This chapter furnishes the reader with a vademecum to the volume. It
places uncertainty in the limelight as a key element for understanding
confessional cultures and belief systems, and shows how early modern
Catholicism struggled to find practical strategies for marrying deepseated
uncertainties with its aim of operationalizing an absolute and
revealed truth. Inspired by Michel de Certeau and Bruno Latour, among
others, this introduction argues that a methodological transfer between
science studies, history of knowledge, and religious history offers a toolkit
to reconstruct the credibility of past beliefs. It introduces the volume’s
focus on the myriad of connected laboratories and work floors of early
modern Catholicism, and on the untainted emergence of a universal
truth from such a multifarious activity. This praxeological approach
is illustrated in the subsequent survey of this volume’s sections and
chapters.
Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of "Baroque Science". Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.
The chapter deals with the Curia’s reaction to Catholic historiography in
the late seventeenth century. Authored by prominent Catholic thinkers,
these books were widely admired throughout Catholic as well as Protestant
Europe for their methodological approach. However, it was exactly their
use of the historical-critical method that brought these authors into
collision with Rome, which accused them of questioning the canonically
attested truth that had already been defined with apostolic authority.
Instead of simply banning them, censors and some factions of the Curia
commissioned learned men to discredit these works, staging as absolute
truth only the Roman historiographical version.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.