The Renaissance Papacy’s Political Theology and Its Projects of Religious Reform

Other Areas: 

SH - Social Sciences and Humanities 

History of Christianity, Early Modern History, History of Ideas 

Abstract: 

The project aims to analyze the theme of the reform or renewal of the Church in the years 1431-1549, investigating the papacy’s ideological, political, and diplomatic strategies. During these nearly one hundred and twenty years, the Popes (from Eugene IV to Paul III) tried to create a Papal State able to expand its hegemony over the Italian Peninsula, and to build an ambitious ideological strategy of political-theological exaltation of the Papacy, which was nourished by the myth of the recovery of the splendor of the origins, but which had later to face the crisis generated by the emergence of the Lutheran alternative political theology. 

This research project tries to address the so-called “Catholic Reformation” in diachronic way and by showing some deeper lines of historical continuity. In this sense, we want to bring out the ambivalence and the complexity of the Renaissance Catholic reformist concept, which precedes the Lutheran criticisms (and it is not simply a response to them). The pre-Tridentine Church should not be seen through the lenses of post-Tridentine rigid “orthodoxy” (institution of the Roman Index, confessionalization of the European States and the Baroque society, etc.), nor should it be analyzed by emphasizing only the “preparation” for the Council or its most conservative stances. On the contrary, in such a crucial moment for the genesis of political and religious modernity, between Renaissance and Reformation, the Roman Curia appears to be an institution capable of promoting various initiatives on both the political and the religious level. The original interpretative key of this project consists in highlighting such “dual” or “dialectic” nature of the Renaissance, pre-Tridentine Roman Church as an institution promoting an ambivalent and complex project of religious reform, where the ideal of the affirmation of a new political (and diplomatic) power, nourished by classical and Roman cultural models, coexists – in dialectic tension – with the attempt to absorb and channel the diverse claims for the spiritual renewal of the Church, based on Biblical and apocalyptic motifs instead. 

Duration of the project: 28/09/2023 – 28/09/2025 

Co-Principal Investigator: 

Andrea Annese 

Principal investigator: 

Ludovico Battista (Sapienza Università di Roma) 

Partnership: 

Sapienza Università di Roma 

Budget of the University of Bologna: 

44.000 EUR