catholic orthodoxy, Philip II, who was king for most of the second half of the sixteenth century acting as a ‘mini-pope’; indeed, Kelly observes that ironically the Spanish government’s declaration in 1572 of all appeals to Rome from the ecclesiastical courts as null and void was ‘an act not dissimilar to those passed in Protestant states’ (p. 33). French Catholicism, for its part, was equally determined to defend its own liberties, and in its case it could be argued that ‘technically, the decrees of the Council of Trent were never officially accepted in France as they were considered to infringe upon the Gallican rights’ (p. 39). The much maligned Cardinal Richelieu, Kelly goes on, ‘embodied a particularly French interpretation of the Catholic Reformation, where bishops were reformers but also political agents because of the Gallican Church’s connection to royal and noble patronage’ (p. 41).
In his discussion of early modern Catholicism in the Americas in chapter four, Kelly steers between the polarities of regarding missionary activity in heroic terms of bringing the light of Christ to the ‘New World’ and seeing it as simply another example of violent, colonial forced conversion. As blunt interpretive instruments, these ‘are in danger of obliterating the genuine experience of Christianity for large numbers. They neglect personal spiritual experience and run the risk of making judgements on individual consciences’ (p. 54). Yet Kelly does not shy away from highlighting how prophetic voices were also sometimes snuffed out by ecclesiastical ‘yes men’. He recounts how two Capuchins, the Spanish Francisco de Jaca and the Frenchman Épiphanie de Moirans, were excommunicated in 1681 by the Iberian-appointed bishop in Havana, Cuba, ‘for preaching that slaves should be freed by their owners and paid for their labours’ (p. 69).
There are a number of instances within the book in which Kelly pushes back against easy assumptions regarding Tridentine reform, the kind of conclusions often reached in popular discourse. This often takes the form of Kelly citing the popular assumption and then either problematising or contextualising it. With the Church becoming more involved in the contracting of marriages during this period, and insisting on the free consent of the couple to marry, Kelly offers the following observation: ‘This could be interpreted as ecclesiastical control being exerted, priestly authority trumping kinship interests, but at the same time these reforms sought to halt abuses around marriage that particularly harmed women’ (p. 78). Likewise with the introduction of the confessional by Carlo Borromeo in his diocese. Once again, Kelly notes that ‘Some historians have said this was an effort by the Church to exert power and control, but the goal can be seen as the same as reform more generally’ (p. 79). Trent’s decree that all communities of female religious should be enclosed and that ‘no nun shall after her profession be permitted to go out of the monastery, even for a brief period under any pretext whatever, except for a lawful reason to be approved by the bishop’ is another example. Kelly admits that ‘This may appear to modern readers as a Church-led attack on women’ but goes on to comment ‘While strict enclosure appears harsh, and recognizing that the early modern world could hardly be viewed as a beacon of gender equality, we should consider the intentions of the Catholic Reformation. . .’ (p. 29), namely the overall context of the reform of religious life, with efforts made to prevent convents being used as ‘elite dumping grounds for younger daughters’ who may not have had a vocation, nor any desire to live as a nun.
Such interventions may strike some readers as apologetic in tone; however, for Kelly, the intention seems to be to offer an alternative entry point to ecclesial developments during this period other than an automatic hermeneutic of suspicion. In other words, sometimes a reform measure should be taken at face value. And when it comes to the reputation of the Inquisition, noting that figures such as Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and the followers of Rose of Lima, and religious groups such as the Capuchins and the Barnabites all fell under its suspicion at one point or another, Kelly makes the point very well that ‘with its strong secular ties, the Inquisition was sometimes more an enemy, rather than a tool, of the Catholic Reformation’ (p. 89).
James E. Kelly’s The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction is a welcome addition to the literature on early modern Catholicism. Lucidly written, and exhibiting a wealth of distilled scholarship, it will be consulted with profit by students and teachers alike.