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In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press.
In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies.
“What one gleans from a reading of the volume as a whole is how very many ways of being Enlightened there were, and how at least some Catholic thinkers reconciled within their life spans…an Enlightened approach to knowledge and traditional Catholicism. [The] introduction by Jeffrey D. Burson . . . should be required reading for anyone interested in the Enlightenment as a whole or its many aspects.” —H-Net Reviews
Ulrich L. Lehner is associate professor of theology at Marquette University.
Introduction: Catholicism and Enlightenment, Past, Present, and Future by Jeffrey D. Burson
Part 1. Catholic Enlightenment and the Papacy
1. Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758): The Ambivalent Enlightener by Mario Rosa
Part 2. Catholicism and the Siècle des Lumières in France and Savoy
2. Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1718–1790): An Enlightened Anti-Philosophe by Jeffrey D. Burson
3. Giacinto Sigismondo Cardinal Gerdil (1718–1802): Enlightenment as Cultural and Religious Achievement by Dries Vanysacker
4. Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794): The Unconventional Revolutionary and Reformer Caroline Chopelin-Blanc
5. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821): Heir of the Enlightenment, Enemy of Revolutions, and Spiritual Progressivist by Carolina Armenteros
6. Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854): Lost Sheep of the Religious Enlightenment by Carolina Armenteros
Part 3. Catholic Enlightenment in the Holy Roman Empire
7. Benedict Stattler (1728–1797): The Reinvention of Catholic Theology with the Help of Wolffian Metaphysics by Ulrich L. Lehner
8. Beda Mayr (1742–1794): Ecumenism and Dialogue with Modern Thought by Ulrich L. Lehner
Part 4. Catholicism, Enlightenment, and Habsburg Europe
9. Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734–1785): Church Reform for the Sake of the State by Thomas Wallnig
10. Johann Pezzl (1756–1823): Enlightenment in the Satirical Mode by Ritchie Robertson
Part 5 Varieties of Italian Catholic Enlightenment
11. Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750): Enlightenment in a Tridentine Mode by Paola Vismara
12. Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769): Reform through Commerce and Renewed Natural Law by Niccolò Guasti
13. Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799): Science and Mysticism by Massimo Mazzotti
Part 6. Catholicism, Enlightenment, and the Iberian States
14. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro (1676–1764): Benedictine and Skeptic Enlightener by Francisco Sánchez-Blanco
15. Josep Climent i Avinent (1706–1781): Enlightened Catholic, Civic Humanist, Seditionist by Andrea J. Smidt
Part 7. Transnational Trajectories: The Intersection of Irish, French, Italian, and Habsburg Developments
16. Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–1787): Jesuit Science in an Enlightenment Context by Jonathan A. Wright
17. Luke Joseph Hooke (1714–1796): Theological Tolerance in an Apologetic Mold by Thomas O ’Connor
Part 8. Catholicism in Protestant Territorial-Dynastic States: Scottish and English Enlightenment Variations
18. Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743): Catholic Freethinking and Enlightened Mysticism by Gabriel Glickman
19 Alexander Geddes (1737–1802): Biblical Criticism, Ecclesiastical Democracy, and Jacobinism by Mark Goldie
Part 9. The Polish Catholic Enlightenment
20. Stanisław Konarski (1700–1772): A Polish Machiavelli? By Jerzy Lukowski
21. Hugo Kołła˛taj (1750–1812): The Revolutionary Priest by Anna Łysia k-Ł a˛t kowska
List of Contributors
Index of Names