“For the Sake of the Truth of History and of the Catholic Doctrines”: History, Documents, and Dogma in Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between theology and documentary criticism in Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici in their own historical and intellectual context. The first two sections of this article are devoted to analyzing two episodes in Baronio’s work, which most clearly show the role of erudition and historical criticism in articulating crucial and controversial political and theological positions in post-Reformation Rome. The third and final section assesses the significance of Baronio’s historical methodology in the context of post-Reformation Catholicism and its importance for our understanding of the relationship between post-Humanist historiography and post-Reformation apologetics and, more generally, for our understanding of the nature of ecclesiastical history.

The Limits of Philology: Antonio Agustín and Textual Criticism of Canon Law in Tridentine Europe

“…21 In 1535, he left for Bologna and Padua, where he graduated as a doctor utriusque juris, a doctor of both laws-canon and civil. His scholarly debut, Emendationes et Opiniones (Emendations and opinions, 1543), a philological and historical commentary on the Florentine 16 See Machielsen;Tutino, 2013;Tutino, 2014, 74-112. 17 Bauer.…”

‘Purest Bones, Sweet Remains, and Most Sacred Relics.’ Re-Fashioning St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–84) as a Medieval Saint between Counter-Reformation Italy and Poland-Lithuania

“…Furthermore, they instantiated changing period notions regarding cultural differences between south-western Europe and its north-eastern borderlands, and the possibility of particularly transregional kinds of numinosity and sanctity. Likewise, the distinctive facture of both reliquaries resonated with Counter-Reformation lapidary and bodily models of hagiography, reifying the Pauline invocation (I Peter 2:4-8) of the saints as "living stones" pieced together like a mosaic into a virtual edifice, the Celestial Jerusalem, constructed from the bodies of the saints themselves and representative of the transhistorical institution of the Church founded on Christ as cornerstone, an edifice simultaneously realized at the end of human history and existing eternally beyond it (Tutino 2013;Noyes 2018).…”