O'Malley, Trent and All That



''Trent and All That. Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era.''

By John W. O’Malley (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2000)

Using the famous line from Shakespeare “ a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” to open this study, Father O’Malley sets out to summarize the historiography of the naming of what is most commonly referred to as “the Counter-Reformation”. This term (like others such as “Renaissance” or “Modernity”) can be used to refer to both a social process/project as well as a stretch of time. Numerous historians writing about Catholicism during and after Luther are surveyed in order to understand how the terms that they chose reflect their beliefs, backgrounds, nationalistic prejudices and personal projects. For example English, German and other “northern” nationals who tended to have Protestant majorities wrote histories of the Reformation pitting a crumbling and corrupt Catholicism against crusading Protestant visionaries. The terms they use reflect this. This tendency to downplay or ignore the reform movements of a multitude of Catholic orders and factions is a major flaw of that tradition. A similar chauvinism is found in the scholarship of Italian and Spanish scholars. The Italians have tended to point out the period following the Renaissance as one of decline: the end of the great city states and art-supporting oligarchies and the crumbling of a vibrant culture. The Spaniards and the French meanwhile wrote of it as a Golden Age in which their states reached both a cultural and a religious apogee. In these the glories of art, literature and a revived Catholicism are emphasized.

The book centers on a close study of the man who would become the most famous historian of Catholicism in the twentieth century, the German priest Hubert Jedin (1900-80). Jedin’s massive 4 volume study of the Council of Trent emphasized the importance of it to such a degree that “Tridentine Era” became a new key term. Jedin spent most of his life in the Vatican archives. He wrote history “from above” focusing on the prelates and elites of Trent. He completely ignored the Catholicism of the every day person. Jedin’s great value is to be found in the fact that he emphasized that “Counter Reformation and Catholic Reformation” ought to be used in tandem to describe the projects of Catholicism in the early modern period. O’Malley points out this is important for two main reasons: first the double term emphasizes an active historical transformation between medieval and modern Catholicism; second, second, the Catholic church’s push against Protestantism was not an act of aggression or a co-opting of Protestant tactics but one of self-defense against an onslaught. The Catholic point-of-view (a generalization) can become a powerful tool for seeing the Protestant movements and Catholicism internal changes in a fresh way.

Topics that played no role in Jedin’s writings however are now those on which historians of the period focus most: women, subaltern voices, popular religion and cultural history. Jedin also ignored the iniquities of the Inquisition and the repressive nature of Catholic authority in the period. O’Malley argues that the sheer size of topics and methodologies used to study the period call for a larger (if blander) name for the period traditionally titled “Reformation/Counter Reformation”. He posits “Early Modern Catholicism” as solid, overarching term. This umbrella is big enough that the old names can still be gathered and used to describe particular aspects of this period of religious ferment and struggle.