Cornucopia

Call for Papers: Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome, for SCSC 2016 (Bruges)

This panel invites papers on the lives and stories of non-Catholics in Rome between the 16th and 18th centuries. Its purpose is both to address recent calls for new approaches to early modern Catholicism, and to build growing interest in public and urban spaces in the early modern world. A vast edifice of 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship was built on institutional records of the Church’s many congregations. These often-prescriptive sources portrayed a monolithic, uniform, and largely successful Church. In response, current scholarship emphasizes the marginal and peripheral, the domestic, and the transitory: shifting identities, fluid boundaries, reception, appropriation and adaptation. Some of the most fruitful results have examined interactions between Catholics and non-Catholics in distant missionary contexts. This panel will seek to build on that approach by examining the contribution of religious minority groups within the city at the heart of the early modern Catholic world. More broadly, it considers whether the history of early modern Catholicism can be written not only as a global religion but also as an inter-religious enterprise even at its core. Papers examining the presence in Rome—temporary or permanent, individuals or groups—of any minority group or religion are very welcome. Please send abstracts (up to 300 words), contact information, and short CV to Dr Emily Michelson at edm21@st-andrews.ac.uk by 31 January.