Forschungsprojekt

Negotiating Confession in Early Modern Europe: Roman Congregations, Mixed Marriages, and Administering Religious Plurality in an Entangled World (16th–18th Centuries)

My project studies the politics of the Roman congregations – in particular, the Roman Inquisition – towards marriages between members of different denominations and religions in Early Modern Europe. It analyses the means the Roman Curia used to deal with religious and legal pluralism, while trying at the same time to achieve a standardized law that would regulate them. Based mainly on records of Vatican archives that have been unexplored until now, the project takes mixed marriages as a key for studying the dynamic tension between legal unity and pluralism seen in efforts to cope with everyday religious contacts and conflicts. The normativity about mixed marriages produced by the Roman congregations was not an order imposed from above but rather a system that emerged from continual negotiation (between mixed couples and their families, between different churches in partibus, local authorities, and Roman congregations and their members) about actual cases. The decisions taken by Roman congregations to resolve a given case became the legal basis on which subsequent resolution would be made by the same authorities. This confrontational negotiation led to a continual process of revision and overcoming differences between a normative ideal (the uniformity of law and religion ) and a factual reality (legal and religious plurality).